by Jeff Strand
"Fine, I'll do it," said Jaunty.
"I wasn't recommending anybody in particular," said Reginald. "I would've volunteered myself had you not spoken up."
Jaunty grabbed the door handle. "If I knock on the window, it's safe to come out. If I scream, it's not. If I frantically pound on the window, it's not safe, but you should be able to tell the difference between me knocking on the window and frantically pounding on it. The longer I talk the more scared I'm getting, so I'll just go."
He opened the door. Before he could change his mind like a shameful coward, he quickly got out of the car and shut the door.
Everything in the well-lit area was white. It was like there'd been a heavy snowfall, except that it was all webs. Every car was wrapped in its own cocoon. The Mountain of Terror was completely hidden. Webs covered the ground—there were only a few spots where the pavement beneath was visible.
The spiders had not left the area. There were fewer of them now, but Jaunty still saw dozens of them crawling on the webs. Though the idea of getting right back in the car held great appeal, it was probably a better idea to stick with the plan. They'd all be safer if they could actually drive the car instead of just sit in it.
He knocked on the window.
The clowns got out. They all took a moment to gape at the web world.
"Everybody watch yourselves," said Jaunty. "There are spiders all over the place."
He walked over to the driver's side front door of the other car. Webs gathered on his shoes with each step, until his feet looked like oversized Q-tips. He pushed the webs off the window, so that he could see inside: more webs. A cocooned driver. And a few spiders.
This was fine. The spiders were no big deal. All he had to do was open the door, reach inside, and put the vehicle in neutral. He could do that without any of the spiders getting on him.
There were also a couple of spiders on the roof, and one crawling along the door. He was pretty sure he could avoid those, too.
He opened the door. The driver's wrapped body flopped out onto the ground. A spider that had been on the driver's head crawled toward Jaunty. He stomped on it. When he lifted his foot, it was gone. He made a sound like a Chihuahua yipping. But when he contorted his leg to see the bottom of his foot, the crushed spider was stuck to the bottom of his shoe—it hadn't disappeared up his pant leg. He scraped it off.
Jaunty didn't want to touch the dead body—at least he prayed the driver was dead, and not simply paralyzed underneath a layer of webs—so he leaned over it, watching carefully for spiders. He grabbed the web-covered gearshift and put the car into neutral.
"I'm feeling a really bad panic attack coming on," said Wagon. "It's not here yet, but I thought everybody should know."
There was an excellent chance that by rolling the car backwards, they were going to roll over part of the driver, but Jaunty decided that he'd rather hear the crunch than mess with the body.
The clowns got into position, making sure their hands weren't too close to any spiders, and then they rolled the car backwards. The driver's body scraped across the ground for a few feet, then came free of the vehicle entirely. Fortunately, it didn't go beneath a tire.
When they'd moved the car far enough out of the way that they could get their own car out of its parking space, they hurried back. Jaunty hoped it was his imagination that the spiders seemed to be moving directly toward them, though by the time he stomped on the fourth one he knew that he wasn't imagining a darn thing.
They cleared the webs away from the windows, then they all got back into the car.
"Any spiders in here with us?" Jaunty asked.
Everybody checked. The car was, as far as they could tell, spider-free.
Jaunty turned the key in the ignition. He'd been worried that spiders had made their way into the inner machinery of the vehicle and clogged up the engine with webs, but hadn't shared this so as not to concern the others. The car started fine, thank goodness.
Driving slowly, Jaunty pulled out of the parking spot and made his way toward the exit. He hoped many spiders were meeting their demise underneath the tires. He also hoped that too many webs weren't sticking to the tires—he didn't want to have to keep stopping to clear them out.
"How can there be that much web out there?" asked Reginald. "That's a preposterous amount of web."
"Big spiders," said Bluehead. "And lots of them."
"Even so, that's an absurd amount of web. They'd have to be mutants."
"I assumed they were mutants from the beginning," said Wagon. "I didn't say anything because I figured we were all on the same page."
They reached the exit to the parking lot. Jaunty glanced to the left and to the right. It seemed kind of dark in both directions, at least compared to the well-lit exterior of the Mountain of Terror. Still, if they'd been left unrescued in the parking lot for several hours, who knew how long it might take for the spider-exterminating army to arrive? They had to get out of here. He turned left and drove slowly down a road that may or may not have been barren—there were webs that stretched all the way across both lanes, so it was impossible to say what lay ahead.
"What if the whole world is covered?" asked Wagon.
"It's not," said Bluehead.
"But what if it is? What if spiders are the new humans?"
"They're not."
"What if our cruelty to spiders caused this to happen? I've killed spiders that weren't really even doing anything. I've walked through webs and all I cared about is that I got web on my face, even though the spider lost a home. This could be karma."
"It's not."
"Now that I think about it, I've lost track of all the spiders I've killed in my lifetime," said Wagon. "I've never plucked off their legs or anything, but I've been stomping and spraying them since I was a little kid."
"It's not karma," said Bluehead. "Or, if it is, then the world will be overtaken by even bigger flies going around killing the giant spiders."
"That doesn't make me feel the least bit better," said Wagon.
The car began to make a weird sound, sort of a grinding. Jaunty applied the brakes.
"What's wrong?" asked Reginald.
"I think the tires have too much web stuck to them. Each person will get out and clear off the tire closest to them. Depravo, since you're in the middle, your job is to squish any spiders that get inside while everybody is getting out of the car."
Depravo nodded. "Got it."
"Three, two, one, go!"
Everybody quickly got out of the vehicle, shut the doors behind them, and went to work like a racing car pit crew. Jaunty crouched down, astounded by how much web the front left tire had accumulated. It didn't come off all that easily.
None of the other clowns started screaming, so he assumed that nobody was currently being attacked by spiders.
He got most of the web off the tire, and then had to get it off his white gloves, which presented its own challenge. Jaunty didn't want to wipe it off on the car or his pants, so he scraped it off on the ground as well as he could. Then he got back into the car. The other clowns followed.
"We good?" he asked.
"No spiders got inside," Depravo reported.
"Perfect." Jaunty took the car out of park and resumed driving.
About a minute later, he heard the same scraping and stopped again.
"Sorry," he said. "I can't think of any way to stop this from happening."
Everybody got out, cleared the tires, and got back in.
They drove for another minute. Repeated the same process.
"We're getting pretty good at this," said Bluehead. "I don't know if it's a transferrable skill, but we are unemployed again, so the more we learn the better."
"Do you think we're the only ones left in town?" asked Jaunty. "It all seems eerily quiet."
"It would explain why the military isn't going around with flamethrowers," said Reginald.
"It's not a very big town. So all we have to do is drive to the barricade, and not get
killed when we clean off the tires. Can't be that hard."
"How would they put up a barricade against spiders, though?" asked Wagon. "You can stop cars from getting out, because cars need roads, but unless they have the town completely surrounded in a circle, the spiders are going to get past them."
"I vote that we say only optimistic things until we get out of this mess," said Jaunty. "All in favor, raise your hands."
Jaunty and Bluehead raised their hands.
"Burying our head in the sand is no solution," said Reginald. "If Wagon wants to bring up worst case scenarios, it's not fun to hear, but it's better to think about them now than to reach the edge of town and be surprised to find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic hellscape."
They paused the conversation to clear webs off the tires.
"I just think we should continue to see the sunny side of life," said Jaunty. "That's what clowns are supposed to do."
"It's not realistic right now," said Wagon. "When we tell our story to others, we can choose to share only the lighthearted moments, but right now we have to accept that we're in deep doody. Yes, I said doody. You're lucky I didn't say crap. Guffaw is dead, and it's not out of the question that two or three more of us will die before this is over, so we have to accept the severity of the situation."
"Fine," said Jaunty. "Let's at least find a middle ground between self-delusion and nihilism."
There was a car up ahead. It was on the side of the road, at an angle that didn't look like somebody had simply parked there because it was convenient. They pulled up next to it just as it was time to clear off the next batch of webs.
The lamppost didn't provide a lot of illumination inside the car, but Jaunty could see at least three web cocoons inside the vehicle. They didn't necessarily contain human bodies, though since they'd just decided to cease and desist on the self-delusion, he had to concede that they were almost definitely human bodies.
They got out of the car and cleared off the tires. Everybody got back inside.
"Oh, God," said Bluehead.
Jaunty looked back at her. "What?"
"One of the cocoons twitched."
Everybody stared out the window for a moment.
"I don't see anything," said Reginald.
Then the cocoon in the driver's seat twitched. It was unmistakable. Only somebody who really, really, really did not want to accept that the person inside might still be alive could claim to have not seen the twitch.
"They're probably too far gone to save," said Wagon.
"Probably," said Jaunty.
"I mean, we're not just going to tear off the web and find a perfectly healthy person."
"Nope."
"Trying to help them would be a waste of time and put us at serious risk."
"Yep."
The clowns all sighed, knowing that they were indeed going to get out of the car and try to help the doomed people wrapped in the cocoons.
"We don't all need to go," said Bluehead. "Two of us should be enough. We'll draw straws to decide."
"We don't have any straws," said Depravo.
"We draw imaginary straws," Jaunty explained. "We work on an honor system."
He held out his empty fist and everybody drew a non-existent straw. Jaunty and Wagon lost.
They got out of their car and walked over to the other one. Now they could see that there were four cocoons, two in the front and two in the back. The two in the back were smaller—presumably the car contained two adults and two kids.
There were also several spiders crawling on the cocoons.
"It would be very unintelligent of us to open that door," said Jaunty.
"I agree," said Wagon.
All four of the cocoons were twitching.
Jaunty opened the door.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jaunty stepped back as a couple of spiders spilled out of the open car door. It was just his imagination that they were slightly larger than the others spiders they'd encountered, of course. It took a couple of stomps for Jaunty to crush one, while the other scurried underneath the car before Wagon could flatten it.
There were other spiders still inside the car, so Jaunty carefully dragged the cocoon in the driver's seat out of the car, hopefully decreasing the chances of a nasty arachnid surprise while he unwrapped it. The cocoon twitched as he gently lay it on the ground.
Wagon shut the door. Then he slammed his fist against a spider that crawled off the roof of the car.
"You're going to be okay," Jaunty assured whoever was inside the cocoon.
"Clowns aren't supposed to lie," said Wagon.
Jaunty pulled the webbing off the face of the wrapped person. It was a man—maybe. His face was too swollen to say for sure. His eyes were wide and his face was frozen into an expression of pure terror. Fluids leaked from his mouth, eyes, and nostrils. His lips quivered as if he was trying to scream, but there was no sound.
Jaunty was no doctor. Could this man be saved? Was he already too far gone?
And if he wasn't too far gone...what were they supposed to do with him and the others? They couldn't fit the four cocoons into their automobile. The best they could do was clear the spiders out of the car—and it would take a while to be sure they got all of them—and hope for the best. That didn't seem like it was worth the risk.
"What are we even trying to do here?" he asked Wagon. "I mean, did we think we'd rip off the webs and the guy would thank us and go on his merry way?"
"We couldn't just leave them."
"Why not? What exactly have we accomplished?"
Jaunty gasped as he felt something crawling over his back. He frantically batted at it, but it was in that hard-to-reach place right between his shoulder blades. He spun around.
"Get it off me! Get it off me!"
"There's nothing on your back!"
"I can feel a spider on it!"
"There isn't one!"
"Then it's under my suit!"
Wagon slapped the back of Jaunty's suit a few times. "There's nothing under there, Jaunty. I promise you."
Jaunty turned around. "Maybe I imagined it. That's where we are now. I'm imagining giant spiders on my back. I want to protect humanity as much as the next clown, but unless there's a jug of spider anti-venom in the trunk next to Guffaw's dead body, we can't do anything to help these people."
As if to emphasize this point, a glob of whitish yellowish reddish slime dribbled out of the side of the man's mouth.
"Do you think a spider laid eggs inside of him?" Wagon asked.
"I'd be surprised if one didn't."
"Maybe we should at least clear the webs away from their eyes so they can see."
"See their ghastly fate?"
Wagon considered that for a moment. "If you had spiders crawling all over you, would you want to see them, or would you want to be blindfolded by webs?"
"I think I'd rather have my eyes covered."
"Would you? It seems to me like fear of the unknown would be scarier."
"But it's not unknown. They know it's spiders."
"Yeah. Still, I think I'd rather see what was going on."
"All right," said Jaunty. "And maybe this will make it easier for them to breathe."
They opened the other three car doors and very carefully reached inside to tear the web off the faces of the unfortunate victims. The woman up front looked just as bad as the driver. The children in the back looked far worse. Jaunty had to choke back a sob as they shut the doors again.
"If this happens to me, I want you to finish me off," Jaunty told Wagon. "Just throw my cocoon to the ground, jump into the air, and stomp on my skull until it breaks apart. I don't want to live like that."
"Noted," said Wagon.
"And I'll do the same for you."
Wagon shook his head. "No, I want to live as long as possible. Even if spiders are dragging me away, don't do any of that 'merciful death' stuff. I want to squeeze out every speck of life I can, even if I'm in agonizing pain. Don't pull the plug on me."<
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"Oh," said Jaunty. "Okay. I won't."
"Tell the others."
"I will."
"I mean it. I want you to exhaust every possible option, no matter how experimental the procedure, before you let me die."
"Gotcha."
They returned to their car and got inside.
"How bad was it?" asked Bluehead.
"There were swollen paralyzed children with pus or something leaking out of their faces," said Jaunty.
"So it was pretty bad," said Wagon.
"They understood that based on what I said," Jaunty told him.
"I just wanted to contribute."
Jaunty started the engine. He drove for about fifteen seconds, and then the car stopped.
"Are the tires covered already?" asked Depravo.
"They shouldn't be," said Jaunty. "We should've had at least another thirty to forty-five seconds of driving time. We need to check this out."
They drew imaginary straws. Jaunty and Wagon lost again.
The tires hadn't gathered all that much webbing yet. They crouched down to peer underneath the car. The illumination of the street lamps didn't do much good down there, but it did appear that the underside of the vehicle was clogged with webs.
"I'm not reaching under there," said Wagon.
"Me either," said Jaunty.
They stood up. Wagon glanced around. "I'll go get something to clear it out," he said.
Wagon carefully watched the ground as he stepped off the road and walked over to the nearest tree. He reached up and snapped off a branch.
Dozens of spiders rained down upon him.
Wagon spent a moment shrieking and flailing his spider-covered arms. Then he dropped to his knees.
Jaunty sprinted toward him. He heard the car doors opening as the other clowns got out to help. As Jaunty stepped off the road, he froze—there were spiders all around Wagon, and he wasn't sure how to reach his friend without getting swarmed by the spiders himself.
Wagon cried out in pain. A spider crawled onto his face.
No time to think about his personal safety. Jaunty hurried over to Wagon and tried to brush the spiders off of him, while kicking his own feet back and forth to keep spiders from getting on him.
