Micro

She threw the rock at him. It struck his breastplate and bounced off with a thump.

He raised his gun at her and took aim through the scope and chuckled just as the fangs closed around him and yanked him into the air, crushing his gun. He screamed.

The spider took a few steps forward and then, surprisingly, flipped itself over on its back, while Karen sprinted for safety. Lying on its back, it lifted the man into the air, sinking its fangs deeper. The razor-sharp, hollow tips punched through the man’s armor, and began pumping venom into him.

His body swelled up as the venom pressurized it, until his armor began to make popping sounds, and blood mixed with venom began squirting out of the cracks in the armor. As the venom went to work, his spine curved backward and his head whipped back and forth. Neurotoxins in the venom set off a firestorm in his central nervous system. He began to writhe, and went into convulsions, a grand mal seizure. As he seized, his eyes rolled up into his head until only the whites showed. Then, abruptly, the whites turned hot-red. Blood vessels had burst in his eyes, as they were rupturing everywhere in his body, for the venom contained digestive enzymes that liquefy flesh. Internal hemorrhages flooded the man’s body, until his heart stopped.

The spider venom was Ebola in thirty seconds.

The spider continued to pump poison into the body until the armor began to crack and split. The breastplate popped open, and the man’s viscera peeked out, drizzling venom.

Karen had taken cover behind a fern, where she found Rick crouching, blowpipe in hand.

They watched the spider process its meal.

Having killed the prey while it lay on its back, the spider flipped over and stood upright on its eight legs again, and began cutting up the prey. It gripped the man in its palps, a pair of hand-like appendages on either side of its mouth. The fangs opened like folding knives; they had serrated inner blades. The blades macerated the body, chopping it into a bloody mash of flesh, broken bones, and intestinal contents, mixed with scraps of Kevlar and pieces of plastic. Using its palps, the spider handled the meat-mass deftly, molding and shaping it into a food ball, while squirting digestive fluid into the mass through the tips of its fangs. In a minute or two, the human remains had been turned into a spheroid of liquescent pap speckled with bone fragments and shredded armor.

“Interesting,” Karen whispered, and turned to Rick. “Spiders digest their food outside their bodies.”

“I didn’t know.”

Having digested its prey, the spider placed its mouth firmly on the food ball and began sucking fluids out of the mess, while its stomach made a steady pumping noise. The eyes gleamed with a faraway expression, Karen thought, or maybe a look of satisfaction.

“Do we need to worry?” Rick asked.

“Nah, she’s busy. But we should get out of here before she starts hunting again.”

They began calling for Erika and Danny. Erika had hidden herself under a hibiscus flower, and Danny had tucked himself under a tree root.

There were four survivors now. Rick, Karen, Erika, and Danny. They gathered themselves, put on the packs, and hurried off into the ferns, abandoning the bodies of Peter and Amar, while a sense of terrible emptiness swept over them. Amar Singh, a gentle person who loved plants, was gone. Peter Jansen, gone. It had not seemed possible that Peter could die.

The loss of Peter had devastated them. “He was so steady,” Rick said. “I really thought he could bring us through.”

“Peter was our hope,” Erika said. She began to cry. “I believed he would save us, somehow.”

“This is what I predicted,” Danny said. He sat down and adjusted his arm sling, then, with his good hand, unstuck some duct tape on his grass shoe and stuck it back in place, trying to tighten his shoe. Then he put his head down between his knees. His muffled voice rose up: “The inevitable has happened…The catastrophe…We are completely, totally, utterly…dead.”

“Actually we’re still alive,” Rick said.

“Not for long,” Danny muttered.

Karen said, “We all had faith in Peter. He was so…calm. He never lost his courage.” She wiped sweat from her face, and hefted her pack, adjusting it, and kept walking. Karen could hardly admit it to herself, but for the first time she had lost her nerve entirely. She was petrified. She couldn’t see how they would ever get back to Nanigen. “Peter was the only person who could lead us. Now we don’t have a leader.”

“Yeah, and it’s clear that Drake knows we’re alive and is trying to kill us-sending hired killers to take us out,” Rick said. “We got rid of two goons, but who knows who else is out there with orders to kill us.”

“Two of them?” Karen asked him.