--Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

Rosalba Enrique-Munez started awake, sweat making her sheets clammy. For a moment, she didn't know what disturbed her, a nightmare, maybe, or a sound from outside. She tried to turn toward her alarm clock, but couldn't. She couldn't ... anything. She felt her limbs, but she could not make them move. Her body felt heavy and her chest...

Rosalba found breathing difficult, as if a great weight pressed upon her lungs. She had come quite awake by the time she noticed this, awake enough to realize her problem wasn't a simple bronchial defect. Something sat upon her, weighing down her chest, pinning her arms and immobilizing her legs. That something was alive.

Rosalba tried to scream, but the sound fell away as if it were too much effort. She tried to reach her husband, snoring beside her in bed, but her arm would not move, her hand would not grasp.

Her husband noisily smacked his lips, stretched, and started snoring again.

The thing atop her chortled. It hunched, swaying slightly, a black shadow without definition, making its victim's skin crawl. Something, a hand, perhaps, stroked Rosalba's cheek. The touch felt dry, rough, scratchy, like tree bark.

"You will be one with me," the thing said. Its tremulous whisper bore the ravages of age, a thousand-year-old woman who chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes.

Rosalba wanted to scream, to struggle, to bolt naked from the bed and run gibbering down the street. She did none of those things. She lay there, helpless, while the thing began to eat her.

#

--Bloomington, Indiana

Harold Alton slapped shut his trashy mystery novel and looked about the motel lobby with a deep scowl on his face. Thursday night and college orientation week. The Travelodge was a ghost town. All those prospective freshmen and their parents were dead to the world in their beds or whooping it up across town at Nick's English Hut or the Cafe Pizzeria. The less oriented of the orientation crowd scarfed down seafood at the Red Lobster right outside Harold's floor-length wall of windows. Or maybe they invaded any number of fast food joints within sight of the desk, from Steak 'n Shake to Taco Bell. Anyway, they weren't in the office, and that made Thursday a slow day.

Harold didn't mind. He had captained the night desk for fifteen years. He knew the best nights were the slow ones, if he could avoid going mad from boredom. But even on these nights he had stuff to keep him busy. He had doors to check, and ice machines, and the lobby trash to empty. Yes, sir, he could always push through a boring, lousy book for hours if he could look forward to emptying the lobby trash. Maybe the phone would ring. Maybe a pizza guy would deliver to one of the guests.

Or maybe, as usual, nothing at all would happen. It was Thursday, after all.

Harold looked long and hard at his watch. Three more hours until the 2am shift relief. Oh, well, five minutes could melt as he emptied the trash.

He picked up the tiny wastebasket behind the counter and dragged himself around the partition to get the larger one in the lobby. Emptying the little guy into the big, he shrugged at the revelation of how little garbage the combined containers produced. That's how slow it was; the guests didn't even make trash.

Grasping the plastic bag from the lobby receptacle, he trudged to the entrance and placed his free hand on the metal bar mounted across the glass door. His arm tensed to push, but drew back at the last instant. Something, three dogs, had just then run along the all-window facade of the lobby. Left to right they'd skittered, fast, too.

Only ... they hadn't been dogs.

Dogs don't skitter.

Dogs don't have that many legs.

Harold backed away from the door.

What had he seen? What had really passed across his field of vision? His head had told him dogs, but his head had been flummoxed and went for the closest convenient explanation. He had seen a bunch of legs on each of those animals, six or eight of them, segmented legs with a low-slung body suspended where they met. He had seen hair, but not fur, not the soft stuff you stroke on a mutt or a cat. That hair had been stiff, rodlike, sparse, almost like quills. Tarantula hair.

Harold licked his lips, but his sticky tongue ran over dry skin. He grinned, then clamped his mouth closed. The grin had felt a might ... crazy.

He knew what he had seen, what he had almost walked out in front of. He had seen giant spiders.

This time, he giggled. The thought drew it out of him. With that, Harold replaced the bag in the wastebasket. He returned to his place behind the counter, always walking facing the glass. He sat down in his seat and listened to the wall clock tick. He rummaged in the drawer under the cash register and drew out a wicked looking letter opener. The designer had copied the appearance and point of a Civil War saber. Harold sat with his back against the wall, listening to the clock, the tiny sword poised with its handle against his thigh, the point directed at the ceiling.

He would empty the trash later.

Next: Rapid Response

New Episodes Drop Every Tuesday