They were brown recluse spiders, also known as fiddle- back spiders, because the shape on their backs looked vaguely like a country fiddle. Steve had seen plenty inTexas , had even been stung by one while rooting in his Aunt Betty’s woodpile as a boy. Over in Arnette, that had been, and it had hurt like a bastard. Like an ant-bite, only hot. Now he understood why the dead man smelled so spoiled in spite of the dry climate. Aunt Betty had insisted on disinfecting the bite with alcohol immediately, telling him that if you ignored a fiddleback’s bite, the flesh 2 around it was apt to start rotting away. It was something in their spit. And if enough of them were to attack a person all at once..
Another pair of fiddlebacks appeared, these two crawling out of the dark crease at the center of the gas- jockey’s strokebook. They joined their pals. Ten, now. Looking at him.
He knew they were. Another one crawled out of the pump-jockey’s hair, journeyed down his fore-head and nose, over his puffed lips, across his cheek It was probably on its way to the convention at the edge of the desk, but Steve didn’t wait to see. He headed for the garage, turning up his collar as he went. For all he knew the goddamn garage could be full of them. Recluse spiders liked dark places.
So be quick. Right?
There was a light-switch to the left of the door. He turned it. Half a dozen dirty fluorescents buzzed to life above the garage area. There were actually two bays, he saw.
In one was a pickup which had been raised on over- sized tires and customized into an all-terrain vehicle- silky blue metal-flake paint, THE DESERT ROVER written in red on the driver’s side of the cab. The other bay would do for the Ryder truck, though, if he moved a pile of tires and the recapping machine.
He waved to Cynthia, not knowing if she could actually see him or not, and crossed to the tires. He was bending over them when a rat leaped out of the dark hole in the 2 center of the stack and sank its teeth into his shirt. Steve cried out in surprise and revulsion and hit himself in the chest with his right fist, breaking its back. The rat began to wriggle and pedal its back legs in the air, squealing through its clenched teeth, trying to bite him.
“Ah, fuck!” Steve scream. “Ah, fuck, you fuck, let go, you little fuck!”
Not so little, though-it was almost the size of a full- grown cat. Steve leaned forward, bowing so his shirt would bell out (he did this without thinking, any more than he was aware he was screaming and cursing), then grabbed the rat’s hairless tail and yanked.
There was a harsh ripping sound as his shirt tore open, and then the rat was doubling over on the lumpy knuckles of its broken spine, trying to bite his hand.
Steve swung it by its tail like a lunatic Tom Sawyer, then let it fly. It zoomed across the garage, a ratsteroid, and smacked into the wall beyond THE DESERT ROVER. It lay still with its clawed feet sticking up. Steve stood watching it, making sure it wasn’t going to get up and come at him again. He
was shuddering all over, and the noise that came out of his mouth made him sound cold- Brr- rrrr- ruhhh.
There was a long, tool-littered table to the right of the door. He snatched up a tire iron, holding it by the pry-bar end, and kicked over the stack of tires. They rolled like tiddlywinks. Two more rats, smaller ones, ran out, but they wanted no part of him; they sprinted, squeaking, toward the shadowy nether regions of the garage.
He couldn’t stand the sick ratblood heat against his skin another second. He tore his shirt the rest of the way open and then pulled it off. He did it one-handed. There was no way he was going to drop the tire iron. You’ll take my tire iron when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, he thought, and laughed. He was still shuddering. He examined his chest carefully, obsessively, for any break in the skin. There was none. “Lucky,” he muttered to himself as he pulled the recapper over to the wall and then hurried to the garage door.
“Lucky, goddam lucky, fucking goddam rat-in-the-box.”
He pushed the button by the door and it began trundling up. He stepped to one side, giving Cynthia room, looking everywhere for rats and spiders and God knew what other nasty surprises. Next to the worktable was a gray mechanic’s coverall hanging from a nail, and as Cynthia drove the Ryder truck into the garage, engine roaring and lights glaring, Steve began to beat this coverall with the tire iron, working from the legs up like a woman beating a rug, watching to see what might run out of the legs or armholes.
Cynthia killed the truck’s engine and slid down from the driver’s seat. “Whatcha doin? Why’d you take your shirt off? You’ll catch your death of cold, the tempera ture’s already started to-”
“Rats.” He had reached the top of the coverall without spooking any wildlife; now he started working his way back down again. Better safe than sorry. He kept hearing the sound the rat’s spine had made when it broke, kept feeling the rat’s tail in his fist. Hot, it had been. Hot.
“Rats?” She. looked around, eyes darting.
“And spiders. The spiders are what got the guy in th_”
He was suddenly alone, Cynthia out the open garage door and on the tarmac, standing in the wind and
blowing sand with her arms wrapped around her thin shoulders “Spiders, ouug, I hate spiders! Worse’n snakes!” She sounded pissed, as if the spiders were his fault. “Get out of there!”
He decided the coverall was safe. He pulled it off the hook, started to toss the tire iron away, then changed his mind. Holding the coverall draped over one arm, he pushed the button beside the door and then went over to Cynthia. She was right, it was getting cold.
The alkali dust stung his bare shoulders and stomach. He began to wriggle his way into the coverall. It was going to be a little baggy in the gut, but better too big than too small, he supposed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wincing and holding a hand to the side of her face as the wind gusted, driving a sheet of sand at them. “It’s just, spiders, ouug, so bad, I can’t… what kind?”
“You don’t want to know.” He zipped the coverall up the front, then put an arm around her. “Did you leave any thing in the truck?”
“My backpack, but I guess I can do without a change of underwear tonight,” she said, and smiled wanly. “What about your phone?”
He patted his left front jeans pocket through the cover-all. “Don’t leave home without it,” he said.
Something tickled across the back of his neck and be slapped at it madly, thinking of the brown recluses lined up so neatly along the edge of the desk, soldiers in some unknown cause out here in nowhere.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m just a little freaked. Come on. Let’s go to the movies.”
“Oh,” she said in that prim little no-nonsense voice that just cracked him up. “A date.
Yes, thanks.”
As Tom Bittingsley led Mary, the Carvers, andAmerica ’s greatest living novelist (at least in the novelist’s opinion) down the alley between The American West and the Desperation Feed and Grain, the wind hooted above them like air blown across the mouth of a pop bottle.
“Don’t use the flashlights,” Ralph said.
“Right,” Billingsley said. “And watch out here. Gar-bage cans, and a pile of old crap.
Lumber, tin cans.”
They skirted around the huddle of cans and the pile of scrap lumber. Mary gasped as Marinville took her arm, at first not sure who it was. When she saw the long, somehow theatrical hair, she attempted to pull free. “Spare me the chivalry. I’m doing fine.”
“I’m not,” he said, holding on. “I don’t see for shit at night anymore. It’s like being blind.” He sounded different. Not humble, exactly-she had an idea that John Marinville could no more be humble than some people could sing middle C off a pitch-pipe-but at least human. She let him hold on.
“Do you see any coyotes?” Ralph asked her in a low voice.
She restrained an urge to make a smart come-back-at least he hadn’t called her “ma’am.”
“No. But I can barely see my own hand in front of my face.”
“They’re gone,” David said. He sounded completely sure of himself. “At least for now.”
“How do you know?” Marinville asked.
David shrugged in the gloom. “Just do.”
And Mary thought they could probably trust him on it. That was how crazy things had gotten.