Angry Jasper: Forty

Kate should have known her world was about to take a decided turn for the horrible when Thomas’ guards sealed off either end of the dark tunnel. Not that mny dared this way, but it was obvious that what he wished to show her wasn’t something he wished many others to know. She could feel the oppressive heat and humidity coming off the heavy iron door. It looked like some sort of prop from a schlocky Twentieth Century Medieval movie. It was set deep in ragged bedrock. The entrance was low and arched. Moss grew long and heavy from the stones, but with a sickly quality, as if it was afflicted by whatever Thomas held or had hidden inside.

A shiver ran through her. Thomas went to the door and ran his long spindly fingers across it in an oddly and creepily sexual way. His expression was fluid. He looked t her and seemed about to burst. The only question was, thought Kate, was what might jump out of that zombie-like body.

“So why bring me here?” she asked.

“Something you must see.”

“I can only guess,” she said.

His voice was low and seedy. “Never in a million years, my dear..”

The lock look primitive enough, but obviously there was much more to it. Thomas pressed his hand to a smooth place hidden deep in shadow beside the door. The rock lit up and scanned the full length and breadth of Thomas’ hand. It was obviously some sort of bio-metric mechanism, but of a sort and sophistication Kate had never seen before. The latch on the door opened with an audible clang and the door swung heavily back. Not much enough to see, especially for the dull yellow-green light within, but enough that she was instantly hit by the stale must of putrefied bodies.

“Dear god!” Kate raised a hand to cover her nose and mouth.

“God?” Thomas laughed mockingly. “There is no god, Kate. God resides,” he began, drawing her to the door, “in the eternal competition for each species’ survival.”

Thomas pushed open the door and shoved he into the chamber. Kate stumbled forward, skidding and slipping on the slick and slimy floor. The light was low and hazy. It took her eyes a moment to adjust. It took her brain a few seconds longer.

She swooned and felt dizzy as her mind swam and spun fighting to accept, or not to accept, what her eyes beheld. She blinked once and turned abruptly to Thomas and the door, gauging her chances of escape. The look in his deadly black eyes-an insects soulless eyes- had the futility of any attempt abundantly clear. Kate turned back to the horror before her, doing her damnedest to stifle a scream.

It wasn’t a chamber, at least not in the sense someone had carved it from the bedrock. Rather it was a natural formation, though what it had become now was anything but natural. Kate was standing between the open legs of a desiccated corpse that she could only assume was a woman. Hundreds of bodies were strewn or piled across the floor where, for the most part they had been stripped to bone and sinew. The mass of them formed a huge pile at the center of the room, where it appeared they had been tossed like old chicken bones after being devoured.

There were other, fresher corpses, all women, cocooned in grayish orange webbing to the rocky walls. Their distended bellies had been ripped open. Horrifying like hybrids, part human child and part spider were hungrily devouring their hosts. One woman, Kate noticed was still alive. She thrust her arms out from those rgged trappings and screamed as one of those disgusting spider-children ripped itself from the poor woman’s belly.

“Tell me again why I never had a kid?”

“You’ll bear my children.” Said Thomas.

Kate’s sly and ready smile, there in the worst of circumstances failed her completely now. “Interested in a loveless marriage?”

He laughed loudly. It thundered in the chamber, startling the insect-child hybrids, who squealed and scurried away into the shadows, or slithered back inside their long dead hosts. It was a belly laugh that went on a little too long. Kate choked back bile noting the darkly yellow urine stain spread across the front of Thomas’ gown.

“Now I’m turned on,” she said with ample disgust under her breath.

“Dear, this isn’t your fate,” he said. “This will form the vanguard of our army, but you and I, we will create a new royal class, a species all our own. It will be the next phase in the evolution of both our species, which will rise beyond this little system to create and empire across this corner of the galaxy. You and I, my dear will be Adam and Eve to a new civilization.”

Kate couldn’t look at him. She was trapped in the horror of the chamber, and of the terrible vision Thomas’ voice evoked and predicted.

“And if I say no?” she said.

Thomas moved behind her. His cold, calloused slithering fingers held her throat. His slimy tongue circled and explored her ear. He bit down upon the lobe, enough to draw blood. His breath carried the fresh scent of decomposition. Kate felt faint, but sadly unconsciousness never rescued her.

“Dearest,” he said, lapping at the trickle of blood at her neck, “that was not a question nor a choice.”