David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

“That thing came into my house , John! It came into my house !”

“I know, I know.”

“I woke up and that thing was biting me. In my bed, John!”

We turned the corner, rounding a closed restaurant with FOR SALE painted on the windows in white shoe polish. We passed the blackened shell of a hardware store that had burned down last year, we passed a trailer park and a used-car dealership and a 24-hour adult bookstore and a skanky motel that never had any vacancies because lots of poor people lived there full-time.

“It was in my house, John! Do you get what I’m saying here? Franky couldn’t even see it. It was on his face and he couldn’t see it. It was in my house. ”

I felt my body push against the armrest on the door. Tires squealed. John was taking a corner car chase–style. Two blocks up was the concrete parking garage for the hospital, the lit windows of the hospital itself looming up behind it. I peered back through the wire screen separating us from Franky, who was laying motionless across the backseat, eyes open. His chest was heaving, so at least he wasn’t dead.

“Almost there, man! Hold on, okay?”

I turned to John.

“It crawled in his mouth! Did you see it?”

“I saw it.”

“Are they gonna be able to help him? You really think the doctors can do somethin’?”

We squealed into the parking lot and followed a sign that said EMERGENCY. We skidded to a stop in a covered drive-up to the emergency room. We threw open the back door and dragged out Franky, then clumsily lugged him toward a set of glass doors that slid open for us automatically. Before we got five feet inside, a couple of orderlies came and started barking questions at us that we had no answers to. Somebody rolled up a gurney.

John started talking, telling the guys that the cop had had some kind of a seizure, that he had something in his throat, definitely to check his throat.

There was a flicker of red and blue lights out of the corner of my eye—a second cop car turning in fast across the parking lot. They probably saw John and me tearing ass through town and followed us here. The orderlies were rolling away Franky and a third guy showed up, a doctor I guess, taking his vitals. I turned to John to tell him about the second cop car but he had already spotted it. I followed him back out to the sidewalk.

“Think we should hang around?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. I’m already on probation.”

“Dave, they’re gonna come get us. They’ll wanna know what happened.”

“Nah, I don’t think this thing’s gonna be a big deal. Probably send us a nice card for getting Franky to the hospital. Come on.”

We took off walking, since it didn’t seem wise to go back home in the stolen cop car. We went around the edge of the lot as the approaching police car whooshed past us. It skidded to a stop next to Franky’s vehicle and two cops spilled out and went inside. We silently cut across the lawn and crossed a street with a traffic light blinking yellow. We cut through the darkened parking lot of a Chinese restaurant called Panda Buffet, which did not in fact serve panda meat as far as we knew. Behind it was one of the city’s many abandoned properties, the depressing twin buildings of an old tuberculosis asylum that had been closed since the sixties, the gray bricks tinged moss-green.

John lit a cigarette and asked, “So what do you think that thing was?”

I didn’t answer. I found myself scanning the dark plane of each parking lot we passed, studying the shadows, looking for movement. I noticed my steps were hurrying me unconsciously toward the pool of light under the next streetlamp. We passed into the parking lot of a tire place with a ten-foot-tall tire mascot standing by the street. The mascot was made of real tires, with mufflers for arms and a chrome wheel for a head. Some joker had used white spray paint to draw a penis on the front of it in the anatomically appropriate spot.

John said, “So that thing crawled into his mouth, what do you think it was doing?”

“How should I know?”

A blur of red and blue zipped by. Another cop car, lights flashing. Thirty seconds later, another one. John said, “Man, these guys really gather around one of their own, don’t they?”

We walked on, hesitant, a sick feeling in my gut. Two more cop cars flew by. One had different markings, state cop I guess.

“They’re just going there to check up on him, right? John?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Let’s get home, we’ll see if they got anything about it on TV.”

But he had stopped, saying, “No point, all you’ll get is the news after it gets filtered for the reporters. We’ll get better information if we go back down there.”

“We’d just be in the—”

I stopped at the sound of a distant scream.

John said, “You hear that?”

“No.”

Another cop car zipped past. How many of those did we have in this town?

“Come on, Dave.”

John took off walking back the way we came. I stood my ground. I didn’t want to go back there, but—and I’m not ashamed to admit this—I also didn’t want to walk back to my place alone, in the dark. I raised a hand to touch the spot on my eye where I had been bitten, raw flesh under a Band-Aid. I winced as the pain in my shoulder stopped me before I could get my hand up there. The chunk taken out of my skin there was getting sorer by the minute. I was about to tell John to have fun without me when—

*POP! POP-POP!*

The sound of distant gunshots, like firecrackers. John started jogging back across the tire store parking lot, toward the hospital. I let out a breath, then followed.

We arrived on the hospital grounds to see that all hell had broken loose. Six cop cars were parked haphazardly around the emergency room entrance, lighting up the parking lot like a dance floor. There was an ambulance, its rear doors open. People were spilling out of the hospital entrance, their heads down like they were running the trenches in a war zone. One lady came out in aqua blue scrubs, one side of her blond hair matted down with blood. There was a clump of onlookers on the far side of the lawn that included three or four wheelchairs, maybe fifty yards from the hospital. It looked like they were gathering patients there, getting them away from the building. One cop was talking to them and gesturing with his hand, karate chopping the air with each barked command. His other hand held a pistol pointed at the sky.

*POP! POP! POP!POP!POP!*

More shots from inside. John, possessing a genetic defect that makes him walk toward danger, strode down toward where it looked like some cops were trying to set up a perimeter around the chaos. Somewhere, Charles Darwin nodded and smiled a knowing smile.

We came upon two cops blocking the sidewalk, a fat black one with glasses and an older guy whose face was all mustache. John stepped off the sidewalk as if to walk right past them on the grass. Black Cop put out a hand and told us to stop, in a tone that suggested if we didn’t he would Taser us until our blood boiled. We backed off, stepping aside as paramedics hustled the bleeding-head lady past us. She was crying, holding her head, saying over and over again, “HE WOULDN’T DIE! HE JUST WOULDN’T DIE! THEY SHOT HIM OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND HE—”

John tapped my shoulder and pointed. A boxy truck was pulling up, blue with white letters on the side. I thought it was some kind of paddy wagon but when the doors opened, a SWAT team spilled out.

Holy shit.

John moved off the sidewalk and up onto the lawn in front of the building. There were some benches there, and a ten-foot-tall bronze statue of a lady in old-timey nurse’s garb holding a lantern. Florence Nightingale? I followed John and we joined a small crowd of onlookers.