Violet Eyes (25 page)

He backed away from the web and waited until a door opened; Terry and his mom got out of the truck. “Mom!” he screamed. “Mom, I’m over here!”

In seconds Terry and his mom had run across the street and stood on the other side of the web from him. Even with all the yelling matches she and his dad had gone through, before the divorce, Eric didn’t think he’d ever seen his mother so upset.

“What are you doing over there!” his mom screamed. She was crying and happy and angry all at once. Her voice cracked as she said, “I told you to stay in the house.”

“I know,” Eric said. “But I found Feral.”

“Hang on,” Terry said. “Don’t get near the web, either of you.”

He ran back to the truck as Rachel raged. “I am sooo angry with you! I thought I could trust you. I
need
to be able to trust you!” And then it dawned on her what Eric had said.

“Is Feral okay?”

“No,” Eric said. “He and Billy…” He couldn’t say it. “They’re both in the house. And there are like…a million spiders and flies in there.”

Terry came back brandishing a leaf rake.

“Stand back,” he warned. “Eric, as soon as I’ve pulled the web, I want you to run to your mother.”

He raised the rake, and brought it down, yelling as he did. The spiders had already run down and across the grass, and were crawling up his shoes and legs, biting wherever they could find purchase.

The web went down with a flash of pale silk, spiders raining from it to the ground. They scurried across the grass to attack Eric, Terry and Rachel.

“Run!” Terry demanded, and the three of them dashed for the street. Eric felt them biting him, but he didn’t slow down until they were on his own lawn. And then he felt heavy hands slapping him, and heard Terry’s voice demanding, “Drop and roll, drop and roll!”

Eric fell to the lawn, not understanding. But everything seemed to be getting a little fuzzy all of a sudden. He closed his eyes, and a minute later he felt hands picking up him. He heard his mother’s voice, and Terry’s, but he couldn’t seem to open his eyes.

“…welts all over him…”

“…bathtub…lukewarm water…”

“…Benadryl…”

The water made his eyes open. His mom had her arm around his head, and Terry knelt beside her. “How you doin’, buddy?” Terry said as Eric struggled to focus.

He blinked a couple of times, and then looked up at his mom. “They killed Feral,” he said. “They ate him.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said, stroking his hair.

Eric closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he was dressed in his pajamas and sitting on his bed.

“How do you feel, kiddo?” Terry was holding his eyelid open, and staring at him funny.

“Tired,” Eric said. “What are you doing?”

“I gave you some anti-venom serum,” Terry said. “Just a little. We’ve helped a few people who were bit by these things and the venom isn’t that bad. It’s really just a tranquilizer. I think if you can just get up and walk around for a few minutes, you’re going to feel a lot better.”

They walked Eric up and down the hallway and through the front room. And as they did, he slowly felt some of the cobwebs leaving his head. Eventually, they put his sandals on, and walked out into the night.

“Just keep walking,” Terry encouraged, and together, the three of them walked up and down the sidewalk of their block until Eric complained, “My feet hurt!”

“One more round,” Terry insisted. “I want to make sure you work all of that out of your system. It’s either that, or a trip to the hospital.”

They walked from one pale cone of streetlamp light to the next, and Eric could hardly even focus on what was around them. It was like…fuzzy black night interrupted by fuzzy orange street light. His legs were aching, and he complained. But his mom sided with Terry.

“That’ll teach you not to listen to your mother,” she said.

When they finally went back into the house, Eric was all sweaty, but he was also fully alert again. He flopped onto the couch and his mom turned on a cartoon channel.

“I think you should stay awake for a while,” Terry said. “Work all of the poison out of your system before you sleep.”

They gave him a glass of lemonade, which he downed in three long gulps.

“Whatever possessed you to go back over to Billy’s house?” his mom asked.

“Because I knew Feral was in there,” he said.

“Do you know how dangerous that was?”

“I do now.”

Terry stifled a laugh, and then forced himself to look more stern. “You seriously can’t do stuff like that, Eric,” he said. “I know you wanted to find Feral, but…you could have been killed in there. Not to mention the fact that you were breaking and entering. If the bugs didn’t get you, the police could have.”

Eric shrugged. “I had to find him.”

As he said it, a tear slid down his cheek. “And I did.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Monday, May 20. 5:20 p.m.

The flies were everywhere. Susan pulled up in front of her building after work, but didn’t get out of the car. She had a bad feeling about…everything. She had not felt right since she’d left Windsor on Friday night.

Susan thought of everything she’d planned for the night—fixing a stir fry, running through a workout tape, finishing the closet cleaning she’d started yesterday—and then took her hand off the door handle. Instead, she started the car back up, and drove to the corner of Main and
Third.

To the Windsor.

She had to know how everyone was. She needed to know what was going on there.

Spiders darted around her feet as she walked up the sidewalk. Susan hated spiders, but she simply stomped at them, and kept going. She could barely take her eyes off the building that she knew almost as well as her home. She finally stopped before reaching the door…because she couldn’t reach the front door.

The front entryway was completely cloaked in spider webs. “What the hell,” she whispered. She started to blow a bubble, but as the pink gum expanded beyond her nose, she suddenly saw a brace of legs land on the top of the bubble. The black forelegs of the spider reached towards her face, and the creepy purple glow of the arachnid’s eyes met her own for a split second before Susan spit with all her might.

The gum, and the spider, landed on the lawn.

“Ewwww!” Susan cried out, and shook away an involuntary shiver. She looked at the wall of white cottony thread in front of her, and steeled herself. She may have been a girly girl in some ways, but she’d also grown up with two brothers. She could handle spiders.

Susan closed her eyes for a second, and in her mind, counted down “Three, two, one…go!”

She plowed through the web and reached the double-door entryway. Without pause, she grabbed the door handle, yanked it open and threw herself inside.

In the foyer, she quickly rubbed the web off her clothes, slapping at a couple of spiders that had come with it. She rubbed her hands together, balling up the sticky threads and then flicking them to the floor. When she’d managed to get most of the spider web off her, she finally straightened up and looked around.

The foyer was mostly dark. The only light came from the head nurse’s station, but just like Friday, the nurse was nowhere to be seen.

In fact, nobody was to be seen.

She could hear a noise coming from down the hall, and she had taken several steps towards it before she realized that the sound was someone crying.

That was the only thing she could hear.

Susan walked slowly down the long hall, passing a series of closed doors. Room 104. 106. 108.

Finally she reached one that she was very familiar with. Room 122. She raised her hand and knocked just below the gold numbers.

“Mrs. M?” she called out. She stopped knocking and listened. Then she called again.

Something moved inside. A thud. Then quiet.

“Mrs. M?” she called again, and tried the doorknob. It opened easily—people were not allowed to lock their rooms here, in case there was an emergency.

The smell hit her first. She couldn’t see in the room, and her hand felt for the switch. The room smelled as if it had been closed up for a long time, and something bitter and grassy had been shut up inside. “Mrs. M?” she called again, just as her fingers found the switch.

Something crashed as the light flashed on. 

A voice croaked “no” or “go” as then the scene hit her.

The corner of the room near Mrs. M’s bed was a solid, thick gray cloud of spider webs…and in the middle of it,
wrapped up
in it, hung Mrs. M.

The woman had always been frail, but now she looked skeletal. Her thin wrinkled hands were buried in web, and her middle was nearly cocooned by it.

A small table next to the bed was upended; the source of the crash. Mrs. M. was still alive. Susan could see her shaking her head from side to side. Her one semi-free leg kicked and twitched next to the bed. She must have kicked the table over when she heard Susan’s voice.

“No.” Mrs. M. croaked.

Spiders ran across her face.

“Oh my God,” Susan cried, and rushed forward. She grabbed Mrs. M. around the right wrist and pulled the woman forward, but she didn’t come free of the web. The gray threads stretched, but Mrs. M. did not come free. Instead, a sudden swell of hundreds of small black legs suddenly appeared. They streamed down the web and leaped onto Susan’s arm. She suddenly felt pinpricks of fire up and down her fingers, wrist and arm.

Mrs. M. looked at her and shook her head. A mewling cry rose in the old woman’s throat.

“Go,” she hissed.

This time Susan was sure of what the old woman said.

She backed away from the web, swatting the biting spiders from her arm. She felt feelers on her neck, and then a bite on her cheek. She slapped it and backed away farther. The room was alive with spiders. They were descending the web from the ceiling and pooling on the floor.

“Good God,” Susan said, trying to stand her ground. But then Mrs. M. opened her mouth, and hissed a line from
The Hunger Games
. “Save yourself. May the odds be with you…” She tried to say something else, but it dissolved into choking. And then her lips were full of black as spiders suddenly spewed in a wave from her throat.

Her body heaved and convulsed in the web, and Susan’s eyes grew wider. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Mrs. M. was suspended in a gigantic spider web…puking spiders.

Susan turned and ran.

As she passed the common lounge, she saw that several of the old people were sitting there, quiet on the couch and in the rocking chair. They sat in the half-dark, their bodies covered in white threads and black darting shapes.

There would not be any Krystal’s and Scary Story Time this Friday, Susan thought. The scary story was here, now.

As she ran through the front door and threw herself through the spider webs outside, Susan finally began to scream. And she didn’t stop until she had pulled up on the street in front of her building again.

When she stepped out of the car, she was trembling all over. Her arms were shaking like it was twenty degrees out. She couldn’t stop it. She kept seeing spiders falling from Mrs. M’s mouth.

“Pull it together, girl,” Susan said. Her teeth chattered as she said it.

She walked a few steps across the parkway, and stopped, looking at her apartment. The only light on was the porch. It went on automatically every night. But the
third and
fourth floors were dark. Her neighbors were always home by now.

Her knees shook. Susan suddenly felt weak. The bites on her arm were swelling. Burning. She itched them, which only made it worse. It occurred to her that the shaking might be from the bites. Poison.

“Oh crap,” she whispered.

All she wanted to do was sit down. Close her eyes. Rest…

Susan shrugged the feeling away and instead walked towards the side of her building. There was something odd there. She stepped across the grass and saw the white-gray cloud of web that extended up from the bushes on the side all the way to the roof
. Shit.

What she didn’t see was the army of spiders that ran through the grass, directly towards the beacon of heat that was stepping conveniently right into their territory.

“Not here too,” Susan breathed. Her eyes fluttered momentarily, and she turned, intending to walk away from the gigantic web.

That’s when she felt the tiny burn on the top of her foot. And then the pinch on her ankle.

The spiders attacked.

Chapter Forty

Monday, May 20. 8:43 p.m.

Peter Skiles had thought that his engagement with Sheila Key was done. He had ordered the extermination of everything on the island, and he’d seen the planes cover the Key with airborne death not very many minutes later. He’d gone home, filed the paperwork, and handled a handful of much smaller, yet still secret, situations since.

Some jobs were never done.

The call came in just as he was thinking that the week was going to start quietly.

Nothing ever goes as planned
, he thought, hearing an old Styx song in his mind. But he didn’t sing the song to the Special Ops Commander on the other end of the red phone when he picked it up. That would simply never happen. Commander Roger Stalvert was not a chatty, or particularly friendly, kind of guy. Generally when Stavert called, Skiles didn’t say anything. He only listened. Closely.

This time around, Stalvert didn’t need to say much for Skiles to get the gist. The last big job he’d been a part of turned out to not be done. Not by a long shot. Apparently I.I. hadn’t communicated to the government the potential danger of allowing that one college kid to return home. Once his story was out of the news, they’d forgotten about him and focused on sterilizing the island. That, apparently, had been a very costly mistake.

“There’s been a mainland outbreak related to the investigations on Sheila Key,” Stalvert explained. “I need you to go to the Innovative Industries complex and get a full appreciation for what they did for us on Sheila Key. The project files have been reopened here, but I think you’ll move faster if you connect with the source, and don’t rely on reports. When you’ve gotten what you can from I.I., then I need you to call in whatever you need and get this taken care of. I’ve already called for a containment barrier to be put in place. We should have a twenty-five-mile full perimeter sealed by 10 p.m. tonight.”