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.
