Nate Carmichael brushed his teeth as he walked to the apartment’s open window while his wife, Mindy, stood at the bathroom mirror doing the same. Nate looked into the night sky toward the moon and saw that the silvery reflection was still there.
“What I wouldn’t give to know what that thing is,” he said to his wife with a foamy mouth.
Nothing was known about the silvery reflection. It had shown up in the sky unexpectedly two days ago, and, despite worldwide efforts to identify it, the only thing people had been able to learn about it was, well, that it looked nearly half as big as the moon and appeared to be silver in color. No one knew for sure that it was even a reflection at all. Naturally, conspiracy theories ran wild with talk of secret missile testing and space launches. Some even speculated that an alien invasion was imminent.
“Eh,” Mindy flicked her toothbrush toward Nate, a gesture of dismissal, “I’m sure it’s just some military aircraft or something like that. That’s what these things usually turn out to be.”
Nate stared at the spot in the sky in silence for a while, initially imagining that it was a tear in the universe that led to another realm, then not imagining or thinking anything at all.
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Above, in the spacecraft that the world had been gawking at for two days, an extraterrestrial being sat on its space throne with a full view of planet Earth before him. The craft was so technologically advanced that all the being needed to do was think about zooming in to the humans of interest and a live close-up image of them appeared before it. The spider eggs it had shot toward the planet had landed directly into a man’s mouth, the exact destination it had aimed for.
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“Ahem,” Mindy faked a cough after Nate had been staring motionless for so long that saliva had begun dribbling out of his mouth and onto his bare chest, weaving through his chest hairs.
Nate regained his focus, unaware that he had been staring. He looked around the room and accidentally swallowed a mouthful of toothpaste froth. “What? What happened?”
Mindy rolled her eyes, “You coming to bed, or were you planning to sleep standing up like a bloated horse?”
Nate closed the window and walked to the bathroom sink to clean himself up. “No, I’m…I’m coming,” he said softly but contemplatively.
He slipped into bed still a little confused and unable to account for the time he had spent by the window. His memory was clear as crystal except for those few minutes. He raised the blanket to his chin as his body temperature began to quickly plummet. He began stretching his jaw in all directions, a numbing sensation taking over in his mouth.
Mindy stared at Nate with one eyebrow raised. “Ok, weirdo. Kiss me goodnight.” She thrust her lips onto his and they immediately stuck together with frost. In an attempt to break free, she pressed her hands against Nate’s ribcage and heard a crack, but Nate just stared at the ceiling, his entire body now numb and not able to feel anything. Their mouths parted, but Mindy’s lips were now covered in the skin that had been torn from Nate’s lips. Mindy felt a quick sensation of shock and horror, but her mind immediately became devoid of thought and her body also grew as numb as Nate’s had.
The sun brightened the apartment the next morning, and the married couple realized that they couldn’t recall anything that had happened the night before. “Last I remember,” Nate explained while he inspected his raw lips and blackened ribcage in front of a mirror, “I was brushing my teeth. And I’ve got nothing past that. You?”
“Same,” Mindy replied as she picked Nate’s dead skin from her lips. Her stomach gurgled so loud that Nate could hear it from the other room. “Ugh, and I feel so awful! I don’t know if I can make it into work today.”
Nate walked to where Mindy was. “Honey, you know that neither of us can afford to miss any work with how strapped for cash we are right now.” Nate’s stomach gurgled the same way that Mindy’s had. “I feel just as bad as you do, but we need to press through it. We won’t make rent this month if we don’t.”
Mindy’s cheeks puffed out as she exhaled a nauseous breath. They didn’t know it, but neither of them had slept a wink last night, and their eyes were bloodshot because of it. Mindy threw her hands into the air, “Ok, we’ll just go to work and be miserable all day then.”
“Aren’t we already miserable all day while we’re at work?” Nate tried to get a smile out of Mindy, but it didn’t work.
As the couple walked to work together, blessed that their jobs were in the same high rise, their bodies began swelling and their nausea increased to the highest possible levels, just below the point of falling to their knees in pain. Nate tried to encourage Mindy by reminding her that rent was due by the end of the week, and he also added a subtle threat that he’d leave her if they couldn’t pay it, just in case the encouragement didn’t work.
They entered the elevator with a handful of other people. As they made their way up the building, their bodies started expanding at a quicker rate, like baking dough with too much yeast, Their size made them look like the bloated horse that Mindy had joked about before this nightmare had begun. Within minutes, Nate and Mindy were so enlarged that the other people in the elevator were crammed between them completely unable to move. Screams ensued as bones began to break from the pressure. Nate and Mindy remained silent, experiencing the worst pain imaginable, but no longer able to make a sound.
At the exact moment that the elevator door opened, the happy couple’s bodies burst. Billions of spiders spilled from the elevator and flooded the main floor. A view into the elevator revealed the remains of Nate and Mindy, torn and flattened on the ground like the shells of popped balloons. The bodies of the others that had been in the elevator no longer existed, as they’d all been eaten by the spiders within seconds of Nate and Mindy rupturing.
Everyone on the floor scrambled for safety without really knowing where to go or what to do. There were no heroes, and not a single person attempted to help another. Instead, the strongest of them began hurling the weakest into the spider flood in hopes that it would quench the spiders’ thirst for blood, their hunger for flesh. The spiders began laying millions of eggs, and the eggs grew bigger as the mother arachnids devoured the weak. Once the eggs reached their maturity, they also burst open, and each egg that hatched grew the spider population by billions.
Once everyone on the floor – both the weak and the strong – had been feasted upon, the spiders moved to the remaining floors of the high rise. As the countless mass annihilated the entire building, it moved to the streets, the ones on the upper levels shattering through the windows and mindlessly falling to their deaths, exploding green on impact. As the sky rained spiders, the plague absorbed every living creature on the street so quickly that there wasn’t even time to broadcast the emergency to others so they could prepare.
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The alien creature sat back in his throne and gazed at Earth as the entire planet visibly turned black, starting with the land and slowly taking over the oceans. He sipped at a soda that was nearly empty and smirked. Speaking in the plainest English possible, he relished, “Such a filthy place, but I sure do love it when a plan unfolds exactly how it’s supposed to.”
