by John Everson
“This guy hasn’t been dead that long,” he said, making a face.
“He’s nothing but bones,” Jess argued.
“Maybe up-top, but not down here.” Billy grimaced and wiped something dark, cool and sticky off the back of his hand on the sand.
And then they all made faces as the smell reached them, a stench of rotting meat mixed with the sour of bad fish.
“Jesus,” Mark said, stepping back.
As Billy stood up they could all see that just below the first couple of exposed ribs, a blackened gory mess yawned under the sand.
“But…what took all of the skin off his head?” Casey asked.
“Not just skin,” Billy answered. His voice sounded grim. “Something took hair, muscle, eyes, fat… without leaving a trace.”
“Fucking gross,” Mark said. Two hands grabbed his arm and squeezed. Jess.
“My foot was on him,” she said. Her voice sounded close to breaking.
Billy slapped a bug on his neck absently. “Well, at least you only touched the clean part.”
Casey echoed Billy, hitting her thigh with her palm. The air around them seemed to hum.
“So much for no bugs,” Mark said. He swatted at a tiny fly or gnat that circled his face.
“Um,” Casey said. “I think we should go.”
Billy turned to look at her, and then his gaze followed her arm, which pointed to a cloud of insects at the edge of the trees. They glittered like a violet constellation in the bright sun. Black and shimmering purple, the horde of tiny insects expanded from the forest in a cloud that grew broader by the second. The co-eds all began to slap at tiny bites as the buzz grew around them, and the air suddenly was alive with tiny beating wings.
“I think we should go now!” Casey screamed, and ran straight through the cloud towards the path of broken branches they had forged. The others followed close on her heels.
They ran through the jungle, the high-pitched hum of hunger all around them. The cloud followed. “Ouch,” Jess cried, swatting at the things that bit her neck and back.
“Keep moving,” Mark yelled, and pulled her by the hand. “In here,” he said, and led them all to the abandoned metal hut. He yanked open the door and they piled past him, collapsing on the floor as he slammed the door.
From outside, the sound of a thousand flies hummed. From inside, the sound of gasping breath and stifled crying filled the silence. Nobody spoke.
Mark ran a hand across his neck and came back with the remains of three smashed insects. “What are they?” he asked.
Billy looked closer, noting the black underbellies and purple slashes of color across their backs. They were the size of mosquitoes, but thicker. The missing link between a gnat and a housefly. He could just make out the iridescent bulging eyes that were reminiscent of a billion inhabitors of garbage cans and other sources of decay. The procreators of maggots. The death cleaners.
“Some kind of fly,” Billy said finally. “Never seen one like it before though.”
“I thought you knew this island,” Casey accused.
“Yeah, I did,” he said. “Things change.”
The one window to the outside remained obscured by a cloud of buzzing insects. They covered the glass, landing for a few seconds, crawling across it in jerky, fast steps and then rising in the air again to loop and soar, looking for something to still their hunger. The air vibrated with a muffled but constant, nearby hum.
“This is insane,” Casey complained. “We can’t just sit in here.” But she didn’t make a move to leave; she hunched down, back to a wall, arms hugging her shins.
Mark stood up and moved to the corner of the hut. He picked up one of the canisters, and turned it around in his hands, looking for a label. But it was unmarked.
“What are you thinking?” Billy asked.
“Looks like a pesticide sprayer to me,” Mark said, running a finger down the handle that would open the nozzle.
“One way to find out.” Billy got up and went to the door. He put a hand on the knob.
“I’ll open it, you put it out there and spray. See what happens. Just don’t go outside. I don’t want them swarming in here.”
“You can’t open the door,” Casey complained.
“Thought you didn’t want to sit here all afternoon?” Mark said.
“No. But they’ll go away sooner or later, right?”
Mark looked at the swarm outside the window. It showed no signs of moving on. “I’m not sure I believe that at the moment.”
Nobody spoke for a few minutes. They all just listened to the buzzing. Finally Mark walked to the door, and turned the knob. He set the canister on the floor and pushed the door open a crack, just enough to stick the nozzle tube through. Then he grabbed the pump handle on the canister, pulled it up as high as it would go, and slowly pushed it back down. Even though the door was nearly closed, the hut was instantly filled with the smell of strong pesticide. But nobody said a word about the smell, because they were all paying attention to what was going on outside. Outside where the flies were dropping off the window by the dozens. A cloud of silvery white mist ballooned beyond the glass of the window and expanded away from the hut and into the trees.
Mark stopped spraying and pulled the nozzle back inside the room.
“Did it work?” he asked, and joined the others at the window. Outside, the mist dissipated like fog in a slow wind, until the deep green of the trees and bushes beyond were crisp and clear again. The air had grown silent.
“I can’t see a single bug,” Billy whispered. “That shit is good!”
They moved towards the door as one, and slowly pushed it open. The air smelled strongly of chemicals, but otherwise, the area was empty. The ground glittered with violet chitin; so many had fallen that the ground crunched as they walked.
“Back to the tents?” Billy asked.
“Uh, duh,” Jess said. “I wish we’d never left the beach.”
Jess moved ahead of all of them, rushing down the path littered with broken branches from their initial walk across the island.
In minutes, the stench of the spray had faded away and the island scents of palm and saltwater took away the horror of the hour before. Jess was almost smiling when they broke through the edge of the trees and bushes and stepped back out onto the golden sand where they’d pitched their tents.
Only.
The sun-bright grains of sand were largely obscured.
The beach in front of them appeared to move. A wave of purple spiders shifted one way and the other, creeping closer to the treeline with every moment. Jess had just opened her mouth to say something cheerful like, “home again!” when her eyes registered what was really in front of them.
Jess screamed.
The tents were crawling with the creatures, purple legs and feelers shifting to and fro as they explored and tasted the fabric.
“Holy shit,” Billy whispered. “There’s a million of them.”
Jess grabbed Mark’s arm and barely contained a scream. “We have to go,” she said for the second time that afternoon.
“Our stuff,” Casey said. “They’re all over our stuff. They’re probably in our clothes. And our food…we need to get to the boat.”
“I’m not just leaving our tents and equipment here,” Billy protested. “I borrowed most of this shit. Plus…” he pointed at the sun, now falling deep in the west on the horizon. “I don’t really want to navigate the keys in the dark if we don’t have to.”
“The hut had beds,” Mark suggested. “And an airtight door.”
Jess began pulling him back towards the trees instantly.
“I need my stuff,” Casey complained. She rubbed a hand across Billy’s shoulders. “Would you…get my overnight bag for me?”
Billy gave her a sidelong glance. “You want me to wade through a million spiders to get you your fuckin’ toothbrush?” he asked. “You’re serious?”
A shock of white-blonde hair bounced across her forehead as Casey answer
ed with a vehement nod.
Billy rolled his eyes. Casey answered by making hers bigger, as her mouth turned to a pout.
“Big time,” was all he said, before wading into the purple sea.
The spiders didn’t part before his shoes. Instead, as he stepped quickly towards the tent, they followed him, a living wave of hunger. Before he reached the tent, some had climbed up the heels of his shoe and over the laces until they found the warm purchase of his ankle. He bent to slap at his shins, but soldiered on, brushing past the flap of their tent’s “door” without slowing.
In his head, he cursed Casey. She had great tits, and nobody had ever done the grind against him the way she did, but…as much as he liked to look at her, her vanity pissed him off sometimes. Times like now.
The inside of the tent was as alive with spiders as the outside. They ambled along the backlit walls of the tent as if delicately searching the threads for sustenance. His skin crawled as he thought about the hundreds of legs moving silently just above his head and back as he stepped through the tent. They crept slowly across the floor, and a couple dozen of them waited on the sheets of the blowup mattress Billy had intended to grind on with Casey later tonight.
Not now.
He saw her Hello Kitty bag tossed to the right of the bed next to their duffel bags. As he bent to grab them, something icy hot bit his ankle, first on one side and then the next. He slapped at it with his hand, and grimaced when the palm came back spattered with blood.
He looked down and saw his left ankle wreathed in purple spiders. The tickle of their feelers made the skin of his neck crawl, but he saw that several of them had stopped their forward crawl and had attached to his leg like mosquitoes. It was one of those that had shed blood when he’d slapped. His blood. The things were ballooning as they drank from him. Like eight-legged mosquitoes.
“Fuck!” he screamed, slapping at his legs again and again until they were clear. But the room around him at the same time began to move.
Closer.
Billy felt them drop from the low ceiling above his head to land on his bare back. The tickle of tiny legs skittered across his shoulders moving towards his neck, but Billy didn’t pause to swat them. Instead he barreled out of the front of the tent and ran across the swarm of spiders, crushing dozens of them with every crunching step on the sand. When he reached his friends waiting at the treeline, he threw down the bags and turned his back to Casey.
“Get them off me,” he yelled, as he bent and began to swat at the ones that had found their way up his legs and onto the strip of fabric serving as his loincloth.
A flurry of hands slapped at his head, his back and his ass as Casey, Jess and Mark all joined in to kill the spiders.
His body felt on fire with a hundred bites, and Billy reached down to itch at the worst of it around his ankles.
“You’re swelling up,” Mark said, drawing everyone’s attention to where Billy itched. Already the skin of his ankles had ballooned to obscure the edge of his old white sneakers.
“What if he’s allergic?” Jess gasped.
“What if they’re poisonous?” Mark said.
“I’ve got some Benadryl in my bag,” Casey offered.
“Damnit!” Mark complained, swatting at a handful of purple spiders that had latched onto his leg.
“Let’s get to the hut,” Billy said. “And then I’ll take whatever drugs you got!”
He grabbed the bags and led the way, limping slightly as he favored first one foot and then the other.
Gool
Billy dropped the bags and collapsed to the floor, gasping frantically for breath. They had run the entire way back to the hut.
“Make sure none of those damn things came in with us,” he said, and then dragged his nails up and down against the dozens of hive-size bites along his ankles and legs.
Casey kicked her bag a couple times with her foot before gingerly touching it and unzipping the latch to dig inside for a water bottle. Then she pulled a package of allergy medicine from her overnight bag before handing the bottle of water and a couple pills to Billy, who downed them in seconds.
She began to zip her things back up when Mark asked, “Got any food hidden away in there?”
Casey considered for a second and then reached back into the duffel to withdraw a bag of Doritoes. She tossed them to Jess, cautioning, “I don’t know if they qualify as food, but…”
Jess ripped open the bag and downed a handful of the chips before passing them on to Mark, who hungrily did the same.
“We need to get settled for the night,” Billy suggested, reaching for the Doritoes. “It’s almost dark and we don’t have a flashlight.”
He pushed himself up with a groan, and together, they explored the two rooms off the main. Each of them was just large enough to hold a small bed and a tiny bureau.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would really just like to lie down,” Billy announced. “So I’m picking this room.” He pointed at the far door.
Mark nodded. “Early to bed, early to rise. And I don’t really feel like sitting here talking in the dark.”
Since they’d closed the door of the hut, the shadows had moved from orange to red to grey. Night was settling upon the island, and without a generator or flashlight, the hut was probably only minutes from pitch black.
Casey followed Billy into the far room, and closed the door gently behind them.
“I hope he’s OK,” Jess said, a furrow creasing her forehead. “I’m sorry this isn’t working out.”
“It’s fucked up,” Mark said, shaking his head in disgust. Then he stepped into “their” room and pulled her with him. “But we’ll have to make the best of it.”
He ran a palm down her shoulder, across her ribs and down her waist. “At least we’ve got something like a real bed, and a door.”
Jess turned and put two hands on his shoulders. She leaned up to kiss him, and then embraced him, hard.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she whispered. “But right now… I just want to go to sleep and forget it all.”
Seconds later, she was curled up on the bed in a fetal position. Mark lay behind her, an erection pushing its way through his costume that was doomed to remain unfulfilled. In moments, his girlfriend was snoring.
The Out-doors
Casey woke with Billy’s hand warm and limp against her breast. The night hung thick in the room and for a second, aside from the familiar touch of her boyfriend, she was disoriented. And then the events of the day came back to her.
She rolled away from Billy, and realized the reason she’d awoken. A painful pressure ached below her belly.
She needed to pee.
And the one thing this hut didn’t have was a toilet.
Casey pressed her head back into the pillow and tried to ignore the feeling. Maybe she could just fall back asleep until morning.
Uh-uh.
Minutes later she could almost feel her leg growing wet. She had to go.
Damnit.
When she could ignore it no longer, she slowly disentangled herself from Billy’s arm, and slipped out of the bed. She was going to have to step outside the hut and pee. It would only take a minute…you didn’t have to be a boyscout to pee in the woods, after all.
And bugs…bugs slept at night, right?
* * *
Casey let herself out of the hut. Her eyes were already accustomed to the dark, and thanks to the shadows of the moon through the palms, she could see well enough to step around to the side of the metal walls to relieve herself. She didn’t need to leave a puddle where they all would step on their way out the front door.
She tiptoed across the cool sand to the side and squatted to do her business in the shade of a heavy-leafed green bush.
She couldn’t see the legs that approached as she released a long, long stream of pent-up piss from a fucked up day.
She couldn’t see how the warmth of her release called to a hoard of spiders like a brilliant red homi
ng beacon, until the branches of every bush and shrub around her hung low with the bodies of eight-legged purple mouths, waiting to feed.
She did feel a slight tickle when the first brave spider crept up the inner skin of her thigh to follow the warmth. But she thought it was just her own water trailing aberrantly down her leg.
Until something bit her right where she normally only let Billy’s teeth roam.
She tensed, and began to rise, though she wasn’t completely through peeing. She reached between her legs with a hand to still the bite/itch and drew her palm back with the remains of a purple spider there, against the damp.
“Bastard,” she groaned. Her face twisted in disgust at the creature she’d crushed against the folds of her labia. “Fucker!”
She shook it off her hand and began to stand.
But at that moment, all of the spiders began to jump.
They landed in her hair and on her back and shoulders. They skittered down her waist and leapt up from the ground to cover her ankles and shins. They were everywhere. Like a swarm of ants over a spot of grease on a summer sidewalk. They fell from the darkness onto her mouth and crawled around her neck to tickle the lobes of her ears.
They covered her body like a deep violet skin, and they didn’t care when she maniacally batted and slapped and crushed dozens of them with her alarm.
There were hundreds more to take their place.
Casey screamed as the spiders covered her naked body like a skin, creeping with delicate but pointed legs across her breasts and kissing with tiny mouths against the pores of her pubes. But as she screamed, they entered her, from below and above. Her mouths both nether and normal, filled with the chitinous legs of spiders, and she tried in vain to spit them out.
They kept coming.
Time To Go
Mark woke to Billy’s hand on his shoulder. Shaking his shoulder.
“Have you seen Casey?” Billy demanded.
His friend’s face looked haggard; his beard had grown overnight, and his hair curled in strange and wild tangents. The Blue Lagoon loincloth tilted half off his hip, but instead of looking provocative, it looked retarded. Billy’s body was not going to win any modeling contests at the moment; its skin was riddled with swollen red hives where he’d been bitten by spiders.