Spider Legs (24 page)

“It can't get at us,” Nathan said, relieved. “The angle is wrong, the snout's too thick, and the thing's not smart.” He went to the door and pushed it shut, hoping the latch would hold if the monster tried again.

Thud!
This time the sound of the proboscis banging on the glass windows was louder than a shotgun blast. The smooth curves of the giant snout gleamed under the overhead fluorescent lights.

The next moment a glass window shattered, the thick plate glass pulverized to diamond-like pieces and projections which scattered colored light in all directions. A few pieces hit Brenda
in the face and she screamed, perhaps blinded by the exploding glass. Natalie immediately went to her.

The big black sucking appendage started to squirm its way through the jagged hole in the plate glass. Long triangles of glass which pointed inward from the window frame did not seem to slow the creature.

“What do we do now?” whispered Bill. A few tiny shards of glass were sticking to the proboscis and forming a dark obsidian sparkle. No one had an answer.

It was heading toward Bill. Bill retreated as they continued to hear the scratching of the sharp glass against the strong proboscis. The thin lines that the glass made in the appendage were apparently so shallow as not to be even noticed by the creature.

The long sinewy organ of destruction suddenly hurled itself through the hole in the glass like a striking cobra. Remaining pieces of glass in the window flew apart in a million shards. The glass fragments showered up, rained down, and tinkled against the floor like little Christmas bells.

“Oh God,” Brenda whispered. Her face was scratched and bleeding, but she seemed to still see well enough. “Oh God, oh God.”

The coffee shop was filled with the heavy aroma of ammonia with the underlying scent of decaying meat. At first, the passengers were still, each one afraid to move. Their worst nightmare had come.

Suddenly Bryan grabbed
The Cat in the Hat
book from the little boy, ran to the snout, and began to slam it with all his might. The proboscis simply vomited some green digestive goo onto the Dr. Seuss book, and then it grabbed the mucilaginous Seuss from Bryan's hands and threw it across the room. Bryan wiped some of the green gel onto his pants and then ran from the undulating proboscis of death.

Nathan stared at the stuff on the floor. Within the goo were tiny skeletons, no doubt the remains of some partially digested fish. The small bones of the fish began to curl as if magically still alive. Their small, bony mouths seemed to open in a silent cry.

The proboscis began to make its way to the little boy, who was now crying wildly. Nathan couldn't blame him; he felt like doing the same.

Bill grabbed a garbage can and threw it at the sucking appendage. As the can hit the floor, a big chunk of watermelon rind fell out. This was eagerly gobbled up by the pycno.

“Don't go so close to it,” Nathan yelled, distracting the pycno. The creature started to overturn a small refrigerator, reducing a multitude of soda bottles to dull green shards. It seized some of the food in the refrigerator and started heaving it against the ceilings and walls as if frustrated by the minuscule samples of food. These could never satisfy its appetite. Everything was broken and crushed.

Bill searched for something else to throw at the creature, found a chair, and then broke it across the proboscis with little effect. The proboscis banged Bill on his arm, and he cried out in pain. He rose to his feet with great effort. His legs surely felt like spaghetti. Slowly the proboscis made its way to the food counter shelves which were stocked with health drink bottles. With one mighty swing, it knocked the shelves to the ground. Puddles of orange and lime liquids mixed on the floor like a fading Miró painting.

It then made a strange hungry humming sound as it propelled itself through the counter and exited on the other side. Bill ducked, but not quite in time. It hit his face, and his gashed and battered forehead started bleeding copiously.

Brenda screamed again. A bag of Cheez Doodles was knocked off the counter, and some of the orange contents scattered across the vinyl floor. As the proboscis pulled itself out of the crumbling remains of the counter, electrical wires were ripped out of the wood and began to pop and sputter, sending up clouds of black smoke from the burning insulation. The live wires began to dance back and forth like whirling dervishes.

“Get away from the salt water on the floor,” Bryan said to the Inuit woman, who stood sallow-skinned against the rear wall of the shop. She stood still as if paralyzed with fear and confusion.

Her hands opened and closed around a crucifix she wore around her neck.

The poodle started to bark and growl and snap at the proboscis. Brenda screamed for the poodle to get back. Then, in one single, fluid motion, the pycno flung the poodle through the glass of a window. Brenda and the boy screamed in unison.

The wires on the floor continued to sputter and spark. It looked like a swarm of fireflies.

“Get away from the water,” Bryan shouted again to the Inuit, but could not seem to make her understand that the danger of electrical shock was equal to or greater than the danger from the pycno who had trouble reaching her.

Bryan tried to walk along some dry spots on the floor to reach the girl. Suddenly she understood the problem but it was too late. The wires entered the water, and her scream was burned out of her vocal cords by a few thousand volts of electricity. Her body continued to twitch for a few seconds but gradually stopped as the electrical current locked her joints, muscles, and tendons. There was the smell in the air of fried meat.

“Get some salt,” Bill said to Bryan as he pressed a pack of napkins against the wounds in his forehead.

“Where? Why?”

“We can throw it at the creature's mouth or eyes.”

“Where?”

“In the storeroom. On the left.” The proboscis had left a dark maroon weal on Bill which ran from his wrist to his elbow. An exposed region of flesh on his wrist was sweating small beads of blood, and a sick throbbing in his arm seemed to distract him from the pandemonium around him.

Bryan ran to the storeroom and opened the door. Styrofoam cups, burger packages, packets of ketchup, and paper napkins lined the shelves. “Where's the damned salt?”

“On the left,” Bill called. “Behind the napkins.” Bryan immediately saw a few shakers filled with salt, and removed them from the shelves and threw them to Bill. The proboscis was only a few feet from the crying child.

“We're all going to die!” a woman screamed.

“Shut your trap,” Bryan said. Now that there was an immediate problem, he was doing well.

“We're all going to die!” she screamed again.

Brenda was at first paralyzed with fear but then tried to pull the boy away. As she pulled him she slipped on ochre jellylike muck which oozed from the proboscis. She tried to scream and pull
away from the creature, but she continued to slip and slide. The snout swung around, seeking.

“What in hell is that?” Nathan muttered as he gazed into the interior of the proboscis and saw something inside, something scurrying frantically in the large cavity.

“Something's inside it!” Natalie cried.

Then they heard a sound Nathan could not quite identify, coming from within the beast. A soft hungry licking. Even as he was seeing it, he couldn't believe it. This was not like any pycno he had studied.

A frigid breeze blew through the broken window, drying rivulets of perspiration on Brenda's face.

“What did you see?” Nathan cried to her.

“I don't know.”

“Probably an internal organ, or a parasite, or something it ate. Could it have been a fish or crab?” He was hoping that she had a better answer than he did.

Brenda stopped talking. She and her son were backed into a corner of the shop with little room to move. Both were staring at the snout as if mesmerized.

Bill took off the top of the salt shaker, ran to the proboscis, and dumped it into its opening. The snout responded by beating the floor of the coffee shop, as it attempted to scrape off the salt in its sucking appendage. The covering membrane of the proboscis glistened with a shifting phosphorescence, and dark brown chromatophores on its exoskeleton exploded into bright crimson. It began to yo-yo up and down like a broken marionette. In doing so the snout banged into Bill's crotch.

“Oooh,” he screamed, as he backed up, bent over, and covered
his aching testicles. The probocis gave Bill a shove into the counter, fracturing his collar bone.

“Oh God, oh God,” Brenda whispered. Her hands clenched and unclenched like the pincers of a lobster.

Nathan was not much better off. He could see the big black eyes of the pycno as they rolled in their sockets and fixed their attention on the woman. A piece of goo flew at her from the creature's drooling sucking appendage and hit her on the arm.

“Jesus,” she screamed. It reminded Nathan of warm petroleum jelly, although it had the exact color of lime gelatin. Brenda quickly wiped her arm briskly on the leg of her jeans, trying to dislodge the gruesome material, which stuck to her skin like flypaper. “Get off of me,” Brenda spoke to no one in particular. She continued to wipe even after the last traces of goop were gone from her skin.

Nathan glanced at Natalie, but she seemed to be as revolted and helpless as he was. The monster was just so big and so awful that it was almost impossible to organize any coherent plan of opposition.

Brenda looked at the thick liquid shimmering on the linoleum floor as if it were luminous paint. Her heart seemed to be thumping rapidly again behind her ample bosom. The proboscis slowly came toward her, and she raced away with her son, her low heels tip-tapping on the linoleum floor. The creature's eyes were as shiny as diamonds as they pursued.

Then the sucking appendage was upon her. Nathan saw a conga-line of squirming bristles ascend her thigh under her dress. The large eyes fixed on hers again.

“We're all going to die!” the woman screamed again.

“We've got to do something!” Natalie said. “Maybe I can get something from the deck.” She went out the door.

Nathan cast about for anything that might make an effective weapon. He found a fragment of broken chair. He hefted it like a spear, trying to locate a vulnerable spot on the immense snout. But the situation seemed hopeless.

The opening of the proboscis widened in what seemed like a yawning snarl. In a few seconds, Brenda was standing on her toes, the proboscis wrapped around her neck. The whites of her eyes were marbled with crimson, while the dilated pupils opened up and stared at the others in the coffee shop. Her pupils were like dark circles painted on paper by an avant-garde artist. A few wisps of her hair were damp with sweat.

Nathan struck at the proboscis, but could make no impression. He used the spear to shove against the monstrous living column, but he might as well have been pushing at a mountain. It ignored him.

The digestive walls of the esophagus turned inside out, making it appear as if a tongue were being formed from the inner folds of flesh. It happened ever-so-slowly, in much the way of a ketchup commercial where the ketchup seemed to take minutes to ooze from the bottle.

From about ten feet away, Bryan pointed at the creature. Then he got the steak-knife, aimed it, and threw it into the interior of the proboscis. A fist-sized chunk of the wet walls of the proboscis's interior fell from the muscular organ and onto the cold tile vinyl floor of the coffee shop. The flesh began to wiggle. Then it started to croak like a frog. The wounded proboscis unwrapped and withdrew from the window, and for a few minutes there was silence in the coffee shop.

Brenda dropped to the floor and curled her body into a tight ball. Her elbow popped with a metallic sound of tearing tendons. She ignored the pain, covered her face with her hands, and peeked out through the cracks between her fingers.

Bryan came closer to the chunk of pink tissue on the floor, which convulsed as paroxysm after paroxysm ran through the dying flesh. Then it began to flap around on the floor, like a bird taking a dust bath, and then to wiggle like a caterpillar. The lumberjack raised his huge boot and crushed the living flesh beneath his heel. It lay there limp, like a dead worm.

“Thanks,” Brenda croaked to him over the boy's screams. She
sounded as if she were speaking with a mouthful of marshmallows. Her bruised voice box must have felt as if it had been pushed back into her esophagus.

Then her eyes took on a wild look as if the enormity of what happened had just hit her. She ran to the chunk of tissue and pounced upon it, spat on it, kicked it. A piece of its flesh flew off from her shoe and struck Nathan on his chest. Another piece catapulted to the chipped Formica counter of pastries and assorted candies and stuck there for a moment, a few of its blood vessels still pulsing feebly, before it loosened and fell with a splash into an open jar of lime drink. Another piece struck Bill on his face and splattered open in a clot of viscous glop. Bill began to gag.

Nathan dropped his useless stick and went to the woman. “That's enough, Brenda.” She collapsed into his arms.

Bryan retrieved his steak-knife from the shiny vinyl floor, cleaned it on a paper napkin, and placed it back in his pocket. An ammonia smell continued to fill the air.

“Let me get rid of that stuff on the floor,” Nathan said. He found a mop and bucket in the bathroom and pushed the dead piece of flesh into the bucket. The stench of the pink flesh was maddening. As he scraped some of the remains, he broke a few pustules of flesh, which began to emit a vague banana-lemon smell. Nathan walked quickly to the broken window and tossed the bucket out onto the deck. Brenda broke into tears, and Bill handed her some napkins.

“Thanks,” she said, her red eyes still streaming tears. Bill stayed next to her. After a few seconds of silence, she caught another whiff of the banana-lemon odor.

“I'm going to throw up,” she said, unable to hold her churning gut back any longer. She ran to a corner of the room, opened her mouth, and vomited.

“Mommy, Mommy,” her son cried.