Our Story So Far:
HatChick and Commitment Girl, crime-fighting duo, have been tipped off that a robbery would occur at the Precovia's Indiscretion store at Blimmercrest Mall. What they do not know is that Precovia's Indiscretion is the secret hide-out of Big Hair Lady, infamous super-criminal and psychotic, and the robbery is a sham, designed to lure them into Big Hair Lady's trap.
During the stake-out prior to the staged robbery, their trusted sidekick Jeff has been surprised and tied up by Hillary -- a member of the Kat-gang recruited by Big Hair Lady to do the robbery. Hillary is unaware the robbery is just a ruse.
The pert and perky crime-fighters scatter the Kat-gang, capturing one - Hillary again - for questioning. Then HatChick goes off to untie Jeff, while Commitment Girl sees to the supposed victim of the robbery - in actuality, Big Hair Lady herself.
Big Hair Lady captures Commitment Girl and suspends her upside down by her ankles, dressed in a black satin teddy designed to shrink to one-fortieth its size when wet.
While attempting to rescue Commitment Girl, HatChick and Jeff fall through a false floor into a silk stocking suspended over the empty space below. The stocking, stretched to hundreds of times its original size by their body weights, is made of the same shrinking material as the deadly black teddy, and the two are trapped in an unbreakable, constricting silken cocoon.
Meantime, the Kat burglar Hillary rescues Commitment Girl from the teddy, but in so doing, Hillary becomes entangled in a giant spider's web disguised to look like a display of women's bathing suits; and Commitment Girl, naked and exhausted, has fallen into the coils of Kaa, a living, 20-foot long plush snake who has slithered in through a secret door from the Weird Tales bookstore next door.
As our story opens, Hillary is becoming acquainted with the owner of the spider-web in which she is an unwilling and helpless guest, Commitment Girl is being dragged back to the bookstore for her (final) date with Kaa, and HatChick and Jeff are still trapped in an ever-tightening silken squeeze. . .
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Our Story Resumes:
HatChick pushed outward with all her strength, willing herself to straighten her arms, her back, and her powerful legs. For all her effort, she could still feel the smooth silk against her and around her contracting, gently but insistently forcing her into a smaller space and crushing her body against Jeff's. Their bodies were assuming fetal positions now, forced that way by the contraction of the space in which they were imprisoned; she was curled over Jeff's head and shoulders, his face pressed hard to her breast. Their legs were intertwined, and the steadily shrinking silk cocoon was forcing their legs up against their bodies - "eventually, we'll break each other's legs from the pressure," she thought.
Breathing was hard work, now. The silk, stretched tightly over her back and pressing her down onto her faithful sidekick's body, seemed determined to squeeze the air from her lungs and keep her from inhaling again. And she could tell from his breathing that Jeff was trying to stay alive - and conscious - with as little chest movement as possible. "He'll try to sacrifice himself so I can survive," she thought.
HatChick concentrated on controlling her breathing, buying as much time as possible for the inevitable, and wondered again how death would come - would she smother when finally unable to expand her lungs for air, or would their shrinking prison crush their bodies first, shattering bones and squeezing their insides into pulp?
She thought about Commitment Girl, now the captive of, incredibly, a gigantic, living stuffed snake. She wondered if Hillary's report could be credited - she played back in her mind the words of the panicked Kat: "Commitment Girl is being carried off by a gigantic toy snake and - I'm - trapped in some kind of -- really big - spider-web . . ." the voice had trailed off and fallen silent.
Then it occurred to her - the thought that had been struggling to escape the back of her mind since she had heard Hillary rescue Commitment Girl from the crushing embrace of the shrinking teddy: how had Hillary released Commitment Girl from the deadly lingerie? The teddy had been made of the same material as the sensuous cocoon in which she and Jeff were about to be crushed; what worked once . . . "Hillary," HatChick called out, "can you hear me?"
"I'm still here, HatChick - and so is . . ."
"I know, Hillary; just stay calm and you'll be okay. Tell me how you got Commitment Girl out of the shrinking teddy."
"I - um - cut her out with my Kat's Claws. HatChick, this is more than I can handle . . . I -"
"Be strong, Hillary; we'll get you out of this. But you have to do something for me first."
"I'll try."
"Good girl. I need your claws - or maybe just one of them. Do you think you can get one into the opening in the floor?" Jeff stirred, turning his head slightly against her stomach. Her breast was pressed to his ear, her knees now hard up against his body. "Hold on just a little longer, Jeff," she whispered. "We have one last chance here." Jeff nodded, or tried to, but she could feel his heart beating faster, and hoped it was from the new hope they had, rather than the first sign of asphyxiation.
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Helplessly entangled in the great spider-web, Hillary leaned as far away from the girl in black as she could - which wasn't very far. Her feet were suspended two feet above the floor, and she was completely enmeshed in the soft, thick strands of the web. It extended above and behind her into the shadows of the ceiling, and was attached somehow to the floor below, and to the walls at either side. Her legs were bound together at the ankles, and thick swaths circled her thighs, her body, and her throat. Both arms were tightly bound in the web, and her own body weight served to pull it even more tightly around her. The web seemed to be composed of exactly the same material as her own Kat-leotard. Its embrace was smooth and cool to her skin, but implacably efficient; she would not escape on her own.
The girl - the spider - hung onto the strands of the web above Hillary's head, her long legs wrapped around Hillary just below her breasts. The blond spider also wore black - legless, close-fitting, with a single red hourglass on the breast. The soft, shimmering material of her suit begged to be touched - just as had the material of the web. "This is how she catches her prey," Hillary thought. "One touch and - blammo! Caught."
The were-spider regarded Hillary steadily and with good humor, from huge, dark eyes. "Don't pull away, kittie," she whispered, pulling Hillary's body closer to hers. "Yummy kittie," she murmured to herself. Hillary looked away, her face pressed to the spider-girl's breast as she tried with four fingers to release the sharp metal cat's claw from the index finger of her right hand. It was usually a two-handed job, but her own hands were denied her and - she winced as she fumbled it, and the curved blade fell to the floor.
"Kitties don't like spiders, do they," the spider said, undulating against her body. "I think kitties are afraid of spiders," she whispered into Hillary's ear. Hillary's attention was fully on her right hand, as she worked to release the second claw without dropping it. "Our lives . . . our lives are in my hand," she thought. "On my hand - three more chances." Carefully she maneuvered the small curved blade to her fingertips; carefully she aimed at the square hole in the floor, so far away . . .
She flicked - the bright metal arced into the air and fell, well short of the hole. Despite herself, Hillary groaned.
"That's two claws down," she thought. "And it has to come from the right hand. I don't think I can reach the hole from the other side."
"Time to go," the spider suggested, grasping a handful of Hillary's hair and pulling down, forcing the desperate girl to stare up into her face. "Time to feed the hunter; time to feed the hunger." The girl/spider smiled, and Hillary went cold, seeing the hungry regard of the predator for the prey. The thin, lanky huntress curled her legs up against her body, dangling from her web by her hands, then extended and wrapped her legs around Hillary's head. The skin of her inner thighs was soft against Hillary's cheeks; the spider pressed the soft mound between her thighs against Hillary's face, gently at first, then with more urgency. Beneath the thin, cool material, Hillary could feel the predator's hunger, the tenacious grasping hold of the carnivore.
Desperately, she released the third claw - from her ring finger. The blade flew in a bright arc, down toward the opening in the floor - this one had the distance - and it stuck, with the faintest "thunk", in the wood at the edge of the opening. She nearly sobbed at the sound. Turning her head against the spider-girl's leg-hold, she could see it reflecting the light, hanging over the edge but of no use to the captives below.
"One more," she thought, as the spider's foot hooked around her left arm, pulling it behind her back. She resisted, buying herself a precious moment in which to launch the last bright missile toward the opening, even though the struggle drove her face deeply into the girl's sexual softness. For a moment she could not breathe and she panicked, struggling to free her mouth and nose of the smothering slick material covering her face; it seemed she would be pulled in as into a mouth, and she thought wildly "this is how spiders feed". She turned her head up, against the spider's flat stomach as the svelte predator folded around her, wrapping her tightly in more clinging silk. Thick swaths of spider-silk circled her taut stomach, pulled tight and pinning her left arm to her back.
The were-spider grasped her right arm, pulling it in to her side. She fought back desperately, as she flung their last hope into the void. The sob finally escaped her as she sent it on its way, and then the spider's arms and legs wrapped around her arms and her body, and she began to choke again as the girl's lean body pressed against her face. The spider-girl's musky scent filler her head, and the world reeled; she felt again the thick cords wrapping her, binding her right arm in a tightening cocoon which spelled her helplessness in the power of this cold and efficient hunter. The lithe predator scrambled around Hillary's back, and she scanned the floor, looking for the tell-tale glint which would show she had missed with her last attempt; but she could not tell if the claw made the mark or not.
The thin blond huntress lifted her helplessly bound captive from the great spider-web to her shoulder. The air whoofed out of Hillary's lungs as her weight came down on the were-spider's bony shoulder, then her world tilted as the spider climbed up her web, toward the ceiling supports. Hillary gave herself over to her new role- prey - as she was carried, tightly wrapped and helpless, through the darkness between the metal beams and toward the were-spider's lair.
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Commitment Girl closed her eyes. "Keep them closed," she thought. "Its eyes are hypnotic." Since the first moment she had looked into the eyes of the great stuffed depiction of Jungle Book's Kaa, she had felt wrapped in a velvet fog - removed from what was happening to her friends and to herself. Now she took stock of her situation.
She felt the firm but strangely gentle grip of the snake's body around her - coiled once around both ankles, and again around her thighs, just above her knees. She felt the floor sliding steadily beneath her - "he's pulling me back toward his lair," she thought. "And I'm naked. But my hands and arms are free.
"On the negative side," she admitted, "I'm weak as a kitten from the ordeal in the teddy. I have to conserve my strength - I may only get once chance to escape."
She knew from the feeling against her hip that they had passed through the doorway into the bookstore - it was rough carpeting under her now, rather than smooth tile. "Rug burn alert," she thought. "As if I don't have enough to worry about."
She assayed a glance at her captor. The great lime-green head was swiveling about, surveying the interior of the bookstore - nothing but shelves of books swathed in shadows -- "no help there," Commitment Girl thought.
"Aren't you a little big for a stuffed animal?" she asked as it - he - paused.
The fuzzy cartoon face rotated smoothly toward her - she averted her gaze, staring at the thick, fuzzy coils wrapped securely around her legs.
"Oh, I'm growing," the snake remarked, darting his head down to try to meet her eyes. "Every time I meet someone new, I get so much - bigger! And, stronger!
"I used to be so little," he continued pityingly, "but then I met Susie, and she became my first friend, and I got bigger. I met Barbara in Biographies and lost my speech impediment, and then I found Claudia in cookbooks and got so much bigger. But I think, froggy, that you will be my most especial friend - I can feel it!" Commitment Girl felt the soft tip of his tail tickling the back of her thighs; she twisted slightly and batted it away. "Mind your manners," she advised him.
He giggled huskily. "Oh, I have good manners now - Barbara was very refined. At least, she was right up until the very end; she got a little squealy and squeaky at the end." He continued his slow but steady way to his destination - a great fake tree "growing" in the center of the store with a large horizontal branch sloping upward, its great nest of leaves nearly fifteen feet off the floor.
Commitment Girl kneaded her arms and wrists. "Mission accomplished - a little time bought for healing," she thought.
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HatChick felt the last of Hillary's metal cat's-claws as it struck the taut silken funnel from which she and Jeff were suspended in their constricting cocoon. She felt the progress of the tiny curved blade as it slid down the side, coming to rest just inches above her head. She could feel the knot of stout silken cord which pinched off the stocking that was their prison: above the knot, the stocking was a funnel, attached to the ceiling around the perimeter of the opening through which they had fallen; below the knot, the stocking was a capsule in which she and Jeff were being compressed more tightly with each passing second. The knot was pressed against her ear - or her head has forced up against the knot by the shrinking space she was allotted by Big Hair Lady's deathtrap. "No matter which it is," she thought; "it's slow death if I don't succeed at this."
"Jeff," she whispered to her companion in pain, "I have to turn my head and push up. I need you to push as much as you can. This is our last chance - can you do it?"
"I can do it," he grunted back, barely audible.
"Okay, then push - now." With that, HatChick straightened once again, with no result. This time, though, she could feel Jeff stir beneath her, and then agonizing pressure against her stomach and breasts as his efforts forced him against her body. "The silk won't give," she thought, "so our bodies must." She turned her head against the vise-like pressure of the silk against her face, and could feel rather than see the miniscule puckered opening in the stocking where the silk cord had gathered it together.
"If this works," she thought, " we may be able to push the knot up along the stocking just enough to let the blade slip through it."
Long agonizing seconds passed in which HatChick was sure she would lose consciousness - she fought back darkness from the edge of her vision with an effort of will. She struggled to keep her lips pressed to the opening -- nothing there.
Then Jeff sagged beneath her, exhausted. But the pressure of his pushing against her remained; the silk had constricted around them as he pushed. A low moan issued from his head, now somewhere between her thighs as the shrinking silk had folded him almost double. "I can't even comfort him," HatChick thought, fighting back tears of anger. "I signed up for the superhero's risks - not him. I accepted the superhero glory - he got nothing but a share in a superhero's death."
And then she felt a touch - cold, hard and brittle - against her lips. HatChick pursed her lips delicately around the touch, and felt the rounded contours of the blunt end of what could only be a cat's claw. She forced a smile, drawing her lips back from the opening; there was a catch - resistance - and then the blade slipped completely through the narrowing gap.
HatChick pulled the hard metal into her mouth, grasping it with her teeth. "Years of orthodontia, don't fail me now," she thought, and turned her head the slightest fraction, bringing the razor-tip of the claw into contact with the silk which even now flattened her nose painfully against her face, drawing reflexive tears. She felt resistance - a slight give - and her tears turned to hope as she felt the tip slip through the unbreakable fabric. She turned her head - and could not move it enough to widen her cut. "I won't die this close to freedom," she thought, and with a supreme effort dislocated her own jaw, moving the blade a scant fraction of an inch to the side. The metal slipped from her grip and remained pressed to her cheek by the fabric now tight across her face.
"Seconds to live - or die," she thought. "I've done all I can do."
She was sure she could feel every increment of shrinkage now; Her own knees were up against her shoulders, and Jeff's body was cradled between her legs, his arms circling her in a grip made cruel by the pressure of the silk around them. She exhaled - "my last," she realized, as she could no longer expand her lungs against the force of his head being crushed against her.
Seconds passed; HatChick watched the darkness encroaching on her vision, and knew she was helpless to push it back this time. If Jeff still lived, his agony must be as great as hers, she knew, but she heard nothing from him - not even breathing.
HatChick's world narrowed to a tunnel. A faint cool feeling against her cheek - the metal of the cat's claw?
No - she could feel the blade as well. The cool feeling expanded with a tiny jolt, as her vision became a pinpoint, and now a buzzing noise filled her ears. There was another miniscule jolt, but the buzzing became a rushing sound, then a roar and her face tingled as the darkness rushed in on her and she fell into it, fell headlong and tumbling . . .
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Hillary's world was a confusion of shadows and true darkness, weird patterns of metal beams passing by and struggles to breath. The were-spider loped along, hopping from rafter to rafter, passing over the false ceilings of the store in the mall, each hop forcing the air from Hillary's lungs as she came down again on the predator's bony shoulder.
Finally the spider stopped, dropping Hillary unceremoniously to a platform composed of thick sheets of black silk. Hillary looked up to see a great construct of opaque material, swirled together in a vertical spiral which fell away in the center - a passage, a throat, a . . .
"funnel," she thought, remembering pictures in National Geographic magazine. "The spider lives in its lair beneath the web, and when the prey is - caught - the spider comes up out of a funnel-shaped entry. This is the entry to her lair." She nearly gagged on the fear which rose now in her throat. The blond girl backed into the silky tunnel, reaching out with both arms and grasping her by her shoulders. To Hillary it looked as if the girl were being swallowed by a gigantic ravenous creature, sucked down its throat with only her head, breasts and arms remaining. Then the spider backed into the darkness, pulling Hillary, helpless to stop her sliding fall, into the throat-like enclosure.
Down into darkness, cool and smooth slickness against her skin, Hillary fell. Then silk against her face; confusion and turning, falling again, and she landed in light and softness, and the spider's long limbs encircling her again. She shook her head - a swath of silk had fallen over her face - and found herself being dragged across the floor of a typical girl's bedroom, across a pink and white carpet, toward a white four-poster bed. The walls were pink with posters on them of rock stars and movie actors; she saw a dresser and a desk - white composite board, a matched set, and then she was sinking into a too-soft mattress amidst heavy down comforters and pillows, and looking up into
the dead white face of the were-spider, blond hair falling over her features, mouth slack with hunger and eyes glazed and empty. The girl's hands shook as she produced long swaths of thick black silk, pulling them out of the air between her hands, fastening them around her throat and then to the bedposts, then around her calves and ankles, securing these to the posts at the foot of the bed. Hillary lay still bound, unable to bend her body or roll away, secured in the overstuffed bed of a teenaged teeny-bopper rock-and-rolling blood-hungry were-spider in black.
The blond huntress kneeled on the mattress next to her, staring into her face. "I'm very hungry," she whined, her hand resting on Hillary's flat stomach. Hillary's heart started racing; "this is it," she thought; "there's no rescue."
"So hungry," the spider whimpered. With a chill, Hillary felt the thin hand steal down her stomach, coming to rest on the soft mound between her thighs. She tensed her legs, but she could not even move enough to escape the awful touch on her most intimate parts. When the spider began to knead her, the touch was surprisingly gentle, and even more surprisingly effective; despite her fear, Hillary felt her body responding to the touch, in heat and gentle pulses of pleasure radiating up her spine and down her legs.
"What are you doing?" she gasped, as the spider's other hand came to rest tentatively on her breast. Again she was horrified to feel a physical thrill at the touch, and to feel her nipple respond to the slightest pressure of the killer's hand.
"I need all of you," the girl growled back as she mounted on top of Hillary, her knee continuing the pressure against Hillary's softness, and bringing her lips to Hillary's breast. "I need your life, your fear, your passion, your anger - I'm very hungry and I need it all."
"Hormones," Hillary thought, succumbing to a body-wracking wave of pleasure. "Enzymes, hormones, adrenaline, she wants it all dumped into my bloodstream before she" -
"Melanie!" The were-spider stopped stock-still at the voice, coming from the other side of the only door to the room. The voice was instantly recognizable, the voice of a
"mom!" the spider called back, lifting her head from her ministrations, and responding in a perfectly human teenaged cadence. "I'm busy!"
"What - what are you doing in there?" came the voice, and now Hillary heard the tremulous quality that said the questioner really did not want to know the answer - and mustt, indeed, be very frightened.
"I'm - just - busy," the spider returned, and this time her voice was a low, threatening growl that sounded as if it came from deep in a silk-lined pit.
There was a brief scurrying sound from the other side of the door, and then silence. Hillary pictured a small, frightened woman sitting on her couch in her tidy suburban living room, listening to the wet sounds as what once had been her daughter fed messily on another woman's child.
The blond head again dropped to Hillary's breast, pausing once to fix an intent, dead gaze on her. Hillary stared into the eyes of the spider, and saw nothing human there; for an instant the hand laying soft against her skin was hard and crabbed, the leg pressing urgently between her thighs was narrow and bristled. Just for an instant, and then it was an empty-eyed girl in a black bathing suit mounted on her body and leaning down to take her nipple between soft, practiced lips.
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Kaa reached the horizontal fiberglass branch and looked back to Commitment Girl. "This is my place; would you like to come up?" he asked brightly, and slid smoothly up into the nest of branches without waiting for an answer.
Sitting naked on the floor beneath him and with her strong legs tightly held in his coiled body, Commitment Girl smiled. A physical enemy, a known threat - this was the most she had had to work with all day. She leaned back, her hands on the floor to either side, her feet resting flat on the floor. "I don't think so," she replied. "Why don't you just go on without me."
"Oh, but I insist," the snake cried gaily, lifting her easily from the floor to dangle above him. Commitment Girl hung upside down, arched her back and looked down to see Kaa's mouth wide open, his fuzzy dry throat dilated to reveal a long, dark gullet. "He's nothing but gullet," she thought.
Then he lowered her almost gently full-length onto his body, still holding tightly to her legs. His body was nearly as wide as her own waist, Commitment Girl realized. "He'll be powerful, up near his head," she thought. "I can't let him trap my arms." She lay still on his soft body, breathing easily, awaiting his next move.
Kaa lowered his head back along his own body, to come nearly nose to nose with her. His eyes began to twirl dizzily, and she reached out to swiftly bat his nose: "no funny stuff," she said sternly. "You have enough advantage as it is."
He reared back out of her reach, shaking his head with an annoyed expression on his velveteen face. "I didn't know there were going to be rules," he muttered sulkily.
"Of course there will be," she replied, although she knew in her heart there would not be. Despite their easy banter, she knew exactly where she was - the jungle. Here the predators had all the advantage, and the unwary, the unarmed - and the naked - were prey. Meat. If he played this without his hypnotic ability, it was only because his other weapons made it unnecessary to immobilize her in that way.
"Any rule against - strangulation?" he asked innocently, popping up a coil beneath her which caught her around her head and tightened swiftly. She reached up reflexively to grasp the encircling coil with both hands, and he instantly enlarged it, flowing it down against her shoulders and around her breasts, trapping her arms. Another coil flowed over the first and snugged tightly just beneath her breasts, with a third following, settling securely around her supple waist as his tail coiled once more around her legs, adding a thick coil around her thighs. Commitment girl lay still on his body, three coils of him around her long, shapely legs, and three coils around her taut body. Her arms were bent and pinned to her sides, her hands caught up against her shoulders. Her head and her sleek hips and bottom were all of her that were free to the air.
Kaa brought his face inches again from hers. Caught in his hold, she could not back away or hit him. "And I will use whatever advantages I want, my dear," he said quietly, his tongue flicking out slowly to just touch the tip of her nose.
"He's fast," she thought, "and smooth." She wriggled experimentally in his grasp - no soap; his hold was firm. "And strong," she added.
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HatChick came to awareness of darkness and pain. Pain in every muscle - but especially in her chest and stomach, where she had struggled to draw breath against an implacable force, where she had been folded over Jeff's body.
"HatChick, open your eyes. Please, Kaivee, let me know you're okay." The voice came from far away at first, but with each word becoming clearer, stronger.
"Jeff?" She opened her eyes to see his face over hers, worry already turning to relief on his open features.
"You had me worried there," he said.
"Everything hurts, Jeff. That was too close and - oh. . ." she looked down at herself, remembering how her uniform had slipped off her breast in their struggles against the constricting silk. The network would edit the image of her bare breast off their prime-time broadcast, but she shuddered at the thought of how long she may have lain there, fodder for bootleg video-capture artists. . .
"I, ah, took the liberty of - I - I took care of that," Jeff mumbled, looking away. Kaivee looked at him with gratitude and compassion. She knew how he felt about her, and how mortified he had been when his body had responded so naturally to hers in the close - and shrinking - confines of the silk stocking trap.
She sat up, feeling the effort of their escape in her stomach muscles. "Back to the gym after this," she thought ruefully. She cupped the back of his neck with her hand, pulling his head close. "Jeff," she whispered, "you have nothing to be ashamed of in this whole caper. You performed above and beyond the call of duty, and of your training. Nothing in the way you've acted - or reacted - reflects badly on you. I don't blame you for any of it, and neither will Commitment Girl."
Jeff looked pathetically grateful for a moment, then looked up. He gasped, and HatChick followed his gaze. They rose as one, to stand looking at what was left of the silk stocking trap.
It hung by a few threads from the silk cord knot that Big Hair Lady had fastened around the stocking to form their imprisoning capsule. The cocoon in which both their bodies had been confined was now no larger than a basketball, and it was visibly shrinking.
HatChick tried to imagine how both their bodies would have fit in that small area, and could not. Every bone would have splintered or shattered, and their soft tissues would have been pulped in the powerful compression. She shuddered and turned away.
"We got out just in time," Jeff breathed. "How did you manage to cut a slit long enough for us to fall through?"
"I didn't," she responded, turning back to the horrifying device. "I only managed to cut two threads - the shrinking action did the rest. The constriction would work on the weakest part of the system. For a while, you and I were the weakest parts, and if it weren't for Hillary, we still would be - make no mistake about that, Jeff, she saved our lives. Once I cut the threads, the tiny gap in the surface of the silk was the weakest part. The stocking ripped itself apart at that point, and forcibly expelled us. We're actually lucky we didn't break anything on the way out."
She looked at him, and caught the trailing edge of a look of longing. ("I have to deal with that, once this is over," she thought). "Now we have work to do," she said. "Commitment Girl and Hillary are both upstairs, and it sounds like they're both in trouble. Follow me." She grasped the dangling silk with both hands, climbing up to the hole in the ceiling through which could be seen the interior of the Precovia's Secret store. With a rapid jerk she pulled the stocking free from one side of the hole, grasped the edge of the floor above, and pulled herself up into Big Hair Lady's lair.
"A little help," she heard from below. HatChick reached down, grasped Jeff's arm by the wrist, and pulled him up to stand beside her.
The interior of the store was empty and dark. In the wall opposite, HatChick spied the door to the Weird Tales bookstore, standing ajar. Muted voices came through the door - Commitment Girl and one other. To their left, the remnants of what could only have been a giant spider-web, composed of the softly shimmering links of women's bathing suits.
"We have to split up," she said. "I'll follow Commitment Girl into the bookstore. You track the spider and Hillary. When you find them, don't be a hero - secure the area if you can, but don't confront anybody unless loss of life seems imminent. We'll catch up as quickly as we can."
Jeff nodded and headed toward the dangling web. HatChick spared one last glance for her faithful sidekick and slipped into Weird Tales.
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Despite herself, Hillary could not help responding physically to the spider's manipulation, even knowing that surrender hastened her death. The blond predator was expert in evoking physical responses in her prey, and it seemed that whatever part of Hillary's body was most sensitive was where her hands or her lips would be in a sensual assault on her victim's defenses. Hillary twisted in her bonds, trying to escape each touch, but the silk anchoring her to the bed would draw taut, allowing her only inches of movement. With her hands bound behind her back, she was helpless to prevent the spider's hands from deeply massaging her womanhood, or the full lips from slowly manipulating her nipples. Even her ear-lobes were prey to the spider's attack, and the knowledge that the teeth nibbling her were fangs only added to the physical excitement. "I'm being prepared for consumption," she thought, as her entire body succumbed to delicious shudders, "cooking from within." Then fear of the inevitable pain and death would overcome her, and her heart would triphammer again. All the while, the master hunter, master cook prepared her victim for feeding.
Soon Hillary was writhing involuntarily in the bonds of the spider's web, struggling to escape the sensations wracking her body, struggling to escape the spider's embrace, struggling to embrace the waves of heat and pleasure washing over her body. When the great building wave was poised to crashed over her, when she was at the very height and she knew she could not avoid the plunge into animal pleasure, the spider would withdraw her touch until Hillary had descended from the heights and lay breathing heavily, sobbing with exhaustion, fear, and sexual frustration. Then the spider would pounce again, long legs clasping her body tightly, hands dancing over her as she shrank from the touch she knew she could not escape, until at last the touch would alight and her body would spring back into awareness of pleasure and danger, and the cycle would start again.
Over and over, the spider took her helpless prisoner to the pinnacle of sensory release, as a frightened woman sat on the other side of the thin walls, listening. And waiting.
Finally, Hillary was poised, one touch from ultimate, cataclysmic relief, and this time the spider did not draw back, but rather drew close, looking into her eyes for - what? Hillary wondered. Desire? Fear? Discovering she wanted still to live more than to reach the climax she had been so long denied, Hillary opened her mouth to scream defiance - but the spider clasped a hand over her forehead, forcing her head back, a hand beneath her pushing up, arching her back. The spider opened her mouth wide, allowing Hillary to see the two enormously long, hollow fangs protruding from her upper gums.
Hillary screamed, knowing now there would be no release, only the pain of death, as she felt the were-spider's lips on her skin, clasped over the soft swell of her breast, not in a kiss but in the death-grip of the hunter; the two fangs pierced her skin, driving slowly downward, parting soft tissue, and muscle, forcing through bone and into the soft flesh of the beating imprisoned creature that was her heart.
Then the final touch of a delicate hand at the soft mound between her thighs, and she realized she had been wrong, there would be release. Her final orgasm felt like a rocket of electrical energy scoring the length of her spine to smash into her heart even as the spider's fangs pierced it deeply from above.
Her heart quailed and fluttered and her entire body convulsed, every muscle locked and rigid, as the spider forcefully and brutally sucked the life from her body. The spider's eyes rolled back in her head so that only the whites showed and the spider's body heaved as she sucked powerfully at Hillary, drawing the blood from her heart, pulling it from her extremities in a long, sustained pull that made it feel as if her organs were being ripped loose from inside. The spider rose to her knees, Hillary's body clasped to her own, the tethering silk lines breaking at the bed posts. Hillary heard a long, low keening sound and realized it was her own death-cry as she felt her body cave in on itself, felt her limbs whiten and grow cold, felt the skin tighten across her face as the spider gorged, becoming sleek and satiated on her stolen youth.
"There will be no rescue," she realized dimly, floating in the now solid embrace of her captor. She felt herself a pool being drawn up in a straw, and she could calculate how long she had before she was entirely consumed. She looked over to the funnel from which she had entered this lair. Everything was washed in gray, and there, leeching color, was
"Jeff." She whispered his name. He was tangled in the silky swaths at the entrance to the funnel, but she knew, even if he could come to her this moment, he would be too late. "Don't feel bad," she thought to him, although she knew he could not hear her. "Nobody could have saved me."
"The claw made it", she said aloud with fierce and quiet joy. "I saved everybody - one time," she counted to herself. Assured of the mathematics of her redemption - one betrayal, three lives returned - she felt her life withdraw into the sucking throat of her killer. She felt a brief, agonizingly sharp pang of collapse as her heart tried to pump a vacuum and then was itself ripped loose and sucked up into the spider's insatiable maw, and then knew no more.
Coming through the funnel to the spider's lair, Jeff had become briefly disoriented and entangled as he tumbled into the room. Now he rose to his feet, to see the blond were-spider from the mall, holding Hillary's body as if she were a doll. The girl dropped the young Kat, and Jeff knew immediately that Hillary was dead.
"No!" he screamed, to hear an answering scream from the other side of the door. "It's not supposed to happen this way!"
The were-spider turned toward him. The girl he had encountered earlier had been thin, waif-like and ethereal. But now he faced a sleek-limbed and lushly powerful creature, with a masterful, direct gaze. She turned on him a look of pure malice and - ownership. "She's already claimed possession of me," he thought, and he found to his horror that his body was responding as if it were so; his heart pounded, and he had involuntarily taken a step toward her. With an effort of will, he halted. His blood rushed to his loins and he felt weak.
"Welcome to the jungle, boy," the were-spider said in a voice at once smoothly seductive and cruel. "The only rule here is the law of club, fang and web."
Jeff looked desperately at Hillary, now a pale wraith lying on the bed. He looked at the spider, advancing deliberately toward him. "If she touches me, I'm lost," he thought. Then he thought of HatChick - Kaivee; ("I can't let her face this after what she's gone through") - and turned and grasped the silk funnel, turned again and pulled with all the strength in his body and the anguish of his failure; grasped again and pulled with the desperation he felt at the thought of Kaivee in this monster's arms; grasped yet again and kept pulling until with a rush of cold air the other end of the tunnel had ripped loose from its moorings and fallen into the spider's lair. "No one else will follow that path to their death," he thought.
He turned back to the newly beautiful blond woman; she was standing, flush with her victim's blood, her body a siren call, a snare - death.
He felt the pull her body had on his; took a halting step toward her; then turned and threw himself without thinking through the only window in the room. There was a rush of wind, then the ground flew up and hit him, hard. He rolled, badly, blood already slick on his hands from the broken glass. Rising, he saw the girl framed by the window and the broken glass. Several blocks up the tree-lined street he saw the grey bulk of the Blimmercrest Mall. Jeff turned and started running in the autumn twilight.
The spider turned from the window and surveyed the wreckage he had made of her web. It would take a long time to re-construct her entry to the mall, source of so much prey. By the time she completed her work, she would once again be very hungry and very weak. She heard the quiet sobbing from the woman in the other room, and though a once-human voice deep inside her cried "mother", the spider, flush with blood and hunger, only smiled. It was good to have a larder against the lean times.
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"Now this seems very familiar to me," Kaa pondered. "Hmmm . . . where else have I been in just this situation? Oh, I remember - it was Susie - or 'Thuthie', as I called her then. Hmmm . . . now what did I do then? Oh, I remember again" - he brought his face very close to Commitment Girl's, smiling conspiratorially - "I squeezed her until she stopped moving.
"But let's do it even more slowly this time," he said, corkscrewing his entire body just a tiny bit around Commitment Girl's legs and body. Commitment Girl wriggled slightly at the tightening; the soft velveteen across her breasts only irritated her still-sensitive skin.
"If you like that," Kaa said, "then I can keep you happy for a long, long time." His eyes narrowed and his smile grew cold as he continued the slow constriction around the helpless heroine's firm and supple body, the soft velvet fuzz sliding easily against her skin, hard muscle beneath tightening inexorably around his prey.
"I was too slow," Commitment Girl berated herself, "and now I'm too weak to resist him." The pressure was building around her body, and she realized that already she was laboring to breathe in. She tried to pull her legs up for leverage, but they were held fast in a cruelly tightening vise, twisted together by the corkscrewing motion of his body around her. She closed her eyes and resigned herself to holding out as long as she could before unconsciousness took her. "I'm getting tired of waiting for rescue," she thought bitterly. "I'm supposed to be the hero, not the damsel."
"Playing with stuffed animals, Commitment Girl?" came a sardonic voice from below. She opened her eyes and looked down as one with Kaa. Standing below them, hands on her hips, feet apart, was HatChick - "super-heroine pose and all," Commitment Girl thought. She smiled - the cavalry had arrived.
"We were just waiting for you, my dear," Kaa replied suavely. Commitment Girl felt his hold on her legs loosen, but the tightening squeeze around her body continued.
HatChick noted Commitment Girl's pallor and the weak way in which her partner struggled in the snake's implacable grip. "She doesn't have a lot left," she thought. She stepped closer, directly under the snake's head.
"A talking snake! Holy smokes!" HatChick exclaimed in an I'm-just-a-dumb-blond voice. From the corner of her eye she noticed his tail dropping from the branch just behind her.
"I do more than talk," Kaa replied happily. His tail wormed its way along the floor, around HatChick's slender ankle, then across to the other, and around. He wound his way up her calf, barely touching her skin, then across to her other thigh, around and back. Patiently he threaded himself between HatChick's long, toned legs.
"Really? What else can you do besides pick on defenseless and stupid naked girls?" HatChick called up, pretending not to notice his touch. Every nerve fiber in her body screamed for her to pull away from the snake's velvety touch, but she held firm with an effort of will.
"Stupid? What do you mean, stupid?" Commitment Girl called down weakly. "Play the part," she told herself; "just hold on."
"Come on, CG, you know what I mean," HatChick retorted irritably; Kaa's tail now touched the outside of her hip, resting there. "Only seconds now," she thought.
"If you were any good at what you do," she continued, "you would have grabbed his throat with both hands the second you were offered even the slimmest chance. Instead, you let him get the drop on you. I don't know why I bother to offer your naked ass any slim chance at all."
"Damn, you're cold," Kaa observed merrily.
Commitment Girl wiggled her fingers to indicate she understood HatChick's message. Only one coil remained around her thighs now, but the three large coils still tightened around her body, and her breath was coming hard. A faint buzzing had started in her head - a warning sign of impending darkness.
"As a matter of fact," HatChick said, beginning to step away, "I think I'll just - oh!" She turned and looked down in exaggerated surprised as Kaa's coils tightened around her legs. She resisted his embrace, tensing the great muscles in her thighs and bunching her calves, but his thick coils corkscrewed smoothly around her legs, drawing them together.
"I don't think you're in any position to offer anything to anybody," Kaa observed, as a length of his body pushed up between her thighs, hard against her womanhood. She bent over, pushing at his body as it began to twist more tightly around her legs and hips. "He's good," she thought, pretending to dither. A preliminary shudder of sexual pleasure surprised her - "almost seduction-snake good. Have to stay focused, for both our sakes."
"But I do insist you come join the party," Kaa continued, lifting her up. "In fact, why don't you share my coils with your friend? There's plenty of room. . ." So saying, he lifted the struggling blonde hero onto his body, sliding her into the tunnel of coils in which Commitment Girl was trapped.
The instant he loosened his grip on Commitment Girl's body to admit his newest victim, Commitment Girl shot her arms straight out ("the slimmest chance - that's all I needed," she thought)and grasped the surprised serpent around his plush throat. His face registered comical shock and then anger, and then real distress as he realized he could not breathe.
In cartoonish fury he collapsed his coils tightly around the two super-heroines, crushing their bodies together, twisting himself savagely around them. But both girls had filled their lungs and hardened the muscles of their backs and shoulders in the moment his capture of HatChick had afforded them; HatChick's arms, inside the circle of his coils, formed a protective circle around her partner's body, pushing outward against the snake's encroaching embrace. "Just buy her a few seconds to choke him - that's all I need to do," she thought grimly, even as she felt the small breathing space she had won for them begin contracting around them.
Now began a silent race. Commitment Girl's sculpted arm muscles stood out in stark relief as she applied all her strength to choking the life out of the animated plush predator. HatChick struggled to push outward against the inexorably tightening coils as he corkscrewed around both their bodies, pressing them against one another, grinding their bodies into one soft and twisted mass. And Kaa squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he bore down on his two suddenly-dangerous captives, working to render them as helpless as he had been promised they would be - "two soft little morsels," he thought in desperation. "Big Hair Lady said anyone I found alive in there would be a tasty little treat, no effort, no problem. This is NOT what I had in mind!"
Feeling betrayed and confounded, Kaa realized he was about to lose this race. Things were going dark all around, and though he could tell that the two soft bodies in his hard coils were wriggling more weakly, he suddenly found he could not keep up the pressure - he felt himself slipping -
Commitment Girl's arms were trembling with the effort of maintaining steady pressure on the velveteen throat of the giant snake; HatChick's efforts had exhausted her as well, and they could both feel the snake's body moving against theirs unimpeded, tightening around them, pressing them toward a common center. "I'm - sorry," HatChick gasped, "I can't hold him off much longer -" her arms failed her, and the coils drew close, sliding against the curves of their bodies, swiftly crushing them . . .
As HatChick felt the world fade away on her and heard again the familiar rushing of blood in her head, she heard a small cry of triumph from her partner, and then they were falling, fifteen feet to the floor below, landing on the softly heaped coils of the suddenly-limp snake. Commitment Girl rose to a shaky kneeling position, her hands still fastened around Kaa's throat. But one look at his face told them what they needed to know - he had reverted back to simply a stuffed animal, a plaything, a toy. They had won the race by fractions of a second.
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HatChick and Commitment Girl sat in the wreckage of their foe, looking at each other with tired good humor. "Every part of me hurts," Commitment Girl remarked, "and if it's all the same to anyone else, I think I'll be wearing boxers for a while." She shifted uncomfortably; "I can still feel that shrinking teddy jammed up my nether regions." HatChick smiled, reddening slightly. "I think Jeff and I may have to get married after what we just went through." Commitment Girl looked at her in surprise, so she added, " - or divorced!" They looked up at the sudden banging coming from the front of the store. It was Jeff, hammering on the store's metal security gate. "I don't see Hillary," HatChick remarked, "and from the look on his face, his part of the rescue didn't go well." The loss of the young would-be bad-guy-turned-heroine sobered them; this was adventure, but with real consequences. "You'd better go to him," Commitment Girl said. "I still need to get some clothes on. And this time, I pick the cut myself." HatChick smiled at her partner and went to face their obviously shaken, faithful sidekick, taking delicate care to step over the flaccid coils of the great serpentine predator Kaa on her way out toward the light.
By B.Ferrett