got that spiderblood in me

 

 Chris Tannhauser

 

 

 

You’re in a dugout canoe, and it’s raining arrows. They pepper the sea to froth around you, and thunk into the gunwales. You raise your bookmarked Bible to show these naked beach people that you are here with God’s blessing and certainly have no intent of stealing the sacred fungus from their shaman’s ghost pouch, the fungus which elongates life like a nightmare hallway and can, in certain circumstances, raise the dead for brief, desperate conversation.  

 

The sound of a Paleolithic arrow going through the Bible is the same one your neck will make three days from now when you finally make landfall and these people get their hands on you.

SPIDERBLOOD—you know the stuff, the eponymous penis pill cum energy drink, and like an old-timey clubhouse it’s strictly NO GIRLS ALLOWED. And when they started guzzling it, man-o-man, it turns out there’s such a thing as a “lady boner” and it’s wild. And that’s why President Reagan (bless his scintillating corpse) replaced Milwaukee with the Milwaukee Metro Area Memorial Crater.

A day later you wake in a bamboo cage, like something out of a castaway sitcom, covered in someone else’s blood. For such a small tribe, they sure do know how to handle people—proving their shared humanity after all. More clichéd TV stuff as the sun sets beyond the jungle clearing and the drums and fires start. But none of this is funny. It’s not funny at all.

 

Their shaman, creased and slouched and grinning, giggles as he fingers his ghost pouch. 

 

You shit yourself again.

SPIDERBLOOD hit the manosphere like an MMA liver TKO—on the Gettin’ It podcast with Dirty Dan & The Weasel, they called it “liquid Jesus” and could not stop gushing about how it optimized their workouts and made morning wood into an all-day affair. With just a handful of all-natural ingredients

 

guarana

ovolactin

hysteriglam

and some kind of “magic man” mushroom extract from the jungle or some shit

 

it would reforge your dick into a porn truncheon and make your cum as addictive as “mugwump jizzum” (whatever that was) to ensnare bitches in your manly thrall, bend them to your will, hugging your leg naked like Frank Frazetta (whoever he was).

 

Mitch immediately ordered a whole case.

The drums deepen, their throats stretching beyond the night and into realms unseen. You and the other survivors are staked out on the ground, spread-eagle, before an idol shrouded in shadow. There is dancing, the women are naked, and the men watch. It starts slow, sensuous, hips tilting and sliding, describing long arcs of desire, weaving a cursive tale of anticipation, release, and rebirth. The last thing you want is to be erect, yet here you are—life seeking any way out of your body before it perishes in the dead end of your corpse.

 

The shaman is spinning, teeth flashing in the firelight, dipping his finger into his ghost pouch and wiping the black paste into everyone’s eyes. You struggle, whipping your head back and forth as he approaches to touch you, but he is patient and experienced and gets you in the end. The stuff burns and you cry out, a sound mimicked by the dancers, who now mount you and the other men, pinning you all down with their weight and riding to the increasing tempo of the drums. You try to think of sweet Christ and your wife, but this is like nothing you’ve ever felt before.

 

The good news, at least, is that they worship a fertility goddess.

By God, the results were real. Mitch’s cock was legend, Betty couldn’t get enough of his cum, and after he blurted the secret during a particularly Olympic doggy-style fuck she was hell-bent on drinking some SPIDERBLOOD herself.

 

“The label says it’s for men only,” he countered.

 

“Pfft,” she scoffed, “there’s nothing in here that women can’t handle. ‘Ovolactin’?  That doesn’t sound very masculine. Gimme.”

 

He relented and she cracked the man-sized can, enormous in her hands, and took a tentative sip.

 

“Well?” asked Mitch.

 

She smacked her lips. “Tastes like—” Suddenly, she chugged the entire can like a pro, crushed it in one hand, executed a flawless free throw into the trash, gave a lusty belch and wiped her mouth on the back of her forearm. “Tastes like... starlight.”

 

Starlight, as in the embers of the Big Bang igniting. And from that moment on she fucked like a man, they all did, every woman who downed a can, taking what they wanted, done when they were finished, ghosting the men who got weird or needy about it.  

 

“I didn’t buy you dinner so you couldn’t eat my pussy, slut,” she said after a particularly fraught meal. “You’d best warm up that tongue of mine.”

 

But Mitch was so very tired, and like many other men in the Milwaukee Metro Area he was learning that having a woman who fucked like a man was nothing like the fantasy at all.

Frenzy. Now you know the frayed edges of the word. The drums are almost a solid drone now, the starlight above remote and searing. You come for the fourth time with no refractory period, somehow keeping up, but feeling like something vital is being milked from you with each terrifying orgasm. The women are fucking like they won’t be happy until you ejaculate the blood from your broken pelvis.

 

The good news, you remind yourself again, is that they worship a fertility goddess—

 

That’s when the shaman, capering madly, ignites the big bonfire before the shadowed idol—

 

You see it then, firelit in all its glory, and gasp, your open mouth instantly filled with tongue from your current rider. Your eyes are wide and white as you stare around her joggling head.

 

The good news is that they worship a fertility goddess.

 

The bad news is that it’s not one of ours.

 

This, this is why the tribe is quarantined by the UN. Not because they’re some kind of precious remnant of what we once were, but because as long as someone’s worshipping, SHE doesn’t come looking for why the worship stopped. The idol in the firelight, stark against the cold black of the sky, so many limbs and mouths, a spider god with tits.

Betty was home again, coming in through the second-floor window as was her habit now. Mitch had learned to give up on hope, as Betty always made it back just as the paralytic began to wear off. She was wet with the semen of pretty much every man within her hunting perimeter, lending a whole new meaning to the term “body count”.

 

“Let’s get you up,” she cooed as she cracked a can of SPIDERBLOOD, downed it, and regurgitated it into Mitch’s slack mouth until it gushed from his nose. The tingling in his fingertips subsided and he fell perfectly still but for his wide white eyes and throbbing cock.

Just when you think you can’t take any more, and you feel the edge of madness peeling back to offer you an escape route, the chopper breaks the tree cover like hunter-of-stars, its great black wings thudding the air in everyone’s lungs. The naked beach people scatter like feral cats among the whipping embers of the blown-out fires as grim-faced mercs snot-rope down and lay overwhelming covering fire into the wind-savaged vegetation. They cut you free, no hesitation at your majestic, glistening erection, and hustle you into a harness. As you rise, dumb and stunned above the fray, you see them walking from staked-out man to staked-out man, putting two rounds into the head of each.

 

Rupert Goatshank, hazmat-suited billionaire, greets you inside the red-lit womb of the chopper. “Did you get it!” he screams over the racket.

 

You gesture weakly to your tear-streaked, black-smeared eyes. Goatshank snaps his fingers, and his medical team holds you down and plucks your eyes out with near-surgical precision. They roll you out the door, blinded, and you fall away from the cacophony into a padded silence. You hit the ground and the world presses your breath from you, but not your soul. You live long enough to find out that for such a small tribe, they sure do know how to butcher people—proving their shared humanity after all.

The scintillating corpse of Ronald Reagan couldn’t believe what he had just witnessed: Nancy drinking three Secret Service agents dry before vanishing into the air ducts of the White House. Even now, barricaded in the Oval Office, he could hear her scrabbling around up there, getting closer.

 

“Sir, there’s no time,” said the gore-steaked agent with the folding Uzi, “you must order the orbital strike on Milwaukee.”

 

The reanimated Gipper looked more confused than usual. “Milwaukee?  Why Milwaukee?”

 

“Because—” said the agent as Nancy burst from a vent and enfolded him, dragging him backwards, screaming, through the too-small hole.

 

This, this was the precise moment Betty finally found the perfect corner in the basement—dark, cool, moist, a corner she could keep from predators, a corner with enough exposed brickwork for the eggs to adhere to. Listening to deeper whispers, she unzipped her jeans, peeled them off her hips, and assumed the position.

 

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