This Book is Full of Spiders (31 page)

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.”

“If you take that shit and you go into a seizure or cardiac arrest, I’m leavin’ you here.”

“Detective, if I take this shit and it looks like the trip is going bad, fucking
run.
”

John squeezed the bottle in his hand. He thought he heard the footsteps again, but decided he needed to stop falling for that at some point. He took a deep breath, and said, “All right. Here goes.”

2 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy
was rumbling through the night in a crowded RV, heading south, scared out of her mind. Her head was between her knees, staring at the filthy floor and praying silently, as had been her habit since she’d been a toddler. She had realized she was doing it out of reflex. If God was the type who needed to be asked verbally before he would support your side over man-eating monsters, then she wasn’t sure what good he would be once he joined. She hadn’t been to Mass since her brother Jim was alive. Her faith could be summed up in two sentences, from one of the
Narnia
books. Speaking about Aslan, the lion that symbolized Jesus, a character says:

“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Amy hated—
hated—
the way the grown-ups her parents had surrounded themselves with were so quick to offer prayers and so slow to actually
do
anything. Old women who barely left the house for anything but bingo and congratulated themselves on never drinking alcohol or saying dirty words, thinking God created humans to stay home and watch televangelists and just run out the clock until the day they die. Well, Amy figured you don’t need more than five minutes on this planet to figure out that one thing we know about God—maybe the only thing—is that he favors those who
act
. David also believed that, though he didn’t realize it.

Guns were clicking all around her. The zombie nerds were pushing all variety of bullets into all varieties of gun parts. Long, gleaming brass bullets, bright red shotgun shells. Guns designed with the elegant lines of sports cars, slick oiled metal and curved textured plastic meant to fit right into your hand. Josh rammed a lever forward on his and it clicked satisfyingly into place. Don’t get her wrong, she saw the appeal. She also saw how you could start thinking of them as toys.

Josh held up a blood red shotgun shell and said, “Dragon’s Breath. Zirconium-based incendiary pellets, looks like a flamethrower every time you pull the trigger. This is an automatic shotgun with a twenty-round drum. Three more drums in my backpack. We get in a jam, this thing will unleash a wall of hellfire, as fast as I can pull the trigger.” He clicked shells into a plastic drum the size of a large saucepan and said, “These shells are fifteen dollars apiece, by the way.”

And there it was. She suddenly realized that she’d rather have David or John, either one, armed with a baseball bat, than any of these guys and their video game hardware. David and John had a look in their eye when things went bad—a sad but resigned familiarity. They weren’t trained for violence and maybe weren’t particularly competent at it, but they weren’t going to go pee in the corner, either. Both of them had come from bad homes, both had gotten hit quite a bit as kids and maybe that’s all it was. Maybe they just understood something about the world and were more ready for it when things took a turn. She didn’t see that look in any of these suburban kids.