David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

Not that John could criticize, because he knew better than any of them what was coming—what was really coming—and here he was, driving in the night in Dave’s beat-up Bronco, without so much as a flashlight in the way of emergency supplies. Not that he would put it like that to Amy. Goddamn he needed a drink. Just to get things back on an even keel.

John cursed himself. Or rather, he cursed the past version of himself for so thoughtlessly screwing over the current version of himself. Everything that would come in useful right now was in the trunk of his Caddie. The Caddie that was parked outside of the burrito stand the last time he saw it, but that by now was either impounded by the government, or stolen, or on fire, or flipped over in a riot.

They were on the exit ramp headed to Amy’s campus when her phone chimed to announce a text message (by playing “One Night in Bangkok,” a private joke between her and Dave). Amy opened it, then scrunched up her face like she’d just watched a waiter at a restaurant slap a squealing live pig on the table in front of her.

John said, “What?”

“It’s… a text. From David.”

She said nothing else. John’s brain seized up.

“And?”

She read it off her screen: “‘I want you to know that I am fine. They have asked us to stay here as a precaution. Ignore the rumors, everything is fine and they are treating me well.’”

John and Amy both were silent for several seconds. Finally, both burst out laughing.

Amy said, “If David wrote that, I will eat this phone.”

John said, “‘ They’re treating me well’ ? I want you to seriously imagine those words coming out of Dave’s mouth. He wouldn’t say that even if they were treating him well.”

“They might as well have had him speaking Japanese.”

“I have his phone in my pocket, by the way.”

The laughter died as quickly as it had come and Amy said, “Why would they send me a fake text?”

“I bet they sent them to everybody on the network. Probably the same one. Trying to pacify the people on the outside, to keep them from beating down the barriers to get into town. Think about it, you got husbands separated from wives, kids separated from parents. Imagine you go out of town to go see a concert or something, you leave the kid with a babysitter, then head back home to find the road blocked by a wall of National Guard trucks, telling you you can’t see your child, who by the way is trapped inside ground zero of a bioweapon outbreak.”

“Do you have any idea how mad David will be when he sees this? Sending this out in his name like that?”

John didn’t say anything. Just let that conversation fade. For now, the goal was to get her away, and safe, and to sit down somewhere quiet and figure out what to do next. Over a beer.

The bullshit reached Amy’s dorm ahead of them, so John’s final estimate was that it traveled at about 80 miles an hour. Of course, bullshit picked up speed exponentially in the information age—the situation in Undisclosed would make a newscast in Japan within the next two hours, and Internet rumors would assure everyone everywhere that they were all equally in danger of a terrorist/zombie attack.

The common room on Amy’s floor was packed with students, gathered around a TV mounted to the wall. It was tuned to CNN, which John guessed meant this was the most CNN anyone in this building had watched in years. It was clear from the coverage that nobody had gotten a camera crew inside the town after the Action 5 News team got eaten. They did have three short video clips that they showed on a loop, all of them shot with shaky cell phones and presumably uploaded to the Web before all of the communication lines went dark. The first was the least exciting, showing a crew of National Guard putting up temporary fencing around the hospital. They were working fast, using a huge drill thing attached to a backhoe to punch holes in the dirt while a crane filled said holes with poles three times as tall as a man. The view cut to a roll of absolutely sinister looking razor wire on the ground, then to a group of guys standing guard, holding assault rifles that John recognized as M4s, as he had gone shopping for one that last summer.

Still no hazmat gear on those guys. Jesus.

Finally one of the soldiers shouted something at whoever was holding the camera and the clip abruptly ended.

Then the next two clips were prefaced by the anchor warning that the following scenes were very disturbing, and that you should leave the room if you were a giant pussy. They then cut to the second clip, shot from inside a car that was creeping along downtown, the driver presumably trying to steer while holding their phone out of the window to record what looked like some bodies laying in front of a smashed-up storefront (John recognized it as Black Circle Records, on Main Street—it hadn’t been smashed up quite as much the last time he saw it). The shot zoomed in on a mutilated body laying facedown. Well, part of it was facedown, the torso part. The pelvis was a twisted pink mess, and the legs were turned all the way around, so that they were toes-up. Suddenly one of the legs snapped into action, bending at the knee as if the legs were going to get up on their own and walk away without the rest of the body. The shot cut to black before we could see if they did.

Finally, they cut to a grainy scene shot from an upper-story window, looking down at the street below. There were three soldiers in a standoff with a lone guy who was holding a curved object that looked like a scythe—it was hard to make out from that distance. The soldiers were shouting commands at the guy, gesturing for him to get facedown on the ground. He advanced on them and they opened fire, all three of them. The clip had no audio but you could see repeated puffs of gunsmoke drifting into the air and bits of flesh flying off the guy. He never went down. He didn’t even stumble. Instead he reared back and threw the scythe thing at the nearest soldier. The soldier grabbed his neck and went down.

The other two soldiers ran.

The camera view started shaking, which John interpreted as the cameraman going nuts and probably yelling to the other people in the room about what had just happened. This got the attention of the monster below, who turned and looked up, directly into the camera, and thus into the eyes of everyone in the dorm common room.

The man reached into his coat and pulled out another scythe. John had a split second to realize he had actually pulled out one of his own ribs, before he hurled it at the window, shattering it.

Everyone in the common room flinched.

The scene cut to black.

A kid at the front of the room with black hair, a beard, and horn-rimmed glasses said, “Now tell me that wasn’t a zombie.”

John’s college career had been brief and he had never lived in a dorm room. This one reminded him of a prison cell. Amy and her roommate slept in bunk beds. They had no TV. There was a bathroom and shower that they shared with the people in the next room. There was a little mini-fridge next to the window, a hot plate sitting on top of it. Not even enough floor space to do a push-up. Not that he hadn’t lived in worse.

In one corner John found a familiar sight, what he thought of as Amy’s “nest.” At the center was an old beanbag chair that looked like it had come from a garage sale or a vintage store. Surrounding it was her Apple laptop, a rolled-up, half-empty bag of Cheetos, an open box of Cocoa Pebbles cereal that she would eat dry, and four empty bottles—orange juice, orange juice, Diet Mountain Dew, water. If she were at home you would also find two prescription bottles there, one pain pill and one muscle relaxer that John knew she took for her back. She probably kept those in her purse, shit like that would get stolen in a college dorm. You could sell OxyContin for ten or twenty bucks a pill here. Price would probably go to ten times that now that the apocalypse was here.