This Book is Full of Spiders (55 page)

I thought, and shook my head.

“Just don’t
waste
yourself. Do you understand?”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

I nodded toward Amy and said, “And take care of her.”

“She takes care of herself, if you haven’t noticed. I’ll see you on the other side.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t mean it. “You got your phone?”

“I got
your
phone. Want me to call somebody?”

“No. You’re going to get video of this. Once things start up again, I mean.”

I had a feeling time was going to whip back up to speed the moment I was in position. “Let’s do this.”

I took a deep breath, my last, I figured, and stood about a foot in front of the bullet, its shiny tip aimed right at my sternum. I had been shot before, and it hurt quite a bit. But I had a feeling I was never going to feel this one. I thought this bullet had a serious chance of passing through my breastbone and through the soft tissue behind it, through my spine and then out again. But by then the bullet would be badly off course, tumbling through the air, breaking into fragments. It should miss her easily.

I steeled myself, trying to make my body harder, as if that would make a difference. I stared down the projectile, waiting for time to resume. I started to get impatient, and made a twirling motion with my fingers. “Come on. Start the clock, damn it.”

In the last second before time resumed and the bullet exploded forward, I registered an orange blur, bouncing along the ground. I turned—

Sacrifice

An explosion of noise crashed in on me from every direction. In an instant, the guns were barking and the wind was howling and the stink of smoke was burrowing into my nostrils.

The orange blur was right in front of me, kicking and thrashing through the air. And then there was a thud and a yelp and Molly was bleeding at my feet.

Amy was yelling “DON’T SHOO—” at the soldiers, finishing her sentence from before the Great Pause, her words choked off in confusion. In a blink, there I was, standing in the road in front of her—to her eyes, I had teleported there. And there, on the ground in front of me, was Molly.

I spun and dove and tackled Amy, pinning her to the ground, sending her glasses askew. The guns thundered behind us, and I craned my head around to see that Tennet’s army of infected were, as I thought, simply collapsing dead where they stood, like marionettes whose strings had all simultaneously been cut. Their parasite puppeteers had been burned to ash.

Torturous minutes stretched out as we lay there and the gunfire continued over and around us, the amped-up soldiers getting their money’s worth. Bullets skipped off pavement and whistled overhead. But slowly, finally, one gun after another got the cease fire command. The Zulus were down.

Amy squirmed out from under me, and goddamnit, she ran right out into the open again, and toward Molly.

She kneeled down over her, crying, pressing her face to the dog’s.

I slowly stood, waving my arms at the soldiers, for all that good it had done Amy last time. Nearby I saw the shredded sleeve of one of the black space suits, and I grabbed it and waved it like a flag.

They didn’t shoot.

I went over to Amy and Molly. The dog wasn’t whimpering or howling, thank God, because I don’t think either of us could have handled that. She was silent, her eyes closed, still. She never even felt it.

Molly had moved when the rest of the world was still, she had been able to navigate the paused world just like John and I had, and I doubted I would ever know how, beyond the fact that there were a lot of things about this animal that I didn’t understand. When things had stopped, she ran, from wherever she was, and she ran as fast as her paws could take her, knowing where she needed to be and what she needed to do. And what she needed to do was to steal my goddamned hero moment.

We kneeled there in the cold, and finally somebody called out to us. It was a soldier, who I had a feeling was doing it against orders. He had emerged from a hatch at the top of one of the vehicles, and was yelling something at us. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, so I just showed him my empty hands and said, “We’re not armed.”

If somehow the crying girl at my feet and I still looked like zombies, then John convinced him otherwise since he was performing the distinctly human—and distinctly non-zombie—activity of filming everything with a cell phone.

The soldier climbed out of his vehicle and jumped down, then crossed the barricades.

See, that’s how you get eaten in a zombie movie, kid.

I heard cars approach from the highway behind us, refugees from Undisclosed who had presumably been huddled down in the Dead Zone behind us, hearing World War III erupting up ahead. But now they came, in their pickup trucks and dirt bikes and ATVs, driving with an adherence to posted traffic laws that zombies so rarely display.

No one on the other side of the barricades panicked and opened fire. The spell had been broken. Amy was whispering to Molly, stroking her fur. I was standing over Amy, my hand on her shoulder, looking down at them. Boots appeared on the road next to me and my eyes tracked up past gray camo pants and black knee pads. A wicked-looking assault rifle was pointed at the ground, a gloved hand on the grip, the finger resting outside the trigger guard.

The soldier said, “Sir! Please identify yourself.”

“My name is David Wong. I am not a zombie or infected with any kind of disease that creates zombie-like symptoms or whatever other bullshit you were told by your commanding officers.”

The soldier gestured toward the approaching vehicles and said, “You’ve escaped the city? Are there other uninfected back there?”

I thought for a moment, studying Amy’s face. I swallowed and said, “As far as I know, everybody in town is uninfected. The effects of this outbreak have been grossly exaggerated.”

“STOP FILMING, SIR! SIR!”

John obeyed, stuffing the phone in his pocket. He said, “You can confiscate the phone if you want. A copy of the video is currently hosted on my Web site. And you can try to get that taken down I guess, but it’s on a server based in the Ukraine. So good luck with that.”

Other soldiers were approaching cautiously from behind the first guy, and in a zombie movie this is when Molly would spring back to life and bite one of them, and then everything would go to hell. But this was not a zombie movie, Molly stayed where she was, her blood turning cold on the pavement.

The cold rain started again. John took off his jacket and laid it over Molly, so she wouldn’t lay there and get soaked. It was for Amy’s benefit, I knew.

One of the soldiers behind the first guy, a medic apparently, said, “Is anyone in need of medical attention?”

John said, “No. We’re fine.”

Then a furious voice emerged from the ditch to my left, saying, “UH, HELLO? I’ve got three bullet wounds down here and I’m laying in fucking freezing water. Somebody?”

*   *   *

We didn’t realize at the time that we would have to basically ban ourselves from watching television in the aftermath. The video clip of the small, wet, redheaded girl weeping over her shot dog would be downloaded 18 million times from YouTube alone in the next month. It would air on CNN, Fox News, the BBC, Al Jazeera, all three broadcast networks and everywhere else. Amy couldn’t stand to watch it, and for a long time, it was
everywhere
.

If it had been me laying there, nobody would have given a shit. A big, chubby guy in a green prison jumpsuit and a weird reputation? The factions who were still calling for blood afterward, who talked of undetectable infection and for internment—if not extermination—of the town, would maybe have still won out. Same if it had been John, or Falconer, or Owen. They could have dug up dirt on us, claimed the corpse was infected, claimed we had killed a dozen orphans just prior to taking the bullet. We’d have just been one more body in the street.

But no one could argue against a dog.

The loyal dog, sacrificing itself to save its owner, laying there bleeding in the rain. Then add in the tiny girl kneeling over her—the dog’s owner that the bullet had been meant for—who couldn’t have appeared more harmless if she’d been made of kittens. The image doused the world’s bloodlust like a bucket of ice water. A perfect, undeniable symbol for the price the innocent pay for unchecked paranoia.

Eulogy

John wrapped up Molly in his jacket and laid her in the backseat of the pickup Tennet had driven out to this spot. A crowd was forming, and vehicles were now lined up bumper to bumper down the highway, an echo of the scene from the day of the outbreak. We were heading the other direction, though, back into town. In the distance, the column of smoke from the asylum inferno drifted into the sky. We passed one house where a guy was unloading suitcases from his trunk and glancing around in confusion, like he had just come back from a two-week vacation and was wondering what the fuck happened while he was gone.

We drove to my house, or the charred remnants of my house, anyway. Amy was pretty upset at the sight of it but John pointed out that we had in fact burned the place down ourselves.

I was exhausted down to my bones, but there was this last piece of business to take care of and no way to put it off. I grabbed the shovel laying in my yard and John and I took turns digging a grave for Molly, rain pelting our shoulders. The temperature dropped into the forties but Amy stood out in it the whole time, watching us, shivering.

I laid Molly in the ground and John volunteered to say the eulogy:

“This here is Molly. She was a good dog. And when I say ‘good dog’ I don’t mean it the way other people mean it, when they’re talking about a dog that never shit on the floor or bit their kids. No, I’m talking about a dog that died saving Amy’s life. By my rough count, that’s half a dozen times Molly saved one of our lives. How many dogs can say that? Hell, how many
people
can say that? One time, Dave was in a burning building, and Molly here rescued him by getting behind the wheel of his car and driving through the wall. You know that couldn’t have been easy for her.

“Anyhow, Molly died in the way that all really good things die, fast and brutal and for no apparent reason. They say that even though it often appears that God just really, really doesn’t give a shit about what happens down here, that that’s just an illusion and He really does care after all, and it’s all part of His great plan to make it appear that He doesn’t care. Though what purpose that serves I can’t possibly imagine. I think God probably just wanted Molly for Himself, and I guess I can’t blame Him.

“Well, God, here’s your dog back, I guess. We hereby commit Molly to doggy heaven, which is probably nicer than regular heaven, if you think about it. Amen.”

Amy and I said, “Amen” and I noticed she was crying again and felt utterly helpless to stop it. She buried her face in my chest and I stroked her tangled, wet mess of red hair.

I said, “Let’s find a roof.”

She said, “Let’s find a bed.”

We walked away from the ruins of my former house and John said, “Wait, what if Tennet arranged all of this as some elaborate form of therapy?”

EPILOGUE

It was December 22nd, or Christmas Eve Eve Eve as John so irritatingly called it. I was alone, staring out of the kitchen window of a cheap, mostly empty mobile home supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There was a single Christmas card on the counter next to me, laying on top of its mutilated envelope.

The trailer had come with furniture, but the sofa smelled so bad we had dragged it out into the yard. I think the trailer had previously seen service in New Orleans after the hurricane and I think it got moldy. In the corner of the living room was our Christmas tree, a two-foot-tall plastic tree with huge googly eyes and a mechanical mouth. John had found it in a thrift store, it had a voice box on the bottom and I think originally it was supposed to do a humorous Christmas rap when somebody walked by. When we put batteries in it, the mouth locked in the wide-open position and it uttered a high-pitched, electronic scream of garbled feedback until we pried the batteries out again.

Under the tree sat John’s gift, a wrapped object that was perfectly the shape of a crossbow.

I had a feeling it would take me years to piece together the whirlwind of lies that had obscured the incident the news media had finally decided to call the “Zulu Outbreak.” The consensus seemed to be that fewer than 70 people were ever actually infected with the pathogen, which they decided was some kind of rare form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, caused by the consumption of some kind of mutated protein from contaminated sausages. So the final death toll was, according to the final CDC reports, 68 dead from Zulu, 406 dead from the violence resulting from mass hysteria.

Plenty of people from in town came forward to dispute those reports. And plenty of other people came forward to dispute
those
reports. A hundred different versions came out and so the public just defaulted to what the guys in suits told them. In the end, They didn’t need to cover up anything—They just drowned it out in a blizzard of conflicting stories. The world eventually gives up and moves on. Like the whole thing with the envelopes of anthrax after 9/11.

Well. Whatever. Now it was a matter of seeing if there would be another outbreak, maybe in another town. But nothing so far.

Snow was inching up the little wooden cross we had planted at Molly’s grave. Every time I looked at it, I imagined replacing it with a little star and crescent, so my neighbors would think that somehow my dog had died a practicing Muslim. I was waiting for a call from Amy, but instead I got a knock at my door. I assumed it was a reporter, which kind of cheered me up because I was making a fulfilling hobby out of giving a completely different version of the story to each and every one of them I spoke to. Why let everybody else have all the fun?

But when I opened the door, there was Detective Lance Falconer, in a black turtleneck and looking cropped from a cover of
GQ
. It actually took me a second to notice the crutches.