Story Notes: Written in September 2007. Crossover with "Kingdom of the Spiders," an execrable 1977 horror movie starring William Shatner. Set post-Call of the Wild for Due South; just after the movie for "Kingdom." Basically, all the movie's survivors are holed up in a rustic inn. (And what they survived was an attack of extra-poisonous, oddly-cooperating-with-each-other, seriously pissed-off-by-DDT tarantulas.)

It turns out it didn't do any good to convince Fraser to leave the police radio turned off on the drive back, because Dief's radar is always on, and he sets up a serious creepy howl when we pass this one off-ramp on the interstate.

"No," I say.

"Ray," Fraser says, "obviously the public good is endangered in some fashion, and--"

"Arizona has its own cops," I say. "And my folks are expecting us. We survived the world's lamest conference, and this is the fun part of the trip, okay?" I'm not kidding about the lameness. I mean, "Physical Fitness Breeds Mental Fitness for Law Enforcement Professionals: The Synergy of Energy?" Jesus. I should have known better than to let him talk me into any conference with a name long enough to need punctuation in the middle.

He looks like he's going to start quoting "sound mind in a sound body" at me again, which would pretty much leave me no choice but to rip the gearshift off and beat him to death with it. But Dief takes it up a notch, and his howls are bouncing around the car and hurting my ears now, and--

"Fine," I say, and whip the car around.

We take the exit, and we've only gotten a couple of miles off the interstate when we pass a sign saying, "Welcome to Camp Verde," and things get weird. These little shreds of white stuff are drifting around in the sky, like in that really dumbass unicorn movie with Tom Cruise. They get bigger and thicker, and there are more of them drifting and it gets a little hard to see, and then all of a sudden there are long strands of the stuff, looping across the road, strung from rock to cactus.

We pull over and get out, and immediately the stuff starts landing in our hair and trying to float into our mouths, blech. Fraser pinches at the strands stretched across the road, pulls off a little piece and rubs, announces, "Spiderweb."

"Okay, are we talking Japanese-monster-movie-sized spider, here? 'Cause if that kinda shit is happening, I say we motor out of here before Gamera and Mothra show up."

"It's not one thick strand, it's hundreds of them woven together," he says, "so I think what we have here is large numbers of normal-sized spiders, cooperating. Which is strange enough in itself--normally they're cannibalistic. These strands were made a couple of days ago, though, at least; they're a lot less sticky than fresh webbing, and easy to pull apart. And, normally, when a web has begun to disintegrate like this, it means that the spider is no longer at home and receiving visitors."

"All right then."

We drive slowly into town, breaking through the stuff all the way, and every now and then we have to get out of the car and pull webbing off the windshield so we can see, and by the time we get a ways in we're pretty much covered with the stuff ourselves. I start getting a whiff of what probably caught Dief's attention, with his one-part-in-a-zillion sense of smell, and it ain't good.

We pull into what looks to be the town square, and it's full of bodies. And, yeah, Arizona is a dry heat, but--a couple hundred bodies still smells really bad.

Makes it hard to think, so it takes me a while to realize what else is weird, aside from the whole Jonestown effect.

"Fraser," I say. "The newest car here is from 1977."

He gives me this look like "And this matters why?" And even Mr. I'll-lick-anything is looking a little sick from the smell.

"Perhaps it was a classic car convention, Ray," he says. "But that hardly seems the most pressing aspect of the situation."

"But--now that I think about it--did you see anything newer on the way in? In any of the driveways? I don't think I did."

"Hmmm," is all I get out of him.

I whip out my cell phone and try to get a signal, but there's nothing; not a big surprise in the desert, but I gotta admit I was hoping we could get the feds up here to take whatever the hell this is off our hands.

We get out of the car and look around, and I don't think anything's contagious here, not with the way most of the bodies are webbed up and spotted with what Fraser agrees are probably spider bites, but I'm sure not touching anything, anyway. There are a couple of bodies, though, where some other cause of death is pretty obvious--and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how spiders knocked over a water tower and set a plane on fire.

I think we'd both really like to get out of here, but we need to keep checking for survivors.

We find dead and dead and some more dead and dead some more, and then we get back in the car and head up a shady little road on the edge of town, with a sign for a bed and breakfast. Still driving through shreds of webbing, but at least getting away from the center of town makes it smell less like a dumpster in the meatpacking district.

When we get up close to the b & b we can see that's it's all boarded up. Which could maybe mean some survivors, here, so we speed up, and when we reach it we pile out of the car and I start knocking on one of the boards across the window and yelling, "Anybody in there? Chicago PD!" which makes me feel a little stupid after I say it, but then a woman's voice from inside shrieks, "Oh my GOD the spiders have learned to TALK!!! We're not opening up for you, you lying little monsters!" and, okay, I'm not that stupid.

But then a much calmer-sounding woman says, "I'm pretty sure those are people," and then there's the squealing of nails getting pulled out, and after a few minutes we're looking in at two guys and two women and one little girl who's got--thousand-yard stare doesn't cover it. She looks like she's staring at some other galaxy.

"So, uh," calmer woman says. "Is it safe out there now?" And we bring them up to speed--no spiders sighted, webbing falling apart slowly, everything fine up to the town limits, at least the way we drove in.

The women and the older guy start crying, hugging each other. The other guy, though, he says, "We thought they'd taken over the world," in this really-- pompous? portentous? both--voice. He sounds almost disappointed, and the way he glances at the women, I'm thinking maybe he was looking forward to being the alpha male in his "we gotta repopulate humanity" plan.

The little girl just stares.

They finally let us in the door, and they're all talking at once about how they survived, and I gotta say, I know they're traumatized and all, but they sound like a pack of dumbasses.

I mean, they opened a ceiling vent BECAUSE they thought there might be spiders in the air conditioning system. Which is when you go ahead and board the thing up just in case--you don't take the vent cover off and then get all surprised when a bunch of spiders fall on your head.

The thing that really gets me, though, is that they keep talking about finding the kid--Linda, her name is--wigging out and spider-menaced in one of the other rooms. And at first I think they're so freaked out they're telling us the same part of the story over and over, but I finally realize they kept leaving the kid alone. Getting attacked by freakin' monsters, and it didn't occur to them to keep everybody in the same room?

Dief trots over and licks Linda in the face. She doesn't even seem to notice.

Alpha Guy (who says his name is Rack--seriously?) starts telling us in this "I'm such a manly hero" voice about swooping in to rescue Linda from the spiders for the thirty-seventh time and manfully knocking all the spiders off her because he is such a manfully manful man, and Fraser is even starting to get pissed, Fraser is ignoring him and crouching down to be on eye-level with the kid. "Linda?" he says, gently.

"Gaaarrrh," Linda says. I think there's a little drool involved.

Fraser looks up at Rack. "Sir, is she usually this...uncommunicative?"

Rack does a little, "ah, it's nothing," handwave, says, "She's just a bit rattled. Hasn't been real chatty since I rescued her out at her house. Did I tell you about that? Too bad I got there too late to help her mother," and he gives a tragic hero sigh, "but then I spotted Linda looking out the screen door, and I used my excellent reflexes to make it to the house while dodging spiders, and--"

"Her mother?" Fraser says. "And she saw it?" And he goes off into this very polite rant about post-traumatic stress disorder and emotional shock and maybe not leaving the kid alone again until we can get her to a competent psychotherapist, and I know this is gonna last a while, because that's a Fraser thing; when what he really wants to do is pick up something and kill you with it he just talks at you for a very, very long time until he gets over it, or you ask him to kill you so he'll stop talking.

So I go on over to the really-old-looking phone on the wall. I'm figuring the phones are down is why they didn't call for help, but with these people, I'd better check--maybe they just didn't think of it.

No signal, though, and when I start to hang up the calmer woman walks over, introduces herself as Diane.

"Ray," I say, and how did I not notice that she had Farrah hair, before? What was this, the whole town having a retro festival or something?

Diane nods toward the phone. "We think the spiders probably got the town's switchboard operator," she says.

"The...what?" I say.

"The switchboard--"

I whip my cell phone out of a pocket and she blinks.

"What's that?" she says.

"Special police radio," I say. "What year is this?"

"What--year?"

**************************************************************************************

As soon as I can get Fraser's attention, which is at about repetition twelve of "perhaps we could endeavor to keep an eye on Linda during the immediate future," I wave him over to a quiet corner of the room.

"These people, Ray," he says, and he's shaking his head. "These people--"

"These people think it's 1977," I say. "Or at least Diane does."

He blinks, then says, "Interesting. If we can check with everyone else, individually, without drawing attention--"

"Hey PEOPLE!" I yell. "What year is it?"

They all look at us, look at each other, then say, "1977," in unison. (Except for Linda, who says, "Glah?")

"There ya go," I tell Fraser.

"Hmmmm," he says. "I'll be right back," and he heads for the door, and Linda makes a little whimpering noise, and when he turns around to check on her I could swear she's actually looking at him, not at, I don't know, the Crab Nebula or something.

He squats down, and reaches a hand out to her really slowly, and when she doesn't freak out at his touch he picks her up, and she puts her head on his shoulder and sighs, closes her eyes and snores.

Fraser turns toward Rack. "Has she gotten any sleep in the last few days?"

"Well," Rack says, "every single time we put her off in a room on another floor by herself so she could get a little shut-eye she was attacked by spiders, and--"

"Never mind," Fraser says, and walks out the door with her.

He comes back in a minute with her still draped over his shoulder and sawing tiny little-girl logs. Lincoln logs, I guess.

He's got the Arizona maps from the glove compartment, and this giant sort of geographical-almanac book that's a listing of practically every place name in North America, rivers and hollers, whatever the hell a holler is, and every single town, even the podunkiest. He always brings it on long trips to drive me crazy with when I've got the wheel at two o'clock in the morning. ("Did you know there's a 'Lizard Lick' in North Carolina, Ray? Did you know there's a 'Coldass Creek?' "I did not, Fraser. Did you know I'm going to put on a "Best of 80's Hair Metal" tape if you don't shut up?")

We flip through the maps and the book, and of course. No Camp Verde.

"I think we're in some kind of--wormhole or something, here, Fraser," I tell him, and he gives me a "go on" look. Which is one way he's a great cop partner--you can throw out any weird-ass theory, and he might argue, but he's at least gonna listen.

"It's like," I say, "eddies in the space-time continuum. I think this town popped in from some other universe and some other time, and--how long do spiders live?"

"Tarantulas, anywhere from two to eleven years, I believe," he says.

"So--this place is twenty years off our world, right? So, I think the spiders hit the edge of town and went--poof."

"Poof?"

"Yep."

"Well," he says. "If that is an accurate assessment, we should probably be leaving before this--eddy--goes back where it came from. And if there's a more mundane explanation, we should be notifying the authorities anyway."

"Right," I say. "Outta here, I got no problem with that."

"There seems to be no immediate further threat to these people, given the--poofing--of the spiders. And it would probably be psychologically inadvisable to remove the adults from their timeline, if timeline there be. But--" he jerks his head down at Linda, snoring away on his shoulder. She's drooling a little. "I'm given to understand that both her parents are deceased, and I have...my doubts about the...standard of care being provided here..."

"You can say it, Fraser."

"These people are morons, Ray."

So he gives the adults a big spiel about us going for the authorities, and taking Linda because she is in need of some immediate psychotherapeutic intervention. But we can't fit everyone in the car and no they should not follow in the camper because if we're wrong about the spiders being gone they're safer here, where they've definitely not sighted any spiders in a couple of days, than in the camper which hasn't been thoroughly checked out and could have a hidden infestation. And I can tell Rack is gearing up to argue, probably he's loving the idea of being the one to tell the authorities about what he thinks is his whole heroic saga, but Fraser puts a hand on his shoulders and says, "And of course you'll need to be here protecting the women," and Rack puffs his chest out and says "Of course."

I'm trying not to crack up through the whole thing because Fraser's got that face I know means he's thinking "technically true, technically true" the whole time to keep from feeling bad about lying his ass off.

So we load Linda up into the car, which turns out to be quite a job because when Fraser tries to put her into the back seat she wakes up and gets an Iron Grip of Doom on his neck, so he finally has to sit back there next to her. Dief snugs into her on her other side.

I start driving.

"At the city limits...do you think she'll..." Fraser says.

"Probably."

"What are we going to do with her if she doesn't?"

I shrug, try not to breathe too deeply as we go through the town square. "Well, after we get her checked out good, we could throw her in with Frannie's brood. Not like anybody else would notice. Hell, I'm not sure Frannie would notice."

"True."

I look back at Fraser when we get near the city lmits, and he nods and puts his arms around Iron Grip Girl, and says, "It's going to be okay, Linda, " into her hair, and I hit the gas and cross the line.

There's a whoooooooooooooooooooooom noise, loud and long, and it sounds like every Star Trek sound effect ever, mushed together and played on the giant Moog synthesizer from "Close Encounters."

I hit the brakes and look back, and the first thing I notice is that there's no webbing there, no town sign, no town, nothing--miles of empty desert road behind us.

The second thing is that Fraser now has his arms full of a Linda who looks to be about twenty-seven, which we were kind of expecting. And he's gaping at her, because what we didn't think to expect is that when she put on twenty years, she kinda blew her little-girl clothes into shreds all over my back seat. So, yeah, all grown up and extremely naked.

Fraser makes a bunch of "Ack!" noises and tries to get his arms out from around her and pat her shoulder reassuringly and cover his eyes and open my duffel bag at the same time, but he hasn't got enough arms. And Dief's mouth is open and I swear he's laughing at Fraser. So it takes a while, but Fraser finally gets one of my CPD tee-shirts and a pair of boxers onto her, and she's just silently looking around through this whole process, not fighting him while he stuffs her arms and legs into clothes but not helping either.

I'm getting a little worried here. Because she could have just gotten twenty years of distance from what happened to her, or she could maybe have just gotten twenty years worth of post-trauma dumped on her at once. Which would be seriously Not Good, and how far is it to a hospital, anyway?

But then she starts to get a "somebody home" look in her eyes. She blinks at me, blinks at Fraser, who's still pink. And says, "Wow. Those people were a bunch of fucking morons."

I think she's gonna be okay.