The Eighth Eye

Three twenty-five in the morning, and the dumpster stirs. Out crawls a spider, its body drenched with once-slippery, now-viscous gore. To the side, to the pavement and the puddle of urine it contains, blood drips, splatters, paints, and splays like never before. A spider is many things, but now, most of all, it is sanguinary.

For eight feet it walks, a foot for each eye, and for each step it takes, the inglorious beast neglects to sigh. Beyond the eighth pace a rusted chariot awaits; the spider called Zero hops in and begins to peel its bloodstained face.

"Your shirt's ruined," Todd ventures, but the shadowy mass in the rearview mirror offers no reply. The woman known as Zero has no quick wit, no charm, no lies to spread, for the world is her glistening web, and the spider has been fed.

"Is he dead?" Chad wonders aloud, and to this the monster slowly tilts her soggy head, holding it there for a moment, as if to ponder the depth of the man's inherent stupidity (that, or his wickedly daft sense of humor).

Her reddened fingers gently sift through burgundy tresses matted down by extraneous bodily fluids, picking up bone fragments here, intestinal lining there; what her fingers do not catch wasn't meant to be found. The spider's face rests upon her lap, though its steely gaze offers not one shred of gaudy consolation, for without inspiration, without her, the spider is nothing but molded rubber bathed in old man's blood.

Chad offers up a cigarette and she leans forward, pressing its fiberglass filter between the vice of her moistened lips. He sets it ablaze with a tiny, saffron Bic lighter, fumbling the entire way, first with the flint, then by struggling to keep the flame intact. He's got the shakes, and he's got them bad; always has, always will, especially whenever dinky trinkets are involved.

"Sooo," the woman states, pausing to inhale, exhale, and watch bemusedly as some gore from her taped-up fingers soaks into the cigarette's ivory shaft, "jit-ter-y."

"Since I was a kid," Chad grouses. "Don't know why." He pushes his seat back as far as it can go in an attempt to prop his feet up on the dashboard, an effort which is, all things considered, marginally successful.

"You're not your characteristically vibrant, loquacious self. What ails you, milady?" Todd quips mordantly.

"I've been smoking, fool. Speaking of which," she growls, extending a stained, striped hand. The dashboard's neon glow reveals an almost blackened appendage decorated with a cornucopia of tattered flesh and splintered bones held in place by a labyrinth of progressively loosening strands of electrical tape. From Chad's perspective, there's a clump of pubic hair, a fractured tooth, a jagged shard of toenail, and a mysterious glop that reminds him of day-old yogurt. From Todd's perspective, there's a chunk of some unrecognizable vital organ hanging from a wayward strip of tape and a shriveled flap of scrotum which desperately clings to the knuckle of her curled pinky finger.

Chad promptly drops a green-and-white box into the woman's saturated palm, followed by the requisite lighter. Fingers retract and the hand retreats, and for some vague reason, Todd is reminded of times when, during his early years, his mother would scoop aged potato salad from a lime-green Tupperware cylinder and slap the mush down upon a square, plastic plate once described as Big Bird yellow. Fuck the seventies, and fuck that grotesque, vomit-inducing sound which accompanies the freak's every movement.

Again, a burst of light, followed by the birth of a distant star amidst a putrid nebula. Chad cracks a window for ventilation.

Todd taps the steering wheel as they pause at a four-way stop, even though theirs is the only moving vehicle in sight. "Looks like this car's a bust," he says, his voice equal amounts frustration and dejection. Stealing cars has become an increasingly hazardous chore; when you're drifting from place to place it's relatively simple, but when you've been stuck in the same ass-fucked town for the past three and a half months, lifting cars like kids pop Flinstones Vitamins, statistics aren't exactly in your favor.

"Let's get that El Camino over on Franklin Street," Chad suggests, sitting up now. "We're only a few blocks away." He readjusts the seatbelt to better accommodate his massive frame.

"The one across the street from the middle school?" Todd quizzes his longtime friend, as if there'd ever be more than a single El Camino on their collective radar.

"Yeah, that one," Chad affirms as the car runs through an intersection, this time ignoring the stop sign as well as the posted speed limit.

The woman leans in between the two seats, smelling of Hamburger Helper gone bad. "Then we're all set."

"No, we're not 'all set'. We have to ditch this car -prematurely, might I add- because you've made an irrevocable mess of it. We need to locate, and subsequently break into another vehicle, which inevitably leads us to the dilemma of getting that one up and running. After that, we keep our fingers crossed, hoping to avoid unwanted attention. Eventually, our luck will run out." Todd's cruising down Thirteenth Avenue at an accelerated pace, pushing fifty miles per hour in a residential area. Soon enough, the hulking, four-story public middle school comes into view, an enormous cube comprised of bricks, mortar, steel, and glass. A product of a more industrious age, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Middle School still stands proudly some fifty years since its inception. Before this shadowy monolith lies the school's vacant football field, and despite his loathing for both public education and recreation alike, Todd appreciates the Spartan design of the facility and its grounds.

"Will it, though? Assuming there is such a thing as luck, I'd say it's been quite the opposite, actually," the woman responds as the car approaches another intersection, one just prior to the glistening, unused field on the right, and a row of nondescript, single-storied houses to the left. "I mean, if anything, it seems like-"

Todd blows past the intersection, only to swerve right and hit the brakes hard, ejecting an unbuckled Megan Erickson through the windshield, taking a sizable portion of it with her as she careens over the hood, across the sidewalk and into the grass beyond, accentuated by a cacophony of crunching glass, flattened earth, twisting flesh, and broken bones. For a moment, neither of the remaining occupants speak, while a neighborhood dog's thunderous barking provides an ambiance of sorts. Chad rolls down his window to its base and sticks his head out to get a better look at the slimy, immobile lump resting several yards ahead of them.

"Wow," he mumbles, thoroughly impressed. "Didn't see that one coming."

"Neither did she, I'd imagine." Throwing the car into reverse, Todd hastily realigns the automobile, drops it into drive, and speeds away just before the porch light from a nearby house flashes bright.