Close to dusk, the cocoon began to sing.
Caitlin heard it first. Doc opened his eyes. He had difficulty keeping them focused. Rex stared up at the cocoon
with his mouth hanging open.
The high-pitched noise was an odd blend of
different frequencies, almost like a band of angels screaming. It
had the strangest effect upon her. It pierced her brain and
resonated in every muscle in her body. She felt herself go slowly
stiff.
The song was paralyzing her.
"Put your hand over your ears!" she cried.
But she couldn't squeeze her ears tight enough
to shut out the sound, and Rex had already succumbed.
The cocoon stirred. A section of the gray
webbing tore. Something wet and black protruded into the dim light.
Caitlin glanced at the camcorder. Doc had
wanted the event recorded. She wondered who would be left to watch
it?
Caitlin wanted to bask in the harmonic song,
drown herself in it and think no more. Whatever was left of her
existence, she didn't want to deal with it. But Rex stood in harm's
way, and she turned to him, fighting her stiffening muscles every
inch of the way. She grabbed him by both arms. Standing a few
inches taller than the deputy, and outweighing him by twenty or
thirty pounds, she had no trouble dragging him out through the
entrance and into the cold afternoon.
Bullets smacked into the side of the picnic
shelter the moment she exposed the two of them. Fractions of a
second later came the sound of the rifle fire that had sent the
projectiles on their way.
She pushed Rex to the ground, fell on top of
him, and buried her face in the snow. Three more bullets plunged
lower to the ground. And then the gunfire paused. On hands and
knees, Caitlin dragged Rex to the cover of the stack of firewood
where the snowmobile was parked. Then she crawled back into the
shelter to rescue Doc Kaufman.
Something emerged from the cocoon. The
spider-lady squirmed. As Caitlin watched, her face ruptured through
the gray silk covering, and she opened her mouth.
And she screamed. She sucked breath, and
screamed again, one long, drawn-out wail of agony.
Caitlin grabbed the spider-woman's foot
protruding through the cocoon and pulled with all her might, trying
to get her away from whatever was hurting her.
The leg came loose and Caitlin fell over
backward. Tissue tore from inside the cocoon, a wet, crackling
sound. The spider woman convulsed. Caitlin clawed at the fabric of
the cocoon in a frantic effort to free her.
The shrill song intensified in defense against
Caitlin's attack. It reached a pitch that sapped Caitlin's
strength. Still, she managed to tear through the webbing.
And the body of the spider lady spilled upon
her, what was left of the corpse. Caitlin staggered back, defeated,
but holding her ground, waiting with an all-encompassing need to see
what manner of creature the caterpillar had become.
It emerged black and wet, an insect with legs. The keening sound intensified, devastatingly effective. Caitlin's
legs became wood. She would not have escaped if only her own life
had been at stake, but Doc lay at her feet, and the need to help him
was greater than her willingness to die. Using every ounce of
effort available to her, she grasped Doc's sleeping back and dragged
him clear of the shelter.
A mere two bullets smacked into the side of the
shelter. Confused and frightened voices cried back and forth the
in the distance. Caitlin ignored the now impotent human danger.
"My rifle," Rex murmured through numbed lips,
only his eyes moving down to indicate the weapon clutched in his
frozen grip.
Forcing her fingers to respond, she grasped the
butt of Rex's gun, and then paused to rest. Rex stared up at her in
horror. Caitlin remembered the gore covering her from head and
face. Rex thought it her own blood. His lips moved. Caitlin could
not hear him over the keening sound growing with the morning light.
She thought of her own caterpillar. She had to
go find it. If it wasn't too late, maybe it would feed her one last
time. Clouds sweeping to the east hid the first gray glow of dawn,
and the moon had set. From time to time, it was dark enough still
to risk a dash to the trees.
"I have to go," she whispered, speaking more to
herself than to Rex.
"Caitlin, no!"
She started out across the field feeling stiff
and clumsy. Putting distance between herself and the shelter, the
keening sound grew dimmer and her body increasingly flexible.
She slipped through the trees and found most of
the hunters clustered about a campfire a half mile away. They
generated a low hum of conversation, terrified to a man. The eerie
sound of the caterpillar's keening echoed through the hills for
miles, too dim for most of the men to pinpoint, and too faint for it
to paralyze. But it struck fear into the hearts of each of them.
Caitlin planned a systematic search for her
caterpillar. She would begin where she had last seen the insect. And it was there that she found it.
The caterpillar hadn't moved, but the boy with
the twenty-two caliber rifle had returned, looking for either her or
her bug.
Caitlin cried out in anguish, but it was too
late to do anything. The boy knelt in the snow with his rifle lying
on the ground before him. The caterpillar was on his back. The
gray tongue was out, except that now it was throwing out a thread of
gray silk, and as the tongue whipped around and around, it was
binding itself and its prey together. It wove its cocoon as fast as
the eye could follow, and it took little more than ten or fifteen
minutes to accomplish its task. Caitlin could do nothing but watch.
Before it finished the cocoon completely,
however, the caterpillar flung its weight from side to side and
toppled the paralyzed boy. Then it crawled along the ground inch by
inch to a nearby tree. And there it climbed, lifting its burden ten
feet off the ground with an amazing display of strength and
determination. The gray tongue lashed again from side to side,
binding itself and its victim to the tree trunk.
Caitlin reached for the abandoned rifle on the
ground. Sensing her presence, the caterpillar trilled soothingly,
inviting her closer. She accepted the invitation, but put the barrel
of the rifle to the boy's chest and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle exploded. The caterpillar thrashed
wildly. She raised her aim slightly and fired again. Black grease
gushed down the truck of the sapling, all that remained of a hundred
human lives.
Caitlin turned away. She hurried back across
the clearing and sank at Rex's side outside the shelter. Rex had
managed to seal Doc inside his sleeping bag where he lay on the
ground nearby. Overhead, the blue sky of dawn began to seep across
the black of night.
The morning was bitterly cold. The wind had
whisked all of the clouds away to the northeast. Toward the west,
it was still dark enough for stars to shine, if there had been any. Instead, she saw a strange band of gold metal flake sprinkled across
the sky to the south.
"I've never seen that before," Caitlin said in
amazement.
Rex said nothing, still writhing in the agony
induced by the keening of the giant insect.
The sky held her attention. "Where did the
stars go? What’s happening to the world?”
Caitlin heard an ominous rattle in Doc's
throat. "We should try to get back to Brighton Hollow," she said,
trying to focus her wandering thoughts to the here and now. The
constant keening of the creature in the park shelter made it
difficult to hold a coherent thought in her head.
Rex eyed the nearby snowmobile, but he made no
effort to move. They were thinking the same thing. They needed to
see for themselves what would became of the caterpillars. It would
accomplish nothing to return to Brighton Hollow ignorant of their
fate.
Rex scooted closer to her after a time. She
curled in close to share her body heat. "I heard gunshots while you
were gone,” he managed to say through lips that seemed not to want
to work. “Did you find your caterpillar?"
"I killed it," she said. "It's dead. It’s
almost over now."
The first rays of sunlight crept over the
eastern horizon. From within the picnic shelter, the singing began
to intensify.
Novels by
William G. Tedford