David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

The rest of his body held itself above me for a few seconds, then pounded down on me with dead weight that knocked the air from my lungs.

The saw shut off and I could hear John yelling questions at me. His hand appeared on Franky’s shoulder and together we rolled the corpse off me. I sprang to my feet, looked down at my body in disgust. I looked like an infant somebody had inexplicably taken to all-you-can-eat rib night.

John said, “You, uh, all right?”

I sprinted to the bedroom door and slammed it shut. I struggled to catch my breath and said, “My bedroom! It’s infested with baby versions of those spider things, they’re all over my bed, eating turkey. My bed, John! They were in my bed! Larvae! This whole time! We’ve got to do something!”

“Did they… eat your clothes?”

“Listen. The army has quarantined the hospital but it’s not doing any good because the spiders are out . They’re here . Here, John! What are we going to do? If we let just one of those things out into the world…”

“Okay first of all we—wait, where’s the head?”

We both looked down at Franky’s headless corpse, now laying in the living room on a spreading pool of blood. There was no head. What the—

“LOOK! SHIT!”

Franky’s head was making a run for it.

The spider’s legs were protruding from the severed neck, and they were scurrying the head through the open front door. I ran, following the crawling head out onto the porch. I stomped on the head with my bare foot, pinning it to the welcome mat. I started to yell to John to get the chainsaw when the asshole head bit my foot.

I yanked the foot free of Franky’s teeth, then reared back with my other foot and kicked the head so hard I felt like I broke four toes. The head sailed ten feet through the air until it bounced off the windshield of Detective Lance Falconer’s Porsche, which had chosen that moment to pull into the driveway.

The head left a pink smear on his windshield, then rolled off his hood and back at my feet. I grabbed it in both hands, teeth facing away from me so it couldn’t bite my dick off. A hugely confused Falconer emerged from the car to the sight of me standing naked in my driveway, covered in blood and covering my crotch with a severed head.

I’m David Wong and I’m here with a special message about AMPHETAMINES.

“PUT IT DOWN!”

Falconer’s gun was out.

I said, “One minute.”

I ran back inside, made it to the bedroom, opened the door, threw the head inside and slammed the door shut again. My brief glimpse of the room revealed the hatchlings had made it halfway across the floor. I ran into the bathroom, grabbed two towels and stuffed them under the door. That wouldn’t hold long…

“ASSHOLE! PUT. YOUR. HANDS. UP. NOW.”

Falconer had come inside, gun still trained on me.

I said, “Okay. Calm down. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is we found Franky. The bad news is we got bigger problems.”

“Wait,” interjected John, from behind the detective. “You’re Lance Falconer!”

“Shut up or I will shoot you in the face.”

“That was driving me nuts all night. You’re the detective who caught the Father’s Day killer, right? Didn’t you throw him out of a helicopter?”

Falconer didn’t answer. John said to me, “He’s famous. I saw this whole thing about him on A&E—”

“Shut the fuck up. Did you kill Franky?”

John said, “It was self-defense. And he stole my car, he drove it here and I had to walk all the way from the police station. Got here just in time, he was raping Dave when I walked in.”

“He wasn’t—”

“SHUT UP. Both of you. You’re coming with me.” To me he said, “Put some pants on.”

“Fuck you. This is my house. I make the rules. You take your clothes off . John, get the Twister mat.”

Falconer asked, “Are you high?”

“A little.”

“What’s in the room? Why are you sealing it up?”

John, thinking quickly, said, “Infection. Franky had it. It’s the reason they quarantined the hospital. It’s—it’s like a virus that—”

“Stop. You’re lying.”

To me, he said, “What’s in the room?”

“Look. I respect your bullshit detector. Everything that I’m about to say is true. Read it in my eyes. There are factors at work here that you would not understand, and that we do not have time to explain. There is nothing more you can do here, detective, other than to get out of our way. You came here to find a man. You found him. He’s lying at your feet. Now go home.”

Falconer gave me a hard look. He lowered his gun, strode past me, and threw open the bedroom door.

His eyes went right to the bed. What he saw were four bloody turkeys—no, that wasn’t right. What he saw were four bloody turkey skeletons , laying on my bed among piles of feathers. The larvae had all but stripped them clean, within minutes. What I saw, but Falconer did not, was that the spiders were now in the carpet, on the walls and crawling around the glass of the bedroom window. They were growing at an impossible rate, some already the size of a fist.

I felt a single drop of sweat fall down the back of my neck, trickling down my spine. I took a reflexive step back. One of the spiders crawled across Falconer’s shoe. He wouldn’t have noticed if he’d been looking directly at it.

“What is that in there, some kind of ritual? Voodoo bullshit? Trying to summon a ghost or demon or whatever you guys do?”

“No. I told you. Detective… you’re not going to solve this one.”

“Sure. I understand.” He holstered his gun.

Then, in a blur he grabbed my arm, spun me around, and slammed me against the door frame of the bedroom. He got my right arm up behind my back and pain exploded down my shoulder joint, the ligaments twisting around bone. I screamed.

To John, Falconer shouted, “BACK.”

Cold steel on my right wrist—handcuffs. Falconer pushed me into the bedroom. He shoved me to my knees, among the newborn spiders. I heard John shout, “NO! NO!” but Falconer spun and put his gun on him. With his free hand he looped the handcuff chain around the metal frame of the bed and snapped the remaining cuff around my other wrist.

I was on my bare knees, hands chained around the bed, and I could feel itchy spider legs crawling up one of my thighs, over my feet.

Falconer stood, held his gun on John and said, “Now. I’m not unlocking that until you’ve explained everything .”

Amypeed a lot when she got tense.

A nervous bladder and a three-hour-long bus ride don’t make for a great combination, but worrying wasn’t something she could just turn off (her roommate at school had taught her some tai chi but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could do on a bus without being asked to leave). She couldn’t get David or John on the phone, and that was weird. Really weird. David always picked up unless he was in the shower or his phone was dead, but she had been trying since early in the morning. And John, free spirit that he was, had Amy on his list of “must answer” calls. He knew she didn’t call him unless it was a big deal and/or she couldn’t raise David. She never abused this privilege.

David had sounded so ominous the night before, getting in one of his moods where he thinks the whole world depends on him and that he’s about to let everyone down. It was Amy’s job to take his mind off it when he got like that and it usually wasn’t all that hard. He was a guy, after all. A guy with a thing for red underpants. But nothing was helping this time and Amy was once again frustrated by the distance.