David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

They don’t have her.

On the fourth visit, they brought a white space suit that contained a smiling, gray-haired guy who John instantly disliked.

“Hello there, John. I’m Dr. Bob Tennet. How are we today?”

“I know you somehow…”

“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting, but I know your friend David.”

“Right, right, you’re his crossbow therapist.”

Tennet grabbed a rolling office chair and dragged it over. He sat on it backward, straddling it so that he could cross his arms over the back in a casual, folksy way, which looked absurd in his huge, bulky hazardous-materials suit. He pulled out a device with a series of clips dangling at the end of thin wires.

“Your left hand, please.”

Tennet clipped the five clips to John’s fingers. At the other end of the wires was a box with a small screen. Tennet punched in some settings. Was this thing going to give him a manicure?

“Now please answer the following questions honestly. They might seem odd to you, but reading your reaction will give us vital insight into your condition.”

John said, “Whatever. Wait, you said ‘know’ David, present tense. Is Dave still… around?”

“We’ll explore that in a moment. As you can imagine, John, we’re working just as hard as we can to give a clean bill of health to the people who don’t need our help so we can devote as much time and attention as we can to the ones who do.”

“And by help, you mean throwing them behind that goddamned prison camp you’ve built next door?”

“You feel what we’re doing here is unethical.”

“Is that… some kind of a joke? You can’t tell me the government knows what’s really happening here. We have… rights and shit.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why do I say there is such a thing as human rights? Wait, what is all this? Who are you?”

“You understand the irony of you asking that question, when my entire role here is figuring out who—or what—you are. You and the rest of the patients in this facility.”

“We have rights either way.”

“Human rights.”

“Yes.”

“But you may no longer be human.”

“Jesus Christ. Look at me. You know damned well there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m sitting here having a rational conversation with you. In English.”

“There is a species of carnivorous turtle whose tongue has evolved to look exactly like the worms local fish are known to eat. The fish swim right into its mouth, going after the ‘worm’, only to have their heads severed by powerful jaws. If, say, a hypothetical predator of humans had learned to mimic human speech and mannerisms in order to make it a more efficient predator, that would hardly make it human, or guarantee it rights under our Constitution or any common system of morality.”

“Holy shit. The whole world has gone insane out there, hasn’t it? So you just throw everybody in a concentration camp and figure you’ll sort it out later? That’s where things are at?”

“Ah, your friend called the quarantine a prison, but you have elevated it to concentration camp! Your generation does have a flair for the hyperbolic when it comes to describing your own adversity.”

“Wait, so you did talk to David? So he’s alive?”

Tennet looked up from his readout and said, “Let’s explore that. That’ll be a good jumping off point for us. If David were here, but was infected, would he still be David?”

“What?”

“Say his personality remained exactly the same, but the parasite caused his head to transform so that his face was replaced with the face of a leech, complete with circles of tiny teeth for sucking human blood. Would you still consider him to be your old friend?”

“Are you saying he’s infected, or are you just fucking with me?”

Instead of answering, Tennet studied the screen on the device hooked to John’s fingers and made some notes on his clipboard. “Good. Now let’s say the opposite happened. Say he still looked, spoke and acted like David, but was, in reality, an inhuman predator. How would that make you feel? Please answer.”

“Are you serious?”

“Please, we have a lot of patients to get to.”

“It would make me feel bad .”

Tennet nodded and checked something off of his clipboard.

“Now let’s say that he was not infected, but was sent to quarantine with hundreds of people who are, and that their infection has dissolved the part of their brain capable of making moral decisions. And let’s say that they overpowered David, restrained him, defecated into his mouth and taped his mouth shut with duct tape, and left him there to writhe and slowly swallow feces all week, how would that make you feel?”

“Who are you?”

A check of the screen. A mark on the clipboard. “Almost done. Now, if you had to choose, either to have Amy Sullivan gang-raped by twenty-seven infected males in town over the course of ten days, or to have David’s digestive tract surgically restructured so that his large intestine fed directly into his mouth, which would it be? And please provide support for your answer.”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

Tennet glanced at his clipboard and said, “If you had to choose, and if you were not allowed to see either ahead of time and had no other information to go on, would you rather fight Mindcrow or Gonadulus?”

“This isn’t a government operation, is it?”

“If it wasn’t, tell me how that would make you feel.”

“You’re behind this. All of this. You people released that thing in Dave’s house. You set all this in motion. What’s your real name?”

Tennet casually glanced at another page on his clipboard and said, “All right, John, I think we’re in good shape here. What we’re going to do is observe you overnight—standard procedure, don’t read anything into it—and tomorrow morning we’ll do this all again, so we can cross-check the results. Between now and then I want you to really mull this over: if you were carrying the parasite right now, how would you know? ”

John didn’t answer. Tennet stood, pulled the clips from John’s fingers and as a good-bye, said, “You are now aware that your lower jaw has weight, and that it requires effort for you to hold it up. Good evening.”

Amywas in the Zombie Response Squad’s headquarters, aka an old RV Josh inherited from his parents. Parents who Amy suspected were fairly rich. One wall featured a rack of five guns that Amy had never seen outside of an action movie or video game. Josh insisted on showing them all to her, and the footlocker of bullets and shotgun shells they had stockpiled. She nodded and tried to act impressed but she had no idea what she was looking at. The guns all looked like they would knock her over if she tried to shoot one. Josh insisted this wasn’t the case and that he would show her how to shoot if she wanted. He asked her if she wanted anything to drink or to eat or, you know, anything else because he was there for her. Massages, boob inspections, whatever.

Amy couldn’t get John on the phone but at this point she expected that and, to be honest, hated his guts for it. Josh was on his laptop now, showing her a map of Undisclosed that somebody was updating with zombie sightings. There was a big red blob in one corner and Amy asked if that meant there were a lot of zombies there or if there was just one flamboyant zombie who was really easy to see.

“Uh, that’s the hospital there, they’ve fenced it off and used it as a quarantine. They’ve got the place built up like a supermax prison now, but it got so bad that not even the CDC staff could stay inside it. Now, it’s a dumping ground. When somebody in town turns up infected they move them there, behind the fences. So that area is pretty much one hundred percent infected, because if you’re not but they stick you in there anyway, well, how long are you going to last?”