ARACHNOEXTINCTION

I was able to tear my gaze from the unwavering, dead eyes and onto the door. Sloppily written in blood across the door was ”SPIDERS IN HERE DO NOT ENTER” with the end of the R smeared to the floor. I felt bad for considering the writing sloppy. If I was being forced to write a warning in my own blood, I was not so sure my penmanship would be all that fantastic.

“He was probably attacked from behind as he wrote this,” I said. “Never had a chance.”

“It was written in blood. I think he knew he was already dead,” said Darren as he examined the body, trying to find a way to move it.

“So what do we do now? We think there’s, at best, one spider-thing wandering around up here, that is probably pretty pissed,” Karen said.

“Probably pretty pissed,” I said to Dr. Kale under my breath.

“Oh, the fun of alliteration,” he said.

“--but,” Karen continued with an angry throat clear, “this guy was pretty certain there were some of those things in the stairwell too.”

“What do you think?” I asked Justin.

“What choice do we have?” he said with a shrug.

“We can’t just sit up here; we have to move, and the stairs are the only way,” I said. “We need guns and electricity, or we won’t live long enough for help to arrive.”

The sound of a soft tap bounced around the hall.

The sound muted the group. It was a tapping we all recognized.

“We need to get into the door now,” I whispered to Darren. He nodded and began hacking at the webs with a small knife he pulled from his pocket.

The tapping grew louder and closer.

I closed my eyes. Oh dear God let it be anything except--a vicious hiss came from behind me--that.

I turned around to see two of the spiders standing in the hallway, their soulless, red eyes burning into us.

Before I could scream, they ran at us. So then I screamed. One of the spiders ran along the ceiling and one came toward us on the floor. My eardrums exploded as Darren and Justin began firing shots at the spiders, but they avoided the bullets with ease. Jumping from the floor to the wall, then to the ceiling with grace at incomprehensible speed, not a single one of the bullets found their target. The bullets hit the walls of the hallway and kept moving harmlessly down the hallway.

“Reloading!” Darren called out, and Justin went to fire more shots at the rapidly--approaching spiders. His gun cliked when he pulled the trigger and nothing came out.

“Shit, me too,” he said and popped the clip out of his gun.

One spider pushed off the ground and sped through the air toward the group.

Justin jumped back to get out of the aim of the spider while trying to reload. He backed into Darren and knocked the clip Darren was trying to put in his gun to the ground out of their reach. I hit the ground and covered my head. The spiders leaped over my head and into the middle of the group, landing on one of the men.

His screams stopped as fast as they started; the spider’s pincers and fangs tore into his throat; he was dead within seconds of the spider landing on him. The second spider had stopped moving, and a green liquid was forming at its mouth. I followed its eyes and saw it was glaring at Karen, who was too horrified at watching her friend being ripped apart to notice she had become a target.

This is stupid. This is so so stupid! I told to myself as I pushed myself up and ran at her. I jumped and tackled her to the ground right as a green glob flew through where she was a second ago. The spider let out an annoyed hiss as the glob landed on the human body tied in the web. The web, along with whayever skin was left on the body, began to sizzle and melted away as soon as the glob made contact; the glass wall was left unaffected by whatever the spider shot.

“Holy balls. Okay, note to self. Do not touch the green stuff,” I said from the ground next to Karen and through my attempts at gasping for air. Karen nodded her agreement in silence, looking too sick to talk.

Justin had wrestled the spider off of the man it had killed and was trying to avoid its pincers as they rolled on the ground. The spider was too strong for Justin; using its eight legs, it was able to flip him around and pin him beneath it. Its pincers made a terrible grinding noise as it moved in for the kill.

Darren, with an eerie calm, slapped a clip into his gun, walked up to the spider, put the gun against the side of its head, and fired. The spider let out a screech and dropped to the floor, still on top of Justin. Darren continued moving forward with a calm face and a smooth, controlled motion. He pulled his knife back out and began to cut through the back of the creature. It wasn’t going to fake its death this time.

From the floor, Justin slid his gun across the floor at me; I caught it and looked at him.

“Nine shots. Squeeze, don’t pull,” he said.

I rose up on my knees and turned to face the second spider; it had closed the gap between us, and was almost on me. I raised the gun, resisted to urge to close my eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

The force of the gun going off almost made it jump from my hand; I was able to grip it enough to hold on. The bullet struck the body of the spider, it jerked to the side and stumbled, but kept it’s balanced and was still moving forward.

Eight shots, I thought to myself.

It let out a fingernail-on-chalkboard--like screech as green goo began to squirt from the wound. The sound caught me off guard, and I fired five consecutive shots that ricocheted off the floor and walls harmlessly away from us and the spider. The spider did not even make an attempt to avoid the bullets, my shots were that off. The screech of the spider intensified as it picked up speed, coming toward me. The shierk sent chills down my back and I started to shake and brought the gun up to fire once more. I still struggled to control the gun and another shot went blazing past the spider.

Three shots, I think. Or was it two? Either way, I was going to pull the trigger until the bullets stop coming. All or nothing.

The spider was within a dozen feet or so of my at this point. I wanted to shut my eyes and fire wildly.

The screech of the spider was well past the point of unbareable. It was like I shoved my head into a tornado siren. I grimaced and ignored the sound the best I could. I steadied then aimed gun once more.

Despite my body wanting to cower and panic, I took a calming breath. I tried to not imagine what would happen if I missed these next too few shots.

This time, I was prepared for the recoil. I braced myself and tightened the grip I had on the gun. With a quick breath in and then out, I shot. The bullet flew through the air. Time seemed to slow as I watched the bullet enter the mouth of the screeching spider, the back of its head exploded as the bullet went through. A mixture of green and red sprayed the ceiling and floor behind it. The spiders legs stopped moving, and it rolled to a stop a few inches in front of me. The gun clicked empty over and over as I kept pulling the trigger and stared at the spider with wide-eyes. My breathing was heavy as if I just ran several miles.

It seemed unreal. This thing shouldn’t have exsited. It especially shouldn’t have been so close to me. Nell would get a major kick out of what transpired. Giant spiders chasing me and me killing one with a gun, no more screaming for help from the shower jokes.

I stared at the body of the spider as it lay, unmoving, unaware my body was shaking. It was a disgusting creature. The body was a huge death-black bubble. The spider looked like a black VW bug with a small head and eight legs. I was so horrified and disgusted that I almost didn’t notice when someone’s arms wrapped around me. I clenched up and started to panic, and then I realized someone was hugging me.

I looked over to see Karen, with her face buried in my shoulder. A mixture of a fruity perfume and the smell of my fear wafted over me. She smelt nice which seemed weird in such dire circumstances, meanwhile I just hoped I didn’t wet myself.

“Thank you,” came her muffled voice. She looked over at what was left of the skelton; most of it had dissolved into the green goo. “That would have been me.”

“Oh, anytime. Also, let’s just hope never again,” I said and saw Darren close the eyes of the most recent victim of the spiders. “I had hoped no one else had to die.”

“It would have been more if it wasn’t for you,” Justin said as he walked up and clapped me on the back. “Good shooting. Well one good shot, the rest were just plain awful.”

“I got lucky, I suppose,” I said and stood up to hand him the gun back.

“Well, I’m glad you got lucky with my sister,” he said.

We all looked at each other; Karen opened her mouth to say something but closed it.

“You know what I mean,” he said and rolled his eyes.

He reloaded his gun then put it back in my hand.

“This is my favorite gun. I want you to hold on to it now. You deserve it,” Justin said.

“Oh, thank you,” I said, unsure of how to hold it since I wasn’t in immediate danger. “Hopefully, I won’t need to use it again.”

“I wish that were the case, but I felt like that’s not going to happen. Just don’t break it,” Justin said as he pulled a second firearm from his waistband and walked back to Darren.

“You can break these things?” I asked Karen.

She just laughed, gave me another hug, and then went to join her brother. I looked at the dead spider, squinting and looking for any sign of movement.

“Spiders that are spitting flesh dissolving venom...as if they didn’t have enough weapons at their disposal,” Dr. Kale said, shaking his head as he examined the green goo the spider spit out.

“You better stay dead,” I said to the spider I killed and left to join the rest of the group.

I stumbled over the other dead spider as I tried to squeeze past it. Dr. Kale caught me before I hit the ground.

“I hate these stupid, eight-legged dicks!” I said as I recovered.

“That’s quite an image,” Dr. Kale said with a sad smile.

“So how many are left?” I asked. “Does this get it to twelve? Eleven? What?”

“I have no idea. We thought two had been killed, but as far as we know, neither were really dead. I think it’s safe to say these are, though. I mean, you blew one’s head off, and Darren pulled all the innards out of the other. So we better assume twelve for now,” he said.

“At least they were nice enough to clear the door for us,” I said.

“Yeah, we’ll send them a card,” Justin called out. “You guys catch your breath and calm your nerves; we go through the door in two minutes.”

“So what happens if the spiders got out of the building?” I asked Dr. Kale.

“Well, unless someone takes them off the island, they’ll be stuck here unless, somehow, they are incredible swimmers. They would be reproducing until there’s too many of them and not enough food. Then they’ll kill each other and die out, like a mini--repeat of their existence thousands of years ago,” Dr. Kale said.

“In theory, how horrible would it be if they got off the island and made it back home?” I asked. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but I was curious.

“It would come down to if we can kill them before they reproduce too much for us to stop. Chances are, we won’t notice them in time before their numbers became too large to stop. They would find a cave or some dark, secluded place where people would not venture too often. They would build a nest and lay low, building up their numbers and killing the wildlife that lived or wandered into the area. They would begin to branch out, slowly at first, then more rapidly as their numbers explode into an unstoppable amount.”

“So they would wipe us out? Human race all gone?” I asked trying to imagine how long that would take the spiders and if any part of the world would remain safe from their aggression.

“More than humanity, probably most forms of life. A mass species extermination,” he said. I could not tell if he was depressed or excited by this. There was something so off about Dr. Kale; I thought a small part of him was enjoying what was happening to us.

“Extinction due to spiders...,” I said.

Dr. Kale cleared his voice and declared, “Arachnoextinction.”

“What?” I asked him.

“Sorry, I don’t know why I said that. It was just…it was fun to say.”

“Alright, we’re moving out!” Justin said.