David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

The look on Falconer’s face told John that he thought he was looking at a dead man, but knew that there was also no point in trying to talk John out of it. Instead, Falconer shook John’s hand and said, “Don’t fuck everything up, okay?”

The supply closet door was yanked open and I awoke to see Owen there with his co-chair, Mr. Gun. They led me to the yard and I found that it was morning—I had managed to sleep several hours among the mops and buckets, exhaustion catching up with me. The group of reds had swelled, huddled around the bonfire to hear my sentence.

Owen said to me, “We figure we’ll give you the choice, bro. You can either crawl through that steam tunnel and whatever happens, happens. Or I can shoot you right here and let your fat ass fuel the fire. It’s all the same to me, aside from the second option settin’ me back one bullet.”

I shook my head and said, “Nah, that tunnel smelled like a graveyard for dogshit. Am I allowed a piece of paper and a pen to write a note to my girlfriend, if she’s even still alive? No idea how she’s ever going to see it but I’d feel bad if I didn’t make the effort. You know like when you forget to call home on Mother’s Day.”

Owen didn’t answer, because he was looking past me. Something deep in my nasal passages noted that the scent of the smoke took on a more sophisticated tone. Instead of the meaty smell of barbecue mixed with the acrid smell of particle board and veneer, I suddenly smelled the sweet, rich fragrance of pipe tobacco. I turned and there was Dr. Marconi, puffing on his pipe with one hand dipped into the jacket pocket of a pinstriped suit. He looked so out of place here he seemed like a hologram.

Marconi said, “Can I ask what this gathering is about?”

I said, “I been sentenced to die but Owen here has agreed to let me write a note to Amy before he shoots me.”

Marconi nodded and said, “I see. You realize, David, that other men do not find themselves in this kind of predicament with the same frequency that you do? I’m beginning to think it’s something you’re doing.”

To Owen, he said, “Can it wait fifteen minutes? I would like to pull Mr. Wong aside and take him up to my floor. I actually believe I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with detection but I’ll need his skill this one last time.”

No answer from Owen. Marconi said, “It really is for the good of all of us, if it works. You can stand right outside my door, if you think this is a ruse to help him escape, though I personally cannot imagine what such a plan would entail. It would also give him the chance to confess his sins, so it would be a personal favor to me, as a former man of the cloth it would weigh on me greatly if I didn’t at least offer him the opportunity.”

Owen pointed the gun at the sky and said, “If it was anybody but you, doc…”

“You know I do not ask lightly.” To me, he said, “Will you take this opportunity to let me show you something? And to reconcile yourself with the creator you’re about to meet?”

Johnjolted awake to find himself staring down a shotgun wielded by his greatest enemy: himself.

He had fallen asleep in the Caddie, his shotgun in his lap. He must have shifted position at some point. If he’d coughed, he’d have vaporized his own skull. The sun stared angrily through his windshield. John blinked and threw open the driver’s-side door, needing to get out and take a piss. He almost fell and broke his neck—the Caddie was sitting six feet off the ground. Then he remembered.

The night before, he’d parted company with the Undisclosed zombie militia and made the nervous trek on foot from Dave’s house up to the burrito stand, only to find the Caddie was not in fact where they’d left it. At that point his only possible hope of finding it again was if it had gotten towed away, back at a stage of the apocalypse when a car partially blocking the street was still considered a priority on somebody’s list. John jogged twelve blocks to the towing company impound yard, expecting to be decapitated by a monster at any moment.

The good news was that he wasn’t. The further good news was that the Caddie was in fact there and that the tall fence had been cut open by some other looter or vandal days ago. The bad news was that the Caddie was apparently the last seized vehicle before towing was shut down—it was still on the back of the tow truck. The truck was the flatbed type, where the whole bed tilted down to form a ramp and let the car roll on and off—a technology that probably came about because the old hook style yanked off too many bumpers in the course of dragging cars out of handicapped parking spaces.

John had jumped up onto the truck’s bed and opened the Caddie’s trunk, expecting to find that everything had been stolen. But apparently even the looters who ransacked the impound yard took one glance at the rusting piece of shit and deduced that there could be nothing in the trunk worth the effort of prying it open. That was probably a good thing for both the citizens and law enforcement of Undisclosed. Inside they’d have found the aforementioned shotgun (a custom-made triple-barrel sawed-off), two hundred shells, Dave’s blood-splattered chainsaw, the green mystery box taken from Dave’s shed, a bag of Dave’s clothes, a bottle of Grey Goose, a bad black velvet painting of Jesus and a fucking flamethrower.

The keys had still been in the tow truck (in fact, the driver’s-side door was standing open from when the driver had run screaming from whatever mob or unholy terror was coming his way). John spent twenty minutes trying to figure out the controls for tilting down the ramp and never could. It was either take the tow truck itself, or walk. So, for the third time in ten days, he commandeered a vehicle for use in a mission, promising himself he would return it when it was over. He was one for two so far.

That is how John wound up spending the night tooling around town in the tow truck with the Caddie piggybacking. One thing he had noticed when he was out: people. Lots of people. Since REPER had retreated and stopped enforcing the curfew, every street corner had grown clumps of people bristling with hunting rifles and shotguns and revolvers and machetes. John was comforted by that for about five seconds, then he saw the looks in the eyes of these harried, tired, cold, frustrated people and realized they would butcher his ass if he even so much as let out a yawn that sounded too much like a moan.

Just before dawn, John had passed the quarantine, which looked even more impregnable than it had with time on pause. Floodlights and armed drones were all powered up and standing guard. Driving slow to avoid the armed crowds that were wandering across the streets, John had made his way up to the asylum. A crowd was busy up there. Dozens of members of the militia were surrounding an RV parked in the yard. The pickup with the wood chipper was parked next to a long ditch that had been dug in the yard, and the chipper was running.

John had edged closer, as close as he could without exiting the tow truck (which he was not going to fucking do) and saw bodies. The militia was dragging them out of a basement window and laying them in a row in the grass. Another crew was picking them up, one by one, and feeding them into the chipper. The chipper was, in turn, filling the ditch with red slush.

Oh holy mother of—

John had heard a scream at that point, and saw a gang of militia approach from the street, dragging a cursing man covered in tattoos. He was thrashing around and lobbing insults at his captors, insisting on his innocence, and his humanity. The captors conferred with Tightpants Cowboy, who was in charge of the zombie disposal operation apparently. The tattooed man’s trial lasted forty-five seconds, then Cowboy vaporized the man’s forehead with two shotgun shells. Into the chipper he went.