Violet Eyes (35 page)

Anders didn’t waste time worrying about that. At this point…it hardly mattered. He reached down across the dead woman’s waist and hit the silver button to release her belt buckle. As he did, a half-dozen black spiders darted out across her face, and one scurried up from behind her neck to walk across her shoulder. They stopped then, poised. It was as if they were watching him.

Or waiting for him.

He grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her towards him, rolling the stiff body out of the seat and to the ground. Then he grabbed her by the feet, and pulled her quickly to the side of the road. The bites were becoming more and more painful, and Anders threw the sheet to the ground and jumped into the car, swatting his hands up and down his arms and sides trying to dislodge any remaining flies.

The keys were still in the ignition.

He turned it and the engine turned over.

Thank God. He didn’t know what he would have done if he’d gone through all this only to find out that the thing wouldn’t start.

Anders pulled the gear shift to the R position and pressed on the gas. The car creaked, but didn’t move. The Honda in front of him shook slightly.

He didn’t know how hard the woman had driven into the other car, but it hadn’t looked that bad from the outside. Still, his front bumper could be caught in the wheel well of the Honda.

Something tickled, as it trod across his chest, and Anders smashed it instantly with his palm. He didn’t even look at the spider. The slap echoed in the cab.

“Fuck it,” he said, and punched his foot down on the gas.

The car groaned. Something outside whined. And then with a grinding snap, the car lurched free and jumped backwards. He stepped on the brake, threw it into Drive and drove a block down the street, pulling into the Mobil lot. As the car moved, so did the webs in the back of the car. Anders looked in the rearview mirror to see if Rachel had followed him.

As he did, he could see the darkening web-clouds around the back window. The spiders surfaced from somewhere many layers down in the cotton silk, and suddenly the top of the web and the car ceiling were alive with black legs and slashes of purple. They were moving to the front of the car.

He looked at the passenger window and saw dozens of black spiders weeping down the window. They leapt from the tan plastic armrest on the inside of the door and landed on the seat next to him.

Anders slapped the seat, smashing three at once.

He repeated the motion again and again, until the seat next to him was a mess of shiny ebony skins and broken legs and yellow slime.

Spider guts.

“Hurry the fuck up!” he called at the rearview mirror.

The SUV was only now moving forward. When it pulled up next to him, Anders leapt out, and ran around to the driver side. He pulled the door open and pushed Rachel to move over.

“I’m driving,” he announced, as she pulled Eric onto her lap.

“We’re out of gas,” Rachel announced.

“Motherfucker!”

“Anders!”

“What? You think I want to go out there and get eaten alive again?”

She shook her head. “I’ll go this time.”

“No you won’t fuckin’ go. I’ve already got bites all over me. Fuckin’ flies are vicious as a witch.”

Rachel held her hands over Eric’s ears. “C’mon, he doesn’t need to hear that.”

He cocked his head. “Really, Rachel? There are fuckin’ swarms of flies out there that might be something out of the Old Testament, never mind the monster spiders that are spinning webs over everything they touch, and eating anything that moves. And we’re in the middle of trying to get the hell out of Dodge before we’ve all got spiders crawling out of our heads. And you think that it matters if I swear in front of him in the midst of all this? I don’t think it’s the cuss words he’s going to remember if we make it to the other side on this one. I really don’t.”

Anders snorted and put the car in drive, pulling up next to a gas pump. “These better be working,” he grumbled, and then looked at Rachel.

“Make sure you catch anything that gets in here,” he said. He tilted his head towards the backseat. “That goes for you too, loverboy.”

Anders got out of the car and a moment later they felt the gas tank door open and the tank cap drop on its tether to crack against the metal of the car body.

He started the pump running, and while the tank filled, he ran to the gas station and pushed the door open, stepping inside.

There was no attendant in the small station building.

“Might as well get something out of this,” he mumbled, and pulled a handful of Reeces and Nestle bars from the snack rack. Then he grabbed a Mountain Dew from behind the sliding door of the old refrigerator unit. For a moment, he considered just walking with the stuff, but then the voice of his mother whispered in the back of his head. Anders was sometimes an asshole, but he was no thief.

He was leaning over to set a $5 bill down on the counter by the cash register when he saw the familiar violet slash on the wall. Surrounding it, was a body of black, and eight, crookedly, poised legs.

Behind it, another slow moving, smallish spider. There were three more below that. All of them were walking up the wall, away from the floor.

Anders leaned on the counter and looked down to see where they were coming from.

And that’s how he found the attendant.

The boy looked young, but Anders couldn’t tell how young. He still wore the gray mechanic’s one-piece that was the uniform of station attendants everywhere but his face was hidden. The patch on the right breast pocket read
Bob
.

He could see the brown curls of a head of hair that the kid would have probably have killed to have retained twenty years from now…but Bob would never have that chance.

The boy’s face was covered with spiders. And Anders could see that when they moved and shifted and revealed some of the skin beneath, the spiders were sitting on welts. The afterlife of their poison kisses.

Bob had probably been dead awhile. His mouth hung open, and the pale tinge of his lips and tongue looked to be more blue than pink.

Anders picked his $5 back up and shoved it in his pocket. Fuck honesty; nobody was gonna be caring about balancing this station’s cash register anytime soon. He moved towards the door, sure that the SUV’s tank had to be full by now. He put his hand on the steel handle, but didn’t push it open. There was a steady drone in the air that was growing closer. He looked out past the gas tanks to the fly-specked sky, and saw the flash of a plane in the air. It was a smaller craft, a single-engine deal, flying pretty low. There were six other planes following it.

He’d seen the Blue Angels practicing many times—while he lived across the state line at the edge of Florida, he wasn’t that far from the air corridor a few miles outside of Mobile where they ran through their aero-acrobatic show every week. This reminded him of that, only these planes were different. They were propeller craft, and looked to be crop-dusting. A silver jet that looked like steam spewed out behind each of them. The vapor spread through the sky to drift down like a heavy cloud across the houses and trees of Passanattee.

Anders raised an eyebrow. That couldn’t be crop-dusting. No. The city—or more likely the county, since nobody seemed alive back downtown—must have finally put together an insecticide campaign.

“About fuckin’ time,” he murmured, and pushed through the door to run to the SUV. He pulled the gas nozzle out of the tank and quickly capped it. Rachel threw the door open for him as he turned from the pump, and he hoisted his way inside.

“Here, buddy,” he said, tossing Eric a candy bar. “Looks like the cavalry’s finally here.”

“Bug spray doesn’t work on these things,” Rachel said. “They tried it before.”

Anders slapped at two flies that had gotten in with him and after smashing them to the driver’s side window, he turned around to stare out the back window.

“Yeah, well I think whatever they’re using is working.” He pointed at the silver clouds that were settling across the house roofs just a few blocks behind them. The sky there was obviously cleared of the swarm.

“It does look like it’s working,” Terry agreed. Wherever the spray descended, the black dots of flies disappeared.

“There are still some people back there! And they’re alive,” Eric said.

It was true. Running down the main street they had just left, a half mile away, were two figures. A man in a red T-shirt and a woman in shorts and a white tank top. Another woman trailed behind them, carrying a child. Her long black hair trailed across her back as she ran, head bent, tucking her child into her shoulder. Ahead of them all, a dog ran. He was just a couple blocks from the barricade that Anders had just cleared.

They could hear the urgency of the dog’s barking inside the SUV, but the drone of the planes grew louder, and began to drown the animal out. The planes were overtaking the runners. Seconds later, the silver fog settled down around the mother and her child, and then it covered the woman and man. All three of them began staggering, as if they had been running for a very long time.

The mother fell. She dropped the blanket-covered baby to the street as she rolled across the asphalt.

The planes were almost overhead, but they could hear the poor woman screaming. It was a bloodcurdling noise, as if she were being burned alive.

The tank-top woman fell too. And then the red-shirt man’s gait began to grow strangely disjointed. He staggered and weaved across the yellow lines in the center of the street for a block or more before toppling.

“Start the car,” Terry said. The tone of his voice left no room for argument. “We need to go. Now.”

Anders nodded, and turned the key.

The dog’s barking suddenly became more frenzied.

The first fog of the pesticide hit the parking lot of the gas station as Anders shoved the gear shift to Drive.

“Mom, look at the dog,” Eric said. His voice sounded near tears. Rachel pulled him by the shoulders and forced his gaze away from looking out the back window.

“Don’t watch,” she said, and held him away. Behind them, growing smaller but still visible, the dog was twitching and spasming on the ground. The thrashing of its jerking legs and tail propelled it around and around in circles.

“That shit’s not just killing the bugs,” Anders said, pushing the gas pedal down. The buzzing of propellers overhead nearly drowned out his voice.

“There’s only one way to kill the bugs,” Terry said quietly.

“What?” Eric asked. His voice sounded tiny.

“Kill everything,” Terry said.

“Yeah, well, they have to catch us first,” Anders said. The SUV continued to accelerate. The tires slipped slightly as the two lanes suddenly veered left, and widened into four.

“Yippe-ki-yay, Mother-F—”

Rachel punched him, and cut off the “fucker”.

“Yeah!” Eric answered from the backseat. “Go, Dad!”

“Like a bat outta hell,” Anders said, and punched the gas again. The SUV lurched forward and the sound of the death planes faded.

At least for now, they had raced death…and won.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Wednesday, May 22. 8: 46 a.m.

His entire body burned. He was swelling up; he could feel the way his T-shirt had drawn tight across his biceps. The skin just above the waistline of his jeans felt like fire. He was dying to let go of the wheel and use both hands to itch the hell out of his back and thighs and ass. He wanted to, but didn’t dare take his hands off the wheel. Once he began touching the bites…he’d never stop. And right now, they didn’t dare slow down. He had to drive them out of range of those pesticide planes.

“Hey, Crocodile Dundee,” he said.

Terry leaned forward. “Yeah?”

“How long do I got?”

“As long as any of us?” Terry asked.

“Fuck that shit,” Anders said. “Give it to me straight.” He lowered his voice. “I got a hundred bites all over me. Knew it was gonna happen, so I’m not crying. But how long do I got?”

Terry’s face went blank. With one eye, he looked to the backseat to see where Eric was, and if the boy was listening. The kid was kneeling on the seat and looking behind them at the growing clouds of smoke. The church steeple and village hall tower that were normally a staple part of the town’s skyline were lost in the haze. Passanattee was nearly obscured by a cloud of deadly fog.

“I don’t know, exactly,” Terry said. “But it seems to move pretty fast. Overnight at least. So a few hours maybe. How do you feel? Do you want me to drive?”

“Sit back and relax, princess,” Anders said. “I got it. I just needed to know for how long. I’ll get us to the top of the boot, and then I’ll hand over the wheel. First we have to get away from the planes.”

Terry nodded. He opened his mouth to say something, and then thought better of it. Instead he sat back and put a hand on Eric’s shoulder. The boy was kneeling on the seat, watching the road slip away behind them.

“They’re still coming,” Eric said.

Terry nodded. “They are trying to kill all the spiders and flies. And anything that they might have laid eggs in. They have to cover a lot of ground if they’re going to be sure they’ve done that.”

“How far?” Eric asked.

Terry shrugged. “I don’t know. Not as far as we’re going though.”

“What about dad?” Eric asked. “He’s been bit.”

Terry nodded.

“Are the spiders inside him?”

“I don’t know,” Terry said. “Your dad’s a strong guy. He might be able to fight them.”

Terry didn’t want to provide false hope, but he didn’t want to be the one to hand out Anders’s death sentence to the man’s son. But he knew there really wasn’t much hope. If there was any at all. The only ones who knew what these things were had determined the best course of action to eliminate the threat. And it didn’t include vaccines or drugs. Their solution was utter obliteration.

Eric didn’t ask another question, which worked out well, since Terry didn’t have any more answers. They rode in silence for a few minutes.

“It looks like something’s on fire,” Eric announced.

Rachel turned and swore under her breath. “Looks like a big one,” she agreed.