The Desert

“They haven’t moved since . . .” Dom started to say, then cut himself off.

I knew how the sentence ended. Since Trish and Jack had made a run for their car parked beyond the driveway, that’s what he was going to say.

Since the spiders had swarmed them.

The Sonoran desert sun shone mercilessly, and the electricity was off in the new house we were trapped in; without air conditioning, we were broiling in the heat. Our cell phones collectively had no signal. Suzy’s father had wanted a home “away from the damn city” and he’d gotten his wish. Despite the explosive growth of the Phoenix metro area in the past decade, Arizona was a big state with plenty of open space left for folks like Suzy’s dad.

Irrationally, I hated him for this. We wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for him.

Or, I reasoned, if we hadn’t decided to spend a Friday night getting hammered before the movers brought in the new furniture.

“So whaddya think?” Dom asked. It was the fifth time he’d asked me in as many hours.

“Man, I don’t know,” I whispered back, as if the arachnids could hear me. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

The spiders had shown up during the night while the six of us were bombed out of our skulls. At least, that’s what we figured. They were already in position around the house by the time dawn broke over the mountains.

I’d seen plenty of spider-related horror movies. All of them, probably. None had depicted a swarm, if that was the right etymological term, of spiders in a perfect circle, motionless, moving only when a human dared step foot outside.

A perfect circle.

None had come indoors that we knew of. That didn’t jibe with the horror movies; the hairy little bastards always found some crevice to squeeze in and drop down on their unsuspecting prey. Not so here, at least not that we had seen. These spiders just waited and watched us, a million-billon sets of eight eyes awaiting our next attempt to go outdoors.

Also contrary to my Hollywood education, these weren’t some mutated super-spiders; only every species known to the desert. Black widows, strangely out of their webs, mingled with tarantulas and daddy long-legs, which stayed nearby the larger grapefruit spiders and brown recluses.

“We can’t stay here,” Dom said.

“I know,” I replied.

We’d only brought snacks and beer. The house was otherwise empty. We’d previously discussed using duct tape around Dom’s tall boots and sealing his hands in work gloves, only to discover we had neither tape nor gloves. I knew a single bite from even the most poisonous of the spiders wouldn’t be enough to kill anyone apart from a child or the elderly, neither of which were in the house. Two, three, or more bites would sicken a person, but with quick attention, even several black widow bites wouldn’t necessarily be fatal. How many bites, from widows and other species, Jack and Trish had sustained before they fell to the ground, I didn’t know. We were all wearing shorts and t-shirts or tanks, plenty of flesh for the piercing. Dom was the only one in jeans, but his arms were exposed.

The venom—coupled with adrenaline, I guessed—had felled Jack and Trish ten yards from Trish’s VW Bug. The irony was not lost on me. The creatures moved quickly, en masse, skittering over one another for a chance at sinking their fangs into naked flesh. Their numbers were so vast that our two friends had been slowed by the spiders as they swarmed up Jack and Trish’s legs. After Jack and Trish had fallen to the ground, motionless, the beasts got back into position.

Into that perfect circle around the house.

If we’d stopped to think about it, it was our best chance to have escaped, while they were busy killing our friends. Dom and I were too paralyzed watching the assault. Our girlfriends hadn’t watched, and I didn’t blame them.

“Look!” Dom barked.

I followed his gaze, and sucked in a breath. A swarm— the correct term, I was sure—of flying insects was approaching the house. They buzzed around the house briefly before landing on Trish’s car, obscuring it entirely.

“Holy shit,” Dom said.

“Bees?” I asked.

Dom nodded. “Looks like. And wasps. And there’s more coming.”

He pointed again, and I felt my stomach lurch. Three more separate swarms were approaching. One swarm nested on my truck, another on Dom’s van. The third simply flew around the house. The low hum of their sheer numbers rattled the windows.

“What’s happening?” Dom’s girlfriend, Suzy, asked from behind us. She didn’t come close enough to see out the windows.

“Nothin’ good,” Dom said, and Suzy whimpered.

“So even if one of us made it to the cars,” I said slowly, “the wasps would get us.”

“Couldn’t kill us,” Dom said. “It’d take thousands of stings.”

“Wasps and bees didn’t kill Trish and Jack.”

“Ah, hell,” Dom said.

“What are we going to do?” Suzy whined.

Dom leaned back away from the window. “We wait,” he said, folding his arms. “They can’t stay here forever.”

“Neither can we,” I said.

I got a nasty look for that.

“What if they come in?” Suzy cried. “What if they—”

“Suzy, shut it,” Dom said. “They haven’t yet, and if they do, it’ll be a good chance to run.” He turned to me. “I can’t back this up, but I get the feelin’ if we can make it past that perimeter, we’ll be okay.”

I’d been thinking the same thing, though I couldn’t express why. The geometry of the arachnid’s circle was unsettling in its perfection, as if drawn by the hand of some eight-legged deity, delineating their boundary. For what purpose, I didn’t know, but it was too well marked to be accidental.

“On the other hand,” I said, “the cars are beyond the circle, and the wasps don’t seem to mind.”

“Think they’d attack if we got past that line?”

“I do.”

“Well, shit.”

“Why aren’t they moving?” I wondered aloud.

“Don’t matter,” Dom said. “It just don’t matter, bro.” He sighed through his nose and began walking back toward the living room.

“We’ll wait,” he said, and disappeared. I heard him grab a beer from the cooler.

Night came. I stayed by the kitchen window. There was no moon to speak of, and since the electricity hadn’t been turned on yet, the landscaping lights offered no clear view of the arachnids. I did think I saw something coming toward the house around midnight, but it was too dark to be certain. At dawn the following day, I saw that I’d been right.

“Dom?” I called.

Dom stumbled, bleary eyed, into the kitchen, an empty bottle in hand. “Whu?”

“Look, man.”

Dom leaned over the sink and peered into the morning light.

The circle had expanded and changed color. From the front door to the outer edge of arachnids now measured about thirty yards, well past the vehicles. But it wasn’t spiders that had joined the mass; it was snakes. Coiled, curled, and squiggled, thousands of the slithery bastards had extended the boundary past the spiders, a second front. Tails rattled and tongues flicked, but otherwise, the reptiles were still, just like the spiders, and like the spiders, formed a perfect circle. I recognized diamondback rattlesnakes and other vipers, and swallowed dryly. A spider bite couldn’t kill you, but a rattler bite—or ten—sure as hell could.

The snakes hadn’t come alone. Scorpions of varying shades of yellow and brown had joined their arachnid cousins closer to the house, looking like polka dots amid the brown-backed spiders when viewed from a distance.

The wasps hadn’t left the cars.

“What the hell!” Dom screamed. He threw the bottle into the sink. It shattered, sending brown shards up and over the counter. A small piece cut his hand, and Dom didn’t seem to notice.

My stomach growled. Despite my terror, I needed to eat. I wondered how Lauren, my girlfriend, was faring. I’d almost forgotten her; she’d gone into what was to be Suzy’s bedroom when the swarm arrived, and we hadn’t seen her since. I went in to check on her. She was sleeping. Asleep, or in shock. Either way, there didn’t seem any point in waking her. I dropped to the floor beside her and hugged her close.

Night came again, our third in the house. I heard Dom and Suzy going at it in Suzy’s parent’s room. I couldn’t blame them. The likelihood of getting out of the house alive was drastically diminished with the addition of the snakes, if they behaved the same as the spiders when someone stepped outside. I was sure they would. So would the scorpions. It made the only sense possible in these perverse circumstances. If Dom and Suzy wanted one last tumble before the end came, either from hunger or being attacked by the desert beasts outside, I wouldn’t begrudge them.

I realized then that hunger was a powerful motivator. Dom and I, if not the girls, would have to try to run. The vestige of our reptilian brains wouldn’t let us simply starve to death if a chance for escape were possible. We’d have to obey our basest instincts and make a run for it.

I shuddered and held Lauren, trying to command my shrinking stomach to be silent. I listened for any slithering or skittering in the air vents, and heard nothing.

Nothing inside.

Outside the house, I heard the ravenous cry of wolves.