David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

And there it was. She suddenly realized that she’d rather have David or John, either one, armed with a baseball bat, than any of these guys and their video game hardware. David and John had a look in their eye when things went bad—a sad but resigned familiarity. They weren’t trained for violence and maybe weren’t particularly competent at it, but they weren’t going to go pee in the corner, either. Both of them had come from bad homes, both had gotten hit quite a bit as kids and maybe that’s all it was. Maybe they just understood something about the world and were more ready for it when things took a turn. She didn’t see that look in any of these suburban kids.

A couple of months ago, Amy had come to stay with David over the long Labor Day weekend. At around midnight on Friday night, a crazy guy started showing up. He knocked on the door and said he had a pizza—they hadn’t ordered one—and he handed them this filthy pizza box, like something he’d dug out of the trash. David opened it and it had dog poop in it. They called the police, but the guy was gone when they got there. The guy came back, Saturday night. This time the old pizza box had a dead squirrel in it. David threatened the guy, slammed the door in his face. The guy comes back at two in the morning, another pizza box. David doesn’t even answer the door, just calls the police again. Again, no sign of the guy when they get there.

At around 7 P.M. on Sunday, the crazy guy starts showing up once an hour. If they didn’t answer, he’d stand there and ring the doorbell, over and over and over. The third time, David goes to the door and this time the guy says something to David, through the closed door. Whatever he said, it made David open the door. They exchanged low, heated words, and the guy leaves a pizza box on the porch and walks away. David looked inside, closed it, and threw it in the trash barrel outside. He wouldn’t tell Amy what was inside. As the man drove away David yelled, “You ever come within a hundred feet of her again, and I’m gonna tear your throat out with my teeth.” Only there were a lot more curse words.

But the guy did come back. At three in the morning. To their bedroom window. They were both fast asleep and Amy slowly woke up and heard whispering, a foot from her head. And it’s the crazy guy, whispering her name, over and over.

She screamed. David sprang out of bed, grabbed that ridiculous crossbow that John bought him at a gun show, and charged out of the house.

David shoots the pizza guy in the chest and the guy goes down, screaming. But then comes the twist—the guy is carrying a fresh pizza, from a local twenty-four-hour pizza place in town. He works for them. The guy is wearing a clean, new uniform, he looks totally sane and acts completely shocked that he got attacked by a customer. The pizza was for a house down the street. He said he just went to the wrong door.

After all of the legal craziness, with charges filed by the guy and talk of a civil suit for his medical bills, Amy asked David what they’d do if the guy came back some night, in crazy mode. David’s answer? “I hit him someplace where I know it’ll be fatal.”

And he would. Even if it meant jail. He would do it for her.

A kid in the back was trying on a pair of night-vision goggles. There were eight people packed into the RV. Fredo was driving. About 150 people counted themselves among the Zombie Response Squad when the wave of zombie panic hit the university. Seven answered the call when it came time to actually meet the threat—all of them piled in the RV with Amy, clacking the mechanisms on their guns.

Amy was scared out of her mind. But she would push through the fear and finish this. And she would have to hope the men sitting around her would do the same. Amy had read the Lord of the Rings trilogy four times, and was starting on her fifth. There was a bit she had memorized when the Ents were marching off to war against seemingly impossible odds (all odds probably seemed against you when you were a big ridiculous walking tree). It was running through her head now and would keep looping from now until they arrived at Undisclosed:

“Of course, it is likely enough, my friends, that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later.”

Yes, Amy had long ago made peace with the fact that she was a huge, flaming nerd.

Johntwisted the silver bottle. It separated in the middle, along a seam that was invisible when it was closed. He didn’t open it all the way—he’d learned that wasn’t always wise if the Soy Sauce was “awake.”

A thin, black stream leaked out from the crack, it looked like a length of heavy black string had come unspooled. John laid his index finger under the stream to catch it.

Then, several things happened at once.

First, the shuffling footsteps John thought he had been hearing got louder, and faster. They had a hollow tone, like someone stomping around on the floor above your apartment. John and Falconer both spun, looking for the source. Then something leaped off the neighbor’s roof, sailing through the air like a huge, weaponized flying squirrel, coming right down on Falconer.

John’s brain had a tenth of a second to try to register what he was really seeing when the Soy Sauce made its move. At the exact same moment John’s mouth was forming the words—

“FALCONER LOOK—”

—the thin, black string of Sauce coiled around on its own like a snake, in a blink whipping around his finger, over his fingernail, and digging into his skin right at the sensitive spot where a hangnail would form. Pain flashed up John’s hand, all the way to his elbow.

Then the Soy Sauce took hold, and the world disappeared.

Dave once described taking a hit of Soy Sauce as like digging up one of those thick fiber-optic lines that feeds an entire city’s Internet connection and plugging it into your brain. All those streams of data crashing into you neurons at once, so hard and fast that you simultaneously know everything and nothing at all. John always thought his own description was clearer: it’s like an Insane Clown Posse concert where all fifty thousand members of the audience are given their own microphone and sound system, and they all start simultaneously improvising bad freestyle rap verses.

John was introduced to the stuff at a party, when he was barely old enough to legally drink (and had been drinking for eight years). It was given to him by a black dude from Ohio doing a fake Jamaican accent, the guy who would later be found with his guts splattered on the walls of his trailer—the fucker got off easy. It was the same sensation this time as the first. Soy Sauce was not something you built up a tolerance for.

Everything stopped—John was yanked out of his body, out of the world, mind freed from the confines of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth and a trillion nerve endings. A wash of alien sensations crashed over him, like being naked at the bottom of a frantic orgy involving everyone in that Star Wars cantina scene.

John found that he was suddenly somewhere else. He was standing among bombed-out buildings, avalanches of brick and wood and glass flung across streets, weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. He had leaped forward in time, he didn’t know how much. He looked around—or rather, his view panned around, as he didn’t seem to have eyes to “look” with. Devastation and broken structures littering the landscape into the horizon and beyond. He saw that the rubble was crawling with life, small skittering things.

John walked—or rather, his view floated—toward the remains of a shattered church. A rotting human head crawled across a pile of ragged concrete, the legs of a parasite jutting below the jaw, the parasite wearing the moldering skull like a hermit crab’s shell. Another head trundled by. Then another. Then, another set of spider legs skittered by, this time trailing a tangled wad of guts.