Eight Legs Too Many || ONC 2021 and 2022

Chapter 1: Shiori kills spiders

The plague forecasters got it wrong that Tuesday.

Not entirely wrong, of course. In the last two years, they'd done a decent job of optimizing the art of predicting zoological phenomena, from fruit flies to locusts to swarms of rabid bats. They had a reputation to maintain.

So the "spiders" part of the forecast was accurate.

Unfortunately, the "tiny harmless garden" part of the forecast was... not.

Shori plucked the newly-killed spider off the floor and scrutinized the red marks on its corpse. She was only a herpetologist, a snake researcher, and by no means a spider aficionado, but she recognized a black widow when she saw one. The fact that her sister Yoko was now flopping around on the sofa of their three bedroom row house, yelling and gasping and clawing at her ankle, was also a bit of a clue.

Outside, spiders floated from the sky. It was like watching a snowstorm, but with emo goth snowflakes with too many legs. They swirled in black clumps, rising and falling with eddies of wind, blanketing the rowhouses, the tree trunks, the cars.

It was almost beautiful—it would have been beautiful—except for the part where they were spiders.

Shiori tossed the dead spider in the trash, glanced at the reddening bite mark on Yoko's leg, strode to the table, and cleared a space for her laptop amid the days-old dishes and general clutter. She made sure to check her chair before sitting down. You had to do that, these days. Even if more spiders hadn't snuck into the house, there was still that plague of rats that had happened the week before—and before that, the fire ants... the paper wasps... the sand fleas...

When Death had started showing an interest in Earth two years ago, everyone assumed it was a temporary thing. No one predicted that Death would find the mortal realm far cushier than the underworld and wouldn't want to go back, nor that he'd buy out the biggest tower in Philadelphia and bring along his buddies—War, Famine, and Pestilence—to inflict misery on every human in a 7,918-mile radius.

Or that he would turn meteorology into an actually lucrative profession.

Yoko's screeches from their beat-up sofa had turned into a steady stream of background panic.

"...suck out the poison?... I can't do it, Shiori, my lips won't reach my leg. I just remembered, I never wrote a will, I don't know why I kept putting it off, I should've written one when I got COVID, or after that crocodile bit me, or when our house was invaded by hornets, but you know me, I always faff around, and it's so stupid, I knew I would die one day with all the famines and pandemics and the fucking plagues, but it's too late now, so I'll just tell you, when I'm gone, I want you to donate a third of my savings to a famine charity, you can get another third, and the remainder should go to the cat—"

"We are not giving your savings to Mister Tibbles." Shiori pulled up her browser. "Black widow... black widow... Black Widow Movie 2021, Why Black Widow was harder to write than Wandavision... wow, really helpful today, Google—"

"Shiori I swear to God I am literally dying over here—"

"Ah here we go..."

Ignoring her sister's panicked rambling, Shiori scrolled through the page on black widow fatalities.

"Good news!" she said cheerfully. "You have an almost zero percent chance of dying from a black widow bite. On the other hand, you have a 9 in 10 chance of getting super buff, shooting webs out of your wrists, and kissing your true love upside down wearing full-body spandex."

"You suck."

But at least Yoko stopped panicking.

Shiori hummed to herself as she clicked through her tabs. Should I tell her about the weakness, vomiting, muscle cramps, and difficulty breathing she might experience in the next twenty-four hours? Eh, maybe I'll just take her to the emergency department when the spiders clear up; they can deal with it there...