They ran through the jungle, the high-pitched hum of hunger all around them. The cloud followed. “Ouch,” Jess cried, swatting at the things that bit her neck and back.
“Keep moving,” Mark yelled, and pulled her by the hand. “In here,” he said, and led them all to the abandoned metal hut. He yanked open the door and they piled past him, collapsing on the floor as he slammed the door.
From outside, the sound of a thousand flies hummed. From inside, the sound of gasping breath and stifled crying filled the silence. Nobody spoke.
Mark ran a hand across his neck and came back with the remains of three smashed insects. “What are they?” he asked.
Billy looked closer, noting the black underbellies and purple slashes of color across their backs. They were the size of mosquitoes, but thicker. The missing link between a gnat and a housefly. He could just make out the iridescent bulging eyes that were reminiscent of a billion inhabitors of garbage cans and other sources of decay. The procreators of maggots. The death cleaners.
“Some kind of fly,” Billy said finally. “Never seen one like it before though.”
“I thought you knew this island,” Casey accused.
“Yeah, I did,” he said. “Things change.”
The one window to the outside remained obscured by a cloud of buzzing insects. They covered the glass, landing for a few seconds, crawling across it in jerky, fast steps and then rising in the air again to loop and soar, looking for something to still their hunger. The air vibrated with a muffled but constant, nearby hum.
“This is insane,” Casey complained. “We can’t just sit in here.” But she didn’t make a move to leave; she hunched down, back to a wall, arms hugging her shins.
Mark stood up and moved to the corner of the hut. He picked up one of the canisters, and turned it around in his hands, looking for a label. But it was unmarked.
“What are you thinking?” Billy asked.
“Looks like a pesticide sprayer to me,” Mark said, running a finger down the handle that would open the nozzle.
“One way to find out.” Billy got up and went to the door. He put a hand on the knob.
“I’ll open it, you put it out there and spray. See what happens. Just don’t go outside. I don’t want them swarming in here.”
“You can’t open the door,” Casey complained.
“Thought you didn’t want to sit here all afternoon?” Mark said.
“No. But they’ll go away sooner or later, right?”
Mark looked at the swarm outside the window. It showed no signs of moving on. “I’m not sure I believe that at the moment.”
Nobody spoke for a few minutes. They all just listened to the buzzing. Finally Mark walked to the door, and turned the knob. He set the canister on the floor and pushed the door open a crack, just enough to stick the nozzle tube through. Then he grabbed the pump handle on the canister, pulled it up as high as it would go, and slowly pushed it back down. Even though the door was nearly closed, the hut was instantly filled with the smell of strong pesticide. But nobody said a word about the smell, because they were all paying attention to what was going on outside. Outside where the flies were dropping off the window by the dozens. A cloud of silvery white mist ballooned beyond the glass of the window and expanded away from the hut and into the trees.
Mark stopped spraying and pulled the nozzle back inside the room.
“Did it work?” he asked, and joined the others at the window. Outside, the mist dissipated like fog in a slow wind, until the deep green of the trees and bushes beyond were crisp and clear again. The air had grown silent.
“I can’t see a single bug,” Billy whispered. “That shit is good!”
They moved towards the door as one, and slowly pushed it open. The air smelled strongly of chemicals, but otherwise, the area was empty. The ground glittered with violet chitin; so many had fallen that the ground crunched as they walked.
“Back to the tents?” Billy asked.
“Uh, duh,” Jess said. “I wish we’d never left the beach.”
Jess moved ahead of all of them, rushing down the path littered with broken branches from their initial walk across the island.
In minutes, the stench of the spray had faded away and the island scents of palm and saltwater took away the horror of the hour before. Jess was almost smiling when they broke through the edge of the trees and bushes and stepped back out onto the golden sand where they’d pitched their tents.
Only.
The sun-bright grains of sand were largely obscured.
The beach in front of them appeared to move. A wave of purple spiders shifted one way and the other, creeping closer to the treeline with every moment. Jess had just opened her mouth to say something cheerful like, “home again!” when her eyes registered what was really in front of them.
Jess screamed.
The tents were crawling with the creatures, purple legs and feelers shifting to and fro as they explored and tasted the fabric.
“Holy shit,” Billy whispered. “There’s a million of them.”
Jess grabbed Mark’s arm and barely contained a scream. “We have to go,” she said for the second time that afternoon.
“Our stuff,” Casey said. “They’re all over our stuff. They’re probably in our clothes. And our food…we need to get to the boat.”
“I’m not just leaving our tents and equipment here,” Billy protested. “I borrowed most of this shit. Plus…” he pointed at the sun, now falling deep in the west on the horizon. “I don’t really want to navigate the keys in the dark if we don’t have to.”
“The hut had beds,” Mark suggested. “And an airtight door.”
Jess began pulling him back towards the trees instantly.
“I need my stuff,” Casey complained. She rubbed a hand across Billy’s shoulders. “Would you…get my overnight bag for me?”
Billy gave her a sidelong glance. “You want me to wade through a million spiders to get you your fuckin’ toothbrush?” he asked. “You’re serious?”
A shock of white-blonde hair bounced across her forehead as Casey answered with a vehement nod.
Billy rolled his eyes. Casey answered by making hers bigger, as her mouth turned to a pout.
“Big time,” was all he said, before wading into the purple sea.
The spiders didn’t part before his shoes. Instead, as he stepped quickly towards the tent, they followed him, a living wave of hunger. Before he reached the tent, some had climbed up the heels of his shoe and over the laces until they found the warm purchase of his ankle. He bent to slap at his shins, but soldiered on, brushing past the flap of their tent’s “door” without slowing.
In his head, he cursed Casey. She had great tits, and nobody had ever done the grind against him the way she did, but…as much as he liked to look at her, her vanity pissed him off sometimes. Times like now.
The inside of the tent was as alive with spiders as the outside. They ambled along the backlit walls of the tent as if delicately searching the threads for sustenance. His skin crawled as he thought about the hundreds of legs moving silently just above his head and back as he stepped through the tent. They crept slowly across the floor, and a couple dozen of them waited on the sheets of the blowup mattress Billy had intended to grind on with Casey later tonight.
Not now.
He saw her Hello Kitty bag tossed to the right of the bed next to their duffel bags. As he bent to grab them, something icy hot bit his ankle, first on one side and then the next. He slapped at it with his hand, and grimaced when the palm came back spattered with blood.
He looked down and saw his left ankle wreathed in purple spiders. The tickle of their feelers made the skin of his neck crawl, but he saw that several of them had stopped their forward crawl and had attached to his leg like mosquitoes. It was one of those that had shed blood when he’d slapped. His blood. The things were ballooning as they drank from him. Like eight-legged mosquitoes.