David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

Another nervous scan of the street.

“Come on. I’ll explain everything once we’re off the sidewalk.”

Amy sighed and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “So, so many kidnappings begin this way.”

“We’re going right down there, to the Powder Keg. It’ll be packed with people. It’s full of rednecks with assault rifles and shotguns, if anyone tries to put a hand on you, they’ll be perforated. Come on. There’s no time.”

He put a hand under her armpit.

“Up.”

She went with him. They hurried along the sidewalk, Josh with his hand flat on her back pushing her along and ducking down like they were dodging machine gun fire.

The Powder Keg was a gun store/shooting range and not, as Amy had thought, a gay nightclub (this wasn’t a snide private joke, it would be days later before she would remember that the nightclub she was thinking of was called the Bomb Shelter). The place was absolutely packed, and the crowd was armed to the teeth. In any other country on earth, this kind of gathering would be cause for an all-out military response.

Josh pushed her through the door and into a crowd. He stopped to tell two burly shotgun-bearing men, “REPER is looking for her. If they show up at the door, tell them we’ve never seen her.”

Amy thought, Did he say Reavers? Like on Firefly ?

Josh pushed inside, pulling Amy through the crowd behind him to the front of the room, Amy still carrying her bag of pharmacy stuff and her stupid pillow.

He reached a spot where a white bedsheet was hanging in front of a display of earmuffs and safety glasses. Josh put his back to the wall and stepped up on a huge cardboard box of clay pigeons, so he’d be a couple of feet above the crowd. He quieted everybody and said, “Okay everybody, we don’t have much time. Now, I need to get something out of the way first thing, I begin every meeting with this. Some of you were dragged here by friends or family, rolling your eyes over the whole ‘zombie’ thing. If you don’t like that word, feel free to pick one that suits you. The Zombie Response Squad was a club promoting physical fitness, weapons training and safety, and wilderness survival. These are skills I believe that every human should possess regardless—they can save your life in the event of anything from natural disaster to civil unrest. The zombie angle was just our way of having fun with it and, obviously, we had no way of knowing that, you know, something like this was coming.”

He paused here. That seemed like a really important point to him.

“So if you don’t like the word zombie, feel free to mentally substitute any word you wish when you hear it. But for the purposes of this discussion, I am going to use the word zombie. The infected are contagious, they exhibit animalistic and predatory behavior toward other humans, they can survive massive organ and tissue trauma. So regardless of what science eventually figures out about this outbreak, right now, the danger these creatures pose to your personal safety, and the method of dealing with them, fully fits the profile of ‘zombie.’ So just deal with it.”

Josh gestured to a guy in the crowd and said, “Fredo?” That was presumably Fredo’s cue to turn on a projector hooked to his laptop. An image appeared on the sheet next to Josh.

Oh my dear god, Amy thought. They have a PowerPoint presentation.

Josh said, “Okay, very quickly. Here’s what we know. For some of you this will be repeat information, just bear with me here.”

A blue slide appeared, with white writing in Comic Sans font. It said, ORIGINS?

“We don’t know where the infection originated from. We may never know. Since it behaves in a way that’s different from anything known to science, I prefer to think it’s man-made. In fact, I also happen to think that the pathogen was specifically engineered to ‘zombify’ the victims, for the psychological impact. Humans have been scared of walking dead since hunter-gatherer days. Zombies are burned into our genetic memory. I was just reading about that in a book. Fredo…”

Next slide. This one had a line graph, starting at zero and spiking rapidly upward. The left-to-right axis was ticking off the days since the outbreak.

“OGZA estimates are that the infection rate within the borders of [Undisclosed] was at twenty percent as of last Wednesday. It exceeded fifty percent yesterday, and will be at ninety to one hundred percent within forty-eight hours.”

Gasps from the crowd. Amy thought, that couldn’t be true, could it? And who was OGZA ?

Fredo hit the next slide. It said, WHO IS OGZA?

“For those of you who haven’t been to previous meetings and who have been following this story in the mainstream press, let me quickly fill you in. A group of resistance fighters have formed inside town, gathering supplies and scouting secure locations where they can hole up as the situation deteriorates. They call themselves Outbeak Ground Zero Alpha.”

He brought up his final slide, which said, SO WHAT ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT?

“One final point I want to make, and I leave this for last because it’s what you need to keep with you when you watch TV tonight. An anonymous source within the government has leaked a series of e-mails between the Centers for Disease Control and the task force for Rapid Exotic Pathogen Eradication slash Research, outlining what they call Operation Leppard. From these e-mails we know that REPER determined within forty-eight hours of the outbreak—based on autopsies of infected dead—that the physiological changes caused by the infection are radical… and irreversible.”

Another “let that sink in” pause from Josh.

“Even if they could kill off the agent of the change—the bacteria, virus, parasite or whatever it is—the subject’s entire nervous system is no longer recognizable as human. There is nothing to be done for the infected. From there they have made the logical conclusion that quarantine is not separating the infected so that they may be isolated and cured. They are being separated—and concentrated in one location—so that they can be wiped out in one step. Just like amputating an infected limb.”

He let that sink, too.

“And our goal, as of now, is to do whatever we can to help them accomplish this.”

The room erupted in cheers.

Johnfound himself packed into the most depressing room he’d ever been in—and in Undisclosed, that was really saying something. It was a gymnasium in the depressing old Ffirth TB asylum, a building that had been old, abandoned and almost certainly haunted since his father was a kid. Inside, the place was even more of a rotting, mildewing shithole than out. The long boards in the old gym floor had warped and curled up over time, creating a rippling floor that, if painted blue, would look like the surface of the ocean on a windy day.

He didn’t see Amy there but he wouldn’t have even if she were—there were partitions with curtains set up to divide the gym into dozens of little rooms containing cots. Teams of guys in those spooky Darth Vader space suits were rolling a cart from one “room” to the next, taking blood samples from everyone. John wondered what exactly they were checking for. He wondered what his blood-alcohol level was.

John’s hands were still bound behind him. Everybody else was getting a standard checklist read off a clipboard (“Are you having hallucinations? Any unexplained urges or mood swings? Are you experiencing any unusual sores or lesions in the mouth area?”) but they came back to his cot twice after his interview, asking him his name, asking how he knew Dave and Amy, and so on. Finally they asked him if he knew Amy’s whereabouts, and John felt a Gatorade bucket of relief get dumped over his head.