by John Everson
Tommy pulled off his glove and shook his hand, glowering at Aaron for his whipped throw. “All right, all right,” he said. “You don’t have to bust my hand already.”
The next couple tosses were better; Tommy threw them right over home plate, and Aaron managed to snag both in his glove before they hit the ground. He still pitched them back a little hard, but Tommy nabbed them without a problem. It was really embarrassing when your younger brother was a better ballplayer than you.
But Aaron was used to it. Tommy was a whiz at whatever he did. At nine years old he was already slightly taller than his ten-year-old brother, and his report card always had a higher percentage of As and plus marks than Aaron’s. And while she tried not to do it, Aaron’s mom had let slip to Aaron the deadly words on more than one occasion that no sibling wants to hear, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
Aaron whipped the ball back at Tommy, who captured it easily, though the smack of the ball in the glove echoed angrily in the air.
Tommy pulled off the glove and shook his had. “Play nice,” he complained. “Or I won’t help you!” Then he lobbed the ball high in the air. “Pop fly!” Tommy yelled.
It was falling near the edge of the backstop again, and Aaron ran to get under it, but misjudged the trajectory and ran past it. The ball bounced to the gray, cracked earth ungloved.
Aaron turned and scooped it off the ground and side-armed the ball at Tommy, who ducked instinctively, instead of catching it. Ha, the kid wasn’t always perfect, Aaron thought. The ball just missed breaking his jaw by a centimeter.
“Nice catch,” Aaron taunted.
Tommy stuck his tongue out and then loped out past the baseline. The ball had bounced twice in Right Field and then vanished into the scrubgrass beyond.
“I can’t find it!” Tommy yelled after a couple minutes of pushing the weeds this way and that.
“Serves you right!” Aaron said. He didn’t budge from his position behind home plate. He’d chased enough balls already today.
Tommy’s blond head eventually disappeared from view, and Aaron sat down on the plate and puffed his shirt up and down to cool off. When he complained about the heat, Tommy always needled him and said that it was because he was fat. Tommy never seemed to care that it was sweltering. But Aaron heard plenty of people moan about how disgusting Florida was in the summer. Fat or skinny, living in the wet heat of a swamp was no fun at all. Right now the sweat was trickling down his back in a river, and they’d only been out here for a half hour, if that. But there was no shade at all on the field, and it was a typical eighty-five degree / ninety percent humidity afternoon for Southern Florida. The air was so full of swamp that you could almost taste each breath. Swamp soup.
After a couple minutes of waiting, Aaron got back up and walked to his backpack where he had a bottle of water. He took one quick swig and then squirted two long ones over the top of his head. The droplets came back down like rain on his face. The water felt good for about five seconds…and then it was just another bit of the atmospheric soup that he walked in. He was just about to call after Tommy when his brother beat him to the punch.
Typical.
“Come here,” Tommy yelled from somewhere back in the weeds. “You have to see this!” He sounded farther away than he should have been…the ball couldn’t have gotten that far with the thickness of the grass and scrub bushes.
“Just bring the ball,” Aaron called back, and sat back down on home plate. He wasn’t going out in the swamp to see anything. He didn’t want to be out here at all, but he knew he had to practice before Friday’s game.
“Ow!” he heard Tommy call.
Aaron leaned his head back and looked up at the deep blue sky. There were only a couple of white fluffy clouds lurking above; not much to block the sun at all. The sun felt like a giant hand of heat, pressing down on his shoulders.
“Stop it!” Tommy yelled.
Aaron heard something that sounded like a slap. And then another.
“Aaron, help!”
What the heck? Aaron stood up. There was something in his brother’s voice that did not sound at all like usual. Tommy sounded scared. No, scratch that. Petrified.
“What’s wrong?” Aaron called, as he began walking towards the outfield.
“They’re biting me,” Tommy screamed.
Aaron could see the brush moving erratically; Tommy looked to be running back and forth in the middle of the swampy field. “What’s biting you?” Aaron called. Alarm awakened his protective instincts. He began to run.
His brother didn’t answer, but instead started making strange gagging noises as Aaron entered the wild part beyond the field.
“Where are you?” he called and plowed into the tall grass. The leaves bit at his arms and legs, but he only sped up, ignoring the stinging scratches. All rivalry was forgotten now; Tommy was in trouble, and he was the eldest; it was his job to protect his kid brother. “What’s the matter?” he called again, his voice a wheezing gasp.
He took two more steps forward and the leaves parted.
At first he couldn’t understand what he saw. The grass was all trampled and beaten down. Some of it was brown, some still green. But some was also red.
In the middle of it, Tommy lay still. His eyes were open, but his face looked strange. Frozen.
“What’s the matter?” Aaron said, and knelt down next to his brother.
Tommy’s mouth opened in an O, but nothing came out but a faint hiss.
And two black legs.
Followed by six more. An inch-long black spider crawled out of Tommy’s mouth, and walked up his lip until it reached his nose.
Aaron’s eyes widened, and he swatted the thing off of his brother’s face. But as the spider dropped to the ground a couple feet away, Aaron saw the others. They were in Tommy’s hair and along the neckline of his black T-shirt. They crawled along the edge of his shorts, and one walked from his left thigh down towards Tommy’s knee. The white cotton of his shirt shifted and moved; a horde of the spiders must have been walking Tommy’s chest. His younger brother’s visible skin was alive with reddening welts. That was part of what had looked strange about his face; Tommy’s cheeks and forehead were swelling up visibly, even as Aaron watched. His brother was covered with dozens, maybe hundreds of bumps that were tipped with angry red dots, where the bites had occurred. It was as if a wave of spiders had rushed across Tommy’s skin, biting as they went. Aaron brushed as many of the ugly creatures off of Tommy as he could. Then he took his brother’s face between his hands and lifted it up from the ground. A mess of black arachnids fled from beneath Tommy’s left cheek, which was bloody and torn—almost as if something had been gnawing on him.
“I’ll get you home,” Aaron promised. “Mom can take you to a doctor, it will be okay. I’m sorry I threw the ball so hard. I didn’t mean for you to get bit.”
One of Tommy’s eyes blinked, and again his mouth tried to move. This time, a faint word came out. “…og,” Tommy said.
“What?” Aaron asked. But his brother only stared at him blankly.
Aaron looked up and around the small clearing again and finally registered the thing that his brother had originally called him here to see.
At the edge of the matted grass was a mess of brown fur and blood. As Aaron looked, he made out the dark brown edge of the creature’s snout, and something that might have been an ear. The rest of it was a mass of blood, exposed bone and matted fur.
“Dog.”
His brother had called him here to see the ripped-up remains of a dog. And then he’d been attacked by spiders.
“C’mon,” Aaron said, and tried to lift Tommy. His brother was a lot lighter than him, but Tommy was also a lot stronger. The younger brother had always been the athletic one, and Aaron the slug. But for once in his short life, Aaron wasn’t going to sit back and wait for someone else to help and do the heavy lifting. He gripped his brother hard and pulled. Aaron had gotten Tommy almost to a sitting position when
he felt the first bite on his back.
“Damn,” he complained, but he didn’t let go of his brother. Tommy hissed something as he lay in the crook of Aaron’s arm, but Aaron couldn’t tell what it was. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get Tommy out of here, but he knew the first step was to get him up off the ground. Then he felt another prick, this time on his neck.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he said through gritted teeth. Tommy was dead weight, but somehow, with his arm around his brother’s back, he got them upright to a kneeling position. And then the bites began in earnest along his calves and thighs. Aaron finally looked down and saw that his legs were covered in tiny black, quickly moving legs. Those black legs were attached to black round bodies, all of them cut across the back with a lightning bolt of purple. The grass all around them was alive with black-and-purple bugs, all of them converging on one thing.
Him.
“Crap,” he said, and tried to leverage Tommy’s body closer, so he could stand. But just as he pushed one foot under them and began to rise, he saw something weird in the corner of his eye.
It was colorful—kind of like one of those little telescopes that you put to your eye to see all sorts of shapes and colors moving around inside.
A kaleidoscope.
It was like that…and the colors spread across his vision from the corner of his eye, until that was all he saw. Aaron blinked hard, trying to shake it, so that he could focus on what he had to do, stand, but it didn’t go away. Still he pressed on and got them nearly to a standing position, Tommy’s body leaning tight to the cushion of his middle, when he felt a series of hard, bitter bites along both of his legs.
Aaron cried out and crumbled then, dropping to his knees and releasing his brother to fall back to the ground. Meanwhile, Aaron slapped clumsily at the black spiders that had covered his legs like a sleeve. They seemed to work almost as a team, crawling up his skin in a wave and then simultaneously biting…
The poison spread fast in his blood, and he was nearly paralyzed by the time his face touched the matted grass, just a couple feet from the bloody remains of the dog Binky, who had fallen there the night before.
As the colors spread across Aaron’s vision, obscuring the broken grass, he thought about catching the game-winning out on first base, the ball falling from the sky and slipping easily into his glove. It was a victory he would never know, but it was easy to focus on as his body went numb and the colors swirled like clouds in a hurricane.
He never saw the lost baseball finally slip out of his brother Tommy’s hand, as their bodies settled completely to the ground, going to sleep for the last time in their short lives.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Thursday, May 16. 5:16 p.m.
“Hey, Mom, can I go over to Tracie Wilkins’ house?”
Rachel opened her mouth to say “sure”, and then thought of Terry’s warning about keeping Eric close. A pang of fear entered her gut and she started to say “no, I’d rather he stay close to home”. But then she second-guessed herself a second time. Was she really going to keep Eric from playing with his friends because she was afraid of bugs? Seriously?
“Go ahead,” she relented. “But go straight to her house, and ride your bike on the sidewalk?”
“I’m going to walk down,” he said. “Tracie wants to see Feral.”
Rachel smiled. It was hard to resist that—the house completely to herself for an hour? “Okay,” she said. “But be back by 6:30. I want to eat at a reasonable hour for once!”
Eric put the pup on a leash and the back screen door slammed behind them as Rachel flopped down on the couch. It was already a quarter after five, and she hadn’t even thought about what she was going to make for dinner. The day at work had been nuts; Susan had called in sick and all of her work had ended up in Rachel’s lap. And Rachel wasn’t the only one who was out. The office had seemed half-empty and tense today. Lots of stuff to do, and nobody there to do it.
Rachel closed her eyes, and tried to envision what was in the freezer without actually getting up…
Eric was only a couple blocks away from home when suddenly Feral started pulling on the leash. Pulling towards the Wilkins’ house.
“Do you remember your old home, buddy?” Eric asked. He stopped and crouched down to ruffle the dog’s short fur. “This is just a visit though. Your home is with me now!”
He stood up and something caught his eye as he did. Eric looked to his left and realized that the lawn of the house next to him was completely overgrown. But more than that…it was hard to see. As if the air around it was hazy. As if something was wrapped around it to shield it from the sun. Something kind of see-through, like a dandelion, but not quite.
As he stared, he realized what the strange effect was—the entire side of the house was enshrouded in a spider’s web.
“Whoa,” he said to Feral. “C’mere boy.”
He pulled on the dog’s chain and stepped through the unkempt lawn to get closer to the house. As he did, he realized that the webbing really did cover the whole house. That was why the place had seemed hazy from the sidewalk; there was webbing from the gutters to the bushes all around it. Some of it was thick but some was barely visible at all; nevertheless, the house was completely enshrouded in silk. He approached the web slowly, and pulled Feral’s leash tight, holding the dog close to his feet. Feral barked and Eric said, “Shush, boy, shhhh.”
He stopped at a hedge of evergreens. The web was so thick there where it wound into the needles that you couldn’t even see the green of the bushes beneath it. The sticky silk seemed to be anchored here, and he could see small oval openings in the heavy cotton—tunnels to its interior—all around. Like prairie dog holes in a cloud. He followed the webbing upward and saw that it stretched all the way up past the second-story windows. The web attached to the house’s eaves. As he looked up the two-story stretch of cotton candy strands, he saw tiny black bodies moving across the web. They darted back and forth, and up and down, midway up the web.
Spiders. Spinning a deeper, thicker web.
But what did they hope to catch with a web that large?
Eric let out a whistle. As he did, all movement above him in the web stopped. He saw the black forms, hundreds of them, hanging still in space for a moment…and then they all began to descend towards the bushes. Thousands of black legs, all skittering down.
Towards the source of the whistle.
Towards him.
“C’mon boy,” Eric said, and pulled Feral’s leash as he backed away from the web towards the sidewalk that he’d promised his mom he wouldn’t get off of.
“Let’s get a move on,” he said and turned his back on the enormous web. He was half-running before he even reached the white concrete. Behind him, the rush of forms down the web had grown thicker. So thick, in fact, that the web literally looked like a brewing storm cloud—at its bottom it was no longer the white of cotton, but the black of tar.
Eric didn’t stop or look back to notice. He had decided it was best to put as much distance between him and the spiders as possible. A wise decision.
When they reached Tracie’s house, Eric was breathing hard, and the poor dachshund was lagging way behind him on the end of the leash. He’d practically dragged the poor dog the last few yards. Eric stopped to catch his breath at the edge of the walk, and once Feral caught up, they walked together up the path to the Wilkins’ front door. Eric rang the bell.
He stood there waiting for several minutes before Mrs. Wilkins answered. She smiled when she saw Feral’s tail wagging on the concrete stoop, but she didn’t open the door.
“I’m sorry, Eric, but Tracie can’t come out today.”
From somewhere deeper in the house, Eric heard his friend’s voice. “Who is it, Mom?”
But before Mrs. Wilkins could answer, Tracie’s head poked up next to her at the screen.
“Hey, Eric,” she said. “How’s my puppy?”
Eric pulled Feral’s leash a little tighter. “He’s my puppy no
w,” he reminded her.
Tracie nodded, and Eric saw that her cheeks were covered in little red dots.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But he’ll always have a part of his home with us, too!”
Then her mom stepped in. “I’m sorry, Eric, but Tracie can’t come out today. She’s gotten a bunch of nasty bites, and I just gave her some antihistamine and want her to lie down. You can talk here at the door for a minute, but then she needs to go back to bed.”
“Aw, Mom!” Tracie complained, but Mrs. Wilkins ignored her.
“Behave,” the older woman warned. “Five minutes,” she said, and then disappeared back into the shadows of the house.
“Do you feel okay?” Eric asked, and Tracie shrugged.
“I was kind of funky earlier, but now I’m just all itchy.”
“What bit you? Mosquitoes?” He thought, even as he said it, that he’d never seen anyone with a face covered in mosquito bites. Though he supposed it was possible.
“No,” she said. “I woke up with them. Mom thinks it’s spider bites.”
“Like the ones at the house on Ajuga Street?” he asked pointing back the way he and Feral had walked.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“There’s a house just a block or two down there that is completely covered in spider webs! Like…from the ground to the roof!”
“Seriously?” she asked. Tracie’s face lit up, and then she quickly brought her hand up to itch the bites on her cheek. Moving her face in a smile or a frown just got the itches going again.
“I want to see,” she said. “Show me!”
“Your mom said you can’t come out.”
Tracie rolled her eyes. “My mom says a lot of things. Go wait for me on the side of the house. I’ll be out in a few minutes.” She smiled wickedly and then said sweetly, a little too loudly, “Well, goodbye, Eric! See you in school.” She winked and closed the door, a big grin on her face.
