This Book is Full of Spiders (49 page)

You may have heard about amputees feeling a “phantom limb” beyond their stump, the nervous system sending back false reports that gives the illusion that the appendage is still there. Well, if John looked at Amy’s missing hand, he would see a literal phantom limb, a translucent hand. If she closed her eyes and concentrated on opening and closing the hand, and flexing the fingers, John—and anyone else under the influence of Soy Sauce—would see the fingers flex. Even though Amy herself would probably not. Amy’s abilities came and went, she had never taken the Sauce but I think she caught some effects from me due to, uh, transfer of bodily fluids.

She squinted and said, “I can see the latch, but just barely. It’s just a shimmer, like the Predator.”

Amy had done the trick with the box lever once before. She leaned over and, to an outside observer, held the stump of her left wrist a few inches from the box. To John’s eyes, her phantom hand grasped the hidden lever and pulled.

A click. The lid rose slowly, on its own.

Inside the box was what looked like a gray lump of fur the size of a football. It was actually metal, and the “fur” was thousands of rigid metal strands, thinner than needles, standing straight up. The first time I saw it, I said the thing looked like a steel porcupine. John said it looked like a wig for a robot. The only part of the device not covered by the metallic fur was the simple metal grip at the end, where it could be picked up. On the handle was a trigger.

It was a gun. What did it do? Well …

*   *   *

Back in the summer, after we lifted the box from the convoy, we had brought it home and spent several days figuring out the ghost latch. We then stared at the object inside for a bit, and debated what to do. John dubbed the thing the “furgun” because we had decided it was some kind of weapon and of course it had that metal fur on it.

Then, late one night, John and I had gotten good and drunk and taken the furgun out to a field to test fire it. John set up three green Heineken beer bottles on a log, then pointed the furry gun thing and squeezed the trigger.

The device made a sort of honking sound, like some people make when they blow their nose. There was a strange ripple in the air, like the heat-warped space above a fire. The beer bottle on the far right was suddenly five times bigger than it was before. John had cheered and whooped and declared the device to be an enlarging ray. He said he’d point it at cornfields and use it to cure world hunger. He fired it again, aiming at the next bottle. It stayed the same size, only turned white. When we approached it we realized the bottle had been turned into a bottle-shaped pile of mashed potatoes. John stated that he would still use it to cure world hunger, but more importantly, he pointed out that he had been thinking of mashed potatoes at the exact moment he had pulled the trigger, and speculated that the gun could react to your thoughts somehow. We fired it at the third bottle and it immediately turned into a double-ended dildo. A black one. John said this confirmed this theory.

He had then handed the furgun to me, and I fired at the first bottle.

That bottle, and the dildo, and the log, and the ground, all were consumed in a ball of fire so bright it looked like a miniature sun had landed in the middle of the field. The blast was so intense that John and I were blinded for half an hour after, and saw blue-white spots in front of our eyes for most of a day. When the fire subsided, there was a twenty-foot circle of earth in front of us that had been scorched into black glass. The papers said the light was reported by witnesses six miles away.

That next morning we had sat at my kitchen table, my head pounding, eating Amy’s macaroni and cheese–filled omelets and staring at the green box in front of us.

John said, “I want to try it again tonight.”

Amy shook her head. “Come on, somebody’s going to get hurt.”

I said, “Yeah, it clearly doesn’t work.”

John said, “We don’t know that. We just have to learn how to use it.”

I shook my head. “No. Remember the truck, and what happened to the guys guarding the thing. If They couldn’t control it, and They built the damned thing … well, in our hands we might as well be cramming gunpowder and ball bearings up our assholes.”

John said, “See, I got a different theory. I don’t think They built it. I think They found it, and had no idea what to do with it. But here’s the thing. At the moment when you were taking your piss turn off the tower, I was thinkin’ back to the best birthday present I ever got. I was nine, and my uncle had gone to a garage sale and found, for ten bucks, a cardboard box of GI Joe action figures. Even had all their guns, backpacks, everything. There were more than thirty of them in there, somebody’s entire collection. Then, well, you saw what happened to the men in the truck.
I
made that happen, Dave. With my mind. From a thousand feet away. We can master this thing. We just need practice.”

Amy said, “You almost started a forest fire.”

“
Dave
did. We’ll be more careful next time.”

Amy sat a plate in front of him and said, “Uh huh.
You
just turned a truck full of people into toys. But either way, good luck opening the box without me.”

Needless to say, it was never opened again. Until today.

*   *   *

I reached in and took the furgun by the handle. John said, “Uh, no.”

“What?”

“I actually agree that the gun isn’t safe in
your
hands. Give it to me.”

Amy said, “
I’ll
take it.”

She did. I said, “What am I supposed to use?”

John said, “We shouldn’t have to
use
anything at all. We get to a door—you know, one of the wormhole doors—and we go right to the water tower. We break their jammer thing, everybody’s phones work again, the world sees the city isn’t full of zombies and the bad guys got no choice but to call off the bombing. Tennet goes to jail and we all go to Waffle House and have breakfast.”

I nodded at the furgun and said to Amy, “We run into anybody, point and imagine something nonlethal. Just … imagine you’re Dumbledore, casting that spell that knocks people’s weapons out of their hand but doesn’t hurt them.”

She sighed and said, “You think I’m five.”

John said, “All right, I’m thinking we can’t use BB’s, because there’s probably a huge mob there by now and I’d prefer to not have to shotgun two dozen rednecks today. What’s the next closest door?”

“No. Think, John. We went through a door and came out here—right where we needed to be.
You
made that happen. Because of the Soy Sauce, you have control. You can control the doors the way
They
do. We’ll go back to the door we came in, the one out on the lawn. You’re going to concentrate—and I know you can do this—you’re going to concentrate on the water tower Porta-Potty and it’s going to take us right there. Right?”

Thunder rumbled outside. The wind picked up and the arthritic old building creaked under the strain.

John nodded and said, “Right. This is going to work.”

*   *   *

We ran to the front door. We dragged away the cabinet we’d used as a barricade. I took a deep breath, opened the front door and was immediately staring down a dozen gun barrels.

Armed townspeople were swarming the scene. Amy said, “Don’t shoot!”

I put my hands in the air and, to the firing squad in front of me said, “I know you’re all worked up, but listen to me. The feds aren’t going to bomb the hospital. They’re going to bomb
the whole town
. That means as of right now, we are all in the same boat. As far as the rest of the world is concerned,
all of us are infected.
”

The guy nearest to me, a big black guy who was built like a linebacker, screamed, “DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND LAY FLAT ON THE GROUND. THIS IS THE ONLY WARNING YOU GET.”

Then I noticed the earmuffs everyone was wearing. I took a deep breath and screamed, “THEY ARE GOING TO BOMB THE TOWN IN AN HOUR!” I tried to pantomime a plane dropping a huge bomb, but I think the motions conveyed that I was warning about a bird shitting on his head.

No response. To John and Amy, I muttered, “I’m thinking we need to go back inside.”

Under his breath, John said, “One. Two. Three—”

We spun and ran back through the big wooden doors—

*   *   *

—and I ran gut-first into a rusting Ford sedan. Amy slammed into my back. I looked around and realized that we were not, in fact, inside the main hall of the asylum. Rows of broken cars grew in a field of yellow weeds all around us.

John cheered. “HA! It worked! Screw those guys!”

Amy said, “This is not the water tower.”

It was, in fact, the junkyard south of town.

John and I spun around at the same time and saw the blue Porta-Potty standing in the weeds behind us.

“Damn it!” said John. “They moved the shitter. What is this, the junkyard? We’re way the hell on the other side of town.”

The first sprinkles of rain were coming down. I took a calming breath and said, “It’s okay. You’re going to concentrate, and we’re going to go back into the Porta-Potty, and you’re going to send us to the water tower. There has to be a door there we can come out of up there. You’re going to send us to
that
door. Any door in the vicinity. You are
not
going to send us back to the asylum. Right?”

Something changed with the light, like a shadow was passing overhead. I looked up and, for the second time that day, saw that a car was flying toward me through the air.

We ran screaming in three directions as a rusting sedan flattened the Porta-Potty with a thunder of rending metal. I stumbled, fell and got a face full of dried weeds. I scrambled to my feet and screamed for Amy, found her crouching behind a hatchback.

John screamed, “There! There!” and we turned to see a shrunken, dried-up old man who looked about ninety. He was maybe twenty-five yards away, standing near a twenty-foot-tall faded fiberglass statue of a smiling man holding a slice of pizza. The old guy looked completely normal, other than the fact that he had a huge third arm growing from his groin, and had massive leathery wings.

The old man bent over and with his dick arm wrestled an old engine block out of the dirt. He shrieked and threw the engine at us underhand, like a softball. The four-hundred-pound hunk of metal turned in the air, little sprays of rainwater flying out of its cylinders. We dodged again, moments before the engine crushed the roof of the hatchback in a cloud of glass bits.

John’s shotgun thundered next to me. It had absolutely no effect on the old man—I don’t know if he missed or if the old guy was immune to bullets. John broke open the gun and fumbled with three more shells. Two of them fell into the weeds.

“AMY! SHOOT HIM!”

Amy turned, raised the furgun, closed her eyes and fired.

The alien gun made that low, foghorn honking sound. The air rippled. The old man recoiled, his hands flying to his face. When his hands came away I observed that he now had a thick, white wizard beard.

John screamed, “GODDAMNIT, AMY! YOU’VE GOT IT SET ON BEARD.”

The man advanced. Amy fired again. The man’s beard grew twice as long.

I yelled, “AMY! YOU CAN GO LETHAL ON THIS ONE!”

“I’M TRYING!”

The old man was running now, terrifyingly fast, arms pumping. Running right at us. We ran away. Amy tried to turn and fire the furgun. The shot went wild and suddenly the fiberglass pizza man had a huge beard.

I screamed, “GIVE IT TO ME!”

Amy tossed me the furgun. Before I could turn on the old man, I was sent sprawling with a blow to my back that knocked the air out of my lungs. I hit the weeds, gasping. I rolled over to see the old man ready to swing a car bumper at me a second time. I pointed the furgun up at the old fart. I squeezed the trigger.

The gun went off with a booming sound that shook the earth. There was a gut-wrenching impact, and the man was disintegrated into a fine, red mist. The grass burned in the spot where he had stood, the soil itself charred.

John walked up and said, “Jesus, Dave. Why don’t you, uh, give that back to Amy.”

Amy said, “The toilet! That car flattened the toilet!”

“We don’t need it.” I looked at John. “John just needs
to concentrate
.”

“Hey, it worked last time, they just moved the—”

“I know, I know. You’re doing great. Now just find something we can go through. The doors aren’t random, not for you.
You have the power to control them.
”

John jogged down the row of cars, rain plinking off of metal trunk lids. He arrived at a windowless van, took a moment to concentrate, then pulled open the doors.

John said, “I think I can see it. I can actually see where it goes…”

“Okay, great. Where?”

“I can’t tell. But there’s an army truck parked there.”

“Perfect! Go.”

We climbed through—

*   *   *

—and tumbled out of the back of a different van in the rear parking lot of some restaurant or other. It was certainly not the water tower.

40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

I punched the air and cried, “GODDAMNIT WHY ARE WE SUCH FUCKUPS?”

There were in fact two military trucks parked nearby, so he had that part right. No personnel in sight.

Amy said, “Go back—”

John said, “No, we have to find a different door. That’ll just take us back to the junkyard.”

John jogged toward the restaurant and went through an open
EMPLOYEES ONLY
door. We followed him into an empty kitchen—stainless appliances and grease-tanned walls. It smelled like detergent and vaporized animal fat. We passed into a main dining area full of small round tables. The building was silent, the restaurant closed—probably had been since the outbreak. We could hear the soft drumming of rain on the roof. Along one wall was a bar lined with bottles and two big-screen TVs that would be showing some kind of sporting event if it weren’t early morning on a Monday during the apocalypse. The opposite wall was covered with a mural depicting a smiling cartoon buffalo, eating a burger.