Violet Eyes

by John Everson

  “Get off the street!” she yelled. “Come on over here.”

  Rachel pushed Eric away from the body. She didn’t need much of an excuse to look away from that. Anders and Terry immediately stepped ahead of her, leading the way across the street to the woman.

  When they reached the house, the woman grinned, and gestured them inside.

  “Emma Poller,” she said. “Couldn’t help but see you wandering around out there.”

  Emma Poller was a big woman, and Rachel didn’t think the hibiscus flower blouse did her any favors. But Emma had an energy about her, and her eyes sparkled as she greeted them. Rachel found that she instantly liked the woman.

  Emma held out a hand and made it a point to shake each of theirs, including Eric’s.

  “I don’t think you should be out here,” she said. “They could come back at any minute. I haven’t seen anyone on the street since yesterday. C’mon inside.”

  She led them into a dark living room and shut the door. “Pretty early to be out wandering around the neighborhood, isn’t it?”

  Rachel stared around the room and saw a wall clock. The time was only 6:40 in the morning.

  “We wanted to get away from the spiders,” she explained. “They’re everywhere. But by my house, they’re all still very much alive. We stopped here because it looks like they’ve all died.”

  “Yes, I noticed that too this morning. That’s a new one. They were definitely not dead last night when I went to bed.”

  Emma put a hand to her head. “I didn’t sleep much though, I’m afraid. You could hear them out there, walking across the windows, spinning their webs, closing me in here.”

  She led them into the kitchen where a light above the stove was already on. “Have a seat,” she said, motioning at the small oval-shaped wooden table. “I’ll make some coffee.” She looked at Eric and offered, “how about some hot chocolate?”

  Eric’s face lit up, and he looked at Rachel for permission. She nodded.

  “Good,” the woman said. Her voice was full of energy, but Rachel could see a pain in her eyes. She pulled down mugs from a cabinet and filled the coffee maker with grounds before taking out a box of hot chocolate mix from the pantry. “I’ve not gotten out of this house in three days,” she complained as she worked. “All of a sudden there were these webs everywhere, and I couldn’t even call anyone; my cell phone won’t work. And when I went to watch the news, it turns out I’ve lost my cable as well. I can’t do much of anything except sit here.”

  She brought a cup of steaming hot chocolate to Eric, who accepted it with a grin. She put two thick hands on the chair on either side of his head and said, “Do you all know what’s going on? I think we’ve got a plague going on here, right out of the Bible.”

  “I don’t know about a plague, but it isn’t good,” Rachel said.

  Emma poured out four cups of coffee and brought them to the table. Her hands shook as she set them down. “Who wants cream or sugar?”

  Rachel raised a hand. Emma passed a sugar bowl to the table and then pulled a half-and-half carton from the fridge before pulling up a chair and joining them. “I’ll be honest,” she said, “I’m a little worried.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she rubbed her forehead. “This whole thing has given me a helluva migraine. And I haven’t even been up but a half hour.”

  “I know,” Rachel smiled. “I barely slept last night.”

  “I had no problem at all,” Anders offered.

  “That’s because you have no brain,” Rachel said.

  Terry pursed his lips, struggling to keep from laughing.

  “Where do you all live?” Emma asked, and took a sip of her coffee. She’d enriched it with two spoons of sugar and a healthy pour of cream. The cup’s complexion looked closer to chocolate milk than coffee.

  “We’re in that subdivision past Countryside Park, off Main, do you know it?” Rachel said.

  Emma nodded. “Not far from the jungle, I know it. You must be used to bugs over there. You’re living in the swamp!”

  Rachel shrugged. “We haven’t lived here long enough to know. Only moved in a month ago.”

  “Ha,” Emma laughed. “I’ve lived here all my life. Bought this house with my husband Jack almost forty-five years ago now. Had a lot of good times and bad times here, but I’ve never felt the need to move on.”

  “Is Jack here?” Rachel asked, suddenly worried that they were talking too loud and might wake him if so.

  Emma shook her head, silver-black curls shifting with the motion. “Nope. Jack left me behind for a walk in heaven three years ago now. Heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said. She felt stupid now for asking. Open mouth, insert foot.

  “No need,” Emma said, and sipped a bit from her cup. “Jack always took the easy road. I should have known he’d duck out early and leave me to live through the hard spots. And this definitely seems to be one of the hard ones.”

  Emma pushed back from the table. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve got to get some aspirin for this. I can’t take it much more.”

  She disappeared down the hallway.

  “She’s really nice,” Terry observed.

  “Makes a good cup of coffee,” Anders said.

  “I feel bad for her,” Rachel said. “Here all alone, dealing with this. She must have been petrified last night. I couldn’t sleep and at least I had…”

  She realized that she was about to talk about sleeping with another man in front of Anders.

  “Go ahead,” he grinned. “You had your boy toy here to keep you warm? If you’d slept with me, like a wife’s supposed ta, you wouldn’t have worried so much. You probably would have gotten some sleep. A real man knows how to calm his woman down.”

  “Shut up, Anders,” she said, as Emma came back in the room. The older woman set a bottle down on the counter and a moment later downed two pills with a cup of water. Then she returned to the table.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “Haven’t been myself lately.”

  “Why don’t you come with us,” Anders suggested. “We’re driving out of town, to get away from these things until the government or someone figures out how to kill them.”

  “They could be everywhere,” Emma said. Her eyes looked a bit crossed.

  “They’re not,” Anders said. “I drove down through the entire state of Florida the other day and didn’t run into them at all ’til I got here to Passanattee. What do you say?”

  Emma smiled. “Thanks, that’s really nice of you. I would like to find out what’s going on…and I don’t know that I can get very far by myself.”

  “Well, we can hit the road just as soon as I finish my coffee.”

  Emma nodded at him, weakly. “I just need to rest my head for a few minutes, and then I’ll get my things together,” she said. “Sometimes I just need to lie down for a bit, and then it’s all okay.”

  She laid her forehead down on her arms.

  Rachel gestured to Eric and the men. Quietly, they pushed their chairs back and stepped out of the kitchen into the front room. “Let her rest a little,” Rachel said. “There’s no hurry.”

  Anders refilled his coffee cup and sat down on an easy chair. Terry and Rachel sat on opposite sides of the couch, and Eric plopped down between them. Given the earliness of the hour, and without the goad of television, in moments, all of their heads were lying back on the soft cushions. Terry and Rachel both closed their eyes.

  Rachel began to dream. She and Terry were sitting on a beach in the hot sun. Terry wore one of those loose-fitting, long-legged swimsuits that she hated (Why did girls wear next to nothing on the beach while guy fashion encouraged long flappy pants?). He was leaning in to kiss her, when something grabbed her by the hair. She was turning to see who when she heard the scream.

  It was Eric.

  Somehow he’d gotten buried in the sand, until only his head remained visible. But she could barely even tell it was Eric, because his face was covered with crabs.
They had run out of the ocean and were using their claws to pinch off pieces of his cheeks. He screamed again, and she tried to jump up, but something was holding her back by the hair. “Let go!” she cried, and swatted her hands at her captor. She turned her head finally, and saw Anders’s greedy eyes staring at her like a prize. She didn’t want to be his prize. She didn’t want to be his anything.

  “Let go of me!” she demanded.

  Anders opened his mouth to laugh, but instead of sound, a thousand spiders poured from his lips. They fell onto his arms and across her chest. Still they kept coming, a million legs attached to hungry fat round abdomens. Now it was Rachel’s turn to scream.

  She jolted awake, and saw Anders opening the front door. “What’s going on?” she asked. Before she finished saying it, she realized the screams in her dream were coming from outside. It sounded like the whole neighborhood was screaming. She jumped off the couch. Terry and Eric were already ahead of her, looking around Anders to see outside.

  “What is it?” Rachel whispered.

  “I don’t know, but people in the houses all around us are screaming bloody murder.”

  He looked out the doorway and saw something that made him step outside and put a hand to his brow.

  “That’s not good,” Anders said after a second.

  The early morning sky was suddenly growing darker as he watched. The shadow grew and he could just make out the specks of individual shapes in the dark wave that was approaching from the east when he heard the familiar buzz.

  “Inside,” he screamed, and pushed them all back off the porch, slamming the outer door shut just as a billion wings slammed against it. They had smelled prey.

  The screen was suddenly alive with tiny hairlike legs, sticking through the holes in the screen like cilia, waving. They moved fast up and down the outside of the door, walking over each other in their haste to find a way inside.

  Inside where warm-blooded mammals waited.

  Anders pushed the heavy inside door shut.

  “So much for our window of opportunity,” he growled. “Now we’re stuck here.”

  Another scream.

  This one from the kitchen.

  “Emma!” Rachel said, and ran to see what was wrong.

  Mrs. Poller was sitting straight up in her chair at the table, but her hands were slapped across her eyes and forehead. Her mouth opened to scream again, and Rachel put a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “What can I do?”

  Emma’s scream degenerated into a horribly forlorn cry, and she let her head drop to her chest.

  A spider crawled across the kitchen table. It looked tiny, but was instantly recognizable by the purple slash across the top of its abdomen. It was one of them.

  Anders smashed it with his palm.

  Mrs. Poller continued to make short horrible screams. Terry knelt next to the table and put his hand on her arm, trying to draw her hand away from her face. “Emma, look at me,” he said. “Calm down and tell us what’s the matter.”

  He gently pulled her arms down from her face, but when Emma Poller did finally look at him, he didn’t see the rheumy blue orbs that he’d seen tucked amid the fatty wrinkle lines of her face before.

  Instead, her eyes were open sockets, churning with a tumbling horde of spider legs. As she dropped her hands, they spilled out of her head, and ran down her blouse and body to dive to the floor.

  Terry jumped back.

  Eric screamed. The boy stomped his feet at the spiders that suddenly rained from Emma’s eyes to the floor, to pool and skitter around his tennis shoes.

  Anders scooped his son up and ran with him into the front room. Terry and Rachel followed, as behind them, Emma continued to make short, sharp sounds in the back of her throat. The sounds were getting fainter already though. Black-and-purple forms slipped into the front room, dashing along the baseboards, and crawling up the walls. The spiders ran everywhere…

  “Perfect!” Anders complained. “Now we can’t stay here either…but we can’t go outside.”

  Terry pursed his lips and looked from one side of the room to the other. They were surrounded by spiders. Whether by accident or design, they would soon have to kill the things no matter which way they stepped.

  Anders followed a line of the things to the far side of the room, and peered behind an end table. “Well, that figures,” he said after a moment.

  “What?” Terry asked.

  “I kinda pegged her as one of them cat people. Old widow, living here alone.”

  Terry walked over and followed Anders’s finger to the space behind the table. Lying on its back, claws to the sky, were the remains of a cat. A calico. Its abdomen was split open, and the flesh inside had been stripped. Spiders still swarmed over the feline, but Terry saw more white bones than he did pink.

  “Damn,” Terry said. “That’s probably where they started.”

  “Yup,” Anders agreed. “Not to mention there, and there…” He pointed at two more furry shapes lying along the wall behind the couch. The bodies moved, but not of their own volition. Spiders moved over and around them, working to get through the fur to whatever remained of the cat meat inside…

  Eric started to walk over, but Anders put his hand out. “You don’t need to see this, son,” he said, and drew back himself.

  Eric stomped on a couple spiders darting towards him with his left foot, and then his right. Rachel did they same. A dance to stay alive. The television shivered across the room as they stamped and stamped.

  Terry looked outside, and it was an identical scene to the night before. The air was filled with swarming, swirling battalions of bugs.

  “We have to get to the car,” he said.

  “And how are we going to do that genius?” Anders taunted.

  Terry held up a finger. “I have an idea.” He disappeared down the hallway to the bedrooms, and returned a minute later holding up a big ball of wadded up sheets.

  “If we hold these over our heads, we’ll still be able to see enough to navigate. We can run to the car, and quickly get inside. Hopefully we don’t bring too many of them in with us.”

  “No way,” Rachel said, stomping on another spider. She bent and slapped one off her leg. “We can’t. They’ll eat us alive.”

  “Not if we’re fast,” Anders said. He nodded in grudging agreement at Terry. “We can’t stay here. Those things have to land on us to bite, and if we move really fast, they shouldn’t get near our skin before we pile into the car.”

  Eric grabbed a sheet and pulled it over his head. He moved in a circle around the room, slowly walking before stepping up in front of Rachel and calling out.

  “Boo!” he said.

  She patted him on his ghostly head, but didn’t smile. “Are you sure?” she asked Terry. She didn’t acknowledge Anders at all.

  He shrugged. “I’m open to other ideas.”

  Anders walked down the hall. They heard a bunch of metallic clinks, and then he reappeared, carrying a plastic shower curtain.

  “I’ll go first and get the car open,” he said. “Then I can hold this over the entrance to block the flies, and you guys can slip through it and into the car.”

  “I don’t know if…” Terry began, but Anders wasn’t listening. He pulled a sheet over his head and then opened the front door and ran down the sidewalk and across the lawn to the car.

  “I guess we’re going,” Rachel said. She bent and made sure all of Eric was covered by the sheet. “Be careful and don’t trip on the edge of the sheet,” she cautioned.

  “You go next and then I’ll send Eric,” Terry said.

  Rachel nodded, and went to stand at the door. Anders stood at the car, the shower curtain draped over himself and the half-open door. “Hurry up!” he was calling.

  In her head, Rachel took up a silent mantra as she stared at the swarming clouds of flies.

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit, she repeated, and then pushed the door open with her sheet-cover
ed hand, bent her head low and ran for it.

  Anders lifted the curtain and let her duck under, and Rachel let the sheet fall to the curb as she slipped past him and into the car. A few seconds later, Eric joined her. Rachel slapped at a couple flies that had gotten into the cab with them. She smeared the blood of one across the back window. Then she hugged her son close and kissed his head again and again.

  “Get in the front,” Anders demanded. “Your boyfriend’s coming.”

  “Come on,” she said, and hefted Eric over the seat, following him a second later.

  Before she was fully sitting again, the door slammed shut, and the two men began slapping the inside car roof and seat and clapping at the air as they tried to swat all of the flies before the things had a chance to bite.

  Rachel pulled the keys out from her pocket and reached forward to slip the right one into the ignition when she involuntarily shrieked.

  Two violet eyes were staring at her from the center of the steering wheel.

  A large spider.

  She raised her hand to smash it, but Terry grabbed her wrist from the back seat. “Wait!” he said.

  He slowly extended his fingers to the wheel, and with a quick motion, pinned the thing with his fingers, pressing and holding the hooks of its thin legs in place. He leaned over the seat farther, and studied the purple slash across its back. Then he shook his head. “This is a big one,” he said. “But I’ve never seen anything like it. In some ways, it resembles the Black Widow, but it has this marking on the dorsal side of its abdomen, instead of the ventrum, where the Widow has its red hourglass.”

  “Thanks for the spider lesson, egghead,” Anders growled. “But could we get out of here?”

  Terry ignored him. “It’s not trying to get away,” he said. “I don’t think this one is…”

  “Look it’s moving!” Eric said. He was staring over Terry’s shoulder from the passenger’s seat.

  “Well, its abdomen is, anyway,” Terry agreed.

  They watched the back of the large spider. Its glossy black abdomen shook and trembled visibly between Terry’s fingers, though its head and legs remained still.