David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

“Why?”

Hope interjected, “No elevators. Nobody wants to tromp up and down a million stairs to get to their room. Everybody would prefer to just pile down at the bottom. Owen declared his people got the good floors.”

I said, “Why did I wind up back at the asylum?”

TJ shrugged. “Like they’d tell us. Loudspeaker came on and said you needed to go to the gate. Truck hauled you away. That was Friday morning. Now you’re back.”

“How long can we keep this up? Before the food and everything runs out?”

TJ said, “They dropped in supplies. Truck dumped out boxes of stuff. I assume they’ll do it again.”

“Yeah, but I’m saying… let’s say that hypothetically they can’t figure out a cure or even a reliable test for the infection. They keep dumping the suspects here in the quarantine and… what? We’re still here ten years from now? Somethin’ has to give, right?”

Looking into his cup, TJ said, “What would you do?”

“Drop a nuke on it. Write a letter of apology to the surviving family members. Send ’em some coupons to Outback Steakhouse as compensation. Rest of the country breathes a sigh of relief.”

He shrugged. “That rumor started about two minutes after outbreak. I was hearing that shit everywhere. Man, people got a low opinion of the armed forces, don’t they? Watch too many zombie movies. No way they get away with that in the real world.”

Hope said, “What if they cover it up? Make it look like something else?”

I said, “What, like fake a gas line explosion?”

“No, all they have to do is poison our food. Then say the infection did it.”

That brought silence to the room.

TJ said, “Both of you think you bein’ cynical, but you’re not. Reality is, if they wanted us dead, they don’t have to do anything. Situation we got here is what cops call a self-cleaning oven. Some gang neighborhoods, they’d just let be. Come back in five years and it’s all quiet, all on its own. You know, because everybody shot each other. It’d be just like that here, because instead of organizing and figuring out how to work together, we all got paranoid, like Owen.”

He stood up.

“It’s early, but I’m goin’ to bed. No TV and it too dark to read. What else am I gonna do?”

Hope said, “Ugh. The nights are the worst. I’m to where I can tolerate the days as long as nobody dies. But the nights go on forever .”

TJ said, “I agree. And yet, the night comes just the same. Like the rotation of the Earth don’t give a shit what we think.”

Hope was making a huge freaking understatement when she said the nights were the worst. I realized when TJ left that I was also exhausted, but it was only after I went to bed that it became screamingly apparent that we had no lights and no heat and were basically living in a third world gulag. I tried to remember what day TJ said it was. Sunday? So the rest of the country was probably watching Sunday Night Football. Or were they? Maybe it was like this everywhere. Everyone in America huddled in the dark, waiting.

TJ and Hope left the room to me at bedtime, so I guessed it was my room. I wrapped myself up in as many blankets as I could find. I knew exactly where to find them, just as I knew where to find the hunk of particle board we used to cover the broken window. My specific memories never came back but a lot of the automatic stuff was still programmed in. I suddenly remembered that I had broken the window by throwing a little television out of it. I couldn’t remember why.

I shivered and wrapped up the covers a little tighter.

We had a bunch of emergency kerosene space heaters that had been left behind in a storage building, but not much kerosene to fuel them. Here on the fifth floor we had two of them in the hall and they’d keep them lit for a few hours at night to take the chill out of the air, but that was it. People set pots of water on top to heat, killing two birds with one stone. Some people slept in the hall to be closer to the heaters, but the kerosene fumes stank so bad the stench radiated into my brain and gave me a headache. TJ pointed out that the stuff was jet fuel, after all.

I shivered. Couldn’t get warm. Or maybe the shivering was something else. So damned quiet. No TV. No ticking clock. No soft whoosh of heat blowing through vents. Not even the reassuring hum of countless electronic devices that you don’t even register until it’s gone.

Somebody coughed out in the hall. A dog barked way off in the distance.

I shivered.

I remembered getting into a drunken argument with a guy about American prisons, him talking about the injustice of the system, me talking about how it’s ridiculous that we spend forty grand a year per inmate to maintain what are basically super-clean hotels for rapists and crack dealers, complete with a computer lab and TV room and pool tables. But now I understood what he was saying. That knowledge that you can’t leave, it’s a twisting knife in your gut. All I could think about was that razor wire at the top of the fence, meant to slice your hands down to the tendons if you tried to climb over. My own government put that there, with my hands in mind. Those hundreds of vicious blades hanging fifteen feet over the bloodstains and brains in the grass of the last guy who tried to climb up. But even prisoners knew when their sentence was up, they could tick off days on a calendar, feel themselves progressing toward freedom. But this place? They could keep us here forever. Or poison our food, like Hope said. Or starve us out. Or let the drone operator use us for target practice. Or fill the yard with nerve gas.

I shivered.

I couldn’t stop. I laid on my side and brought my knees up, trying to control it. Where was Amy right now? Could she have gotten out of town? How the hell could she, the way they were locking the place down at the end there?

I thought I’d lay there, shivering, staring at the wall until the sun came up. I could sense no sleep on the horizon. But when I heard footsteps in my room later, I realized I had drifted off.

I didn’t move. I pulled open my eyes and stared at the wall. I heard nothing, decided I dreamed it. My eyes slipped shut—

My bed shifted. Weight. Gentle, settling in.

I thought, Hope?

She was friendly earlier, but were we… friendly? Holy shit was that possible? I wouldn’t think I’d do that to Amy but… here, alone, in this cold place? Would I turn down a warm girl and soft skin and the chance to do the one thing that would let me forget all this? I admitted, I didn’t hate the idea. I stayed frozen, on my side, not sure what to do. I thought about reaching back, looking for a thigh or a hip. Casually, you know. Just to see who was there. I wondered if I would find her naked. An entire separate part of my nervous system roared to life at the thought. I moved my hand, slowly. My heart was pumping.

Now watch, you’ll roll over and it’ll be TJ, wearing a tiny leopard-skin thong.

I reached out and rolled over at the same time.

I grabbed a handful of red fur.

Note: Do not ask the author how the details of the following sequence of events were obtained. The explanation would only leave you more confused and dissatisfied than would any theory you could come up with from your own imagination.

Experienced pet owners know that if your pet ever goes missing, the first step is not to panic. The vast majority of the time, the pet will simply find its way back home on its own.

Mollyknew this, so she hadn’t been all that concerned when her male human first went missing nine days ago. In the beginning, things had been in a general state of agitation everywhere Molly went, so she figured it had something to do with that.