David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

“But we don’t know how much time we have—”

“I’m not done. If , on the other hand, we help infected leak out into the town and they start wreaking havoc, and multiplyin’, then the same dudes looking at a map with a little red circle around this hospital are gonna draw a bigger red circle around this whole town . Right? And you think your girl is out there. And John, and whoever else in this town you care about.”

“That place that makes those Cuban sandwiches.”

“Yeah, Cuba Libre. You had their coffee, man? No way we can let ’em bomb that place.”

“You see the waitresses?”

“Mmmm-hmm. Whoever does the hiring there, he definitely an ass man.”

“All right, all right. So who gets to go?”

“Well, see, Spider-Man, now there’s a tough-ass decision we got to make.”

Seven people were waiting for TJ and me out in the hall outside the boiler room. In addition to Hope, Wheelchair was there, along with Corey (the curly haired kid who’d come in on the truck earlier), an old guy whose name I didn’t know, Lenny (a short balding white guy who looked like Vizzini from The Princess Bride ) and the two women who heard the commotion and wandered in from the break room.

We told everyone about the tunnel, and the two bodies. Old Guy said casually to TJ, “Which wall is it on, nigger?”

Without blinking TJ said, “North.”

Old Guy nodded thoughtfully and said, “That’s what I thought. Same boiler used to service the other buildings, before they tore down the old hospital and built this one up on top of it. Probably, oh, fifty or sixty years ago. Now back in those days, if a black so much as brushed past a white woman on a sidewalk, they’d have had him hung by torchlight come nightfall, but of course a lot has changed since then. Me and my friends, we had a bluegrass band back in the 1960s—”

“I think Racist Ed is right,” said TJ. “How far to the other end, Ed?”

“Oh… you’re talking about half a mile of tunnel there, Porch Monkey. Long way to crawl. I couldn’t make it, on these knees. You know the workers back then would have a cart they’d lay on, and there was a pulley system and you’d just lay on your back and then down at the end you’d have a big strong nigger turning a crank—”

“Well there’s no pulley system in there now, so we got to make some knee pads, or else all our knees will be hamburger by the time we get out the other end. But if Racist Ed is right, there may be seven- or eight hundred meters of tunnel there; that’s a long stretch to crawl over brick and mud. If you’re in pretty good shape I bet you could make it in twenty minutes, if you’re not, and you got to constantly stop and rest your knees, you could be an hour gettin’ through there. So first question is, who’s up for it? Show of hands.”

Everyone but Racist Ed.

“That’s eight of us, and that’s a pretty big group already. If I could pick the optimal number to take on this mission I’d stop right here—”

“I’m not leavin’ without Terry,” said the bald guy. “If it comes to that I’ll stay behind.”

“I wasn’t finished! What I was sayin’ was I don’t expect any of you to leave loved ones behind, but that’s all you can take.”

Wheelchair said, “We gotta tell Dennis and LeRon.”

Hope said, “Katie and Danni…”

TJ said, “Okay now see we’re getting up to more than a dozen people now, take some time to think about it but you get very much beyond that and it goes from a group sneaking through to get the word out to an all-out prison break that’s going to provoke a full armed response. No way we can go with more than fifteen people—”

“What about the sick people? And the doc?” said Hope.

TJ sighed and rubbed his head. “What about ’em?”

“Katie’s one of the nurses. She said some of the sick are so bad off that they’re not going to last long if they don’t get to a real hospital. The diarrhea is so bad they’re getting dehydrated.”

“Babe, how are they gonna crawl through a half mile of tunnel if they’re that sick? What if they get halfway through and can’t go no farther? We got no way of getting them out and they’re clogging up the tunnel for everybody else. It’s narrow, real narrow. There’s pipes all around. You’ll see.”

“And what about the doc? He’ll have to know.”

“ Why does he have to know?”

“Well for one he’s going to notice Katie gone when she doesn’t show up to the second floor to help, and if we don’t tell him where she went, he’s going to waste time looking for her. Two, we’re going to need to take some stuff with us. Bandages, basic first aid. Doc has all that up there. And we’re out of the… mouthwash. We used the last of it today. We need to take some with us and that means we need the doc to make it.”

I said, “Actually she makes a good point with people being noticed gone. Everything is going to fly into turmoil when Owen and the rest notices a bunch of us missing. People will think we got eaten or something. That could turn ugly if it becomes a witch hunt.”

TJ said, “Yeah, we’ll leave a note.”

“Saying what?”

“ I’ll think of something. Fuck, man. Look. We come back and we meet out in the hall in one hour. Hope, go get Katie and tell her that if they have sick people up there who can’t last a single more day but are still somehow capable of crawling for a half mile through the freezing mud, then we’ll take them. Dave, go see the doc and get him to make up a jug of mouthwash. But you got to have him put it in something that’s not going to leak when it’s banging around in the tunnel.”

I said, “Okay do you know where the doctor is right now? Or if not, what he looks like so I’ll know when I find him?”

TJ stared at me. “The doc? Marconi?”

“Wait… he’s here ?”

“Where else would he—Ah, you’re pulling that unfrozen caveman shit. Yes, he’s here. And he don’t sleep. Didn’t you go talk to him after you got back from the hole? Like I told you?”

“No…”

“You need to go now, man. He’s been asking about you.”

“The situation is much worse than I had thought,” said Dr. Marconi.

He was leaning over an unconscious woman and shining a flashlight into her eye. I had actually only seen this man in person once—every other time it was on television or on a book jacket. The neat white beard, the glasses down on his nose. And here he was, standing in front of me, not dressed in a red or green jumpsuit, but in the same style of three-piece suit I’d seen him in on TV. Only now, the man wearing it looked like he hadn’t slept in a decade.

He glanced up at me expectantly and said, “What did you find out?”

“I’m… totally lost here, doctor. My memory of this whole quarantine experience only goes back to earlier today. I remember up to the chaos of the outbreak and then the next thing I remember is waking up over at the asylum with no idea where I was or how I got there. I had no idea you were here and I have no memory of us ever speaking.”

Marconi turned his back on his patient to give me his full attention. “They wiped your memory?”

“I… I don’t know. You think they can do that? Just pick a specific bunch of memories and erase it like files on a hard drive?”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s no method to do such a thing safely. I also do not believe these men give a tinker’s dam about such things.”

“You mean REPER?”

He shrugged. “If that’s what they’re calling themselves now.”

“How did you wind up here again?”