Crawlies
Part 1
By Ira M. Gansler
Michael had
been washing his hands when he spotted the spider. It paused briefly as if taking him in as he
saw it out of the corner of his own eye.
He didn’t think much of it and certainly took no extra time to examine
it. The spider did not seem anything out
of the ordinary or give him cause to pay it much attention. For some reason he could not explain, he did
not feel his usual desire to crush the living creature. Perhaps it was the news that he had received
just that day regarding his wife’s pregnancy.
Maybe that information gave him a newfound respect for life that
extended to the eight-legged arachnid before him. Whatever the reason, Michael acted counter to
his nature and habit and left the insect alone, ignoring the feeling of
revulsion he felt at the sight of it.
Whether or
not there were missed opportunities or mistakes that dwarfed Michael George’s
that day would never be a topic that would be debated, because no one would
ever know of it. Michael, himself, would
go on back to his house to his wife and rejoice in their unborn child. They would celebrate, make love, and fall
asleep in contentment. They would do all of this unaware that Michael had just
sealed the fate of the entire human race, including theirs and their unborn
child. Michael, Melissa, and little
Sylvester would all be dead within two years’ time and their deaths would not
be marked in any way special or out of the ordinary for that period in history,
not that there would be anyone left concerned with recording history. They would succumb to the same fate as billions
of others would over the next four years, all of which could be marked from one
of several possible starting points, one of which was Michael’s almost
unconscious decision to let the “spider” live.
Humanity would never discover if the
spiders had mutated through some fluke of nature, although the search for
answers went on until the primary focus of every last living person would
become one of pure, simple, and primal survival. We would never know if they had possibly come
on some object from space. We would
never get the answers to the speculations that they were created in a lab and,
if they were, if they had been released accidentally or intentionally. Again, none of these things would have helped
humanity in the least, but it is in the nature of people to wonder. However, we will never know. We can never know what might have been.
- - -
The fire had spread quickly and most
of the once proud city was now burning.
The idea had been simple, but ultimately flawed. They would find the city’s main nest and burn
it out with a controlled burn. They
would set up sandbags and build a fire wall that would prevent the spread of
the flames from the front and sides.
Nature, via the river right outside of the large warehouse attached to
the rear of the building, would finish protecting the rest of the surrounding
area from the fire. Once they had
eliminated the nest, along with the breeder, they would then be able to
methodically go through the city and wipe out the rest of the population. Once that was done, they could allow
themselves to think about what might be next.
It had all gone wrong from the start.
Callie had not trusted Ben from the
moment he had joined their group. He
seemed to always be on looking around the group nervously, as if he were sizing
them up. A certain degree of edginess
was to be expected from anyone over the last four years, but Ben seemed to be
constantly twitchy and on edge. It had
been too long since society had collapsed for him to still be going through any
kind of withdrawal, yet that was exactly the impression he gave. He refused to share anything of his past or
even a last name. He was simply
Ben. At first, Callie had almost been
willing to overlook this fact, despite her immediate sense of wrongness about
the man. After all, wasn’t there enough
horror going on around the globe that had created some stories that were best
left untold? As time went on, however,
his refusal seemed less like simply a desire not to talk of some trauma and
more about evasiveness.
Callie had tried to argue against the
plan from the very moment it came out of Ben’s mouth. The problem was that she could voice little
opposition past the fact that it was unlikely to have any long-term results
worth the risk. She couldn’t come out and
say that she didn’t trust the plan simply because it was Ben’s plan. Callie was a pleaser and always had
been. Even the end of the world as she
knew it didn’t change that. If anything,
it seemed to intensify the trait. The
moment she found the group to which she now belonged, she immediately set forth
to prove her usefulness and be accepted.
Having no one to win approval from had left her feeling empty and weak
spirited in a way that civilization’s downfall and the death of her closest
loved ones had failed to do. So, in the
end, she had gone along with the plan.
She would quickly wish that she had not.
But that was the crux of all of the problems they seemed to face
now. One simply could not know the right
choice until the benefits had come to pass or it was too late to do anything
about it. There were too many unknowns.
- - -
Despite all
of the unknowns, several things came to be known very quickly as the “spiders”
began to spread and grow and then spread more.
The first was that they were not spiders in the normal sense of the
word. Their exoskeletons were harder than
any known insect or arachnid previously encountered in nature. Bullets could stop them, but only if aimed
properly so that they hit one of very few areas on the body not covered by the
armored encasing. The heads were much larger proportionally
then a typical spider leading some “experts” to claim that these creatures
actually had three segmented body parts and, therefore, were more like
insects. Their legs had nine segments
instead of seven as a spider’s does. The
joins in the legs could flex in any direction, making them able to quickly move
and change direction. It also provided
them with a tremendous ability to leap over large distances or even straight
into the air. Their jaws seemed to
operate more like a shark then a typical spider, extending out to clamp onto
prey with amazing force, as opposed to the simple side-to-side movement of
normal spiders. However, they did share
some characteristics with spiders.
They had
eight simple eyes. Many of them spun
webs and used these webs to catch their prey.
The few that were able to be caught and studied before things got too
far were discovered to have the same internal organs and muscle structures as a
spider. They hunted in one of the four
primary ways that spiders did. They were
known to use their webs to catch prey or to go hunting for their food. The most terrifying, however, were the ones
that waited in ambush for a passing victim and then sprung with uncanny speed
and ferocity. Those unfortunate enough
to encounter these type seldom survived the encounter.
- - -
From the
moment they came to the building they were certain must be the nest, it all
felt wrong to Callie. Dusk had begun to
set in and she had tried to argue that they should wait for morning. A cold stare from Ben quickly silenced
her. Jacob Stans led the group with
Elizabeth, his wife, right beside him.
Jacob and Elizabeth had been inseparable in all the time Callie had
known them. They would not go into great
detail about their experiences in all of the tragedy around them, but they had
shared enough for the others to learn that they had lost a child to the
creatures that had become known simply as “crawlies.” Since that time, they clung to each other
with the ferocity of two people who have nothing else to live for outside of
each other. They were quick to agree to
any endeavor that would result in the death of crawlies and insisted on taking
the lead in any exploration. Callie both
admired and pitied them. Their raging
desire to kill as many of the creatures as possible prevented Callie from
trusting their judgment.
Following
close behind Jacob and Elizabeth was 16-year-old Natasha Conneley. Natasha had been the sole survivor of a middle
school that had been infested and subsequently blockaded three years prior due to
the suspicions of local authorities that it had become a nest. She had managed to sneak out of the school
and past the blockade with a few of her friends. The friends did not survive the trip out of
the school that led them right past the heart of the nest. Natasha’s boyfriend had sacrificed himself to
allow her to escape. She was their
primary source of nest information on this expedition. As such, she was sticking close to the front
with Jacob and Elizabeth.
The group
was rounded out by three men known best the other survivors as “the trio.” The three had no connection prior to the
outbreak when they found themselves trapped in a local restaurant. Bob, Sammy, and Will held out and actually
managed to fend off a swarm of crawlies for a week with only the supplies they
had found in the small building. They
had brought themselves and eight others out of the situation alive. Shortly after, they split off from the
remainder of their group from the restaurant, desiring to go on more of an
offensive and seek out like-minded individuals.
They had found that with Callie, Jacob, Elizabeth, Natasha, and now
Ben. Sammy and Will were in their late
teens and Bob was in his late twenties and Callie thought that they were still
too full of testosterone for their own good.
She couldn’t object to the sense of safety she got from them, however,
so she said nothing about it to anyone else.
Natasha
approached the building cautiously. Like
many of the surrounding structures, it was covered with taut webs. They crisscrossed every way and overlapped in
most areas. They were a mixture of thin
and thick, the strands obviously having been made by crawlies of a variety of
sizes. After a few minutes of searching,
careful the entire time not to touch any of the webbing, she seemed to find
what she was looking for. She peered
into an opening with trepidation, but aware of the necessity of the action if
their plan were to have any chance at success.
A single touch of the webbing could yield one of only two results. The first would be that she could become
impossibly entangled and stuck before she was able to react. That would mean that they would either have
to abandon her to wait for one of the crawlies to find and kill her or, if
possible, they would have to amputate any stuck appendage quickly and
decisively. The second possibility was
that the touch would reverberate through the entire structure and sound a loud
dinner bell for everything inside.
Neither was a situation that the group wanted to find itself in.
In order to
ensure that their plan was actually worth the risk, they would have to actually
venture into the nest and set the fire directly at the heart of the
encampment. If they could burn out the
breeder, the rest would likely ignore them and come to the aid of their
queen. That would draw in as many of the
creatures as possible and allow them to torch the entire building. Whatever the creatures were, they were just
as susceptible to being burnt to death as any other living thing. The idea was to positively identify the
building as the nest so that they could bring up the truck they had loaded with
the sandbags for the fire wall. The trio
would then establish the fire wall while the rest of the group spread out
through the outer edges of the building and doused it in as much gasoline as
possible. Ben had volunteered to seek
out the queen with Natasha’s help. They
would find it, burn it, and return to the outside of the building where they
all could regroup and set the entire building ablaze. Ben insisted that it was a simple plan, but
it all felt wrong to Callie. She would
come to wish that she had spoken up sooner.
Natasha peered
into the darkness looking for the tell-tale signs of a nest. She made sure to keep herself outside while
shining her light in. She knew all too
well the risk of a leaper coming out of the darkness. She remained low to the ground and looked
around. After a few minutes that seemed
to go on for an eternity, she stood up, took a few steps back, and turned back
to the group.
“This is
definitely the nest,” she said to them with an air of pride at being able to
provide useful information and thereby justify her part within the group. Just as she announced this, they heard a
shaking from a group of bushes off to their left. Before anyone could react, the huge leaper
sprung from the foliage with its eight legs extended. Elizabeth barely managed to get out a scream
before it had collided with her and wrapped its segmented legs around her upper
torso as it knocked her to the ground.
Jacob
screamed a guttural sound of rage as he threw himself onto the back of the crawly. He pounded at its armored back with no
results. He was still pounding on it
when Elizabeth shrieked as the underside of its abdomen opened and the stinger
came out. The crawly’s stinger slithered
up between its own body and Elizabeth.
It raised up its cephalothorax enough to give it room to strike. As Elizabeth’s scream turned into a shriek of
pain, the stinger buried deep into her chest and blood spurted out all of her,
the crawly, and the surrounding ground through the hole in her back. The rest of the group stood by in shock at what
happened next.
The crawly
seemed to grow additional appendages from the underside of its body. Eight small tentacles wrapped around
Elizabeth and pulled her dying body close to the crawly. It stood up quickly, throwing Jacob off of
its back. Jacob hit the ground hard on
his back and pushed himself up onto his elbows just in time to see the crawly
take Elizabeth into the dark recesses of the nest. Elizabeth’s blood stained the ground and
trailed after the creature as it went into the blackness.
Jacob laid
propped up recovering from the shock of the moment for just a few seconds. Before anyone in the group could do anything
to try to stop him, he jumped to his feet and ran into the building screaming
his wife’s name.
- - -
The most
disturbing fact about the spider-like creatures that had been dubbed the
crawlies was their apparent high level of intelligence. It was a hotly debated topic for as long as
the media continued to hold out and one expert inevitably contradicted the next
expert until no one was really sure. No
one, that was, except for those who witnessed the intellect of the crawlies
first hand. The problem was that most of
these people did not live to pass on the information. Basic observations were made, however, that
generally seemed to conclude that their intelligence was equal to, if not
rivaling, that of their human prey.
The few that
were able to be captured showed an ability to maneuver mazes with little to no
difficulty. Further, one lab discovered that,
within their physiological limitations, the crawlies could manipulate
locks. That particular discovery cost
the lives of every person working in the lab.
When the government lab team had failed to report in for
twenty-four hours, a SWAT team was sent in and three more lives were lost
before the single crawly was dispatched.
There were many who argued that the creature could not have been nearly
as successful at taking out the entire facility in such a short period of time
if it were not able to plan and reason.
This scared the government higher-ups like no information that they had
received before and the orders became to systematically eliminate the creatures
while only taking enough alive so that they could test more efficient ways to
kill them. In addition, the ones that
were taken alive were to be severely wounded prior to being transferred to
research facilities. That order turned
out to be much harder to execute then anyone had anticipated.
PART 2 - COMING IN ONE WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!
PART 2 - COMING IN ONE WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!
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