Authors: A.J. Aalto
“Okay, I'm going in. But if the mother of all spiders is in there, dude, I fucking quit.”
Batten's sigh was resigned. “I'll be right here if you need me.”
“That's not making me feel any better,” I told him.
“Declan's in.”
Most days, that taunt would have worked. “Declan's the new guy, so he still cares about impressing you. I'm totally okay with you thinking I'm a gutless wonder. Try bribery.”
He considered this. “You go in, and I'll send Agent Golden on an errand to fetch you coffee.”
I turned my back on him so he wouldn't see my reluctant smile.
Bastard knows me too well
. “Look at that, you are capable of a good idea. Who knew?” I advanced towards the hut, then pulled up short again. Batten's shuffle stopped at my back.
“Hey Kill-Notch?”
“Still with you.”
“Would you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
Right. Letting that one go.
“Declan's car, my kit, you'll find something that looks suspiciously like a Taser with modified probes and a butane lighter rammed in the launching mechanism. Grab it for me?”
Batten was quiet; his boots didn't crunch gravel. I gave him a second to comply, then showed him an eyelash-batting grin over my shoulder. He gave me the stink eye.
“What?” I asked. “It's not really a Taser.”
Anymore
.
“Of all the stupid—”
“Fine. Don't get it. If a fat-assed momma spider the size of a football leaps on my face, I'll throw her out of the shed into your obliging arms.”
“No you won't,” he warned.
“Sure I will. You can impress everyone with your Macho Man Randy Savage impersonation and wrestle the giant hairy spider to the ground while her legs squirm in your face.”
“Knock it off, Baranuik.”
“Try not to pop the squishy sack on her back. Spitting carrion spiders carry their newborns around with them, like kangaroos do. A thousand tiny red spiders will pour out and swarm all over you.” I smiled again, fluttering my eyelashes at him, waiting for him to cave. “Their sting rates a four on the Schmidt Pain Index.”
Batten wasn't going to mess around with a gigantic spider anymore than he was going to venture in to a nest full of baby spiders, and we both knew it. If I had to go in, he was going to give me any weapon I asked for. At that moment, I could have requested a flamethrower and he'd have considered it, paperwork be damned.
“Stay here,” he said tightly, and turned to jog to Declan's Buick. I counted the seconds until his hands started to drift up his arms to scratch at imaginary itches; he didn't make it three seconds.
Declan murmured at my shoulder, “Golden's right about one thing. You
are
evil.” I thought there was approval in his voice, but I didn't turn around to catch him grinning.
“You'll want to remember that,” I advised. “What have we got in there?”
“A body, still largely intact. You might want to take psychometric impressions before we take apart the webs. It looks like something has been in here before us, because there are big swaths of webbing that look torn and knocked down.”
“The shed wasn't locked before?”
“Guess not. Owner must have locked it after he found the body.”
“All right. Note that, and take as many pictures as you can. Gloves off in ten.”
“Do you need me to assist you with that?”
I hesitated a beat before admitting, “Not sure how you could?”
“I have a small influence over …” He drifted off as Batten returned with Wesley's contraption in one tanned, capable hand. “What the hell is that?”
“Early birthday present,” I bragged. “Isn't my brother nifty? He also fixed my leaf blower last week. I can only imagine what he did to it. I'm kinda hoping it doubles as a hovercraft.”
Batten hesitated before handing it over, tipping it toward my open hands and then whisking it back to rest on his shoulder. “Does this thing do what I think it does?”
“If you think it goes clicky-clicky-fwizz-
foomph
, then, yes, that's exactly what it does.” I'd tried it out on a fencepost when Wes had given it to me. The aim was a little tricky, but the results were spectacular.
“Christ. Be careful.” He slapped it into my palm. “Dr. Edgar, you better back out of there for a few minutes.”
Declan took a moment to consider, eyes flicking between us. “I'm sure Dr. B has got it under control,” he said.
Batten barked a laugh, then backed up a full eight feet, choosing a spot in the light as the sun rose from behind the tree line.
“Self-destruct in five,” Batten said under his breath, loud enough for me to hear it.
I decided that if the momma spider did jump me, Taser or no Taser, I was going to heave her like a cream pie at Batten's smirking face. Rolling my right glove off against the thigh of my white coverall, I dropped it into Declan's waiting palm. Holding the Taser in my left hand, the one still safely covered with a black neoprene glove, I stepped into the shade of the shed and was immediately enveloped in a still, peculiarly spicy, and fetid heat.
As Declan had said, the body was mostly intact. That should have been a good thing, but seeing his limbs frozen askew (
its
, I thought stubbornly, not
his
) his clawed hands reaching forever now in the dark, legs swept out from under him, crumpled like he was not done running, made the horror more human. This was a life laid waste; its owner would never smile again, or taste, or smell, or witness the rising tides or gibbous moon, feel the pleasure of someone's touch. From the pictures in Chapel's photo files, and the torn-to-hell chimp costume, I knew this was indeed Roger Kelly, our missing dentist. It wasn't
immediately evident if you looked at his face, since he was laying on it, and the top half of his head was missing, which sort of scrambled the bottom half. His skin drooped, making his forehead a wrinkled mess, dragged his eyebrows out of shape against the dirt floor. I stood on my toes and peeked up and over his skull.
As I feared, most of his brain was missing. In the hollowed-out cranium, there were chunks of white and grey matter clinging to a scrap of brain stem, dangling over the edge of the jagged hole like a severed rope bridge off a cliff. In the hollow where his brain used to be was stringy membrane tissue, a wad of congealing yellow-white lymph, a purple blob of something that might have at one time been a thick vein, and about fifty torn-up wormy green larvae, half-eaten, coated in the slick, glimmering grey web sac typical of spitting carrion spiders.
And me without caffeine.
Tiny stars whirled in my vision. I reminded myself,
passing out
face-first into that would be bad.
A creeping shudder worked its way from my ankles to my chin, and I jerked my gaze up to make sure there wasn't a plump spider sliding down from the rafters at me, then I moved one step deeper into the shed. I had threatened Batten with a monstrous critter without really believing one would have taken up residence, but now that I was nearly enclosed in a misty grey web, the probability of something unimaginably revolting sharing this space with me, watching me approach, waiting to leap out hungrily and slurp my brains out, seemed entirely too plausible. I became aware of a river of sweat trickling between my shoulder blades. It felt too much like something unsavory crawling towards my Kermit-print panties, and I shivered again. I hate giving myself the willies, but I had a primo case of them going on, and I'd only been inside for a few moments.
I have to Grope this shit? How is this my life?
The smell hit me even more strongly when I tried to take a nerve-settling breath: grand wormwood, hot and strong. Licorice and sulfur. Magic? Not revenant magic; that smelled of burnt sugar. The source was something unfamiliar.
Though the webbing was thick, I could see the outline of a fish carving bench, buckets for dross, a peg board full of tools, knives, and a flare gun, but no evidence of any kind of still. No absinthe.
No booze of any kind and no herbs … so why was I smelling grand wormwood and anise? I put my bare hand out into the air and let it Grope around at the aura of the shed for a moment, before tickling the swaying ends of spider webs.
Without warning, my heart rocketed to pound up high in my throat like a terrified rabbit's beating hind feet kicking and jerking for escape.
No, help! Help!
Not my voice, not my thoughts.
Stopstopstop!
I held my breath so I could hear past my own inhalation; trembling began deep in the core of my body and spread down my arms and legs. I stood my ground, letting my bare fingertips brush the webbing again.
Scritching noises. Not in my ears, but in my head, memories of noises, not current but past. I crouched and touched the unfinished floor of the shed, where the webbing was a spongy carpet. All this webbing in just a few hours. Industrious spiders. But where were they? I didn't see a single one. Brushing the webs aside, I reached dirt.
A Groper's visions are rarely subtle when murder is involved; the Blue Sense slammed open in my mind and images launched themselves at me like the oncoming lights of a freight train, rocking my head back.
Roger Kelly crawling into the shed, shaking violently — he's shaking, no, I'm shaking — his throat scratching with terror, then sobbing, he's dry-heaving, hoarse,
no help no help NO! Help!
while something on his back slammed, slammed, slammed at the back of his skull. My skull, no his. A fist. A human fist. A man. Not a man. A boogeyman. Slam. Slam. Bone cracking. Slam.
Stop! No! Help!
Roger reaching up behind to bat and claw feebly, ineffectually, as someone's hands wrenched apart hair, flesh and fragments of broken skull to gouge nails and bony fingers into his brain. A horrible tearing sound, Roger shrieking, and then nothing.
Under the smell of wormwood, I picked up the faint odors of copper and ammonia. I dropped my head toward the shredded remains of the fursuit. Blood. Piss. The spiders hadn't bothered wrapping Mr. Kelly's legs, as their food source, the beetles, had focused on the easy meal offered by the remains of his battered cranium. The bottom of his fursuit was ripped to hell, one of his running shoes had been lost somewhere, and the sport sock covering the left foot was stained. There were splatters of blood in the dust, but not as much as one would expect. Most of that had been devoured.
Declan stepped back into the shack; he had pungent cream under his nose, the smell of which always made me think of dead people. The vision whiffed away like an extinguished candle.
“Marnie?”
“Wipe that shit off, I can't smell the important stuff.”
“Sorry,” he said, ducking out for a tissue then returning. I still couldn't smell past the menthol.
“No spiders yet,” I reported. “Grab my notebook for me?”
He dug into his doctor's bag. When he handed it to me with my pen, I jotted down the date, time, and results, then snapped a new neoprene glove on my right hand and tucked the Taser under my armpit. “Get a shot of his skull, close-ups of the dead larvae, and these dark patches here.”
I heard Chapel calling my name outside, from far away, and tried to focus on the body; Batten would take care of Chapel.
“See, the flesh here is discolored.” I showed Declan the black blooms on the back of the dentist's neck, looking a bit like furry moss under the skin in the white flare of his flashlight. “We found
Yersinia sarcophaginae
in Cosmo Winkle's results.”
Chapel's voice, higher now. He sounded stressed. Too much coffee, the lucky prick.
“Flesh-eater plague?” Declan sounded grim. “You didn't touch it, did you?”
“Trust me, my dear assistant, when it comes to plague I am very, very careful. No, I did not touch it.”
“You're sweating.”
“I still have a cold from Fur Con,” I admitted. “Also, it's about a hundred fucking degrees in here, and this Tyvek doesn't breathe.”
“You're thinking this body will give the same results on
Yersinia sarcophaginae
?”
I nodded without looking up. “Most likely, though—”
“Marnie, get out here!” Batten barked. I rolled my eyes at Declan, who continued,
“No footprints or animal prints,” Declan made a note in his iPad. “No prints of any kind. Just these slimy trails through the webbing.”
I sat back on my haunches. “Slime is never a good thing.”
“Slime goes in the bad column.”
“It goes in the ‘things I could live without’ column.”
Beside Bossypants Batten.
“Marnie!” This time, Batten almost sounded scared. I huffed to my feet.
“Don't jizz a brick, dude, we're coming!” I stepped carefully over Roger Kelly's legs, backing toward the shed door, still talking to Declan. “Of course, under all this webbing there could be prints. Beetles and spiders might have brushed them away.”
“What's this pile of goo, do you think?” Declan jerked a thumb at the corner, where there seemed to be a load of chunky greenish-yellow dog vomit.
“Regurgitation?”
“Whose? His?” Declan said. “I haven't seen a single spider yet, have you? That's odd.”
“So we've got grand wormwood. Regurgitation. Slime. Webs. Missing brains, a severed arm.”
Oh holy shit.
“Uh, Declan? This guy has both arms. Roger Kelly isn't missing an arm. Cosmo Winkle wasn't missing an arm. Whose fucking arm is behind the—”
Something hooked me by the back of my coverall and yanked me hard out where the floodlights blared, hauling me right off me feet. The coverall's zipper caught me under the chin, choking from me a startled
gwak!
I spun around to see Agent Golden and Agent de Cabrera behind Chapel. I was staring down the barrels of two standard issue Glocks and Chapel's Springfield XD.
Batten's hand was shaking against the fabric of my coverall, whether with fear or fury I couldn't tell.
“When I say ‘out,’ you get the fuck out!” he yelled, releasing me.
“Holy hell, you don't need to rage in my face. What's your goddamn malfunction?”
Golden put up her gun, pushed past me to grab Declan by the arm and wheel him away from the shed; she took up sentry duty at the threshold.
“CDC just called. The Denver lab fucked up on Winkle's tests: it's not only flesh-eater plague. CDC found something else developing in the samples: creeping plague.”