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As the man ran to his truck, the drunken woman stumbled back into its confines.
"Eewwwww! I hate ssspidersss! She complained. "Creepy, hairy bodiesss and all thossh grasssping legsss." she slurred.
"Well get in and shut the door!" the truck driver yelled.
But just before he reached his truck he felt something brush the inside of his pants leg. The telltale patter of many ticklish legs moving up his calf.
He stopped and frantically shook his leg as if it were alight.
Out fell a large back spider, which he immediately squished beneath steel capped workboots.
As the arachnid ground into the bitumen and a sickly yellow, green paste spread from beneath his heel, the man could have sworn he felt some kind of vibration resonate from his foot like a ripple. It spread out all around him and gave him a great sense of uneasiness.
As if the spiders weren't enough to unnerve him.
He turned and ran once again, grabbed the pull handle of the truck's door and heaved his none too small bulk back into the cabin.
What he saw stole the breath from his lungs.
His mistress sat still as a statue, wine bottle held in frozen hand. Her face a tableau of absolute fear and terror, mouth hung wide open, as if to scream.
But not a sound had escaped.
And on one of her eyes a huge spider had attached itself. And was feeding on the soft jellylike tissue.
The truck driver was about to scream himself when something bit him on the hand. A sharp double prick, like two hot needles which burned in his veins the second he felt it. It grew in intensity and as the poison ran though his veins it left a strange lethargy in its tracks.
He found he couldn't move. Only stare in terror as the huge spider attached to his mistresses eye writhed about in a greedy feeding frenzy, all the while, more of the little black terrors swarmed into the cabin of his truck.
Somehow he felt detached from all that was happening. As much as it frightened and appalled him, he felt it was happening to somebody else.
Soon the interior of the truck had filled with so many crawling spiders they had piled up into one writhing mass between he and his lover.
And as the pile of dark limbs, shiny mandibles, and fuzzy abdomens grew ever higher, they seemed to coalesce into a dark shadowy shape.
Within a terror filled moment, the truck driver saw the spiders become a man.
This man, though nondescript, had something about him, something totally alien in a way he could not pinpoint.
And from behind round rimmed glasses the truckdriver noticed that one of the stranger's eyes was missing. Almost like he were a porcelain doll and part of his face had been cracked by a tiny hammer and fallen out. Only fathomless blackness lay within. And if the truck driver stared too long, he felt himself being drawn into that missing eye, as if it were the centre of a black hole.
The stranger dusted his jacket and looked at the truckdriver curiously, as if summing him up.
"Yes. You will do most nicely."
He cocked his head in a dismissive gesture at the woman with the wine bottle.
"She however, will not." he said with no emotion.
His focus once again fully centred on the truck driver. "Do you feel the poison coursing though your veins? I take that frightened look as a yes. Soon you will think as I do, and will obey my every whim. Now, close that door and get this vehicle moving again. We have much work to do."
The truck driver complied from a warm and fuzzy place where he knew his mind once lay.
As the wheels crunched over gravel and back onto the smooth road, the truck driver stole a glance at his once lovely lover. Her entire eye socket had withered and rotted, and was drooling yellow ooze. It slowly dripped off the hairs on the tips of the still feeding spider's legs down her frozen face.
And what was even more terrifying, was that the stranger that sat between him and this grizzly sight, now had two eyes.
The stranger adjusted his glasses in what seemed a habitual gesture. When he noticed the drivers observations, he winked at him with the new eye.
"What is that rhetoric you humans are so fond of living by?
An eye for an eye?"
"When I was a child I flew! Then as an adult- I watched others soar."
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