David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

I joined TJ at the window and scanned the fences at the edge of the yard, trying to see what was behind them. I saw the tops of some white tents, but not much else. We weren’t high enough to see much into the distance.

I said, “So, what, the CDC just retreated over to the other building?”

“CDC gone, man. They left, these other people swept in. REPER. National Guard gone, too, they pulled out to the perimeter around the city. Left my ass behind.”

I said, “Wait, you’re the TJ John mentioned? You were on the scene the day it all started.”

“Yes, sir. National Guard. Deemed an infection risk. Some REPER motherfucker thanked me for my service, took my rifle and sidearm and left me on the wrong side of the fence. There’s more than a dozen of us in here. Least there was anyway. The first bunch of us on the scene didn’t have Level C suits or nothin’. Clusterfuck.”

From behind me Hope said, “Here” and handed me a crunchy granola bar, a little bag of peanuts and a “fun size” Snickers bar.

“There’s no hot water left from lunch or else I’d have made you some Ramen. Coffee’s gone, too. Didn’t last long. There’s bottled water on the floor there.”

TJ looked appalled and said, “Damn, girl. He gets the last Snickers? Almost had to wrestle a dude for that.” To me he said, “Don’t talk to nobody too much, all right? As you can probably tell from Owen down there—that was the dudebro with the big-ass hair and neck—things are kinda tense. Tell people you’re tired or you got that stomach flu or that you got a migraine. But I wouldn’t let it slip about the memory thing. No need for a complication. They all still need you out there, red and green both, so let’s not upset that balance until we got to. You’re our Spider-Man, and we don’t got a backup.”

“Okay why does everybody call me—”

A buzzer sounded, an angry noise like the expiring shot clock in a basketball game.

TJ said, “Showtime. You can eat that on the way down. Just follow my lead. Don’t say more than you have to.”

He picked up two of the bleach bottles from the corner and hurried out the door.

There were half a dozen of us clomping down the stairs by the time we reached the bottom. I had been shocked when Wheelchair Guy got up from his chair to follow us, for some reason it never having occurred to me that he was just using the chair as a chair and in fact had no disability. In the stairwell, Wheelchair said, “Owen been tellin’ people that he was gonna cure the whole next batch. Sayin’ it ain’t worth the risk.”

TJ said, “Well we gonna have to talk to Owen. But it don’t matter now, we got Spider-Man back. He hasn’t failed yet. You’re not goin’ to, right, Spidey?”

I started to answer but he cut me off with, “You do this, we’ll get you some rest. You probably just dehydrated is all.”

Out through the lobby and back into the yard. Everybody out there was standing and staring. Not at me, but at the fence, at the gate I had just come through.

Man, there’s no guard tower or anything. What would they do if we just tried to run? Just charge that gate when they open it…

Nobody spoke. I could hear the bonfire crackling. Somebody had thrown some more fuel on it since last time, piling the scraps into a pyramid shape to create that jet engine afterburner effect, for when you wanted your bonfire really, really hot. If there were soldiers on the other side of that fence, they weren’t chatting or shouting instructions or doing anything else. I couldn’t even hear idling engines. It really did feel like we were alone and I couldn’t shake the idea that we could just walk out. Maybe everybody with guns fell back and figured they would stop the outbreak at city limits. So why not break out of here?

And what makes you think the “infection” stopped at city limits, hmmm? Last time you saw these guys in action they didn’t exactly have shit under control.

There was a faded white line painted into the lawn, forming an arc around the gate like an NBA three-point line. No one crossed it. No one got within twenty feet of it. I opened my Snickers and shoved the whole thing into my mouth. I dragged my peanuts from my pocket—they had an American Airlines logo on the bag—and sat down on the grass.

TJ roughly grabbed my elbow and yanked me to my feet.

“Do not fuckin’ do that,” he hissed. “Shit, man, you forgot everything.”

I started to ask him if those two flimsy fences were really the only thing between us and freedom, but he shushed me. He leaned into my ear and whispered, “Listen, man. Buzzer sounds an hour before new arrivals. Buzzer means nobody gets within ‘run for it’ distance of the gate. It goes off again right before it opens, as a final warning. In a few seconds, truck gonna come through there. It’s gonna be full of new inmates, people they rounded up off the streets because they might be infected. They get processed over at the asylum and run over here. Then you gonna look at ’em and make sure they’re clean. Right?”

“And how exactly am I gonna—”

But I didn’t need to finish that sentence.

Check them for spiders.

Because I can see the spiders.

I’m the Spider-Man.

I glanced down at the two white jugs TJ had set at his feet. I found Hope standing behind me. She was chewing on her thumbnail. Nervous. Everybody was nervous. The air hummed with it. The fence closest to me displayed a picture of a woman’s lower body wearing only underwear, a pink slogan saying VICTORIA’S SECRET CHRISTMAS PANTY BLOWOUT.

There were some faint clicks and clanks in the distance—having heard it before, I knew it was the outer gate sliding open. Beyond the plastic sheeting of the inner fence, a military cargo truck rumbled in. We heard truck doors open and shut. Engine. Exterior gate again. Silence.

The shot-clock buzzer sounded once more, and the inner gate finally rattled open on its own. Laying on the grass, in the exact spot where I had been minutes ago, were four people. All of them young, looking to be college age. Three guys, one girl. The three guys were in green suits, the girl in red. Their hands were bound behind them.

“Goddamnit,” muttered Wheelchair Guy from somewhere behind me. “Wish they wouldn’t lay them on the ground like that. Those dudes are gonna get a shock one of these days when Carlos comes up for a snack.”

I swear that every other sentence somebody uttered in this place sounded like a foreign language. It was starting to piss me off.

The four new citizens of the Undisclosed Spider Quarantine stumbled awkwardly to their feet and shuffled into the yard. The split second the last one was through, the gate slid shut on its own. The mechanism was fast—I’d say two full seconds from fully open to locked.

The huge blond-haired guy—Owen, TJ had said his name was—shouted to them, “Welcome to quarantine. Please listen carefully to what I am about to say, and don’t talk until I’m finished. This will save you a lot of questions later.”

His voice echoed through the yard, huge lungs making the words split the air like a rifle shot in the woods.

“As you can see, there ain’t no guards here. There ain’t no feds, there ain’t no soldiers. They ran out on us several days ago. And that’s just fine with us. We have food and water and medical supplies, you are welcome to whatever you need. That’s the good news. Bad news is there ain’t no mail. There ain’t no phones, there ain’t no Internet, there ain’t no televisions or radio. What we’ve got, don’t get a signal. We are cut off .”

Owen paused, to let that sink in.

“Also, there’s no power. Maybe it’ll come back and maybe it won’t. We’ve been getting by without it and we will continue to get by, until somebody gets their shit together and comes and lets us out of this prison. Okay, so now that you’re caught up on all that, let me get to the important part. There’s a little more than three hundred of us in here. And not a one of us you see here is infected.”