by John Everson
She unlocked the front door and stepped into the living room. “Eric, I’m home,” she called, and walked into the kitchen to drop the groceries.
He didn’t answer.
Probably wrapped up in a video game instead of homework, she thought, and walked down the hall to the bedrooms.
“Eric?” She poked her head into his room, intending to chide him for not answering. But the room was empty. The screensaver was swirling incandescent colors across a black background. That meant he hadn’t been in here for a while.
But where could he have gone? She’d only been gone to the store for, like, twenty minutes!
Rachel checked the bathroom and then walked into the kitchen and peered out the window to the backyard.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, she said over and over in her head. I can’t do this!
Rachel called his name twice more in the house and then went outside to yell his name to the neighborhood.
Nobody answered.
She went back inside and called Jeremy’s house to see if he’d gone down the block for some reason.
They hadn’t seen him.
Where else? She dug around and found the number for the Wilkins. She couldn’t believe he would have disobeyed her and gone all the way to Tracie’s house, but…
The phone rang and rang. Nobody answered.
Rachel felt the panic rising now. She had no idea where else to look. She struggled to keep a tear from escaping, but it got out anyway. And once one ran down her cheek, the floodgate opened. Anders had always said she was a lousy mother. He’d been right. She knew better than to leave a ten-year-old alone, even if only for a few minutes. Now she was going to be punished for being an idiot. Eric was a good kid, but he was still a kid.
She had to do something, but she didn’t know what. Finally, she picked up the phone again and dialed. She felt ridiculous, but she couldn’t do this on her own. And she certainly wasn’t going to call Anders.
Her heart stilled just a little when the ringing stopped and a man’s voice picked up and said “Hello?” Just the sound of his voice made her feel slightly better. He gave her hope.
“Hello, Terry?” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I don’t know what to do. I can’t find Eric.”
At that moment, across the street, Eric skidded into the kitchen and stopped short of the door. The floor in front of him was covered in dark, skittering legs. They streamed out of the pantry and down the walls from where they had been hiding in the thick web to block his way. Eric turned to look back the way he’d come, but as he did, the flies entered the kitchen, and began to swarm around him. He screamed and ran back through Billy’s living room towards the front door, but found his way there was blocked as well; the door was completely obscured by a thick nest of spider web. The flies were biting and landing all over him.
Eric dropped to the carpet and rolled, trying to crush them off of him. But as he rolled, he saw a wave of spiders advancing. They came down the hallway from Billy’s bedroom and out of the kitchen. They had found dinner.
And dinner was him.
“No, no, no!” he yelped, and rolled back to his feet. He was not going to be eaten here, he wasn’t. There was only one way out, and he was just going to have to get through it.
Eric ran back to the kitchen. The bodies of spiders crushed audibly beneath his sandals as he ran, but that didn’t stop others from latching on to the side of his soles and climbing onto the top of his feet. He felt their bites, and looked down to see his feet covered in black and purple.
The mass of spiders still blocked the door and the air was so thick with flies he could barely breathe.
Then he had an idea.
Eric ran to the kitchen sink and turned the water on hot, full-force. Then he picked up the spray hose, aimed it at his feet and pressed the trigger. The spiders washed off like dirt, scurrying to get out of the path of the water.
“Ha ha!” Eric yelled. “Take that, you stupid cridders!”
He sprayed the air back and forth, forcing the swarm of flies to vacate the room or be washed to the ground. When most of them were gone, he turned the spray on the floor near his feet. He pulled it as far as it would reach from the sink as he could so that he could aim around the kitchen table and wash a path clear to the door. The spiders raced from the center of the room to the edges and scurried up the walls, back to the giant nests in the corners of the ceiling. When Eric was satisfied that he’d cleared enough of them away to escape, he tossed the hose back on the sink, slapped the water off and turned back towards the kitchen door.
But the spiders had other ideas.
Something bit him on the neck. And then the shoulder.
They were dropping down on him from the ceiling. Kamikaze dive bombers. All around the room, spiders were descending on webs from the ceiling, each fine thread of silk ending in a black spider with a violet stripe. If they couldn’t attack him from the ground, they’d descend from the air. As Eric contemplated running towards the door, a thousand spiders all slid down on rapidly lengthening strands, blocking his way to the door. They stopped descending at right about his eyelevel, and waited. A million violet eyes stared at the boy, all waiting for him to make his move.
“Crap,” Eric said.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Monday, May 20. 6:09 p.m.
The brakes to Terry’s truck squealed as he skidded into the driveway. Rachel had been just short of hysterical when she’d called, and he hadn’t wasted a minute. He’d pulled on a clean T-shirt, grabbed the keys and peeled away from his house, slamming on the brakes only when he reached her driveway five minutes later.
When he got out of the truck, she was waiting on the stoop.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and threw her arms around him. “I just didn’t know what to do. I’m scared.”
“I know,” he said and hugged her tight. “We’ll find him. He can’t have gone too far in thirty or forty minutes.”
He held her by the shoulders, squeezing her tight. “You’ve checked with all of his friends around here?”
She sniffed, and blinked away the tears, nodding. “Yes,” she said. “Nobody’s seen him.”
“You’ve checked everywhere in the house?”
She nodded. But Terry shook his head.
“I mean everywhere. Like…the closets? Behind the fence in the backyard? If he fell and knocked himself in the head, he could be right here, and you’d never know it.”
Rachel appeared unconvinced, but led him inside the house. Together, they walked room to room, opening the pantry, the bathroom closet, the little storage crawlspace, Eric’s bedroom closet. They looked behind the shower curtains and even behind the couch. Then they walked the backyard, peering across the fence to the neighbor’s yards.
They came up empty.
“Let’s take a drive around the neighborhood then,” he suggested. “Maybe he went to someone’s house that you don’t know, and he’s walking home. He knows you’d be worried, so I can’t imagine he would stay away long.”
She nodded, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Okay,” she whispered. “Thanks.”
They got in the truck, and backed out of the driveway. Terry shifted it into drive and as they pulled down the road, they passed right by Billy’s house, without hearing the screams coming from inside.
“What if he went to Tracie’s house and the flies attacked him?” Rachel cried.
“You called Tracie’s parents?”
She nodded. “They didn’t answer.”
“Hmmm…” he said. “Let’s check there first.”
The first thing Rachel noticed as they turned left onto the Wilkins’ street was that the Haidan house was no longer the only one covered in spider webs. The entire street looked as if it had been attacked by tent worms. Everything was covered in a thin gauze of web.
“Oh my God!” Rachel cried out.
Terry hit the brakes. “What is it?”
She pointed at the Haidans’ house. The ten
t of silk was the thickest around it, but Rachel could still see the front door through the haze. It was open. But that wasn’t what she was pointing at.
Lying on the front stoop, one hand outstretched and caught by the thick spider webbing, was a man. Or what was left of a man.
“Jesus,” she said.
Terry looked at the corpse on the lawn, and at the other houses nearby, all of them wrapped in spider silk.
“I suspect he’s not the only one,” he said.
The Wilkins’ house was also covered in spiders.
“I don’t think he’s here,” Terry said, watching the dark shapes cascading down from the roof to the doorway as they walked up the sidewalk. “I hope he’s not, anyway.”
He brushed the thin strands of web away from the doorway and rang the doorbell. They heard it echo within the house, but nobody answered the door.
“Ouch!” Rachel complained, and slapped her shoulder. Her hand came away with the black legs and yellow pulp of a spider.
Terry slapped his leg and his back, and then put out a hand to encourage her to retreat from the stoop. They stepped backwards down the walk, away from the house, and then Rachel saw the entire front area of the house had grown dark with crawling legs. The spiders had seen them on the stoop, or felt the bits of their web wiped away, and converged. As they watched, they could see a dark shadow move down the web, following the two arches that held the awning above the front step. When the shadow reached the ground, the sidewalk suddenly erupted with a wave of black spiders. All of them ran towards Rachel and Terry.
“Come on,” he said, and pulled her towards the truck.
Once they were inside, he gunned the engine and backed out of the driveway with a screech.
“These things are not friendly,” he said, announcing the obvious.
Next to him, Rachel started to cry.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Monday, May 20. 6:10 p.m.
Anders threw his knapsack into the back of the ’94 Chevy and slammed the door shut. He’d been thinking about Rachel and Eric nonstop for the past week, and he was tired of just thinking. He had put in to take a couple days’ vacation, starting tomorrow, and gotten them approved. Now was the time for doing.
It shouldn’t have been this way. And he knew once he got to Rachel, and made her see reason, that he could fix it. She loved him, he knew she did. She always had. Hell, he used to be able to tell her to drop and suck it, and she’d be on her knees with her fingers on his zipper in ten seconds flat.
She loved him. Whatever had gotten in and poisoned her head? He didn’t know, but he could fix that. He just needed a little time alone with her. He bet some fuckin’ candypants had sweet-talked her until she’d lost all reason. Guys were all the same. They talked and talked and flattered until they made a girl get all moist thinking she was a princess. Anders knew the game. He’d played it himself; that’s how he’d gotten Rachel to go home with him the first time.
He’d proposed to her in a pair of cowboy boots and a denim shirt, and had even grabbed a long blade of grass to slip between his teeth. They had been dating for six months, and he liked the way she moved with him, before and after the dark. She was a good woman, always trying to do the best thing for her man. And so he liked being her man, and wanted to keep it that way. So he went down to the Crestview Mall and found her a ring, and then invited her to a walk down near the Gulf. They’d had dinner at one of those little crab shacks along the beach and then he’d taken her down a long boardwalk that led to the sand. When they were almost to the end of the wooden walk, he’d pulled a long blade of scrubgrass and put it between his teeth. There was nobody else around. Just the lights of hotels and restaurants in the distance, and a couple boats out on the dark of the waves.
“Ma’am,” he had said, bowing his forehead. “I’d sure appreciate it if you’d be my missus.”
She’d always liked it when he played the cowboy, and she sure liked it this time. After she had slipped his ring on, they had taken their clothes off and made love right there on the sand as the moon came up.
Rachel belonged to Anders, and that’s just the way it was. She’d been led astray somehow, but he was determined to corral her back to the right path.
He’d even pulled on his old cowboy boots. He wasn’t taking any chances.
Google maps said it was about eleven hours from Crestview to Passanattee. He was hoping to shave an hour off if he could. But either way, he was going to be there in the morning.
Anders planned on having breakfast with his family.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Monday, May 20. 6:16 p.m.
Eric picked up the hose from the sink again, and turned on the water. The flies were already filtering back into the kitchen again, and while the floor was clear, there was no way he could run through all those hanging spiders without being covered by them.
“Assholes!” he said, and turned the water back on the air between him and the kitchen door. It brought dozens of the spiders down, and all around the floor, black eight-legged shapes pulled themselves out of the water towards the safety of the webs.
This time, Eric didn’t waste a breath for thinking.
“I’m outta here, suckers,” he yelled, and dove towards the floor.
He’d turned the tile into a pool of water littered with drowned bugs, but this time he didn’t worry about getting wet or trying to unlock and open the door, which had been his original plan. He dove for the doggy door, and as soon as his hands were through, he pushed them to the sides of the door and levered the rest of his body through.
In seconds, he was standing on the sidewalk outside of Billy’s house.
Free!
He breathed in and out quickly, struggling to catch his breath. His clothes were soaked, but he didn’t care…he’d gotten out of the house.
But his exit wasn’t unnoticed. The web all around him was suddenly dark with legs. He ran towards the side of the house, but when he got there, he found the spiders had already closed the entryway with a surprisingly thick skein of web. And the violet bolts of lightning shimmered from the threads. Hundreds of spiders were there ahead of him, waiting.
As he considered whether he should throw himself through and take his chances on being brought down by poison bites, he saw Terry’s truck pull into his driveway across the street.
He backed away from the web and waited until a door opened; Terry and his mom got out of the truck. “Mom!” he screamed. “Mom, I’m over here!”
In seconds Terry and his mom had run across the street and stood on the other side of the web from him. Even with all the yelling matches she and his dad had gone through, before the divorce, Eric didn’t think he’d ever seen his mother so upset.
“What are you doing over there!” his mom screamed. She was crying and happy and angry all at once. Her voice cracked as she said, “I told you to stay in the house.”
“I know,” Eric said. “But I found Feral.”
“Hang on,” Terry said. “Don’t get near the web, either of you.”
He ran back to the truck as Rachel raged. “I am sooo angry with you! I thought I could trust you. I need to be able to trust you!” And then it dawned on her what Eric had said.
“Is Feral okay?”
“No,” Eric said. “He and Billy…” He couldn’t say it. “They’re both in the house. And there are like…a million spiders and flies in there.”
Terry came back brandishing a leaf rake.
“Stand back,” he warned. “Eric, as soon as I’ve pulled the web, I want you to run to your mother.”
He raised the rake, and brought it down, yelling as he did. The spiders had already run down and across the grass, and were crawling up his shoes and legs, biting wherever they could find purchase.
The web went down with a flash of pale silk, spiders raining from it to the ground. They scurried across the grass to attack Eric, Terry and Rachel.
“Run!” Terry demanded, and the three of them dashed f
or the street. Eric felt them biting him, but he didn’t slow down until they were on his own lawn. And then he felt heavy hands slapping him, and heard Terry’s voice demanding, “Drop and roll, drop and roll!”
Eric fell to the lawn, not understanding. But everything seemed to be getting a little fuzzy all of a sudden. He closed his eyes, and a minute later he felt hands picking up him. He heard his mother’s voice, and Terry’s, but he couldn’t seem to open his eyes.
“…welts all over him…”
“…bathtub…lukewarm water…”
“…Benadryl…”
The water made his eyes open. His mom had her arm around his head, and Terry knelt beside her. “How you doin’, buddy?” Terry said as Eric struggled to focus.
He blinked a couple of times, and then looked up at his mom. “They killed Feral,” he said. “They ate him.”
“I’m sorry, baby,” she said, stroking his hair.
Eric closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he was dressed in his pajamas and sitting on his bed.
“How do you feel, kiddo?” Terry was holding his eyelid open, and staring at him funny.
“Tired,” Eric said. “What are you doing?”
“I gave you some anti-venom serum,” Terry said. “Just a little. We’ve helped a few people who were bit by these things and the venom isn’t that bad. It’s really just a tranquilizer. I think if you can just get up and walk around for a few minutes, you’re going to feel a lot better.”
