It was on me! Looming over me! The sunlight streamed down and then a shadow. Not the shadow of the spider, something bigger, farther away.

I was looking up at nostril! A pair of huge, hairy, human nostrils. And beyond them, weirdly bright human eyes.

I tried to run, but the spider reared up, flailing its front legs like a frightened horse. It jammed one of those legs down so fast I didn't see it move. A claw grabbed my left middle leg. I fought and twisted, but there was no escape.

Huge fangs were descending on me.

Then, "Oh! Oh! Aaaarrrggghh! A spider!"

Everything went nuts. The bananas went flying. We were falling, me and the tarantula, which still refused to let me go. Monstrous bananas, each as big as a piece of concrete sewer pipe, fell toward us. But the spider and I were falling, too.

WHAM!

Bananas all over me. Brilliant sunlight everywhere!

In panic, the cook had knocked the pile of boxes off his dolly. The banana crate had smashed down onto the floor just inside the loading dock.

"What are you doing with my bananas?" the truck driver yelled. Then, "Oh, jeez! Kill it!"

I'd been battered and beaten by falling bananas, but that spider still had me. And now, in addition to the sheer, screaming panic I felt, the roach brain was adding the terror of sudden, bright light.

Run! the roach brain yammered.

Run! my brain agreed.

"Stomp it!" someone yelled in a voice that vibrated down through my body.

A huge, slow-moving shadow came down and down and down.

SQUISH! A banana exploded under the impact of the giant shoe. It gushed banana goo, sweet and sticky, all over us.

And still that tarantula held me. Eight huge, expressionless black eyes glared down. The gnashing, hungry beak strained for the chance to rip me open.

"ls that one of you?" Tobias cried from far away.

Thanks be to a million years of evolution that has given the hawk its magnificent eyes. Oh, yes, oh, yes, love those eyes.

"lt's me!" I yelled.

I didn't see Tobias come falling from the sky. All I saw was a blur of big, craggy talons snatch the spider up, up and away.

I kept my grip on a banana. My leg was ripped away by the spider, which flatly refused to let go. It hurt in a sort of vague, distant kind of way. But roaches are pretty tough.

"Let's move!" Jake said. "Head toward the shade. That should be the inside of the building."

We moved out. I moved a little more slowly, and with a tendency to drift toward the side with the missing leg.

And from high above I heard Tobias say, "Hmmm. Not bad. Not bad at all."

"See, this is what happens whenever Rachel starts in with her "let's do it" attitude," Marco complained as we scurried across a filthy floor.

"We end up being eaten by spiders or something."

"Hey, I don't see where you suffered, Marco," I said. "I'm the one who can only count to five on her legs."

"Stick close to the base of the wall," Jake said. "l don't want to get stomped. I got swatted in fly morph, and that's enough for me. I am not getting stomped on, too."

We were a little shaky, obviously.

"You think Tobias actually ate that spider?" Marco asked.

"With banana relish," I said.

We laughed a nervous kind of laugh and continued zooming along the rubber baseboard in the facility's kitchen. Then, an opening in the wall and we were in. I was grateful to be out of the harsh light. And away from so many shoes.

"I've spotted the guy." It was Cassie's thought-speak voice.

I was puzzled. "What are you doing?"

"Ax and I morphed to harrier and osprey. We've been looking in the windows, trying to spot Mr. Edelman. I have him. Second floor. Above the kitchen, then maybe twenty feet along the building. He's in a room with three other patients. They're wearing hospital gowns and slippers.

They're watching TV."

"It's the show called Gilligan's lsland," Ax added helpfully.

"Now, how does Ax know about Gilligan's Island?" Marco wondered. No one answered him.

"Okay, straight up," Jake said.

The inside of the wall was a natural home to cockroaches. In fact, I noted several scattered areas of roach poop.

It's the kind of thing a roach brain notices.

The inside of the wall was otherwise a pretty clean place. I was standing on a wide expanse of wood. The grain was like ripples under my roach feet. A nail head protruded in front of me and looked about as tall as a tall woman. To my left and right were the backsides of Sheetrock - featureless, blank, gray.

We tried our feet out on the Sheetrock. They tended to slip. So we scuttled down to an upright beam and climbed the wood instead.

Eight feet straight up, and it was weirdly like flying. I felt the "ground" recede way, way below me. Dozens of times my own height. I knew I wouldn't be hurt if I fell. But still, hanging sideways, crawling straight up against gravity, seemed dangerous.

We reached the top of the beam and I was grateful to haul myself up and over into a space between the upright and a cross beam. We were just beneath the floor. But now things were complicated. The space between the second floor and the ceiling beneath it was mostly blocked by a wall of wood. But eventually we found a way in, walking sideways and scraping between rough-sawed wood-ends.

My antennae waved wildly, trying to comprehend the long, square tunnel before me. It was almost pitch-dark. Only a tiny hint of light filtered down from the floor above. And after the run-in with the spider, I was very jumpy. Who knew what might be in that vast, dark space?

"That light must be from some kind of crack," Jake said.

"I guess we go toward that. Unless anyone else has any ideas?"

"l have an idea," Marco said. "We get out of here, go back to the mall, and see how many Cinnabons Ax can eat before he explodes."

"Oh, come on, you babies," I said, trying to sound braver than I felt.

"Let's go." I scuttled forward. I was walking on Sheetrock that formed the ceiling below. The wooden walls on either side of me were insanely tall - ten, twenty times my height.