'Nids
Page 12
“Where’d the movie go?” Ollie said, frowning at the white screen.
Gary said, “Hey, didn’t you guys hear what they just said over the radio? They’re ‘vacuating the theater.”
“What?” Ollie said.
“Some guy just said they’re ‘vacuating the theater,” Gary said again. “Look, people are leaving.”
Matt turned and looked at the snack bar. “There’s a buncha cop cars here, too,” he said.
“What the hell’s goin’ on?” Ollie said.
“Well, I want popcorn before we leave,” Gary said. “I been cravin’ some, I just didn’t wanna miss any of the movie.” He got to his feet and went to the tailgate, jumped off. “I’ll be right back.”
“Get me some Red Vines,” Ollie called.
Gary looked around on his way to the snack bar. Headlights were coming on and cars were heading for the front gate. He wondered what was going on. If he saw one of the cops, he’d ask.
He noticed the snack bar’s door was closed. That seemed odd. There were also four Sheriff’s Department cars parked around the small building, but he didn’t see any deputies. Two deputies stood with a group of people, most of whom were crying, over in the small playground next to the snack bar.
He entered the snack bar and stood in the open doorway a moment.
Gary recognized Rodney Lepke, but he didn’t know the girl. Pretty fuckin’ nice, he thought as he quickly looked her over. Rodney and his friend stood against the counter. Behind them stood the guy who worked there at the counter. All three of them stared at him with big eyes.
He stood there and stared back a moment. Why were the looking at him like that? He waited, thinking they were going to say something to him, but they did not speak.
“What?” Gary said.
Something jumped on Gary from behind. He heard the girl scream as he was knocked hard to the floor on his face. He struggled to get up, but couldn’t, then pain exploded in his back, deep burning pain, and he felt blood rise up in his throat, tasted it.
Gary was dead before he could utter a sound.
Forty-Four
Rodney and Heidi wasted no time in jumping over the orange counter. There was an open doorway behind the counter and Rodney went to it, pulling Heidi behind him by the hand. Shaggy headed there, too. The three of them collided outside the doorway.
The counter guy went in first, then Rodney and Heidi followed. Rodney turned and closed the door, but it wouldn’t catch.
He looked down at the knob, but there was no knob. There was a hole in the door where the knob should be. The door would not close.
“Shit,” Rodney said. He turned around and pressed his back to the door, holding it closed.
They were in a small storage room. A couple of brooms and a mop in a bucket leaned against the wall. There were big plastic bags of unpopped popcorn, packages of paper towels, stacked boxes of candy, boxes of napkins and straws. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling with a small chain attached.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t try to get in here,” Rodney said, “because I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold it off for long.”
Forty-Five
Harker heard the scream. As he followed the sound, he realized it had come from the snack bar. He looked over there and saw the door was open.
He’d been walking along rows of cars looking for the spider. Other deputies searched on foot, while some drove around the lot in their cruisers, which wasn’t easy with everyone leaving all at once.
As he neared the snack bar, Harker saw a pair of feet sticking out of the doorway, toes down. He jogged the rest of the way.
A teenage boy lay in the doorway, a bloody hole in his back. Harker lifted his head and looked into the building.
The spider was on the other side of the snack bar, it’s back to him.
Harker stepped over the body into the snack bar, raised his shotgun, and called, “Rodney?”
A door behind the counter pulled open a bit and Rodney’s face looked out.
“We’re in here, Sheriff!” he shouted.
The spider turned around.
Harker fired and two of the spider’s legs shattered. It charged forward unsteadily.
Harker racked the gun to fire again, but it was on him. He fell backward on top of the teenager’s body.
“Rodney!” Harker shouted, his voice high with panic. He fired the gun and a hole appeared in the wall to Harker’s left.
He felt the spider’s fangs enter his abdomen. He thought of Rodney, and he threw the shotgun through the air, over the spider, and onto the floor across the room.
His last thought was of Anna, of kissing her.
Death came shortly after he heard the spider begin to eat him.
Forty-Six
Rodney pulled the door open a little more.
“Sheriff?” he called. He looked over his shoulder at Heidi and said, “Stay here.”
“You’re not going out there,” she whispered. Her voice was tremulous, but very firm and decisive.
“I’ll be right back.”
Heidi made a small, inarticulate sound of protest in her throat as her brow furrowed deeply above her tense eyes.
Rodney stepped out of the storage room. He heard a sound that filled him with dread – wet slurping and smacking. He walked slowly and cautiously to the counter, placed his hands on the cold, flat surface.
The spider was on Sheriff Harker.
Rodney saw something on the floor peripherally and turned toward it. On the floor in front of the counter lay Harker’s shotgun. He’d thrown it there for Rodney to get.
He looked at the spider again. It was eating the sheriff. The sounds it made were wet and thick.
Heart pounding, Rodney vaulted over the counter. He landed softly, not wanting to make any noise. The shotgun lay two feet away. He bent down, picked it up and turned to face the spider.
At the same time, the crippled spider turned to face him.
Rodney raised the gun and it made a loud, satisfying sound as he racked it.
The spider, which was just inside the door, started toward him. It was wounded and did not move as fast as it had before, but it moved fast enough.
Rodney aimed at the hairy face, at those three black fangs. He squeezed the trigger, and the shotgun delivered a solid click.
It was empty.
Forty-Seven
Deputy Kevin Lomander walked away from the group of sobbing, traumatized parents who were finding their small children in pieces in the playground. He had to get away, if only for a moment. He was a parent, too. He and his wife had a two-year-old, little Tammy, and he felt for those parents. Maybe he felt a little too much – he’d been at this for only a year, and he had not yet hardened himself to all the pain he encountered in his job.
His mouth was dry as a bone – he could hardly swallow. Kevin headed for the snack bar to get something to drink. He saw the two feet in the doorway and ran the rest of the way.
“Sheriff?” he said when he recognized the sheriff lying on top of another guy. Kevin made a strangled sound in his throat when he saw the big hole in the center of Sheriff Harker. He saw the spider just a few feet away. Its back was to Kevin and it was just starting to move forward. Kevin saw the young man holding the shotgun – he looked shocked and terrified.
Kevin racked his shotgun and put it to his shoulder.
Forty-Eight
Rodney was paralyzed. The shotgun was empty, he had no weapon. And even though it was wounded, the spider was still fast enough to keep him from getting over the counter.
It was getting closer and Rodney was so scared that when he tried to cry out, his dry throat only made a cracked, broken sound. He held the gun out before him, and the spider got close enough to close its fangs on the barrel.
Rodney shoved the shotgun farther into the spider’s mouth, and it backed up a little. He pushed harder, and the spider moved back farther.
Before he could push again, the spider’s left front leg swung up
and easily knocked the gun from his hands. It clattered over the floor as it slid away from Rodney. Somehow, he felt even worse without it, even though the shotgun was empty and useless. At least it had allowed him to hold off the spider for a few seconds. Now he had nothing.
The spider started forward again and there was an explosion in the small snack bar. The rear part of the spider’s abdomen exploded and splattered a white gooey substance in all directions. It was warm on Rodney’s face as it dribbled down his cheeks.
The spider lay flat on the floor, dead.
Rodney found he could not move, except for the rise and fall of his chest as he gasped for breath. He stared down at the spider, at the bloody fangs now with tiny bits of flesh caught on the serrations. The two small eyes remained perched atop the head, black and as dead in death as they had been in life. One of them had been broken open and leaked a white viscera.
Hands closed on his arm and he turned with a gasp to find Heidi at his side. She pulled him away from the spider and embraced him. She had a napkin in her hand and she used it to wipe his face. She was speaking, but Rodney could not understand her. His ears rang loudly from the gunshot, which had been like a bomb going off in the snack bar.
The deputy who’d fired the shotgun stood just inside the door, his mouth open as he breathed hard, staring with wide eyes at the dead spider.
Rodney looked down at the spider. Heidi put her arm around his shoulders and he put his around her waist.
The spider began to melt.
Rodney frowned and tilted his head forward as he watched it melt into a puddle that spread over the floor.
“Rodney, what’s happening?” Heidi said.
As the puddle grew and neared their shoes, Rodney realized the spider had not melted – it was now a clearer, brighter yellow and still perfectly solid.
Rodney and Heidi stumbled backward together as Heidi screamed and Rodney said, “Shit, they’re babies!” He started stomping his feet on the small spiders.
They spread out on the snack bar floor in a cloud of tiny pumping legs and little black fangs.
“Son of a bitch!” the deputy shouted as he turned and stepped back over the two bodies on the floor and went out the door.
Heidi climbed up on the counter.
Rodney kept stepping on them, but he was not fast enough. Two of the spiders, each a couple inches long, crawled up his sock to his shin. He cried out when one of them bit him. But he didn’t have time to tend to it because they kept coming.
“This way!” Shaggy shouted. He came out from behind the counter and ran across the room to the doorway on the other side.
Rodney and Heidi followed as he opened the door and went through. The baby spiders crunched faintly beneath their feet. Once they’d passed through the door, Shaggy slammed it.
“This goes to the projection shack,” he said. “We can get out through there.”
They went down a short hall to another door, and into the projection shack. It was empty and dark.
“Looks like Chuck took off already,” Shaggy said.
Rodney stopped, rolled up the leg of his jeans and slapped the spiders off his leg, then stepped on them. There were two bites, and they were very painful and bleeding. Rodney clenched his teeth as he stood upright again.
Shaggy went out the door on the other side of the small room.
Rodney took Heidi’s hand and said, “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”
Forty-Nine
They said nothing for a while as Rodney drove away from the drive-in theater.
Before leaving, Rodney had told one of the deputies about all the baby spiders in the snack bar, but the deputy had just stared back at him as if he weren’t sure where he was. Rodney didn’t wait around for a response.
He drove home and parked in the driveway. He and Heidi went inside and down the hall to Harry’s room. Rodney opened the door and they went in.
Harry was feeding his tarantula and scorpion. He turned around when they entered.
“It had babies,” Rodney said.
“Was it carrying them on its back?” Harry said.
Rodney nodded.
“A female,” Harry said. “What happened?”
“They just poured off of her,” Rodney said. “Hundreds of them.”
“Oh, god,” Harry whispered as he thought about that. “Did you stop them?”
“Stop them?” Rodney said. “There were so many of them, we were lucky to get out of there alive.”
“Are they all going to grow that big?” Heidi said.
“Oh, god,” Harry whispered again.
“What?” Heidi said.
Rodney said, “What are you thinking, Harry?”
Harry said, “I’m thinking we’re gonna have to move.”
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Dedication
PART ONE: An Unidentified Animal
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
PART TWO: Night of the Sun Spider
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
PART THREE: Creature Feature
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine