This Book is Full of Spiders (54 page)

The Bible II

John and I backed up. I raised the furgun, stupidly, having no idea what effect it would have on these beings. We retreated, slowly, bumping backward against the rigid Amy statue what was still standing there, frozen. Her arms were outstretched, her eyes wide, unwittingly putting herself in an absolutely perfect posture for the situation.

The shadow man closest to me was no more than ten feet away. I had the furgun on him because I had nothing else. Where there would be eyes on a man, burning coals of yellow and orange flared on the shadow man, like a pair of lit cigars floating in the blackness. And in that moment I knew that this wasn’t just a shadow man, but was
the
shadow man, the one I had seen in my bathroom, the one that lurked in my cell in the basement of the old asylum, the one that now, in this moment, I sensed was actually never far from me. I could not bring myself to think,
What are you?
Instead, the feeling was more akin to,
It’s you again.

I … have spoken to it before …

The blackness closed in on us, no gap between the shadow men now, their cold intelligence, malice and cataclysmic lethality advancing as a solid black wave, like the artist who painted our reality had knocked over an ink bottle on it. We had no room to retreat, both of us pressed against the Amy monument.

“Dave…” John hissed. “Dave … shoot. Shoot them. Do something…”

But my eyes were fixed on the burning coals of the shadow man in front of me, and something was passing between us. There were no words, but we were communicating. The thoughts passed instantly, faster than words could have managed, like files instantly streamed between two computers. If I had to translate what the shadow man told me into words, it would be this:

*   *   *

What is a man? What do you think a man is? What do you think we are? What do you think your relationship is to us?

You believe in a spirit, or a soul. What do you think that is? It lives inside your flesh, but only your flesh can interact with the world, only your flesh can speak and eat and fight and fuck and reproduce, and ultimately the soul must obey the impulses of the flesh. What, then, is the soul but a prisoner of your flesh? An undying yet constrained energy, bound and enslaved within a shuffling, steadily rotting suit of tissue and savage needs? By virtue of your birth, you make a prisoner of a soul. An enslavement that multiplies as you multiply, breeding with grunts and stench and the spilling of squirming fluids.

You recoil in horror at the idea of the parasites, these creatures who against your will can commandeer your sensory interaction with the world, imprisoning your mind behind a repulsive monstrosity that can command your limbs and even your very thoughts, poisoning every aspect of your being with its own alien desires until it becomes impossible to distinguish your own personality from the urges of the squirming thing living invisibly inside your body. Until nothing that is truly you remains.

Now, you understand.

For us, man is the parasite.

*   *   *

Somehow, I could feel their hate, an energy that was too big and too cold to get the scope of it, the way that from the ground, the curvature of the earth just looks like a straight line. The shadow people moved in. So, so slowly. A dark tide creeping in on an island of mud and grass maybe ten feet in diameter and shrinking. All those glowing eyes, little pinpricks of light floating on dark, featureless faces.

John said, “Dave … do it.
Dave. Now
.”

“Do
what
?”

“Focus! Focus on the most powerful thing you can imagine and squeeze that trigger.”

But that wasn’t right. A nuclear explosion would not work here. Fire would not work. Violence would not work. That was the energy
they
were made of. Shadows aren’t repelled by the dark, they’re repelled by the light—

The shadow man—my shadow man—floated right up to me, right up to
Amy.
I found myself shrieking, “NO! NO! NOOO!” in short, barking bursts, the single word over and over again.

Amy’s outstretched arms were beside me and the shadow man was on her now, drifting right into her left hand. My stomach turned as I watched her hand dissolve and vanish completely. All that was left was a stump, her left hand gone forever. But, no, that must have been the confusion of the moment because of course her left hand had always been gone, the accident and all that.

I raised the furgun, pointing it right at the “chest” of the shadow man. It was
in
his chest.

My mind was blank.

I reached out and grabbed Amy’s other, frozen hand and squeezed. I closed my eyes.

I need to think like Amy.

In that one second before I squeezed the trigger, a face popped into my head. The face was the same one that would have come to probably 75 percent of Americans, if put in the same situation. A bearded face that was surely from the imagination of some long-lost Italian painter, a face that looked nothing like a Middle Eastern Jew. I suddenly remembered two dozen horrible kid shows my adoptive parents made me watch on VHS, where in the final scene the main character always turned toward the camera and said some variation of, “I know how we’ll solve this problem! With
Christianity.
”

Well, their programming worked. When terror drove everything out of my mind, I fell back on the iconic face and all I could picture in my head was that painting, that shitty velvet Elvisey Jesus that had hung on my wall, that was still sitting in the trunk of John’s Caddie for all I knew.

I squeezed the trigger.

A flash of white light poured forth from the device in my hand. The whiteness condensed down to a shape. Small. Square.

Suddenly, hovering there before us, in midair, was that stupid painting.

The painting swiveled, facing the dark hordes. The eyes on the face of Velvet Jesus burned with white fire. The mouth opened, and let loose an inhuman roar.

Velvet Jesus faced a shadow man to my left. Laser beams fired from his eyes.

The shadow man exploded.

The eyes lit up again, and fired. Another shadow man left the world. The painting turned in midair, we hit the dirt. Beams of white fired left, then right, clearing swaths through the shadows, piercing the blackness with a glare that was somehow equally terrible, a white-blue light that I knew would leave me blind if I looked too long. The terrible light chewed through the shadows with a sickening righteous energy that genuinely made me pity them. I suddenly knew how the scientists of the Manhattan Project felt the first time they saw a nuclear detonation, witnessing the power of what they had unleashed, the reflection of the light off of the surrounding sand bright enough to blind a man wearing dark glasses. Power so astonishing that it became hideous.

And then, there was only one shadow man left, my shadow man, the one in front of me that had taken Amy’s hand, or made it so that her hand was already gone.

Velvet Jesus flew toward the shadow man, then circled behind him. The painting screeched like an animal and the mouth on the painting opened wide. The painting launched itself at the shadow man.

Velvet Jesus bit his head off.

The shadow man’s body evaporated like a cloud of car exhaust.

Then there was a flash, so bright that I couldn’t close my eyes to it because they were already closed, but the brightness penetrated to the back of my eyeballs, burning all through me. There was a thud in the ground, a shock wave that sent a ripple through reality. The painting disappeared. The furgun exploded in a miniature supernova of blue light.

I don’t know how I ended up flat on my back, but I was staring up at the still, gray clouds and trying to blink spots out of my eyes. All was silent.

John appeared over me and said, “When they write the sequel to the Bible, that shit is
definitely
gonna be in there.”

My ears were ringing. Somehow,
all
of my senses were ringing. Overload. Then John was pulling me to my feet and saying, “Look! Look at that one’s face.”

He was pointing to one of the still life–infected REPER men, one I didn’t even know had been standing there when the world froze. It had been in the process of rounding the burning truck, running toward us. It would have reached Amy in about three seconds if John had not called his Soy Sauce time-out. I walked over to the infected spaceman. His eyes were a pair of road flares, sizzling and crackling and smoldering with white light.

The parasites were burning.

All
of the parasites were burning—at least the ones around us. The white, crackling pinpricks of light were twinkling from the infected spacemen, the sizzle of the frying spiders filling the preternatural silence in that still world.

And then the lights blinked out, one by one, the sizzling of the flesh fading, as the last of the parasites in the field died. The men they had lived in would not suddenly wake up and find themselves cured—happy endings like that never happened in Undisclosed. When time sped up, they would collapse, dead. But they would be free. And they would be no threat to us.

*   *   *

In the stillness of the aftermath I said, “Man, I need a nap.”

I looked around at the frozen battle, one that nobody involved in knew had just taken a radical turn in the infinity between ticks on the clock. “What happens now?”

John surveyed the landscape and said, “We just got to get out of the way, right? Time starts back up and the army realizes the zombies are all down and they’ll stop shooting and then they’ll give us all medals.”

I said, “Amy is still out in the open. If I position myself so that I’m kind of pushing her over, when time starts back up we’ll tumble down into the ditch, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Try not to break her neck.”

“Go down there and get ready to catch us.”

John jumped down into the ditch, looking over Falconer, who had been shot multiple times. He certainly looked dead because he wasn’t moving, but nobody was moving so we couldn’t know for sure. I walked toward Amy, her frozen arms outstretched toward me like she was trying to ward me off.

Something hit me in the chest.

Actually, I ran into something. Something hovering in midair, something small and sharp.

A bullet.

An inch long and as thick as a pencil. Fired from one of the many guns bristling out of the line of green vehicles behind me.

There was no mistaking the trajectory. It was heading right for Amy. Specifically, right for Amy’s heart. In the frantic fog of zombie combat some guy—who had probably enlisted to help pay for his college education—had taken a shot at the waving figure next to the ditch, and the shot was good. It was going to take her right out.

John saw me standing there, slackjawed, looking at this frozen projectile, this little copper-jacketed death warrant hanging in the air about eight feet away from Amy. He looked back and forth between the bullet and the frozen Amy and didn’t need me to mutter, “Headed right for her,” though I did it anyway.

He said, “Okay, okay. Let’s think it through. What if we—”

“One of us has to die.”

“Now, that’s not true—”

“Either it tears through her heart, or one of us stands in front of her and lets it tear through ours.”

“Bullshit. It doesn’t have to be your heart. You can, like turn sideways to it, press your bicep against it, get that big bone in your arm in front of it.”

“A bullet like this … John, this thing is traveling at half a mile per second. They design them to punch through military-grade helmets and body armor. It’ll smash through the bone and rip through your lungs and take out your heart anyway.”

“You don’t know that—”

“I do, because, Marconi was right. I knew he was right. They still need their freaking sacrifice. Otherwise this thing won’t end. It’s a bill that needs to be paid. Somebody has to die.”

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Dave…”

“If you don’t understand the symmetry here, well, just think about it. It has to be me. It’s right. It fits. You said yourself that time won’t resume until we do what we’re supposed to do. If you stand here, in front of this thing, you’re going to be waiting forever. It won’t go off pause until I do it.”

He said, “Fine. Then leave it on pause. We’ll go do, whatever. Whatever we want. Piss off the top of the Statue of Liberty. Walk across the ocean and screw with frozen tourists in Paris. We got all the time in the world. We’ll use it. We’ll tour the world, you and me.”

I shook my head. “And leave her here, this thing hovering in front of her heart? Knowing things could suddenly snap into action at any second? No, I’d never be able to relax, knowing that. We’re screwing around somewhere on the other side of the world and suddenly she takes a bullet and she dies here, alone? Calling for me, her last thought to wonder where I am? No. I spent my whole life putting off what I knew I needed to do. No more of that.”

“Well fuck you, then.”

“Yep. Fuck me.”

“Wait! You can leave a note. Like, a final message to her.”

“I don’t have anything to write with.”

“You have the contents of your own body. Smear the note onto the street.
With your shit
.”

I stared at him. “Yes, John, let’s have that be Amy’s last memory of me. I mean, once time starts again all of this is going to just be instantly in front of her. So from her point of view, she stood up, then in the blink of an eye suddenly I’m sprawled dead in front of her and
I LOVE YOU BABE
spontaneously appears onto the pavement, spelled out in smeared human feces.”

“Oh my God, do it! You’ll be a legend.”

He laughed. I laughed.

I said to John, “Good-bye, man.”

“Just … just wait, okay? There’s no hurry. There’s a whole list of things I need to say first—”

“No, there isn’t. There really isn’t. Whatever you think you need to say, I already know. Trust me. Just … if you make it out of here, don’t…”