(from wendigo, a commenter on Cracked.com)
The spiders had been acting odd.
As far as I was concerned, everything about the damned pests was
strange. This was different, though. On the first morning, day one, they
started emerging from their hiding spots and abandoned their webs.
Black Widows, Orb Weavers, they all exposed themselves to any number of would-be predators.
You could barely walk through your yard without entangling yourself in
the near-invisible threads they'd cast out into the breeze. It was as if
a thousand tiny, inverted fishermen had dropped their hooks into the
sky.
The web (of course) lit up with chatter. It was happening anywhere you'd
expect to find arachnids. Within minutes, all the "Ask" sites and
insect expert message boards filled up with annoyed queries.
"What are they doing?"
"Is this happening to anyone else?"
"Is this happening everywhere?!"
The true shock was still to come, as the creatures simultaneously reeled
themselves UP those threads. It was an Indian Rope Trick to stupefy
entomologists the world over.
The consensus at that point? Well, at least they're gone.
Then the sky began to cloud over.
Some caught on quicker than others. A few folks in my neighborhood, not
necessarily ignorant folks, looked upward and determined a storm had set
in. Myself, I immediately recognized the wrongness of it all.
The sunlight was being blotted out, ever so slightly, by one tremendous dome of webbing.
A plane came down over the hills near my house, its engines clogged with soft gauze and mashed spiders.
Five days in, birds started disappearing. Their songs all but ceased,
and the only sign of their existence was the stray tiny, hollow bone
that would drop from high above.
Dark spots could be observed with the naked eye. Using powerful
binoculars or a telescope showed the viewer a myriad of small, cocooned
bodies floating motionless in a lofty, darkening haze. Sparrows, Crows,
Hawks, and even Bats became entangled in the grim construction.
Flights were cancelled soon after the original rash of crashes. Pilots
thought they could simply break through the paltry web-work of such
insignificant beings. Nearly ten thousand dead passengers and crew said
otherwise.
The last plane to be cleared for take-off was the rare exception. There
was a roar, a violent shrieking of engine blades, and then it just
stopped.
It hung there, diagonally, until the entire thing was cocooned above our heads.
The bones that fell to the ground after that did not belong to birds.
It was after a week that "Arachnocalypse", as a term, had been
officially coined. Newspapers and television networks spat the phrase
out at every opportunity, and it took its rightful place alongside
"Snowmageddon", and the rest.
For what it's worth, I think we could've made do, as a species, without
use of the sky. Even though the haze grew thicker and our world grew
darker every day, there were rain storms and natural collapses to give
us small breaks in construction.
The rain, by the way, would come through cloudy and slick. I didn't want to know why.
The real problem, the one we couldn't work around as easily, was the
spiders that remained on land. The jumping spiders, the hunting spiders,
the tarantulas, all of those who seemed to have evolved past
web-weaving.
They could produce some silk, but beyond that they were at a loss. You
could almost feel sorry for them, standing tall on leaves and branches,
preparing for an ascent that was never coming.
I heard stories about scorpions doing the same thing, but I never saw any proof for myself.
It was almost as if they knew. It seemed to drive them mad. When they
weren't stoically waiting for their strands to take root above, they
attacked and bit without any sense of reason.
I lost my pet, a loyal and loving Bulldog. She came in one night covered
in clinging spiders, bites all over her body. Within moments, before I
could even think of who to call (Vet? Poison hotline?) she collapsed and
stopped breathing.
Daddy Longlegs... I don't even know if they were in on the plan,
whatever it was. They seemed to cluster in homes, crawling over people
as they slept, creating vast hordes of staring, though seemingly eyeless
little horrors positioned on faces and chests.
When the things weren't engaged in frightening us to death, they would
simply gather on ceilings and randomly "squat" upward as if it were some
elaborate spectacle the human brain couldn't comprehend.
On the thirty-second day, when the Governments finally began working on possible solutions, everything changed yet again.
The Widowers crawled out from places unseen.
A Widower, about the size and shape of a man, seemed to have no interest
in joining the growing, breeding masses in the skies. The black,
armor-plated arachnid creatures only displayed one common goal.
Ensnaring us.
Daytime, as dark as it had become, was the only time it was relatively
safe to go out. At night, Widowers could be all around you... in the
trees, in crevices... and you'd never suspect. The last thing you'd see
was the red hourglass on their abdomens.
That, and not-quite-human hands scrambling for your hair, your loose clothing, anything within reach.
Abandoned buildings were just as bad as the outdoors. I was with a
group... I want to say this was about two months along... and we all
took shelter in an old doll factory when it grew dark and we couldn't
walk any longer.
The dismembered baby dolls, with their dark streaks of venom and plastic
flesh wounds should've turned us away. Still, the webs they levitated
in seemed old and abandoned. We figured the Widowers had their run of
the place and long since moved on.
I didn't wake up to screaming.
It's weird to say that.
I wish I had woken up to screaming.
Instead, I lazily opened my eyes around what I assume to be Midnight. I
reached out for a bottle of water, only to draw back a hand covered in
burning, dark yellow venom.
I don't know if you've ever seen a bug trapped in a spider's cocoon. All
they can do is silently rock. Back and forth, back and forth, bending
at the middle. Sometimes there'll be a single free limb or antenna that
waves around, trying to feel out any sign of help.
It's the same with people.
I'll have to live out the rest of my days remembering that sight. I'll
have to live with the fact I ran away and left them there. People who
had pulled me out of a burning truck. People who fed and clothed me when
I had nothing.
There was nothing I could do. Logically, I know that.
The red hourglasses were already descending around me, and no matter what form it takes, an hourglass means time is running out.
My time.
Everyone's time.
