Click-click-click-click-click.
The crash team were about to enter the room but Bradshaw turned to them and told them to stay back. The clicking noise was coming from Gordon Lewis’s body. His blood covered chest looked to Bradshaw like it was somehow rippling. Then it looked like hairs were growing out of the crimson mass. This time Bradshaw did scream, loud enough for it to be heard in the next ward. They were not hairs coming out of Gordon’s chest, they were spiders, hundreds and hundreds of spiders. They were breaking through the skin of Gordon’s chest and soon they were free and sliding down the sides of the corpse. Each spider began to mutate and change shape each one in a slightly different way. They began to crawl over the floor towards Bradshaw. She was frozen to the spot, unable to comprehend the scene unfolding in front of her. The spiders were shuffling and crawling their way over Benchley and right up to where Bradshaw was stood. She turned and ran as fast as she could but she ran straight into the defibrillator trolley that one of the crash team had been wheeling. Bradshaw went right over it, taking the trolley out with her. She put her arm out to catch herself but her full body weight was behind her and as her hand made contact with the floor her forearm cracked in half and then folded up underneath her. She lay on the floor staring at the slimy mass of spiders coming out of the door of the private room. She heard the screams of the other staff, she saw the footsteps of staff and patients beginning to run for the exits and all she could think about was the fact that the pain from her newly broken arm was the worst pain she had ever felt in her life. She was going to pass out at any moment, she knew that. But she was scared that the spiders that were heading right for her were going to get to her first. One of them bit her ankle, two of them bit her good arm. Several dozen of them bit her head and her face. Mercifully, her heart stopped before they began to feed. A few minutes after Bradshaw died Doctor Benchley’s body began to tear open and another swarm of mutated spiders began to crawl out of the corpse and crawl their way through the hospital. Within the hour the entire building was overrun. Just as the television reporter Giles Dyson was giving a live broadcast to the nation one of the last surviving hospital porters made it outside with two of the spiders clinging to his back. The paralysis hit his muscles just two feet away from Giles and he collapsed to the floor. The television company cut the live feed and Giles and his crew made a hasty exit.
As the night wore on the spiders, having run out of a decent food supply began to leave the building. They began to head south towards the next abundant food source. Newtown was next on their list.
9.
Lorna woke up with a start. She hadn’t wanted to fall asleep, she had wanted to be on guard in case anything from the hospital had started to spread out towards the spot where she was parked up. Something had pulled her from her sleep, a noise which had been out of the ordinary. She had slouched down in her seat and she straightened up, amazed by how much stiffness had settled in her back. She really needed to get out of the car and stretch again. Her hand fumbled for the door handle and she was about to pull it when the noise that had woken her up came again. There was a muted tapping noise from the window right next to her on the car door. She looked and she saw it and she pulled in a long breath to scream, but at the last moment she caught it in her throat. There was a large spider sitting on the window. Its leg span was almost the full length of the window and its distorted body blotted out most of the light coming from the lamp post outside the car. Lorna froze, not wanting to attract the spiders’ attention. Fear was rushing through her, making her want to scramble over to the passenger side, jump out of the car and run for her life. She almost did it, but the spider suddenly crawled up the window and on the roof of the car. As it moved its legs made the tapping noise that had pulled her out of her impromptu sleep. The spider made it to the roof and she could hear it tapping away as it walked around up there. She had a look out of the window to see if there were any more of them anywhere. She couldn’t see any of them, but other than the orange glow from the lamp post there wasn’t much in the way of light to be seen. She decided not to think about it anymore, she was going to make a run for it, back to the supermarket. She needed to phone the emergency services to get someone out to take care of the monster spider that was sitting on top of her car. She yanked the handle of the car door and it popped open. She had got one leg out of the car when the spider on the roof began to crawl back towards her open door. Its front legs curled around the top of the open door space. Lorna screamed this time, loud enough for it to echo around the car park. She scrambled backwards into the passenger side of the car, scraping her legs across the gear stick and the handbrake. She pressed herself against the passenger door and pulled her legs in as best she could. The spider crawled onto the roof inside the car. It stayed there for a moment and then it lost its grip and plopped right into the drivers seat. Lorna began to scramble for the door handle on the passenger side door, unable to take her eyes off the monstrosity that had climbed inside her car. The spider began to move towards her and she began to scream and kick out at it. She caught it with the heel of her shoe twice and the spider began to rear up awkwardly. A small trail of greeny-yellow pus began to run from its face where Lorna had kicked. She tried to kick out again but the spider had backed up a little in an attempt to defend itself. Lorna’s hand suddenly felt the cool protrusion of metal against her hand and she gripped it and pulled it hard. The door popped open, spilling her onto the tarmac. The back of her head connected with the hard floor and sent a horrendous bolt of pain right through her head. She rolled over as quickly as she could and scrambled to her feet. Her awkward sleeping position and the new bump on her head caused her to tangle her feet up in themselves and spill her to the floor again. She got back up as fast as she could and began to move forwards. She had craned her head round and saw the spider crawling out of the open passenger door and dropping to the floor with exactly the same grace that she had done a moment earlier. She turned her head forwards again and another bolt of pain ran through her head from the back. She checked it with her hand and gasped when she saw that there was a decent amount of blood coming from her wounded head. She started to head for the supermarket and then she froze in her tracks. All the lights were still on inside the shop but she could see that there were several of the spiders clinging to the windows. Their mutated bodies were silhouetted against the bright lights. Lorna froze where she was stood, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. Was this the subject of the overheard phone conversation in the toilets just a few hours ago? It had to be, the radio broadcast that she had listened to made sense too. She looked all around her. There were spiders beginning to make their way across the car park towards her in all directions. No matter which direction she chose to run, there were spiders in her path. She decided right there and then, that if they were going to come for her then they were going to get a fight. She prepared herself to start stamping on them when she heard a noise from behind her.
Psssssssssss
She turned round and saw the girl that she had followed out of the store earlier. She had some sort of canister in her hand and she was spraying it at the incoming spiders. The spiders reared up and backed off from whatever the spray was.
“Come with me, I have a safe place,” she said to Lorna.
Lorna stared at her for a second, still unable to take any of it in. The girl grabbed her by the hand and pulled her. “Come on, move it,” she said.
They began to run. The girl kept the spray going as they ran. The spiders that were in their path backed away from the spray. There was a waft of insect repellant coming from the spray. Whatever it was it was enough to get them to where they were going. The safe place turned out to be the motor home that Lorna had seen her get into earlier. As they got close to the door it was opened from the inside by an unseen hand. The girl almost dove into the open door, dragging Lorna inside with her. Somebody pulled the door shut again, closing out the light from outside. In the darkness Lorna could hear locks being bolted.
“Is everyone O.K?” said a voice from the dark, a male voice.
“My head is bleeding,” Lorna blurted out.
“Well, don’t worry about that, we can fix you right up,” said the voice.
“Are we safe for lights up?” said another male voice.
“Yep, all sealed now.”
There was a click and some ceiling lights came on. Lorna heard footsteps approaching and a moment later two strong hands were yanking her to her feet.
“What the hell do you think you are doing, are you trying to get yourself killed?” said a deep male voice. He wasn’t shouting but he was whispering with more venom than she had ever heard anyone whisper with before. She opened her eyes and saw a face that wasn’t totally unappealing but it had seen a few fights by the look of it. He had a nose that looked like it had been splattered across his face a few times. His bottom jaw protruded out to an almost sharp point. His mouth was open a little and his small and numerous teeth were gnashing together as he spoke.
“Back off Johnny, can’t you see that she’s scared?”
Johnny puffed and blowed thoughtfully for a moment and then he let Lorna go. She tottered for a moment and then the girl’s arms were around her shoulders and they were guiding her to a seat. The girl squatted down in front of her. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. She had perfect dark skin and the clearest brown eyes that Lorna had ever seen. Her long hair was snatched back in a ponytail and her clothing looked to Lorna like they were military issue.
“My name is Shannon ma’am. Do you have a name?” she said.
“L……L…L…Lorna, my name is Lorna Johnson.”
“Well I’m pleased to meet you Lorna Johnson, and welcome aboard,” said Shannon, a little smile spreading across her face.
“What the fuck……spiders?.....what the…..where…” spluttered Lorna. She was still feeling the residual panic from her altercation outside.
“Don’t you worry about them, you’re perfectly safe in here. Those bastards can’t get to us in here, trust me on that,” said Shannon.
“What are they? Where did they come from?” said Lorna. She was beginning to regain a little control, just enough to stop her from hyperventilating.
“Originally or just tonight?” said another voice. Another man came out from the room at the back of the van. He was wearing thick black framed glasses and he looked to Lorna like he was a hundred feet tall from her vantage point.
“Erm…..both.”
The man made his way over to her and he sat on the seat opposite. He leaned forwards and smiled at her.
“Well then, looks like I have to tell you a little story doesn’t it?” he said.
That was the first time Lorna laid eyes on Doctor Michael Briggs.
10.
Laurence tried three times to open his eyes without much success. The light streaming into the room mad it so much more difficult. It stung his eyes and sent a deep throbbing pain right to the back of his head. He needed to get up. His bladder was cramped and full to the point of it becoming painful. He needed a piss more than anything in the world. He opened his eyes again and the same bolt of pain raced through his hungover mind. He squeezed his eyelids so that the worst of the daylight was filtered out of his vision and them he half stumbled, half walked out of his bedroom and into the bathroom. It was mercifully not so bright in here. The sun wouldn’t hit the front of the house until mid-afternoon. He lifted the toilet seat and urinated for what felt like half an hour. It was about halfway through his relief when he realized that he was totally naked. He was momentarily puzzled. He tried to recollect everything he had done the night before that would have warranted him being stark bollock naked right now. For a moment there was nothing but a hazy gap in his memory where last night used to be. Then little drabs of yesterday began to flash through his mind. Lorna had gone, yes that was right, she had been fucking the gym guy and he had thrown her slutty arse out of the door. Then he had been at the whiskey for a little while whilst he figured out what to do. Then he felt a pulse of excitement when he remembered his new mission, which was to get even on the fuck scale. If he had done that then he could start getting on with the rest of his life without Lorna ruining the whole thing. He finished urinating and then washed his hands in the sink. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. He looked a bit rough, but he had certainly looked worse, then he saw the marks on his neck and his shoulders. He looked closer at them, wondering where on earth they had come from. Then he remembered a little bit more. Jimmy the barman sending someone a drink on his behalf. Then he remembered Chloe Jones. The marks on his shoulders looked like teeth marks and the ones on his neck looked like scratches, perhaps caused by someone…..
An image flashed though his mind. He was fucking Chloe Jones on his living room floor. She had given him a pill of some sort, he didn’t know what it was, but he took it anyway. Then he had brought her home and by the time they got through his front door he had been as horny as a bull moose. He had wanted to take her upstairs but she was all over him like a bad rash. He had managed to get as far as the living room floor and before he knew what was going on he was inside her. She thrashed around underneath him and held him close, she had dug her nails into his neck and bitten into his shoulder as he pounded in and out of her. He smiled at his reflection in the mirror, feeling pleased with himself that he still had what it took. Or perhaps it was whatever was in the pill that had made him able to perform in ways that he hadn’t done since he was in his mid-twenties. He left the bathroom mirror and began to make his way back to the bedroom. He hadn’t even noticed if she was still in his bed or not and if she was, he was going to give her some special breakfast. He was halfway across the landing when his ears prickled. There was a sound that he wasn’t used to hearing within the walls of his home. He had lived here for a very long time and he knew every creak and click that this house had to offer. He tilted his head slightly listening to the foreign noise. He couldn’t tell if the noise was coming from inside the house or outside of it. It sounded almost like a buzzing noise and whatever it was, it was getting slowly louder. He went striding into the bedroom and rescued his trousers from the bedroom floor. As he was shoving his legs into them he saw that Chloe was indeed, still in his bed. She was lay on her back snoring steadily with the cover only covering her bottom half. Laurence smiled to himself again, she was a pretty fine looking woman, especially when she was naked. He was going to find out what the mystery noise was and then he was getting back in bed for a while, perhaps for the rest of the day. He finished zipping himself up and then he went over to the bedroom window. The curtains were letting the early morning sun spill through them despite the fact that they were fully drawn. He grabbed the curtains, on in each hand and pushed them open. When he saw what it was that was making the noise his mouth dropped open. He wanted to close the curtains again so he wouldn’t be able to see the nightmarish image that was laid out before him, but he couldn’t. The back of Laurence’s house had a decent garden space. There was a generously sized fence at the bottom of it. You could open the gate at the left side of the fence and go right through it onto a large field that was owned by a cantankerous old farmer that the people in the village were only too happy to ignore. His name was Davidson or Jefferson, or something along those lines, Laurence didn’t know. But he knew that the farmer owned all of the fields at the back of the houses that were up here and he didn’t like to share them with anyone. On any ordinary day, the field would be occupied by half a dozen dairy cows who would lazily stroll around and tear mouthfuls of grass off the ground and take a decent sized shit right near Laurence’s fence. On this day however, the field wasn’t just occupied by cows. There looked to be about a thousand horribly mutated spiders making their way across the field. Laurence couldn’t even see most of the grass anymore; such was the volume of the spiders. The mass of them was so dense that the ground looked like it had turned black. Every single part of it was moving, it was as if death itself w
as spreading out across the field. The spiders would get near one of the cows and the animal would roar in pain, a sound that Laurence didn’t think they were capable of making. At times it sounded like it was a human screaming for their lives. The cows would try to get away, but then they would be overwhelmed by the spiders and would fall like a felled tree to the ground. Laurence could feel the meaty thud of them hitting the floor vibrating through the house. Then he saw something that snapped him out of his trance, the spiders were heading right for his garden fence. He bolted from the window, crashing his bare foot into the corner of the bed. He bellowed a curse, loud enough to snap Chloe from her sleep.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she muttered at him in a croaky voice.
“Trouble….we have trouble,” said Laurence and hobbled as fast as he could towards the bedroom door.
“Is it your wife? It better not be your fucking wife…” said Chloe.
Laurence said nothing, he went out of the door and half hopped, half ran down the stairs. He went straight into the kitchen where the back door was. He had left it open slightly the night before, which was the usual thing for him to do. Being drunk made him feel uncomfortably hot and he would sit at the kitchen table with the door open trying to cool himself off. He had no memory of doing it last night, but that wasn’t unusual either. He could hear the noise from outside and it was almost unbearably loud. It was a chorus of clicking noises that Laurence was pretty sure was coming from the spiders. He heard another cow braying its agony as it fell to the spiders. Laurence grabbed the door handle and pulled the door shut with a bang. He jerked the handle up and then locked the door with the key. He went to the window and got hold of the blind, ready to pull it down so that the spiders couldn’t see in. His hand paused on the blind as he saw the spiders beginning to scale the fence at the bottom of the garden. They spilled over the top, most of them falling to the grass. Some of them broke open and a combination of yellowing pus and blood began to ooze out of their broken bodies. Many of them survived the fall, righted themselves and began to make their way towards the house. Laurence tore the blind downwards and obscured the view into the kitchen. He ran, breathing hard, to the front door, which he also locked and bolted. He went into the living room and pulled the curtains closed. He stopped for a moment so he could try and get his wind back. It was bad enough expending this much energy when he was straight, but he had spent the previous evening drinking and fucking like a trooper. He was getting too old for this shit, he had no doubts about that. There was a loud and piercing scream from upstairs and he realized that Chloe had probably had a look out of the window to see what the noise was all about. He bolted out of the room and back up the stairs to shut her up before she led the spiders right to them. When he got into the bedroom, Chloe was stood at the window with both her hands on her cheeks. She was still screaming and trying to say something but it would only come out as a jumbled, shrieking mess. He bounded across the room and clapped a hand over her mouth to try and stifle the screams.
Dawn of the Spiders: Special Edition Page 5