by John Everson
How? Eggs in his clothes?
On the edge of the mattress, his fingers twitched. His whole hand shook, as if someone were pulling the strings, but didn’t know how to operate the puppet.
The tremors grew more intense, and a spike of pain shot down behind his ear. His head felt like a balloon that had been inflated beyond capacity. Things seemed to be tearing inside, and his eyes felt distended, as if he were turning into some hideous Halloween prop. His skull had to pop, it would pop. He knew this without question. Despite all logic. The only question was when. And how much pain he would endure before it finally exploded from the pressure.
It hurt to close his eyes, so he left them open, staring with glazed inattention at the busy spiders on his ceiling. The web seemed to be growing thicker even as he watched. The creatures crisscrossed back and forth across his entire room, running down skeins of web as they added more. His ceiling was a cloud that was growing centimeter by centimeter, closer to the bed.
Above his face, he stared at one still spider. It was pale, not black, and larger than the other arachnids. As the sparks of pain shot through his ears and the ache grew unbearable behind his eyes, he saw a piece of the spider shiver slightly. The skin of its back moved, and then seemed to peel forward. Something dark glinted from inside. Several somethings. Tiny legs pushed the spider shell aside, and in seconds an explosion of black wings and purple eyes exploded into the air beneath the spider’s empty skin and above Billy’s face. They hung there for a moment, like a cloud of very large gnats.
And then it came to Billy how he’d become infected. How he’d become the host.
The flies. The flies bit and laid their eggs. The larvae hatched beneath his skin, beneath the boils of his bites and swam to the brain. Something drew them specifically to the brain. He’d been bit all across his body, but the pain was completely centered in his skull.
The larvae hatched into spiders.
He thought of Casey’s half-eaten face.
Hungry spiders. They fed on their host, and then spun their webs. And then they went dormant. Cocoon. And from the spiders, emerged the flies. The travelling form of the life cycle. They would seek out new food. New hosts.
“Jesus,” Billy whispered, as the theory crystallized. He knew unequivocally that he was right about this. Spiders were hatching from inside him, and on his ceiling, flies were hatching from spiders.
“What fucking genius thought this was a great experiment?” he said, thinking back to the vials and instruments in the empty Quonset hut on Sheila Key.
“I’ve got to…” he began to say aloud, but it ended in a scream as something seemed to crack behind his left ear. Still, he struggled to push himself up from the bed. His arms shivered and threatened to collapse instead of holding his weight. He had to tell someone what was happening. If these things spread in a populated area…
Pain pricked at his eye, and Billy’s hand unconsciously lifted from the bed to rub it. He couldn’t support himself on one arm and he fell back to the pillow with a muffled groan. Something crawled across his face, just beneath his eyelid. And then the prick came again, and more tiny feet began to move across his face. He could feel a tickle in his ear too, and Billy knew that he was too late.
The spiders were truly hatching now. The ones on his ceiling were just the front line. Tiny legs pushed out from beneath his eyeballs, and walked wetly across his cheeks. At the same time, a line of hair-like legs moved quickly across his earlobes and tickled down his neck. Something bit him on the ribs, but he couldn’t move to swat it.
His entire body seemed to be trembling. Shivering.
At the back of his skull, the itching, tingling pain that had been growing in intensity for hours—days really, if he thought about it—suddenly burst into a flower of hot pain. Billy jerked an arm upwards; this time his instincts conquered whatever nerves the spiders had chewed away, and his shivering hand slapped clumsily at the back of his head.
His fingers met something wet. He cringed. Had he just crushed spiders across his hand? His jerking fingers slicked the sticky liquid across his hair as his hand shook and slapped its way back to the bed. He managed to tilt his head slightly and saw that the fingers of his hand were not covered in the pulp of smashed spiders.
They were coated in blood.
A light flashed before his eyes, and the entire room seemed to dim. He choked on something that moved in his throat. His face was suddenly alive with the tiny pricks of spider feet and spider mouths. He could see them moving away from his eyes, and crawling across the bridge of his nose. They were streaming out of him, tunneling out from behind his eyes, and ears and nostrils. They tickled there, and he sneezed, repeatedly.
Something shifted with the blinding light in his head, and he felt a rush of something warm across his pillow.
The pressure was suddenly gone.
Dimly, Billy knew why. The cork had finally opened. The creatures had literally burrowed a hole through the back of his head.
Just like the skull they had found on the beach at Sheila Key. The skull with a hole in the back of it.
He saw the evidence as it ran past him. Hundreds of black spiders that raced along the side of his arm and down the edges of the bed. The creatures were spotted in crimson, and shared one thing with the tiny flies swarming the room above him.
They looked at him with violet eyes. But even as he saw the similarity in the eyes, Billy saw no more. He breathed a short sigh of relief as the pain diminished. The world turned gray and a part of him felt his life flowing out from the hole in his skull in wet, rhythmic pulses. But the pulses were slowing. Billy thought of Casey, of the raw meat of her face at the end. How fast they had eaten into her.
He felt them crawling across his face. He barely felt the bites.
And then he felt nothing at all.
Some of the spiders fed on their host, but most were still sated from their time inside. From eating their way out.
Along with the swarms of flies, they looked around the room for other things to attack.
Their blood sang with new life. They were newborn and anxious to explore. They felt a drive in their legs that they couldn’t deny. They yearned to move. To travel to find a new place to nest. To spin their webs.
The flies led the way, slipping out of the room and down the hall, searching for an exit. Searching for the light of the sun. Searching for new places.
Places that were warm.
Places that offered food.
Places that were human.
Chapter Nineteen
Sunday, May 12, 2013. 11:55 a.m.
Aidan Richards slapped a broad hand to his calf. The resulting sound was sharp. And wet. Aidan was sweating his ass off. It was eighty-eight degrees without a cloud in the sky, and the humidity must have hovered around eighty percent. You could almost taste the air as you breathed.
“Welcome to summer in the swamp,” he grumbled, and slapped something on his left biceps. He was getting eaten alive out here.
“Damned bugs,” he complained, and stood up from his small vegetable garden with a groan. He looked at the holes in the broad hairy leaves of his tomato plants and frowned. He’d been worried about leaf rot this year—it had been so wet. But instead, it looked like he was feeding a healthy crop of tomato hornworms. He bent over and lifted the branch with the chewed leaves, looking for the offender. They blended in well with the plant, but Aidan found it quickly, clinging to the underside of the third leaf on the branch. He reached down and plucked it off before it could do any more damage. The thing was fat and green, and had already probably eaten twice its weight today. Hornworms were nature’s “stripping machines”. They’d crawl up a stem, start chewing, and just keep chewing, hunger or not, hell or high water, spurting out voluminous bug poop as they ravaged their way along the leaves. They ate until they were so fat they couldn’t hold on to the plant anymore, and then they’d roll off, fall to the ground and turn to a pupa that eventually would hatch into a moth.
“Well, ain’t that the devil,” Aidan complained. He’d never had a hornworm invade his garden since he moved to Florida, though he’d had them up north. Best thing he could do would be to mix up some soapy water and spray down the plants with it. The worms hated the soap and started squirming around—which would help him locate…and dispose of them.
Aidan walked across the backyard to the house. Emily was out for the afternoon, so he didn’t bother to take his shoes off when he walked across the carpet to the kitchen. If she’d been home, she would have shrieked at him like an angry tea kettle. Aidan poured some dish soap into a spray bottle, filled it with water and shook it. Then he trudged back to their small garden. It wasn’t a big yard, but he loved to eat tomatoes and peppers that he’d grown himself, even if his yield was small.
He knelt and squirted the soapy water at his eight tomato plants until the leaves were quickly covered in suds, then he watched to see if anything came squirming out from under the leaves, irritated and angry. As he looked, he slapped at the back of his neck. Another bite. He could already feel the ones on his leg swelling.
There!
He reached down and retrieved a squirming hornworm as it revealed itself, accordion-ing around a tomato plant’s stem as it tried to escape the soap. It was a big one, electric green and plump as fruit, with a long curved horn at one end.
Aidan snorted. “Let’s see how your horn handles a shoe,” he smirked. He dropped it to the grass and stepped on it.
Something bit him on the arm, and he looked down at his forearm.
A fly. A damned fly. Weird-looking little bugger too—this fly was jet black, with a little slash of purple on its back. Must have come in from the Everglades or something. This was like, the Revenge of the Bugs day. He dropped the spray bottle and slowly lifted his other hand above the arm. When he brought it down, he felt the thing smash beneath his palm. That made him smile. Weird fly was now dead fly.
Revenge of the Bugs day was turning into Revenge of the Gardener day. He picked up the spray bottle and headed back to the house. But he swatted his legs twice as he walked.
Damned things were persistent.
Chapter Twenty
Sunday, May 12. 8:10 a.m.
Rachel was walking Feral again. And walking was a more apt description than it had been a couple days ago. Eric should be taking the dog out, but she didn’t complain too much, because she had been hoping to run into Billy outside again. She needed to see if he’d mind keeping an eye on Eric again tomorrow night. Terry had asked her out again.
And she really wanted to go. This time, without a makeshift cane!
But as she walked Feral up and down the block, and the dog proceeded to sniff at every single tree and bush root, nothing moved around Billy’s house. She was going to have to go over there later, at a decent hour and knock. She wished she’d gotten his phone number or email address the other night. It was stupid, but she’d rather email someone than walk across the street and knock on their door. It was just…more unobtrusive. She could ask on her own time, and he could answer on his… One thing Rachel definitely embraced was the e-mail age.
Of course, Anders—naturally—felt otherwise. He preferred to be right there, in your face, every time he had something to say. She shook away the thoughts of him, and led the dog back home. Thoughts of Anders, Terry, Billy had to take a backseat. She had to run errands and clean the house and do all the other things a single mom had to manage—cramming a week of “home” work into the weekend.
Seven hours came and went, but when Rachel finally realized she still needed to connect with Billy, she still saw no sign of life across the street. She walked across the street, conquering her distaste of begging people in person, but it didn’t matter. Billy didn’t answer her knock on the door.
Hmmm.
She had never asked what he did, but she thought he was still going to college. The whole news angle on the reports of his tragedy on the Key had revolved around mentions of coeds. Where the heck would a college kid be on a late Sunday afternoon?
Maybe he’d taken a boat back to the island of the flies, she thought. And stifled a laugh. That’d be a genius move.
She decided to talk to Susan at work in the morning and see if she could keep an eye on Eric for a couple hours. So much for relying on neighbors!
The “beach bunny” said yes. Rachel didn’t know where Susan found time to cultivate such a rich tan when she was stuck in a cube five days out of seven, but she couldn’t help but look at her and think of her as “the beach bunny”. And part of her saw the Playboy emblem when she thought “bunny”.
Rachel hated herself for being so critical of Susan, especially when the girl was nice enough to say, “Sure, I can watch Eric tonight, I love kids!” Which she did, first thing Monday morning. But there was just something about her constant positive energy (and probably a bit of jealousy about her perfect tan and shockingly blue eyes) that irritated her every time Susan spoke. How the girl could always be so enthusiastic about things, Rachel didn’t know. The jaded part of her wagged a finger and said, “She’ll learn.” But another part of her wanted to be Susan. And knew that whatever “Susan-ness” she’d had had been stomped and broken by Anders years ago.
As it happened, it was lucky that Rachel had thought to ask Susan if she’d watch Eric first thing in the morning, as they were both in the lunchroom getting coffee. Because the rest of the day was a train wreck—call after call, meeting after meeting. She never even stopped for lunch. And then it was 5 p.m., and Susan popped her blonde head over the top of the cubicle and said with a guileless smile, “See you in an hour?”
Rachel put aside any pettiness and genuinely grinned. “Yes! And thanks! I’ll buy you guys a pizza if you want?”
“Where do you want to eat?” Terry said an hour and a half later as he helped her up in to the cab of his truck.
“What are my choices?” she asked. Her stomach growled audibly in the cab, and Terry laughed.
“Sounds like it probably doesn’t much matter, but there’s tolerable, good, and better…it just depends on how far away from here you want to drive.”
She laughed. “We’d better aim between tolerable and good… Billy hasn’t been around, so I’ve got Susan from my work watching Eric. I don’t want to keep her too long.”
“Okay. Then I’m going to introduce you to… The Gator Shack. One mean lizard, one good cook.”
“Is that their slogan?”
“No, that’s just an honest description. There’s a pet gator in a fenced-in pond just behind the place. You can sit out back on the deck and watch them feed it, if you’re there at the right time.”
“Sounds charming. Do they serve burgers?”
“Sure. And a mean gator gumbo if you’re brave…and not afraid of offending the mascot!”
The place was hopping, with John Fogerty belting a bayou vibe over the whole shebang with “Change in the Weather” as they walked in and were escorted to a table that had some kind of tree moss hanging over it from the ceiling.
Rachel skipped the gumbo, but she did try some French-fried gator nuggets. “Let me guess,” Terry asked as she chewed the first one. “Tastes just like chicken?”
She laughed and nodded vigorously.
He grinned. “Everything does when it’s breaded and fried!”
She was still smiling when a woman with jet-black hair and a tan worthy of South Beach stopped at their table.
“Well, is that the infamous Terry Brackson sittin’ right thar at a table?” she said with a deep drawl. “I haven’t seen you in a python’s age. But I see you’ve found someone to keep you busy!”
Rachel felt her eyes go wide. She wasn’t sure what to think about that comment…was this a former girlfriend? A hopeful? Was she an obstacle here?
But Terry didn’t react to the comment at all. He just laughed easily and introduced Rachel.
“Leave it to you to bring up snakes!” he laughed. “This is Monique,” he explained to Rach
el. “She was a park ranger for a while, but while she loved the reptiles, she missed the sun, so she went back to lifeguarding. As you can see, it suits her well, but I always told her that she’ll get cancer faster that way. I warned her!” Then he looked back to Monique. “It’s just our second date,” he said, “so Rachel hasn’t ‘kept me that busy’ yet…but I’m hoping she will!”
Rachel laughed, and inside, she felt a warm spot blossom. So. He was hoping that she’d keep him busy, huh? Nice! But Terry was still talking. Saying something about a guy named Keith, and a beer run gone wrong.
“I told him, if you’re going to take beer into the swamp, you better run a string behind you to find your way out.”
“Keith couldn’t find his way out with a string.” Monique laughed.
“Probably true,” Terry agreed. “So it’s a good thing he had his cell phone to call me with so that I could wade in and find him and the rest of the idiots.”
Monique smiled, but then turned to look at the bar, as if she was trying to see if people she was meeting had arrived. In doing so, she gave them a view of her mostly bare shoulders and back.
“What the hell,” Terry exclaimed when she turned. “Did you work on your tan while lying on a bed of fire ants or something?”
The skin around her shoulder blades was covered with angry red bite bumps.
She turned back around and grimaced. “Lovely, ain’t it? I don’t know what they hell they were, but they bit the hell out of me. I was just jogging the other day—and when I stopped at this intersection, it was like a cloud of these nasty little flies were all there waiting for me. I was slapping at them like crazy, but the only way to stop them from biting was to just get back to running! I don’t think I stopped for half a mile after that!”
“Looks nasty,” Terry said.
“It feels worse!” she answered. “But I have to admit, they drove me to a good workout!”