“Aim for the heads!” A woman’s voice shouting could be heard from the barn. “They’re all over the horse.”

The deafening tune of two Browning Automatic Rifles drowned out the shrieks of the dying animal. 

One of the creatures turned, rearing up as it did on its hind legs.  Seen in silhouette, it much resembled a giant spider, complete with four rear legs, two pairs of forefront legs, mandibles, and peculiar faceted eyes.  0.50 caliber rounds from one Browning stitched a line across the creature’s thorax. A burst from the other Browning smashed through the head. The creature dropped to the ground, its limbs flailing convulsively. Schroeder and Parkinson then engaged the other three creatures, which were similarly rapidly dispatched.  One rifle shot was heard. The horse’s screams ended.

“Miss Hayes? Are you here someplace?” Cooper called.

“Second floor of the barn, shooting out the haying door,” she called back.  “Turns out you can kill them with a hunting rifle. You shoot them in the eye.”

“That’s right good shooting,” Parkinson said.  “Are there more of these things?”

“You got four, and it took a while but I got the other six,” Hayes said. “If there were more, they skedaddled. They had to look my way before I could get an eye shot.  But I’m down to half a dozen rounds of .308 and one round for my pistol.  Only had two dozen rounds of .308 to start with. Rest is in my room.

The three men cautiously advanced across the corral, watching for any sign of motion that would suggest that the creatures were not actually dead.  A solitary light bulb above the barn door gave feeble illumination to the eldritch scene. They were joined after a few moments by Melanie Hayes, her finger not quite on the trigger of her loaded rifle. 

“Jesus, Mary, and all the saints,” Schroeder said to himself, “which gate to Hell did these creatures escape through?”  He pointed at the creature, which looked vaguely like a giant spider, at least if one ignored the polychrome plates of armored shell. The men spent time examining the creature, its oddly articulated legs ending in cruel claws, and its bloody mandibles.

“From due south,” Melanie finally said. “And those weird noises they made.  Even before they got here, the horses were spooked.  I had my pistol, a substantial box of pistol ammunition, and my .308, which I didn’t expect to use.  I figured the horses were spooked by rustlers, who’d run off if someone fired a few shots in their direction.  But after I saw the spiders eating the first horse – I finally put a round into the horse’s head, to put it out of its misery – I saved one round for my pistol.”

“Shoot an eye out at pointblank range?” Schroeder asked. “That’s an amazing shot.”

“I watched them take down and eat the first horse,” Melanie answered.  “They didn’t bother to kill it first.  No, that last round was for me, when other choices became worse.”

“You are one cold-blooded young lady,” Parkinson said.

“You don’t survive in this business, being a woman, if you’re prone to fainting,” she answered.  “Which reminds me.  Those disappearances, the ones in the paper.  Might these things have had another meal first?”

Winston looked up at the starry sky.  “There have actually been ten disappearances in this county,” he said, “Three of them, we could see where someone had settled down for the night, and there’d be a small pile of shell casings.  Once, a rifle that was all bent up, never saw the like.  Once a house, a one roomer, looked to have been torn open from the outside.  Family of four was just gone.  Every time, there was blood all over the place.  Ghastly.  We couldn’t figure out the house until now.”