This is the fourth of
five unconnected short stories crossing Supernatural with other
fictional universes. The
other stories
in the series can be found here.
Betaed by Solo. Thank you again!
Arachnophobia
Sam was laughing, the bastard. Blood running down his face and
bones crunching underneath his feet and one arm stuck to the wall and
the giant black hairy corpse leaking something foul onto the ground
right next to him – and Sam was laughing.
There was something wrong with that boy.
"This isn't funny, dude. Seriously."
"You should see your face, Dean!"
Yeah.
Actually, Dean would have preferred a nice uplifting view like that to
the sight of the huge-ass spider carcass, legs sprawled all over the
cave. One of them was planted in the rock wall right in front of Dean's
chest. He'd have to crawl under it to get out, and jeeze, there were
claws at the end of it and it was as thick around as his wrist, and it
glistened slightly in the beam of the flashlight and bristled with
thick, spiky hairs that looked as sharp as needles.
This kind of shit just wasn't right.
"... when she clicked her mandibles you screamed like a little girl!"
'Mandibles'?
Who the hell used a word like 'mandibles' when they'd just been all but
beheaded by a freaking monster spider creature? "That was a manly
bellow," Dean muttered. Even he could hear the lack of conviction in
his tone.
So he didn't like spiders. Big fucking deal.
Spiders were creepy. Fact of life. All those legs and eyes and the way
they paralyzed their victims and left them hanging alive in a web while
their insides slowly liquefied, to be sucked dry little by little.
And that had to have been the hugest fucking spider in all of history,
ever. Larger than a freakin' púka.
"Yeah,
well," Sam said, suspiciously solemn. "Don't worry, big brother. She
can't hurt you now, so come over here and give me a hand with this
webbing stuff. My fragile flower."
Dean would so
get him for this. Later, though. First, they had to get out of here.
Still. "Don't call it 'she', alright? Just don't."
"The creepy little guy called her his Dark Lady."
"Yeah well, the creepy little guy was batshit insane, in case you
hadn't noticed."
He'd
also tried to stab Sam from behind with what looked to be a rusty
sword, probably one of those just lying around on the ground with the
bones and the rags and stuff (just how old had this thing been,
anyway?). Dumb move, because creepy little not-exactly-human guy hadn't
been immune to silver any more than his creepy huge-ass monster.
Sam
had managed to get pretty much his entire arm stuck in the webbing that
covered the wall. Turned out Dean's knife stuck to the stuff pretty
well, too, so after wrenching it free once, he just sliced through the
fabric of Sam's jacket instead.
This stuff was vicious.
They'd been damn lucky the silver bullets had worked. Or maybe it had
been the holy water, or the shotgun load of rocksalt to the torso, or
the machete wounds, or even Sam shouting at the thing in Latin. Or any
combination thereof.
Hold on a sec. Sam shouting at it in Latin? Like they knew any
exorcisms for ginormous Godzilla spiders?
"Sammy. What was that you were shouting at it – the exorcism for
spirits trapped in herds of cattle?"
"Uh, no. No, that was – that was an improvisation based on the, uhm –"
"Yeah, right. Admit it, Sammy. You were just as freaked as I was."
"No
I wasn't." But Sam had on his innocent face, all wide-open big
oh-believe-me-I'm-so-trustworthy puppy eyes and harmless,
I-have-no-idea-who-put-black-foodcoloring-in-your-toothpaste expression.
Dean
gave him an appropriately disgusted look, and Sam tore free of the wall
at last, leaving a good part of his second-best jacket behind.
Fucking spider.
It had eaten kids, too. There were a couple of pint-sized skeletons
right over by the exit. Fucking
spider –
"Dean. What the hell?"
Dean
followed Sam's gaze to one of the dead spider's legs. The limb was
curled up almost beneath the bulk of its body, but even so, the
metallic gleam around one of the claws was impossible to miss.
Fucking spider wore jewellery? Or was that some kind of spell
container? Had someone been controlling it?
"You
know what?" Dean grabbed Sam and dragged him out of the cave, into the
blessedly fresh air. "I don't even want to know. Let's just burn the
sucker and get the hell out of here."
(Lord of the Rings)