The itsy bitsy spider,
Wiped out humanity!
Admit it, you were singing along, weren’t you? Maybe it’s because you have been so eagerly
awaiting the third installment of Crawlies. Well, wait no longer, because here it is! See what fresh horrors await our survivors,
if you dare!
Crawlies - Part 3
The wound was moderate in size and
circular with slightly torn edges.
Besides that from the initial stabbing, there was little blood around
the wound as the crawlies had a powerful coagulant in their stinger that could
be used to accompany the delivery of their eggs into a host. After all, it would do them no good to inject
a host just to have it die. Sammy lie on
the ground panting and going into shock.
Bob loaded another clip into the rifle and shot the handle off of one of
the doors with little consideration for what he might attract or what could be
behind the door itself. With everyone
else’s attention diverted, no one stopped him.
Bob scanned the darkened room and saw
no sign of crawlies. He entered with a
little more caution then he had shown in opening the door. He quickly found what he was looking for and
drug it out into the hallway. Bob used
the chair to prop up Sammy’s feet. When
Callie looked at him questioningly, he simply stated, “To prevent shock.” Callie just nodded and turned her attention
back to Sammy.
“Shhhh,” she cooed, “It’s going to be
all right. Everything will be fine,
you’ll see.” She gently stroked his long
hair away from his face. She had no
romantic feelings for him, but felt that he deserved the kindest of treatment
given the circumstances. Sammy looked up
at her and managed to slow his breathing and nod.
Sammy croaked out, “You know what you
have to do.” He reached into the chest
pocket on his jacket and pulled out a small package. With shaking hands, he tore the package open
and a small vial of gasoline and matches fell out. Callie shook her head and looked away. She wanted to scream at the injustice of it
all. The whole situation sucked and she
was tired of watching good people die because humans had been bumped down a few
notches on the food chain. She wanted to
sink deep within herself and pretend that none of this was happening.
Sammy’s voice brought her out of her
denial. “Please, don’t make me do it
myself. I don’t want to go to
hell.” Callie was disgusted at the very
notion of heaven or hell at the moment.
How could any God allow such a plague to overcome his creation? Humanity may be fucked up, but they didn’t
deserve this. Again, however, she did
not see any need to upset the man. He
was essentially dead. Now that he was a
host, it was just a matter of time.
Callie nodded and reached to Bob for
the rifle without looking at him. When
she felt nothing enter her hand, she looked back towards him. He just shook his head and aimed the rifle at
Sammy.
Bob’s voice was choked with tears,
“Any last words, buddy?” His aim never
wavered from Sammy’s head.
“At least I’ll see Patricia
again.” Sammy managed to say. None of them knew who Patricia was. Sammy had never really talked about his past
prior to the outbreak. Now, they would
never know.
Bob kept his eyes on Sammy as he
pulled the trigger. The left side of
Sammy’s head exploded in a rush of blood, brains, and skull. He instantly fell still. Bob and Callie carried the corpse into the
side room with as much care as they could.
Once the had him situated in the middle of the room and were sure that
there was nothing around him that could
catch, Callie opened the gasoline vial and spread it over the body as
well as she could. She lit a match, closed
her eyes, and dropped it onto the corpse.
There was an instant rush of flames and the body began to be consumed. Bob and Callie left the room without looking
back.
Bob stepped out of the room in an
apparent daze, but quickly looked around and saw Ben cowering across the
hall. Before anyone could react, Bob
grabbed Ben by his shoulders, lifting him off the ground and slamming him into
the wall in one fluid, forceful motion.
Ben could not meet the angry man’s gaze.
He shook, although Callie didn’t know if it was from fear or from
whatever had been wrong with him from the moment he had joined their
group. Bob did not seem to care.
“Where the fuck where you?” Bob
screamed, the spittle coating Ben’s face yet not causing a reaction in the
man. “You throw that fucking thing at
him like your passing a football and then you run? I should put a fucking bullet through your
fucking head!” Bob’s face was crimson
and the veins on his neck and forehead were standing out in his fury. Callie didn’t think that Bob and Sammy had
known each other prior to meeting at the beginning of the outbreak, but they
had been through a lot since that time.
They had as close of a friendship as people could hope for during this
whole mess.
“I didn’t know,” Ben feebly tried to argue
his defense. “I didn’t know it would
infect him.” He continued to shake.
“What did you think the thing was
going to do, give him a fucking kiss?”
Bob shook Ben as he yelled at him.
Callie expected the smaller man’s neck to snap with the ferocity of
Bob’s attack. All of the others in the
group just stood watching the whole thing play out, but for different
reasons.
Natasha was tending to Will and his
injured leg. She had managed to stop the
bleeding and they were lucky that the bullet had gone straight through his
leg. It had miraculously missed hitting
any major arteries from what they could tell.
Will was unable to get up without help.
It was doubtful that he would have helped Ben even if he was able to do
so. Will, Bob, and Sammy had been a team
and he felt the same way about Sammy’s death as Bob. Additionally, he blamed Ben for the bullet
that had injured him and would likely turn into a death sentence. Given the condition of the world, a person
who was unable to run was not likely to survive long. Callie was torn.
Callie didn’t want to see Bob hurt
Ben. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he
deserved it for what he had done, she simply felt some degree of pity for
him. He had reacted in fear and that was
all. At the same time, she had not liked
him from the moment she had met him and believed that they might be better off
without him. Overall, her desire to
please made her hesitant to choose sides.
She had thought that her need for approval was a handicap when the world
was fully functional, but now it was crippling.
There really was a physical need to
be with a group that accompanied with psychological one. She couldn’t picture surviving very long on
her own. She had not realized just how soft
she had been in her life prior to the outbreak.
How much she had taken for granted as a natural part of her daily
routine. She didn’t have the knowledge
or skills to survive something like this on her own. Her conscious and her survival instinct were
at opposition with each other. Finally,
she found herself deciding on the best course of action without having to take
sides.
Callie cleared her throat and spoke
loudly enough to make sure that Bob would hear here through the fog of his
anger. “If you are going to kill him, do
it quickly so we can move on. The longer
we stay here, the less chance we have of finding Jacob and Elizabeth.” She didn’t really think that Bob would kill
Ben and she was desperately hoping that stating it in that way would snap him
out of the rage trance he seemed to be in.
At the same time, it did not place her against Bob, so she felt that it
was a safe move.
Bob seemed to hesitate and then get a
hold of himself. He released Ben, who
sank back to the floor and curled up into a ball. Bob looked down at him in disgust. “This guy isn’t worth the extra time it would
take to kill him.” Bob spat on Ben and
walked away towards Will and Natasha.
Callie looked down at Ben with a mixture of pity and revulsion. After a brief moment, bent over and tapped
him on the shoulder.
“If you are planning on coming with
us, you had better get up,” she said.
With that she walked over to Bob, Will, and Natasha. She felt that her conscience was assuaged at
the attempt. “Can he walk?” She asked
Natasha as she reached them.
“We’ll need to help him, but I think
he’ll make it.” Natasha confirmed.
“Don’t bother,” Will stated as
unemotionally as if he were telling them to go to a movie without him. “I’ll just slow you down.”
“The hell with that,” Bob sneered as
he lifted Will up. Will accepted the
help and managed to limp down the hall with Bob’s help. Bob handed Will the spiked club and took the
machete for himself. He handed Callie
the rifle and commented “Better for someone with two open hands to handle
this.” Natasha still held the flickering
torch. As they started down the hall
Callie noticed that Ben had rejoined them but was hanging a few feet to the
rear of the group.
As they walked down the hall, Callie
could hear their footsteps echoing through the corridor. Her heart pounded and she swung the rifle
from left to right. She expected
something to jump out at them any moment.
After a few minutes and some more twists and turns towards the center of
the building, she began to wish something would attack. It was too quiet. The building was disturbingly unguarded for a
nest. With each step her tension built
until she felt the irrational urge to start banging on walls and objects they
passed in order to prompt something out of hiding. She resisted the urge, but when Will coughed,
she turned quickly and almost fired at him.
Seeing what she was about to do, Bob shoved the barrel of the rifle
towards the floor without a word.
Callie managed to keep herself from
pulling the trigger, but it was close.
She took a deep breath and steadied herself for the continued trek
through the building. They still
followed the blood trail, although it had started to taper off and become
inconsistent. Callie knew that there was
no way that Elizabeth was still alive and wondered how long it would take Jacob
to come to the same conclusion. She was
about to round another corner when she heard a loud grunt of pain from behind
her.
Callie, along with the rest of the
group, turned and saw Ben bent over gripping his stomach in pain. She shined her flashlight right at him and
saw the look of pure terror on his face.
What she did not see was confusion and all of a sudden all of her
questions were answered. Bob must have
sensed the same thing. He passed Will
off to Natasha. Before Ben could react,
Bob slammed him up against a wall and tore his shirt open. Callie instantly saw the reason for Ben’s
closed, secretive nature.
The injection wound on Ben’s chest
had long since healed over, but it was still as clear as it had probably been
on the day he had been made a crawlie host.
Callie watched in disgust and horror as his stomach actually bulged
outward with the stretching of the creatures’ legs and bodies. Bob took several steps back and growled some
incomprehensible swear words. Callie
raised the rifle to shoot Ben and end his misery. Her hesitation allowed Bob to take action.
Bob reached into the back pocket of
his pants and pulled out his gasoline and matches. Before anyone in the group could stop him,
Bob twisted the cap off of the small bottle of gasoline and doused Ben. He quickly struck a match and touched it
right to Ben’s chest. Ben became a pyre
of burning flesh in an instant. As his
screams quickly became shrieks of agony, Callie thought she saw a smile on
Bob’s face. She didn’t hesitate any
longer. Callie pulled the trigger and
ended Ben’s suffering with a single bullet to the head.
Ben’s corpse dropped to a burning
pile on the ground. Will limped over and
added his gasoline to the fire and the popping sound of Ben’s burning flesh was
now accompanied by the high pitch squeals of the trapped and dying crawlies still
in Ben’s body. They all watched until
the fire died down. Bob’s smile did not
fade. Callie gazed at him. She wanted to hate him, but she could not
allow herself to do so. Despite, what
Bob had just done, she still needed him and the rest of the group. She tried to placate her guilty conscious
over what she had just allowed to happen by reminding herself that Ben had been
lying to them the entire time. By doing
so, he had put them all in danger.
“I guess that explains why we haven’t
seen any crawlies in a while,” Bob said, nodding to the blackened corpse on the
floor. “We better go find Jacob and
Elizabeth before the rest of the hive finds us.
They are going to be pissed.”
- - -
Although it could never be verified,
it was a widely held belief by most of the scientists studying the crawlies
that there existed in them some kind of swarm mind. Observations and reports from the field
seemed to suggest a connectivity between the minds of the creatures that bordered
on telepathic. Since it was too dangerous
to gather them in large groups in order to test this theory, all that the
“experts” had to go on was speculation based on circumstantial evidence and
anecdotal reports. Two main sets of
evidence pointed strongly towards this conclusion.
It had been noted by clean up teams
each time there was a specimen escape and subsequent overrunning of a
laboratory that every crawlie containment unit was empty. It did not seem to matter how far apart the
cages were or even if they were separated by walls or sections in the
facility. Every containment unit would
be empty, the same previously unknown weakness in the unit being exploited on
every one of them. It seemed obvious to
the scientists conducting the after-incident reviews that it would not have
been possible for any known method of communication to pass along this
information in such a widespread and consistent manner. The general conclusion, although “officially”
dismissed, was that there existed a telepathic link between the crawlies. This link was dubbed hive-mind. The theory was also backed by reports from
the field.
Many soldiers around the world
reported a similar situation when crawlies were encountered. It would not matter if one or a dozen were
initially encountered. Within a few
minutes, crawlies would come from every corner and crevice in the surrounding
area. This was one of the reasons it was
so difficult to collect live specimens.
Soldiers seldom had time to safely capture a specimen without risk of
being overwhelmed. The surviving soldiers
often said it reminded them of a scouting team being sent out to locate then
enemy and then calling in reinforcements.
Anyone who voiced this opinion aloud was quickly reassigned to a
location where they would not stir up any panic. By this time, most of the governments of the
world realized that they were fighting a losing battle. The focus was starting to shift away from
research and containment and towards keeping the public calm while doomsday
scenarios were developed and debated in secret.
Things were coming to an end.
- - -
As they moved through the dark
corridors, they could all hear scuttling sounds coming from behind the
walls. Each one of them knew what that
meant. The crawlies had been keeping
their distance because they knew that Ben was a host. They had sensed the growing creatures within
him that were preparing to emerge and did not want to interfere with that or
risk them being harmed in any attack.
Now, however, Ben was dead and with him the creatures that he had
carried. The crawlies not only no longer
had any reason to stay back, but they were likely going to be seeking revenge
for the death of their own.
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR
THE FINALE OF CRAWLIES!
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