This Book is Full of Spiders (16 page)

It all seemed very familiar.

John was pulling me along. I caught the eyes of Detective Falconer, who was back up, now trying ineffectually to help a heavy teenage girl get the spider off of her neck. His look spoke clearly:

Take it all in, white trash.
You
did this.

He was right. Before the fire, we had the parasites imprisoned inside the house. The feds could have roped it off, sealed it up, kept all the bystanders safely away. They could have taken their time figuring out how to neutralize the threat. We could have told them what we knew, told them not to get within a hundred yards without mouth protection and to bury the house under a mountain of concrete. Instead, the fire had drawn a crowd. First the firefighters with no protection, and then the gawkers who crowded around like a goddamned all-you-can-eat parasite buffet. They would all die. Maybe everyone would die. Maybe the parasites would own the planet. And it would all be my fault. It was the DVD sticker situation all over again.

We ran. We bumped into CDC crews with holes chewed through their space suits. We shouldered past confused National Guardsmen. We dodged the Action 5 News camera guy and a lady reporter demanding an interview from someone, anyone.

We piled into the Caddie. It stank of turkeys, possibly because there were two turkeys in the backseat. Live ones, pecking at the seat cushions. John cranked the ignition and Creedence Clearwater Revival blared from the dash. He stepped on the gas and we ripped through a band of yellow police tape somebody was trying to string up.

Probably a little late for that, buddy.

Outbreak

Amy
decided she was fighting mankind’s most ancient battle: physical impulse versus human dignity. Her bladder felt like it was filled with knives, but the bus toilet was not something a human should be allowed to touch without wearing a wet suit. Would she give in to animal impulse and surrender her human dignity? She would not. Actually, she tried to go back there about fifteen minutes ago but it was occupied and there was a guy in there making weird noises. So, she was back in her seat, counting the miles to the nearest bathroom. Not far, now. They were right outside of town, already past the tractor dealership.

On the seat next to her was a white cardboard box from a bakery not far from the university, containing what was probably the finest food ever produced by the human species. They were red velvet cupcakes with a cheesecake filling and a cream cheese icing. There were only half a dozen in the box but you could barely finish one of them before you had to go sit down somewhere and stare at the ceiling. It’d sit in your belly like a bag of concrete but you’d have no regrets. The fat and sugar hit your system so hard that with every bite you just wanted to give the world a hug—

Oh, no …

The bus was stopping.

Amy stood up and saw cars. Cars and cars and cars, stopped dead on the highway leading into town.

Her heart sank.

This was … surely just a car accident or something. Not every bad thing that happened revolved around David. Surely.

Surely.

She was already dialing. But this time, no voice mail—a recorded message from the cell phone carrier saying all circuits were busy.

A helicopter swept overhead. Low.

Ohhhhh … crap.

Across the aisle of the bus, a couple of college-looking guys in vintage clothes and thick-rimmed glasses were whispering frantically to each other, huddled over the screen of a cell phone.

“Excuse me. Are you guys getting a signal?”

“Internet still works. Look.”

The guy held out the phone and Twitter was up. If you’re reading this in a future where the Twitter fad has passed, Twitter was a Web site where people posted short little messages, usually from their phones, for the world to see. So, at any moment you could go on their site and see what the world at large was talking about, in real time. The main page of Twitter would always list what subjects were hot or “trending” at the moment. So when news broke, it broke on Twitter first—if a plane crashed near New York, people on the scene would start Tweeting about it within seconds, long before the first news camera showed up. Within minutes you’d see “#NYPlaneCrash” pop up on the trending topics.

The number one topic on Twitter at this moment was:

#ZOMBIEOUTBREAK

Exodus

John’s old Caddie had a huge engine that would qualify as a human rights violation if built today. It roared down the road, chugging gas and farting a blue cloud of dinosaur souls.

“They’re sealing off the town!” John screamed over John Fogerty. “Munch told me! They’ve got the highway and Route 44 both blocked.”

We weren’t heading to the highway, however. We would never have made it even without the roadblock—John’s Caddie wasn’t exactly hard to spot and we were being pursued. Fortunately, we knew a shortcut.

John tossed his phone into my lap and said, “Call Shiva! Tell her to meet us at the water tower!”

“Who?”

“Shiva! My girlfriend!”

“That’s actually her name?”

“I think so!”

“There are absolutely no bars on this phone.” I pulled out mine and said, “Shit! Mine, too!”

“Goddamn we get shitty coverage here!”

Burrito stand. The tires screeched us to a stop. We spilled out and I yelled, “TRUNK! TRUNK!”

John stopped in his tracks and said, “Molly!”

I spun and there she was. She was by the trash can, her paws pinning down a scrap of aluminum foil while she hurriedly ate the remaining half of a chorizo burrito.

John fumbled with his keys and got the trunk open just as we heard in the distance, “DON’T FUCKING MOVE!”

Goddamned Lance Falconer, sprinting down the street, gun in hand. Holy shit that man could run.

I abandoned my stuff and sprinted to the back door of the burrito stand. The good news was it would get us out of there. The bad news was that the destination was a crapshoot and only one would work.

Come on water tower, water tower, water tower …

We opened the door and squeezed into the utility closet. A blink later the door changed in front of us and we stepped out to—

“PANTIES! SHIT!”

We were at the Walmart dressing room. No good. If the feds had blocked off the highway at city limits, we were still on the wrong side of it. John said, “Back in! Back in!”

Back into the dressing room. A blink. The smell of burritos hit us. We stepped out of the door at the exact moment Falconer skidded to a stop in front of us. He leveled his huge automatic at my face and said, “FREEZE!”

We ducked back inside. I heard Falconer yanking the door back open a split second before we emerged at a destination that stank of liquor and disinfectant.

“Shit!” hissed John, surveying a display of Jägermeister. “We’re at the liquor store.” Specifically, the restroom at the rear of the store. “What now?”

“Maybe if we wait here, he’ll wander away.”

“He’s not gonna do that, he’ll search the burrito stand for a hidden hatch or something. Then he’ll search our car and interrogate the burrito guy to see if he’s in on it.”

I glanced around. “What’s going on?”

The liquor store was packed. People were hauling armloads of bottles up to the counter and somebody was arguing with the cashier.

“People stocking up.”

“Screw it. He won’t be expecting us to pop back out. We’ll go out and right back in. Third time’s a charm.”

We shoved back into the liquor store restroom just as a guy nearby piled Jäger and half a dozen Red Bulls into a shopping basket.

A blink. Burrito smell.

I peeked out of the utility closet. A hand grabbed my collar and threw me to the ground, knocking the air from my lungs. A knee was on my back.

Falconer screamed, “HOW ARE YOU DOING THAT?”

“WE TOLD YOU! Just fucking let us go!”

“
Shitbird
,” Falconer growled, “you need to understand that it’s going to be
martial law and rioting
within the hour. That means if I put a bullet in both of your heads and leave you here,
nobody will fucking care
.”

I said, “Listen! Listen to me! Everything that has happened has happened because they wanted it to.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I DON’T KNOW! Find out! You’re goddamned Lance Falconer!”

John said, “Don’t you get it? You’re wasting your time, we’re just a couple of inconsequential dipshits in this whole thing. The people behind this will take out all three of us. We’re all pawns. Well, you’re a pawn, we’re a couple of Gummi bears your retarded little brother stuck on the chessboard.”

I felt the knee lift from my back. I looked up at Falconer towering over me, I met his eyes and found it easier to look into the barrel of his gun.

He said, “See, I would let you go so you can try to jump the quarantine, but
I would like to not be responsible for destroying the world today.
I’d sooner let everybody in this town past those barricades before you two fucks. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but disaster follows you
everywhere you goddamn go
. Now we’re going to—AAAHHH!”

An orange blur had attached itself to Falconer’s crotch. It was Molly, her teeth buried right in the detective’s junk.

John grabbed my jacket and we stumbled into the closet. I pulled the door shut—

Cornfield.

“Yes!” screamed John.

We stepped out of a blue Porta-Potty, the middle one in a row of three at the edge of a construction site. To our right was the legs of a half-finished water tower.

In our various experiments with the doors over the months, we’d only found one—this one—that took you outside city limits. But not by much. No more than a quarter mile to the south of us we could see dots of military vehicles, parked along a road bisecting the field. A little bit of the cordon encircling the city. John pulled out his phone and said, “No reception. Man, you think they’re jamming the signal?”

“Dunno. If so we just gotta get far enough away, they’re not blocking it for all of America, right?”

“Well. Highway’s about a quarter mile that way.”

We went stomping across the expanse of broken cornstalks and mud of the harvested cornfield, tracing a similar path from that summer night when we saw the black convoy and found The Box. Fifteen minutes later, we got a good look at the traffic jam on the highway, a line of cars that extended across the horizon as far as we could see in both directions. In the distance to our left was the roadblock, a cluster of flashing police lights, Humvees and the muted echo of somebody shouting into a megaphone. They were trying to get cars to cross the median and go back the way they came, but due to people refusing to comply, or confusion, or just the general dipshit dysfunction of crowds, the whole process had resulted in gridlock. We both flinched as a helicopter swept overhead.

A day and a half ago I was at work playing browser games on the PC and trying to think of what to get Amy for her birthday. Suddenly it’s the freaking apocalypse.

John glanced at his phone, then stuffed it back in his pocket. Ten minutes later we made it out of the cornfield and onto the grass along the shoulder of the road. We took a right, putting Undisclosed to our backs. To our left was a wall of cars and semis forming an automotive Great Wall of China that snaked over the next hill.

When we crested that hill, we saw that the shopping center just outside of town—a U-shape strip of stores encircling three sides of a huge parking lot—had become a gathering place for refugees. The parking lot was packed with vehicles, and more were parked in the grass along the entrance leading in. As we got closer we saw people standing around, on their phones, trying to get in touch with loved ones behind the barricades.

That prompted John to pull out his phone.

“I’ve got bars! Well, a bar.”

He dialed and said, “Hey! Shiva. It’s me. Huh? No, no. Look, Sheila, Dave and I need a ride. We’re right outside that strip mall with the Best Buy. They got the roads all blocked—what? Yeah, I don’t know. Did you say zombies? No. Your friends are morons. What? No. Why would we have anything to do with it? Uh huh. That’s fine. Can you still pick us up? Hello? Shiva?”

He put the phone away and said, “Call got dropped. Also, I think she broke up with me.”

“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop but, uh, did zombies come up in that conversation?”

“Yeah, apparently the Internet is full of zombie rumors. People are stupid.”

“I guess that’s not any stupider than the truth.”

We made it to the shopping center parking lot. On one end was the Best Buy, on the other was a now-closed movie theater. Between the two was a row of storefronts, half of them unoccupied.

John said, “I didn’t know they had a Cinnabon out here.”

“We got to get a ride, John. My feet are killing me.”

We walked past a parked Greyhound bus and John said, “You think they’d let us on there?”

The bus was empty. I said, “I don’t know. Where’s it going?”

“Who cares?”

“Good point. Find the driver and see if you can buy a ticket. Or bribe him. I have four dollars.”

“I have zero dollars. You might have to blow him.”

I peered through the smoked front windows of the Best Buy and saw the store was absolutely packed with people, staring up at a massive bank of televisions along the back wall.

We went in and shouldered our way through the crowd. They were watching live news coverage of the chaos in Undisclosed on three dozen flat-screen TVs of various sizes. The Action 5 News Team was finding as many ways as they could to say the same thing over and over—that there was some kind of unspecified crisis in the town, that they didn’t know the nature of it but that it was huge and terrible and that we should all remain calm but glued to our televisions. Then they threw it out to star reporter Kathy Bortz, who was standing about one block from my house:

“Thank you, Michael. Look behind me. Fire trucks. Police cars. Military Humvees. A large RV that appears to be a mobile command center from the Centers for Disease Control. Numerous civilian vehicles. Behind them, a raging house fire. There is mass confusion here, folks. We heard gunshots when we first arrived, we have been told there are at least three bodies but that’s all we know. Personnel are—what was that? Did you catch that, Steve? Back on me. Ready? Personnel are swarming the scene. They’re trying to push back onlookers, as you can see quite a crowd has gathered around. Information has been hard to come by but what we know is that this is the same address where less than an hour ago neighbors called in reports of a shouting, bloody, naked man carrying what appeared to be—what’s that? Steve? No, there’s something on my—AH!”