Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“Red Hand?” Apache said.

“Gotta be,” Moondog told him. “I wonder what happened?”

He moved the Wagon slowly through the maze of wrecked vehicles and every time they thought they were free of them, more were revealed in the fog like grim headstones. All had flat tires or torn off bumpers, crushed-in quarter panels or doors missing. Something absolutely devastating had happened here. Slaughter told himself it could have been a battle…but he didn’t believe it. He saw no bullet holes, no burned vehicles, no sign of exchanged ordinance…just those smashed Hummers and trucks. Some of them had huge, gouging scrapes in their sides.

The Wagon moved on, the fog heavier now, misting and drifting about them like fine lace. More abandoned vehicles, badly used. And then…what looked to be dangling thin cables that were hanging everywhere. They were perfectly white and freakish. They came down from the trees and out of the mist overhead, dozens and dozens of them, some drawn taut where they were connected to Hummers but most hanging limp and fraying, many broken and dangling in the slight breeze like broken clothesline wires.

At first, Slaughter thought he was looking at power cables, but power cables weren’t white and there wouldn’t be this many. The farther they went, the more they saw. Like driving through a forest of spaghetti. No, these weren’t power lines. There was only one thing they could be—

“Fucking webs,” Moondog said. “Spider webs.”

“That’s bullshit,” Apache Dan said.

“You think so?”

The others had moved up front now and were looking, feeling the flesh along their spines begin to crawl. Webs or not, there were so many strands of that white material now it became decidedly eerie. Vehicles and trees were festooned in great sheets of the stuff like gigantic cobwebs and blown cotton, spokes and threads, ropes and anchor lines and spreading white nets. It was everywhere. Combining with the pale mist, the webbing looked ghostly and surreal. The Wagon pushed through, snapping strands as it went, pushing through spokes of the stuff and woven filigree. The vehicles they saw now did indeed have human skeletons in them.

This was a graveyard, a great webbed graveyard.

“Maybe we should go back,” Apache Dan said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice and doing a real poor job of it.

“I agree,” Jumbo said. “ Something spun this. I don’t want to see what.”

“Nowhere to turn around,” Moondog informed him.

“Keep pushing through,” Slaughter told him.

The web kept getting thicker, so thick that the wrecked vehicles were swallowed in networks of white mesh. The road ahead was a sold mass of the stuff, an immense funnel web that covered the trees and road and was spun overhead.

Then Apache Dan said, “What in the fuck is that?”

Moondog slowed the bus but it didn’t seem like it could possibly slow enough because that thing that came hopping and scuttling out like some cyclopean blind insect was right in front of them. From where Slaughter was standing he couldn’t be sure what it was with the fog wrapped around it, only he thought it had maybe a dozen eyes that were perfectly liquid and perfectly golden. It had a huge bulbous body that was black-red and shiny, hairs standing out on it like the bristles of a hog. And then the Wagon hit it. The cow-catcher sheared right into the thing and it made a weird, wavering, mewling sort of sound that made everyone’s hair stand on end and some brown-black juice sprayed up over the windshield and the wipers pushed it around in dirty smears.

Nobody said anything.

They knew what it was.

Slaughter felt that he finally knew what it was like to be a fly caught in the web of a house spider as they pushed on, tearing through that intricate network of white gossamer. In the headlights the stuff was shiny, glistening with something that might have been the saliva of spiders. It was about that time that they began seeing things dangling in cocooned pockets—animals, men, lots of men—dangling by threads, shriveled husks sucked dry. Then the mummies were everywhere, hanging like executed men on gallows’ nooses, bumping into the windshield, thumping against the side of the Wagon, and then it wasn’t just the mummies but spiders…or things like spiders: huge, round, bloated bodies the size of basketballs, horribly glistening black-red, hairless and shiny, fans of needle-like legs sprouting from them. And eyes…glossy green eyes like marbles. Dozens of the things hung in clusters and leggy pods as if they were mating, daisy chains of mutant spiders whose jaws dripped a foul sap. There were hundreds of these clusters and literally thousands of individual spiders strung together in snotty harnesses of silk.

Slaughter thought they were like those photographs of social spider colonies in Texas you saw that webbed up forests…except taken to a fantastic extreme.

And then on the roof of the Wagon… thump, thump, thump.

Some of that was the mummies and some of it was the spider-clusters bouncing along the roof, but much of it was individual members dropping onto the War Wagon like it was something to be fed upon, something to be webbed and sipped dry. They could hear them up there scuttling about, perhaps dozens of them, their legs making a skin-crawling ticka-ticka-ticka sound as they raced back and forth over the metal shell.

These are the babies, Slaughter found himself thinking, as afraid as he’d ever been in his life. These are the babies, but somewhere here, somewhere there’s a mother…

There were so many clusters of spiders by then that the Disciples began backing away into the rear of the Wagon. Slaughter and Apache Dan stayed up front with Moondog and, seeing no more wrecked vehicles, he eased the speed up to twenty and then thirty miles an hour and it became louder and louder with the clusters banging off the Wagon and the thumping of the hanging mummies. And then one of those clusters must have broken free of its anchor line and came swinging down at the windshield like a pendulum and the result was instantaneous: two or three of the spiders burst open upon impact with a gush of that brown-black slime and the worst part of it, the very worst part, was that everyone in the Wagon could hear the tinny, shrill, agonized screams of the things.

The windshield was a clotted, oozing mass of spider tissue and spider legs—some of which were still moving—that the wipers knocked from side to side until the spray cleaned the emulsion free.

And it was about this time that something came out of the mist and the webs at them. It was immense…something the size of a pick-up but swollen and shiny with spreading legs like telephone poles and a huge sucking black mouth fanning out with immense fangs. It dropped right on the Wagon and the entire thing shook and groaned, rocking on its springs.

Several of the Disciples cried out.

Slaughter was one of them.

He could see a pair of night-black legs, immense but tapering to surgical points tapping away on the hood…and above, that huge and fleshy thing was tearing at the roof with its fangs and the sound of that was like the blades of shovels scraping iron. The force of those teeth was unbelievable, pushing in dents, and then it did something else, it suckered its mouth to the roof and tried to drain the Wagon. The roof popped out, then in, out, then in, like the shell of an aluminum can in a fist.

“Pour it on, man!” Slaughter cried at Moondog, who stomped the accelerator, and the War Wagon rocketed forward, still sluggish with its rider. And then the spider clusters were thinning and the web was no longer a funnel but threads and wires and ropes, and it was then that the Wagon rocked again with a resounding thump and the thing was gone, jumping back into the mists and webs as the Wagon climbed a hill and broke free from the valley below.