David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

You stop that apocalypse shit. Keep your head, John.

Amy had the lower bunk, which John knew because on the wall next to it she had taped up a little world map with a dozen cities in Europe and Australia bearing red stars she had drawn on with a Sharpie. Cities she wanted to visit someday. John noticed she had added a star to Japan since the last time he had seen it. He tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets of Tokyo. It was like picturing RoboCop in Middle Earth—

“John, you’ve met Nisha, right?” John had. Amy’s gorgeous Indian roommate. She was on the top bunk in pajama pants and a tank top, glued to her phone and tapping in Facebook updates. A bottle of absinthe leaned against the wall next to her, a textbook nearby served as a tray for an ornate glass, sugar cubes and a disposable lighter. Saturday night!

Nisha said, “Okay, I am freaking out over this. Did you see that zombie video?”

Amy said, “Yeah, it’s crazy. David is still there. In the town.”

“Who?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Oh, wow. I’m so sorry. Is he okay?”

“We don’t know. Nobody knows anything. John was there when everything happened, he just barely made it out.”

She looked at John. “Oh. Wow. And he’s not… infected or anything, is he? He didn’t get bit?”

“No, no. He was way away from everything when it happened. They actually let him out at the checkpoint, they checked him over and said he was fine.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“But don’t tell anybody, okay? People will freak out. You know how people are.”

“Oh, totally.”

“Do you mind if he crashes on the floor tonight? Tomorrow we’ll make some calls and go back and pick up David.”

Pick up David, John thought. Like he just needs a ride.

John thought the absinthe looked like it had barely been touched.

“Absolutely,” said the roommate, even more oblivious. “Hey Pizza Factory is doing their two-for-one thing tonight.”

John thought,

Brains, splattered on blue plastic.

As Amy said, “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we need to eat. Uh, John, what do you take on your pizza?”

A part of John realized this was crazy, but another part of him wondered if there would be such a thing as pizza a week, or a month, from now.

“John?”

“Meat. I want meat on it. All of the meat that they have.”

Amy sank into her beanbag chair and John noticed she called the pizza from speed dial. Nisha nodded to her absinthe bottle and said to John, “Wanna drink with me?”

Well… it would be rude not to at this point.

Amycouldn’t help but notice that after John had gone on and on about how tired he was and how he’d had no sleep because he was busy rescuing David the night before, he was still going strong at midnight. He and Nisha finished off the absinthe but then Nisha went down the hall and came back with another bottle of some kind of liquor or other. It had a pirate on the bottle. John was getting talkative and was suddenly in action hero mode. “We need weapons, that’s the first step,” he said. “We may have to improvise something. All those assholes gotta pay.”

Pay for what?

He was getting loud and that made Amy nervous because, apocalypse or not, it was against building policy to have overnight visitors from off campus and if the RA caught John in the room she’d make him leave. And then what would he do? Sleep in the truck? But now, he and Amy’s roommate were getting drunk and downing pizza and making a party out of it.

Uh, everybody deals with crisis differently… I guess?

They asked Amy if they could use her laptop and they both huddled over it, refreshing the news Web sites and all of the social networking hubs over and over and over again, even though nothing new was coming out of Undisclosed and Amy was pretty sure nothing new would come out until daytime. If nobody had reporters on the inside and the phone lines were down, then all that was coming out were the stupid rumors. Sitting there and sucking up the rumors wasn’t doing anyone any good, it was just following the crisis as a form of entertainment. The crisis that David was stuck right in the middle of. Amy didn’t think either of them even noticed when she got up, put on her jacket and walked out.

There were still a lot of people in the common room. The channel got switched to Fox News and a panel of experts was desperately trying to fill airtime by finding ways to rephrase the nothing that they knew, over and over again. She thought it was fascinating how the coverage on the Internet and the coverage on TV were from alternate universes. TV was all “terror… terrorist… Al Qaeda…” and the Internet was “zombies… zombies… zombies…”

Amy just kept walking toward the elevator and headed down, out of the building. She needed air.

The campus was buzzing. The hot dog truck was pulled up in front of the building and there was a line three wide and ten deep in front of it. Amy walked past because she wanted to wish Spiro the hot dog guy a happy birthday—his was one of the over two hundred birthdays programmed into the calendar app on her phone. He smiled and told her the hot dogs were free tonight, one per customer. Not because of his birthday, but because of the other thing.

She passed a flyer posted to a utility pole with a huge letter Z on it, which she ignored, but then she passed another one, and another. Then she arrived at the visitor’s parking lot and found one under the windshield of David’s truck (and all of the other cars) and read it:

Zombie nerds. They probably had the flyers already made up for this. There was nobody creepier than the zombie nerds, college guys who not only watched zombie movies and read zombie novels and played zombie video games, but actually formed clubs and collected zombie-killing weapons. Gun shops around there actually stocked zombie targets, and special zombie bullets with glow-in-the-dark tips. Not toy bullets, mind you. These guys would go out in the woods and train and shoot and defend to the death their right to stay in childhood until age thirty-five.

She climbed inside the truck. She wasn’t going anywhere. She had never learned to drive, her car accident happened not long before she would have been due to take her Driver’s Ed courses in high school. She never got back around to it after she went back to school and now the thought of it terrified her. She didn’t know how anybody did it. Hurtling down the highway at 65 miles an hour while a barrage of other cars come flying toward you like huge cannon shells, whipping past in the next lane, just five feet from your own squishy body. If at that moment one of you nudges your steering wheel at the wrong time, two seconds later your body is a bunch of spaghetti wrapped around bundles of twisted steel. She’d yell at David for eating while he drove, a Coke between his legs and a hamburger in one hand, steering with two fingers, at night. It’s like nobody in the world gets how fragile life is. How fragile our bodies are.

Amy got the crying to stop about ten minutes later. Her tear ducts were getting sore. She turned the flyer over and found a pen in her purse. She held the flyer to her thigh with the stump of her left wrist, and began writing with her right. She was making a list.

1. Call the Centers for Disease Control.

John said that’s who was on the scene of the house fire, which made sense because this was sort of a disease. If so, at some point they had to establish a hotline for people to get in contact with their loved ones inside quarantine. There’d be riots otherwise. They were still Americans, there was still such a thing as the Constitution. All she needed them to do was confirm that David was okay, even if she wasn’t allowed to see him or talk to him.