TWENTY FIVE HOURS EARLIER.
The first thing anyone sees when they walk into Melmon Bank is a giant dollar bill etched into a marble slab thirty feet across and taller than any spider. You have to walk around it to get into the bank proper. Humans coming here usually stop and stare for a minute; the immediately eye-catching thing is that instead of Washington in the center oval you've got a sweaty, bulldog-jowled Richard Nixon staring insanely at something out of frame, like he just saw hippies holding a sit-in. Further inspection of the light tracery on the dark stone reveals more peculiarities. The leafy boughs in the corners are twisting suckered tentacles. Below Nixon, in the stout serif'd typeface that normally reads ONE DOLLAR the legend reads YOUR ONLY GOD.
Walk around the carving and the space suddenly opens up; Melmon Bank is a rotunda and all the action happens along the circumference, which is divided into roughly a dozen sections. Each section belongs to one of the human banks, and each one has a row of tellers behind glass and a winding queue of customers. This being the only place in Midway where the banks can operate, the lines regularly overflow their rope mazes. The banks are all itching to further open up the market, but it took protracted argument just to get the spiders to agree to the Melmon Charter of 1956, which officially restricts them to one and one branch only, right here, the building shared among them—spider thinking being that it's safer to keep 'em all in one place. The banks have several other responsibilities: for one, they have to hang a tapestry over their section, "handsomely Fringed and festoon'd in Embroiderie depicting thy Corporate Logoe," according to the Charter, which Mayor Pixcreel insisted on writing in his version of olde English. They have to abide the close proximity of their competitors; security guards, separately hired by each company, are there not just for the protection of the capital but to keep espionage to a minimum. And once a week they all have to put up with a preacher from the Fifth Church of Our Lady of Discord ceremonially flipping a card table and cracking a whip at customers until they run away.
A professionally neat young woman has been studying the altered dollar in the entranceway for a few minutes now, as incoming and outgoing customers fork around her. Mousy and pretty, with a tiny nose and long, straight brown hair tied into a sensible ponytail, she wears a green blouse under a crisp gray blazer that matches her skirt and the messenger bag resting on her slim hips. It's Delenda Cartwright's first time in Melmon Bank; she's only been in Midway for two weeks now and everywhere she goes she gets distracted by these bits of local culture, which are always the most interesting when they're forced to abut capitalism in some way. The spiders sure do lay it on thick. Of course, she's heeding her boss's strident warnings to stay well detached from the locals themselves, in every sense of the word.
Delenda heads for the line forming underneath PNC's tapestry and waits patiently. Most of the other customers are human too, spiders not having much use for banking services. Some AAA officers in their green sashes patrol the area, though all of the private guards are humans. In the center of the bank, amid modernist benches and squared-off topiaries, one female spider sits and licks an ice cream cone while her male friend kneels between her legs and licks her. All of the humans, including Delenda, pretend not to notice, but the spider girl for some reason notices her. "You look uptight. Wanna borrow him for a minute?" she asks, indicating her friend, who looks up from between her legs with eight puppy-dog eyes. "He's real good at this!" Delenda blushes and avoids eye contact.
They'd sent her to a special class for all of their underground-bound employees. Before even mentioning anything with six arms, it started off with a three-day crash course in Chicago school economics that was perhaps intended as an inoculation. When they finally got around to mentioning the giant spider people that had been living among us for all of history, and some of her fellow execs-in-training called bullshit, they dispelled disbelief by introducing one to the class, right there. He had to crouch under the doorframe when coming in, and he was a light, wintry gray all over, with pale green eyes. His name was Sezzed, or something like that, and the braver students got to go up and shake his claw, though Delenda stayed back. She thought maybe he was looking at her for a moment, but then realized she couldn't tell. Someone asked him why he was wearing pants and no shirt. "I didn't want to wear the pants either, but they said you guys would freak out—I don't know how you put up with these things."
Naturally that made the students curious about spider culture. The next session, which Sezzed was not present for, began with a brief description of the spiders' unsophisticated society, with its opposition to order and structure and resultant technological stagnation. They were warned that the spiders still lived in a kind of communal fashion—"we've been trying for decades to get them to see how efficient free markets can help," said the lecturer gravely, "but their insectoid brains probably predispose them towards primitive, collectivist societies—one might say hives. Before humanity built the underground cities for them, they were limited to living in rudimentary tunnels and warrens. In fact, it's thanks to local steel production that Midway was the first major underground settlement in North America. But I digress. There is one thing every human who may be exposed to spiders must be aware of, one thing even more dangerous than socialism, and that is the Change…"
Delenda's turn arrives, and her teller turns out to be a spider—a black one, with green eyes the color of a pool table. He has a crisp little bow tie and one of those visors worn by hard-nosed accountants and poker players. When she approaches his window, he does not even make a cursory attempt to disguise checking her out. "Nice shoes," he says.
"Gee, thanks."
He radiates a toothy smile and neatly folds two pairs of claws on his desk. "What can I help you with today?"
"Hi, my company has a safe deposit box here, and I need to get some things from it."
"No problem. Name?"
"Delenda E. Cartwright," she says, passing the spider her driver's license.
"Nice to meet you, Delenda—my name's Kalak, by the way—but I'm gonna need the company name, too."
"Uh… Wallace Shale."
He pauses for a split second, his cockeyed look belying the dramatic shift in mood Delenda has learned to expect when namedropping her employer. It reliably causes friendly spider exuberance to curdle into some mixture of pity, dejection, and disgust, but on the plus side there's no surer way to deflect flirtatious arachnids she doesn't want to deal with.
"C'mon back." The spider curtly buzzes her through a door into PNC's designated space. Not far inside is the vault, lined with boxes. "You got a key, right? You're looking for number six sixty six." Delenda is confused when she follows the numbering all the way to the end of the vault's inner edge and finds out that the boxes stop at 500, and over on the other side they start again at one. She looks back at the teller and he only gives her an exaggerated shrug. No help there. When she gets into the sixties, though, she stops—someone's used a label maker to attach another six to #66. From behind her, the teller laughs. She unlocks the box and directs an unamused glare his way. "Uh oh, weoffended her. Hey, do you have any idea what your company is doing down here, let alone up there?"
"I'm only a personal assistant."
"So, no, you don't. Right? Cause it'd just break my heart to know a pretty human like you knows about all that stuff and works there anyway. We like to pretend the only really evil humans are the old fat guys in suits."
"Look. I don't know what particular thing you have a problem with, but I promise you I had nothing to do with it. I don't decide anything."
"What's that got to do with it?" The teller sighs. It's never just the suits. The spiders have known about coal and oil and gas for centuries. Compressed black deathstuff, seeping poison, hidden suffocation lying in the earth to punish those who dig too deeply. The collective spider instinct is to fear them. What scant organized scientific research spider society has ever been able to conduct has largely been directed towards the avoidance of such deposits. Yet nobody was surprised, many years ago, when the humans decided to direct most of their incredible world-altering machinery (that of it which they could spare from killing each other) towards digging the goddamn stuff out of the ground. Deep down every spider assumes that humans, no matter how individually lovable, harbor an instinctual drive to destroy the world.
"Listen," says Delenda.
"I'm listening," he says, but Delenda doesn't actually have a defense prepared, so she only stands there with her arms crossed. And then suddenly—KERBLAAAAAAMMM.
The explosion, originating from somewhere near the main area of the bank, is so loud Delenda can feel it in her chest. The floor shakes. "Holy shit, says the teller, running out of the vault, and Delenda follows him. "Holy shit," he says again when they get outside. Chunks of stone litter the floor and the corporate tapestries are singed at the edges. There is a huge hole blown into the side of the building, almost the full height of the wall, beyond which some Midway side street is visible. A tank rolls in through the hole, treads rumbling over the rubble, yes a real WW2-style tank, which presently judders to a halt just inside the building. There is a muffled metal clanking, and the bank becomes remarkably quiet before the tank's hatch cover swings up as it is thrown open from inside.
"Move! They're gonna get away!" screeches a nasal New Jersey accent from inside the tank, and then a chubby orange spider girl squeezes herself out of the hatch, rolling over the side when a comrade pushes up from underneath her. Her bright fur is pumpkin-colored, her eyes and claws are solid black, and she is wearing nothing but a Stahlhelm strapped below her chin. Delenda's heart sinks—now that her lower half is visible, so is her leg and the twisting maze of creeping ivy running up it, a marking indicating her status as one of the spiders Delenda was repeatedly warned to stay away from at any cost—the Huntsmen.
"Like you could even catch one," says the spider coming up from below—this one's a guy, black eyes and dark brown fur with black edges, like charred wood. The intricate tribal patterns snaking up his left leg are done in white, for better contrast with his body. "Hell, they already ran away," he says, in no particular hurry. "—'cept for that one there. Mine." He is pointing, of course, at Delenda, who now sees that all the other humans have scattered and only a few spiders have been too curious or frightened to run. (Two AAA officers look poised to do something, but another spider from the tank fires a quick burp of warning shots from an automatic rifle, halting their advance.) He steps towards her, openly appraising her body, and smiles a malicious little smile of approval, to Delenda's utter horror.
"Lasck, you jerk! I want a cock!" whines the orange spider in the helmet.
"Then go run one down, fatty. Episkopos promised the next one to me," says the spider approaching Delenda, without taking his huge, dark eyes off of her. He's got a long, blocky face and a high forehead; the fur on his head is swept up and backwards into a quiff made of individual hair-spines. "And I'm taking her."
"Yo!" The bank teller interrupts, voice cracking. "Wait! You guys won't take another spider's human, right? It's part of your code! So… fuck off! That one's mine!"
Lasck grumbles, but stands still. The orange female says "That's bullshit! Seriously, how many times are we gonna let a good cock get away cause of that dumb rule?" Both of them, and all the other Huntsmen in the bank, look back towards the tank—there's now another spider standing there. A woman, in red and purple robes and a hood that covers most of her face. She smiles peacefully, fangs out. Her robes are an intricate manifold of scarlet silks, yet they only cover half her body, leaving her three tan left arms exposed, though thanks to careful folding her vestments do cover the space between her legs. They wait for her direction.
"It issss true," she begins, "that we must always resssspect the bond between our people and their humanssss. But—you will forgive me—I musssst quessssstion your bond. Why are you allowing your penis to walk around on her own? It isssss… most incautious. It demonstrates a…. disssssrespect for the sacred bond. Tell me, isssss this really your human?"
"Yeah," says Lasck. "How do we know you've even met her before? If she's yours, what's her name?"
Now all eyes turn to the teller. His first second of hesitation is enough to answer their question, but the Huntsmen don't give him the easy out, they just stand there grinning until he's forced to guess. "Uh… Desiree?"
"Desiree? Desiree? Do I look like a stripper?!" shrieks Delenda. "You saw my ID! It's Delenda!"
"Oh man, that's right." The teller snaps a claw. "Knew it was D-something."
Lasck laughs. "You're both wrong. If she was really yours the right answer would have been 'my cock'."
The teller shrugs apologetically. Delenda sighs; not like she remembered his name, either… But she's got one more trick up her sleeve; it's a long shot, but doesn't she have to try? "You don't want me! I… I work for Wallace Shale! People will come looking for me!"
Oops. If there was some magic phrase that could have gotten her out of this, that certainly wasn't it. Nobody among the few remaining spider spectators looks impressed. Even the two AAA officers share a sidelong glance, and the teller sucks a breath in through his teeth. The Huntsmen all turn and stare, seething, until the chubby orange one screeches "Get that cunt, Lasck!"
Is there any sense in trying to run? As Lasck reaches for her, oozing grim judgment, she isn't sure her legs would even obey her if she tried. She finds her mouth and tongue certainly won't, as she screams but only gets an escaping whisper of unshaped air. He's big, so much bigger than her. He seizes her without urgency, around her waist, her wrist, and her neck. There is no hope for clemency in his unbreakable grip.
"One moment, Lasssck." It's their robed leader, approaching one of the bank's surveillance cameras. She removes her hood, revealing dazzling clear purple eyes and a lightly lined face, looking about as old as spiders can—which could put her anywhere from 40 on up. She angles a camera towards her and begins to speak.
"Sssspiders of Midway—you poor, ssssoft things. You have lived among the humans for sssso long you are forgetting your true nature. Ssssome of you believe it is possible to love a human with the ssssame love you have for your fellow sssspiders. Humans! Those fragmented vessssels, those poisoners and murderers! They have one purpose, and that is to complete ussss. Do you not sssseee what they do when left unchecked? They kill and desssstroy! To leave them to roam and yet claim to be connected—this is an utter inverssssion of your true insssstincts, your real Will."
"You cannot ssssee the truth because you live in these pleassssure caves the humans have built for you. But the underground cities are zoos. For what other reason would the humans sssspend such vast amounts of their precious money? Make no mistake, brothers and ssssisters, you are being domesticated. But we will remind you of the true order of things. We will sssshow the humans, and those of you that choose to live as their pets, what their purpose truly is."
"There issss nothing more ssssacred than the connection between a sssspider and their human. We, the Hunters of Nuit, have dedicated ourselves to reasssserting the primacy of this bond. It issss the natural order. The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect, and not two; sssso it is written. Hear me, denizens of Midway! No longer will we honor your imaginary connections. No matter what falsities they have taught you, a human that is not a part of one of ussss is an unclaimed human—and an unclaimed human issss fair game for taking."
She aims the camera at Delenda and the spider holding her. "Brother Lassssck, I have already delayed you too long. Please—demonsssstrate." He doesn't need told again: his claws rip through her clothes at once and shred her Aspirational Young Businesswoman getup. She stands all but naked in the chilly bank, then Lasck tears off her panties too, and the only sound is snapping elastic and her tiny whimper. All eyes, including whatever ones watch from beyond the CCTV, are focused on her.
The monstrous thing presses his body against her. She can't do anything other than turn her head to the side, eyes squeezed shut so she won't see any of this—it can't be happening, any of it, it won't end up for her like this, she has so many plans, Director, Vice President, Senior Vice President, if not at Wallace Shale than somewhere else, but either way she's destined for boardrooms and corner offices, not for being permanently installed in the crotch of a huge, hairy spider monster. This kind of thing doesn't happen to people like her, she's an executive-to-be, not some kind of degenerate freak who'd be okay with being nothing but an organ, unable to do anything other than—than get hard and spurt cum… His chest presses into the side of her face, bristly fur hot and scratchy against her cheek; his scent is like the faded ghost of cologne in a root cellar.
Lasck's claws launch an uninvited investigation of her body. He touches an ear, traces an eyebrow, brushes aside her hair to investigate the curious curve of her smooth neck. This whole time he's growling quietly, a two-stroke engine of a rumble from far down in his throat. "You're scared. All humans are scared, at first. But they never want to go back." There's a claw between her legs now. "Not once they feel what it's like to be a cock. What they're supposed to be. Humans never want to go back once they find out how good it is."
Doesn't that make it all the more terrifying?
They taught her about the Change in class too, with a VHS tape halfway between middle-school sex ed and Cronenberg. Someone had asked, "—is it dangerous?" Oh yes, said the lecturer. We believe it can change how you think. Something in it that causes anti-establishment thinking. But even worse is that you are at the mercy of a spider, an irrational, chaotic creature. Remember that you are helpless. Fully incapacitated. Utterly immobile. They can turn you into part of them and decide, on a whim, to never change you back…
So this is where Delenda goes while the spider violates her, back to her company-sponsored initiation into the underground… She doesn't hear him command her to spread her legs, so he picks her up and positions her as effortlessly as a doll, with an arm for each limp limb and two to stabilize her. He holds her out in front, running a claw up her cream-white back, along her bumpy spine and over sharp shoulder blades, pulls the ponytail holder out of her hair, leaving that glossy brown curtain free to slide off her shoulder and into her face. (Later she will remember these last minutes in her body and realize that she was already being held as though she had taken on her new, permanent role. Soon, his arms will not need to support her; her own internal rigidity will be all that she needs…) She squeals when Lasck puts his cock in her, but that's just automatic, something her body does. She's still back at the corporate lecture hall learning Their tips n' tricks for dealing with the spiders: don't wear suggestive clothing (as he pulls her back against him, all the way inside) and definitely don't get into any political arguments (as he pulls her away again).
"Hurry up, Lasck! You even start yet?" The fat orange spider, with her grating voice and oily Jersey accent, somehow manages to be the thing to snap Delenda back to the present, in time to hear him grunt his reply: "Jusssst did." Delenda knows the only thing they can be talking about, of course, but still looks back to confirm it, low so as not to see his face, and yes, it's happening; she's being Changed.
The balls of her heels have connected to her buttocks, and her thighs and lower legs are melting together. From beneath the spider's bristly fur, deep burgundy brownness spreads in blotches across her hips. Her toned legs lose their definition, becoming shorter and rounder. She looks expectantly at her arms, at her chest, to see if there are signs there, too, but nothing—yet. (She knows that it happens differently for every spider. What you look like after it's all over—when you're a penis—depends on you. But the spider determines how you change. The first change she ever saw, in a droneclub on her first night in Midway—the girl was there one moment, then her face was a giant cockhead the next. Her head changed first, and faster than her body, so for a brief minute she was a giant pole with tits—but soon she lost those too, and for the rest of the night Delenda couldn't help casting glances at the spider's long cock and thinking about the young woman it really was…)
Heat envelops her hips as a ring of Lasck's dark skin creeps up her body. She's being consumed rather than morphed, like a toothless snake is trying to swallow her. It moves so fast that reflexively she brings a hand down to her waist to try and stop it, but that's a mistake—instead her hand gets trapped under the encroaching ridge. She tries to pull it back, but it's stuck in there good. She screeches and does the same thing with the other hand before she can stop herself, and now both of them are stuck in there up to the wrists and then past them, forearms feeling the squeeze as she's sucked deeper in.
Delenda flails around without the support of her arms and tries to straighten up. She tries to kick her legs too, but only gets a small, distant response from them, like they've both gone to sleep and she's trying to kick through a very viscous gel. She sees why when Lasck, in order to get better control of her, sits down on the bank floor—her legs are now big round fuzz-covered balls, with only a few lumps, smoothing out before her very eyes, to suggest they were ever anything else. Where her hips once were is now the round ridge separating the furry ballsack from taut brown flesh, her body and simultaneously his.
She's found her voice again—can't stop screaming, in fact, which certainly isn't helping anything, although it makes Lasck laugh. She's pulling and pulling, trying to get her arms out of the shrinkwrap spiderskin tube sucking her in, but the more she pulls the faster she seems to be stuck. It's up past her belly-button now. A moment ago she could feel resistance in her wrists, tugging on her knuckles—but now she can't feel them at all behind the tingly, homogenizing warmth inside this sheath. The sensations of her lower body are not absent but altered; when the spider obscenely fondles his new testicles, Delenda feels it not as rubbing on her leg but on her balls, even though she's never had balls before and they currently occupy the same position in sensory space that her legs used to…
The cockskin cocoon is nearly at her tits. Inside, some unimaginable metamorphosis is happening; the outline of her fingers has softened away entirely and her lower arms have turned into soft, puffy tubes. She still struggles, but it's more symbolic than anything now, and she quiets down to moans alternated with ragged gasps for air. Once it reaches a little past her waist, the terror subsides—that's her adrenal gland going away. (One more fun fact from her training.) The intellectual, entirely rational fear of spending the rest of her life as a penis is still there, of course, but now it's the spider's hormones coursing through her and not her own, clouding her mind not with primal terror but an uncomfortable miasma of lust which, she feels, is wholly inappropriate to the situation. She does not want to be turned on. But her sexuality has been taken, pussy nowhere among the crinkly scrotal folds where it was a minute ago. (Not like she was using it anyway. Hm? Intrusive thoughts here, coming if not from her own unwillingly horny mind, then—something more sinister—are they sneaking across nerves from him to her, via newly forming bridges linking the spider's brain with whatever she's becoming?)
She admits to herself that it's physically pleasurable. She can even feel a sensation building, like an army on the far side of a distant hill, that resembles an orgasm. But it's a long way off, and meanwhile she still fears the rising Change consuming her body, ready now to claim her shoulders. Her breasts, never notable to begin with, have already gone under and flattened out. She can't move her arms at all. They are now only prominent veins running up and down her tubular sides. It's only seconds away, but she dreads the sheath rising above her neck, closing her in, cutting off the light. Will she still be able to breathe, will she not need to? What will it do to her—to her mind?
The same scared thoughts chase each other around Delenda's brain a dozen times in the space of a few seconds, but Lasck interrupts: he grabs her phallic body at its base and pulls upwards, squeezing out one low, long groan, and for a moment, every thought in her head. She's never been touched like that before, never had that kind of sensation—but she's never been a cock before. How can she resist something that feels so good? She can feel a strange compressing force on her shoulders, rounding them out painlessly. Like a cresting wave, the unfamiliar skin has wrinkled and bunched at its upper edge, forming a ruffle of foreskin, and it begins to tickle her chin. She stretches her neck out to get away, like someone caught in quicksand trying to keep their head above the fatal line a little longer, stay connected to the daylight even though no help is coming and there's that irresistible pull tugging her down, down…
Suddenly, the skin lurches upwards. Delenda is cut off mid-scream as it seals around her head, leaving only a small tuft of her hair poking out the top like unshucked corn. Her mouth left open in surprise, her fine nose, her light brow and wide eyes all leave a topography of bumps and dips in the veiny surface of the spider skin covering her head, but in seconds they all smooth into nothing, leaving the familiar shape of the tip of a penis. The light brown hair still poking out of the end falls away.
Lasck rolls the foreskin of his new cock back, confirming for the camera that there is no visual trace of Delenda left—her pretty face is now only a plump, dark glans. The reveal seems to push him over the edge into violent orgasm, hunching over and bellowing as he masturbates Delenda's new body so fast that his claws blur, the penis that was a young woman spasming upwards as it blasts jizz all over the scattered corporate signage littering the ground. Lasck even turns to ensure he spreads the wealth to as many of the banks as possible before he slumps to the ground. The CCTV will show him with a satisfied, faraway smile, big chest heaving as he catches his breath.
There's no rest for the wicked, unless you've got friends. Lasck may be too weak to walk, but two of his compatriots team-lift him by his arms. The orange spider walks around scattering pellets too small to be seen onscreen, which explode with tiny white flashes and fill the room with impenetrable black smoke. There is the sound of another explosion, but this one is different in character than the tank shell, tighter and more focused… When the smoke clears, the Huntsmen will all be gone, leaving their tank behind and a seemingly bottomless sinkhole in the middle of Melmon Bank's polished stone floor.
That's all the viewers of UDKA-TV will ever see played on the news, and when the Arachnid Altercation Agency reinforcements arrive in a few minutes, they will be dismayed to find the hole leads directly to the tunnels underneath Midway, a maze twistier than even the interstitials, parts of which were used for, and had not been touched since, the initial construction of Midway. Of course there are connections to the deep tunnels. How can you stop a spider from simply digging upwards, any more than you could stop a person from walking through a field? The perfunctory search will be called off after a few hours.
But here and now, the Huntsmen are racing through depths dark and unknown, not sure if they are being chased or how close their pursuers may be. Somehow, the Episkopos is out in front. Lasck is being carried on someone's back, allowing him to see the chubby spider struggle to keep up at the rear of the pack. This is deeply amusing to him. "Attagirl, Itkil. You can use the exercise."
"Fuck (huff) you (puff) Lasck," she says with great effort.
They hustle through the detritus of a lost era, some of this stuff obviously untouched for decades. Overturned school desks, freon-leaking fridges in mint green, baroque streetlights, wrecked movie projectors and their tattered film reels, long sections of wrought iron fence… As they travel, the tunnels grow less finished, giving way to black canvas walls and unadorned wooden supports. It's a little like being backstage at a theater, huge set pieces all around, and the combined energy of a massive collective not far away, just on the other side of a thin barrier…
Their red-robed leader raises a claw. "I think… we may resssst now, children." They all stop and find a place to sit on the floor, except for two that stand watch on opposite sides of the small group, staring down the dark hallways as if challenging them to produce something capable of taking them on. Lasck leans against a clump of ripped-up sandbags, letting flaccid Delenda flop to the floor, leftover drips from her tip wiping out years of accumulated dust in circular spatters. His neat quiff has been demolished from the harried trip, spiny hairs sticking every which way. Itkil takes a seat next to him and, without asking permission, plays with his new penis, twirling and rubbing it in a fashion more inquisitive than sensual. Lasck doesn't appreciate this, but he's too tired to object.
Delenda hasn't gone anywhere. For a minute there, things got a little strange for her, especially when she was cumming. She had never felt, or imagined, anything like it, and any objections, any thoughts at all she had were temporarily obliterated by the orgasm that wracked her entire form. The ensuing afterglow was deliciously peaceful, carefree as laughing gas even as the spiders scrambled down these dark tunnels, away from the life she'd known, possibly forever, and her unable to do a single thing about it. She is reminded that she has no conscious control over her phallic body when her useless, invisible attempts to evade the orange spider's claw don't move her flaccid self a millimeter. Itkil's clumsy rubbing doesn't feel good at all; not only is Delenda totally spent, but she finds Itkil personally repugnant.
"You want me to suck her?" (Oh god, please don't, thinks Delenda.)
Thankfully Lasck shares her sentiment. "Naw. Let go. You're just mashing her. And she thinks you're gross, anyway." (How did he know that?!)
"Fine," huffs Itkil, releasing Delenda. "She don't know what she's missin'."
"Don't worry," says Lasck, addressing his own penis. "We can do way better than her. We'll find you someone you'll really like… you want a boy or a girl? You pick."
It is a sudden reminder that Delenda's new role is that of a copulatory organ, and it's not going to be all handjobs and jacking off. She gets these images of herself in her new body being aimed twatwards at some spider chick with her legs spread open, begging for Lasck to rail her. Previously Delenda wouldn't have even ranked herself as bi-curious, but there's now some kind of strange attraction at the thought, though she can't be sure whether it's hers or the spider's. But when she thinks (or has the thought come from him?) of being stuffed into the forbidden asshole of a spider male, just as strong and built as Lasck, and being the central point of their dirty connection… she begins to stir.
"Mmm. You want a boy. Alright."
If she still had a face, she'd be blushing.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
If you're walking through Limestone Heights tonight, in that enclave of moneyed humans where the financiers and a few of their spider consorts dwell in mansions and glass condos, you may see a particular human, thin and paper white, pace impatiently through the second-floor picture window of a particular Gothic Revival mansion—dark wood, wrought iron window frames, and soaring finials on the parapets that reach out to Midway's stone ceiling (though Schlangenkraft Manor was, of course, constructed no earlier than the forties, when a handful of human tycoons decided it might not be so terrible to have a vacation home among the hedonistic, savage spiders…)
The Doctor paces his sitting room, as he's been doing for most of the past 25 hours. He's got a kind of command center set up here, where the expansive window bathes the room in Midway's artificial light and lets him look out over the city. TV's tuned in to the news, laptop charging on the couch, phone waiting to receive a call. He's barely slept, so his already red eyes are bloodshot terrors, and there's a scatter of angel-fine stubble on his clenched jawline, catching the light on his marble skin like quartz dust. His thin brows have settled into furrows of simmering anger. The normally fastidious Doctor has even skipped his morning shower, surprising Skenge. ("But sir, I could come in and get you if someone does call…" "Yes, you'd like that, hmm? I think not.")
The Doctor is aware, peripherally, that Skenge is upset, possibly even scared. He has been shorter with her than usual. It gives him no pleasure, but his maid's feelings are not currently at the forefront of his mind. She is in the adjoining kitchen, cooking, even though he has given her no indication that he wishes to eat. She knows better than to press him, but she has been hovering nearby all day, as she so often does whenever he is visibly frustrated. Her concern for him is endearing, but aggravating. After he declined dinner tonight, she asked him to fuck her, even bringing him an assortment of whips herself in the hopes that he could be coaxed into taking out some frustration on her… Skenge, for heaven's sake, can you cease thinking with your vagina for an hour? Do you understand the importance of these matters?
Firstly, there was Margreta's band of terrorists overplaying their hand. How the devil did they manage to get a tank down here? It was understood there'd be some kidnappings. It's their group's whole modus operandi, after all, and it creates a healthy sense of fear besides. But it's going to take a month to repair Melmon Bank. Naturally, PNC, BoA, Chase, and the rest aren't pleased with losing their only inroads into Midway, and they've certainly been letting him know it.
Yes, other than the wanton destruction of capital, the Huntsmen's little show was perfect, really. He's been encouraging Margreta to play up the religious angle, and it paid off beautifully. There's no hotter item in today's Fear Market than fundamentalist terrorists of any creed. Margreta's monologue has been playing nearly nonstop on UDKA-TV. He wrote a press release for the MARC advising Midway's humans that their safety could not be guaranteed here (as if it ever could be anywhere). If only fear was more effective on spiders; all he could wheedle out of Mayor Arachnypoundcake, despite hyperbolic warnings of kidnappings and threats of sanctions, was a reluctantly given three day lockdown.
But that was still a small victory. His real problem is that Sidwell Greenstreet was out of hand. Somewhere on the surface, after his minder from the Arachnid Altercation Agency decided to take him on a little jaunt up there without any kind of prior authorization—not that the AAA would care about that in the first place, or about the 24-hour rule. And he was now stranded there—thanks, maddeningly, to the Doctor's own machinations. He could have Arachnypoundcake end the lockdown at the cost of an immense amount of credibility, not to mention pride. No, he'd just have to hope Greenstreet showed up after the blockade ended, even if that did scuttle his hopes that a way could be found to make it permanent…
How did Greenstreet end up in the custody of this spider, anyway? That wasn't the plan. This Lieutenant Skeila could be a problem. She was chosen so carefully to match his psychosexual profile. The Doctor was pleased when he pulled Greenstreet's internet history and discovered a predilection for transsexuals, not uncommon at all among the spiders—and so he could delve into specifics. Deeper analysis of the young man's tastes revealed, perhaps, a subconscious yearning to be dominated, controlled… The MARC keeps better personnel files on the AAA than the AAA does, so it was a simple matter to find in their number a young trans spider with a reputation for rough treatment of humans—a HAARPie, even. Perfect. But she was supposed to be bait, only bait…
The Doctor silently ruminates over his problems, staring out into the subterranean skyline. And then—one of the freight elevators lights up, the almost invisible glass pillar turning without warning into a bright column of rectangular light. The Doctor's eye twitches. Rage is beyond him; a kind of cold, focused wrath is as close as he ever gets. But oh, is he there now. Three days—a mere three days—was all he could wring out of that old bastard, and the bug kept his promise for barely a full day. He can't decide whether this is an intentional slight or just the result of arachnid stupidities, but either way, Arachnypoundcake would pay, oh yes—
"Skenge? Fetch my binoculars. They're in the bureau in the study, top-right drawer, in a leather case towards the front." He turns, throwing a burning red-eyed glare her way. "Now, please."
The spider rushes off, resembling for the instant a blurry black-and-white photo. She's as colorless as her master, all soft greys and whites in a shiny black maid's outfit. (Skenge knows better than to hesitate, but it is precisely the lack of anger in his voice that frightens her now. The Doctor lets his guard down around her, around her and nobody else does he display irritation, frustration, sometimes even worry, voice slipping now and then into that West Virginian twang she finds so cute. But now his voice is as flat and affectless as she has ever heard it, as unemotional as when he addresses his employees at the MARC…) In seconds she's back with the binoculars; she waits patiently by his shoulder for further instruction as he locates and focuses in on where the clear glass shaft meets the stone ceiling. They wait in silence—and slowly an freight cab lowers into view.
He zooms in. A spider and a human molesting each other, briefly. The human pulls away. The spider, curiously enough, is an Arachnid Altercation Agent, green sash and all. Seeing it from the back, the Doctor is momentarily confused: it has sizable breasts but an oddly male build; broad shoulders, muscular arms, no hips to speak of… and when it turns around, there's an erection there, not nearly large enough to have been a person. Oh—of course. A grin splits the Doctor's pale lips, thin as a hairline fracture in ivory.
There is Order in this universe. He does not even need to look at the human; he is as sure as he has ever been about anything. But he does, just to see the face he has only seen in grainy security cam footage and Facebook pictures years out of date, and there he is—Sidwell Greenstreet. The Doctor's grin breaks into raucous, open-mouthed laughter, totally uncontrolled, head tilted back, face to the ceiling.
Skenge stares in horror. She's never seen the Doctor act like this. Oh, he's not humorless, he allows himself a chuckle here, mild laughter there, but never anything this unseemly. She knows better than to question him, but… "S-sir? …what's so funny?"
"Oh, Skenge," he says, removing his heavy glasses and wiping tears from his eyes. "Everything's so perfect."
This does nothing to assuage Skenge, but she stays quiet as the Doctor returns binoculars to red eyes to watch the rest of the little drama play out. Sidwell looks agitated about something. Seems to be… avoiding Lt. Skeila, actually, who follows him around the elevator. Hmm. Now the spider is holding him from behind, and she's saying something… no telling what. (Skenge, take a memo to Mr. Waterproof, tell him to have audio recorders installed in all freight elevators…) She touches his forehead, and—oh dear.
They're kissing. Hmm.
This could be problematic; at best the spider would be a distraction. But if they're stuck on each other, it'll simply have to be a matter of finding the right crowbar, that's all. The Doctor has the zeal of a man in the service of a higher power. Who knows how many promising young minds have been lost to the productive world, down here among the spiders, and Sidwell Greenstreet is what you'd call the at-risk type. Well. He won't be losing Greenstreet. He needs him.
