Violet Eyes (11 page)

“George?”

Finally she heard some response from the back den. The heavy stomp of her husband’s footsteps grew louder, and then he was there in the room with her, a half-crushed Miller Lite can in his hand. George was enjoying his retirement too, though his drink of choice was a bit different than Betty Anne’s.

“What are you yelping about, woman!” he growled. His belly shook as he spoke, and it was all Betty Anne could do not to say something about it…but she knew she had no room to talk. A part of her wished he’d trim that ridiculous tuft of white hair that curled over the neckline of his T-shirt. He looked like an aging bear poured into human clothes.

She resisted saying anything about the way his checkered pants made him look even older than he was, and instead pointed at the thing on her counter. “Kill it!”

George raised one eyebrow and shook his head. How many times had Betty Anne screamed for him to come running to kill a bug over the course of their forty-seven years of marriage? He was glad he couldn’t put a number on it, because the number would only have made him more irritated than he was. He’d been deeply engrossed in a thriller novel when she’d jolted him out of his world, and out of his chair. Frowning, he tossed the can into the small trashcan beneath the sink, and pulled off a paper towel off the cabinet door while he was there.

He raised the paper above the head of the tiny creature and brought his fingers together, anticipating the tiny crunch that always happened when you smooshed a spider in your hand. When he was sure the thing was dead, he threw it in the trash atop his crushed beer can.

“There,” he said. “Are you happy? I’ve killed for you again.”

“Will you always?” she smiled, pursing her pale, heavy lips together for a kiss.

George laughed, and smiled patiently. He’d kill for her again and again. Bugs at least. Hopefully he wouldn’t be called to do hand-to-hand combat. So far he’d escaped any fisticuffs in retaining her hand. He leaned forward to give her a peck on the lips, but before he touched her, Betty Anne screamed again.

“There’s another one!”

He followed the point of her finger, and sure enough, a small black spider was meandering across the floor not far from their feet. He repeated the crush and dispose procedure, and Betty Anne made him look around the room a second and third time before she was satisfied that there were no more of the offensive monsters roaming about. When she was, Betty Anne finished filling her coffee with sugar, and retreated to the front room. But before she sat down, she called out one thing to George, who was moving quickly back towards his novel.

“You’re calling the exterminators today, I hope you know.”

He grunted and sat back in his chair. “Mmmm-hmmm,” he grunted, before he was back in his world of spies and guns.

Neither of them had noticed the one thing in the kitchen that should have concerned them. In the corner of the kitchen window, just above the drapes, a large spider web obscured the upper corner of the frame. Two small spiders with purple slashes on their backs moved back and forth at the edges of the web, extending it farther. Already it had captured several small flying bugs, and one still-struggling housefly.

But the spider that sat at the center of the web…that spider was a different story. It was larger than the other two. Bloated. And it wasn’t moving. It sat there still, covered partially, in its own silk.

It looked different to the eye than the other two active arachnids. This one had grown pale, as if its skin was just a shell. If George or Betty Anne had discovered the web and stood watching for a while, they would have seen that the spider in the center of the web was just a shell. It had been there for a couple of days, because despite having really all the time in the world, Betty Anne wasn’t the greatest housekeeper. The spider had spun its initial web, and then begun its metamorphosis. Because the violet-backed spider was only the eater.

From its back, hatched the seeders.

Right now, its back was moving, a parchment-thin flap of skin jittered and shook, and the first baby of the new cycle crawled out, preened two fuzzy legs up over its thorax, and walked down the edge of the spider’s shell. It was followed by another, and another.

More flies continued to emerge from the spider’s back, as the first poised for its initial flight. It stared at the doorway of the house, where Betty Anne had disappeared just a few moments before.

It was drawn by the sound waves of her voice and the vibrations of her motion and the color of her warmth.

It saw all this with emotionless eyes. Hungry eyes.

Violet eyes.

Chapter Sixteen

Saturday, May 11. 11:21 a.m.

Billy didn’t feel so good.

After talking to Rachel, he let himself back into the house and returned to his bedroom to lie down. In his head, he felt a thousand things moving. Tiny pinpricks of pain behind his eyes and nose and along the back of his skull.

He lay down on the bed and stared at the spider webs that had somehow managed to expand from a few cobwebs in the corners to cover large patches of his bedroom ceiling over the past few days. Dark things were moving diligently in the thickest portions of the web, but he didn’t worry about them. His head hurt too much. He’d have to get some RAID and spray the ceiling. Fuckin’ bugs. Florida was like the breeding ground for all insects. You learned to live with them, or you moved. But for now…all he knew was that he couldn’t stand anymore.

Billy rolled over on his pillow, clutching it for comfort. For stability. For home. But from the corner of his eye he could see that he was not the only one who’d been using his pillow. There were stains on the pillowcase. Small circles of darkness. Tiny shreds of what looked like broken slivers of colored plastic dotted the pillowcase. But it wasn’t plastic, Billy knew. The bits were colored purple and black. The shells of broken spiders lay crushed on his pillow.

He knew where they’d come from. He’d seen the evidence in his Kleenex. Over the past few days, when he blew his nose. He’d seen the skins of arachnids dotting the mucous. When he cried, which he did more and more as the pain increased…his tears stained the tissues in a color he had grown to despise.

Purple.

Over the past couple days, Billy had cried purple tears.

What the fuck
, he’d said the first time he saw it. But he knew what it meant. He’d tried to pretend otherwise, but deep down, he’d known for days. They were inside him. He’d tried to ignore the sensations in his ears, behind his eyes. The tickles in his throat. But he couldn’t ignore it any longer. They lived inside him. And now they were coming out. He was crushing them into his pillow into his sleep, but they were still creeping out of him. They were crawling across his ceiling, looking down at him, now that they had hatched from the cavities in his head.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered staring for the first time closely at the thousands of legs moving across the ceiling. And at the larger ones, the pale ones, the spiders who were not moving. “What will they do if they are not confined to an island?”

His leg twitched, as something walked across the nerves that controlled it. His head was alive with motion now, and he felt nauseous and euphoric at the same time. Billy clutched his pillow as his arms suddenly felt cold, and then his fingers seemed to burn.

I should have sprayed myself with that shit I hit Mark and Jess with
, he thought.
That would have been so much simpler.

His foot spasmed and shook in the air as he held the pillow tighter and tighter, and closed his eyes, willing the strange feelings in his body to leave. But a part of him knew that when the trembling, hallucinatory feelings left, there would be nothing left of him. When the spiders left, he would be an empty husk.

Billy McAllister lay shaking on his bed, beneath an ever-growing web, and thought back to his last day on the island. To the morning they had found Carly.

Chapter Seventeen

Sheila Key

Sunday, May 4. 6:52 a.m.

Billy burst into Mark and Jess’s room at dawn after he’d woken up alone. He shook Mark awake.

“Have you seen Casey?” Billy demanded.

Billy’s face looked haggard; his beard had grown overnight, and his hair curled in strange and wild tangents. The
Blue Lagoon
loincloth that Jess had given him tilted half off his hip, but instead of looking provocative, it looked, well, retarded. Billy’s body was not going to win any modeling contests at the moment; his skin was riddled with swollen red hives where he’d been bitten by flies.

Mark opened his mouth, yawned and finally spit out one word.

“No.”

Jess moaned next to him and rolled over to see what was going on. Standing at the foot of the bed, Billy caught a glimpse of the dark shadow of a nipple before she woke enough to realize, and slapped a hand over her chest to hide herself. It didn’t matter; at that moment, he wasn’t tantalized in the slightest. He was worried.

“When I woke up, Casey was gone,” he said.

“She probably just woke up and took a walk,” Jess suggested.

“Yeah,” Billy snarled. “Great idea when the island is overrun with fuckin’ man-eating bugs.”

“She’s not a man,” Mark offered.

“Smartass.”

“All right, all right,” Mark laughed while stifling a yawn. “We’ll look for her. She probably went back to the tents to get some stuff.”

Jess slipped out of bed and straightened her scanty outfit as Mark rolled out of bed and stretched next to her. The room glowed with the reflection of the light of morning from the one window in the main room.

Together the three of them stepped out of the Quonset hut door to the jungle floor. Jess headed towards the path to the beach where they had docked.

“I can’t believe she would go back to the boat without us,” she said.

Mark didn’t follow her. He caught a glimpse of something red amid the foliage, and stepped around the side of the hut.

“She didn’t,” he called, in answer to Jess. His voice sounded thick, choked.

Billy turned from the path and hurried to join his friend. In seconds the leaves echoed with a cry of pain and anger.

When Jess reached them, Billy was on the ground, his hands touching the ragged flesh of Casey’s hips and head.

There wasn’t much left of her face but a gruesome cavity capped with teeth and vacant eye sockets.

She was naked, but there was nothing attractive about her corpse. Most of the skin had already been eaten away.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Billy kept saying, over and over. Amid the cursing, he was crying.

After a few minutes, Mark and Jess pulled him away from her body.

“We need to get out of here,” Jess said again. Her voice was shaking.

“But…”

She pressed a hand to his cheek. “I know. She was my best friend.” A tear trailed down Jess’s face as her words tumbled out faster. The more she spoke, the more shrill her voice became. “But we can’t stay here and wait for the same thing to happen to us. Take us home, Billy. Please. Get us out of here.”

Together they rose, and started towards the path. They had only gone a couple steps when Mark turned back and simply said, “Hang on,” before running back to the hut.

He disappeared through the door as Billy and Jess waited. When he came back out, he was carrying a canister. They had all noticed it the night before; a metal torpedo that appeared to be filled with pesticide.

“I want my shit back,” he explained when he rejoined them. “If there are bugs anywhere near it…”

The beach was empty when they reached it. The tents were not covered with spiders, but instead stood like lonely sentinels of abandonment.

“Break ’em down,” Billy said, and didn’t hesitate to go to work on the one he’d set up for himself and Casey. Their
Blue Lagoon
love nest. He pulled the main post with an urgency that smacked of vengeance.

Ha. His stomach contracted with the thought. So much for playing the hero. His expedition had killed the best thing in his life. Like the poison of his past come back to bite when he tried to use it for good…

Billy and Mark stowed the tents back on the boat and then returned to pick up the last things.

“We can’t leave her here,” Jess whispered.

Billy shook his head in agreement. “We won’t,” he said.

He turned to Mark. “Help me?”

They walked back to the hut in silence, and barely said a word as they searched for pieces of her arms and legs that still had skin to grasp. Gingerly grabbing the uneaten flesh, they picked up Casey’s body to carry it back to the boat.

For the first time in his life, Billy looked at the remaining curves of her breasts and belly and the tantalizing flesh below and saw nothing left of Casey’s body that could get him hard. Instead, he wanted to get sick.

He forced himself to simply walk.

They laid Casey’s corpse on the deck of the boat, and then returned to the site of the tents on the beach to gather up the last stakes and bags and debris.

“So much for paradise,” Mark mumbled. His throat was so thick it felt difficult to breathe.

“Yeah,” Billy agreed.

That was when the buzzing started.

The sky suddenly clouded with the violet of flies, and Jess screamed.

“Not again,” she moaned, collapsing in a heap of limbs to the ground. “I can’t stand it.”

“Then get up!” Mark demanded, and grabbed her arm. He wasn’t gentle as he yanked her to her feet. But the horde was already upon them. The air swarmed with thousands of the purplish creatures driven by the need to feed. They descended.

“Fuck!” Billy screamed, as he began swatting the flies right and left. “Let’s get to the boat,” he said, and began to run. But in seconds, he stumbled, and fell hard to the beach, a cloud of purple flies following him down.

Jess screamed, and pulled away from Mark, swatting spastically at the air and at her own skin, as she fought to deflect the flies. But it seemed like the more she twisted and slapped and vaulted around, the more buzzing creatures descended from the sky to touch her. To bite her. To eat her…