The World's Next Plague Read Free Page B

spiders,” the younger brother said.
    “True… plus, I’d eat all the profits,” the
other replied.
    They pulled their meals out of the hot fire
and set them down on small aluminum plates to cool. Each then
reached into their packs for their pocket knives, which they would
use to remove the head of the spider.
    “You better put that one back in, it’s
looking a little frisky.”
    The younger brother looked down and one of
the spiders was spasmodically twitching its legs on one side. He
grabbed the charred spider, which was still too hot to hold onto,
and promptly tossed it back into the fire, where the legs
immediately curled back up next to the abdomen. “You’d think you
would know how to build a hotter fire,” he said sarcastically.
    After flipping open his knife with his
fingers still stinging from touching the roasted spider, the
younger brother started trying to stab at the heads of the spiders
on his plate without touching their steaming bodies. Each time he
came close, but the spider glanced off the blade and would spin out
of the way.
    “Stop being a child and grab it,” the older
brother said as he reached down to grasp one of the spiders in
front of him. “Our sister is more of a man than you are.”
    As he placed his hand around the large
roasted spider in front of him it suddenly struck at the exposed
skin between his thumb and first finger. The fangs went in deeply
before the astonished man shook his hand viciously. The spider was
thrown brutally into the trunk of a nearby tree, where its hairless
brittle charred abdomen cracked open like the shell of a nut.
    The pain quickly spread to the fingers before
he put the bleeding pinpricks into his mouth and started in a
forsaken attempt to draw out the poison. It was already too late.
The venom spread like wildfire up his arm. The agony was so intense
when it reached his shoulder seconds later he started
screaming.
    The fire intensified even more as it flowed
into his chest and neck. An uncontrollable seizure threw his body
savagely backwards and his head cracked brutally against the hard
ground.
    The younger brother stared transfixed a few
feet away, hands frozen, still reaching towards the spiders in
front of him… his dazed expression clearly mirroring the horror he
felt. Fifteen seconds later, before he was even able to consider
how to react, with the echoes of screams still echoing in the
forest, the tortured figure of his brother lay nearly motionless
except for small tremors running through his prone body.
    Breaking suddenly from his immobility, he
jumped up and leapt over the fire to his brother’s side.
    “No. No. No. No.” He reached for the carotid
artery in brother’s neck and, feeling no pulse, quickly pulled his
hand away.
    Through tear filled eyes, movement from his
left caught his attention. Glancing over he saw a charred spider
climbing over the edge of his brother’s aluminum plate and
unsteadily moving his direction.
    Terrified, the brother jumped up and sprinted
hysterically towards Rock and the rest of the crew.
     
    ~ Chapter IV
~
     
    Tanis lurked warily out of sight watching the
men in the Jombi village. It had been almost five years since the
ancient man had seen another uninfected human, and he had never
seen outsiders like this before. In his younger days the wrinkled
shaman standing upright would have barely reached the shoulders of
the powerful men in the clearing, however, now his crooked back
kept him perpetually stooped making him even shorter.
    He had not worn even a loincloth in years and
was unexpectedly conscious of his nakedness when he first saw the
men. Tanis had removed the many bone necklaces and bottles from
around his neck and stashed them in the knot of a large tree to
keep from making noise. With only his walking stick, he was silent
and virtually invisible in the fading light of the rainforest.
    The old man had been living alongside the
Jombi for years and knew how to coexist with them, but tribal