David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

Johnhad lost track of how many consecutive days he had woken up not knowing where he was. This place was full of people and echoes and creaky boards and mold. Someone was shouting at him to wake up. He sat up on the cot and the first thing he saw was one of the terrifying Darth Vader guys holding a machine gun. John thought, oh, right. It’s this bullshit still.

Two spacemen surged forward and lifted John off his cot and took him roughly out of the gym and into an old shower room covered in ancient chipped tiles held together by mildew. John half expected to see a dozen naked men in black space helmets snapping towels at each other. Instead he found himself alone, the long-dry shower room now piled high with boxes of rubber gloves and syringes and trash bags and every other thing. He was alone for ten minutes, until he was joined by—

“Detective Falconer! Shouldn’t you be wearing a space suit?”

Falconer was wearing his street clothes—jeans, a black turtleneck and an empty shoulder holster under his armpit. Cowboy boots. Little bit of beard stubble. John wondered if the guy would walk from one end of the street to the other without winding up covered in bitches.

Falconer said, “A suit wouldn’t help, would it?”

“Might buy you a few seconds. Where’s Amy?”

“Who?”

“Dave’s girlfriend? Redhead. Only one hand? They snatched her up. Both of us. But I think she got away, they don’t seem to know where she is. I don’t know if she’s in town, or…”

“Didn’t see her.”

“What about Dave?”

“I can ask but they won’t tell me either way.”

“Because you don’t work for the CDC.”

“Does this shit look like the CDC to you? You see what those guys were wearing? What they were packing? No, they’re not CDC and I’m not one of them. I’m being processed for infected, just like you. I turned myself in. I got them to let me talk to you because I said you might have information, but when we’re done, both of us will get tossed over the fence down at the hospital. And it sounds like nobody comes back out of there.”

“You turned yourself in? Great plan you had there, detective.”

“I am really trying to restrain myself here. Do you understand? This all happened because of you two shitbirds.”

“Man, fuck you. I don’t think Dave made it out. Did you know that? I’m pretty sure he got his brains blown out when everything went bad. Or if not, they got him after shit went to hell. Either way…”

“Well, I’m sorry if that’s true. But I can say that I don’t know that to be true, either. Some people were killed in that first round of riots but I never heard that he was among them.”

John shrugged.

“But, none of this is my main point.” Falconer moved to a spot where he could see the gym from where he was standing. Making sure nobody was close enough to listen.

“My point is, I’ve seen everything I need to see in here. So I figure that instead of rotting in their quarantine, I might as well get to the bottom of this and save the world.”

John stood up. “Now you’re talking.”

“Don’t get excited. If I think you can help me, I’ll get you out of here, too. But you have to prove you can help me first.”

John sat. “Okay, fine. Want me to show you some karate or…”

“I watched both of you go into a door at a taco stand and not come back out. Where did you go?”

“To a construction site outside of town.”

“How?”

“Magic door. No, seriously. Don’t get mad. The door is magic. It’s not my fault.”

“But it didn’t work for me. And if the illegal aliens they got manning the grill at that place go through the back door, they’re not gonna wind up outside town.”

“Correct. Neither will most other people. Me and Dave can do it, so can some other people around town. They’re the ones who built the doors. We just stumbled across them.”

“‘Doors.’ There’s more than one?”

“Yeah, they’re all over.”

“And who are these people who put them there?”

“We’d love to find out. They’re very well funded, and very powerful and they dabble in weird shit. They’re also almost certainly the people responsible for this outbreak. Which as Dave tried to explain to you, is the work of invisible monsters. I think that Tennet guy is with them. He has that vibe.”

“A few days into this situation, CDC, military, everybody pulls out and this new agency—REPER—sweeps in. They got all the right equipment and all the right training for this exact thing. And nobody has heard of them before.”

John shrugged as if to say, “Sounds about right.”

“These guys, the ones you say are behind this, do they do anything else, other than build magical doors and monsters? I’m having a little bit of trouble figuring out how they make money off that.”

“Dave thinks the monster stuff is a side effect, an accident. He thinks they’re experimenting under the table with the door stuff, quantum teleportation or wormholes or however they do it, and that when they started dicking around with the fabric of space-time and dimensions and so on, weird shit started leaking through. From, you know. Other dimensions or wherever they come from. But the stuff that came through, don’t think of it as just animals that run around biting people. Some of it is intelligent. Superintelligent, maybe. Dark shapes, like ghosts.”

John could tell from Falconer’s face that he was losing him.

“Detective, all that stuff I just said, we didn’t just fill this in with our imagination. We’ve had encounters here and there, stuff has leaked out from inside the operation. We look like a couple of assholes but Dave has actually worked really hard to put this together. And you’ve seen enough weird shit in your time here to give us just a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.”

“These people, you think they’re part of the government?”

“I think that when the government comes to investigate something that goes down here, these guys can make some calls and that shit just disappears. Cases get closed. Also, they’ve been around a while. Stories about this town go back as far as the history books go. Maybe forever.”

“What’s so special about this town?”

“Don’t know. Maybe there’s some kind of electromagnetic conditions that make it ideal for whatever it is they do. Maybe they just got a good deal on the land. Who knows.”

“And what’s so special about you and David? Why can you use the doors? Why can you see the monsters?”

“Short answer, we’re magic. Longer answer, he and I took a magic potion that gave us the ability. The longer still answer is that a drug hit the streets, looks kind of like molasses, or motor oil that hasn’t been changed in a decade. The dealer was calling it Soy Sauce. You take it and you change instantly. The veil comes up off your perceptions. When you’re on it, the first few hours, you’re like a fuckin’ demigod. You can slip through time, space, unlock the mysteries of the universe and shit. Then you come down and you feel normal again. But some of the effects are permanent. You become a member of the club.”

“That drug, it came from these people, right? All the weird shit comes from them?”

“Yeah.”

“You have any of it left? The drug?”

“You don’t want to take it. It kills ninety-nine percent of the people who come in contact with it. Mostly in gruesome ways. The dealer who sold it to me, they found him splattered on the walls of his trailer. But in answer to your question, yes, we do have some of the Soy Sauce left.”

“Where?”