Creeptych

VIOLET LAGOON

Setting Sail

“You’re sure Jess is coming?” Billy asked pointedly. “You didn’t scare her off with that Blue Lagoon shit?”

Mark shook his head and grinned. “My gal ain’t shy. She’ll be here.”

Casey nodded and popped the top on a Lite. She took a swig and then gave Billy a long kiss. When it broke, her boyfriend could barely hide a gasp. “Wow…” he said. “I could get drunk on that!”

“Jess was all into it,” Casey smiled. “Just like me. We could all use a total break from reality.”

“Well, I’d like to start that break this week,” Billy grumbled, toying with the “Captain’s wheel” of the speedboat. “I only borrowed this for three days you know.”

“We’ll get it back in time,” Mark promised. “Knowing your clients, I think you could get away with being a little late if it came to it.”

“Knowing my clients, I could be at the bottom of the bay if it’s back an hour late,” Billy answered. “Anyway, I’m reformed.”

Mark pointed to the red cooler sitting in the rear of the craft and grinned. “And I suppose you’ll tell me that there’s no secret compartment filled with Mexico’s finest beneath the false floor right about there?”

“I said reformed, not no fun,” Billy said. “And how do you know so much about drug smuggling, hmmm?”

“Well for starters, I’ve been your friend since Freshman year.”

Casey laughed and ran her hand up Mark’s shoulder. “Hey that’s right…You know, I bet you could give me a lot of good dirt on our friend here. For instance, that girl he was seeing last semester, Beth? Did he ever…”

Just then, the slim blur of a brunette came running down the dock yelling, “OK, OK, I’m late! You can make me walk the plank later. But look what I got!”

From a bulging canvass bag, Jess pulled out a few scraps of tan fabric, cut with irregular triangles. One piece was clearly meant as a loincloth, the other could have been a bikini top. Both looked like stage costumes meant for extremely scantily clad prehistoric island dwellers.

“I am not wearing that,” Billy proclaimed, as Mark reached out an arm and helped her climb into the boat.

“Of course not, silly! That’s for Casey.” She reached into her sack and pulled an almost equally small loincloth and tossed it in his lap. “This one’s for you.”

Mark cocked an eyebrow and looked skeptically at her. “I know we said ‘Blue Lagoon’ and all, but do you really think we’re all going to parade around in these?”

“Well not here,” she grinned, waving at the dock, crowded with sailboats and speedboats and people milling about. It was a gorgeous summer Friday morning, and plenty of people were playing hooky and heading out to sea. On many of the decks, small groups of people were kicked back in easy chairs, taking in the sun, drinking beer for brunch and talking with friends. “But Billy promised that nobody goes to this island, it’s off the map. Totally empty. So if we’re going to ‘get away from it all’ and play Blue Lagoon for the weekend, let’s do it. We can change once we’re out near the island.”

“I don’t think you girls will stay in those outfits for long, anyway,” Billy said with an evil grin. Then he turned the key in the ignition and the motor sputtered to life. “All hands on deck,” he called, and after releasing the dock ties, they slowly began to move out into the crystal blue ocean.

The Island

Billy McAllister drove the boat borrowed from one of his former “customers” due south, navigating between various small keys, some of which were barely larger than a dune of sand with a frosting of scrub grass. He was really looking forward to this weekend, and not just for the obvious, expected benefits. After being busted for drug peddling and spending a couple years out of circulation, he’d decided to clean up his act and go back to the U of Miami to earn his botany degree. He wanted to erase all of the black marks of his last couple years of high school, and aborted first couple years of college from his mind. This Blue Lagoon trip celebrated the end of his first term back, and things were really starting to look up. He still had some connections with the people of his past, hence the boat, but he didn’t deal. And people had finally stopped asking him to. Now he had Casey, who he liked to say, put the blo in blonde (though he never said it to her face). And more importantly, semester finals had ended for all of them yesterday afternoon, and Billy felt good about his scores. This weekend, he really had a good reason to party. While it had played him poorly in the end, his checkered past had given him the ability to play tour guide for his friends. If he got nothing else out of three years of serving as the pickup man for shipments of pot, he now had a cartographer’s knowledge of all the lesser known keys south of Florida. And the one they were heading to had once been a favorite spot, since it was large enough to boast trees and an expansive beach, but remote enough to be unfrequented. In all the times he’d stopped there, he’d never seen evidence of another human being. He and his connection may have been the only two ever to set foot on the island, for all he knew.

“Are we there yet?” Mark whined.

Billy turned to look at his friend and saw that Mark was busy staring at the girls, who’d stripped down to bikinis to lounge on the deck. “Like you care right now,” he answered, laughing. “But yeah, actually, we’re just about there. See that?”

He pointed to long strip of sand just to their right. It was one of the larger keys they’d seen in the past half hour; its center held a thick copse of palms and other trees, and while areas of the shore were obscured by scrub grass and silver-green bushes, there were long strips of the beach that looked white and inviting.

“This is the place?” Casey asked. “It looks perfect! Do you think we can find some coconut shells? Jess’s costumes would be better with coconuts…”

“I don’t do coconuts,” Jess answered. “Too heavy.”

“Actually, I was thinking for the guys.”

“Like a codpiece?”

“Dream on,” Billy interrupted the girls’ musings. “But you might want to get off the deck while you’re doing it. I’m pulling us in to shore.”

“Where do we tie up?” Mark asked.

“There should still be a portable dock over there,” Billy answered. “We drop anchor and roll it out. If it’s not there anymore… then we all swim!”

A few minutes later, Billy dove into the water and in just a few powerful strokes was into the shallow water near the beach. He disappeared around a copse of bushes, reappearing a few minutes later with a thumbs-up signal and a rope in hand. The thin wooden slat dock rolled out into the water on large rusted metal wheels. The piece that stayed on the island was anchored by chains to two shafts of metal buried deep in the ground. Billy maneuvered the dock to the deepest part of the beach drop off, and then swam back to the boat to guide them in.

Minutes later, and they were all standing on the beach. Casey surveyed the shore, hands on her hips, the posture making her well-tanned cleavage more than obvious as she slowly turned a 360. “Nice place, Billy,” she finally said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” he answered, his eyes fixed obviously on her breasts.

A tan sliver of fabric hit him in the chest. “Suit up, horndog,” Jess said. She tossed another at Mark.

“You first,” Billy dared, and Jess shrugged. “All talk, no action,” she laughed, and without pause, turned her back to the guys and untied her store bought bikini, let it drop to the sand and then slipped on the scanty homemade bikini top. Then she dropped her bottoms, giving them all a clear view of the white triangle that remained untanned on her ass, as she pulled up the thin triangles attached to a leather string. When she tied it tight, her tan lines were still clearly revealed.

“You’re gonna burn your butt,” Mark warned.

“I brought lotion,” Jess answered. “I might even let you put it on me.”

“I won’t need any,” Casey taunted, and performed the same quick change routine as Jess, her bronze back and ass clearly demonstrating that she spent a lot of time in the sun. And apparently most of it in the nude.

“You ever study with a tan like that?” Mark asked.

Jess put a finger to her boyfriend’s chin and turned his eyes to meet hers. “Watch this way,” she warned.

“Sure,” Casey laughed. “What do you think I do while I’m tanning?”

“Boy’s turn,” Jess announced as Casey turned around, now displaying even more bare skin than her previous bikini had allowed.

Billy shrugged at Mark and the two turned away and dropped their shorts, quickly stepping into costume.

“Aw, look Jess,” Casey taunted. “They’re shy.”

“You two are asking for it,” Mark said, turned back to them. He shifted a little uncomfortably in his new island g-string. It hung loosely between his legs, and didn’t hide the fact that he was more than a little aroused by the situation.

“And they’ll get it. Plenty,” Billy promised. “But first we need to pick a camp site and get setup.”

“Let’s stay near the boat,” Casey suggested. “We could setup right over there at the tree line?”

“Works for me,” Billy said, and Mark shrugged acceptance. Jess hopped back into the boat and tossed her heavy pack to Mark. Billy stepped past her and grabbed a tent bag, and the two walked up the shifting sand to a spot sheltered between two huge palm trees. “Wish I had a hammock,” Mark observed.

They got to work setting up the first tent, while the girls brought some of the smaller gear from the boat and piled it nearby.

Mark popped in the main pole at the same moment as Jess screamed.

“What?” he jumped out from the midst of the green fabric to see her standing on one foot just a couple meters away. Her hand massaged the top of one foot while her eyes stared at the beach in horror.

Casey held her shoulder. “Did it bite?”

“Did what bite?” Billy demanded, and Jess pointed at a spot on the sand. Billy knelt in front of her and stared at the thing she pointed at.

“What is it?” Mark asked, joining him.

“A spider of some kind,” Billy answered, leaning closer to stare at its thin but spiny legs, and oval, violet back.

“Looks like a small crab,” Mark said. “Never seen a purple spider.”

Billy shook his head. “You’d think so, but that’s not a shell. Those legs are insectoid.”

“Is it poisonous?” Jess cried.

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “Did it bite you?”

Jess shook her head. “I was just standing there and I felt something tickle my foot. I looked down and there it was, standing on me. I kicked it off right away.”

Billy stood, and the spider began to run across the sand. But Billy didn’t let it go. He stepped to the left and ground the heel of his sandal on the thing, leaving a glimmering mess of violet film and yellowish mush in his wake.

“It won’t bother you again,” he promised.

Jess hugged herself. “I hate spiders,” she said. “And where there’s one, there are always more.”

“I’ve got bug spray,” Casey announced, and pulled a can from her bag.

“Does it keep away spiders?”

Casey began spraying it all over her friends’ feet and legs. “Guess we’ll see.”

Billy held his nose at the poison sweet smell. “Might keep away boyfriends,” he suggested.

“Really?” Casey asked, and then made a show of slowly spraying her arms, legs and bare midriff. Then she tossed the can to Mark.

“Naw, I guess not,” Billy admitted, and slipped his arm around her back to pull her close.

“Camp first, cum second,” Mark announced.

“Niceeeeee,” Casey rolled her eyes. “Your momma would be so proud.”

“Bet your mom would love to see a picture of that getup you’re almost wearing,” Billy laughed.

“Come and get it,” she taunted, and ran behind the palms and into the foliage beyond. She raised a hand from behind a tall green frond, and dangled the top half of her costume. “No?” she asked, with mock innocence.

Billy looked at Mark, who shrugged and changed his direction. “Cum first, camp second.” Billy grinned, and followed Casey into the jungle.

Mark turned to Jess for a kiss, but she put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him away. “Not right now,” she pleaded. “I’m still a little creeped out.”

A Path Through The Shadows

Later, after Billy and Casey finished their task while Mark and Jess handled setting up camp, they all wolfed down a lunch of ham sandwiches Casey had packed. Mark leaned back against the trunk of a palm, and belched, loudly.

“Truly a well-mannered boy,” Jess observed.

“A compliment to the cook?” he offered.

“Nice try.”

Billy stood up and stretched. “Anyone want to take a hike, see what’s around?”

Jess and Casey jumped up. “Sure,” they said in unison.

Mark moaned and rubbed his bare belly. “But I’m all full and comfy.”

“You’re coming,” Billy demanded. “I’m not leaving you here to drink all the beer. Grab the machete from the boat? We might need to cut a path if it’s really thick.”

They filed beneath the palms in the same direction that Casey had led Billy earlier, and in moments the rich blue sky was replaced by a canopy of deep green. The steamy summer heat dropped by 10 degrees almost instantly. They walked through the bushes and trees, Billy periodically slashing away a few branches, though none really blocked their path. “Breadcrumbs,” he explained. “We can follow the branches back if we get turned around.”

There seemed to be an almost natural path into the center of the island. After walking for just a few minutes, they saw why.

“Check this out,” Billy stopped and pointed to their left. Sheltered behind a stand of thin trees and brush, they could just make out the corner of a silver-topped roof.

“What is it?” Jess asked.

“Looks like a Quonset hut,” Billy said, stepping closer.

“I thought you said nobody ever came to this island,” Casey accused.

Mark stepped past Billy and walked up to the door of the small building.

“Um, I don’t think we should be seen right now,” Jess suggested, wrapping her arms around her chest to hide her cleavage.

“You were the one who made us wear them,” Mark reminded. “But I don’t think you have anything to worry about. I don’t think anybody’s home.”

Billy joined him at the door, a simple metal rectangle with a nameplate in the center, just above the knob. Innovative Industries, it read.

“I didn’t leave the beach much when I came here before,” Billy said. “But I don’t think this was here two years ago.”

Mark turned the knob and the door opened, easily. “Hello?” he called, sticking his neck inside. Then his feet followed.

“All clear,” he declared, and the girls gingerly stepped to follow Billy inside.

The door opened on a long thin room, about 10 feet wide and 20 across. Two doors interrupted the back wall, and Mark and Billy quickly opened and shut those, pronouncing “empty.”

Casey walked along a counter that was attached to the inner wall. It appeared to be made of stainless steel and extended out about three feet from the wall. Above it on the wall were three shelves, littered with vials, steel containers, a shortwave radio, something that looked like an oven, and several other unrecognizable pieces of electronic equipment. The counter itself was empty, except for two steel canisters at the end of the room.

“What is this place?” Casey mused.

Billy shook his head. “Looks like an outpost,” he said. “Weather station or something. No sign that anyone’s been here for awhile though.”

He opened a small white refrigerator at the other end of the room, and gagged when the stench hit him. Black fuzz coated the inside of the appliance, along with unrecognizable lumps of something that no doubt had once been food. He quickly slammed the door shut.

“Generator’s apparently been out of fuel for quite awhile,” he pronounced, still coughing.

They stepped back out of the hut, and now the cool air of the foliage brought a chill to their exposed skin. Jess had an overwhelming desire to pull on a T-shirt. Playing Blue Lagoon was all well and good when you knew nobody else was around, but now she was a bit discomfited that obviously somebody had been to this island.

Mark read her thoughts and put an arm on her shoulders. “Whoever it was, they haven’t been here in a long time. Months maybe. I don’t think we have to worry about them coming back this particular weekend just to spoil our party!”

“C’mon,” Billy said. “Let’s see what’s on the opposite shore. This island isn’t that big; it can’t be much farther.”

They continued walking, but everyone seemed a bit quieter than an hour before. The leaves made the only sound as they shifted in the slight wind.

“Have you noticed there are not even any birds here?” Mark said at one point. “It’s so quiet—no bugs buzzing, no birds calling…”

“It is still,” Billy agreed. “Probably just cuz we’re so far out from the mainland. Think of it this way, that’s just more proof that it’s an uninhabited island.”

“There are spiders,” Jess declared. “Freakin’ ugly spiders.”

Just as she said that, the group stepped through a stand of bushes and were suddenly out of the foliage and back on open beach.

“No spiders here,” Billy said, and pointed to the white sand that extended from the edge of their feet into the crystal clear water just a few yards away. “Anyone want to see if there are fish?”

With that he took off running towards the water. Casey joined him. “Last one in,” she called. Mark and Jess laughed and followed. When they were all chest deep in the water, Casey turned to Jess and pointed to her bikini top, noting, “Um, these costumes don’t really cling very well.” Her naked breast broke the surface of the water briefly, as she demonstrated that the tan triangle had slipped easily to the side.

“Exhibitionist,” Jess accused. “Mine stayed on just fine.”

“Mine could use a little adjusting,” Mark suggested, rubbing up against her thigh to make it obvious that his privates had also slipped out of his loincloth after their short swim.

She reached down and encircled the stray organ, and with a smile, slipped him back inside the fabric. “Down boy,” she laughed.

Mark shook his head and bent to kiss her. “Nuh-uh,” he answered.

From behind them, Casey called out, “We’re going to swim for awhile.”

Mark grinned, and pulled Jess back out of the water towards the beach.

“Right now?” she whispered, glancing at the two playfully wrestling in the water behind them.

“They’ll stay out there awhile,” he promised. “Probably doing the same thing.”

“Ew, with the fish?” she grimaced.

He pulled her into the shade of a bush and kissed her, hard. His hands roamed the wet skin of her back and thighs, trailing up between the cleft of her ass and then cupping her behind to pull her even tighter to him. When he broke the kiss, Jess’s eyes were on fire.

“OK,” she breathed heavily. “Right now.”

She pulled the tie on her bikini and he did the same, just before kneeling to suck one dark nipple gently between his lips. He bit down playfully, and she moaned. “Pick a position,” she whispered. “Cuz one of us is getting sand in their ass.”

“Missionary,” he said, and helped her lay down in the cool sand.

“You’re such a gentleman,” she said, but didn’t protest. She laid down on the sand and opened her thighs provocatively.

“I won’t be a gentleman in a second.”

Jess cried out as he entered her, and stifled herself with a finger.

“You can let go,” he encouraged, “No one will hear.” And soon enough, she did. Her heels dug in and pressed against the sand, and she raised her knees to let him in deeper. It was strangely erotic, to be pressing her feet through cool sand as he dripped warm salty water across her chest. She pressed her feet deeper into the sand until her toes met something that didn’t shift. Cold. A rock. She curled her toes around it as Mark cried out his own finish, and smiled as he wilted against her, resting his head on her chest.

Then as the fog of pleasure faded and the world suddenly took shape again around them, the sand began to itch between her ass cheeks and she gently pushed him up. He rolled to the side and she sat up, looking for her bikini top in the much-disturbed sand.

It lay just beyond her knee, and as she bent forward, she saw the rock that her foot had been massaging. Only, it wasn’t a rock.

“Oh god,” she whispered. “Mark?”

Mark had rolled on his back, but he opened his eyes at the tone of her voice. “What’s the matter?”

“Tell me that isn’t what it looks like,” she said, pulling her foot as far away from the white thing in the sand as she could.

Mark reached out and pulled the thing from the sand and stared into a pair of open eyesockets. Yellowed, bare teeth grinned back at him. Human teeth.

“OK,” he agreed, his voice cracking a bit. “This isn’t a skull.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she swore, leaping to her feet and pulling her bottoms on. “I’ve been playing fuckin’ footsy with a dead guy for the last five minutes.”

Mark dropped the skull. It rolled to the side, and he could see the back of its braincase was broken. It almost looked chewed…

“Better or worse than a spider?” he offered, but she didn’t hear. She was already running for the beach to call to the others.

In The Air

Billy and Casey moved into shallow water, both of them clumsily trying to push their coverings back into some semblance of covering as they stumbled to shore.

“What’s the matter?” Billy said when he reached Jess, who waited impatiently at the water’s edge.

“There’s a dead guy back there!” Jess announced.

Moments later they had all gathered around the skull. Billy reached down and gently pushed sand away from the area that the skull had come from, and soon had uncovered the bleached vertebrae of the neck, followed by the shoulders, collarbone and ribs. Then abruptly, he stopped.

“This guy hasn’t been dead that long,” he said, making a face.

“He’s nothing but bones,” Jess argued.

“Maybe up-top, but not down here.” Billy grimaced and wiped something dark, cool and sticky off the back of his hand on the sand.

And then they all made faces as the smell reached them, a stench of rotting meat mixed with the sour of bad fish.

“Jesus,” Mark said, stepping back.

As Billy stood up they could all see that just below the first couple of exposed ribs, a blackened gory mess yawned under the sand.

“But…what took all of the skin off his head?” Casey asked.

“Not just skin,” Billy answered. His voice sounded grim. “Something took hair, muscle, eyes, fat… without leaving a trace.”

“Fucking gross,” Mark said. Two hands grabbed his arm and squeezed. Jess.

“My foot was on him,” she said. Her voice sounded close to breaking.

Billy slapped a bug on his neck absently. “Well, at least you only touched the clean part.”

Casey echoed Billy, hitting her thigh with her palm. The air around them seemed to hum.

“So much for no bugs,” Mark said. He swatted at a tiny fly or gnat that circled his face.

“Um,” Casey said. “I think we should go.”

Billy turned to look at her, and then his gaze followed her arm, which pointed to a cloud of insects at the edge of the trees. They glittered like a violet constellation in the bright sun. Black and shimmering purple, the horde of tiny insects expanded from the forest in a cloud that grew broader by the second. The co-eds all began to slap at tiny bites as the buzz grew around them, and the air suddenly was alive with tiny beating wings.

“I think we should go now!” Casey screamed, and ran straight through the cloud towards the path of broken branches they had forged. The others followed close on her heels.

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.

“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.

They kept coming.

Time To Go

Mark woke to Billy’s hand on his shoulder. Shaking his shoulder.

“Have you seen Casey?” Billy demanded.

His friend’s face looked haggard; his beard had grown overnight, and his hair curled in strange and wild tangents. The Blue Lagoon loincloth tilted half off his hip, but instead of looking provocative, it looked retarded. Billy’s body was not going to win any modeling contests at the moment; its skin was riddled with swollen red hives where he’d been bitten by spiders.

Mark opened his mouth, yawned and finally spit out one word.

“No.”

Jess moaned next to him and rolled over to see what was up. Billy caught a dark shadow of nipple before she slapped a hand over her chest to hide herself. Strangely, he wasn’t tantalized in the slightest.

“When I woke up, Casey was gone,” he said.

“She probably just woke up and took a walk,” Mark suggested.

“Yeah,” Billy snarled. “Great idea when the island is overrun with fuckin’ man-eating bugs.”

“She’s not a man,” Mark suggested.

“Smartass.”

“Alright, alright,” Mark laughed while stifling a yawn. “We’ll look for her. She probably went back to the tents to get some stuff.”

Jess rolled out of bed and straightened her scanty outfit as Mark rolled out of bed and stretched next to her. The room glowed with the reflection of the light of morning from the one window in the main room.

Together the three of them stepped out of the door to the jungle floor. Jess headed towards the path to the beach where they had docked the day before.

“I can’t believe she would go back to the boat without us,” she said.

Mark didn’t follow her. He caught a glimpse of something red amid the foliage, and stepped around the side of the hut.

“She didn’t,” he called, in answer to Jess. His voice sounded thick, choked.

Billy turned from the path and hurried to join his friend. In seconds the leaves echoed with a cry of pain and anger.

When Jess reached them, Billy was on the ground, his hands touching the ragged flesh of Casey’s hips and head.

There wasn’t much left of her face but a gruesome cavity capped with teeth and vacant eyes.

She was naked, but there was nothing attractive about her corpse. Most of the skin had been eaten away.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Billy kept saying, over and over.

After a few minutes, Mark and Jess pulled him away from her body.

“We need to get out of here,” Jess said again.

“But…”

She pressed a hand to his cheek. “I know. She was my best friend.” A tear trailed down Jess’s face. “But we can’t stay here and wait for the same thing to happen to us. Take us home, Billy.”

Together they rose, and started towards the path. They had only gone a couple steps when Mark turned back and simply said, “hang on” before running back to the hut.

He disappeared through the door as Billy and Jess waited. When he came back out, he was carrying a canister of pesticide.

“I want my shit back,” he explained when he rejoined them.

* * *

The beach was empty when they reached it. The tents were not covered with spiders, but instead stood like lonely sentinels of abandonment.

“Break ‘em down,” Billy said, and didn’t hesitate to go to work on the one he’d set up for himself and Casey. Their Blue Lagoon love nest. He pulled the main post with a vengeance.

Ha. His stomach contracted with the thought. So much for playing the hero. His expedition had killed the best thing in his life. Like the poison of his past come back to bite when he tried to use it for good...

Billy and Mark stowed the tents back on the boat and then came back to pick up the last things.

“We can’t leave her here,” Jess whispered.

Billy shook his head in agreement. “We won’t,” he said.

He turned to Mark. “Help me?”

They walked back to the hut in silence, and barely said a word as they found pieces of her arms and legs that still had skin to grasp as they picked up Casey’s body to carry it back to the boat.

For the first time in his life, Billy looked at the remaining flesh of her breasts and belly and below and saw nothing left of Casey’s body that could get him hard. Instead, he wanted to get sick.

But he forced himself to simply walk.

After they laid Casey’s corpse on the deck of the boat, they returned to the site of the tents to gather up the last stakes and bags and debris.

“So much for paradise,” Mark mumbled. His throat was so thick it felt difficult to breathe.

“Yeah,” Billy agreed.

That was when the buzzing started.

The sky suddenly clouded with the violet of flies, and Jess screamed.

“Not again,” she moaned, collapsing in a heap of limbs to the ground. “I can’t stand it.”

“Than get up,” Mark demanded, and grabbed her arm.

But the horde was already upon them. The air swarmed with thousands of the purplish creatures. They needed to feed. And they descended.

“Fuck!” Billy screamed, as he began swatting the flies right and left. “Let’s get to the boat,” he said, and began to run. But in seconds, he stumbled, and fell hard to the beach, a cloud of purple flies following him.

Jess screamed, and pulled away from Mark, swatting spastically at the air and at her own skin, as she fought to deflect the flies. But it seemed like the more she twisted and slapped and vaulted around, the more buzzing creatures descended from the sky to touch her. To bite her. To eat her…

“Wait a minute,” Mark promised, as he witnessed his two friends collapse to the sand under a swarm of purple.

He ran to where the tents had been, and grabbed the canister that he had brought from the hut. When he got back, he could barely make out the writhing body of Jess beneath the shifting mass of black and violet flies that covered her, thousands of them fighting for sustenance.

Mark didn’t think twice before opening the nozzle of the pesticide on the bugs.

The creatures stiffened and fell from Jess’s body as he sprayed them, until he could see her skin again through the gaps they left behind.

Nearby, Billy fought his way back up from the ground, swatting and twisting until the purple cloud writhed in the air around him but did not settle.

Jess vaulted to her own feet as the flies fell to the ground, instantly killed by the poison of the spray. Her skin already welted with a hundred poison bites, but she smiled and held out her arms to Mark in thanks.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Thank you.”

But then her mouth changed from happy to pain. And Mark witnessed the pale surface of her skin change from tan to crimson.

“Mark?” she said, her voice rising strangely.

Her skin melted as the flesh beneath brought itself to the fore, hemorrhaging its life onto the sand in a broken stream that didn’t stop. Jess screamed as her body seemed to dissolve, and then she collapsed in a lifeless heap to the sand at her boyfriend’s feet. While some of the top half of her remained recognizable, the other half dissolved from the bones in a slurry of blood, until her legbones lay bare on the sand as if they’d been bleached by a hundred summer days of sun.

All told, her death took less than 3 minutes.

“What the hell?” Billy gasped, struggling to come closer while still swatting and twisting to break through the wall of flies that engulfed him.

But when Mark turned the nozzle of the spray gun at him, Billy knew better.

He punched his friend and the spray of the gun let loose nearby, but not on, Billy.

“Did you not see what that just did?” Billy demanded and pointed at the jelly remains of Jess, which were dissolving into the sand as they spoke. “You’re not spraying me with that shit.” As he said it, flies poured over his lips and into his mouth, and Billy coughed so hard he almost puked.

Mark simply looked dazed, as he held the nozzle of the pesticide sprayer. He shifted the nozzle from pointing at Jess’s body to aim at Billy.

Meanwhile, Billy shook his arms and legs like a madman, and then screamed a howl of rage as he suddenly ran away from his friend and towards the ocean. He dove into the cool green water and almost breathed in the ocean with relief as he felt the horde of flies leave his skin. The sting of their bites made him want to jump out of his skin.

Billy swam for a minute beneath the ocean, reveling in the feeling of having his skin freed; he rubbed his hands against his chest and thighs, ensuring that he no longer carried any unwanted passengers, before he rose out of the water and walked again towards the beach.

The swarm didn’t wait before they attacked again. The cloud converged on Mark, who stood on the beach watching the water for Billy to resurface. And then suddenly Mark dropped the cylinder and began to swat madly at his neck and sides and back. And then he began to yell and dance, twisting across the beach as the bites grew more intense. The cloud of flies surrounded him until there wasn’t a remnant of humanity still visible. Mark became a shimmery hoard of insects, pulsing and moving in a shape that sort of approximated human.

“Help me,” he cried, as Billy came running from the water.

“Help me,” Mark cried again, and Billy reached him and began to swat at the angry flies that shimmered with violet hunger but didn’t leave Mark’s body. The more he tried to swat the flies off Mark, the more they began to gather around and attack him again.

“Get up,” Billy urged, but his friend only moaned, and somewhere beneath the flies, he moaned a vague, “I can’t.”

Billy stepped back and looked at the solid mass of flies that moved with insect energy around a six-foot space on the sand. He thought “space” because there was no indication that his friend lived there, beneath the flies.

“Mark?” he called out.

From deep beneath the bugs, he heard the faintest, horrible plea. “Get them off,” Mark begged, his voice gagging with the bites of insects streaming into his mouth.

Billy bent and began to swat at the bugs that covered his friend… but as he did, and the flies broke above him to swarm around his head, he looked at his hands.

Where they’d touched the legs of his friend, they’d come back wet with blood. Mark’s blood.

Billy stepped back from the swarm and reached out to pick up the pesticide canister.

He turned the nozzle toward his friend and considered the result of not pulling the trigger. It wasn’t good either way.

“I love you, man,” he murmured. And the death of the spray encircled Mark.

“I’m sorry.”

Mark cried out for a moment, and then was quiet as around them the buzz of flies filled the air with excitement and anger and death. The swarm lifted briefly and then abortedly fell again to the sand, in a ray of glimmering violet. In moments, the air had grown quiet, and Billy could see the half-eaten body of his friend, laying exposed and bleeding on the sand. One flap of Mark’s cheek hung down to reveal the white of skull beneath.

Billy felt tears roll down his cheeks, but he didn’t let himself stop to think about what had just happened. Instead he dragged the bloody remains of Billy and Jess toward the boat, carefully loading them onto the deck next to Casey’s. The air still sang in the distance with the call of strangely purple flies, but they seemed to have retreated temporarily from the death doled out by his canister.

He didn’t wait around to let them reconsider. Billy released the boat from shore and headed out, away from the island, towards the mainland.

The sky looked blue and welcoming ahead. Behind, it was wreathed in an angry purple glow. Billy didn’t look back. He couldn’t. His eyes wouldn’t stop crying.

At Home

Billy was a hero. And a victim. The papers painted it both ways. He didn’t think much about it. Instead, he stared at his coffee every morning in his apartment, and wondered when his headache was going to go away.

Wondered, until one day, he felt it shift and move. And his eyes exploded into tears from the pressure.

“Damnit,” he complained, and hung his head into his hands.

When he pulled his head back up, his palms were glistening.

Tears had escaped from his eyes, and as he looked at the white of his hand, he saw the remains of something purple fragmented across his skin. He pressed his hands to his forehead and brought them back, There was another tear left behind.

And another purple glimmer. As he looked closer, the legs of the glimmer moved.

The legs of his new cargo.

The legs that made his headache grow deeper. The legs of spiders with violet eyes.

He thought of the flies, and their bites. And he thought of the maggots that flies normally left behind. These flies, perhaps, left something else. Something that hatched with eight legs.

He remembered the blown-out hole in the back of the skull they had found on the island and groaned.

Maybe this time, they would be gentler, kinder.

But when Billy laid back in his bed, he really didn’t think so.

Instead, he waited for the explosion to build at the back of his skull. He waited for the inevitable.

And he cried purple tears.