Violet Eyes (32 page)

Terry spoke softly. “We can make it to your car if we’re quick. They’ll be alerted by sound and motion.”

“I’m not leaving my truck,” Anders began.

Terry shook his head. “If you try to break through that web, you’ll be bit a dozen times before you know it. We’ll use the car to break through. If you want to get out once we reach the street, that’s your call.”

Anders let it drop. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Go!” Terry said, and they all piled through the door, each carrying a suitcase or a box of food from the kitchen. Essentials.

Rachel popped the trunk and threw her case in before walking to the driver’s door. She grabbed the handle of the door but then jerked her hand back as if scalded. It came back sticky with web. Terry reached around her arm and yanked the door open. “No time,” he cautioned, and pushed her inside.

Eric had already hopped in and slid across the backseat. Anders followed him in and slammed the door.

Terry ran around the other side and opened the passenger door.

“Hurry,” Rachel called. She could see the web at the front of the carport quickly turning dark. The spiders were alerted to their exit. The ground was already moving just a few feet from the car. A swarm of black legs in motion.

The door slammed, and Terry was inside. Rachel started the engine, and put the car in reverse. The car plowed easily through the web, but now her back window was obscured by a cloud. And thousands of black legs shifted and moved in the middle of it all.

As they backed away from the house, Anders let out a gasp.

“Holy shit,” he said.

“Whoa,” Eric said.

As they pulled back, they all saw that the house was almost completely obscured by spider web. But it wasn’t just their house. It looked to be the entire block.

“It’s like they’ve captured our house!” Rachel said.

“It was only a matter of time before they got inside, to get to the prize,” Terry said.

“Us,” Eric breathed.

“Oh no, we’ll be safe in here,” Anders said with a drawl.

Rachel and Terry ignored the dig. She pulled out of the driveway and turned into the street.

“Stop!” Anders demanded. “We’re not leaving my truck.”

“We’re in this one together,” Rachel said. “And I don’t think you’d want to try to get in your truck anyway.” She pulled up next to the vehicle, which had its own cocoon forming around it. The street itself seemed alive. The spiders were a wave of black legs, running from grass to asphalt and back to grass again. They shifted back and forth, spinning thicker webs. The crunch of their bodies beneath the tires was audible inside the cab as she pulled away. Anders didn’t demand to be let out at his truck, when he saw the number of spiders running up and down its driver’s side door.

Rachel drove slowly through the neighborhood, looking at the homes that had been captured by the spiders. Passanattee looked as if it had snowed overnight. And it
never
snowed here. Ever.

“Mom?” Eric asked, as they passed Tracie Wilkins’ house. “Do you think anyone is still alive inside these houses?”

“Maybe,” she said. She wasn’t about to tell him that his friend was probably lying inside, being eaten by spiders. “We were.”

She turned onto Main and drove slowly through the center of town. It was still early, but the road seemed strangely empty.

Empty except for the spiders. They were everywhere. And it was quickly apparent that it wasn’t just Rachel and Eric’s neighborhood that had been overrun, seemingly overnight. The webs were everywhere, obscuring buildings, covering automobiles, stretching from trees across the road. Rachel drove through it, and used her windshield wipers to clear them away from her view. Black legs skittered ahead and behind the wipers like angry rain.

“Where did they all come from?” Eric whispered.

“I’d say from there, and there…and there.” Terry pointed at three silk-wreathed forms lying on the sidewalks of the downtown. It was clear that the web surrounded people. Or rather, corpses.

“I don’t think the spiders came from people,” Anders snorted.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Terry said. “These spiders are some kind of new parasite. I don’t think they’re really spiders at all, but some kind of mutation. We were talking about it a couple days ago, after we found the first animals dead by the Everglades. I think they actually hatch inside the body and gestate there until they’re fully mature. Then they eat their way out of the bodies to hunt for other food. We found some animals near the edge of the ’glades that had these things streaming out of them. And it was clear that some of them were just tiny babies. They hadn’t shown up to feed…they were born there.”

“Gross,” Eric said.

“I can’t say exactly where they came from,” Terry added. “But some of the ones running around this street probably
did
come from those poor people.”

“That is fucked up,” Anders said.

“Language!” Rachel warned. “I’m trying to teach Eric not to swear, I don’t need you to show him a bad example.”

“I think he can handle it,” Anders said. “This is kind of an unusual situation right now. And it is absolutely—let me be blunt here—fucked up.”

They passed through the center of town and were moving back into a residential area when Eric suddenly said, “Mom, stop the car!”

She hit the brakes. “What’s wrong?”

“Look at them!”

Eric pointed out the front window to the street ahead. “They’re not moving.”

It was true. The street was still covered in the bodies of spiders, but the movement of the carpet of legs had stopped. Here and there a spider crept one way or the other, negotiating around the still forms. But mostly, the spiders were frozen. It was as if their batteries had all run down, and they’d stopped in place.

Rachel took her foot off the brake and let the car roll forward. One block went by, and then another. The spiders were legion. And eerily…still. She pulled up along the curb, and put the car in park.

“What are you doing?” Anders asked.

“Susan lives here,” Rachel explained. “I want to see if she’s okay.”

“We really shouldn’t go out there,” Terry suggested.

“They’re dead,” Rachel said. “Something has happened. Maybe the Public Works department got off their asses and sprayed some pesticide.”

“We tried spraying them,” Terry countered. “RAID didn’t even slow them down.”

Rachel shrugged. “You guys can wait here, but I just want to check on her.”

She opened the door and started to step out onto the parkway.

“I’m coming with,” Anders and Terry both said at the same time. As soon as the words were out, they glared at each other over the seat.

“C’mon,” Terry said to Eric. “We’re sticking together.”

They all followed Rachel, four doors slamming almost in unison. She walked quickly up the sidewalk to Susan’s place, a small four-story apartment with brown brick and faint green siding. Spider bodies crunched like popcorn beneath their shoes as they walked.

Rachel rang the doorbell, and waited. She turned away from the door, looking at the other three. They were watching her, and stealing glances side-to-side at the horde of still bugs all around. Nervous.

If the things all suddenly came alive, they would be overcome before they could scream. But Rachel didn’t think there was anything to worry about. When you stopped and really looked at them, most of the spider bodies nearby were now nothing but shells. They were paler than their moving brethren. Pale because you could actually see through them. They were like locust shells—whatever had been inside them had moved on, leaving behind the skins.

Nobody answered the door.

“Maybe she’s not home,” Terry offered.

Rachel shook her head and pointed to the blue Mazda parked on the street.

“That’s her car.”

Rachel tried the door knob of the big wooden door, but not surprisingly, it was locked. She knocked a few times and then stood back to wait again.

“Mom, look over there.” Eric was pointing to the side of the building. He stepped off the stoop and began to cross the yard.

“Eric, don’t go over there!” Rachel pushed past Anders and followed her son, grabbing him by the arm just as they reached the object of his curiosity. A body. And like the ones they’d seen in town, it was covered in spider web. Terry and Anders appeared a second later. They separated naturally, one taking up position on the opposite side of her than the other.

“Oh Jesus,” Rachel breathed, and forced Eric’s face to her belly, forbidding him from looking.

Susan lay on the ground on her back. A million strands of silk tied her body to the grass, and partially obscured some of her clothes. Spiders had spun their silk across her face too, but not enough to obscure the damage that they had done.

Susan’s eyes were gone.

In their place, were two dark red tunnels into her skull. Rachel could see the glimmer of white deep inside her friend’s braincase that might have been the edge of one of her eyeballs. But she wasn’t going to step closer to find out.

As she struggled to stifle the tears that demanded to come, she saw the legs of a black spider curl up over the edge of one of Susan’s empty eye sockets, and pull itself out to stand on the base of her nose. Another followed.

“That’s fucked up,” Anders said.

Rachel shook her head, willing the image away. She hugged Eric close and stopped herself from seeing the ravaged body of her friend…

“Hey, you people!”

Rachel, Anders, Terry and Eric turned as one to see who’d called out. The voice came from across the street. There was a woman standing on the front porch of one of the houses there. As they watched, the woman used the handle of a broom to break a hole in the webbing that partially obscured her from their view.

“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.