He kept away from the shoulder, his wheels straddling the yellow line, the front end rattling a syncopated cadence that fed his impatience. The road straightened and ran parallel to an abandoned train track cut through the brownfields, a crooked row of telephone poles stretching away through the marshes; their angled cross-arms broken and mis-aligned made a mournful parade against the sodium-yellowed sky as they dwindled away towards the horizon, towards the hills that obscured the city. A tall chain link fence topped with razor wire jumped up on the right, red and white No Trespassing signs flashing by at regular intervals.

Echo stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and slowed the car as the entrance approached. It was narrow and easy to miss. He turned hard to the right and followed the drive to an automatic gate which opened silently at his approach. A left and there was the parking lot, dark and empty except for the lab jeep and a red Dodge van with out of state plates.

He rolled the car into a spot next to the entrance, turned off the engine and set the parking brake. He inhaled deeply through his nose and heard the slow clicking of the hot engine cooling off under the hood in front of him. He climbed out of the car and stretched, then reached back in and gathered up the trip-debris from the seat, the plastic bottles, paper bags and wrappers, napkins, straws, gum wrappers; he put it all in a plastic bag and knotted it. He picked up his phone and put it in his shirt pocket with his cigarettes. Carrying the plastic bag of trash he walked towards the door to the lab.

The lab was built inside an obsolete power plant, a great fist of a building with five smokestacks that stretched like reaching fingers to the sky. It had been abandoned thirty years before, ZDI had occupied it for nearly two years, although there were few traces of their occupancy other then the razor wire and the brown smoke that intermittently rose from stack number four.

The door to the lab was set in a slight recess under an overhang. There was a twenty-five watt bulb in a dingy porcelain socket mounted on the cracked plaster ceiling. The door was made of silver aluminum extrusions and opaque black glass. Silver lettering on the door read: "Zeppelin Development International - Research Laboratory No. 3" And in smaller letters below: "Unauthorized Access Prohibited." Set in the wall to the right of the door was a sensor panel and a speaker.

Reaching to get his wallet to wave it at the sensor, Echo paused, seeing the light reflecting from a spider web spun across the doorway. The web was large and perfectly symmetrical, swaying slightly in the night air, stretched in front of him, its radials taught between their anchorages, the spiraling sticky threads hung from them, dangling slightly. In the very center of the web, just at his eye level was the spider, about the size of his thumbnail, its body and legs striped orange and brown. It hung motionless, attuned to the vibrations of the atmosphere, clinging to the quivering cables and threads it had spun. Patient. Waiting.

As he pulled out his wallet he thought what a shame it was that he would have to brush the web aside, that all the spider's effort was going to go to waste. He waved his wallet at the sensor and the little red light turned to green.

Later, he could remember hearing the buzzing of the lock just before the stars exploded inside his head and the world turned red and then black.



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