Summer Slaughter Series: Chapter 5
Warning, make sure you read PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, and PART 4 before continuing…
“Mom… don’t you smell it?” I whispered, my voice cracking in anger.
She shook her head and rattled Frankie’s rotting arm in her hand. “There’s nothing here, Aiden. Frankie’s fine.”
Flecks of foul flesh spackled the dried grass and dirt. Black and red specks sprayed her blouse and skin. I nearly vomited as I got caught in the spray myself. Frankie hadn’t said a word, he seemed to be unconscious. The violent jerking of his arm had no effect on him.
I started crying. Mom glanced at me and I didn’t recognize who I was seeing, she seemed different, somehow. I didn’t know why.
She picked up Frankie and began to walk toward the boat. I still sat in the dirt and grass, confused. I watched her walk off in silence.
It was then I noticed her ankle… putrid blackened rot seemingly creeping up her leg, under the leg of her capri pants. I took a harried and grasping stumble backward on all fours as a thick layer of deadened skin sluiced off her leg and onto the dirt.
“Mom! Are you okay?”
She paused with Frankie in her arms. She turned her head ever so slightly, not looking at me.
“I’m fine, Aiden. You need to calm down. Come on the boat.”
Not sure what else I could possibly do, I followed. I was still crying, and I wiped tears and snot from my face as I made the trek to the boat. I had been walking slower than I had thought because Mom had taken Frankie on board already. I saw her standing toward the bow… Dad was there, too.
I made my way up the small ramp and trudged my way toward the front in silence and dread. I felt the boat rock slightly, but the water looked too still – it looked thick. Silvery. I heard nothing but lapping waves – thick, chunky slaps against the wood. No birds, no splashing. I was shattered by the past few minutes already – the silent stillness just made it worse.
As I approached the bow, I saw that Mom had Frankie on the deck. Frankie was silent and still. Dad stood there, fishing rod in hand, looking down at Frankie like he was a catch that puzzled him.
As I crept closer, I noticed the drips and splatters on the deck… rotting flesh. I followed the trail with my eyes to my mother’s leg – the whole foot, now, was beginning to slide off the bone. Within a moment her ankle snapped in a spray of gunk and she hit the deck, hard. She said nothing. Dad stood there, in silence.
I stood, shaking, and watched her pick her body up enough off the ground to climb up on her legs with a struggle. I saw her rest her weight on the mashed stump as though nothing had happened. She stood lopsided and had I not been so frightened it would have been strange. Now, it simply terrified me.
I approached my parents and my younger brother. The smell of rot grew stronger the closer I got.
“Mom? Dad?” I whispered.
My Dad looked at me and I could see how that his left hand had become an oozing curtain of rotten skin. He smiled as though nothing had happened.
“Looks like Frankie is really tired, huh?”
Mom stood, lopsided and wobbling, staring at Frankie. Frankie’s hand was now starting to resemble my father’s.
“Oh, Aiden,” Dad smiled and gestured toward me with a finger, “you’ll like this. Your dad is quite the fisherman.”
He gestured to the cooler chest behind him. I leaned to look just past him at his catch, already knowing what it was. The chest was full of shimmering, coiled jelly. A twitching tentacle hung over the side, slapping idly at the plastic.
“Who knew your father could catch something so big, huh?” Mom chirped.
“Frankie is going to love it when he wakes up,” Dad added.
Yeah yeah, the insects tend to get ALL the attention here on Nightmarish Nature. But honestly, this one takes the beefcake. It’s the New World Screwworm Fly, and it’s as terrifying as the name suggests. And they aren’t limited to the Americas, there is an Old World version as well, as they can be found pretty much anywhere tropical or seasonably suited.
Revolting Little Buggers
The Screwworm Fly is a parasitic fly larvae that burrows into its host to feed, named because it seems to screw deeper and deeper into the flesh over time. This process is called myiasis and do NOT look it up online, you WILL regret it. They blur those images out for very valid reasons, trust me (and not because of pornographic content). And these maggots will continue to burrow en masse, rather than staying put as a botfly larvae would.
Do Not Do an Image Search on Screwworm Myiasis, Like Seriously – You Will NEVER Unsee That
The female Screwworm fly lays her eggs on an open wound or orifice of her chosen host… And not just one egg or a couple of eggs, no – hundreds, even thousands of them. Let’s let that sink in a bit, shall we? Or screw in as it were. Although any warm-blooded animal is a prime target, cattle are a fly favorite, costing millions of head of cattle to this sick and disgusting horror annually. And if beef isn’t on the menu, Fido or even yourself might be.
The Great American Worm Wall
In fact, this particular feature here on Nightmarish Nature is so terrifying that the United States has made agreements with all of Central America, even including countries that do not generally share its interests, in order to create a “Great American Worm Wall” to prevent them from spreading back into the United States. I’m not going to go into all of the creepy and juicy details of this bizarre science fiction freak fact, you’ll just have to watch it here on Half As Interesting’s YouTube channel.
Essentially, the Worm Wall is a complicated byproduct of scientists studying radioactivity on the flies’ maturity as well as the flies’ sexual lives and using this information against them to nearly eradicate the species and banish it from much of its former range. So, Peter Parker, if you thought everyone was messing with your love life before, be glad you weren’t bitten by a radioactive Screwworm.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
You’ve almost made it to the end of the finger spiders here at Haunted MTL! Because I made A LOT of unfulfilled requests for a spider out of fingers, I will continue this snarky little AI art series with NightCafe and Canva through the month of September… In case you missed out, here are the other parts of this series:
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: hand that is a spider; spider legs as fingers; fingers becoming spider; spider all fingers.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Keep Trying! Yeah, I’m sure you don’t remember being bitten. Because of the ways they warp time and space, and the natural chemical reactions involved, the AI art generated finger spiders’ bite isn’t typically felt. They are still attached to you, feeding… You have to get them off… Keep trying!
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: spider leg fingers; spider made out of hand fingers; hand spider picking banjo; fingers as spider playing banjo.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders That’s All Folks! Well, I guess that’s that then. It’s been nice knowing you. Enjoy your new form. Nothing left for it but to play the banjo…
All of the AI art images used in this series were generated on Thursday, June 13, 2024. If you want to see more freaky spiderness in art here on Haunted MTL, check out Bitten and Soul Catcher. More AI art graphic narratives from Jennifer Weigel have explored Little Red Riding Hood and Into the Deep Woods. Oh, and the Tiny Brain Computers exploration. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
We just can’t get enough of spiders here on Nightmarish Nature… so here are some more creepy spider facts for you to consider, outside of the giants, eating and mating habits, and wasp predation as previously mentioned in this series. Plus the finger spiders have taken over the whole of the month of September, so strap in because they’re here too – no goofy drawings this month just more terror unleashed in the form of AI art, courtesy of NightCafe.
Spiders Are Baby Mama Machines!
Spiders can lay hundreds and thousands of eggs in their egg sacs at a time. And when they hatch, all those tiny baby spiders can balloon, flying to new homes on airborne strands of silk as if raining from the sky… So if you suffer from trypophobia and are weirded out by large quantities of clustered small and tiny objects (especially when they are alive and moving) you may want to steer clear of these little bug bombs.
Spiders Are Athletic Archdukes!
Jumping spiders can leap as far as 40 times their body length. And wolf spiders can run up to 2 feet per second. In movement, spiders have four feet on the ground and four in the air at all times. And they have six knees on each leg for a total of 48 knees – that’s a lot of potential kneecapping, I’d try to take them down a different way if I were you…
Other Interesting Factoids
Spiders are on every continent except Antarctica and there are over 40,000 identified species of them. All spiders produce silk for all that they don’t all make webs, since some prefer to live on the move or ambush from hidey holes. There is a known species of herbivorous spider, the Bagheera Kiplingi, but most are carnivorous or omnivorous. And the longest lived spiders can survive for 40+ years.
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