This one was for Richard Griffiths, of Crafty Butchers fame, who just wanted “spidermonkeys”.

We live to serve …

Cliff reloaded his rifle as quickly as he could, letting the spent cartridges join those already scattered about his feet. The barrel of the gun was hot enough to scorch the wooden parapet of the outpost as he propped it there, glad for a moment not to have the weight against his shoulder.

“How many of them are there?” asked Delilah.

“Depends,” replied Cliff. “If they breed like monkeys, we’ve got to be getting to the end of the troupe by now. If they breed like spiders …”

The words hung in the air as thick as the tropical heat.

“If they breed like spiders …?” Delilah asked meekly.

“Then I don’t have enough bullets.”

There was a crash out in the jungle, and the familiar screeching of the spider monkeys. Cliff had tried to work out where the nest was, considering in his darker moments that maybe the only way to survive this was to take the fight to them, to find their home and burn it out, but every part of the jungle seemed to be their territory. This was their place.

“Cliff, maybe we should take the other jeep, try and –”

“They know where the road is,” said Cliff flatly. “You didn’t see what happened to Clint, Helen, and the others …  Trust me Delilah, you don’t want to end up like that.”

Cliff closed his eyes for a moment. Hunting was a dangerous profession, he’d seen people hurt and killed before. He’d seen the things that an animal can do to a human in a matter of moments, he’d seen how inhuman the things that were left behind looked. What he had seen on the road out of the jungle though, what he had seen in the spider monkey’s web… that was something different entirely. That was a human level of cruelty.

The crashing in the jungle grew closer, and the screeching grew louder. Cliff cocked the rifle back up to his shoulder and peered down the sight.

“I can help,” said Delilah, awkwardly hefting up a pistol.

Cliff sighed. They were dead, of that he was certain. Delilah may as well die on her feet.

“Remember to aim low,” he said, with an uncommon note of kindness. “If you hit the poison sack, that seems to do the trick.”

Inspired by Ryan Reed, who asked for a story featuring ““A man who has been bitten by a radioactive man, a VW Camper Van, and a pie”

Rain rattled against the side of the camper van. Reed tried to ignore it, and concentrated on cooking. Cooking was a lot more complicated for Reed these days than it used to be as, since the bite, he had to work just as hard to keep things out of his meals as put things in.

Thunder crashed overhead and the VW camper rocked from side to side as Reed gingerly lifted the baking tray out of the small oven he had installed into the van. The van, like Reed, had been through a lot of changes, since the bite.

Four years on the run, four years since the bite.

Placing the tray on the edge of the sink, he picked up the piping hot pie and dropped it onto his only plate. He didn’t feel the heat of the pie, the flesh of his fingers long dead.

Long dead since the bite.

The rain was gradually turning into hail, hammering harder on the sides of the van. Reed knew that he didn’t have long, that soon the rain and the hail wouldn’t be the only things hammering on the sides of his van.

The village was less than an hour away and he was sure that the children would have been missed by now. He wished that it didn’t have to be children, but they were the only things that worked.

The only things that worked since the bite.

Edging down the van, the wind threatening to topple him at any moment, Reed caught a glimpse of himself, reflected in the windscreen. His flesh was rotten, sloughing off every bone. The poisoning was getting worse. The poisoning that had been eating away at him ever since the bite.

He sat down, and let the aroma of the pie fill his nose.

Soon, he would look like everyone else. Soon, he would be able to walk among the normal people, and no one would know.

The secret was in the pie.

And all it would take was a bite.