“Yes,” she said in a meek voice, “I do love him.”
Laurence’s mouth fell open. A small strangled noise came from it. Another tear ran down his right cheek. His worst possible nightmare was coming true right here in his kitchen. There was one piece of hope that he had left. His future from this moment was going to be decided from this one question.
“Do you love me?” he asked. He didn’t shout this time. The raw emotion of the moment had reduced the remains of his voice to a barely audible croak. Lorna looked at him and for a moment her heart went out to him. She remembered the man he once was, before they had got married and just after, that wonderful caring and reliable man that he used to be, but then she remembered how he had become in the years afterwards, how he had chosen his life with the drink rather than the life he had with her. It had changed him into someone she didn’t even know anymore. He had made an effort this evening, but she could still smell the beer on his breath and the stink of it which seemed to ooze out of his pores. That was the reality of the man he had become. The other side of the coin was Deke. He was younger, he had an amazing body and he had given her the confidence that she thought had long gone many years ago. She felt like a new person with Deke, a better one and now everything was out in the open she could get away from Laurence and go and be the person that she wanted to be. She looked at Laurence with his doughy skin, his bloodshot eyes and his absolute love of the drink and she realized she wanted to be as far away from him as possible. All she had to do was answer his question, perhaps take a beating and it would all be over.
“No Laurence, I don’t love you anymore,” she said.
She was pretty sure that she could see the exact moment that the information hit home. She saw his screwed-up facial expression melt into one of utter despair. His head slowly sank downwards along with his shoulders. He looked like a man who was utterly defeated, like he had the starch taken right out of him. There was an almost eerie silence in the room. She wished that he would say something, anything just to break this moment, but he just kept on sitting right in front of her regarding the ground.
“Laurence?” she said.
Nothing.
“Laurence?” she said again.
Suddenly his head came up and he roared at her with such venom that Lorna nearly fell backwards off her chair.
“Well, if that’s what you want, then why don’t you fuck off and have him you slag, you fucking slapper. Get the fuck out, get the fuck out of my house right fucking now.”
Lorna scrambled off the chair and ran down the hallway. She was grateful that she had hung her coat on the end of the banister along with her handbag. She snatched them up and fled out of the door, banging it shut behind her.
Laurence was still sitting in the kitchen. The silence in the room was almost overwhelming. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt the need to shout with such ferocity. His throat felt like it had been torn out with the force of it and his ears were still ringing. He swallowed and felt a click in his throat. He had knackered his voice alright and there was only one thing that could make that better. He got out of his chair and went to the bottom left cupboard, the one nearest the door. He went to one knee and peered inside and sure enough his emergency whiskey was sitting in there staring at him. He reached in and drew the bottle out. Just the feel of the bottle in his hand made him feel better straight away. He unscrewed the lid and took a long pull on the bottle. The fiery liquid hit his throat and gullet and almost made him gag. He stood up and made his way into the living room, clasping the bottle to his midsection like a baby, and sat down in the armchair that was closest to the television. His hand hovered over the remote, wanting to put the thing on so that it could distract him from the storm that had just swept through his life. He decided that he needed to do some drinking and thinking (one of his favorite pastimes) about where he was going to go from here. Did he want to win Lorna back or was he going to try and go forwards without her. He had another nip from the bottle, hoping that he could find an answer from the ensuing drunkenness he was feeling. She had shit on him and their marriage big time, could he ever go back knowing what she had been doing behind his back? He didn’t think that he could. He could just envision it now, him being on top of her, being inside her, knowing that he had been sharing the space with that muscle bound twat from the gym. He must have been at least half her fucking age, what the hell was she thinking? How could he ever be intimate with her knowing all of that? How could he do anything with her if he was wondering how good he was in bed. He probably had much better stamina and recovery time than he did. How many times would they do it in one session? How many times would she come? How….
He stood up out of the chair and drank from his bottle again. There was only one way that he could solve all of this. Things would have to be on an even footing if he was going to be able to be with her again. Then a plan jumped up in his mind. He knew that the only way to do all of that would be to go and get himself some extra marital attention. He drank from his bottle one more time and then marched into the kitchen so he could put the bottle back into its cupboard. Afterwards he went and got his best jacket, grabbed his keys and headed for the front door. He was going out and he was going to get himself a revenge fuck. That was how he was going to put the final nail in the coffin, by doing unto her what she saw fit for him.
5.
It wasn’t the alarm that had made Doctor Benchley run as fast as he could back to the room with the bite victim, it was the ferocity with which Nurse Bradshaw had screamed his name. He had never heard anyone sound so utterly distressed that they would need to scream like that before. The sound of it made him freeze momentarily and then he bolted like a scalded dog away from his patient with pains in their left leg and across the department to the private room. When he went inside he saw Nurse Bradshaw standing in the far corner of the room. Her hands were on her cheeks and she was pulling her mouth upwards into a grotesque smile. He was about to yell at her, but his attention was caught by the patient on the bed. He looked like he was shaking in some way, but to Benchley it was more like a vibration. His chest was covered in thin streams of blood that were making their way down the sides of his body and turning the crisp, white bed sheet a dark shade of scarlet. Benchley knew one thing straight away, Gordon Lewis the firefighter was going to die right there and right now and there was nothing that he could do to save him. Gordon’s head turned towards Benchley and his eyes locked on him, then they rolled over white and his eyelids began to flutter. Benchley stepped forwards until he was right next to Gordon. Gordon was making a strangled noise in his throat and his mouth was trying to move. Benchley knew that Gordon was trying to say something, perhaps give them a clue as to what was happening to him, but the breathing equipment in his mouth was preventing him from doing so. Thinking quickly, Benchley took off all of the restraints and then pulled the tube out from Gordon’s throat. Gordon took a slow rasping breath inwards. Benchley lowered his ear to Gordon’s mouth ready to listen to what could possibly be the man’s last words. All he could hear was a low groan from down inside the man’s throat that suddenly got choked off. Benchley thought it sounded like Gordon’s airway was collapsing which sometimes happened when you withdrew the breathing tube too soon. He tipped Gordon’s head back to try and open the airway and his eyes caught something inside Gordon’s throat. It looked like it was movement of some kind, possibly some sort of foreign object. He stuck his fingers into Gordon’s mouth and began to rummage around to see if he could dislodge whatever it was that was in there. He turned to Nurse Bradshaw who was still standing in the corner of the room.
“Go and get the crash team right now,” he said in a stern voice. Bradshaw looked at him as if he had been talking a foreign language. Benchley felt his temper flare.
“Move your fucking arse Bradshaw. Crash team, now!” he roared and Bradshaw came back to life. She hurried out of the room yelling for the crash team. It was just at that moment that Benchley suddenly felt a s
harp stabbing pain in the fingers that he had in Gordon’s mouth. He withdrew them, hissing in a breath over his teeth. He looked at the fingers and saw that the middle finger had two small pin pricks in them. Blood was beginning to ooze out of them. He almost put them in his mouth to try and suck the pain away and then he realized that he had just had them in the mouth of a patient. He looked down at Gordon’s mouth wondering what on earth could have stabbed his finger in such a way. His brow furrowed as he looked. Something was wriggling inside and trying to get free. It tugged itself out of the back of Gordon’s throat and began to pull itself slowly out of Gordon’s mouth. Benchley began to back away, his heart crashing inside his chest. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing and he didn’t want to believe it, but it was right there in front of him. There was a spider was crawling its way out of Gordon’s mouth. It was like any spider he had ever seen before. It moved without any of the coordination and grace that a spider usually exhibited. To Benchley it looked like it was drunk and that it had been dealt some of the worst genetic defects that a spider could have. Its body was thick and bulbous and seemed like it carried just a little bit too much weight for the spider to move comfortably. Its two rear legs were so long and misshapen that they were still dangling into the mouth of Gordon Lewis.
Click-click
Click-click-click.
The noise came from the spider, it turned in a half circle and it saw Benchley, it began to advance over Gordon’s face towards Benchley. Benchley tried to make for the door but there was something wrong with his legs. They felt like they had been filled with lead and they wouldn’t cooperate with the panicky signals being emitted from his brain. It was almost like a dream where he was trying to run from some unseen foe and he just couldn’t get the speed up. He tried to shout for help instead.
“’Elp ee. Urze Babhawwww,” he brayed at the open door. His tongue felt like it was swelling to the size of a balloon. He tried to reach up to check that it was just an illusion but he couldn’t raise his hands. He half turned and then fell to the floor, smashing the back of his head on the hard tiles. He tried to yell again but his throat was closing up. He knew that he was going down with anaphylactic shock and If he didn’t get an adrenaline shot soon he would be dead. Panic was exploding in his body but there was nothing he could physically do. He just had to stay here and wait until Bradshaw returned with the crash team. They would save him, he just had to wait it out. He had to control his breathing and wait it out, that was all. He just needed to…..
Click-click.
It was the spider. Benchley knew that it had made its way to the floor and it was now right by his left ear. He turned his eyes as far as he could in the direction of the noise and he could just about see the dark misshapen object shuffling across the floor to him. He wanted to close his eyes but his body was now almost fully paralyzed. He was trapped. He felt something tickle his left ear and he felt it scraping against the lobe, making a noise that reminded him of sandpaper. He began to attempt a scream, but nothing came from his throat except for a faint whistle. He had never felt such utter terror in his entire life. The horror of having a spider crawling up the side of his face was one thing, but a mutated specimen that had been hiding inside the mouth of a human being? That was terror on a whole new level. The terror exploded even more when the spider came into his line of vision. Again, he tried to yell out but nothing would come out of his mouth. The spider shuffled its way onto his nose. At one point its legs made contact with Benchley’s left eye. He reflexively tried to squeeze them shut, but the eyelids wouldn’t respond to his brains commands. Mercifully the contact was brief, but his relief was short lived. The spider suddenly bit down onto the bridge of his nose sending a flash of pain all the way through his mind to the back of his head. He tried with all his might to move something, anything just so he could fight back, but it was to no avail. His vision began to swim, he was going to faint at any moment now, his fear was that if he did, he would never wake up again. He felt something begin to tickle his top lip. Something was being pushed into his open mouth. A moment later a sticky liquid began to pool on his tongue. It had a taste that reminded him of the time his mother made him a sandwich for school without realizing that the bread was growing green mold spores all over it. He had bitten into the sandwich and was on his third chew when the rancid breath-taking flavor had filled his pallet. He had spat the bread out and thrown up right there in the dinner hall provoking the response of the most child unfriendly dinner lady that the world had ever seen. Her name had been Mrs. Hall and she had torn into him with such vengeance that he had simply stood there and cried. This little blast from the past flashed through his mind as the foul concoction was making its way down the back of his useless tongue. It struck his throat and a moment later his airway was beginning to be compromised. But then his throat reflexively went to work and it swallowed the grotesque concoction. His stomach knotted for a moment. It wanted to throw whatever it was that had invaded right back up, but the knot was only temporary and everything settled back down again. The spider was not relaxing its grip on Benchley’s nose and his battle with staying awake was beginning to come to an end. He was starting to fade. He would have passed out completely if Nurse Bradshaw hadn’t come back into the room with the crash team, seen Benchley laid out on the floor with a large spider attached to his face and screamed louder than any woman had ever screamed in the history of the world.
6.
Lorna had got straight into her car and started driving. She had no earthly idea of where it was that she was actually going to go. She had gone to the large supermarket just outside of town and parked the car. She had been reaching for her phone to give Deke a call and see how he would be fixed for putting her up for a few nights. But her hand paused before she could press the button to phone him.. She didn’t want to suddenly impose herself on him. It might even freak him out to the point where he would run a mile. She had tried to discuss the future with him but he would always evade the subject. She guessed that the near twenty-year age gap between them was a big issue when it came to the subject of them being in an actual relationship. She saw a side of him that irritated her beyond measure and that was his immaturity. He was an amazing physical specimen, there was no doubt about that, and she sure as hell liked to put her hands all over him. He was also pretty amazing in bed too. He had been the only man that had ever made her come so hard that her legs shook like a shed in an earthquake afterwards. The problem with it all was that he knew how good looking and how good he was in the sack and it all went right to his head. She supposed that she was naively thinking that he would be just like a younger and more caring version of Laurence, but he wasn’t. He was something totally different on every conceivable scale. The youth and good looks were one thing, but this guy was still all about sowing his wild oats, not settling down with a woman who was fast approaching middle age. She wondered whether or not it would even be worth waiting for him to grow up to a point where he would want to settle down, after all, how long was it going to take? She didn’t have enough reasons to try and take it to a level that it was never going to get to at the present time. Then there was the fact that her period was late by about two months now and she had done a pregnancy test that had come back positive. She wasn’t entirely sure if Deke was even the father because there was that one last time with Laurence. She had tried to work out the dates, but it was all fifty-fifty as to who the daddy really was. She had to hedge her bets right now, because at the moment she was sitting in her car with nowhere to go. Amazingly she felt a terrible pang of hunger which was out of the ordinary considering what had just happened between her and Laurence. She decided to go and grab something to eat from the supermarket. She really needed to pee as well, so she would take care of that too and then she would be able to think straight about what to do next. After all, she couldn’t very well live in her car. She opened the door and hauled herself out. Her back was aching a little and she stretched, relishing the feeling of her spine cra
ckling as it realigned itself. She began to make her way across the car park towards the entrance. It was only when she was near the door that she realized that the car park was unusually empty. On a Friday evening this place was normally packed out with people doing their post work, pre-weekend shop. There were a few cars dotted around the place and, what looked like a large motor home, but nothing like the chaos that usually took place on a Friday. She disregarded it for now, there was probably a big football game on or something like that and she, not being a fan, had missed that titbit of information. She went into the store and headed straight for the toilets. There was one cubicle with the door shut and so she chose the one furthest away from it as she usually did. She didn’t like to have an immediate neighbor whist she was taking care of business, it put her right off. The woman in the other cubicle sounded like she was talking on the phone to somebody. Lorna eased her door closed and locked it. She couldn’t help but listen in on the conversation.
“I know…….just get away from all the big cities for now……..I don’t know how far it will reach, nobody does……..Just get to the coast and I will meet you there in a couple of days…….I’m sure it will all get taken care of, the best man for the job is on the job if you know what I mean.”
Lorna was stood silently in the cubicle listening in. her bladder was straining with the need to be emptied. It was causing Lorna to squeeze her legs together like a three-year-old trying to hold it in.
“Something went wrong, that’s all I know……..It mutated somehow and it….What? Yes I know it’s on the news and believe me the powers that be are not happy……of course they want to keep it under wraps….A mass panic isn’t going to help things is it……Look, just do what I tell you and everything will be fine…”
Dawn of the Spiders: Special Edition Page 3