Spider facts!

  Category: Anatomy/Physiology

  Subcategory: Appendages

  The chelicerae of spiders are more commonly known as the fangs or jaws. Different species of spiders can manipulate these structures in different ways, with some species striking vertically downwards and others striking horizontally. The structure of the chelicerae is analagous to that of a hypodermic needle, with a beveled, hollow point allowing for efficient injection of venom for incapacitation of prey or self defense.

  Jon sighed. He really didn’t want to kill this last bunny, but he felt he had to. These creatures had some means of communicating with one another from what he had seen, and he was not about to leave an informant behind to tell them who to look for.

  In the fight, his instincts and fear for his life had made things simple, but it was different now that he had time to process it. Jon could be blunt, and he could be strong, but in his heart he felt he was a gentle person. He had been fine confronting people who thought they could scream obscenities in a busy emergency department, surrounded by children and the elderly. He had even been fine on the rare occasions when those people tried to assault him. He had defended himself as necessary until they could be sedated, but took no pleasure in it. It was part of the job, and he did what he had to do to give them the care they needed.

  He just did not like seeing people hurt. It had caused him some difficulty when he started doing invasive procedures in residency, like placing chest tubes or even just starting intravenous lines. He had never properly gotten used to it, though he tolerated it enough to be proficient in his job.

  This was a big part of why Jon went into hospice care. He did not have to hurt anyone. True, the situations were shit, but all Jon had to do was help as best he could. He couldn’t fix whatever was making the person die, but he could make them feel less pain along the way.

  Jon looked down at the bunny. When farmers killed chickens, they usually wrung their necks with a sharp pulling motion. It was a humane way to euthanize the animal. People were killed in the same way by the state for thousands of years, taken to a height where the neck would snap and cause near-instant death, but not so high the head popped off and caused a scene.

  Jon could just spear it through the head, like he had the others, but somehow it made him feel queasy. He was also mindful of something Herman had said: he had an audience. He did not know how much that would affect things, but he suspected that as a spider, he would be on the villain arc. The last thing he needed to do was make that worse for himself by brutalizing helpless bunnies.

  Jon decided to just break its neck.

  Unfortunately, he no longer had hands. He had fangs, eight legs, and….what the hell were these things? He examined two smaller limbs he hadn’t made much use of so far. They were just on the outside of his pincers, and shaped like his legs but only half as long. He held up his right front leg next to the appendage to compare. He still didn’t see much difference, except the ends of the leg looked a little different. Also, when he flexed his leg, a razor-sharp retractable claw as long as a man’s forearm appeared, whereas the palp had only two finger-length blades that he could click like salad tongs. Jon wondered if he was missing any other differences: Zach’s voice sounded in his head once more,

  “Spider facts!

  Category: Anatomy/Physiology

  Subcategory: Appendages

  Located just lateral to the chelicerae, the pediapalps, also known as the palps, are very similar in shape and segmentation to the legs of the spider, though the metatarsus is not present on the palps. Spiders use palps for various functions: grooming the eyes, grasping prey or manipulating them during feeds, ‘chewing’ in some species with serrated sections near the base, and of course the sex dependent differences in function---

  Jon cut off the audio with a mental command. He got the idea, pediapalps or palps were basically his spider-hands. He knew he was stalling, and even though Jon didn’t want to do this, he didn’t want to wait for the creature to wake up either.

  Jon picked the creature up by its head with his palps, and tried to twist the neck rapidly. The bunny slipped in his grip and flopped over to one side. He tried again. He dropped it.

  Irritated, Jon grabbed the bunny once more, then rammed it into the cavern wall. It bled heavily from a wound on its scalp, but the charge failed to harm its neck in any way. He grasped the bunny by the head again, spinning around with it and stopping suddenly. The limp creature bled heavily, but continued to breathe slowly.

  Jon grew frustrated, hoisting the bunny by the feet and carrying it over to the mouth of the tunnel. He whipped its neck against the tunnel entrance again and again, first with a clack of its quills hitting the rock, then with a wet *thunk* *thunk* *thunk as crunching noises occurred. Somehow, its neck remained stubbornly unbroken.

  Finally, Jon grabbed the biggest rock he could find with his palps and charged back to the creature, smashing its head. One of its hind legs spasmed out, then it was still. However, a few seconds later, he noticed it take another breath. He grabbed the rock again, striking the bunny on the head over and over until it was a mashed-up paste.

  The bunny was dead. Jon stood for a minute, abdomen heaving in and out.

  That could have gone a little smoother. Jon shifted around, then looked at each of the four corpses. He quickly dragged each of the four bunnies into a line, and then went to take a closer look at the dead bear creature.

  The bear was laying on the left side it had originally fallen on, and Jon noted numerous quills sticking out all over its body. The fatal wound appeared to be two large bites at the area where he assumed the right carotid traveled. The bear did not have any fur, rather it looked like someone had carved a facsimile into its wooden flesh, like a hand-carved toy. The too-large ears were stiff as boards, and the left ear propped the bear’s head up slightly, making a tripod with its large snout and left shoulder. Its eyes were flat like buttons.

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  Jon stared at, thinking. He had absolutely no way to transport this thing, which was a real pity given the amount of meat it must have on it. He decided to lop off a foreleg at the shoulder to take with him, and then focus on carrying off the bunnies.

  Doing all of this would make it obvious there was a third party who killed all these creatures. However, he reasoned if anything was intelligent enough to figure that out, they could also analyze the marks on the rabbits. That would rule out the bear as the attacker. Further, it was clear the bear’s wounds would not have allowed it to survive long enough to kill anything.

  Last, but not least, he had to eat something. Jon had an instinctive sense that the bunnies he killed were good nutrition for this new form.

  As Jon prodded around to feel for the shoulder joint of the bear, he felt a roiling feeling of disgust from his abdomen. There was nothing specifically wrong with the taste or smell, it was some other instinct. The bear smelled like a pine air freshener, and tasted faintly of cinnamon. However, Jon knew he did not want to eat this thing. He decided to take a leg anyway, in case he changed his mind later, or in case he grew desperate.

  Jon was not a butcher or a veterinarian, but he still felt comfortable identifying the shoulder joint in this creature. As a human, this dissection would have been difficult without time and assistance, or at least hanging the huge animal, but it felt simple to him now.

  Jon was much stronger, and had more limbs. The limbs also came with built in knives.

  He grasped the bear’s right elbow with his fangs, and braced on its chest and neck with his second legs, pulling the limb taut. After he had some tension, he used his palps and first legs to cut his way down to the joint. The hide was fairly stiff and felt like bark, but the flesh was unremarkable. He wrenched and turned the limb after he had identified the joint capsule, and the bear’s humerus detached. It only felt about as difficult as de-boning a roasted chicken, and took him less than two minutes to complete.

  Jon carried his prize over to the line of rabbits, then lay a line of spider silk, intending to place them on it and tie them together for ease of transport. He planned to use the thick, elastic threads he used to anchor himself during leaps. But as he went to do so, he felt one of those haptic feelings in his head again.

  The buzz had relayed a better understanding of his silk, and he understood he could make different kinds of silk. Armed with this knowledge, Jon opted for a thinner thread with less elasticity. It was more like regular rope than the bungee cord material he produced to anchor himself when jumping.

  Jon placed the thread on the ground, looping it over itself to form a slip knot. He had never been a boy scout or anything like that, but he had made a point of studying knots during his surgery rotations in medical school. He had been amazed at how much surgeons could do with nothing but scalpels (well, a bovie, whatever), glorified string, and a strong foundation in anatomy.

  A couple of basic tools, and you could remove an appendix, stopping a deadly infection. Of course, most appi’s weren’t open anymore, the O.R. stockroom had about a million specialized tools, and with laparoscopy you had to add a whole bunch of things into the mix, but the principle stood. Cuts and strings were still the bulk of the action. Unless you cared about things like anesthesia, but that was just getting picky.

  In any case, it had inspired Jon to do some reading on knots, and even practice some more complicated ones.

  Jon was grateful for his limited research now, as he still remembered enough to make the loop tighten when pulled, and got the bunnies each into their own loop. He then took each of the loops and tied all of the bunnies together into one large flesh bundle. As he moved the bundle, the quills from the different bunnies clacked together quite a bit. He unrolled them, then stuck the bear forepaw in the center to dampen the noise.

  He took a moment to look over his work, and he felt his stomach rumble. He was ravenous. Maybe...Maybe he could eat just one of them before he kept going.

  Jon shook himself, throwing off the weird train of thought. There was no way in hell he was sitting down here, right in front of the warren, to chew on one of its members.

  The wrapping complete to his satisfaction, Jon took up one end of the silk, and began pulling it over his left side. Wiggling and pulling, he slowly dragged the bundle onto his back, then fastened it in place with another spider silk thread across his abdomen.

  For how much suffering they had caused, the bunnies were quite light, especially for his new form. Having resolved the issue of transporting his meal, he looked around the clearing and returned to his prior conundrum. Where to go.

  Although the cavern had an idyllic appearance, he still had little interest in going down the path where all the bunnies had come from. He ruled it out. The possibility of more members of the warren was too high. He couldn’t fight again right now, and diplomacy was probably out the window for those little psychopaths. Transporting a bunch of their dead comrades on his back probably would not create a great first impression anyway.

  The tunnels were out for the same reason.

  Jon looked further up the cavern walls, and thought he saw small caves midway up the surface. He decided to make his way up the cavern side, then either dig his way into the wall himself or take over a tunnel.

  With his mind made up, he began his journey up the cavern wall. It was a shear cliff for the first ten meters, but he easily walked up it. The vines made it easier for his clawed feet to find purchase here than in the tunnels.

  Once Jon reached the top, he found a shelf-like area with bushes growing along its surface. There was a cave on the far right. It was only around half a meter wide. The bushes were short, and he was able to see most of the little plateau at a glance. He felt no vibrations from any of the plants or the ground beneath them, making him fairly confident it was safe to proceed. He still remained tense as he made his way between the vegetation to the wall. He didn’t completely trust his new senses and something about the place put him on edge.

  After he walked to the wall as slowly and silently as possible, he resumed his ascent up the shear face to the next level, another fifteen meters up. The vines were looser here, allowing him to feel more secure continue his ascent under cover. Jon lowered himself to be as close to the cliff face as possible. As he reached the halfway point, he felt some motion in the bushes below through his vibration sense. He attached a bit of spider silk to secure himself to the cliff face, then turned to survey the plateau again.

  Below him, a small chipmunk-like animal had scurried out from one of the bushes. It skittered back and forth for a few moments, and then paused. It cocked its head to the side, then got up on a small boulder, looking around the plateau.

  Then the side of the rock snapped open, and a tongue darted up towards the chipmunk, which dodged the tongue and bounded towards a nearby bush. The rock sprang up on two stubby legs and waddled after the chipmunk, but abruptly a clawed hand slammed down on it from one of the bushes. The claw retracted as swiftly as it had appeared, there was a couple of loud crunching noises, and then the plateau was silent and still once more.

  “Fuck you Herman,” Jon thought. “Fuck you oh so very much.”

  He turned, feeling notably less secure in his new perception, and continued up the cliff face. He needed shelter before he went the way of the rock mimic.

  At the next level, the landing was considerably narrower. Jon was grateful to see it had only lichen covering it, no evil bush creatures or rock mimics.

  Jon glanced up, to the sides, and all around. The area was exposed. He was pondering his next move when all of his new instincts burst out in alarm, and he jumped forward several meters.

  There was a powerful impact on the soil behind him.