SATURDAY NIGHT

BEN HADN’T COUNTED ON getting lucky that night. He went to the same bar he always went to, the one that got him affordably drunk, and from whence he always went home alone. That night, there was this brunette, short hair, curvy, and with a ready laugh. For some reason, she found Ben to be hilarious. Then her hand was on his thigh, and she was saying she was new to the area, just moved up Florida way, and her apartment was right around the corner.

Goddamn, Ben was not going home alone. He was even going to her apartment. Walking distance, since they were leaning to and fro. The planets must have aligned or something. He wasn’t quite sure what planet it was right then, because Peggy, that was her name, she was more into bourbon, so it was not cheap drinking with her, but if he got laid, it was worth every bill he laid down.

In her tiny but neat apartment, she was kissing him, and stroking his crotch, and before he knew it, they were on the bed, rolling around naked, and she was a fleshy marvel—really, at that point, the drought he had, it wouldn’t have mattered what she looked like—and she was riding him like a fucking rodeo rider. Then she leaned down, and whispered, “Hey cowboy, want to fuck me in the ass?”

He didn’t have to be asked twice. She went to all fours, presented her broad backside, and he drunkenly found his way to her ass crack. Yes, the planets had aligned, the gods had smiled on him, whatever the hell it was, but Ben was in nirvana.

He was balls-deep in Peggy’s ass when something brushed his dick.

His first thought was that some stray fecal matter was in there, coming up to greet him as he thrust into her. This seemed odd to him, as Peggy was clearly no stranger to anal, as her asshole was not virgin territory when he plowed in. He assumed she was a lady who took care of her poop chute, but he was so grateful to get the backdoor action, so he was prepared to deal with it.

He felt it again. Peggy hadn’t reacted much in the last few thrusts, so he knew he wasn’t hurting her, so maybe she had anal warts or something, but then he felt two distinct touches on the head of his cock.

He withdrew, fully expecting to see shit on his dick, she let him go bareback, for God’s sake, but he was clean as a whistle. He slid back on the bed. Peggy wasn’t moving, and he tapped her slightly on her raised ass cheek. Nothing.

Her asshole pulsed, and a leg edged out of her loose sphincter.

“What the hell?”

Then another leg. A hairy spider did a pullup out the iris of her butthole, and unfurled itself, and took residence on her left ass cheek.

The shock made Ben come, his ejaculate hitting Peggy’s backside. The spider was a brown and black tarantula of some kind. It pivoted in Ben’s direction. A second set of legs emerged from Peggy’s sphincter. Another tarantula took up position on the opposite cheek.

Ben backpedaled off the bed, and the first spider, dripping with cum, launched itself. Ben shrieked as the spider landed on his dangling cock. It wrapped its legs around his member. It bit down on his shaft.

Ben screamed, swatted at the spider, but it held on tighter, and stabbed its fangs again and again into his cock. He grabbed the fat, hairy body, pried it off him, and flung it aside. It splatted against the wall and rolled back toward his feet, dead and mangled. He looked down at his swelling cock, on fire with venom, misshapen, and for a brief insane moment, he admired his new girthiness.

More spiders streamed out of Peggy’s asshole.

They ran down her legs to the floor. Stepping back, he slipped on the guts of the first spider he killed, and went down. The spiders swarmed him, their tiny legs skittering over his skin, and he rolled over to crawl away.

A black widow scampered down his thigh, latched onto his scrotum, and sank its fangs into his right testicle. He screamed himself raw, as the testicle burst, his baby seed spilling into his scrotum, as venom filled his sack. He rolled over again, swatting at the arachnids on him. His limbs felt sluggish and numb.

The thickest legs yet pushed out through Peggy’s ass crack. They weren’t legs, but black fingers. They pushed her gaping asshole wider, her perineum ripping, as the fingers thrust up, gripped the ring of flesh, parted it as the hands rose higher. Peggy’s pelvis shattered, her buttocks opening up with a sickening crunch, and its arms thrust into the air. Her spine unzipped, and out of the ruins of her bloody flesh, the Spider King rose.

Tall as a man, it stepped off the bed, its exoskeleton hard and black, and it stood on two humanoid legs, as around its carapace, six arms waved. Its face was matte-black, with more eyes than Ben could count. Its fangs chittered.

It watched Ben as more spiders poured out of Peggy’s body, carpeting the floor and Ben. The last thing he felt was his body going numb, as spider legs tapped over his open, swollen eyeballs.

The Spider King eased down onto all eights and deftly crawled to Ben’s corpse. Around it, the spiders teemed and roiled. The Spider King bent down and tore strips of flesh off Ben’s body, slurping them down.

***

SUNDAY MORNING

Ana and Curt were sitting in the sun, eating brunch at an outside café. Curt was handsome, and he knew it. If what she found in his phone was true, he was content to share his gloriousness with other women. The Florida sun was not yet hot, and the humidity was blessedly low. Such a beautiful day to sit outside, eat a frittata, and figure out how to spend the divorce money. Ana had swallowed another bite of her frittata when she felt a tickle in her throat.

She coughed.

“I think I got a hair in my mouth.” She looked down at her plate. “Gross. I hope it was mine, at least.”

She daintily searched her mouth, found the hair. It came out, straight and wiry. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. Feeling the tickle again, her throat swelled. It felt like she had a blockage in her throat, like when Curt made her deep throat him, except from the opposite direction. She felt something tickle her back molars, and then a scraping along her tonsils, as her mouth filled with heavy hair, and what felt like sticks scratching into her tongue and gums.

She opened her mouth. The spider emerged. Its legs grabbed the sides of her mouth, and it dragged itself out. Ana bit down, and the spider sank its fangs into her tongue. It hung there dangling. She shot up, tripped over her chair, went down, and hit her chin on the table edge. Her jaw clicked shut, cutting the spider and her tongue in half. Blood spurted over the table.

Ana slid off the chair, falling to the ground. Her bloody mouth opened, as spiders deluged out of her mouth, and blanketed the ground.

Seeing movement below him, Curt stood. The spider under the table clambered up his ankle to his pant leg. Curt stumbled back, swatted at it, and when the spider reached his most prized possession, it bit down.

His scream was exquisite.

He went down in a heap, clutching at his groin, and dozens of spiders skittered over him, and he struck at them, but was overwhelmed. He lay motionless, covered in arachnids.

The flow of spiders out of Ana stopped. Her mouth opened wider, and fingers pried at her lips, opened her face, skull splitting, bones cracking. Hands emerged, and the Spider Queen slithered out of Ana’s ruined face.

***

SUNDAY NIGHT

As night fell over the swampy area off Route 192, the Spider Queen reclined in her web. She scanned the darkness with her numerous eyes. Her web was stretched between two palms, rising out of the moss-covered ground. A teeming mob of her children writhed beneath her web.

They parted, forming a walkway between the mass of spiders jumping and crawling.

The Spider King was coming.

He made his way with his army behind him, a column of spiders from all over the world: brown recluses, wolf spiders, and daddy longlegs. Its fangs clicked and snapped as it approached the web.

He tapped the edge of the web. The web shivered, and the Spider Queen turned to her suitor. The King circled the bottom of the web, cautious that the Queen not devour him.

The Queen reared, then backed down. The web quivered, and she tapped on it.

The King tapped back, cautiously mounting the web, he began a slow but steady approach to the Queen.

They squared off, the web trembling as they circled each other.

The Queen presented her backside, and the King salivated into her, orally pleasing her, preparing the way.

The Queen submitted, and the King shot its sperm packet onto the web.

Below his fangs, two shorter legs, his pedipalps, seized the sperm packet. The King advanced on the Queen, and she presented her epigynum, and the King inserted the packet. The orifice closed.

The King went to move back, but the Queen pivoted, and she was on him, forcing him down, her fangs cutting his head off.

She fed on his corpse, storing all the protein.

***

TWO WEEKS LATER

The warmth and humidity of Florida sped the hatching.

Out of the Queen’s huge abdomen, her children emerged. The size of small dogs, hundreds of them cascaded out of her, coating the web, then down and scattering into the swamp.

***

FOUR MONTHS LATER

Somehow, a mid-October day, in a theme park in Florida, was the hottest summer day Sam had ever experienced. Sweat ran into his ass crack. Jenny was whining about how none of the t-shirts fit her, and she needed to have this perfect one. The one with the rat on it. It was so cute, but nothing lay on her right. All Sam knew was that he hadn’t gotten to lay on her at all since this trip began. Every night, they came home too pooped to even play grab-ass, and his money was funneling down some deep dark hole, never to be seen again.

They didn’t even have kids, but here they were in this humid hellhole, surrounded by the dregs of fucking humanity. They, too, were suckered into this magical fantasy like Sam and Jenny, except they were dragging around kids, most of whom looked like they would rather be inside in the central air, playing videogames, than sweating, jostling, and standing in lines for hours for a ride that lasted three minutes.

Sam wished for a meteor to crash down, obliterate the castle, and send body parts flying. At least then, he would have an excuse to leave before all of his money and his will to live were gone.

That’s when the screaming started.

At first, he thought that some cartoon character had come out to meet and greet, and people were acting like a rock star had shown up, but the tenor of the screams was less “Elvis is in the building” and more “Zombie Elvis is eating people’s brains.”

People ran toward Sam, and he got spun, and he saw Jenny go down. He went to help her up, and more people slammed into them.

Thrown to the ground, hands skinned raw on the hot macadam, Sam wished again for the meteor.

It was no special effect, no magic trick the theme park had pulled out of its obsessive-compulsive ass. People were running as black spiders the size of Dobermans clambered over them, their legs clacking off the perfectly maintained pavement.

One was on Sam’s face. The smell was like a thousand wet dogs wrapped in sauerkraut. Its fangs opened, venom dripping from them. It closed its fangs around Sam’s neck, and he felt a hot, blinding pain as his throat was crushed. His head twisted off, and as his dying brain fired off its last synapses, his eyes transmitted one last sideways image, the spider tearing his body limb from limb.

In the days to come, webs were strung down in the underground city beneath the theme park. Tourists hung in the webs, held fast to the strands, consumers now becoming the consumed, food for the growing army.

***

The President was ignoring his Chief of Staff. Always with these goddamn briefings. There was always some shit-fuck problem around every corner, and being the Leader of the Free World was a pain the ass, and played hell with your golf game.

When you are Leader of the Free World and playing on your own goddamn golf course, you can tell the Chief of Staff to shove it up his ass. He was this close to beating the pants off this girly-man of a CEO. Later he planned to drag this sycophant in front of the cameras– if he wanted that merger to go through, that is–and tell them how he got beat like a little bitch at golf, and when the CEO saw the Leader of the Free World in the shower, the Leader was hung like Arnold Palmer.

It was good to be the king.

Shimmying his ass, the Leader of the Free World lined up his shot. The sun shone down on his perfectly shaped right ear, as smooth and blameless as a child’s. He cocked his head to get the line perfect.

Something soft scuttled behind him. A Secret Service agent, near the edge of the course, was pulled back into the bushes.

The Leader stood, mouth open, dull surprise on his face.

The bushes erupted. The spiders charged across the green, headed for the biggest morsel, shining in his white shirt and red hat. They swarmed him.

He really should have read that briefing.

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