Page 51

PIPER

I paced the house, my eyes flicking out the window every few seconds to see what was going on.

We’d gotten an automated call about lockdown, which neither Debra or I were prepared for.

What the hell did lockdown even mean? I ran for the door and immediately flipped the deadbolt, wondering if that was enough.

“If it was something really terrible, I’m sure Patrick would have told us to hide under a desk or something,” Debra said, stirring her cup of tea just as she’d been doing for the past ten minutes.

It had gone cold by now, I was sure, but I didn’t bother to tell her that.

She was keeping herself busy while her son was out there doing God knows what.

I’d already been on the receiving end of the terror.

When he jumped in front of that bear, I was scared, but this was different.

Now, I had feelings for him. I’d grown used to living in the same house with him, and I knew his mother and loved her.

What would I do if something happened to him?

With nothing else to do, I marched upstairs and started stripping the beds. I’d do laundry. That would at least keep my mind occupied enough to function. I couldn’t just stare out the window, waiting for him to return.

“Honey?” Debra asked from the doorway.

“Hmm?” I answered, refusing to look at her. If I did, I might break down in tears, and that just wasn’t acceptable.

“He’s going to be okay.”

“Oh, I know that,” I said, flipping the covers off the bed.

“He does this for a living, as much as I like to pretend that he’s really a realtor or in construction.”

“You do that?” I asked over my shoulder.

“Of course. It keeps the fear at bay. When he called me and told me he had a broken leg, I’d actually convinced myself that it happened when a beam fell on him at work,” she chuckled.

That was actually a pretty good idea, but I wasn’t sure it would do anything for me in this moment.

I grabbed the fitted sheet at the corner and started to pull when a hideous black spider with white dots on its back and the size of my hand crawled up the wall.

Screaming, I released the sheet, jumping back as my heart pounded in my chest.

“What the hell is that?” I screamed, grabbing a shoe off the floor and throwing it at the wall. The spider scurried away, now lost somewhere behind the bed.

“What? What is it?” Debra shouted.

“I don’t know! Some kind of demon spider!”

She gripped my arms just as tightly as I gripped hers, both of us terrified to go any closer to the wall. I was not normally afraid of spiders, but I’d never seen a spider that looked like that before.

“Oh my God! That thing was terrifying! Where is it?”

“Maybe we should move the bed,” Debra said, her voice shaking.

I reared back, horrified by her suggestion. “You want me to go closer to that thing?”

“Only so we can kill it.”

“Kill it? That thing will eat me!”

“But…if we don’t, it could go somewhere else in the house.”

The thought sent chills down my spine. There was no way in hell I’d be able to sleep tonight knowing that horrible beast was wandering around, waiting for its moment to pounce.

“Okay…say we…we move the bed. What do we kill it with?”

“Vacuum cleaner?”

I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think I’ve seen one in the house.”

She sighed. “That should have been a decoration we picked up for him.”

“A broom!” I screamed, running out of the room.

“Don’t leave me here all alone!”

I heard her footsteps pounding on the stairs after me. I snatched the broom out of the closet and headed back up the stairs, with her following me once again. But once we were in the room, we had the problem of where the spider had gone.

“I really hope he isn’t on the sheets.”

“We’d have to burn them,” she agreed.

“Do you think Patrick would mind if we just burned down the house? That seems like an easier solution.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think it’s paid off yet.”

Yes, that was a bit of a problem. “Alright, I’ll grab one end of the bed and you grab the other. We’ll tug it out into the center of the room. There’s no way the spider could have moved that far that fast.”

“You hope,” she added ominously.

She was absolutely right, but I couldn’t think about that right now, not when I had a job to do. I would be brave and stronger than this cursed spider. I would not let him win. Hesitantly, I walked over to the other side of the bed, waiting for her to bend at the same time as me.

“One, two…” On three, we both jerked the bed away from the wall, both of us screaming at the top of our lungs in the process. I didn’t waste a second grabbing the broom.

“There it is!” she shouted, pointing at the wall.

Screaming with every breath in my body, I slammed the broom against the wall repeatedly.

“Ah!” Debra joined me, hopping on one foot. “It’s getting away! Get it! Get it!”

I did the best I could, but the little bastard was fast. “It’s coming toward me!” I shouted, terrified for my life. “Oh, God! It’s going to murder me!”

I started slamming the broom into the wall harder and harder, hoping to hit it. I wasn’t even sure what I was swinging at anymore, but I desperately hoped I was hitting something.

“Down!”

I didn’t think twice at the command. I dropped to the floor, covering my head with the broom in some desperate attempt to protect myself from the beast. Heavy breathing filled the air, but no sound of shooting or killing of any kind.

Slowly, I lifted my head, watching as Debra did the same closer to the door. Patrick stood in the doorway, his chest heaving and his crutches tossed aside as he held a gun in his hand. Chase stood beside him, looking around in confusion.

“What…what happened?” he asked.

Slowly, I got to my feet, clutching the broom tightly as my eyes skittered across the wall for the gigantic spider. “There…there was a spider,” I said breathlessly.

His eyes narrowed on me as he lowered his weapon. “A spider? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Language,” Debra chastised as she got to her feet.

“Do you have any idea what we just went through?” he snapped. “There was a fucking killer on the property, and when I heard—Fuck, Piper, what the fuck? You were screaming over a fucking spider?”

“Language!” his mother snapped.

“Jesus Christ, I could have shot someone!”

His mother sighed, rubbing her fingers across her forehead. “Lord, please help him.”

“So, we’re not needed here?” Chase asked.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, springing into action. I thrust the broom at them, determined to kill this fucker before we actually did have to burn down the house. “He’s still over there.”

“The spider?” Patrick asked incredulously.

“Yes, the spider! He was big and black and hairy! He had white spots and he was the devil! Oh, and he was the size of my fist!”

“Piper, that’s just a fucking field spider. You’re in Kansas. They’re everywhere.”

“You didn’t tell me that when I came out here!”

“It wasn’t exactly a stipulation of yours that I fill out a spider identification form,” he snapped, like he was the one who should be angry about this.

“You didn’t tell me you had killer spiders!”

“It’s not poisonous.”

I scoffed at his attempt at coming up with a good excuse. “And that makes it okay? That thing could have torn off my face!”

“I highly doubt that,” he muttered.

“Look, there’s only one way around this. Either you get in here and kill that spider or I’m burning down the house.”

“Right,” he snorted.

Crossing my arms over my chest, I refused to budge on this point. His mother shot him a withering look that he finally gave in to.

“I can’t fucking believe this.”

“I can’t believe I have to convince you to kill a spider,” I retorted.

“I can’t believe you’re freaking out over a harmless spider.”

“I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to think that any woman would be okay with a creature the size of her hand wandering around the house, and she wouldn’t freak out!”

“Okay,” Chase sighed. “We get it. There’s a lot of disbelief going around. Can we kill the spider now so I can go home?”

“Gladly,” I said, shoving the broom at him since Patrick apparently didn’t think it was that big of a deal.

Both of them sighed and pushed their way into the room. I scurried to the doorway, clinging to Debra. This was life and death, after all. They searched for a good minute before they found it, and then Patrick turned to me angrily.

“The size of your fist, huh?”

“It was,” I said, my eyes narrowing at him.

“Really? Come take a look.”

“I don’t think so. I already got a close-up view of it.”

“This thing is no bigger than a thumbnail.”

“And that matters?”

“It does when you want to burn my house down!”

“Well, if you didn’t have gigantic spiders roaming freely, I wouldn’t want to burn it down!”

“I don’t let them roam freely,” he argued.

I pointed a finger at the wall with wide eyes. “Puh-huh!”

“Puh-huh? What the fuck does that even mean?”

“Exactly as it sounds!” I snapped. “Yeah, right. I beg to differ. You bet your fucking life! Take your pick!”

“Alright, I’m not sure what’s going on, but this seems like a good time for me to exit,” Chase muttered. “Good luck with…this,” he said to Patrick.

“I think I’ll go downstairs,” Debra said, twisting her fingers.

As they both left, I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at Patrick. “Well?”

“Well, what?” he snapped.

“Is that all you have to say?”

“About what? I don’t even know what the fuck is going on here!”

“What’s going on is a spider tried to kill me and you don’t even seem concerned about it.”

“We were nearly eaten by a bear and you think a tiny fucking spider is going to kill you?”

“It tried to!” I shouted. “It was two seconds from biting off my hand!”

“It’s not even big enough to pierce the skin!”

“It has sharp pincers!” I screamed.

I knew I was being slightly irrational, but that thing nearly killed me and he didn’t seem to care about it. If he was going to act like this when I was scared, then was there really any hope for us? Not at all.