by Jeff Strand
He was skilled at taking a fall and landed without harming himself. But his right hand came down on a rat, smashing it but not killing it. The mangled creature writhed underneath his gloved hand and he quickly scooted away, accidentally hitting another rat with his left hand.
Jaunty heard more squeaks and thrashing, as if multiple rats were now being attacked by multiple spiders. Whimpering without shame, he crawled back over to the ladder. A falling spider hit him in the eye. It didn't puncture the orb, but it hurt like heck.
Something bit his foot through his sock. It felt more like a rat than a spider. He kicked it away, confirming that it was indeed a rat.
He scrambled up the ladder and out of the manhole.
Depravo had an arm around both Bluehead and Reginald's shoulders. "Jaunty's alive!" Bluehead said. "We can start walking now." They moved forward, helping a limping Depravo.
"Do we have a plan?" asked Jaunty, though he said the words out of order because he was still in a state of intense anxiety from all of the rats.
"To keep walking," said Reginald.
"That's a bad plan. Look at all those spiders. They'll get all of us eventually, and Depravo first. We need to find a safe place, like...the hardware store!" Jaunty pointed to Mount Tulip Hardware. "There'll be stuff we can use to defend ourselves! Shovels and wrenches and pliers!"
"And I bet they'll have rope!" said Bluehead.
"Why do we need rope?"
"To tie up the spiders!"
They hurried toward the front doors of the hardware store. Depravo put weight on his injured foot and let out a howl of cosmic agony, so they slowed down just a bit. They reached the storefront and took a brief "stare in abject horror" break. Through the glass doors, they could see spiders galore and at least a half-dozen dead, swollen, grotesque human bodies.
The automatic sliding doors opened.
The clowns hurried away, causing Depravo to let out another scream of soul-shredding misery. When he was done screaming, which wasn't in a timely manner, he said, "Just leave me. I'm slowing you down. I'll get you all killed."
"No," said Reginald. "You are slowing us down and you may get us all killed, but we're not leaving you."
"I can't have your deaths on my conscience," he said. "Just leave me."
"It's very selfish of you to worry about your own conscience right now," Bluehead told him.
"Consciences are irrelevant," said Reginald. "Depravo will be dead in twenty seconds if we just drop him on the ground. That's not much time to be consumed by guilt, and at least half of those seconds will be spent focusing on the spiders."
"Fine, fuck my conscience," said Depravo. "What I mean is that I don't want any of you to die because of me! Just leave me behind! Do it! As your manager, I'm ordering you to leave me behind!"
"Then just let go of our shoulders," said Reginald. "You're still limping along with us, when all you'd have to do is stop moving. It's not like we're dragging you."
Depravo said nothing. He continued to limp along with them.
"Look!" said Jaunty.
Everybody looked.
"It's the library! It doesn't have an automatic sliding glass door! Maybe that's a safe place to hide from the spiders!"
"That idea is so crazy it just might work!" said Bluehead.
They hurried over to the front entrance of the library. The door was opaque wood, so there was no way to tell what nightmares might lurk within. Jaunty placed his hand on the door handle. "Everybody watch out in case millions of spiders pour out."
He opened the door. Millions of spiders did not pour out. They went inside, shutting the door behind them.
There were plenty of spiders inside the library, but not nearly as many as there were outside. Reginald and Bluehead walked Depravo over to a table and pulled out a chair for him. He plopped down onto it and thanked them.
Jaunty walked around. "This seems...unsafe, but an improvement." He selected a heavy hardcover book from one of the shelves and used it to smash a spider, splattering its arachnid guts across the spines of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Jaunty, Reginald, and Bluehead walked around, surveying their surroundings.
"Are there any dead bodies?" asked Depravo.
"Not that I can...oh, wait, there's one. No, two." A pair of cocooned bodies lay on the floor between two shelves of the Fiction section. Jaunty hoped their final books had been ones they enjoyed.
"There's one over here," said Bluehead from another row. "And some severed fingers."
"Okay, so, the library isn't as safe as we'd like," said Jaunty. "But if we go on a spider-smashing rampage we can clear the area, and then maybe relax a bit. Everybody grab a book."
Jaunty smashed another spider, then realized that a better technique was to fling books at the spiders, so the clowns began to do that. They missed most of the time, but there were numerous books available on the shelves so they had almost unlimited ammunition.
"What the hell are you doing?" a voice called out.
Jaunty turned around. A very angry looking elderly woman stood there, pointing a shotgun at him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jaunty put his hands in the air. "Please don't shoot me," he said.
The elderly woman took a step forward. "You're a clown. I hate clowns."
"I'm not a scary clown. It's just makeup."
"All clowns are scary."
Jaunty shook his head. "No, they aren't. Some clowns bring joy to the world. We juggle and do magic tricks and put smiles on faces both young and old."
"Nope. I don't like Bozo the Clown, I don't like Ronald McDonald, I don't like Howdy Doody—"
"Howdy Doody is a puppet."
"Puppets are even worse."
"They sure are. And ventriloquist dummies are even worse than regular puppets. That's what you should be worried about, not clowns."
"Well, when a group of ventriloquist dummies break into my library, I'll deal with them. Right now all I see is Pennywise."
Jaunty glanced behind him. Reginald and Bluehead were there, also with their hands in the air.
"Pennywise isn't real," Jaunty said. "Neither is the Joker. Neither are the Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and neither is John Wayne Gacy, and—okay, John Wayne Gacy was real, but he's been dead since 1994. We're not like any of them."
"You all look like Satan clowns."
"It's just makeup," Jaunty explained. "I mean, obviously it's just makeup. Our faces weren't born like clown faces. What I'm fumbling around to say is that we're actors from the Scary Clown Room at the Mountain of Terror haunted house, so while we are indeed professional clowns, we're playing the roles of scary clowns, because we lost our...actually, I can see from your scowl that you're not interested in our backstory or really any kind of explanation so I'm just going to keep standing here with my hands in the air and hope that you're merciful."
"May I ask a favor?" asked Reginald.
"Sure," said the woman.
"There's a spider crawling on my leg and I'd really like to get it off. May I move around just enough to get rid of it?"
"I never said you couldn't move."
"Oh. The shotgun implied it. Thank you." Reginald frantically shook the spider off his leg, then stomped on it.
Jaunty had been waiting for Depravo to sneak up behind the elderly woman and knock her unconscious, but apparently that wasn't going to happen.
"If you wish to take shelter in this library, that's fine with me," said the woman. "It didn't work out for the other poor bastards, but you might have better luck. However, I expect you to respect the books. Do you understand?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Jaunty.
"Good." The woman lowered the shotgun. "My name is Rose. I'm a librarian."
"So was that shotgun already here at the library, or did you run home to get it?"
"I have a large stockpile of weapons here," said Rose. "Things that shoot, things that ar
e sharp, and things that blow up."
"Was that to prepare for the apocalypse?" asked Reginald.
"No. The public library system is a crucial part of society, but when you have leaders who cringe at the thought of reading a book, library funding is in danger. I decided that if they tried to close down this library, I was taking as many of them with me as I could before I died in a hail of bullets. That's how much I believe in the sanctity of the written word."
"All right," said Jaunty.
"So," said Reginald, "let's say that nobody was currently coming to shut down the library, but the entire town was overrun by deadly giant spiders. Any chance we could borrow those weapons?"
"Sure," said Rose. "I have plenty. Follow me."
The three clowns who could walk on their own followed Rose down a short hallway, narrowly avoiding a few spiders along the way. She opened a door and led them into a back room filled with cardboard boxes.
"The boxes with my weapons are labeled 'Subsidy Press Donations,' because nobody will look in them. Help yourself to whatever you wish, as long as you return it in two weeks."
"Do you have a flamethrower?" asked Bluehead.
"No," said Rose. "I have an acetylene torch, but that's in case I need to torture somebody for information."
They opened the boxes. Guns a-plenty. Grenades. Knives. A machete.
"Are these plastic explosives?" Reginald asked, peeking into one of the boxes.
"Oh, yeah. I could bring this entire building down if I needed to. That's a last resort, obviously."
"Obviously."
"So have you just been hanging out here, massacring spiders?" Jaunty asked.
"Goodness, no. I've been hiding in a conference room. One door to protect, and these spiders can't burrow through doors. A perfectly safe place to hide until this all blows over. I have doughnuts. Stale from this morning, but still, doughnuts. Glazed."
Jaunty couldn't believe what he was hearing. They were saved! There was absolutely no reason to believe that these spiders would mutate and be able to dig through heavy wood. All they had to do was stay in the conference room with the door closed, enjoy some stale doughnuts, and wait to be rescued.
And yet...
"We can't do this," he told Bluehead and Reginald. "Look at all of the grenades. Think of how many people we can save from spiders with those. We have no idea how many innocent people are still trapped in Mount Tulip, and I can't justify hiding here when we could be saving them with our newfound arsenal. I won't hold it against you if you don't want to join me," he said, even though he knew he totally would.
"We're with you all the way," said Bluehead. "I couldn't live with myself if we didn't kill spiders that were going to kill people."
Reginald nodded. "We're sticking together, no matter what. Human lives are far more important than glazed doughnuts."
"There's been a misunderstanding," said Rose. "I wasn't offering to let you stay in the conference room with me. Being trapped in a small room with clowns is my idea of hell on earth. And I have no idea how long those doughnuts have to last. The conference room is my sanctuary, not yours. Find your own."
Jaunty frowned. "You know, we specifically said out loud just now that we weren't going to hide out with you. You could have said absolutely nothing and we would have thought you were a kind and generous soul."
Rose shrugged. "I have nothing to prove to clowns."
"Our friend hurt his foot and can't walk. Could he stay here?"
"Is he a clown?"
"He...looks like one, yes."
"If you wanted to take your friend with you, one of our regular patrons is in a wheelchair and because of that he, sadly, couldn't get away from the spiders. He died near the back, in the 170 section. This obviously would turn you into the kind of people who would steal a wheelchair out from under the corpse of a man who recently died a horrible death. His family is probably still praying for his safe return. Bit of a moral dilemma. Anyway, the chair is there if you need it."
They returned to the main area of the library. Depravo was still seated, with a few dead spiders around him. "What's the plan?" he asked.
"We're going to get a wheelchair for you then head back outside to kill spiders with grenades."
"Works for me."
Jaunty, Bluehead, and Reginald went to the row where an obese man sat dead in his wheelchair. The spiders had not yet finished cocooning him, so his head, leaking badly and with his tongue lolling out of his mouth, was visible.
"He doesn't need that wheelchair anymore," said Jaunty.
"That is correct," said Reginald.
They stood there for a moment.
"There's nothing wrong with taking it," said Jaunty.
"That is also correct," said Reginald.
They stood there for a longer moment.
"Somebody has to say it," said Bluehead. "I think we'll all go to hell if we dump the dead guy on the floor."
"No," said Jaunty. "I don't agree with that. We'll be using that wheelchair to do good. I'm not saying it'll fast track us to heaven, but our motives are pure. Look at him. What we'd be doing is a pretty minor indignity compared to what those spiders already did to him. If he was alive and had to choose which was worse, being taken out of his wheelchair or oozing the way that he is, I can guarantee you he'd choose 'oozing' and I never even met the guy."
"If robbers beat somebody with crowbars, stole their wallet, and left them for dead in a dark alley, and you came upon them and swiped a quarter from their pocket, what you're doing is not as bad as what the robbers did but it's still evil," said Bluehead.
"But if you swiped that quarter because you needed it to call the police to report a fire that was about to consume an orphanage, burning dozens of children alive, you were in the right."
"Yep, I totally agree with your point," said Bluehead. "Let's dump him."
Jaunty had envisioned a process where they tipped the wheelchair and gently eased the dead gentleman onto the floor. It was quickly clear that it wasn't going to work out like this. After a couple of minutes of trying to maintain the dignity of his corpse, the three clowns finally just worked together to tilt the chair up enough that he slid out and fell to the floor. His swollen head burst open upon impact.
They scooted the wheelchair away from the body and, without saying a word to each other, made a vow never to speak of this experience again.
They wheeled the chair over to Depravo. He wrinkled his bloody nose at it. "There's fluid on the armrests."
"It's just pus," said Reginald.
Depravo sat in the chair without further comment. They pushed him into the back room and explained the deal with the weapons. Then they made their selections.
Bluehead took a machete. She swung it a few times with the skill of a master machete-wielder, though in a "Samurai swordsman" fashion and not a "masked killer of teenagers" fashion.
Reginald took a machine gun. He did not test it indoors.
Depravo also took a machine gun. The back of the wheelchair had a vinyl bag in which to store things, so they filled it to overflowing with grenades, then put some more on Depravo's lap.
Jaunty took an aluminum baseball bat that had spikes on it. These spikes were not glued to the bat and there was no evidence that they'd been fused to it with a soldering iron. Instead, it seemed to have been originally molded as a baseball bat with spikes. Jaunty really wanted to know where Rose acquired such a thing, but she was already in the conference room and he didn't want to disturb her.
As they walked toward the library exit, Jaunty wondered if they were making a mistake. They were safe here. They could ride this out. Maybe there was nobody out there who even needed to be rescued. They might be marching out to their deaths while the entire rest of the town except Rose had been safely evacuated.
Maybe.
But if they could save even one person, or even one dog, they needed to get out there and do it. They were heavily armed, and by golly they were going to kick some spider posterior
.
"Let's mess up some spiders," he told the others. "To save lives—not for revenge or pleasure."
He held open the door while Reginald pushed Depravo outside. Then the clowns walked down the sidewalk, with a bit of swagger to their step.
There was a large cluster of spiders up ahead. Jaunty picked up one of the grenades from Depravo's lap, pulled out the pin, and flung it. It landed exactly where he'd aimed.
A moment later, purple smoke began to spew from the grenade.
"Oh," said Jaunty. "I guess these are smoke grenades. Not quite as useful for our purposes."
"Yeah, these would actually make things worse for us," said Reginald. "Although I can see why Rose would want them. They'd be helpful if there was a raid on the library. Not sure why she'd need this many of them, but it's not my place to question her."
Jaunty sifted through the grenades to see if any of them were different and might explode, but no, they all looked the same. He didn't want to just dump them onto the street, so he opened the door to the library again and the clowns took all of the grenades back inside and returned them to the box. Then they left the library, walking with slightly less swagger.
The grenade was still spewing smoke, so they walked the long way around it because the smoke was making it more difficult to see the spiders.
"Cover your ears," said Depravo, pointing his machine gun at a cluster of spiders up ahead. He squeezed the trigger, and the spiders disintegrated into mush.
"Nice job!" said Jaunty, when Depravo finished shooting.
"I was aiming at different spiders, but I'll get the hang of it."
Bluehead swung her machete back and forth a few times, slicing up a spider with each swing. Jaunty swung his baseball bat, sending a few mangled spiders flying into the air.
The arachnids didn't stand a chance.
It was time for clowns versus spiders, and the spiders were toast.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The machine guns made things a lot easier.
Sadly, they had far from an unlimited supply of ammunition, so they couldn't just mow spiders down left and right. After about fifty spiders were shredded by gunfire, they decided that they had to conserve bullets for times when they were in greater danger.
