Alone. I finally had some time to myself, but I couldn't stand the sight of Andrew, slumped against the wall. The red trail that painted the cracked concrete above his head already dried to a darker hue, so had the blood that lined the singed hole in between his eyes.
Andrew's expression reflected emptiness. I relished the silence but couldn't help feeling guilty that I did it. So guilty, that it took me almost an hour to actually let go of the gun, letting it clatter to the garage floor with several metallic clicks that echoed, soundlessly, in my mind for several minutes afterward.
I think Andrew shat himself before I spilled his life from the back of his head onto the wall. Several times while I sat there, the thick smell forced me to gag, on a painfully empty stomach, and pull up acidic bile to linger at the back of my throat. It burned intensely and my vision blurred to watery sight because of the fresh stinging tears that welled up at the ends of my vision.
When I finally rose from my place, opposite of Andrew, leaned against a stack of plain cardboard boxes, I struggled with my numb, sleeping legs and staggered into the adjacent kitchen through an already open door.
My eyes squinted into thin slits against the refrigerator's bright light, and the harsh glare off of Andrew's half-eaten bag of Lays potato chips, lazily folded closed, next to a half empty jug of Sparkling Drinking Water. The refrigerator's hum tickled my ears and pricked my senses up, back to normality, and cleared the fog from my mind. I closed the door on the empty shelves, deciding to ignore the dull pains of my hunger.
The skies rang a clear, intense blue outside the kitchen window and a small, brown and black feathered sparrow perched on the sill. Spider web cracks crawled from the corners of the windows.
A sink full of dirty dishes, that I assigned Andrew to wash but never got washed, gave me a slight sense of the time that had passed. The sleepless nights caused by Andrew's weekend keggers, the less than satisfactory grades on my math tests, and all the toes I've stubbed on overturned furniture and other results from reckless parties all added up, three days ago, into a bullet.
The dented and scrapped wooden doors under the sink popped open with difficulty. Inside, spider webs reached out from corner to corner, catching dust and hugging a box of large trash bags. Of course, it's Andrew's job to take out the trash this week.
I freed the box from the dead spider's home and the filth encrusted strands cracked and resisted with unusual strength. The webs thickened, with the shadows, farther back into the cabinet and along the sink's aged pipes. The darkness hinted at a small shift of movement. I shut my eyes tightly and shook my head to drive away the remaining fuzz that clung to my thoughts and tricked my vision.
I closed the cabinet, returned to the garage with the box in hand and produced a shiny, black bag. The snap of if being torn from its container slightly disturbed the flies that crawled in and out of Andrew's ears and mouth. Pink maggots squirmed and multiplied among themselves inside the blackened head wound and on large misshapen patches of his arms, creating an illusion of crawling flesh.
I separated a bag and placed the box on the unused work bench attached to the wall next to me and whipped the bag fully open. The louder and harsher noise drove the flies into a buzzing frenzy, they furiously clouded around his head. After a few moments the group settled back down and I watched, with admiration, of their perfect, but chaotic, formations. They all walked a steady, constant, unmarked path in the pale, blue flesh, on a mission to lay more eggs.
I imagined his brain, but replaced by a wet squirming mass of blood slicked maggots. I entertained an image of Andrew's skull slowly bulging and splitting under the pressure of a growing army of wriggling death.
He didn't use his brain for much anyway. Becoming a hallow cavity to keep a fly family's nest seemed pretty noble to me, considering the way he used the organ in life: drowning it in alcohol at night, and numbing it in front of the television between classes.
The school's sprawling campus ended a couple of blocks down. I met Andrew when he responded to my ad, the day after I placed it in the college newspaper, under the “Seeking a Roommate,” section. I thought that I would have had more offers, pouring in, considering that I lived in a two bedroom house, not a dingy apartment or a cramped dorm room, but Andrew was my only choice. His Mom and Dad in Denver paid his half of the rent and for the parties that would be in full swing when I came home from Burger World, smelling of French Fries and expecting to get some sleep. My pillow, held tightly over my head, couldn't block out the shitty techno music that the double stacked speakers, installed in the living room, vomited.
When I started to walk the razor thin edges of my sanity, my uncle passed away from liver failure. His will stated that his .45 Magnum would be left to me while the rest of his gun collection went to my other brother. But only only needed one gun and one bullet to solve my problem, but I didn't think of I what I would do with a 200 pound sack of rotting meat sitting in my garage.
I stepped as close as I could to the body and stopped when his stench aggravated my gag reflex again. He looked about three trash bags big, if I managed to chop him up using the ax I left, buried in a stump, in the back yard.
I draped the bag from my hand over its box, stepped back into the kitchen and noticed the sink's cabinet door, slightly ajar. I remembered closing it, before going into the garage, but I've also been staring intently at a corpse for close to twenty four hours. My mind can't be expected to produce any reliable thoughts. The way the dark blood splattered violently against the wall shocked my rational mind into a trance, while a part of my imagination became fascinated with the sight of a brain out side its skull, destroyed, mixed with brown hair and bone fragments. A chunky crimson soup, spilled out of its human bowl by a single bullet.
We didn't exchange any words before I pulled the trigger. I didn't want any possibility of the frat boy talking his way out of the mess he created. The stinging smell of gunpowder faded into a sour stench, I guessed to be death.
The ax's edge glimmered in the afternoon sun, and its wooden handle pleasantly warmed the palm of my hand. It broke away from the stump easily and its weight reassured me that it would get the job done. A helicopter's blades tore through the cloudless sky loudly. I realized that the world still turned for everyone else but I didn't even know the day and could only guess, by the sun's eastern position in the sky, that the time just struck about three or four o' clock PM.
The ax's weight pulled, defiantly, against my stiff arms as I walked back toward my white house with the blue trim and the charming flower garden below the kitchen window. I dragged the tool to the back door with a miserable scraping along the concrete walkway. I bore it's weight on my left shoulder and climbed the small set of steps, back into the house.
I stopped, feeling cold chill wash through my nerves, completely puzzled. The cabinet's doors hung, swinging, off of their hinges. Hairline cracks ran through the black and while tiled floor, between the cabinet and the garage door. Assuming that's where the trail led to, I stepped in, closed the door softly and gingerly leaned my back against it. Stale, cotton silence plugged my ears. Andrew's body no longer gathered flies. His eyes seemed deflated and his jaw hung open dumbly, resting on his chest. I tightened my grip on the ax's handle, the old wood complained under the pressure.
Momentarily, I considered raising its blade and stepping forward, but instead I stood still with its comforting weight, strengthening my right hand with sharp metal. My eyes narrowed and strained against the murky orange darkness being created by the quickly fading sun.
A pop shattered the silence and my heart beat in my throat. An undying, constant echoed throbbed in my brain. Seven more pops eclipsed the initial sound in rapid successions. My body stiffened in automatic response and my arm franticly slapped the wall to the left in search of the light switch. Eight new pops and two more hallow slaps later, I flicked the small switch up. Aged yellow light bulbs flickered to dim life, casting dirty illumination on his congealed eyes and the thin, black, insect legs protruding from them, wriggling in the gelatin texture. Four limbs danced on each side of the organs, in a placement similar to a spider's. My heart beat at a double pace to compensate for the ice cold charge that raced up my spine and tightened the ever growing knot my stomach suddenly twisted itself into. Cold sweat beaded on my forehead and my intestines rolled over themselves in warm nausea, and my bowels weakened a little.
The legs simultaneously clamped themselves down into Andrew's soft, oily flesh, breaking through the skin, digging down into the deep layers for enough leverage to lift their eye ball bodies out of their socket tombs, along with stringy nerve endings laced with different blood red and bruised purple hues.
A lump, inflated to the size of a fist, in his throat. Two more spider legs shot from the slack mouth, splattering dark blood, on the cardboard boxes in front of them, to announce their presence. They stretched to a length equal to that of my arms, shoulder to fingertips.
My sweaty palms slipped on the cold brass door knob several times before I gained purchase. I flung it open and threw myself backward to slam it closed with all 175 pounds of my being. My grasp failed me again and let gravity harshly pull me to the ground. I struggled with cold sweats and mounting panic while I placed my feet back under me. In the cabinet, the tightly woven webs, I observed while retrieving the trash bags earlier, hung in savage tatters, carrying the metal fragments from shattered pipes.
While gathering myself and returning vertical, my boots cracked loudly against the broken tile. I pulled out, suddenly, useless decorative drawers and silverware. They clattered to the floor and the sound threatened to split my ear drums. From the cluttered mess, I created, I produced a serrated meat knife to replace the ax that no longer sternly caressed my palm. An image of it, abandoned, on the oil stained garage floor, flashed in my mind.
So did the spiders.
Monstrous legs waving madly, ferociously cutting through the air, from a dead man's mouth. It knew that I stood there, but I didn't want to wait around to fully appreciate mommy, mutant spider.
My instincts took command of my legs and told them to take me into the living room and exit at the front door. Desperation suddenly choked me all at once and pinched my windpipe almost completely closed. Memories stung the back of my mind, I thought of the asthma attacks I suffered as an underdeveloped kid in a seventh grade P. E. class.
During the few brief moments, when my lungs decided to function correctly, I desperately stabbed at the dark gray webs I found wrapped around the door's knob and expertly threaded through its locks. The knife bounced off of the thick barrier, recoiling and hurting my hand in sharp bursts of dull pain.
I tightened my grip, despite the raw discomfort, and sawed. The serrated edge skipped off of the web's strands, leaving them unmarred. My hands throbbed with a hot numbness that resurfaced as needles of misery the moment I grabbed my favorite antique, sixteenth century, hand carved sitting chair and flung it recklessly at the drawn curtains, in an attempt to damage the tall living room windows, that featured a great view of the front yard, I enjoy while studying when Andrew's out of the house. Glass shattered behind the French styled curtains that I learned how to design from a program on Home and Garden Television.
The dark purple sky teased me from behind the curtains in quick, limited glances. The gentle evening breeze guided them, back and forth, in smooth waves to play a game of peek-a-boo with me.
Crimson stained the fine off-white colored fabric in the form of my bloody hand prints. I curled my fingers into a painful grasp on the curtains. Agony bled throughout the lines of my palm and dripped from my clenched fist. I pulled straight down, shredding the fabric. The sound tore through my mind and burst bright red in my tear-blurred vision.
The night sky bore a rare silver diamond of glimmering light, suspended among only a couple of its, seldom seen and appreciated, brothers. Its light would be bright enough to admire for only so long, before the city lights drown him out, too. I viewed the wonderful scene, broken, behind thick iron bars that tore, vertically, through the cloudless, dark blue heavens.
I bowed my head in trembling frustration and noticed a round yellow sticker, stuck to one of the numerous jagged shards of glass at my feet.
“This Home Protected by Brain Spider Security Systems.”
I clenched the muscles in my jaw and ground my teeth together in an effort to fight off a scream that would do nothing but piss off the spiders.
Something gently and persistently scratched at the garage door, a faint sound that almost died in my ears, it reminded me of my dog, Black Jack. He used to paw softly against the back door at night, and i would sneak him inside, out of the cold darkness, against my dad's orders.
The scratching abruptly stopped.
Without conscious thought I held my breath against the overbearing silence, that still carried a real threat in the tense air, and closed my eyes, shivering and unnerved by the dreadful suspense. After several long moments that could have been minutes, my lungs spasmed, greedily sucked in the stale, hostile air, and burned in relief..
My senses violently burst through the surface of my awareness and shocked me back into survival mode. The thick wooden door splintered to pieces loudly and echoed from the kitchen, triggering a cold release of adrenalin. My nerves, all at once, ignored the groaning swollen muscles and the raw, screaming blisters clustered, slick and bleeding, in my palm.
I dropped the knife on the wooden floor and it bounced, blade to hilt, several times. I had already sprinted forward, toward the hallway, that connects to the bedrooms, before the knife even had a chance to settle completely still.
The decorative area rug, under the solid maple coffee table, shifted under my foot and projected me forward, into a falling position. Before I had any time to react, my knees broke my fall, absorbing my full weight and all of the damage. My mind pumped too much fear into my central nervous system for it to recognize the pain of bone bashing into hard wood.
I continued, pushing myself forward into a running position, bursting from the ground and slamming onto my feet. My blood pumped and body functioned with will alone. The muscles in my legs throbbed along with my heart beat, thumping in my ears, drowning out the world.
My boots pounded an irregular, muted rhythm into the carpet. The well lit hallway stretched three rooms and ended at a sharp turn to the right that lead into the kitchen. I passed the second door, my room, and stopped, by throwing myself against the wall and digging my nails into the baby blue paint, in an absolute effort to avoid the spider leg that punched a crude, splintered hold through the wall, barring my path. The appendage glimmered with a slick residue.
I used the smooth texture of the wall to help me maneuver low enough to snake under the creature's leg just before seven more limbs simultaneously bashed through the wall, sending me, flailing, to the ground. Debris and dust particles swelled into the air, a storm cloud raining flickering paint chips. The furious hail of debris quickly enveloped me in its wrath, attacking my open eyes, burning my sight out to nauseating, undefinable murk; a painful whirlwind of shifting, bruised hues interrupted by brief tear-streaked blurs of dust settling in a blanket over the hallway.
The pitch black limbs clicked along the wall, leaving behind deep fissures scared into the wood. The legs stopped walking and formed a vague circular pattern, embedding themselves deeper into the house before all eight legs slowly lifted away from the wall, releasing a quick downpour of rubble from the deep intrusions pressed into the wall. In unison, the legs became visibly tense, their joints meeting in dramatic angles. The harsh glare captured by the slick coating of their flesh, thinned as the smooth skin itself, stretched. The legs continued to elongate, completing the transformation into unforgiving, black needle points. The legs trembled slightly in this position to maintain the taut, painful pressure required to form eight angles of perfect death.
Their trembling ceased.
The legs seemed suspended, perfectly still, somewhere outside of time and probability. I gazed on, dumbstruck, until my eardrums exploded with a sudden, sharp crack and the legs sprung forward. The perfect points sliced through the air, creating a gust of air that stung my flesh and forced me further into the ground and my cry of pain dissolved from my throat into silence.
The points crashed into the wall with solid, deafening blows, crippling the house's foundation. Creaks and pops echoed throughout the hall, surrounding rooms and ceiling with alien anger. The floor trembled wildly, I hastily backed away from the chaos, struggling with balance, using outstretched arms to travel inches at a time, and drag my numb body against the grain of the carpet. My fingers found and excitedly traced the molding of Andrew's room, the last door. Some hope seeped into the tired blood beating through my heart.
The tremors slowed to an almost stop for several waning moments. The thick, breathing cloud of aftermath cleared a thin path of visibility.
A baseball sized chunk of debris broke away from the intersection of the ceiling and the wall, on the opposite side of the deep scars in the wood. It glanced off of the surface of one of the legs and ricocheted between two others before landing into a roll, on the carpet. The resulting hole doubled in depth, spilling several smaller fragments that rattled against the wall on their way down and scattered among the rest of the rubble.
In the following moment, the wall spit out another chunk, from a section just above the floor. The jagged hole hole also split open and deepened. An immense tremor shot through the floor, stronger than any of the previous shocks.
The scene in front of me, froze. My lungs suddenly worked twice as hard as the air slowly thickened. I scrambled backward with newfound desperation. The cool wall met my sweat drenched tee shirt after three paces.
I straightened against the wall and fought with my insides, trying to will my organs to function at a normal pace. My heart threatened to explode straight through my chest. I became fully away of every tick and tock in my body and my mind, unintentionally, tried to separate each function.
The two large, uneven breaks in the wall suddenly met with a deeper vertical gash. The wall slowly bulged outward, breeding cracks and splits that spread almost instantly outward, crumbling the wall completely. A black cloud of filth burst, with frightening speed, through the rapidly growing fractures. I shut my eyes tightly, bowed my head and drew my knees to my chest.
Hot goosebumps sneaked below the surface of my flesh. A wave of of airborne filth crashed over me, rushed up my nostrils and filled my lungs with black poison. I imagined the grime crusting over and rotting away my inner walls, straining them beyond repair.
A venomous hiss rose from down the hall, then died out to throbbing in my ears. I opened my eyes to a blurred, dark world. The black cloud parted in small, scattered patches.
Click. Click. Click. I heard its steps behind the shifting darkness and struggled with the shock waves that knocked the walls askew. The floors shook with each click.
Two, tense and trembling legs emerged from the rolling shadows, digging and climbing along the walls. The narrow hallway forced the creature to create its own path. More legs faded into my view, they bore a black, stringy, wet mass as a body. The raw, dripping form pulsed with a constant rhythm. Its flesh constantly shifted , spasmed and crawled with the same motion and texture as dead flesh, alive with maggots. The flesh captured a glare the same way its legs did. The rippling sheen revealed that it constantly grew in mass.
The thing had trouble maneuvering in close quarters. I climbed to my feet, using the wall as a much needed support. A sharp pain exploded in my lower back, it seeped down into my legs, infecting my lower body and settling as a dull, throbbing pain.
My legs only allowed me to limp down the rest of the hall. My heavy lungs spasmed and forced poison air through my dry, raw throat in half coughs, half gags. Vomit danced at the back of my throat, sneaking into my taste and burning the inside my saliva-less mouth.
The spider smashed into the walls, lingering just a few feet behind me, punching through the wood, reducing my beautiful home into painful splinters, a pile of smoking ruin. The usual clicks mixed with the overwhelming, booming sounds of death beating and slicing a trail to me. The carpet ended and I stepped into the kitchen.
A devastating shudder rocked the ground in a violent quake that punched me in my center of gravity, almost toppling me. The moment I won my composure from collapsing, night's stinging breeze licked the back of my neck. The cold air spilled from a growing fracture in the ceiling and then rushed to assault me from behind falling walls.
Wood splintered sharply and concrete shattered apart, cracking against other hard surfaces and I thought I heard fire crackling. My hearing popped and the sound of a frantic beating overtook me, I thought I slammed my head repeatedly against a concrete wall, even the smashing and cracking faded and died to the thumping blood vessels in my ears.
My bruised, numb, and dying body spilled out onto the back door's concrete steps. My head cracked against the last step and my vision burst and melted into whiteness.
A bright ball of orange light expanded from the center of that white backdrop. It hurt my eyes, and burned away the rest of the nothingness.
I relaxed and my head tipped to the side. A clear blue sky stood behind the orange sun.
“Holy shit!” Andrew's fresh, cleanly shaved face peeked in from the edges of my sight, “Fuck, uh,” his face disappeared again, “Stay here dude!, I'm gonna call 911 . . .” his voice floated away with the gentle afternoon breeze. Footsteps clicked, quickly, up the concrete pathway and a door creaked open. The breeze whispered in my ear with the faint song of a sparrow family.
My mind buzzed with quiet static that gradually increased in volume. Gravity pulled my head gently to the side until my chin rested on my shoulder, in the crook of my arm. My vision shifted out of focus. The sun splashed my lower arm, and my skin tone looked a few shades paler than usual through my severely fuzzy sight. My eyes crossed while they tip toed down my arm, starting from my inner elbow, down, and then stopping.
My vision refocused in and out of a fog, several times and then clearly reported two lacerations about the length and width of my thumb. Puss bubbled around the edges of the swollen wounds. Dark red, almost black liquid pooled inside of the punctures, catching the bright shine from the sun's smile. The thick liquid ran down the bend of my arm, slicing red trails through my flesh, leaving it raised and singed black. Pale green flesh boarded the perfectly shaped holes and farther down, my arm blotched a deep purple trail; four dots parallel to another four. I fully uncurled my fist and revealed a squirming, black blob in my palm. Slick residue reflected the sun shine and manipulated the bright glare in perfect waves. The motion captivated my attention, and I watched it grow eight thin legs to carry it into the lush, green grass, becoming smaller and smaller, until its slow moving, graceful legs faded away.
I turned my head back to the sun. The orange light slowly faded into a small orb, disappearing into a pitch black expanse. The static overwhelmed my senses and created a strong copper taste in my mouth.
THE END
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