by Howard, Bob
It all seemed to happen in slow motion, and later as they answered the questions on the computer screen, they had to ask each other about that day to see if they were remembering everything correctly. They weren’t sure if there had been noise at first, but as they were coerced into remembering what they had wanted to forget forever, they remembered that it had sounded like a college football game crowd that had erupted into one long, loud, and sustained cheer. But it was screaming and crying.
When Phillip and Denise turned back from the melee in the distance, it was to tell the elderly couple that they should hurry to the police station only two blocks away. They turned in time to see them disappearing in another tidal wave of people that was flowing toward the municipal center. The elderly couple was practically carried by the wave in that direction. A hand grabbed Phillip’s arm, and he yanked himself away out of reflex. The hand was covered in reddish and yellow grime that looked like it had just been inside a freshly killed chicken, and as soon as Phillip broke free, the hand reached for Denise.
Denise screamed for Phillip to get the man off her, but he had already grabbed the man by the hair on the back of his head. It seemed like the right place to grab him, and it proved to be very effective to not only pull him off of Denise but to redirect him away from both of them. Phillip steered the man to the right until he was pointed directly at an ornate wrought iron fence. When he shoved from the back of the man’s head, he was only trying to push him hard enough to make him fall, but Phillip was shocked to see a metal fence post erupt from the middle of the man’s skull. Phillip’s first impulse was to be upset that he had just killed a man, but that impulse didn’t last more than a second before the crowd washed over him and his wife.
It was their turn to be swept away by the people who were running for their lives, and the one place everyone wanted to be was the police station. They were in a sea of people, and their heads seemed to be bobbing, rising above and sinking below the surface. Phillip managed to catch the outstretched hand of his wife barely in time as he was almost pushed off his feet. Falling down in the stampede would mean death under the feet of what was now a crowd of thousands. Someone else grabbed his other arm, and he pulled hard to free himself of the grip out of reflex. He found himself face to face with a teenage girl as he reeled her in close to him. Her pleading eyes locked onto his, and she begged desperately for him to help her. Phillip gripped more tightly to his wife while pulling hard on the unknown girl’s arm. He somehow managed to draw them closer together until his wife was able to help by catching her fingers in the material of the girl’s shirt. Holding tightly to each other, they just focused on keeping their feet under them and went with the flow of the crowd.
As if the entire event wasn’t already unreal, a new sound blended in with the screams and shouts. Up ahead where the sea of people was already cresting against the municipal center there was a popping noise. Phillip had the insane thought that someone was making popcorn, but he immediately replaced it with another insane thought. Someone was shooting into the crowd, and in the split second when he realized he knew that sound, the teenage girl released her hold on him and Denise. They held onto her as long as they could, but they reluctantly let go when they saw her hair was matted with blood. Almost as if they had the same thought, Phillip and Denise immediately shifted their hands from the girl to each other. They held their bodies as close to each other as they could and ducked their heads lower. The popping sound became a steady rattle.
They could see no rhyme or reason to the shooting because there were so many people who were attacking rather than escaping, but the shooters were doing the best they could to tell them apart. Somehow the Corrigans found themselves at the front of the crowd, and they were pulled as much as they were pushed through a line of blue uniforms. They didn’t stop to watch as they scrambled to safety along with dozens of people into the depths of the building. The sound of the battle was behind them, and then there were more doors closing behind them. They weren’t sure how far they went, but eventually the only sounds were coming from the people who had come inside with them and a police escort.
The Corrigans were surprised to see how much time had passed since they had started answering questions and typed into the computer that they would like to take a break. There was no response to the question, but a new window opened on the screen that had the same appearance as the previous questions. The only difference was that every question was related to where they had been since the first day, and how had they had survived. Phillip typed that they weren’t going to answer any more questions until someone answered something for them.
There was a longer pause that stretched out enough for Phillip to decide that he wasn’t going to get any answers if he kept filling in the boxes below the questions they had for him. He sat back from the computer and crossed his arms. Fifteen minutes later a text box appeared with the question above it, “State your inquiry.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Phillip typed three words.
“Who is Ed?”
CHAPTER THREE
Spider Web
North of Charleston
Six Years After the Decline
Jed Ambrose noticed the difference before his friends at the colony. The spiders were changing, but when he thought about it, why shouldn’t they? Everything else had changed. What he noticed was the way the meanest spiders didn’t seem to be hiding. Some of the people in their camp didn’t agree, but most of his friends said if someone who grew up in the country thought the spiders were different, you could believe they were different.
He and his friends had survived for six years by moving constantly, but they never let themselves get too far from the territory they knew the best. There was plenty of room to move in the forests, and they quite often found themselves to be right back where they had been the year before.
The northern banks of Lake Marion was where most of them had been raised, and from the beginning they used their knowledge of the lake and the dense trees to at least outlast the dead that seemed to have an endless supply of replacements.
Spiders weren’t exactly new to South Carolina, and if you learned where they liked to live, you could avoid them. Growing up in Cross, South Carolina, Jed had seen his share of brown recluse and black widow spiders, and it was their predictable habits that spared him the scars and fevers from their bites. One predictable thing about them was that they had always hidden from people.
As an African American child from the country, Jed loved the isolation of his small community. His parents had taken him to Charleston a few times, but he preferred the woods around Lake Moultrie. If weather permitted, he would be fishing on the Tailrace Canal at the headwaters of the Cooper River every day after school, and of course he was there all weekend. He loved catfish the best, but whether he knew it or not, he was becoming educated in the ways of outdoor survival at a young age. While he caught food necessary to live, he avoided the habitats of the spiders, snakes, and alligators.
He recalled passing by a campsite on the way to the Pinopolis dam at Lake Moultrie and seeing a young family at a picnic table. They were cooking on a charcoal grill and had set up a beautiful table of food that would be tempting to any kid with a healthy appetite. The family had mistaken his interest in the table as wanting some food, and they asked him if he wanted to join them. He almost forgot why he had stopped and stared at them, and he was ready to accept the invitation. At the last moment when they moved aside to give him room at the table, he remembered what it was he had stopped for.
“Did y’all check under the table for spiders before you used that table? Them poisonous ones like it under there.”
There was a mad scramble as the three children and the mother literally fell off the benches backwards. The husband rushed to lift them out of the dirt and to inspect them for spiders. He stood them up and brushed at their clothing as if spiders would fall out. The mother was on her feet screaming and stamping as hard as she could
.
While they carried on, Jed moved into position with a long tree branch. He reached under the table with the tip and circled it around the wooden boards. He pulled it back out covered with a big mess of spider webs and a long legged spider angrily attacking the branch.
“Brown recluse,” he said with satisfaction and a big smile.
He held it out in the direction of the horrified family, and they scattered for a second time.
“My daddy told me that you should always turn a picnic table and benches over and check the bottom for spiders before you sit at it.”
“Are there anymore?” asked the father. His voice was much higher than he wanted it to be.
“Yessir. There’s always some more.”
Jed helped the man turn over the table and benches. It was safe to say they were having more fun when they were ignorant of what they were sitting with, but they were close to making a trip to the emergency room. There were brown recluse spiders under both benches, and their webs were full of newborns. Thousands of baby spiders hung within inches of the children’s bare legs.
Years later Jed found himself standing on the northern side of the big lock gate at the Pinopolis Lock. He wasn’t close enough to see down into the water and would have to go much further to see over the one hundred foot drop, but what he was able to see at the top was something that bothered him tremendously. He knew spiders, and something was making them do something he had never seen before. They were almost agitated, and he wondered if the thing that was causing the ringing in his ears was bothering the spiders too. The ringing had been driving Jed crazy for weeks.
From where he was standing, he could tell it was a spider web, but he didn’t recall ever seeing one that big, not in his entire life. He could also tell it was a brown recluse web by the disorganized way it was spun. It was like a giant, off-white cotton ball that had been pulled apart. He thought about that picnic table from long ago and imagined that if he threw the table into this web, the web was big and thick enough to stop the table from falling through it to the water below.
At the age of forty Jed thought he had seen it all in his small rural town, but then the infected showed up. He had organized the members of his church and set up a small militia that had worked hard to protect their families. They had pulled together as a community and managed to survive without help from the outside. That had worked for the first five years or so, but over time they were forced to go further on each supply run, and they had lost people. Their population only got smaller, and it had become a greater burden on him and a few others to find supplies for the rest of the community.
Now Jed was confronted by this new development and didn’t know what had caused it. Only a week ago he had crossed the dam at this point to reach the other side of the Cooper River. It had been a useful escape route they had all used from time to time. With little more than a narrow walkway and safety railings, it was difficult to cross it if you were afraid of heights.
If you were being pursued by the infected, all you had to do was go out to the walkway and cross the very top of the lock gates. It had been easy to block both ends with rope so that people could climb over, but the infected would crowd around the walkway until they fell over the edge into the water below. Now that walkway was barely visible under the mass of webs. In some places he couldn’t see the walkway at all.
Jed checked the trail behind him to be sure there were no infected today, because his escape path was temporarily closed. The buildings near the top of the dam were the only cover available, but the advantage was that he could see further than if there had been trees. He knew he had to go out to that web to see why spiders had built it out in the open like that, and he didn’t want to get trapped there. The sun was out from behind the clouds, and there was only a slight breeze, but it was way too quiet. Jed knew that the animals in the forest would stay quiet when it wasn’t safe to make a sound, so he strained to hear anything. No moaning and no breaking of branches under the clumsy feet of the dead, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He wished again that his ears didn’t ring so much.
“Sometimes the stupid things just stop and stand still,” he mumbled out loud.
He thought again that he shouldn’t have gone out alone, but it was his turn. He couldn’t make someone go with him just because he was having a bad feeling about it.
Like many people, Jed could recall the unpleasant experience of getting a spider in his hair or somewhere in his clothing. If you were going to live in the south, you were conceding that sooner or later it would happen to you. When he was six he had woken up in the middle of the night to find a large wolf spider taking a shortcut across his pillow. His screams had made him the victim of merciless kidding for several days, and his big brother said he screamed like a little girl. His scalp itched just looking at that messy web. There was debris in it, and even from a distance he could see things moving through it. As he got closer he could make out more details, and it made him sick to see that spiders were adapting to the new world order. There were birds stuck in the web.
Jed couldn’t believe his eyes at first. Birds flew into webs when they stretched between trees, but he had never seen a web stop a bird. Sometimes they had to land and strip themselves of the sticky webs, but they always got away. He imagined that somewhere in the Amazon there were spider webs that trapped birds, but not in Cross, South Carolina.
The brown recluse didn’t try to build webs that would capture prey. They made webs for the sole purpose of retreat. That’s why they were such an ugly mess. If it was a maze through which only they could navigate, then it was a successful web. The difference with this web was that it was just so big that it was hard for things to avoid it.
He followed the safety railing out as far as he could go, but he was boxing himself in. He kept checking the trees behind him, and even though he couldn’t see anything moving, he was sure they were there. They would come for him if they saw him, so he watched and waited for five full minutes before going closer to the web. When he inched closer again, he could see some larger dark shapes further down inside the web. It appeared that birds weren’t the only victims of the spiders. There was an assortment of small forest animals. Possum and raccoons were always rooting around in human habitats, so he wasn’t really surprised to see them wriggling around inside the cloudy mess of sticky silk. It must have been windy since the web was built because it was full of leaves too. He didn’t know what went through the mind of an animal, but he could imagine that was a horrible way to die, especially if you could see the spiders coming for you.
Now he was within a couple of feet from the web. Where it covered the safety railing Jed saw that the aluminum poles were almost invisible because the web was so dense. What he wanted to see was how far down it went.
He was at the top of the lock gates. The lake was seventy-five feet below the level of the river, and the last time it had been operated, the water level inside the lock had been lowered to the height of the river. Apparently, someone was trying to come upriver to the lake, and the gates had not yet been opened. The water level was almost a hundred feet below where Jed stood to peer over the edge. He was sickened by what he saw at the bottom, and he suddenly understood why the web was at the top of the lock. It was also at the bottom and everywhere in between. The web was over one hundred feet deep since it included the railing at the top of the lock.
At the bottom there was a writhing mass of infected, and if he hadn’t seen them yet, he could certainly smell them. There must have been several thousand for them to be able to fill the bottom of the lock so completely, and from what he could tell, the web was fastened to the bodies of the infected. The spiders were already feeding on them at the bottom. It didn’t look like they would be getting to the small animals any time soon.
There was a cracking noise behind him, and he knew without looking that he was in trouble. He turned and backed up at the same time, and as his hip bumped into the railing, he recoiled in panic. He could s
ee dozens of spiders dropping down on silver threads as they tried to get away from his intrusion.
Jed began swatting at his pants, whether there were spiders there or just his imagination, he felt like he had to get them off his body as fast as he could. As he swatted he turned in circles, forgetting completely about the noise he had heard behind him. The infected dead that was reaching for him leaned forward and missed as Jed twisted out of its way, brushing at an imaginary spider. Two more steps forward, and the infected was shoulders deep into the dirty, tangled nightmare that Jed had only brushed against.
Jed was in the process of removing his shirt because he thought he felt a spider go down his collar and crawl to the middle of his back. He had seen the infected go by and kept one eye on its progress while trying to undress and check his surroundings for more infected. He could hear a mewling sound coming from somewhere but didn’t know it was coming from him. He had been amused by the family at the picnic table, but that was a few little webs. This was the one from a movie he had seen, but it was even bigger.
His fears were confirmed when Jed saw a large brown recluse run out of the shirt he had thrown to the ground. He knew he hadn’t been bitten because the bite of a recluse was usually painful. That didn’t make him feel better at the moment. Jed reached up to his head with both hands and ran his fingers through his short hair searching for spiders he was sure were there. Having confirmed he had bumped the web hard enough to get them on him, he was positive he would find more.
The infected dead had waved its arms around in the web and come away with a sizable amount of dirty strands that clung to its face and upper body. The infected didn’t know a web from cotton candy, and it didn’t care that its head and arms were covered with the eight legged creatures that lived in the web. It did care about the living being that was making strange noises as it dodged around pulling off its clothes.