This Book Is Full of Spiders

  They sold office chairs over at the far side of the store and there were people sitting in them but something about the sight of the short redhead fighting back tears made three different guys give up their seats at the same time. She took the one in the middle.

  She waited, and waited. She tried to call, circuits busy.

  It wasn’t as bad as she was making it out to be. Didn’t David say they had made it out of town? And that they were fine? That’s what mattered. She suddenly realized how hungry she was. Was there anything to eat at this place other than those disgusting cinnamon rolls at Cinnabon?

  * * *

  There wasn’t. Ten minutes later she sat at a table by the window, picking tiny bits off of an enormous sticky cinnamon roll and stared at people freaking out in the parking lot. She needed to keep an eye on the bus, it still had her suitcase on board and she needed to make sure it didn’t leave with it.

  The driver was back at the bus, opening up the luggage compartment to drag out bags for people who were bailing out on the trip. A tall guy with long hair and muddy pants was bothering the driver about something, and the driver was telling him no. The guy reminded her of—

  “JOHN!”

  Amy ran out the door and across the pavement as fast as her designed-purely-with-cuteness-in-mind shoes would let her. John was startled to see her. Before he could speak, she threw her arms around his torso.

  “Oh, thank God. Oh my God, John. I can’t believe you’re here.”

  John still looked baffled and said, “Yeah, I fell off but … I mean holy shit, Amy, I thought that … Anyway. It worked out so, great. Great. Oh my god.”

  “Yeah.”

  John said, “We should head north, get as far away as we can, and just kind of regroup. Need a ride though, I’m trying to get a spot on the bus but apparently that’s not allowed…”

  John looked around. Amy looked around. At the exact same time both of them said, “Where’s David?”

  Revelation

  Vultures. Big, noisy, circling, mechanical vultures. That’s what Amy thought of as she saw, for the first time in her life, half a dozen helicopters circling around in the same sky. A couple of them were news choppers, the rest looked like army. Buzzing, that soft thwupping fading in and out as their blades chopped up the air. If you ever see more than two helicopters over you, you can be sure that something terrible has happened.

  Amy made John take her out to the water tower and the toilets. John went to the one on the far right and opened it, showing her that it was just a toilet, showed her that if he went and stood inside, nothing happened. She made him do this about twenty more times. She suggested he try the other two, he said that he had done that and that they, too, were just toilets.

  Amy hated crying. She hated crying more than she hated puking. And she would rather puke on live television than cry in front of John right now. She wasn’t a large person under normal circumstances but when she cried she could feel herself shrink two feet. She instantly got demoted to child, everybody making soothing sounds and apologizing for things they didn’t even do. Strangers inviting themselves to put an arm around her shoulder like she was a five-year-old lost at the bus station.

  And she was a crier. She cried when people yelled at her, she cried when she got frustrated, she cried during particularly sad commercials. But it was just crying. She didn’t get hysterical. She didn’t fall apart. But everybody treated her like she did, because her eyes were so quick to start leaking when things went wrong. And now, as John opened the toilet door and again she saw nothing but blue plastic walls and a whiff of poop chemicals, she felt that hot sting in her tear ducts and knew they were going to betray her for the ten thousandth time.

  The thwupping got louder and one of the helicopters seemed to be swooping really low on its passes. It was a huge thing with two blades. She could feel their pulsing in her gut.

  A black semi truck was turning down the lane, heading right toward them. Watching it warily, John said, “We have to get out of here. We’ll regroup and come up with a plan. But if they catch us then it’s over, we can’t help him.”

  “One more time.”

  John glanced back, toward the truck, and then toward the tiny army men in the distance and the bright orange fencing they were stretching across the field, sealing off the town behind them. Tiny shouts from a bullhorn were drifting through the air. Yells from angry and scared people. Honking horns. All of it playing under the terrible hollow drumming of the helicopters—the soundtrack of every worst-case scenario.

  John obeyed. The toilet was just a toilet.

  * * *

  You haven’t really experienced the full range of human emotion until you’ve cried your eyes out while hanging on for dear life on the back of a dirt bike bouncing across a cornfield in the freezing cold. Amy and John made it back to the shopping center, which was clearing out fast. They returned the motorcycle to the pickup, propping it up by the tailgate because they couldn’t get it lifted up into the bed. Maybe the owner would think it just fell out.

  Cars were filing out and heading up the highway, because rumor was spreading around that they were going to expand the quarantine to include the shopping center and everything for a few miles on the other side of it, but who knew if that was true.

  The Greyhound was boarding, ready to just dump everybody off at the stops where they had been picked up. Amy thought she could get the driver to let John on board—the guy wasn’t made of stone—but John thought that would make them too easy to find if that detective came after them. It made sense, and she got her bag and watched the bus lumber down the highway without them. It was the right decision, but they were now stranded.

  * * *

  Amy would never be able to eat at a Cinnabon again for the rest of her life. They sat there, at the same table she was sitting at when she spotted John an hour earlier. John was on and off his intermittently working phone, first trying friends in town to see if they happened to be outside of city limits when everything went crazy. Those calls wouldn’t even go through. Then he tried some people he knew outside of town, but the ones who answered had their own problems.

  Amy suggested getting a ride to the airport about ten miles away and renting a car there, but John said he had some things on his driving record that would ensure he would never be able to rent a car for the rest of his life. Amy didn’t have a license, so that shot down that idea. It was just so freaking frustrating, David needed breaking out from a military zombie quarantine and his saviors couldn’t get a ride from Cinnabon.

  John paused in his phone calls to shove the remaining third of the cinnamon roll into his mouth when his phone rang. He picked it up and mumbled, “Munch! Where are you?”

  * * *

  John’s friend Munch Lombard had not in fact fled the country in David’s truck as John instructed him, but simply went to his parents’ farm outside of town. He promised to come get Amy and John in fifteen minutes or so, but John wasn’t comfortable waiting at the shopping center that long so they agreed to meet him at the John Deere dealership a mile up the street. They took off walking. Amy’s left foot felt sticky and she was pretty sure it was actively bleeding in her stupid shoes but she said nothing because broken blisters were unimportant when the world was in crisis. She kept telling herself that over and over again, wincing with ever step along the highway.

  Fewer and fewer cars passed them going north. More and more green trucks passed them going south. She was fairly sure that by sundown there would be more military personnel encircling Undisclosed than there were people inside it. All of that, between her and David.

  * * *

  Soon, John was driving David’s Bronco, Munch in the passenger seat and Amy sitting in the smelly backseat. The truck had stunk of rotten eggs for years for reasons no one could explain. They turned off onto a gravel lane snaking into dense woods, the canopy of trees blocking the sun and fast-forwarding the clock to the mid-evening hours. The lane was barely wide enough for one vehicl
e and Amy wondered what they did when two vehicles met going opposite directions. Did somebody just have to slowly back all the way out? Did they flip a coin to decide who?

  Amy tuned in to the conversation between Munch and John to hear Munch say, “Yeah, I mean, they’re playin’ that clip of the reporter’s face getting eaten every five minutes.”

  “What are they saying it is?”

  “Some kind of virus. Maybe something the terrorists released. Eats your skin. Eats your brain. Makes you crazy.”

  “Jesus. That’s the story they’re putting out there to calm people down? That’s really worse than just saying zombies.”

  “My dad and grandad have been huddled around the TV since it happened. They think it’s Revelations. Though I can’t remember anything that messed up even in the bible. The face-eating part I mean.”

  They rounded some trees and came to a closed gate, and behind it sat a shiny black pickup truck. Behind the wheel was a big guy with a dark beard and aviator sunglasses, who Amy thought looked like John Goodman’s character in The Big Lebowski.

  Munch muttered a curse and got out of the Bronco. The guy stepped out of the black pickup, then reached inside and pulled out a shotgun. John got out and Amy followed his lead, thinking that it had taken society all of two hours to degenerate to the Shotgun stage.

  To the shotgun guy John said, “Hey, Daryl.”

  “Daryl” nodded curtly but didn’t answer. Then Munch said, “Come on, Dad, don’t embarrass me. Let us through.”

  Shotgun guy, who Amy gathered was Munch’s dad, and whose name was Daryl unless John had gotten it wrong, said, “They’re from in town, right? They were in the city when the outbreak happened?”

  “John was, she wasn’t. That’s his friend, Amy.”

  Amy waved.

  Daryl Shotgun said, “Make you a deal. Drive him back to the National Guard checkpoint they set up outside town, let ’em check him over and if they give him a clean bill of health, we’ll talk. But until then he ain’t gettin’ past this gate. Him and nobody else. We already had refugees wandering around out here, tryin’ to see what they could steal.”

  “Come on, Dad. They’re homeless. They can’t get back in town, they got nothin’, they left everything behind. Don’t be a dick.”

  “Don’t push me, Mitchell. We talked about this.”

  John said, “If it makes you feel better, if I was infected you’d know it. I saw a guy get it right in front of me and it took hold of him within one minute.”

  “Who are you, again?”

  Munch said, “Goddamnit, Dad. That’s John. From the band. You’ve met him half a dozen times.”

  Daryl nodded and said, “From the band. Of course.”

  John said, “Look, don’t let me in. It’s fine. But she needs a place to stay and she was never in town, she was on her way in when they shut down the highway.”

  Amy was about to speak up. She wasn’t staying here with these nutjobs, the place had post-apocalyptic rape cult written all over it. Daryl rendered it moot.

  “Maybe she wasn’t in the city, but she’s been with you all day. Right?”

  Munch laughed, shook his head and said, “Unbelievable. Fuckin’ unbelievable.”

  John said, “No, no, it’s fine. I’m not trying to sow discord in your family here. I shouldn’t have asked. We’ll be on our way.”

  Daryl said, “That’s right, you will. And I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told everybody else who’s come up to this gate. ’Til a man in uniform comes and gives the all-clear, and maybe not even then, if you show up here again you ain’t gettin’ the courtesy of a warning shot.”

  The look on John’s face said he was wondering if he could get the shotgun away from Daryl and smash in his nose with the stock. Amy was pretty sure John could do it, the guy looked fat and slow. But then John snapped out of it and they headed back to the Bronco.

  As they did a three-point turn in the lane to head back out into the chaos, Amy sighed and said, “What now?”

  “Back to plan A. We head north. Put some distance between us and the bullshit. If we get caught and thrown in jail or quarantine, it’s over. So for right now, the goal is to not do that.”

  She crossed her arms and blew some dangling hairs out of her eyes and said, “I don’t like going farther away from him. I mean David could be hurt or running away or who knows what. And we’re just … leaving him.”

  John was silent for a moment and Amy detected that there was something he wasn’t telling her. But either he’d tell her or he wouldn’t, she’d learned that she couldn’t press John like she could David. Every conversation took place on his terms.

  John said, “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll be back. But we’re coming back strong. We’re coming back to veto all this shit. But we got to load up first.”

  And Amy thought, he doesn’t believe that.

  The Maps and Shit

  As they drove, instead of the highway, John only saw blood and brains, splattered on a filthy blue plastic door.

  Book II

  PAGE 55 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI

  For the concept of the zombie, we can thank two parties: ants, and a dog who probably died more than ten thousand years ago. Let us start with the dog.

  First, you must imagine humanity as it would have existed at the time. Agriculture is a new concept, a radical practice that must have seemed like magic. Settlements are becoming larger. Humans everywhere are struggling with the transition from living in sparse, nomadic tribes hunting gazelle and gathering berries in the woods, to everyday life in close proximity to dozens of strangers in something that could be called a village.

  All of this would have been a startling and hugely stressful change for our ancient ancestors. Yes, on one hand there is suddenly more food and comfort and spare time than the species had ever known. But maddening complexity arises at every turn. Language explodes. Man evolves the ability to think in words, essentially creating an entirely new schematic for his brain with which he will create abstract thought for the first time. And along with it, questions. Man needs to understand his place in the universe, and his relation to his creator. But this is not the beginning of science. It is the birth of superstition. What he does not understand, he fills in with this newfound cognitive power. The universe that this man inhabits will be one born from the astonishing new power called “imagination.”

  Already at this point, superstitions about the dead would have arisen; decaying flesh is a playground for infectious disease and bacteria—man would have long realized that too much time spent in the presence of the dead means sickness or even death for one’s self. They find burying or burning the dead in a special place, away from the rest of the tribe, prevents this.

  So one day, some nameless and now long-forgotten man dies. He is buried in a shallow grave by his friends, as is now their custom. But along comes a dog, or a wolf, which smells under the loose soil the irresistible scent of slightly putrid meat. The dog digs and finds a hand. It pulls it up from the soil with its jaws, but then becomes distracted in its task and runs away. Along come the deceased man’s friends once more, and what do they find? A pale, dead hand, pushing up through the soil, as if clawing for the sky. Their friend, though still clearly dead, attempts to escape from his grave and walk! And thus the undead enter our cultural memory once and for all. That image, of the pale, decaying hand emerging from the grave, can still be found on endless movie posters and horror novels. From that primal fear would develop the mythology of the zombie and the vampire and countless other incarnations across time and cultures.

  But why does this haunt us so profoundly? After all, a shambling, decaying man should present less of a physical danger than a quick, strong, able-bodied man who wishes us the same harm. If anything, such a man would be easier to outrun, outwit, and eventually put down. Why would mankind spend a hundred centuries obsessing over such an easily vanquished opponent?

  For the answer, we must look to the ant.
r />   As I alluded to, even before civilization began to emerge, agriculture must have seemed to early humans an inconceivably brazen attempt at playing God. Why, to refuse the nuts, berries and game that were naturally placed before you by providence and to instead plant and grow your own? It would be the ancient equivalent of some mad scientist today promising to grow a child in a vat. This bitter divide among early man finds its way into our mythology with the story of Adam and Eve—the decision to abandon the self-sustaining garden in favor of food that only grows reluctantly from the ground by “the sweat of thy face.” But this kind of audacious assault on nature—an act not observed in any other of the world’s creatures—required man to accept (or believe, if you prefer) that he was unique. Blessed. Divine. The planet is there for the taking and he must believe that he is destined to subdue it. Thus mankind embraces his identity as an eternal creation, a being above and beyond the physical. A being capable of choice, where all of the other beasts and fishes function according only to the simple arithmetic of crude instinct. A bear’s actions can be boiled down to hunger, or fear. But a man is capable of decision, because he has this indefinable but all-powerful spark. This is what makes him man.

  But then man observes the ant.

  Clearly no individual ant possesses this same spark. No ant ever created a work of art, or felt love, or loyalty. No ant ever thought through a decision—ants mindlessly follow pheromone trails, to the point that if the leader forms a circle, the colony will follow it around and around, endlessly, until all have died from exhaustion.

  Yet, they create vast colonies, with separate chambers for the hatching of eggs and waste and storage. They grow and harvest fungi for food. The tunnels are designed with ventilation to the surface to carefully regulate temperature and air quality. A human would need years of formal study to learn all of the various principles and skills required to build a structure as complex as those created by the “mindless” ants.