This Book is Full of Spiders (44 page)

Molly pushed past Amy, jumped and scrambled up into the tunnel.

“Molly! Wait!”

It was barely more than a whisper. The tunnel was crawling with bugs and dripping with muddy water. But that wasn’t the worst of what she knew lurked in there. Molly scampered into the darkness, the scratches of her claws disappearing into God knew where.

“Molly!”

Amy shined the flashlight down the tunnel, and saw two eyes reflecting back at her. Molly had stopped and looked back at her, but stayed where she was.

No. No, no, no, no, no—

Amy climbed into the tunnel, realizing it wasn’t tall enough for her to crouch. She would have to crawl, on her hand and knees, over the bricks. She started, realizing the flashlight was next to useless in her right hand, the beam whipping around crazily as she edged forward. She briefly thought about sticking the flashlight in her mouth, but pictured the dead hand that had been clutching it and decided no way.

She pressed on.

*   *   *

Amy crawled, and crawled, and crawled. The brick ate up her knees and the stump of her left hand and the knuckles of her right that were trying to simultaneously clutch the flashlight and act as her front paw. Molly had taken off, her claws echoing down the tunnel until not even the echoes could be heard, and Amy wondered how long this tunnel could possibly be.

She crawled. Pain flared up each time a bony kneecap struck brick, grinding away at the paper-thin skin between the bone and the denim of her jeans. It seemed like she had crawled for miles, and hours. Water dripped in her hair, and on her back. She pushed through spiderwebs, she squished bugs under her hand, she thought she saw a rat scurry off at the sight of the flashlight beam.

She had to stop and rest. She couldn’t take the agony in her knees and fingers. The crawling was pulling and twisting at muscles she hadn’t used since she had learned to walk.

She stopped, pulled up her knees and leaned up against the rusty pipes. She shined the light back the way she came. She could barely see the entrance to the tunnel. She shined it ahead of her. No end in sight. Her knees were wet and dark. Blood. She was turning her kneecaps into hamburger. A cockroach crawled across her lap and she swatted it away. Suddenly the thought struck her, and in that moment, in that place, she believed it fully: she had died back in the RV, and now was in Hell. This is what Hell was, a cramped, dark, cold tunnel that you crawled through forever and ever, grinding away the skin and muscle and bone of your hands and then your arms and then your legs, endless brick that chewed away your body until you were just a helpless lump for the insects and rats to come feed on, forever.

She heard a noise. Behind her, from the direction of the room full of dead. Something was coming. That got her moving again. She crawled, faster than before, shutting out the pain, hoping that whatever was pursuing her was as poorly designed for crawling as she was.

Time stood still. All that existed was the bricks and the darkness and the chilled breaths tearing in and out of her lungs. Scuffling, over bricks, from behind her. No way to tell how far behind. She tried to go faster but she was crawling, and fast crawling was slower than slow walking and as she inched slowly along the tunnel she became sure this was a nightmare, the classic nightmare everyone has about being chased in the dark and you try to run but you can’t—

Suddenly, there was Molly, ahead to her left. Molly barked. There was an intersection in the tunnel, where you could continue straight or turn left. Molly wanted to take the turn and Amy was in no position to argue.

A few feet into the turn, the tunnel came to a dead end. It was blocked by wood, ancient and covered in mildew. Molly scratched at it. Amy crawled up and pushed Molly out of the way. She sat back on her butt and kicked the wooden barrier as hard as she could. It didn’t break but it bounced and cracked.

She pounded it again, and again.

Her pursuer got closer, slithering and slapping at the bricks. She heard it breathing. It would round the corner at any moment—

She screamed like a karate master, lashing out with her exhausted legs, her muddy tennis shoes cracking against the board. And then there was no board, it flew away in one piece, slapping against a tile floor somewhere beyond.

Amy scrambled out, climbed to her feet and immediately fell over, the muscles in her thighs spasming and seizing from the crawl that seemed to have lasted weeks. She forced her way up and swept the flashlight around the room. Next to the tunnel exit she had crawled through was a vending machine, of all things, full of bags of chips and cookies and candy bars. On the other side of it was about three feet of space between it and the wall. She went around, put her back to the machine and her feet on the wall and pushed. It tipped over and landed on its side with a crash that sounded like a building being demolished. It didn’t block the tunnel entirely, but it blocked most of it.

She got back to her feet and picked up the flashlight. There was one door out of the room. She was sure it would be locked, so sure, but it wasn’t and when she pulled it open, she was bathed in light.

*   *   *

And just like that, she was suddenly in a spacious, well-lit office. There were a dozen computer workstations around the room. The computers were new, the desks were ancient. The place was empty but looked like it had been vacated just minutes before; there were half-full cups of coffee sitting around, one chair still had a winter coat draped over the back. A manila folder had been dropped on the floor, spilling printed forms where it landed. A box of donuts had been knocked onto the floor nearby.

Everyone had left in a hurry.

Amy turned back to the door she had just entered, and listened intently. Nothing from the other side. She checked to make sure Molly was in the room with her, then locked the dead bolt. She stood there a few minutes more, listening for the sound of someone or something struggling to push over the vending machine. She heard only her own pounding heart.

Had she really even heard anything in the tunnel? Or was she running from her own echoes? Or a raccoon?

Amy turned her attention back to the room. It was warmer in here, but not room-warm. She did a loop around the room and found a pair of kerosene space heaters that somebody had remembered to turn off when they evacuated. She turned them back on, felt the warm air waft up at her and she just stood there and shivered and wished she had a change of clothes. She smelled like sweat and mold and pee.

There were two doors leading out of the room. She inspected one and found it was locked from the inside, and she decided to leave it that way. The other led to a tiny bathroom that she was shocked to find had running water. She ducked inside and spent several minutes going about the completely unnecessary yet, in that moment, incredibly important task of cleaning herself up. There was a pump with antibacterial soap on the sink and she pulled down her pants and scrubbed the raw skin on her knees. She cleaned her hand and her wrist and her glasses and even got her hair down vaguely into hair shape. She got to where she recognized the face in the medicine cabinet mirror again. It helped.

She emerged from the bathroom and, out loud, asked Molly, “So where are we?”

But that wasn’t hard to figure out, was it? She drew a map in her head of the building and the tunnel thing that ran south toward the hospital. She had taken a left turn and that would put her in the basement of that smaller building behind the asylum. This would have been the administration building, with all of the offices and stuff.

Amy glanced around at the computer workstations and suddenly had a revelation that made her feel like Neo in
The Matrix
, the first time he realized he had gained the power to stop bullets.

This was the nerve center of the quarantine, before the government abandoned it. And they left their computers behind.

Figuring out which workstation she wanted was an easy choice—there was one that had three monitors attached to it. She held her breath and hit the power button. It came up, and she wondered how much electricity she had—the room had to have been running off of a generator, but the guys in charge of putting gas in it or whatever were gone. There was nothing to do for it, but to work fast.

The system booted and a network password box came up. At this point the question was how many passwords did this system require. There was a big difference between getting through one password and getting through three—getting through three would be much easier.

She was, after all, at the workstation—she wasn’t trying to break in remotely (which she couldn’t do, but she knew people who could) and in the world of computer security there is a threshold of just how many passwords a human can remember. Give them one, and they’re fine. Two, they’re probably still okay. But give them three—say, one for the workstation, another for the network, and a third for whatever application they use—and they’re going to have to start writing them down. She started opening creaky desk drawers and found the big one in the middle contained nothing but a box of ballpoint pens and a single Post-it Note with a list of nonsense words and characters. The first would be the username, the rest would be passwords.

And just like that, she was in. She tried to make sense of what programs they had on their desktop, then noticed something that made her yelp with joy.

This computer has Internet access.

Holy crap. She didn’t even know where to start.

*   *   *

She nervously checked both of the locked doors—still no sounds from the other side—and settled in at the workstation. The first task, she decided, would be to get a sense of the layout of the system, and what exactly she had available to her. She found what they were using for e-mail, and saw tons and tons of messages in the in-box with attachments—status reports and equipment requests and lots of other standardized forms. Bureaucratic spam. There were also long e-mail exchanges about sound—reports and experiment results about frequencies and modulation and terms she had never heard before, like “infrasound.” The staff were sending audio clips back and forth, and huge walls of analytical text referring to them full of technical gibberish. She’d have to set all that aside for now, she could spend weeks trying to get through it all.

She next found a program that, when she clicked on it, took over all three screens, filling them with banks of various camera feeds. Absolutely nothing was going on in most of them—you wouldn’t know they were live if not for the occasional bit of trash that would blow into view—but they were clearly of the exterior of the hospital quarantine.

She got out of that, and found a separate application that gave her a full aerial view of the hospital grounds, rotating slowly just like the gun-camera video Josh had shown her earlier. She was going to hit “Esc” to back out of it, but suddenly had the irrational fear that if she hit the wrong key, she’d see a missile come flying out of the bottom of the screen and blow everybody up. After a little more snooping she found out that the aerial drone thing was controlled elsewhere, which made sense. You wouldn’t control something like that from a keyboard, you’d want a control stick and all that. She was just watching the feed as a spectator—

David.

She saw him, because the camera view swung around and focused on him. She had no control over that, whoever was operating the drone, wherever they were, had done it. The view blinked and zoomed in, then blinked and zoomed in again.

It was David, plain as day, in a standoff with a big guy who looked really mad. They were surrounded by a crowd, next to the huge bonfire Josh had said was some ceremonial thing (and no matter how she looked at it, it really did look like skulls and bones in there). There was radio chatter going back and forth in the video feed, but it was faint and Amy couldn’t make it out word for word. What she was able to gather was that the guy flying the drone was asking for permission to fire from a superior, and then Amy realized that she wasn’t just watching this through a camera, but a
gun
camera, and that the gun was pointing right at David.

“No! Don’t shoot!” she said, stupidly, at the computer monitor. She had to have some ability to contact them, right? There were landline phones here. And she would say, what? That she was a random girl who sneaked into the REPER command center and that she didn’t want them to shoot her zombie boyfriend? All that would do would alert them to the fact that they had an unauthorized person on their network and that they needed to remotely shut down everything.

On the video feed, the big guy raised a gun, pointing it right at David. The camera view shifted slightly, putting the big guy in the crosshairs.

“Yes! Shoot that guy!”

They didn’t. She picked up enough of the radio chatter to get that the drone pilot (who she gathered went by the code name “Guardian”) had been told to stand by and await further orders. Several excruciating minutes later, David was hauled away and taken inside the hospital building, and the camera view zoomed back out so that it could see the whole yard and, presumably, any zombies who tried to make a run for the fence. The next most likely one to make a run for the fence, however, was David, if she knew him at all. And David was not a zombie. This was not wishful thinking on her part—when David was talking to the big gun guy, he was gesturing and conversing exactly the way David had the last time she had talked to him. David was no more a zombie than he had been two weeks ago, and Amy had faith that the drone operator in fact did not know that. He had been sold the same B.S. that Josh believed, about murderous infected non-humans. Those things did exist—Amy just watched them eat the crew she had ridden down here with. One could burst in that tunnel at any second. But the people inside that fence were people.

And the military was about to bomb them all.

*   *   *

In the end, it took Amy an hour to make the connection. As a hacker, she was a novice, but she knew that by far the most effective way into any system was what hackers called “social engineering.” The biggest weakness in any network is the human beings. It doesn’t matter how many firewalls or passwords you set up, in the end the system was manned by people. Lazy, busy, harried people who when all was said and done, would take the path of least resistance.