Read The Quillan Games for Free Online

I wasn’t about to let that stop me. For what I wanted to do, heavy was good, and timing was everything. I pulled the crate down so hard I felt the muscles of my arms burn. But it toppled. The spiders were nearly on me. I dove out of the way. The crate came down and smashed on the cement floor . . . right on top of the fat leader. I heard it scream. It sounded almost human. But I didn’t have time to be grossed out. I hoped this move would buy me the few seconds I needed to escape, so I jumped onto the broken crate and launched myself up to where it had been. I was about to continue my escape across the carton tops, when I glanced back to see something impossible: The spiders were retreating. Fast. I stopped to watch as the wave of black little demons slipped back like the receding tide. They kept chattering and screeching, but there screams sounded more scared than angry. It was like the queen bee of a hive had been destroyed, and none of the other bees had a clue what to do, so they scattered. Psych! I didn’t even mean to crush the fat little monster. All I wanted was a few extra seconds to escape. But hey, I’d rather be lucky than good anytime. I sat on a crate to catch my breath, and watched the spiders disappear to who-knows-where. I didn’t care. All that mattered was that they weren’t after me anymore.
    Once I was sure they were gone, I jumped back down to the floor. I’m not sure why I did what I did next. I guess it was out of some morbid curiosity. But I moved to pull the broken carton off the lead spider. I wanted to get my first close look at a quig. Most every time I saw a quig in the past, whether it was a bear on Denduron or a snake on Zadaa or a dog on Second Earth, I was usually running too fast to get a good look at it. But now I had the chance to see one up close. Saint Dane created these things somehow; I thought that bytaking a closer look, it might give me some clue as to how he was able to make these mutants appear at the gates to do his bidding. Or maybe I just wanted to make sure it was dead and not waiting for me to relax so it could call its buddies back. Either way, I wanted to see it.
    As I began to pull away the wooden crate, I saw that one side of the container had almost completely broken off. My curiosity shifted to the box. I wanted to know what was being stored in this monster tomb of a warehouse. I yanked the side off the rest of the way to reveal . . . a stack of plates. I’m serious. Plain old white plates like you’d see in a diner or something. I picked one up to confirm that there was nothing special about it. Somebody had packed away about a dozen white boring plates. The one thing that was of any interest at all was the logo printed on the back of the plate. In simple black one-inch letters was a single word: BLOK . That’s all. BLOK . A quick check showed me that all the plates had this same word printed on their backs. This meant exactly nothing to me, so I put the plate back and reached over to pull the crate off my victim.
    When I heaved the crate over, I instantly realized two things. One was that this particular itsy-bitsy spider was not going to be chasing me anymore. It was definitely dead. Though as I stared at it, I wasn’t sure if “dead” was the right word, because this quig was never alive. Not in the true sense, anyway. That was the second thing I learned. The weight of the carton had smashed open its body and spread it all over the floor. But it wasn’t disgusting or anything. That’s because the remains of old spidey weren’t organic. That’s right. The outside was fur covered and looked every bit like a very real, very big spider. But the insides were a different matter. My little nemesis was mechanical. Instead of blood and guts, I was looking at a pile of high-tech computer-driven machine parts.
    It was a robot.
    The works weren’t like any kind of machinery I had ever