by John Everson
It looked different to the eye than the other two active arachnids. This one had grown pale, as if its skin was just a shell. If George or Betty Anne had discovered the web and stood watching for a while, they would have seen that the spider in the center of the web was just a shell. It had been there for a couple of days, because despite having really all the time in the world, Betty Anne wasn’t the greatest housekeeper. The spider had spun its initial web, and then begun its metamorphosis. Because the violet-backed spider was only the eater.
From its back, hatched the seeders.
Right now, its back was moving, a parchment-thin flap of skin jittered and shook, and the first baby of the new cycle crawled out, preened two fuzzy legs up over its thorax, and walked down the edge of the spider’s shell. It was followed by another, and another.
More flies continued to emerge from the spider’s back, as the first poised for its initial flight. It stared at the doorway of the house, where Betty Anne had disappeared just a few moments before.
It was drawn by the sound waves of her voice and the vibrations of her motion and the color of her warmth.
It saw all this with emotionless eyes. Hungry eyes.
Violet eyes.
Chapter Sixteen
Saturday, May 11. 11:21 a.m.
Billy didn’t feel so good.
After talking to Rachel, he let himself back into the house and returned to his bedroom to lie down. In his head, he felt a thousand things moving. Tiny pinpricks of pain behind his eyes and nose and along the back of his skull.
He lay down on the bed and stared at the spider webs that had somehow managed to expand from a few cobwebs in the corners to cover large patches of his bedroom ceiling over the past few days. Dark things were moving diligently in the thickest portions of the web, but he didn’t worry about them. His head hurt too much. He’d have to get some RAID and spray the ceiling. Fuckin’ bugs. Florida was like the breeding ground for all insects. You learned to live with them, or you moved. But for now…all he knew was that he couldn’t stand anymore.
Billy rolled over on his pillow, clutching it for comfort. For stability. For home. But from the corner of his eye he could see that he was not the only one who’d been using his pillow. There were stains on the pillowcase. Small circles of darkness. Tiny shreds of what looked like broken slivers of colored plastic dotted the pillowcase. But it wasn’t plastic, Billy knew. The bits were colored purple and black. The shells of broken spiders lay crushed on his pillow.
He knew where they’d come from. He’d seen the evidence in his Kleenex. Over the past few days, when he blew his nose. He’d seen the skins of arachnids dotting the mucous. When he cried, which he did more and more as the pain increased…his tears stained the tissues in a color he had grown to despise.
Purple.
Over the past couple days, Billy had cried purple tears.
What the fuck, he’d said the first time he saw it. But he knew what it meant. He’d tried to pretend otherwise, but deep down, he’d known for days. They were inside him. He’d tried to ignore the sensations in his ears, behind his eyes. The tickles in his throat. But he couldn’t ignore it any longer. They lived inside him. And now they were coming out. He was crushing them into his pillow into his sleep, but they were still creeping out of him. They were crawling across his ceiling, looking down at him, now that they had hatched from the cavities in his head.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered staring for the first time closely at the thousands of legs moving across the ceiling. And at the larger ones, the pale ones, the spiders who were not moving. “What will they do if they are not confined to an island?”
His leg twitched, as something walked across the nerves that controlled it. His head was alive with motion now, and he felt nauseous and euphoric at the same time. Billy clutched his pillow as his arms suddenly felt cold, and then his fingers seemed to burn.
I should have sprayed myself with that shit I hit Mark and Jess with, he thought. That would have been so much simpler.
His foot spasmed and shook in the air as he held the pillow tighter and tighter, and closed his eyes, willing the strange feelings in his body to leave. But a part of him knew that when the trembling, hallucinatory feelings left, there would be nothing left of him. When the spiders left, he would be an empty husk.
Billy McAllister lay shaking on his bed, beneath an ever-growing web, and thought back to his last day on the island. To the morning they had found Carly.
Chapter Seventeen
Sheila Key
Sunday, May 4. 6:52 a.m.
Billy burst into Mark and Jess’s room at dawn after he’d woken up alone. He shook Mark awake.
“Have you seen Casey?” Billy demanded.
Billy’s face looked haggard; his beard had grown overnight, and his hair curled in strange and wild tangents. The Blue Lagoon loincloth that Jess had given him tilted half off his hip, but instead of looking provocative, it looked, well, retarded. Billy’s body was not going to win any modeling contests at the moment; his skin was riddled with swollen red hives where he’d been bitten by flies.
Mark opened his mouth, yawned and finally spit out one word.
“No.”
Jess moaned next to him and rolled over to see what was going on. Standing at the foot of the bed, Billy caught a glimpse of the dark shadow of a nipple before she woke enough to realize, and slapped a hand over her chest to hide herself. It didn’t matter; at that moment, he wasn’t tantalized in the slightest. He was worried.
“When I woke up, Casey was gone,” he said.
“She probably just woke up and took a walk,” Jess suggested.
“Yeah,” Billy snarled. “Great idea when the island is overrun with fuckin’ man-eating bugs.”
“She’s not a man,” Mark offered.
“Smartass.”
“All right, all right,” Mark laughed while stifling a yawn. “We’ll look for her. She probably went back to the tents to get some stuff.”
Jess slipped out of bed and straightened her scanty outfit as Mark rolled out of bed and stretched next to her. The room glowed with the reflection of the light of morning from the one window in the main room.
Together the three of them stepped out of the Quonset hut door to the jungle floor. Jess headed towards the path to the beach where they had docked.
“I can’t believe she would go back to the boat without us,” she said.
Mark didn’t follow her. He caught a glimpse of something red amid the foliage, and stepped around the side of the hut.
“She didn’t,” he called, in answer to Jess. His voice sounded thick, choked.
Billy turned from the path and hurried to join his friend. In seconds the leaves echoed with a cry of pain and anger.
When Jess reached them, Billy was on the ground, his hands touching the ragged flesh of Casey’s hips and head.
There wasn’t much left of her face but a gruesome cavity capped with teeth and vacant eye sockets.
She was naked, but there was nothing attractive about her corpse. Most of the skin had already been eaten away.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Billy kept saying, over and over. Amid the cursing, he was crying.
After a few minutes, Mark and Jess pulled him away from her body.
“We need to get out of here,” Jess said again. Her voice was shaking.
“But…”
She pressed a hand to his cheek. “I know. She was my best friend.” A tear trailed down Jess’s face as her words tumbled out faster. The more she spoke, the more shrill her voice became. “But we can’t stay here and wait for the same thing to happen to us. Take us home, Billy. Please. Get us out of here.”
Together they rose, and started towards the path. They had only gone a couple steps when Mark turned back and simply said, “Hang on,” before running back to the hut.
He disappeared through the door as Billy and Jess waited. When he came back out, he was carrying a canister. They had all noticed it the night befo
re; a metal torpedo that appeared to be filled with pesticide.
“I want my shit back,” he explained when he rejoined them. “If there are bugs anywhere near it…”
The beach was empty when they reached it. The tents were not covered with spiders, but instead stood like lonely sentinels of abandonment.
“Break ’em down,” Billy said, and didn’t hesitate to go to work on the one he’d set up for himself and Casey. Their Blue Lagoon love nest. He pulled the main post with an urgency that smacked of vengeance.
Ha. His stomach contracted with the thought. So much for playing the hero. His expedition had killed the best thing in his life. Like the poison of his past come back to bite when he tried to use it for good…
Billy and Mark stowed the tents back on the boat and then returned to pick up the last things.
“We can’t leave her here,” Jess whispered.
Billy shook his head in agreement. “We won’t,” he said.
He turned to Mark. “Help me?”
They walked back to the hut in silence, and barely said a word as they searched for pieces of her arms and legs that still had skin to grasp. Gingerly grabbing the uneaten flesh, they picked up Casey’s body to carry it back to the boat.
For the first time in his life, Billy looked at the remaining curves of her breasts and belly and the tantalizing flesh below and saw nothing left of Casey’s body that could get him hard. Instead, he wanted to get sick.
He forced himself to simply walk.
They laid Casey’s corpse on the deck of the boat, and then returned to the site of the tents on the beach to gather up the last stakes and bags and debris.
“So much for paradise,” Mark mumbled. His throat was so thick it felt difficult to breathe.
“Yeah,” Billy agreed.
That was when the buzzing started.
The sky suddenly clouded with the violet of flies, and Jess screamed.
“Not again,” she moaned, collapsing in a heap of limbs to the ground. “I can’t stand it.”
“Then get up!” Mark demanded, and grabbed her arm. He wasn’t gentle as he yanked her to her feet. But the horde was already upon them. The air swarmed with thousands of the purplish creatures driven by the need to feed. They descended.
“Fuck!” Billy screamed, as he began swatting the flies right and left. “Let’s get to the boat,” he said, and began to run. But in seconds, he stumbled, and fell hard to the beach, a cloud of purple flies following him down.
Jess screamed, and pulled away from Mark, swatting spastically at the air and at her own skin, as she fought to deflect the flies. But it seemed like the more she twisted and slapped and vaulted around, the more buzzing creatures descended from the sky to touch her. To bite her. To eat her…
“Wait a minute,” Mark promised, as he witnessed his two friends collapse to the sand under a swarm of purple.
He ran to where the tents had been, and grabbed the canister that he had brought from the hut. When he got back, he could barely make out the writhing body of Jess beneath the shifting mass of black-and-violet flies that covered her, thousands of them fighting for sustenance.
Mark didn’t think twice before opening the nozzle of the pesticide on the bugs.
They creatures stiffened and fell from Jess’s body as he sprayed them, until he could see her skin again through the gaps they left behind.
Nearby, Billy fought his way back up from the ground, swatting and twisting in the air until the cloud of flies writhed around him but did not settle.
Jess vaulted to her feet as the flies fell to the ground, instantly killed by the poison of the spray. Her skin already welted with a hundred angry bites, but she smiled and held out her arms to Mark in thanks.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Thank you.”
But even as she spoke, her mouth changed from a smile of relief to a grimace of pain. And Mark witnessed the pale surface of her skin boil from tan to crimson.
“Mark?” she said, her voice rising strangely. She sounded afraid and unsure at the same time.
Then the flesh beneath her skin brought itself to the fore, hemorrhaging its life onto the sand in a broken stream that didn’t stop until Jess coughed, screamed and then collapsed in a lifeless heap to the sand at her boyfriend’s feet. While some of the top half of her remained recognizable, the other half seemed to have simply dissolved from the bones in a slurry of blood, until her leg bones lay bare on the sand, as if they’d been bleached by a hundred summer days of sun.
All told, her death took less than three minutes.
“What the hell,” Billy gasped, struggling to come closer while still swatting and twisting to break through the wall of flies that engulfed him.
But when Mark turned the nozzle of the spray gun at him, Billy knew better.
He punched his friend and the spray of the gun let loose nearby, but not on, Billy.
“Did you not see what that just did?” Billy demanded and pointed at the jellied remains of Jess, which were still dissolving into the suck of the sand as they spoke. Her skin seemed to just… Melt into the beach. “You’re not spraying me with that shit.” As he said it, flies poured over his lips and into his mouth. Several hit the back of his throat and began to move down. They would not stop. Billy coughed so hard he almost puked.
Mark simply looked dazed, as he held the nozzle of the pesticide sprayer. He shifted the nozzle from pointing at Jess’s body to aim at Billy.
Meanwhile, Billy shook his arms and legs like a madman, determined to fling the bugs off of him. Then he screamed a howl of rage and suddenly ran away from his friend and towards the ocean. He dove into the cool green water and almost breathed in the ocean with relief as he felt the horde of flies leave his skin. The sting of their bites made him want to jump out of his skin.
Billy swam for a minute beneath the waves, reveling in the feeling of having his skin freed; the saltwater burned in his bites, but he didn’t care. He rubbed his hands against his chest and thighs, ensuring that he no longer carried any unwanted passengers, before he rose out of the water and walked again towards the beach.
The swarm didn’t wait for Billy before they attacked again. The cloud converged on Mark, who stood on the beach watching the water for Billy to resurface. And then suddenly Mark dropped the cylinder and began to swat madly at his neck and sides and back. He began to yell and dance, twisting across the beach as the bites grew more intense. The cloud of flies surrounded him until there wasn’t a remnant of his humanity still visible. Mark became the orbit of a shimmery hoard of insects, pulsing and moving in a shape that sort of approximated human.
“Help me,” he cried from inside the swarm, as Billy came running from the water.
“Help me,” Mark cried again, and Billy reached him and began to swat at the angry flies that shimmered with violet hunger but didn’t leave Mark’s body. The more he tried to swat the flies off Mark, the more they began to gather around and attack him again.
“Get up,” Billy urged, but his friend only moaned, and somewhere beneath the flies, he moaned a vague, “I can’t.”
Billy stepped back and looked at the solid mass of flies that moved with insect energy around six-foot space on the sand. He thought “space” because there was no indication that his friend lived there, beneath the flies.
“Mark?” he called out.
From deep beneath the bugs, he heard the faintest, horrible plea. “Get them off,” Mark begged, his voice gagging with the bites of insects streaming into his mouth.
Billy bent and began to swat at the bugs that covered his friend…but as he did, and the flies broke above him to swarm around his head, he looked at his hands.
Where they’d touched the legs of his friend, they’d come back wet with blood. Mark’s blood.
Billy stepped back from the swarm and reached out to pick up the pesticide canister.
He turned the nozzle toward his friend and considered the result of not pulling the trigger. The end wasn’t good either way.<
br />
“I love you, man,” he murmured. And then he let the death of the spray encircle Mark.
“I’ll miss you.”
Mark cried out for a moment, and then was quiet as around them the buzz of flies filled the air with excitement and anger and death. The swarm lifted briefly and then it dropped again to the sand, in a mass crash of glimmering violet. In moments, the air had grown quiet, and Billy could see the half-eaten body of his friend, lying exposed and bleeding on the sand. One flap of Mark’s cheek hung down to reveal the white of skull beneath.
Billy felt tears roll down his cheeks, but he didn’t let himself stop to think about what had just happened. Instead he dragged the bloody remains of Billy and Jess toward the boat, carefully loading them onto the deck next to Casey. The air still sang in the distance with the call of hungry purple flies, but they seemed to have retreated temporarily from the mist of death doled out by his canister.
He didn’t wait around to let them reconsider. Billy released the boat from shore and headed out, away from the island, back the way they’d come, towards the mainland.
The sky looked blue and welcoming ahead. Behind, it was wreathed in an angry purple glow.
Billy didn’t look back. He couldn’t.
His eyes wouldn’t stop crying.
Chapter Eighteen
Passanattee
Saturday, May 11. 11:36 a.m.
Tears slipped again from Billy’s eyes as he remembered the last moments on the island. As he watched Jess’s body spontaneously dissolve beneath the venom of what he had thought was simply pesticide. As he watched Mark die and turn to jelly beneath his hands… And beneath the cloud of deadly purple flies.
Billy had escaped it all, and lived to tell.
But now, he realized that he hadn’t escaped it at all.
Somehow the spiders had come home with him. And they’d burrowed inside him.