Push the thought down, Jason. Push it down. What the hell was this man doing in there and how had he gotten in?
“Who are you?”
The man stood, pulling his hand away from the baby. Jason could see Nadine had what looked like ash on the inside part of her hand, like whatever covered the man remained on her.
Jason looked up to stare into the man’s eyes. He saw fire there, the flame burning where the man’s eyes should have been.
Jason felt their heat. He felt it all through his body. It ran through his veins, and he knew the faster his blood pumped through him, the faster he’d be burned from the inside out. It felt like it was going to eat its way out of him just to have him spontaneously combust right there, his inner life force working against him, but then it centered on his own eyes. A throbbing formed and he had to force them closed.
Everything around him cooled back to what he had felt before he had seen the man. He could hear the hum of the cooler kick back on, no longer whining against some unnatural heat.
He counted his breaths, waiting until he reached a hundred. Then he opened his eyes, but wished he hadn’t. Spiders. They were crawling from under the door of the cooler, from out of the vent of the refrigeration unit. Any crack in the wall, spiders flooded out of it then over him. He was covered in hundreds of them.
He opened his mouth to yell, but spiders ran inside before he could. They filled his lungs as he tried to breathe. He could feel them wiggling and squirming to make their way into his ears, climbing up his nose. They were everywhere, their little legs on his skin. He was infested with them.
He realized that if he was seeing them, it was already too late.
He wished like hell he hadn’t been able to see them. He liked it when he didn’t know they were already taking over.
Someone in the room, he couldn’t see who because there were too many on top of him, was laughing. He didn’t know when he had lay down, but he could feel a layer of spiders covering him. Even with them in his ears, he still heard the laughing. He knew it was that thing. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. The thing had won, and it was laughing.
EPILOGUE
(PART 2)
The general watched the camera feeds, watching as the five survivors each sat in their own isolation room. Five survivors… That had been all that had made it out. Of everyone…the townspeople, the soldiers at the inner perimeter and the outer perimeter…only five people made it out.
Four of them had escaped through one of the blockades just seconds before the M.O.A.B. had taken out the area. The fifth, Sergeant Wade, who had been commanding the inner perimeter, had also been found, though no one, not even the sergeant, could explain how he had made it just a mile from the outside perimeter.
Five people. That was it. All of them were now sitting there. He wasn’t sure how long he would keep them in isolation. It was a mess outside. The biological entities were contained, although no one knew for sure what the hell they were, but they had to nuke a town to do so. The political aftermath was a nightmare. The president had tried to deny any knowledge of it. He really did act like his shit didn’t stink, and it seemed like the fool actually thought none of this would blow back on him.
Now, the general thought they might actually have had the first U.S. President to be arrested on murder charges, but there would never be any hints at orders so nothing could ever get back to the president. That had been the reason for all the secrecy in the first place but, somehow, it seemed like that might not matter. The American people were crying bloody murder, and they wanted his head. It didn’t matter if he had anything to do with it or not. Hell, most of the U.S. wanted his head after they heard about the Snowden leaks. This just gave them more justification for it.
Not that any of that mattered to the general. None of it would trickle down to him. He was in a special part of the country now, a special base, tucked away from everyone and everything. He was given one mandate and that was to find out what had happened in the town, then see what he could do to weaponize it. After all, there was just too much potential to let it go.
And all he had were five people who didn’t know a thing. He wasn’t sure how long he would keep them there. There wasn’t much use as long as they weren’t a threat. They couldn’t politically harm anything more than what was already out, so he just needed to make sure they weren’t dangerous.
A part of him wished he could just dig a big hole somewhere out in the Nevada desert and drop them all straight down into it. Just bury it all away so it would disappear. His name wasn’t a part of it yet, which was good. How everything had been set up, his name shouldn't ever be a part of it. With all the backlash though, he didn’t know if that would stay true. The truth always had a nasty way of coming out, usually when it could hurt him the most.
Someday, the truth would come back to bite him on the ass.
And the biological entities were all gone. Every single one of them was destroyed. No matter how much he wished he could have kept at least one for them to study, all of them had been burned. The necessity of it negated any possible way he could keep one for his people to study. They just spread too damned fast, were too hard to kill, and just too dangerous to keep around. If he hadn’t killed them all, they would have eventually wiped everybody out.
It was over and they all had just barely survived.
* * * *
Sergeant Wade didn’t know how he had survived. He was on the line with his men. He had stayed with them. No matter how much the brass was trying to come after him for abandoning his post, he knew he hadn’t. He had been with them, fighting next to them. Long after he ran out of rounds, he was still there. He would take a rifle from a wounded soldier and would continue firing. Soldiers who ran would drop their weapons, and he would pick it up. He had not abandoned his post.
His post had abandoned him. Many of the men had fallen around him, getting overrun with the things. They didn’t move too fast, but he wasn’t backing away fast, either. They continued to move back, backpedaling to stay facing their enemy. No matter how many times they fired, how many bullets were shot into the things, they just kept coming.
McCormick had somehow gotten to his side. The kid had been smart. Get close to the guy who seemed to be surviving. It hadn’t helped him, though. While Wade had been focusing on a group of the things coming from their left, one had come up on their right. By the time Wade had seen it, it was already too late. One of their soldiers, a private who must have gotten attacked early, had grabbed his communications man, pulling him to the ground.
Almost everyone was down. It was chaos. The war between life and death was battling all around him. He knew he didn’t have a chance, but he was not going down until he had taken as many of the things with him.
Of course, none of the things were really going down. They just kept taking the hits, falling down, and getting right back up. Bullets riddled their bodies and they just kept getting right back up. It didn’t matter how many times they were shot. They still came. It didn’t matter if they had heads. They still got up and came forward.
After a while, he noticed that he was the last man and the things were surrounding him, but they weren’t coming quickly. Instead, they seemed to stop a few paces away. The ones with mouths, were just opening and closing them, looking at him in that hungry, dead way, but they didn’t come any closer.
Then he heard the inbound overhead and looked up to see the bird coming in. He knew it was a drone, and knew what must have finally been happening. He wasn’t surprised. At some point, he knew they would have to drop a tactical nuke because there was no way they could ever allow any of this to get out. It had to be contained.
He let the rifle fall to the ground, hearing it land with a distinguishable sound of metal on asphalt. Then he just waited for the things to attack him as he watched the metal object fall from the sky.
They never attacked, and he saw a bright white flash surround him.
Then he woke up in the white roo
m, not sure how he had gotten there. He was found miles outside the outer perimeter. It just didn’t make sense, so the brass didn’t believe him. Instead, he was labeled a traitor and someone who ran in the face of battle.
None of it made any sense.
* * * *
Bruce felt so relieved when they had made it out. There had been many times he didn’t think they would. But they had, and here they were. They were alive. How the fuck did that happen?
He knew that moose guard on the front of his truck had taken one hell of a beating. Hell, his whole truck did. They had been lucky at that first blockade. The police were so overrun with those things, they didn’t even care about the truck flying right past them. They had been damn lucky the cops hadn’t had their cars across the road. Rob had actually been pissed at the negligence of the officers, even though it had saved their lives.
At the outer perimeter, they had even more luck. The soldiers out there had been in the process of pulling out. Bruce hadn’t known why, the private in the back had said something about a M.O.A.B or something, but they just barreled through, passing the soldiers, who then chased after them.
Then something exploded, and Bruce had just stopped.
The soldiers had quickly caught up with them and, the next thing he knew, he was here…wherever the hell here was. White room, the whole place reeking of sterilization. They had escaped from one quarantine to another.
And here he was in a small room with white walls that he stared at every day. No matter how much he slept, he felt like it was never enough. He was always tired, and the lights seemed like they were always on. And, occasionally, he thought he saw a spider. He would see one, then he would blink and it would be gone.
He had to be imagining things. Hell, with what they had all been through, he was sure he would be seeing spiders for the rest of his life.
And then there was the man, that foul-smelling man he had met at the truck stop. He couldn’t remember anything about him, just that he smelled really bad. Bruce would wake up and see the man sitting in the corner, watching him. Sometimes Bruce would wake up and he wouldn’t see the man, but he would smell him. The stench would be gagging him, and he would find it hard to breathe. He would have to toss himself over, so that he was on his side, and start dry-heaving. He would hear his horrible laughter, and it would rake inside his skull like nails on a chalkboard. It would echo on and on, and no one who came to check on him could hear it.
He wondered at just what point he had lost his sanity in that town. But hadn’t he met the man before he went into town? In fact, hadn’t the man been the one to tell him the interstate was backed up, sending him down 23 and through Hammond.
Maybe the man had never been real. Maybe none of this had ever been real.
And there was another spider crawling along his wrist. It was a small, black spider that he felt as its legs danced upon his hairs. It was feeling its way up along his arm. Was it real?
And, again, he heard that dark man. As much as he had looked around for him, he never could see him, but he always heard him laughing.
AUTHORS NOTE
Hello,
I hope you enjoyed “Caught in the Web” which is book 2 of the “Invisible Spiders” series and that I haven’t given too many nightmares. Who am I kidding, of course I wanted to give you nightmares.
Caught in the Web and the Invisible Spiders series as a whole came from an interesting idea and the more I build on the universe and work with these characters, the more they come to life. I truly love writing this series and hope to continue to find new ways to make it a scary experience to read each new chapter as it develops.
When I started writing “Hatched” the first book in the series, I had the idea that I wanted to extend the initial transformation into a zombie and that was my initial concept. I feel that zombies in themselves are not that scary of a subject, but the idea of becoming one is. So I took that idea and started to develop the concept.
As I was developing “Hatched” at some point I felt that while that was a book I really wanted to write, it would be a hard book to have people enjoy. I felt that the slow build didn’t have much of a pay off in the “action” element of something in the zombie genre. So that was when I started developing the military aspect and was when the book started to become more a piece of a series and not a standalone story.
“Caught in the Web” is the pay off for the first book. It is the finale to that part of the story and it does end with one helluva bang. Though some might feel it ended a little clipped, I felt to add on more action to the end would have been pushing the limits of enjoyment. There was a certain amount of closure and to continue with that one more chapter would not have been that entertaining.
So now we prepare for book 3, “Weaving the Webs.” I will warn, when thinking in the aspect of the larger story, this was just the opening scene. Book 3 will be starting the series over again. It will be a departure from the story so far, as things are reset. Whereas one chapter of the story has ended, the next chapter begins almost anew, and the long story will start to build.
I hope all of you will enjoy and take this journey with me. It will be a bumpy road and there will be a lot of heart break, zombies, and of course, spiders…
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
EPILOGUE (PART 1)
EPILOGUE (PART 2)
AUTHORS NOTE
Caught in the Web Page 33