Chapter 18
Trey
The first time Trey had an existential crisis involving spiders was when he was ten and his dad sent him into the garage to get a tool needed to fix a broken sink in his mom’s house.
He didn’t remember what specific tool it was, probably some kind of wrench, but this situation was the reason he preferred all tools to live in a large Tupperware inside their actual living space and not in any outside storage area.
After his parents divorced, the garage had become a dumping ground for whatever junk his mom didn’t want in the house but wasn’t quite ready to donate or throw away.
Many of the things she claimed were his father’s and, for some reason, his dad didn’t want the items either.
So by the time the broken sink incident happened, the garage was a mess of dust and grunge.
When getting the tool, he’d knocked over a small box of old cables, and along with the mess of cables also came an explosion of spiders.
They spread everywhere like a writhing mass until one spider sprang toward him, sending him falling backwards over another box of old shoes.
He screamed in a panic, convinced all the spiders were about to consume him for their afternoon feast.
His father ran into the garage, yelled at him for creating chaos and scaring his mother half to death, and then roughly dragged him into the house.
As he tried to explain to his parents what happened, a wayward spider crawled from somewhere behind his shoulder and down his arm, sending him screaming once more.
It was an origin story of how he came to believe spiders were the devil’s animals and why he was fastidious in keeping all his living spaces as clean as they could be.
As a grown man, he wouldn’t admit to being terrified of them, but he preferred they stayed in their world and he stayed in his.
As long as these boundaries were respected, there wouldn’t be any issue.
Of course, this was before the whole shrinking thing happened, and he was in their world now and, even worse, below them in the food chain.
As soon as he saw things on the horizon moving, some of them doing jerky hops, he knew in his heart it was the spiders coming to finally get him and finish him off.
“Uh, Trey,” his wife said, sounding more alarmed as she looked behind him.
“Please don’t be spiders. Please don’t be spiders,” he said in a low chant, preferring ignorance like it was a blanket he could throw over his head and remain safe.
But he knew he had to look because life didn’t work that way and he had to know what he was about to face.
Also, he wasn’t going to let Catalina fall victim to spiders either.
Bracing himself, he slowly rotated, fully prepared to throw his wife over his shoulder and sprint away.
He forced himself to make sense of what he was seeing. They weren’t official spiders, but, as far as he was concerned, they were close enough to make his blood run cold.
“Crabs.”
“Shhhh,” he hissed, clambering to his wife’s side and wrapping a hand across her mouth in order to prevent her from revealing their location. “He’ll hear you. And don’t move. They can’t see us if we don’t move.”
He actually didn’t know if crabs had ears or whether or not Jurassic Park T-Rex rules applied in this situation, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
Trey had seen a picture of a ghost crab in a collage of images on the resort’s website when he looked up the hotel soon after winning the vacation.
To most normal-sized people, these creatures would be the crab version of a cute anime character because they were about the size of a quarter with adorable, elongated, cartoon-like eyes above the sand-colored body.
But it was hard to find it cute when the animal towered over Trey’s new height, its body the size of a large deep-sea fishing boat and the spindly legs the same as small tree trunks.
Plus, he’d like to remind everyone, ghost crabs were essentially beach spiders, except worse because of the ferocious, jaws-of-life claws. His new worry revolved around the possibility of getting his dick snipped off.
With his wife wrapped within the grip of his arms, he slowly backed away from the crab, pulling his wife along with him, afraid of taking his eyes off of it.
The crustacean was far enough away, doing its crab business, and Trey and Catalina appeared to be escaping detection. Perhaps they’d be able to—
A spray of sand flakes rained down on them, directly to his right.
Emerging from a burrow in the ground, a different crab skittered out, hovering beside the couple.
Everyone was in a state of frozen shock, including the crab.
His black, vertical eyes took them in unblinking.
It was as if the whole group was unsure as to what was supposed to happen next.
Releasing one finger at a time from the hand pressed across his wife’s mouth, Trey loosened his grip on Catalina. “Run,” he whispered into her ear, hoping she’d react as quickly as possible.
Cat didn’t need to be told twice, flipping around and sprinting away.
He waited a moment to give her a head start before following behind her, soon closing in as he pumped his arms to get him running up to speed, his bare feet sometimes losing their footing in the shifting pebbles of sand and slowing him down.
The crab was lightning fast. It darted quickly behind them, not coming directly but scurrying in a zigzag pattern. His hope of outrunning the animal wasn’t good.
Then Trey was flat on the ground, chest first, the wind knocked from his lungs.
He barely had time to protect his head from smacking forward, jarring his whereabouts.
Before he could react further, he was pulled backwards like he’d been lassoed by a cowboy and dragged.
It was then he realized the crab had one of those claws around the same ankle he’d slightly twisted earlier in the day and yanked him directly to the animal.
“Shit.”
Trey frantically clawed at the ground for something, anything, he could use in a fight, coming up with nothing until his fingers grasped a small log of driftwood.
As soon as there was a pause in being pulled, he screamed while yanking himself into a sit-up and swung the driftwood as hard as he could into the claw.
The crab released him, but before Trey could blindly swing another attack, the claw locked on to the log, ripping it from his grip and flinging it away.
It was a monster truck of an animal, towering over him, one of its claws frozen above him like it was going to spring forward and snatch him.
Trey hoped the claw would go for his head and put him out of his misery quickly instead of staying over his groin area like the crab somehow knew this would damage him the most. He slipped his hands over the crotch area of his shorts as if this would be enough to keep anything from getting snipped off.
As the claw swooped forward, Cat was suddenly there, pouncing on it. She helplessly wrestled with the claw, an animalistic growl escaping her as her strength strained against a losing tug-of-war. The crab easily wrenched from her grip. The force sent his wife rolling across the sand.
“Get out of here!” He was a lost cause, but she had a shot at surviving. He didn’t want to catch a glimpse of his wife being ripped apart by a beach spider.
The claw was back, but it seemed to be struggling to open.
It was then he noticed a small rubber band had been fitted over the tip, like prepping it for market.
The other smaller claw started rubbing against it to get the band off.
It wouldn’t hold for long. Trey attempted to get up but only managed to crawl backwards across the ground, putting as much distance between them as he could while the crab was distracted with the rubber band.
Cat ran back into danger, her bag clutched in her hands, and with as much force as she had, she swung and bashed her bag, as though it was a ball and chain instead of a fashion accessory, into the legs on one side of the crab.
With a hard exterior shell, it was doubtful the animal felt anything, but the action was enough to momentarily shift the body of the crab off-balance like a tilting table.
Cat didn’t stop, bashing its legs over and over with her bag.
“I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU DON’T GET AWAY FROM MY HUSBAND, I’M GOING TO FUCKIN’ RIP YOU APART UNTIL YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A CRAB CAKE! ”
She was a wild woman in full feisty mode.
It was times such as these when he believed his wife was capable of her threats.
The crab appeared confused at what he was supposed to do, switching between skittering away from Cat and attempting to go after Trey.
She didn’t relent, continuing to yell and go after the animal’s back legs as though she wore armor under her dirty, ripped cover-up instead of a bikini, and her pure rage was enough to protect her.
He silently cheered for his wife because she was a badass, and Trey couldn’t help but fall more in love with her.
Wow, what a fucking hero. Except the crab made a noise deep inside the main body, a high-pitched growl, like metal grinding together.
Turning its full attention to the banshee with the bag, its free claw snapped at her, and she dodged out of the way, but not before it managed to latch onto the bag.
“Let it have it!” Trey yelled. “It’s not worth it!” He finally managed to get up and limped his way toward her as fast as he could.
“NO! I’m not going through all this just to let a silly crab take all my stuff.
” She did her best to yank ownership over the bag while being mostly in the air.
The crab was stronger, dragging her toes along the sand and then upward.
It continued making its weird science-fiction growl, which was both haunting and terrifying.
Trey leaped toward her, wrapping his arms around his wife’s torso and using himself as an anchor. “Let it go!” He wasn’t about to lose her this way.
“No! I already lost an empanada! I’m not giving this up too!”
“Stop being so stubborn!”
“You love me when I’m stubborn!” she said on a sob.
“Reason number eighteen, by the way!”
The sound of fabric tearing cut through the air, and he soon had her full weight on him as they both tumbled to the ground, the contents of the bag raining down around them. The crab also seemed surprised by this unexpected fabric pinata, scampering away.
Cat crawled to Trey, practically getting onto his lap, her hands brushing over him in a tactile inspection before taking his face between her palms. “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Tell me you’re okay.”
He was trying to catch his breath, but all he said was, “Holy shit. You’re amazing. Will you marry me again?”
Before she could respond to his ridiculous proposal, they were interrupted by more skittering close by. Their heads whipped in this new direction, knowing danger wasn’t far. “We have to move.”
“I agree.”
“Help me get this stuff,” she said, scrambling across the ground and reaching for one of the discarded water bottles. He tried to yank her up, not wanting to stick around in this spot longer than necessary.
“Just get what you can. We don’t have time.
” He grabbed a different water bottle and the last bag of airplane pretzels.
Trey tried to run, but his ankle was tender from where the claw had grabbed him and could only manage a hop-shuffle.
Catalina slid under his arm, wrapping her own around his waist as though she could support him alone.
They jogged along, not really knowing where was going to be a safe position from the rest of the crabs, as they were still on the open beach.
He took her support while trying not to burden her too much, clutching her close.
“You called me your husband,” he said, grinning at her.
It had been a long time since she had claimed him so fiercely.
He’d missed it. “And you came back to save me.” Even though he knew this would do nothing but antagonize her, a mischievous part of himself couldn’t help but poke the beast, wondering if there was a part of her heart that continued beating for him.
She gave him a small smile. “Like I’m going to allow an asshole crab let you off easy when you’ve only come up with eighteen reasons why I should love you. Maybe I want to hear them all.”
“So you like them then?”
She didn’t say anything for a while, and he thought the whole conversation had died on that note, but she surprised him by speaking up again, this time her words softer. “I do like them, and I think… I want to be convinced.”
His chest expanded with hope. Sure, they were defenseless on a beach filled with dangerous ghost crabs that wanted to eat them.
But, with this one small confession from Cat, he finally had a moment where their survival was not only entirely possible but essential.
He had to have as much time as he could with his wife.
Trey tilted his head closer, speaking into her ear. “I never should have stopped giving you reasons. You know, before all this. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too…for making it hard to love me because I thought I didn’t want it anymore.” She turned her gaze to him. He felt a shiver go through her. “It’s not true.”
He wanted to kiss her at that moment, really kiss her, not a tease but to completely let go. Unfortunately, stopping would be a bad idea, especially when a spray of sand landed nearby and they had to dart away from it.
“As soon as we’re safe,” he yelled, “I’m going to give you the biggest reason of all.”