Hell's Kitchen

~So where were the spiders?

-D.B.


When it was all said and done, the only people still left on the street were dead. The spiders had begun stacking them in the middle of what had been 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue, an area known not so long ago as Hell’s Kitchen. They’d been at it all night and they were still going strong, he could see, as the sun rose up from behind the buildings across town. It came glowing over the skyline as the monstrosities stacked their hideous column of wasted flesh and blood and bone. Tom Speed found himself almost astounded as he was revolted. He could see the bodies below sagging and spreading, losing form under so much dead weight. He watched in disbelief as the bugs flipped body after body onto the corpse-mountain. Speed had a commanding view of the street. He didn’t see anything human for the whole of it. The spiders held sway here now. The city - or at least this part of it - had been taken. It was hard to gaze up at the creatures - so busy and efficient at their grizzly chore - and not guess the same was true for the rest of Manhattan.

Speed looked up, rapt, as the immense beings ran up and down the street passing corpses through their ranks like water buckets to quench some irresistible, fast moving wildfire. He didn’t remember seeing any of the things last night. Then again, there wasn’t much he did remember of last night. The whole last forty-eight hours, in fact, had been a whirlwind of events, people, and sounds. He’d been drifting in and out of fever dreams and hallucinations and, so far, lucking up. He knew it couldn’t last.

***

You can stay with us you know. Down here. There’s lot’s of us. Daddy says if we keep moving, he can figure out a way to get the city back, or at least to get us out of the city. He says he knows about the spiders. What they are and what they do…If I was you, I’d stay here.

The girl had spoken to him in even, measured tones, even as the sounds of death and gunfire and screaming rained down on them, echoing back a thousand-fold in the cement labyrinth. As she spoke, she redressed his wound, packing it with gauze and disinfectant. She was gentle and his arm felt better. For a while, sitting there watching the mound of bodies grow in the gathering dusk, he thought there might be something to the girl’s idea. Maybe he should hang around. Watching the death creep up and down 9th Avenue, flinging bodies onto the miserable rotting pile, the choice seemed easy.

But that had been at least a few days ago. The bodies were still stacking and the boiling air was thick with rot. The girl hadn’t reappeared to dress his wounds and he wondered if he’d dreamed her. He wondered if he’d been dreaming still. He didn’t remember anything after seeing his friends throat slashed. The blood spray, her eyes. They’d rolled white, and he heard her drown. He’d seen it over and over again in his mind but somehow he couldn’t push his memory past it. He remembered seeing fire out beyond the crowd. He remembered the children closing the distance. They’d meant to kill him…And then…What?

***

He’d woken up here. In the dark, in a sewer pipe? A drain? Someplace directly underneath where he’d been. He recognized the sounds and run toward the closest beam of light. He watched twenty spiders kill hundreds of people.

Spiders. He thought it was appropriate, and the girl…

The spiders can’t get us down here. They can’t smell anything.

The girl he’d dreamed had told him that while putting an imaginary dressing on his imaginary wound. Somehow, the wound was still there. It itched now, where before it had burned, but it was still there. The imaginary dressing? Well it had been hours. It was dirty. He thought he remembered taking it off. At some point he began to doze, and would spend the rest of the night ping-ponging back and forth between weird nocturnal reveries, and the horrible stench and sound of his amazing new reality.


He studied them up close through the drain but they were always moving fast. They were spiders plain as day, but something else as well. They had metal plating jacketing he length of each leg, so there was that. They were giant spiders and therefore not real, actual animals, so there would have to be some metal somewhere. They wore helmets, which wasn’t a spider trait that he recognized. On the other hand, he was certainly no expert. For all he knew, all spiders were all metal. Also, they were wearing pajamas. Black ones. He’d seen a few breathe fire as well. It sprayed from under their Volkswagen-sized midsections in great tumults of orange and red. He watched them silently from the drainpipe as they scurried around the area, picking up three or four bodies at a time and then bolting back down the street towards the mountain of corpses.

***

A few hours later they torched the pile. The gathering and stacking of flesh had long since stopped, and the creatures had gathered around the base face-in like a security cordon in reverse. The blazing NYC sodium lamps caught some type of spray in florescent relief, and from the safety of the drain pipe he was hidden in Tom wondered if they were spraying some form of disinfectant, or sanitizing agent. Then the sharp stench of raw gasoline hit him through the drain-grate and he knew what was about to happen. Just as the loop closed in his mind, the pile of corpses - at least forty feet high by now, went up like a roman candle, snapping and popping in the saturated city air. He could hear the flames feasting on first the gas, feel the omnipotent heat of the thing. Then - after only a few minutes - the dead flesh began to roast and slough off bone. It took five minutes and the entire pile was a flaming, melting mass, dealing out black smoke touched with gasoline, spent oxygen, various roasting plastics, and a deeper, weightier scent, almost appetizing to Tom Speed, whose last square meal had been over a week ago. The street was soon filled with the acrid, malignant smoke, and the pile became a hot glow somewhere in the caustic air. When it started to fall into the grate Speed pulled back and backed a few paces down the giant pipe. He sat, then lay, then fell asleep, dreaming vigorously of horrible things he hoped he’d never remember.