Arachnoextinction Chapter 1: Chapter One - Budget Cuts and Woolly Mammoths

Read chapter 1 of Arachnoextinction by ShowerKrogan on NovelPedia.

"Oh, come on!" I said while ripping my buzzing phone from my pocket. This was the third call I'd received since arriving on this godforsaken island. I worked for the U.S. government, and my job was to inspect some of the government… facilities, to ensure they were progressing along as expected. I decided if they deserved the budget they were requesting, or if they were not worth the taxpayers’ dollars. Believe it or not, we didn't try to waste too much of the taxpayers’ money. I'm the decider! I chuckled to myself. God, I needed sleep. These were not typical government programs. The facilities contained highly classified, and honestly, highly illegal programs. Programs that must remain unbeknownst to the public. Today I was on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which I was pretty positive did not appear on most maps. The only things on this island were a ridiculous number of trees and a fortified building where cloning experiments took place. Thank the Lord it was so fortified. Who knew what would happen if a group of the small, island-native monkeys decided to wage war against the United States? Oh, there was also the dirt landing strip where the pilot had just tried to destroy our plane on approach to the island. Idiot. I was already nervous enough about this trip without the threat of crashing into the ocean. I balanced the buzzing phone in one hand and my luggage in the other as I made my way down the steep stairs. “Let’s just get this visit over with,” I mumbled to myself and took a deep breath to calm my nerves. All my assignments were a little mysterious and sketchy, but something had seemed off about this one ever since I had been briefed on this job. I got the feeling there was a lot more going on at this facility than I was supposed to know. So, I was either sent here to figure out what, or sent here to do my job and ignore everything else. I couldn’t wait to find out which it was. I slipped my phone into my shirt pocket and contemplated the consequences of ignoring the call. I tried to fix my thick brown hair, which I had damn near pulled out during the plane’s horrific landing attempt. I swapped my usual glasses for my way too expensive, goofy-looking, aviator sunglasses to hide my eyes from the undeterred sunlight. I slid my glasses into a pocket inside my briefcase. I brought minimal luggage with me on these trips. I shouldn’t stay on this island more than one night, so I just carried a single briefcase containing a change of clothes, my laptop, and contacts so I didn’t have to worry about breaking my glasses inside the facility. I kept my cell phone and a special flash drive on my person at all times. The flash drive was one of the perks of working for the government. This tiny thing could hold more information than a single person would ever need in a lifetime. I could store years’ worth of round-the-clock video surveillance on this thing without making a dent in the storage. I made sure everything in my briefcase was secure and straightened the sunglasses on my face. The last thing I needed was them slipping off and breaking. I had spent more money than any sane person should on these sunglasses. If there was one thing I had learned from working in the U.S. government: you have to own expensive sunglasses, or you just won't fit in. The buzzing phone reached maximum annoyance, and I ripped it out of my pocket. Since arriving five minutes ago, I've had two different government officials call and try to convince me of their various points of view on these experiments. I never listened to those fools, but every visit I went on, several tried to call and sway my opinion. So understandably, in my opinion, when I got my third call within those five minutes, my temper flared. “Hey, man, can you make that buzzing stop?” the pilot said. I politely declined to respond to him. "What!" I flipped my phone open and yelled. Yes, I had a flip phone; old school for life. All these young kids burying their faces