It was close to two in the morning, and they were tired. They were all so tired.
They’d gotten the spider into the container safely enough, but Patrick put it down too close to the edge of the table, and then Bark’s hip banged against the side of the table. The container teetered. For a heartbeat, it looked as if it was going to be okay. One of those moments Melanie wished she could have back. But it wasn’t okay, and the container tipped and started to fall, and Melanie’s skin barely touched the glass before it spun off the edge, dropped, and smashed on the floor. The shattering sound woke them up. All four of them, yelling and fumbling and trying to catch the spider. It scrambled, alien and fast, up the table leg and across Julie’s lab coat and onto Bark’s shirt and then . . .
A thin split in Bark’s skin. An ooze of blood. The spider gone. Inside him.
They’d picked that spider out from the others because this one, Julie noticed, had subtly different markings from the others. They’d prepared and dissected three that were identical, plus the seven spiders that had died on their own, and those seemed to be the same as well. The only difference with the seven that had died—for no apparent reason—was that they were almost desiccated. As if they’d just sort of used themselves up. It didn’t make much sense to Melanie. None of it did.
They’d started by feeding the spiders normally. All the spiders in the lab were fed on a strict schedule, crickets and mealworms and other insects, but these spiders didn’t seem interested in insects. From the beginning, they’d been after blood. It was grotesque and fascinating. The way they overwhelmed a rat, stripping the flesh from the bone was amazing. It looked like a time-lapse video gone horribly wrong. They had assumed that the food needs of these spiders would correspond to those of the spiders they were already familiar with, and they’d been wrong. These spiders were voracious. And they weren’t patient.
When they first burst from the egg sac, they turned on one another, eating several of their kin in the frenzy of hatching, but they were quick to turn their attention to the rats. But then, yesterday, they’d counted again and realized that, even counting the dead ones, they were three spiders short. After a few minutes of panic, Julie suggested spooling back through the video, and they found footage of the spiders in the tank attacking and eating one another. The spiders that died on their own, the desiccated, used-up spiders, were left alone, but when it was time to feed, every living spider seemed like it was fair game. So instead of dropping in a single rat, Melanie decided to drop in a bunch of rats at the same time to see what happened. The spiders seemed pleased. The sound was disgusting, but it wasn’t long before there were a few more piles of bones.
And one untouched rat.
The surviving rat was pressed against the glass, huddled in the corner of the insectarium, radiating sheer terror. Melanie didn’t usually ascribe much in the way of emotional lives to her rats. She couldn’t afford to. They were things for testing, or, right now, for feeding, and she didn’t want to have a moral crisis every time she wanted to get some work done. There was no other way to describe it, however. The rat looked scared. It was squeaking and shivering and pushing itself as far away as possible from the spiders. The spiders, for their part, were ignoring the rat, which was bizarre to Melanie. They’d positively inhaled the other rats. It had looked like an unruly arachnoid wrestling match as they fed. But this rat seemed as if it were almost invisible to them.
“Julie,” Melanie said. “How many rats have we dropped in?”
“Today?”
“No. Total. What number is this?”
Julie scrolled through some notes on her tablet. “Nine. No. Ten. Counting the first one, and then the ones we just dropped in, we’ve fed them ten rats.”
Patrick gently touched the glass on the other side of the rat’s body. “You think these spiders are counting or something?”
“Or something,” Melanie said. “Why are they leaving this one alone?”
“They didn’t,” Bark said. “Not exactly.”
Melanie looked at him. He’d mostly pulled himself together since she told him she was ending things, but he hadn’t been particularly vocal. “What do you mean?”
“He’s got a cut on him. On his belly.” Bark pointed through the glass.
“Wait,” Patrick said. “We’re short another spider.”