This Book is Full of Spiders (34 page)

I was in the middle of tying my shoe when an idea popped into my brain, out of nowhere. Somehow, I suddenly just knew that
Molly was eating my beans.

“Hey! Stop that! Bad dog!” I slapped her snout away from the can. She licked bean sauce from her nose, sniffed the air, and took off, presumably to find someone else’s food to steal. I considered eating the rest of the beans even though they were contaminated with dog spit now, but decided I hadn’t gotten quite that low yet. I decided to go back to bed, and took one step inside the main entrance when a drum solo of rapid footsteps approached from the stairwell. TJ skidded to a stop on the tile and said, “Roof.”

I thought he had barked at me, but he headed for the stairs and I followed him all the way up. Two dozen people were up there, lined up along the ledge like pigeons. Hope met us as soon as we stepped out of the roof access door. She grabbed my elbow, pulled me to the edge like she was going to toss me over. She leaned close, pointed and whispered, “Look. That’s the boom we heard earlier.”

I said, “The asylum.”

From behind me TJ said, “Now you see all them headlights, lookin’ like it’s rush hour in Atlanta? All them vehicles headin’ off to the north? That’s REPER buggin’ out. Headin’ for the highway.”

“Perfect. Let’s break outta here.”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘perfect.’ Means the situation out there has gone so much to shit that a few hundred men with body armor and assault rifles decided it’s not safe
for them
. Plus I don’t see any reason they’d take the rest of security offline. If anything they need it more, right? I bet tomorrow instead of two of them UAVs up there they’ll have six, or ten.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “if they’re just giving up containment of the quarantine, that means somewhere right now there’s a table full of guys with medals on their jackets trying to figure out exactly what type of bomb you need to vaporize several city blocks, and what would be a cool name for the operation. Something like Operation Cleansing Dawn.”

“Damn, man, that is a good name. I’d feel proud to get burned up in somethin’ called that.”

“You seriously don’t think that option’s on the table?”

“I don’t know, man. I didn’t ten minutes ago.”

I said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’re all gonna have to make our own decision here. Me? If I can get my dog to help me figure out how to get outta here, I’m going. And I mean tonight, if at all possible. Cover of dark, while they’re good and confused out there.”

“Uh huh. So you wind up on the other side of the fence and then what? You’re out on the streets, unarmed. You think you just show up at Wally’s tomorrow and clock in like nothing ever happened?”

“Like I said, do what you want. But for me the choice between inside and outside a cage is no choice at all.”

*   *   *

Goddamn I would not miss the stairs in this place. A hundred freaking stairs to get to the roof and it somehow seemed like even more to get back down. I had gotten down ninety-two of them when, from below me, Hope screamed.

When TJ and I got to the bottom, we found Hope staring terrified at Molly. The dog had something long and horrible and meaty in her jaws. It took me a moment to register that it was a very fresh-looking human spine.

Damn, she
was
hungry.

120 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John
was screaming and trying to run directly through the garage door, hoping to smash through it like the Kool-Aid Man. The daddy longlegs creature landed on top of the Porsche, wrapping its legs around the entire body of the car.

Falconer was paralyzed by fear for a whole .5 seconds before he screamed, “GET DOWN!” and reached over the roof of the car with his automatic. He squeezed the trigger and filled the closed space with lightning and thunder. Chunks flew off the monster, but it held on.

“MOVE!”

John saw the rear lights flare up on the Porsche not six inches from his face. He threw himself out of the way as tires spun and the Porsche smashed backward through the garage door. Huge slabs of rubber flew in every direction as the Porsche flung off the ruined remnants of its tires. The car hobbled backward down the driveway, off into the grass, through a mailbox, and into a shallow ditch full of dead leaves.

Immediately John registered good news and bad news:

The good news was the spider was gone—the garage door had scraped it off.

The bad news was that he and Falconer were dead. The street was full of zombies. Fast zombies. The shadows were thick with crouching shoulders, tensed limbs and crazy eyes. The Porsche spun out helplessly, bare rims trying in vain to dig their way out of the muddy ditch.

For some reason, this was the moment the little flame of hope inside John blew out, everything inside him was oddly cold and dark and calm. The crowd washed in, swarming the Porsche. Detective Lance Falconer was yanked roughly from the car like a toddler and dragged away.

It was all happening in silence for John, the desperate screaming and cursing and everything falling apart.

John had time to think—

I am not the star of a zombie movie. I am the guy in the background who gets eaten in the first montage.

—when he was bear hugged from behind.

Eight thin, horrible arms wrapped him up from neck to ankles, squeezing the breath from his lungs, cracking ribs. The spider’s shriek filled the world.

105 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy
jolted awake, ripped out of an awful nightmare that involved something terrible happening to the people she loved. She didn’t remember the details of the dream, but didn’t need to. That was the only nightmare she ever had.

She was shocked that she had drifted off. If you ever needed proof that we are prisoners of biology, there it is. These could be her last minutes on earth and her body decided to sleep through a bunch of them. Josh was rubbing his finger on the screen of his phone and Amy was pretty sure he was playing a game.

They were absolutely alone on the highway, not meeting a single car coming the other direction, no taillights as far as they could see. Amy moved up and took the empty passenger seat next to the driver, Fredo. He looked more scared than she was. She kept him company. She found out his last name was Borelli and that he was getting a degree in Public Relations, but was thinking of changing his major because a lot of the classes depressed him. Fredo’s brother was in the marines, as his father had been, as
his
father had been. Fredo’s dad had fought in Desert Storm, Grandad in Vietnam. Brother saw action in Afghanistan. Fredo took classes in PowerPoint. Fredo was really into Japanese anime, but none of the porn stuff, he assured her. He didn’t have any friends or family in Undisclosed, but hoped David was okay. They talked about
Battlestar Galactica
for a while. That made the time go by, as Amy knew it would, and soon Josh was telling Fredo to turn and exit the highway onto a country road that Amy knew would eventually take them around the lake, past the woods and the turkey farm/stench factory.

“Where are we going?”

Josh said, “We have to get off the highway before the army’s roadblock, this road circles around the lake and comes in behind the industrial park. The friendly checkpoints are there. Once we get through, then we meet up with OGZA.”

“Where are they?”

“They set up inside the building REPER abandoned, I guess they left a ton of equipment and supplies behind. But that means they’re right there outside of quarantine and they’ll be the first to get overrun if the quarantine fails. So the first order of business is to meet up with them and get a status update. But it’s a fortified building, and we’re all going to be armed. Everything is going to be fine.”

Josh turned out to not be full of crap on the subject of getting inside town—the army guys manning the checkpoint on the country road south of the lake let the RV through after a short conversation with Fredo. But then, a few miles later, they met a second checkpoint, one that was approximately ten times scarier than the first. It was a terrifying wall of black vehicles and men in equally terrifying black suits. They had night-vision goggles or something behind their visors that lit up red in the night, making them look like freaking demons.

“Josh? What is this? Who are—”

Josh shushed her, but Amy thought he looked like he was trying with all his might to keep poop from escaping his body. An army of the black-clad men with their elaborate machine guns swarmed the bus, those red eyes floating in the night. Barrels were raised, like they were ready to paint the inside of the RV red. One of the guards went to the driver’s side door and Fredo held a one-way conversation with him. Fredo gave the guy the OGZA pass code or whatever, but there was no answer. The guy backed away and conferred with someone else. After a tightly knotted minute, he waved them through. Amy and the seven members of the Zombie Response Squad entered Outbreak Ground Zero.

The power seemed to be out in most of the town and all the stores were closed, but they would be anyway since it was the middle of the night. Still no signal on her phone. Fredo said, “We’re six blocks away. Still nothing from OGZA?”

Josh tapped on his laptop and said, “No. Everything has been cut off for the last hour.”

Amy said, “We probably just got close enough to the town where the wireless signals are all blocked or whatever. Like maybe they can still send but we can’t receive now.”

Josh said, “That’s probably it,” in a way that did not sound at all convincing. “I actually don’t know how they were getting around the blackout before.”

Fredo said, “Whoa, is that it? The lights down there?”

Josh answered, “That’s the quarantine. That’s the city’s hospital back there behind all that. They got the perimeter all lit up. Look at that fence.”

“Jesus,” Fredo breathed. “It’s … right …
there
. They’re right there behind that fence. Jesus.”

Amy could see Fredo’s imagination spinning with images of what creatures must be shambling beyond that fence. Or maybe she was projecting, because that’s what she was doing.

And David is in there with them.

Wait, why were there advertisements all over the fence? Under one of the floodlights she could see an ad for McDonald’s bratwurst.

A chubby guy hugging a long machine gun—a gun Amy recognized as “the gun all of the bad guys use in Vietnam movies”—said, “What do we do if they’ve been overrun?”

Josh answered, “We’ll have to play it by ear,” which Amy understood to mean, “We’ll turn around and run away and congratulate ourselves for having tried.” The RV continued past the quarantine and headed right for the creepiest buildings in town: the old TB asylum, a depressing old building that looked like a giant cinder block somebody had fished out of a swamp, next to a smaller building just like it, both of them looming over a bunch of dead trees.

Amy said, “Okay, that place does
not
look safe.”

The larger building was damaged, with smoke drifting from a huge hole in one end. A lot of equipment was scattered around the yard. She saw boxes of supplies on a pallet and at least two hoods from decontamination suits laying in the weeds. They’d all either been killed, or run away in a panic. And this RV full of college kids was declaring it their new safe house.

Josh said, “I bet it’s one of the safest locations in town. The feds already did the job of securing all the windows and doors and OGZA says they found a lot of food and stuff left behind.”

The RV was rolling to a stop. Amy stared at the massive, smoking hole in the wall and her imagination lit up with the image of some elephant-sized creature, breathing fire, smashing through it with its fists.

Oh, you have got to be kidding me, Sullivan.

Josh said, “That’s the gym down there, with the hole in it, but OGZA got that sealed off so you can’t get into the rest of the building that way. I guess some oxygen tanks exploded.”

“Were they trying to kill a shark?”

“What?”

Amy didn’t answer. To Fredo, Josh said, “You got the flares?”

Without a word, Fredo reached into the glove compartment and pulled out an orange pistol with a comically oversized barrel. He rolled down his window, pointed the gun toward the sky and fired. The lawn was bathed in light, a tiny white star rocketing up, then drifting lazily back to earth.

Josh said, “They’re supposed to signal with a light from one of the windows. They have a lantern or something and they’ll flash it off and on.”

Everyone stared at the darkened building. Minutes passed. No lights.

“Maybe they didn’t see it.”

Josh said, “Do another one. Do you have a red one? Maybe they missed the last one.”

Another flare fired. Another wait. No response from the building.

Vietnam Gun Guy said, “Man, that’s ominous as shit. Maybe we should go back.”

Josh said, “Hey, this is what we came for, Donnie. If they need help, so be it. That’s why we brought all this hardware. This is the real thing here, we’re not just playing zombie video games and jerking off here. Everybody load up, we’re goin’ in.”

Amy finally spoke up and said what she had been wanting to say for more than two hours. It was futile, she knew, but she had to try.

“Josh … I want you to leave the guns behind.”

Vietnam Gun Guy, Donnie, said, “What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?”

Josh asked, “Why?”

Amy took a breath and said, “I don’t know how to say this without bruising your ego or whatever, but you’ve accidentally pointed that gun at my head four times in the course of loading it. Josh … I’m impressed that you did this, you’re amazing for just making this trip. But
you don’t know what you’re doing with that thing
. And I think there’s a one percent chance you’re going to actually need the guns and a ninety-nine percent chance that a stray cat is going to jump out of the shadows and you’re all going to shoot each other. And me.”