Day of the Spiders

  Ironic that it had been Braden Benson’s plan all along. It was just a pity he wasn’t allowed to see it happen.

  Mary wasn’t going to let him get away with killing Trent, not a chance in hell. He had been her last gasp of having something in her life that gave her real joy and meaning and what Braden had done to him was as good as murder. She knew that he had driven away without him. She knew he had condemned Trent to death. He had to suffer the consequences of his actions once and for all.

  They had made it to the Layton dam with seconds to spare. The spiders weren’t far behind them when they pulled the car up just a few feet from the waiting chopper. The moment the car pulled over, Mary was out of the door and snatching Jax up into her arms. She made it to the chopper first, loading Jax on and then stepping aboard herself. She saw Braden running, his gangly legs flapping around as he charged forwards. She waited until he was near enough for him to hear her and she suddenly yelled out.

  “He’s been bitten.”

  Braden had heard it. His face had creased over in puzzlement. He tried to get on the chopper, but the people on board kicked him away. He fought them, screaming and begging them to let him on. Then a soldier had come forwards and shot him three times. Jax hadn’t seen it. She was unaware that the fuss was about her Dad. She had asked her where he was when they had lifted off. Mary had told her that he had to go and do his own thing again. She had heard that one so many times before. After today, she would never hear it again. They headed for the coast. Mary wondered what she could possibly get up to now that she had finally broken free. The possibilities were endless, as long as they took care of those bastard spiders.

  The second helicopter contained Brigadier Taber. She was looking down at the mass of spiders assembling around the Hurst Centre. Keller, the smart arse, was on board too. She needed his eyes, not that she would ever admit it to him, the little puke.

  “That’s the same, isn’t it? That’s the same as Newtown. I seen the pictures Ma’am,” he said, pointing down at the spider tower below them.

  “Yes it is,” said Taber. She clicked the button on the headset to the open channel. “All units to the Hurst Centre. Give ‘em everything you got, all chemical, then get back to your sweeps,” she said.

  Not on my fuckin’ watch she mumbled under her breath.

  Epilogue.

  Out in the woodlands, not far from Layton Valley the decapitated body of the Wells creature lay out in the sun. A steady hum of flies hung around the remains of the beast. The severed head was less than three feet away, and it almost looked as if it had a little smirk on its face.

  Three hours earlier, the mutation formally known as Wells had found the Katie Underwood mutation in the woodlands. She had purposely found a quiet place to be and she had begun to emit a pheromone that proved to be as intoxicating to Wells as the smell of freshly fried doughnuts. When he found her, the smell had become as addictive as any drug he had ever experienced in his life. It ran through his broken body, bringing it to life, making it tingle with a desire that he had never felt before in all his time as a human. The Katie thing turned away and held its rear end upwards towards him. Small fragments of his human mind and instincts were still flickering deep within his psyche as his mutated genitalia was pushed inside hers and gripped with a firmness and a pleasure that he had seldom enjoyed before. The explosive and prolonged orgasm he had experienced had probably been one of the best moments of his life. It had almost seemed worth it, worth the unrelenting agony of his new body.

  But it was also the last thing that he ever did. The Katie thing pulled away from his deflating hardness, turned around bit off his head in one fell swoop, sending a jet of blackened blood skywards. She waited for a few hours, making sure that the gift he had given her was ready to proceed and then she squatted over his stiffening corpse and laid her stinking, fertilised eggs onto the body of Wells. When they hatched, they were going to feast on the body of their father.

  The new breed was about to be born.