This Book Is Full of Spiders

  Owen had the automatic in his hand, but wasn’t threatening with it. In this setting it seemed more ceremonial, like a gavel. He said, “I don’t like it. It don’t make sense. That’s a big dog, it ain’t like a squirrel gettin’ past the sensors and shit out there. Dog probably weighs a hundred pounds, if it can make it through, a dude can make it through.”

  I said, “Well, awesome. If there’s a way in, there’s a way out, right? Maybe there’s a place you can dig under the fence after all, out of sight of the—”

  “Dipshit,” interjected Owen, “we have been around and around that fence. It’s all we got to do, all day, bro. No, there ain’t no good place to cross the fence. There ain’t any storm drains, there ain’t any big sewer pipes like in the damned Shawshank Redemption.”

  I shrugged. “Well I personally observed this dog, in town, eating a burrito, after the hospital was locked down. She was on the other side of that fence and she didn’t come in on the last truck. So…”

  “Speaking of which,” Owen said, “What are we supposed to do with it?”

  I said, “Why do we have to do anything? To be clear, there’s no indication that dogs can get infected, right? So we’re not worried about that end of it?”

  TJ said, “No, dogs don’t get it. Animals and kids, they don’t get it.”

  Owen said, “You’ll bet your life on that? All of our lives?”

  I said, “So, I’ll check her mouth.”

  “That ain’t a hundred percent, neither.”

  “So, what, you want to put her down? She’s our ticket out of here.”

  “Our ticket outta here is keeping this place safe and secure until we hear the all-clear. There ain’t no reason in the world to make a jailbreak even if your dog leads us to a magical train platform that hauls us all to Hogwarts.”

  Everyone stared at Owen until he said, “I told you, I got a kid. Fuck off.”

  I said, “Your ‘let’s remain calm and stay put’ speech would be a lot more convincing if you weren’t giving it in front of a pile of burning skeletons. So, we kill the dog because maybe she’s not a dog and maybe she’s some new kind of undetectable monster. We gonna us that same standard on the next human who walks through those gates? Where does that shit end, Owen? Government shows up to give the all-clear and it’s just you and a mountain of bones?”

  Owen had no rebuttal for this and I have to be honest, I detected relief in his face. He didn’t want to have to shoot a dog.

  “She monsters out, and it’s your ass.” Owen stuffed the gun into his pocket and apparently that signaled that the meeting was adjourned. The reds huddled among each other and the greens headed back inside.

  I walked with TJ and said, “There’s somethin’ else to this, but I don’t want to jump to any conclusions or anything. Molly really belongs to my girlfriend, Amy. I think Molly showing up here, it’s not coincidence. I think she was sent here, as a signal to me. John and Amy—hopefully just John, I guess, with Amy in some safe place—I think one or both of them are out there, and are trying to bust me out or trying to show me how to sneak out.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “Means I have to figure out what the plan is. But I feel like they definitely have a plan.”

  Somewhere beyond the fence, an explosion lit up the sky.

  3 Hours, 30 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

  John sprinted across the asylum parking lot screaming, “SHHIIIIIIIT!”

  Black smoke poured through the house-sized hole that had been blown in the gymnasium wall. Screams and gunshots chased him. Nearby, a car windshield shattered. There was another explosion, and the shock wave threw John to the ground, scraping his palms on the pavement. Falconer grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him to his feet.

  They made it to the Porsche parked a block away and ten seconds later were tearing through the streets of Undisclosed, drawing the attention of every gun-toting spaceman they passed. And there were a lot of them, clusters of them seemed to populate every corner.

  Falconer growled, “That was liquid oxygen, dumbass! That’s why those tanks had those huge orange warning stickers all over them. They use it in rockets.”

  “I didn’t know! Jesus.”

  “You didn’t know oxygen burns? Where did you go to school?”

  “Here! Look around! It’s a shithole!”

  The Porsche smashed through wooden barricades set up in the street, and on the other side was a ghost town.

  Broken glass in the streets. Garbage piled on the sidewalk. The Porsche turned down an alley and John realized that what was crunching under the tires like gravel were brass shell casings from machine guns.

  John said, “Holy shit. Is everybody dead?”

  “There’s a twenty-four hour curfew outside the Green Zone. Inside those barricades we drove through, they’ve still got military doing foot patrols. But out here, it’s lockdown. Nobody on foot, just armored Humvees making sweeps every now and then. Anyone seen roaming the streets out here is presumed infected and either shot or hauled off to quarantine, depending on how far gone they are.”

  “Christ. How is that legal?”

  Falconer shook his head. “I have never seen anything like this in all my days. Everybody you see inside town, all hazmat suits, all the vehicles—that’s all REPER. Everybody else has withdrawn outside of town. If we turned right here, we’d eventually run into a REPER cordon at city limits. Get past it, and you’re in the Dead Zone—it’s a five-mile-wide ring around the city where nobody is allowed. All the houses in that ring have been evacuated, all the businesses shut down. REPER patrols it in armored vehicles. It acts as a vacuum seal between the city and the outside world. At the end of the Dead Zone, you find the National Guard. I’m talking tanks here. Rows of them, guns aimed at the city like they expect Day of the Dead to come pouring out at them at any moment.”

  Falconer pulled off into the yard of an abandoned house, and parked in a spot behind the garage where the car wouldn’t be visible from the street.

  He continued, “But you see what they’ve done. What the outside world knows about what’s going on in town, is only what REPER tells them. There is no one else. All the phones are jammed. No news crews, no Internet access. The military, they’re on the other side of five miles of no-man’s-land. Whatever the people are hearing, whatever the government is hearing, comes from REPER. It’s their show.”

  John said, “And I’m pretty sure at least one of the guys in charge is crazy.”

  “I’ll agree with that assessment. Let’s just say that I’ve heard some shit. About what goes on in that asylum.”

  John said, “Well, what now?”

  “We wait to make sure they’re not still after us. I’m hoping the shitstorm you left behind back there makes us a low priority. They got to get containment back in place first.”

  John said, “Can we get to Dave’s place? Are they … guarding it or anything?”

  “Why would they?”

  “They would if they knew what was there.”

  Falconer said, “The drug, you mean. The Soy Sauce.”

  “Let me apologize ahead of time, detective. Because shit is about to get weird.”

  3 Hours, 15 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

  Amy was about to explode. She didn’t get mad often, and it took a lot. But once the pin on that grenade had been pulled, there was no containing it. This was something she had in common with David, though he didn’t realize it.

  Amy’s mom, back when she was alive, had said God had made sure to give her brother Jim all of the size and Amy all of the temper. He had been as big as a bear, but was always the voice of reason in an argument—the only time she had seen him fight, it was to defend her. Amy was literally less than half of his size but had that grenade inside her. Her mom called it her “Irish” as in, “now calm down, your Irish is coming out” which, ironically, made Amy furious. Wasn’t that racist or something? But the look on Josh’s face right now, it
was about to get all Irish up in here.

  “We have to go now. We should have left two hours ago. Fine, you don’t care about David, you don’t care if he gets eaten by a zombie or burned up to ashes, but who knows how many more are in there? Women, kids, who knows? We have to get them out. As many as we can.”

  Josh, not making eye contact, said, “I totally understand you’re upset, but we have to be smart about this. Mike and Ricky aren’t here, they’re helping their families move before the quarantine swallows this place. And I told you about Zach, he’s got food poisoning. He’s already in bed. That’s three guns we’re short. But tomorrow—”

  “Oh, for the love of— You know what you are? All of you? Children. Little kids playing pretend, with toys. You’ve spent years obsessing about this and now it’s here, much to everyone’s surprise, it’s actually here, and it’s ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Tomorrow, when the sun comes up. Tomorrow, when the weather’s warmer. Tomorrow, when we have more help, when things aren’t so bad, when everything is aligned just right so that there’s no risk of anything bad possibly happening.”

  “Calm down.”

  “Screw you!” Amy shrieked it, a sound that tore a hole in the air.

  Grenade, Amy, watch it.

  “You want to sit here in your little fantasy, your little suburban womb. With your laptop, in your little clubhouse, rubbing oil on your guns and congratulating yourself on how brave and strong you turned out to be in the stupid zombie war fantasies that play in your head. You’re not a man. You’re a boy. All of you. You’re little boys because you choose to stay little boys. You don’t become a man until you wake up one day and realize that today the world needs you to be a man. Josh, so help me, if you don’t step up, and become a man right now, people will die. Tonight. Not tomorrow.”

  He didn’t answer. He had his MacBook open and was fiddling around with the touchpad, and he had that look on his face that had pulled Amy’s pin. A mask of feigned nonchalance. It took practice to come up with that look. Somebody who had been shamed so many times that he’d adapted to simply never showing it, rather than changing to not do things he was ashamed of. She wanted to slap him and slap him and slap him.

  “Amy, all I’m saying is—”

  “AAAAARRRGGGHHHH!” Amy bent over and screamed at the floor. She didn’t know what else to do. Mom was right, if the Lord had given her Jim’s body, she would have thrown this kid through the windshield of the RV.

  “Fine,” she said. “All I want you to do is give me a ride down there. Drop me off at the barricades. I’ll figure out a way to get across. I’ll figure out a way to find David and anyone else who needs help in there and I’ll figure out a way to get them out and if I don’t, then I will die. And that’s okay because while I’m dying trying to save the people I love, you’ll be back here in your cocoon, playing your zombie video games and jerking off and dying would be better than watching you do that.”

  The side door of the RV ripped open. A short dusky kid who Amy remembered was called Fredo leaned in and said to Josh, “Did you hear?”

  “I couldn’t hear anything over her.”

  “Outbreak inside the REPER command center. All hell broke loose, there was an explosion, the building’s on fire, all their containment breached. Infected pouring out of their holding area.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “OGZA says fire trucks headed one way, then ten minutes later REPER were going the other. Pulling out. Leaving the Green Zone. Leaving everything.”

  “They’re pulling out of [Undisclosed]?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Amy said, “So what does that mean?”

  Josh said, “It means all the manpower is now devoted to keeping anyone from leaving the city, and anybody left behind is now on their own.”

  Fredo said, “OGZA put out a call for assistance, anybody and everybody with a gun. They said this is about to go from a class two to a class three zombie outbreak.”

  Amy said, “Is a class three the one where you guys actually do something?”

  Fredo said, “They said they can get us inside the city. They got friends on the cordon but that’s only until the feds change the guard rotations.”

  Josh hesitated, studying the ridiculous collection of guns on the wall. Finally, he said, “Tell everyone it’s a go. The feds shit the bed, and now it’s up to us. We roll in thirty minutes.”

  3 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

  John couldn’t help but notice that, while all of Undisclosed appeared to be the aftermath of a post–Super Bowl riot in Detroit, if you had woken up in Dave’s neighborhood you wouldn’t have noticed any difference. Same old busted windows and same months-old trash bags sitting on porches. John found this comforting.

  The big change, of course, was where Dave’s little eleven-hundred-foot bungalow had previously stood, there now wasn’t much of anything. Just a floor supporting the black frames of two burned-out walls and piles of wet, charred debris. Blackened drywall and two-by-fours and roofing and gnarled wiring.

  John really didn’t feel anything about this, one way or the other. And not just because he had been the one to burn it down. John didn’t get sentimental about houses. Maybe it was because he bounced around so much as a kid, thanks to three different divorces. But he liked to think it just made more sense to not get attached to things. The memories didn’t get burned up with a house, or transferred to the new owners if it got sold. A house was just wood and nails. Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

  Falconer wanted the Porsche out of view, in case REPER came by or somebody tried to steal the stereo or something. One of the abandoned houses down the street had left its garage door open, and Falconer pulled in. John personally thought it was wiser to have the car within lunging distance in case they needed to make a desperate getaway, but apparently desperate getaways were what other people did in Falconer’s world, while Falconer chased them and told them they had the right to remain silent.

  Once parked, John found the prospect of opening the car door and stepping out into the night erased any illusions he had that this was the same old neighborhood. In the rearview mirror, John saw curtains rustle in the dark house across the street. An infected? Or somebody hunkered down, scared that John and Falconer were infected? Who knows. If it was some terrified refugee crouched with a shotgun, John was hoping that the Porsche would put them at ease. No zombie’s gonna drive a Porsche.

  There you go, with that zombie bullshit.

  They eased the heavy garage door down, closing it behind the Porsche. They headed down the sidewalk, at which point John thought he saw somebody slip around a corner, but then realized he didn’t. He thought he heard footsteps, but it was a windy night and the sound was a strand of Christmas lights—from last year—tapping against a window at the neighbor’s place.

  Falconer asked, “The Soy Sauce, was it in the house when it burned?”

  “No. I’ll show you.”

  John was afraid Falconer would say, “Great, I’ll wait here!” but instead Falconer led the way, striding into Dave’s yard like a man with a huge gun. Falconer glanced this way and that, alert but not scared. John followed and made his way around the yard to find the toolshed hadn’t burned. It was also still unlocked from when he’d grabbed the chainsaw the day everything went to shit. He reached inside and grabbed a shovel. He tossed it to Falconer.

  “The sauce is in a little silver container, about the size of a spool of thread. Inside is a really thick, black liquid. When we find it, don’t open it. Not only will the shit kill you if it gets on your skin, but it will come after you. Have you seen The Blob? It’s like that. Only tiny.”

  “And when you say it will kill ‘you,’ you mean ‘me.’ Because you can handle it for some reason.”

  “Yes. You’ll see.”

  “Uh huh. And judging from the shovel, I assume you buried it?”

/>   “Yeah, around here somewhere. Don’t look at me that way, I need you to do the digging, you’ll see why. It’s not deep. Now, the container is somewhere here in the backyard. I know where. But I’m not going to tell you. I want you to walk to a random spot—what you think is a random spot, anyway—and dig down about a foot.”

  Falconer didn’t move from where he was standing. He plunged the shovel into the dirt right in front of his feet. Three scoops and then—

  “Look. Right there.”

  Falconer looked down, and in the moonlight saw the glint of brushed steel, poking out from the mud. “All right, how did you do that?”

  “I didn’t. It did. The Sauce. When we buried it, Dave just threw the shovel like a javelin and said wherever it landed, that’s where we’d bury it. That’s where it landed. Where you’re standing. Because the Soy Sauce wanted it to land there. Because it knew you would be standing there a year later.”

  “‘It’ knew. So the Sauce is alive.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And now you’re going to swallow some of it.”

  “That’s the least painful way, yeah.”

  “And you have no idea how it does what it does.”

  “Let’s just say it’s magic.”

  “Let’s just say that I need a little more explanation than that if I’m going to go along with this.”

  John sighed. “Okay, have you heard of nanotechnology?”

  “Yeah. Microscopic robots, right?”

  “Right, and imagine they can make millions of these robots and embed them in a liquid, so that you now have a liquid infused with the power of all these machines. Got it?”

  “All right.”

  “Now imagine if, instead of tiny robots, it’s magic.”

  John dug the bottle from the mud with his fingers.

  “Stand back.”