So, you ask yourself. You’ve found yourself naked and running at the spider satan has nightmares of. Your accompanied only by a bunch of other, equally naked, children.

What’s a guy to do?

Apparently, some instinctual part of being a Thing allowed me to skip the type of fear and hesitation a normal, sane person has when faced with such a hellish imagining. I was running to my death and all I was feeling was an all consuming hunger.

My brothers and sisters raced ahead of me, having given in to their instincts well before my rational mind would allow me too. As the first of the five Things oriented on this particular spider reached the monstrous thing, the Spider reared up to display yet more spikes and fluid sacks on its underside. With an almost supernatural quickness the creature lashed out, hooking two of its eight legs around the Thing and tossing it viciously into the horrible spikes lining its body.

As it did so, the fluid sacs burst, with a soft hiss that I could barely hear over the combined keening of my cohort. The poor grappled thing wailed in pain, impaled by ridges of bone and slowly being burned to death by what was apparently acid.

Then a peculiar thing happened. Instead of flailing, struggling, or panicking - like I would certainly be if I was going to die - the Thing turned its still unhinged jaw on the spider and chomped down, tearing a dog sized hunk of flesh out of the creature and consuming yet more acid in the process.

More of us had begun to arrive by now, and the spider began to frenzy, whipping its scythe like legs towards us in wide, haphazard swings. It seemed desperate to keep us back from it and I could see why. Despite being barely alive beneath its tremendous girth, our man on the inside was going to town on the beast. Each moment brought another ripping noise and the sound of torn flesh.

I wondered if spiders could scream as we evaded the spiders attacks and began to crawl over it like a horde of cannibal midgets. I was beginning to feel pretty good about this fight, and so, last to arrive, I hurled myself forward past the outstretched limb of the spider and rolled to a halt under it, my brothers and sisters already savaging its body with their mouths. I was just about to try and find a spot without any acid sacs left to bite into when the mewling of our brave fallen brother reached my… shit do I have ears? I don’t think I have ears. How the fuck do I hear anything?

I rotated my head to look at the dieing Thing that had first struck the spider and noted that any minute now, this thing was going to die and probably fall on him. I narrowed my… eye… sockets… in thought while I eyed him, and it was only the sudden horrific thought that he’d probably be safe to eat that snapped me from my hunger induced Frenzy.

What the fuck was wrong with me? I stared dazed around me, the sounds and shrieks of the battle fading as my rational mind reasserted itself. Sure we were winning, with all but one spider having been more or less hurt so bad that it would be impossible to survive without medical care I doubted existed in a forest full of giant fucking acid spiders, but it was a Pyrrhic victory at best. We were getting slaughtered out here. Half my cohort were too stupid to avoid the acid sacs covering the spiders, and the other half were swarming around and over each other with so little coordination that they were actively shoving each other into oncoming attacks. When one of us actually got close enough to deal some damage the world around us seemed to stop existing as we went into a feeding frenzy. We weren’t helping each other at all.

With an effort of will, I managed to resist the desperate urge I had to consume everything I looked at and ran towards the thrashing underbelly of the spider. Leaping as I ran, I latched on to my injured brother and pulled his mewling body off the spider, quickly dragging him away across the ground when I landed. He was probably going to die anyway, but too much of my thinking was entirely human in nature to just let what was probably my brother die without trying to help.

The poor guy didn’t look good. Huge swathes of his skin were burned away to reveal the sickly yellow muscles and fat beneath them.

I made eye contact with him, and for a frozen second I thought I saw the glimmer of intelligence in its eyes. And then the sockets of its eyes shrunk into non resistance as it closed its eyes. It was still breathing, but I doubted that would last long.

Rising from the ground I surveyed the battlefield once more. The single remaining spider was having a much better time of it, now that the majority of my cohort had converged on the two dead spiders to eat. Only two of my overly focused fellows remained to harass it, and I feared they too weren't long for this world.

Annoyed I ran towards my nearest feasting brother, dug my fingers under the hinge of his jaw and yanked him away from his meal stop the quickly disappearing corpse of the spider we brought down. It must have fallen at some point, as the other Things were languishing around it as they ate.

The Thing I had pulled from its meal made a gurgling noise at me and waved its it's open mouth at me in what was probably a threatening gesture that ended up just looking funny to me, its mouth opening so wide it almost seemed like a cartoon character.

Scared and aggravated, I kicked its legs out from beneath it and climbed on top of it, my small hands catching at the edge of something on its face. It struggled beneath me for a moment but I managed to direct its head towards the remaining living spider. It froze for a moment and I chirped angrily, point at the beast. Trilling in aggrieved acceptance, the Thing beneath me waited for me to get off and make some distance before snapping its jaws at me and turning to run towards the still living spider.

I repeated the process several more times, dragging the wounded towards the first Thing I had helped, and browbeating the others into helping with the remaining spider.

It wasn’t much longer afterwards that the beast was brought down, and the horrendous hunger I had been staving off returned. Glancing around to make sure I wasn't in any more immediate danger, I crept towards the head of the spider - and promptly began to dig in.

Spider eyes, it turns out, taste like chicken. A fact I guess you'd never notice eating the palm sized ones back home.

It was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten in my life. It was juicy, and plentiful, and I had ripped and torn my way across the corpse until I reached a section doused in acid and paused in thought.

A curious trilling noise echoed out from behind me, and I turned to see the handful of Things I had shoved off the spider staring plaintively at me, darting furtive glances at the spider corpse and then back to me.

Most of them had eaten enough not to be as crazed by now, and their intelligent eyes gazed at me with something hovering between awe and fear. One of the less injured things had pushed itself up and was standing watch over the others I’d dragged off, and those injured that were still conscious gave me stares filled with pure devotion.

Confused, I made an agreeable chirping noise, and gestured at our kill. I hadn't actually helped kill it, so I had no idea why they thought I would or even could stop them from eating.

At my gesture, with a collective… well not a sigh - more like a gurgling exhalation, they descended on the spider like Piranha.

A sizable area around where I was standing was left completely untouched however. I stared blankly at the sight, unsure of what was going on.

Before I could wrap my mind around it, the din of something tramping through the bushes drew my attention and I whirled to face the disturbance.

“Great.” I thought. “What fresh fucking hell is this?”

***

A few moments passed as the sounds steadily grew closer to us. I trilled a warning to the other Things and noted that the group that had been gorging on the other spider blithely ignored me, while the group I had bullied lifted their heads to peer attentively in the direction I was looking.

All at once.

Setting that aside for a moment I tensed, prepared to run the hell away if another murder spider appeared.

Instead of what I had been expecting, Big Thing trudged out of the bushes, coming to a stop just inside the clearing. In unison my fellows returned to what they were doing.

I peered at Big Thing, suddenly peeved with it. Where the fuck had it gone just now? Weren’t we its children? It had basically just left us to fucking die!

I left my meal to begin stomping towards him, noting I rarely that he seemed confused as he glanced about the clearing. Not at the spiders, or at the feasting, but at the neatly lined up injured that were quietly mewling at the side of the clearing.

I chirped angrily at the him as I approached, and for a second I thought he was going to ignore me until, at the last moment, his head turned at a 90 degree angle to stare at me, pointing angrily at it from a scant foot away.

A complete lack of interest was present its eyes when it turned to me. It wasn't angry, it wasn't worried, it wasn't even annoyed. My ire continued to rise each moment the blank stare lasted until finally I snapped, giving up on the the idiotic thing.

If it wasn't going to protect us then I didn’t want anything to do with it. I'd look after the myself. I snapped my jaws at it once and then pivoted to walk towards my injured brethren, an idea taking hold as I approached them.

Most of them weren't hurt too bad. Yeah there were puncture wounds, but they didn't look all that deep really. If I could jury rig a bandage to cover to skin damaged by the acid, maybe stop some bleeding, a few of them might live.

My eyes narrowed in thought for a moment before I spun around, headed back to the spider. Stopping in front of the massive spinneret, I began slowly pushing at the spiders behind, hoping I could pressure it in a way that would make some of its webbing come out.

It was crude. I mean, it was definitely not modern medicine, but after warning the other things off, I managed to get it just right, although I practically had to punch the spiders behind to get what I wanted. Soon enough I was pulling thick green leaves off the nearby bushes, packing them together with the spiders webbing and pressing them against the wounded areas of the other Things to create adhoc bandages. When that was done, I trundled back towards the remains of the spider and began tearing hunks off the wretched thing, dragging the bits of putrid flesh back to the wounded Things.

It wasn’t long before the unwounded Things began mimicking me in a confused daze, doing what I did because I was doing it, more than because they understood it.

What made this especially aggravating to me, was that I didn’t even know why I cared about these things. It was obvious that they didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, empathise with their fellows - they were content just to eat what was in front of them until I started shoving them around.

And yet, they had some kind of intelligence. Then again. Maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see. Maybe being a good person for me, here and now in this moment, was the best I could do to prove that I wasn’t one of these creatures. I was a human being - and no one could take that from me.

Emotionally anyway. Physically, I was definitely a Thing.

All the while Big Thing watched me work. I glanced at it from time to time, to find it’s head rotating like an owls to track me as I moved. I’d have kissed my teeth at it but since I couldn’t I opted to keep ignoring it.

I had decided I was going to be in charge of these things, and until someone disapproved me of that notion that meant I had to figure out where the hell we were going to sleep. Assuming Things slept and didn’t just live horribly brutal lives of unending hunger until they managed to breed or died finding a meal.

I shuddered at the thought, and my eyes landed on the torn apart corpse of another spider. My part of the cohort had made quick work of ours - taking it apart with brutal efficiency and leaving nearly nothing left except the spinneret. The others spiders were a mess. Maybe it was the lack of a clear leader in those other groups, but the Things frequently left swathes of spider uneaten as they snapped and chirped at each other. Fighting over who got what I guess. But there was some benefit in that to me.

Leaving my group to meander over to a less tattered spider, I carefully pressed a finger against the sharp inner edge of one of its legs. Almost immediately I felt my skin part, and I cringed, remembering the brothers and sisters that had taken hits from such a sharp object.

Finding a length of the appendage that wasn’t broken up by joints, I steeled myself and slammed my teeth down on the joint. It wasn’t a clean cut, and I had to tear the sharp limb from the remaining gore very carefully lest I cut myself on it, but eventually I had a remarkably light shortsword equivalent.

That done, I headed back to the intact spinnerette, snapping at the few Things from the other group that took issue with me taking some of their food. The minor conflict garnered the attention of ‘my’ Things, who stopped eating to snap at them along with me, the sound of our jaws clicking shut like the rattling of a machine gun in the quiet forest.

Big Thing watched the whole ordeal with great interest, shooting a knowing glance at the hungry little assholes I was walking away from. So I snapped once at him too - because he was an asshole and it made me feel better.

Taking great joy in the shocked look it sent me, I moved towards the spider, using more leaf bundles and spinnerette glue to make a makeshift handle on my spider shiv. Swinging it once or twice to be confident it wouldn’t slip from my grasp I turned to take in the clearing again. At least half of our cohort was hurt. The injured from the other groups had died attempting to take part in the feeding frenzy once all the spiders were safely put down, and my group was only doing marginally better in that our injured weren’t dead. I hoped anyway.

Seeing me finish everything I was doing, Big Thing lurched into motion, gathering up all the Things that could move and heading off into the forest. The Things from my group glanced back and forth between Big Thing and me for a moment, before loping off after him. I didn’t, and Big Thing left the clearing without giving me a second glance, leaving me with three spider corpses, and five wounded things.

Fuck him though. I wasn’t stupid - that spider attack hadn’t been a coincidence. Big Thing had brought us here on purpose, even if I couldn’t understand why. It was the confusion when it’d seen how many of us had survived that did it for me. Even if it wasn't on purpose, it clearly didn't have any intention of helping - but clearly knew most of us could have died. Coward.

Maybe Things had a super spartan culture. Maybe survival of the fittest was the rule of law here.

But I wouldn’t know. I’m not a Thing.