It was moving slowly. Mike knew it wasn’t the right word for an eight-legged thing, but it looked as if the spider was limping. He squinted and leaned over. There was clearly something wrong with the bug—two of its legs weren’t moving and it was dragging its body along the ground. Maybe it had been injured in the crash or gotten burned too? Mike shook his head. Who cared what happened to the spider? The only question that mattered was, how the fuck had it gotten into Henderson’s head?
Except, Mike realized, as he watched the spider dragging its body across the floor, the question that was bothering him the most was, why in all of the angels of mercy was the spider coming toward him? Because it was absolutely headed toward him. It wasn’t trying to get away or hide or even oblivious of Mike. It wasn’t doing any of the things that to Mike, in his limited experience with creepy crawlies, seemed natural. No, it was clearly moving in his direction. Mike tried stepping to the side, and the spider changed its line, angling toward him again. Mike took another step to the side and banged into the table that was next to Henderson’s chair, and again, the spider changed its bearing. Mike started to reach for his gun, but he quickly realized that shooting a spider might be overkill. He started to psych himself up to just squash the thing with his foot—it might be big and hairy and incredibly creepy what with the eating its way out of Henderson’s face and then making a beeline for Mike, but it was still something he could stomp on—when the spider stopped moving on a dark spot on the floor.
It took Mike a second to understand what the spider was doing. The dark spot on the floor was blood. He looked at the suit jacket wrapped around his hand and saw a drop of blood fall to the floor. He had been bleeding on the floor.
The dark spot on the floor was his blood.
And as near as he could tell, the spider appeared to be feeding.
Mike wanted to shriek. It took everything in him not to run screaming, but then he felt the table against the back of his thigh again and he remembered the crystal glass he had picked up off the floor. He put the flashlight between his teeth again, then, trying to be careful but quick, he flipped the glass over and slammed it down on top of the spider. He grabbed the flashlight again and pointed it at the glass. The bug didn’t seem to notice at first, but then, after a few seconds, the thing went absolutely fucking berserk. It flung itself at the sides of the glass, hitting it hard enough that Mike could hear the ping of its body. He was glad billionaires had serious, heavy cut-glass crystal on their planes instead of the flimsy plastic cups he got when he flew coach.
A light hit him in the eyes and he realized it was Moreland training his flashlight on him. The cop had come into the plane. “Is that a spider?” he said.
Mike nodded and looked down at the glass. The bug had stopped thrashing and seemed as though it had gone back to working on the blood. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any big jars lying around? Something with a metal lid that we can poke holes in?”
Moreland squatted next to the glass and tapped on the top. The spider started flinging itself against the glass again. Its legs made a disturbing skittering sound, like leaves blown across pavement, and when its body hit the glass it made a clear ringing sound that would have almost been pleasing—like wind chimes—if it weren’t coming from some sort of flesh-and-blood-eating creature that was a quarter of the size of Mike’s fist.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “How about you don’t do that?”
Moreland stood up and turned to walk out of the plane. “I’ll see what I can find. I bet the EMTs or the firefighters have some sort of container that would work.”
Mike kept his flashlight trained on the glass as the sound of Moreland’s footsteps disappeared. There was something niggling at him. Something more than just having a spider eat its way out of Henderson’s face, something about the plane. Reluctantly, he moved the beam of the flashlight off the spider so he could look around. He splayed the light across the wall and the ceiling, but it was just scorched metal, melted plastic, marks from the fire. On the floor, bits of ash stirred whenever the wind cut through the hole in the plane, but the larger lumps of charred materials stayed settled, held down by weight or simply melted to the floor. He extended his leg and poked at one of the lumps with the toe of his shoe and watched it collapse into a pile of loose ash. Were there more of these spiders around? Maybe they’d burned up in the fire? He took a few steps toward the front of the plane and caught what was left of the flight attendant’s body in the beam of the flashlight.