David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

They sold office chairs over at the far side of the store and there were people sitting in them but something about the sight of the short redhead fighting back tears made three different guys give up their seats at the same time. She took the one in the middle.

She waited, and waited. She tried to call, circuits busy.

It wasn’t as bad as she was making it out to be. Didn’t David say they had made it out of town? And that they were fine? That’s what mattered. She suddenly realized how hungry she was. Was there anything to eat at this place other than those disgusting cinnamon rolls at Cinnabon?

There wasn’t. Ten minutes later she sat at a table by the window, picking tiny bits off of an enormous sticky cinnamon roll and stared at people freaking out in the parking lot. She needed to keep an eye on the bus, it still had her suitcase on board and she needed to make sure it didn’t leave with it.

The driver was back at the bus, opening up the luggage compartment to drag out bags for people who were bailing out on the trip. A tall guy with long hair and muddy pants was bothering the driver about something, and the driver was telling him no. The guy reminded her of—

“JOHN!”

Amy ran out the door and across the pavement as fast as her designed-purely-with-cuteness-in-mind shoes would let her. John was startled to see her. Before he could speak, she threw her arms around his torso.

“Oh, thank God. Oh my God, John. I can’t believe you’re here.”

John still looked baffled and said, “Yeah, I fell off but… I mean holy shit, Amy, I thought that… Anyway. It worked out so, great. Great. Oh my god.”

“Yeah.”

John said, “We should head north, get as far away as we can, and just kind of regroup. Need a ride though, I’m trying to get a spot on the bus but apparently that’s not allowed…”

John looked around. Amy looked around. At the exact same time both of them said, “Where’s David?”

Vultures. Big, noisy, circling, mechanical vultures. That’s what Amy thought of as she saw, for the first time in her life, half a dozen helicopters circling around in the same sky. A couple of them were news choppers, the rest looked like army. Buzzing, that soft thwupping fading in and out as their blades chopped up the air. If you ever see more than two helicopters over you, you can be sure that something terrible has happened.

Amy made John take her out to the water tower and the toilets. John went to the one on the far right and opened it, showing her that it was just a toilet, showed her that if he went and stood inside, nothing happened. She made him do this about twenty more times. She suggested he try the other two, he said that he had done that and that they, too, were just toilets.

Amy hated crying. She hated crying more than she hated puking. And she would rather puke on live television than cry in front of John right now. She wasn’t a large person under normal circumstances but when she cried she could feel herself shrink two feet. She instantly got demoted to child, everybody making soothing sounds and apologizing for things they didn’t even do. Strangers inviting themselves to put an arm around her shoulder like she was a five-year-old lost at the bus station.

And she was a crier. She cried when people yelled at her, she cried when she got frustrated, she cried during particularly sad commercials. But it was just crying. She didn’t get hysterical. She didn’t fall apart. But everybody treated her like she did, because her eyes were so quick to start leaking when things went wrong. And now, as John opened the toilet door and again she saw nothing but blue plastic walls and a whiff of poop chemicals, she felt that hot sting in her tear ducts and knew they were going to betray her for the ten thousandth time.

The thwupping got louder and one of the helicopters seemed to be swooping really low on its passes. It was a huge thing with two blades. She could feel their pulsing in her gut.

A black semi truck was turning down the lane, heading right toward them. Watching it warily, John said, “We have to get out of here. We’ll regroup and come up with a plan. But if they catch us then it’s over, we can’t help him.”

“One more time.”

John glanced back, toward the truck, and then toward the tiny army men in the distance and the bright orange fencing they were stretching across the field, sealing off the town behind them. Tiny shouts from a bullhorn were drifting through the air. Yells from angry and scared people. Honking horns. All of it playing under the terrible hollow drumming of the helicopters—the soundtrack of every worst-case scenario.

John obeyed. The toilet was just a toilet.

You haven’t really experienced the full range of human emotion until you’ve cried your eyes out while hanging on for dear life on the back of a dirt bike bouncing across a cornfield in the freezing cold. Amy and John made it back to the shopping center, which was clearing out fast. They returned the motorcycle to the pickup, propping it up by the tailgate because they couldn’t get it lifted up into the bed. Maybe the owner would think it just fell out.

Cars were filing out and heading up the highway, because rumor was spreading around that they were going to expand the quarantine to include the shopping center and everything for a few miles on the other side of it, but who knew if that was true.

The Greyhound was boarding, ready to just dump everybody off at the stops where they had been picked up. Amy thought she could get the driver to let John on board—the guy wasn’t made of stone—but John thought that would make them too easy to find if that detective came after them. It made sense, and she got her bag and watched the bus lumber down the highway without them. It was the right decision, but they were now stranded.

Amy would never be able to eat at a Cinnabon again for the rest of her life. They sat there, at the same table she was sitting at when she spotted John an hour earlier. John was on and off his intermittently working phone, first trying friends in town to see if they happened to be outside of city limits when everything went crazy. Those calls wouldn’t even go through. Then he tried some people he knew outside of town, but the ones who answered had their own problems.

Amy suggested getting a ride to the airport about ten miles away and renting a car there, but John said he had some things on his driving record that would ensure he would never be able to rent a car for the rest of his life. Amy didn’t have a license, so that shot down that idea. It was just so freaking frustrating, David needed breaking out from a military zombie quarantine and his saviors couldn’t get a ride from Cinnabon.

John paused in his phone calls to shove the remaining third of the cinnamon roll into his mouth when his phone rang. He picked it up and mumbled, “Munch! Where are you?”

John’s friend Munch Lombard had not in fact fled the country in David’s truck as John instructed him, but simply went to his parents’ farm outside of town. He promised to come get Amy and John in fifteen minutes or so, but John wasn’t comfortable waiting at the shopping center that long so they agreed to meet him at the John Deere dealership a mile up the street. They took off walking. Amy’s left foot felt sticky and she was pretty sure it was actively bleeding in her stupid shoes but she said nothing because broken blisters were unimportant when the world was in crisis. She kept telling herself that over and over again, wincing with ever step along the highway.

Fewer and fewer cars passed them going north. More and more green trucks passed them going south. She was fairly sure that by sundown there would be more military personnel encircling Undisclosed than there were people inside it. All of that, between her and David.