David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

Back in Dave’s yard now, which was unfortunately exactly how he’d left it: with a deformed motherfucker swooping down on Falconer, ready to saw his body into pieces.

This was incredibly frustrating. He had as long as he wanted to form a plan, but since the only thing he could move was his own body, this advantage amounted to nothing more than the ability to throw himself into the monster’s jaws instead of Falconer. Even now, he saw how stupid his idea had been earlier, to try to just shove Falconer out of the way. They’d both wind up on the ground, with the beast on top of them. All he’d be doing is supersizing the monster’s lunch. John wondered if he had stuffed a weapon in his pocket before he froze time, if he’d be free to use it? After all, his clothes moved with him—

Ah, there we go. He did have something.

From Falconer’s point of view, John stood in front of him and started to open his little silver pill bottle. Then John got a momentary look of panic on his face, shouted, “FALCONER LOOK—” and suddenly blinked out of existence. At the exact same moment, a growling, shrieking, inhuman mass of thrashing limbs fell onto Falconer’s back, flinging him to the grass.

Falconer rolled over and whipped out his sidearm in one motion. What was in front of him was a spastic tableau of absurdity.

A grossly deformed once-human monster was rolling around, howling in frustration. It had four jagged limbs full of huge white teeth that it was trying to whip through the air to slash anything in the vicinity. It couldn’t, though, because it was restrained by lengths of cloth that knotted the limbs behind its back like handcuffs. Standing over this flailing, shrieking beast was John, in tiny black jockey shorts, screaming, “Yeah! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck yoooooooouuuuu!!!”

Falconer kicked away from the monster and got to his feet. John looked at him and yelled, “What are you waiting for? Shoot him in the mouth!”

The word “mouth” could not be heard over the gunshots.

A minute later John, heart pounding and breathless, untied his pants from the twitching beast and pulled them on. Falconer was reloading. Falconer had put six bullets in the creature’s maw but John had no idea what it took to kill a spider—the only one he’d ever successfully killed was the one he drowned with the turkeys. Glancing nervously at the creature, John suddenly remembered the real reason he had made Falconer bring him here. He said, “The box.”

“What?”

“The green box, get it out of the toolshed and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Falconer ran to the shed and said, “Not here.”

“Shit! They took it. No, wait. Dave put it in the trunk of the Caddie while I was burning the house. We have to find it. What would they have done with an abandoned car? We left my Cadillac at the burrito place…”

“If it was blocking traffic, they’d have impounded it. Maybe. Who knows. Why do we need the box?”

“Trust me, we need it. Or rather, we need it to not wind up in the hands of somebody else. Oh, wait! Damn it!”

“What?”

“It just occurred to me that I could have written Dave a message on a wall using my own shit!”

Falconer didn’t ask for clarification on this, he just jogged down toward the garage that held the Porsche, with John in tow. This time John knew he was hearing footsteps. Fast steps. A lot of them. Out of breath, John hissed, “Detective…”

“I hear it. Move.”

It took both of them to open the garage door—it was old and the springs were busted, which meant it was heavy as hell without the lift system to help. John was left to keep it propped over his head while Falconer ran in to start the car.

Footsteps. A stampede. Something had been roused in the night, probably by the sound of the gunshots. John whipped his head around, squinting in the night, nervous mists of breath puffing into the night air.

A crowd rounded the corner.

Blocking the street.

Dozens and dozens of shambling figures, so many that no light slipped between them.

“DETECTIVE!”

The zombies approached fast, coming up the street like a tide. John turned and saw that they were coming from the opposite direction, too, converging like a hammer and anvil. The Porsche started and John was calculating the time it would take Falconer to back out, stop, let John in, pull into the street, and plow through the crowd—

The tires were flat.

It was so dark in the garage he almost didn’t notice. Both of the back tires had been slashed—shredded, in fact—and John was going to guess the same went for the front. He was just about to tell Falconer this but at that moment, John felt something touch his face. A caress, like a finger. Only it was definitely not a fucking finger.

That was all it took—John cursed and ducked inside the garage. The door slammed shut, sealing them off from all light.

“Detective! Your tires! Shit!”

From inside the car, “WHAT? GET IN!”

“NO! WE—”

Falconer flipped on the headlights, lighting up the interior of the garage.

There was a giant daddy longlegs spider covering the entire inner surface of the garage door—easily eight feet across. Where the body of the spider would normally be, was a human face.

The creature jumped.

I was in the middle of tying my shoe when an idea popped into my brain, out of nowhere. Somehow, I suddenly just knew that Molly was eating my beans.

“Hey! Stop that! Bad dog!” I slapped her snout away from the can. She licked bean sauce from her nose, sniffed the air, and took off, presumably to find someone else’s food to steal. I considered eating the rest of the beans even though they were contaminated with dog spit now, but decided I hadn’t gotten quite that low yet. I decided to go back to bed, and took one step inside the main entrance when a drum solo of rapid footsteps approached from the stairwell. TJ skidded to a stop on the tile and said, “Roof.”

I thought he had barked at me, but he headed for the stairs and I followed him all the way up. Two dozen people were up there, lined up along the ledge like pigeons. Hope met us as soon as we stepped out of the roof access door. She grabbed my elbow, pulled me to the edge like she was going to toss me over. She leaned close, pointed and whispered, “Look. That’s the boom we heard earlier.”

I said, “The asylum.”

From behind me TJ said, “Now you see all them headlights, lookin’ like it’s rush hour in Atlanta? All them vehicles headin’ off to the north? That’s REPER buggin’ out. Headin’ for the highway.”

“Perfect. Let’s break outta here.”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘perfect.’ Means the situation out there has gone so much to shit that a few hundred men with body armor and assault rifles decided it’s not safe for them . Plus I don’t see any reason they’d take the rest of security offline. If anything they need it more, right? I bet tomorrow instead of two of them UAVs up there they’ll have six, or ten.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “if they’re just giving up containment of the quarantine, that means somewhere right now there’s a table full of guys with medals on their jackets trying to figure out exactly what type of bomb you need to vaporize several city blocks, and what would be a cool name for the operation. Something like Operation Cleansing Dawn.”

“Damn, man, that is a good name. I’d feel proud to get burned up in somethin’ called that.”

“You seriously don’t think that option’s on the table?”

“I don’t know, man. I didn’t ten minutes ago.”