Zombies..

The choice between being lunch to the undead and a spider hole was not an easy one.
ooooo
Mark covered his nose with his arm, the stench of rotting flesh striking him like a solid thing. He dry heaved over the side, but nothing fell upon the walking corpses reaching up for him. Their fingertips barely brushed the concrete just a foot below, but he certainly did not feel any safer for that.

With a glance he made a quick body count, and the frightening additions had him scrambling. He balanced his steps, clinging his toes to the rubbery sneakers that gripped the top of the cinder block wall, and leaped off to the adjoining drainage structure.

He heard the moans of want and the ragged hisses of those without much flesh as he moved, and felt the hair on his arms rise. He darted his eyes back for a moment, and saw the bony tip of fingers ripping at the stone.

There were more of the shambling slow moving --things-- now. There were more gathering with every passing hour, and the sun was setting. It was only a matter of time before the unthinking things somehow found a way to reach him up here, in this no man's land between planned communities built nearly atop one another.

The way was an easy walk as wide as a normal walkway, once one bothered to climb up the first ten foot section of wall. He knew it well as his personal playground, having run along it for years.

The flood drain of stepped gardens and cultivated backyards lead here, and flowed down all the way to the river. That was why he rushed along. He had to reach it in time to maybe somehow block it off from the dead things, to make it a sanctuary for the living. At least for the night.

The entrance still resembled a decaying concrete barrel lying on its side, with a rusted jagged mesh exposed like dried bones on a dead fish. Mark narrowed his eyes as he walked up to the shadowed maw, and cringed down into a leaning squat as he ducked his neck low.

He swallowed as his empty stomach seemed to drop to the earth's core.

From the fine clingy drapery that never failed to weave its way across his path, to the varmit's sprawling many, too many, hairy legs, spiders just always gave Mark the creeps. The cracks that he could see within the crawl space formed pockets and gaps that he knew spiders just loved.

He looked over his shoulder, almost longingly, and spied a scraping hand gouging a grip into the top of the wall. For a moment, he felt envy of them, for the dead did not have to face such things as these vile, skittering creatures.

Without so much as a "pop", the meat gave way with a sudden jerk, breaking the rotten arm off right at the wrist, and Mark's definition of the word "vile" solidly changed.
Sent via a stray supercharged nano particle of unobtainium....