“Come on.”
Mauricio led us back into the hallway and I realized I had left my cellphone in the interrogation-room, so I ducked back in to grab it as we passed. Then I saw the old landline phone on the table and reflexively froze as I said, “Oh, shit…”
“What?” Lynn asked, pausing just outside the room and glancing in at me. She followed my gaze to the table and figured it out for herself when she saw that the old white phone had been split into several pieces, the top of its bulky plastic casing peeled back as if something had exploded out of it. Or more accurately, HATCHED out of it.
I nodded at the phone and said, “I’m gonna assume that’s a bad sign.”
“What’s a bad sign?” asked Mikey, who had been trailing behind the rest of us and sprinkling holy water in our wake while quietly chanting in what I’m pretty sure was Latin. He had just finished blessing the first section of hallway and turned to face us. That’s when he spotted the phone for himself and froze.
For the first and only time that night, Mikey looked genuinely concerned as he muttered, “Oh, shit…”
“What does it mean?” I asked, despite honestly not wanting to know what it took to put that look on Mikey’s face. Though it quickly became a moot point; he didn’t get a chance to answer me before Grace’s scream suddenly reverberated through the room like a shrill gunshot.
Mikey disappeared down the hallway in a flash, running toward the sound of her voice and Lynn sprinted after him. I started to follow suit when Mikey suddenly reappeared in the doorway, almost plowing into me as he reentered the interrogation-room and grabbed the fire-extinguisher from off of the table.
I quickly leapt aside as Mikey started back into the hall. I hurried to follow him and was just in time to glimpse what at first appeared to be a large mass of dryer lint swarming Grace. Then Mikey began to spray her with the fire-extinguisher and she was enveloped in an off-white fog. As the fog began to dissipate, I saw that the dryer lint was now falling off of Grace in clumps. Mikey stomped on each new piece as it fell loose.
By this point, the swarm of babyface spiders had eaten through most of Grace’s trenchcoat but had yet to actually harm her before Mikey used the fire-extinguisher to blast them loose. He yanked Grace to her feet and then snapped his head around to face me as he shouted, “Let’s go!”
As I followed Mikey down the hallway to the panic-room, I heard a faint clicking sound above me and looked up to see a second, much larger swarm of white spider-things scurrying across the ceiling. Just as I spotted them, one of the spiders let out a disturbingly child-like wail and dropped down toward me.
I barely managed to make it inside the panic-room before the little fucker was able to dive-bomb my head (just thinking about it now is still enough to make me shudder.) Mikey pushed the heavy steel door shut and it slid closed with a pressurized THUNK.
“What the hell, Mikey?!” Grace screamed. I turned to face her and saw that the tattered remains of her trench coat were no longer doing such a great job of covering her risqué undergarment.