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“Fuck!” he screamed, slapping at his legs again and again until they were clear. But the room around him at the same time began to move.

Closer.

Billy felt them drop from the low ceiling above his head to land on his bare back. The tickle of tiny legs skittered across his shoulders moving towards his neck, but Billy didn’t pause to swat them. Instead he barreled out of the front of the tent and ran across the swarm of spiders, crushing dozens of them with every crunching step on the sand. When he reached his friends waiting at the treeline, he threw down the bags and turned his back to Casey.

“Get them off me,” he yelled, as he bent and began to swat at the ones that had found their way up his legs and onto the strip of fabric serving as his loincloth.

A flurry of hands slapped at his head, his back and his ass as Casey, Jess and Mark all joined in to kill the spiders.

His body felt on fire with a hundred bites, and Billy reached down to itch at the worst of it around his ankles.

“You’re swelling up,” Mark said, drawing everyone’s attention to where Billy itched. Already the skin of his ankles had ballooned to obscure the edge of his old white sneakers.

“What if he’s allergic?” Jess gasped.

“What if they’re poisonous?” Mark said.

“I’ve got some Benadryl in my bag,” Casey offered.

“Damnit!” Mark complained, swatting at a handful of purple spiders that had latched onto his leg.

“Let’s get to the hut,” Billy said. “And then I’ll take whatever drugs you got!”

He grabbed the bags and led the way, limping slightly as he favored first one foot and then the other.

Gool

Billy dropped the bags and collapsed to the floor, gasping frantically for breath. They had run the entire way back to the hut.

“Make sure none of those damn things came in with us,” he said, and then dragged his nails up and down against the dozens of hive-size bites along his ankles and legs.

Casey kicked her bag a couple times with her foot before gingerly touching it and unzipping the latch to dig inside for a water bottle. Then she pulled a package of allergy medicine from her overnight bag before handing the bottle of water and a couple pills to Billy, who downed them in seconds.

She began to zip her things back up when Mark asked, “Got any food hidden away in there?”

Casey considered for a second and then reached back into the duffel to withdraw a bag of Doritoes. She tossed them to Jess, cautioning, “I don’t know if they qualify as food, but…”

Jess ripped open the bag and downed a handful of the chips before passing them on to Mark, who hungrily did the same.

“We need to get settled for the night,” Billy suggested, reaching for the Doritoes. “It’s almost dark and we don’t have a flashlight.”

He pushed himself up with a groan, and together, they explored the two rooms off the main. Each of them was just large enough to hold a small bed and a tiny bureau.

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would really just like to lie down,” Billy announced. “So I’m picking this room.” He pointed at the far door.

Mark nodded. “Early to bed, early to rise. And I don’t really feel like sitting here talking in the dark.”

Since they’d closed the door of the hut, the shadows had moved from orange to red to grey. Night was settling upon the island, and without a generator or flashlight, the hut was probably only minutes from pitch black.

Casey followed Billy into the far room, and closed the door gently behind them.

“I hope he’s OK,” Jess said, a furrow creasing her forehead. “I’m sorry this isn’t working out.”

“It’s fucked up,” Mark said, shaking his head in disgust. Then he stepped into “their” room and pulled her with him. “But we’ll have to make the best of it.”

He ran a palm down her shoulder, across her ribs and down her waist. “At least we’ve got something like a real bed, and a door.”

Jess turned and put two hands on his shoulders. She leaned up to kiss him, and then embraced him, hard.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she whispered. “But right now… I just want to go to sleep and forget it all.”

Seconds later, she was curled up on the bed in a fetal position. Mark lay behind her, an erection pushing its way through his costume that was doomed to remain unfulfilled. In moments, his girlfriend was snoring.

The Out-doors

Casey woke with Billy’s hand warm and limp against her breast. The night hung thick in the room and for a second, aside from the familiar touch of her boyfriend, she was disoriented. And then the events of the day came back to her.

She rolled away from Billy, and realized the reason she’d awoken. A painful pressure ached below her belly.

She needed to pee.

And the one thing this hut didn’t have was a toilet.

Casey pressed her head back into the pillow and tried to ignore the feeling. Maybe she could just fall back asleep until morning.

Uh-uh.

Minutes later she could almost feel her leg growing wet. She had to go.

Damnit.

When she could ignore it no longer, she slowly disentangled herself from Billy’s arm, and slipped out of the bed. She was going to have to step outside the hut and pee. It would only take a minute…you didn’t have to be a boyscout to pee in the woods, after all.

And bugs…bugs slept at night, right?

*   *   *

Casey let herself out of the hut. Her eyes were already accustomed to the dark, and thanks to the shadows of the moon through the palms, she could see well enough to step around to the side of the metal walls to relieve herself. She didn’t need to leave a puddle where they all would step on their way out the front door.

She tiptoed across the cool sand to the side and squatted to do her business in the shade of a heavy-leafed green bush.

She couldn’t see the legs that approached as she released a long, long stream of pent-up piss from a fucked up day.

She couldn’t see how the warmth of her release called to a hoard of spiders like a brilliant red homing beacon, until the branches of every bush and shrub around her hung low with the bodies of eight-legged purple mouths, waiting to feed.

She did feel a slight tickle when the first brave spider crept up the inner skin of her thigh to follow the warmth. But she thought it was just her own water trailing aberrantly down her leg.

Until something bit her right where she normally only let Billy’s teeth roam.

She tensed, and began to rise, though she wasn’t completely through peeing. She reached between her legs with a hand to still the bite/itch and drew her palm back with the remains of a purple spider there, against the damp.

“Bastard,” she groaned. Her face twisted in disgust at the creature she’d crushed against the folds of her labia. “Fucker!”

She shook it off her hand and began to stand.

But at that moment, all of the spiders began to jump.

They landed in her hair and on her back and shoulders. They skittered down her waist and leapt up from the ground to cover her ankles and shins. They were everywhere. Like a swarm of ants over a spot of grease on a summer sidewalk. They fell from the darkness onto her mouth and crawled around her neck to tickle the lobes of her ears.

They covered her body like a deep violet skin, and they didn’t care when she maniacally batted and slapped and crushed dozens of them with her alarm.

There were hundreds more to take their place.

Casey screamed as the spiders covered her naked body like a skin, creeping with delicate but pointed legs across her breasts and kissing with tiny mouths against the pores of her pubes. But as she screamed, they entered her, from below and above. Her mouths both nether and normal, filled with the chitinous legs of spiders, and she tried in vain to spit them out.