David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

John got the fuck out of there.

He had headed as far outside of town as he could get without running into the REPER barricades. So, John had parked the tow truck, with the Caddie piggybacking, in a cornfield a mile or so from the water tower construction site, the REPER barricade now standing between there and where he’d spoken to Dave for the last time. He had gotten drowsy, then climbed up to the Caddie because he figured the higher vantage point would give him an advantage if he was ambushed while he slept.

John sat upright and worked his stiff joints. He threw the shotgun into the passenger seat where it clinked off the empty Grey Goose bottle. The gun was a custom-made job he’d bought at one of the gun shows he frequented. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked—firing all three barrels would chop down a small tree. He kept double-aught buck loaded into the two side barrels, and a slug in the middle. Give the target a nice variety of projectiles to think about.

He needed to get into quarantine. And not as a patient, either. He needed to get in there with the implements of destruction in the Caddie’s trunk. John pictured himself just plowing toward the fence in the tow truck, but remembered the concrete barricades meant to stop somebody from doing just that.

Well, sitting here was accomplishing nothing. John jumped down, pissed for several minutes, then threw himself into the tow truck.

Marconi led me up to the second floor, with Owen in tow. He made Owen stay outside of the makeshift hospital within a hospital, telling him there was a risk of him spreading the nasty stomach flu to the rest of the quarantine.

Once on the other side of a door, Marconi muttered, “We have less time than I thought.”

“What? Before Owen shoots me?”

“No. Believe it or not, that’s actually not our most pressing problem.”

He led me to a window and said, “Look. Beyond the fence.”

I did. A freaking crowd was gathering out there. “Holy shit, doctor. Who are those people?”

“Looks like everyone.”

Hundreds of people. Cars were parked here and there, scattered like toys out beyond the fence. People were sitting on the hoods, or were off in bunches, talking. Everyone seemed to have a gun. I swear one person actually brought a pitchfork.

Marconi said, “Your neighbors, your coworkers, the people who mow your lawn and deliver your mail.”

Nobody mows my lawn.

“I don’t understand.”

“Critical mass, Mr. Wong. They’re going to get what They wanted. And I haven’t the faintest idea of how to stop it.”

“Who? Who’s going to get what they want? The mob, you mean?”

Marconi looked me in the eye and said, “We’re speaking in private, I assume that we can drop all pretense. This conversation will take longer if we filter everything through a façade of skepticism of the supernatural, and at least one of us doesn’t have the time. If I have seen the shadow men lurking about, then I assume you have, too.”

I sighed and said, “Yes, doctor.”

“So when I speak of an invisible ‘They’ working against us, you’ll not waste precious seconds asking who ‘They’ are. The shadows, and the men who knowingly or unknowingly work on their behalf.”

They .

I often wondered if “they” had an office building somewhere, where They sat around a long, black granite conference table with a pentagram etched into the top. Or maybe They had a headquarters inside a hollowed-out volcano, like a James Bond villain. Or maybe They had the technology to leap effortlessly across time and space, holding shareholder meetings on the surface of Mars, or on top of a plateau in Pangaea circa 200 million B.C.

John and I knew very little about Them, which made me an expert when compared to the general population, who don’t know They exist at all. They are people, or at least They assume the form of people. They are wealthy, or at least have access to wealth, or maybe have means which render wealth as we understand it moot. The little Asian man who disappeared into the burrito stand was surely one of Them, as was whoever was waiting for that convoy of black trucks we saw last summer.

But all I have are rumors, stories John dug up on the Internet probably written by people who know even less than we do. Some say it’s a cabal of wealthy men who, centuries ago, poured Their wealth into experimentation with the occult. At some point, the story goes, They tapped into a dark power that They saw as one more resource to be exploited, the way that humans would later learn to split the atom and use it to power our televisions and hair driers. Instead, the legend goes, the dark energies that poured forth infected Them, corrupting these men who learned too late that the power They had bought would cost them the last remnants of Their own souls. That’s the story, anyway. Shit, for all I know, They wrote that version of the story and the truth is another three layers down. That’s how They work.

These days, if you ask John to summarize who They are, you get only one answer: “Well, they’re not fucking vampires, I’ll tell you that.” Then he’ll stare hard at you for a solid minute until you walk away.

Marconi tapped the side of one of the jugs that contained the spider specimens. It didn’t react, but still I wished he wouldn’t do it. He said, “This was always chess, not checkers. I’m not sure you ever fully understood that.”

I said, “Tennet. You know that name? Claims to be a psychiatrist but suddenly turns up consulting for this agency nobody’s ever heard of? REPER?”

“Oh, he’s a psychiatrist. Search his past and you’ll find twenty-five distinguished years in that profession, an expert on the virulent nature of fear. And likewise, if it just so happened that he needed to be a plumber in order to be in an advantageous position to observe and influence the situation, then you would find a quarter century of plumbing in his background. And so on. He would be whatever is required.”

“Can’t somebody investigate him? If his licenses and all that are fake then—”

“I didn’t say he would use false documents. I said he would actually have twenty-five years on the job. Whatever job. Do you understand? Again, chess. With a very advanced player who can see many moves ahead. They put their pieces into position.”

Marconi checked the vitals on a sleeping patient as he spoke, puffing on his pipe the whole time. I again wondered to what degree Dr. Marconi actually knew anything about medicine.

He said, “In the case of Dr. Tennet, he not only has specialized in treating violent and paranoid patients since the 1980s, but has written multiple prominent books on the subject, and dozens of journal articles. More pertinent to this situation, he has also written extensively on the subject of group paranoia and crowd dynamics in crisis situations. He didn’t have to infiltrate the government. When the ‘outbreak’ hit, they came to him. Do you understand? The pieces are always positioned where They need them.”

“Right, and ‘They’ are dicks.”

“But we can’t stop there. We need to ask the big question: what do They want ?”

“To… kill us all?”

“Ha! We should be blessed with an adversary with such uncomplicated ambitions. No, war is never about killing the enemy. War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.”

Johndidn’t get within three blocks of the hospital quarantine. There were people everywhere. It was like the afternoon of the Fourth of July, when everybody ambles out to the park in loose groups to find a place to watch fireworks. Only instead of carrying blankets and lawn chairs, everybody was armed to the teeth. From the driver’s seat of the tow truck, John recognized a familiar cowboy hat and denim-wrapped ass walking nearby. John pulled up to where Tightpants Cowboy was on the sidewalk, shouting orders to somebody. John rolled down the window and Tightpants said, “Did Hank send you out here? We’re still four short.”