This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It

by David Wong

  Yet, they create vast colonies, with separate chambers for the hatching of eggs and waste and storage. They grow and harvest fungi for food. The tunnels are designed with ventilation to the surface to carefully regulate temperature and air quality. A human would need years of formal study to learn all of the various principles and skills required to build a structure as complex as those created by the “mindless” ants.

  So what, then, makes humans so special? Of what good is this explosive wonder we call imagination, or the internal monologue we call our “mind” or “personality”? Of what value is the divine “spark” that we believe grants us dominion over all, including those ants? All of our greatest achievements can apparently be duplicated without it.

  That is why we fear the zombie. The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.

  8 Days, 12 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

  John noted that somebody could actually chart in miles per hour the speed at which the panic and bullshit rippled outward from Undisclosed.

  They left the highway to get gas about an hour north of the town, and at that point everything still seemed just a couple of ticks off from normal. The convenience store was busy but not crazy. John bought cigarettes and two Red Bulls and even chatted with the girl at the counter about what was going on. She talked him into getting a couple of hot dogs that had been slowly rotating in their warmer for a week or so. Amy grabbed a huge bag of strawberry Twizzlers and the biggest Diet Mountain Dew they had. Amy paid and John promised to pay her back. Then he had a moment of panic when he wondered if the guy who wrote his paycheck every two weeks was even still alive. Or if the bank where he had his checking account was still standing. If not, then what? He had nothing. Just the clothes on his back.

  Then, when he and Amy stopped at another convenience store just twenty-five miles up the road, both of them urgently having to use the bathroom for different reasons, the place was a madhouse. The lines to the gas pumps led all the way to the street, blocking traffic as people waited to turn in. All of the bottled water, milk and bread had been stripped from the shelves. An Indian guy behind the counter was arguing with someone about a per-customer limit he had just imposed on everything in the store at that moment. Everyone was on their phones, yelling about packing up, getting the kids from basketball practice, heading to Mom’s house. Yes, now, they’d say. A curfew was coming. Martial law was going to be declared for the whole tri-county area. Or the whole state. Or the whole country.

  “Terrorist attack” was the key word in all the conversations. A biological weapon, released by a cop who went crazy and became a jihadist. The stuff made the skin rot off your bones, ate through your brain, made you kill your family. Highly contagious. Countless infected may have gotten out of the town before the government sealed it off. We could all be infected for all we knew. Some thought this was what the government wanted. Some thought the government itself released the pathogen.

  John and Amy got out of there as fast as they could, not even stopping to buy a courtesy item which Amy said was her normal policy when using the bathroom at a business. John said that was the kind of rule that got suspended during the apocalypse.

  John was trying to stay calm because Amy was getting worked up and panic has a way of multiplying when you have two people’s fear flowing back and forth, creating a feedback loop. She kept asking questions that he didn’t have answers to. Wouldn’t somebody from the government come looking for them for breaking quarantine? Wouldn’t they know to look for the Bronco? He didn’t know.

  They were heading back to her dorm at the university because they had literally nowhere else to go. But Amy kept asking questions about that, too. Wouldn’t they come looking for them there? If the infected were dangerous, shouldn’t they get some guns or something? John thought all of those were great questions but he wasn’t entirely clear what he was supposed to do about any of them. Say they dumped the Bronco. Then what? Walk? Steal a car?

  Yes, somebody would eventually come knocking at the dorm if they stayed there too long (though he thought the government had bigger fires to put out at the moment) but goddamnit, they needed to stop somewhere and sit down and reorganize. He had just slept for a couple of hours the night before, in a chair at the police station. He just needed to … reset himself. Get something to drink.

  Yes, it would be nice to have the flamethrower plus a shotgun and ten or twenty boxes of shells. They didn’t. He also didn’t have the cash to buy a gun, but even if he did, he was pretty sure if they stopped at a Walmart they would find the line to sporting goods wrapped around the store. All of the guns would be gone, along with all of the ammo and cleaning kits and knives. Also gone would be the camping supplies, the water purification tablets, the tanks of propane, the batteries, the hand-cranked emergency radios and so on. This is a part of the country that created a nationwide ammunition shortage the day after they saw a non-white president won an election. They’ve been waiting for this shit.

  Not that John could criticize, because he knew better than any of them what was coming—what was really coming—and here he was, driving in the night in Dave’s beat-up Bronco, without so much as a flashlight in the way of emergency supplies. Not that he would put it like that to Amy. Goddamn he needed a drink. Just to get things back on an even keel.

  John cursed himself. Or rather, he cursed the past version of himself for so thoughtlessly screwing over the current version of himself. Everything that would come in useful right now was in the trunk of his Caddie. The Caddie that was parked outside of the burrito stand the last time he saw it, but that by now was either impounded by the government, or stolen, or on fire, or flipped over in a riot.

  They were on the exit ramp headed to Amy’s campus when her phone chimed to announce a text message (by playing “One Night in Bangkok,” a private joke between her and Dave). Amy opened it, then scrunched up her face like she’d just watched a waiter at a restaurant slap a squealing live pig on the table in front of her.

  John said, “What?”

  “It’s … a text. From David.”

  She said nothing else. John’s brain seized up.

  “And?”

  She read it off her screen: “‘I want you to know that I am fine. They have asked us to stay here as a precaution. Ignore the rumors, everything is fine and they are treating me well.’”

  John and Amy both were silent for several seconds. Finally, both burst out laughing.

  Amy said, “If David wrote that, I will eat this phone.”

  John said, “‘They’re treating me well’? I want you to seriously imagine those words coming out of Dave’s mouth. He wouldn’t say that even if they were treating him well.”

  “They might as well have had him speaking Japanese.”

  “I have his phone in my pocket, by the way.”

  The laughter died as quickly as it had come and Amy said, “Why would they send me a fake text?”

  “I bet they sent them to everybody on the network. Probably the same one. Trying to pacify the people on the outside, to keep them from beating down the barriers to get into town. Think about it, you got husbands separated from wives, kids separated from parents. Imagine you go out of town to go see a concert or something, you leave the kid with a babysitter, then head back home to find the road blocked by a wall of National Guard trucks, telling you you can’t see your child, who by the way is trapped inside ground zero of a bioweapon outbreak.”

  “Do you have any idea how mad David will be when he sees this? Sending this out in his name like that?”

  John didn’t say anything. Just let that conversation fade. For now, the goal was to get her away
, and safe, and to sit down somewhere quiet and figure out what to do next. Over a beer.

  * * *

  The bullshit reached Amy’s dorm ahead of them, so John’s final estimate was that it traveled at about 80 miles an hour. Of course, bullshit picked up speed exponentially in the information age—the situation in Undisclosed would make a newscast in Japan within the next two hours, and Internet rumors would assure everyone everywhere that they were all equally in danger of a terrorist/zombie attack.

  The common room on Amy’s floor was packed with students, gathered around a TV mounted to the wall. It was tuned to CNN, which John guessed meant this was the most CNN anyone in this building had watched in years. It was clear from the coverage that nobody had gotten a camera crew inside the town after the Action 5 News team got eaten. They did have three short video clips that they showed on a loop, all of them shot with shaky cell phones and presumably uploaded to the Web before all of the communication lines went dark. The first was the least exciting, showing a crew of National Guard putting up temporary fencing around the hospital. They were working fast, using a huge drill thing attached to a backhoe to punch holes in the dirt while a crane filled said holes with poles three times as tall as a man. The view cut to a roll of absolutely sinister looking razor wire on the ground, then to a group of guys standing guard, holding assault rifles that John recognized as M4s, as he had gone shopping for one that last summer.

  Still no hazmat gear on those guys. Jesus.

  Finally one of the soldiers shouted something at whoever was holding the camera and the clip abruptly ended.

  Then the next two clips were prefaced by the anchor warning that the following scenes were very disturbing, and that you should leave the room if you were a giant pussy. They then cut to the second clip, shot from inside a car that was creeping along downtown, the driver presumably trying to steer while holding their phone out of the window to record what looked like some bodies laying in front of a smashed-up storefront (John recognized it as Black Circle Records, on Main Street—it hadn’t been smashed up quite as much the last time he saw it). The shot zoomed in on a mutilated body laying facedown. Well, part of it was facedown, the torso part. The pelvis was a twisted pink mess, and the legs were turned all the way around, so that they were toes-up. Suddenly one of the legs snapped into action, bending at the knee as if the legs were going to get up on their own and walk away without the rest of the body. The shot cut to black before we could see if they did.

  Finally, they cut to a grainy scene shot from an upper-story window, looking down at the street below. There were three soldiers in a standoff with a lone guy who was holding a curved object that looked like a scythe—it was hard to make out from that distance. The soldiers were shouting commands at the guy, gesturing for him to get facedown on the ground. He advanced on them and they opened fire, all three of them. The clip had no audio but you could see repeated puffs of gunsmoke drifting into the air and bits of flesh flying off the guy. He never went down. He didn’t even stumble. Instead he reared back and threw the scythe thing at the nearest soldier. The soldier grabbed his neck and went down.

  The other two soldiers ran.

  The camera view started shaking, which John interpreted as the cameraman going nuts and probably yelling to the other people in the room about what had just happened. This got the attention of the monster below, who turned and looked up, directly into the camera, and thus into the eyes of everyone in the dorm common room.

  The man reached into his coat and pulled out another scythe. John had a split second to realize he had actually pulled out one of his own ribs, before he hurled it at the window, shattering it.

  Everyone in the common room flinched.

  The scene cut to black.

  A kid at the front of the room with black hair, a beard, and horn-rimmed glasses said, “Now tell me that wasn’t a zombie.”

  * * *

  John’s college career had been brief and he had never lived in a dorm room. This one reminded him of a prison cell. Amy and her roommate slept in bunk beds. They had no TV. There was a bathroom and shower that they shared with the people in the next room. There was a little mini-fridge next to the window, a hot plate sitting on top of it. Not even enough floor space to do a push-up. Not that he hadn’t lived in worse.

  In one corner John found a familiar sight, what he thought of as Amy’s “nest.” At the center was an old beanbag chair that looked like it had come from a garage sale or a vintage store. Surrounding it was her Apple laptop, a rolled-up, half-empty bag of Cheetos, an open box of Cocoa Pebbles cereal that she would eat dry, and four empty bottles—orange juice, orange juice, Diet Mountain Dew, water. If she were at home you would also find two prescription bottles there, one pain pill and one muscle relaxer that John knew she took for her back. She probably kept those in her purse, shit like that would get stolen in a college dorm. You could sell OxyContin for ten or twenty bucks a pill here. Price would probably go to ten times that now that the apocalypse was here.

  You stop that apocalypse shit. Keep your head, John.

  Amy had the lower bunk, which John knew because on the wall next to it she had taped up a little world map with a dozen cities in Europe and Australia bearing red stars she had drawn on with a Sharpie. Cities she wanted to visit someday. John noticed she had added a star to Japan since the last time he had seen it. He tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets of Tokyo. It was like picturing RoboCop in Middle Earth—

  “John, you’ve met Nisha, right?” John had. Amy’s gorgeous Indian roommate. She was on the top bunk in pajama pants and a tank top, glued to her phone and tapping in Facebook updates. A bottle of absinthe leaned against the wall next to her, a textbook nearby served as a tray for an ornate glass, sugar cubes and a disposable lighter. Saturday night!

  Nisha said, “Okay, I am freaking out over this. Did you see that zombie video?”

  Amy said, “Yeah, it’s crazy. David is still there. In the town.”

  “Who?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Oh, wow. I’m so sorry. Is he okay?”

  “We don’t know. Nobody knows anything. John was there when everything happened, he just barely made it out.”

  She looked at John. “Oh. Wow. And he’s not … infected or anything, is he? He didn’t get bit?”

  “No, no. He was way away from everything when it happened. They actually let him out at the checkpoint, they checked him over and said he was fine.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “But don’t tell anybody, okay? People will freak out. You know how people are.”

  “Oh, totally.”

  “Do you mind if he crashes on the floor tonight? Tomorrow we’ll make some calls and go back and pick up David.”

  Pick up David, John thought. Like he just needs a ride.

  John thought the absinthe looked like it had barely been touched.

  “Absolutely,” said the roommate, even more oblivious. “Hey Pizza Factory is doing their two-for-one thing tonight.”

  John thought,

  Brains, splattered on blue plastic.

  As Amy said, “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we need to eat. Uh, John, what do you take on your pizza?”

  A part of John realized this was crazy, but another part of him wondered if there would be such a thing as pizza a week, or a month, from now.

  “John?”

  “Meat. I want meat on it. All of the meat that they have.”

  Amy sank into her beanbag chair and John noticed she called the pizza from speed dial. Nisha nodded to her absinthe bottle and said to John, “Wanna drink with me?”

  Well … it would be rude not to at this point.

  8 Days, 1 Hour Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

  Amy couldn’t help but notice that after John had gone on and on about how tired he was and how he’d had no sleep because he was busy rescuing David the night before, he was still going strong at midnight. He and Nisha finished off the absinthe but then Nisha we
nt down the hall and came back with another bottle of some kind of liquor or other. It had a pirate on the bottle. John was getting talkative and was suddenly in action hero mode. “We need weapons, that’s the first step,” he said. “We may have to improvise something. All those assholes gotta pay.”

  Pay for what?

  He was getting loud and that made Amy nervous because, apocalypse or not, it was against building policy to have overnight visitors from off campus and if the RA caught John in the room she’d make him leave. And then what would he do? Sleep in the truck? But now, he and Amy’s roommate were getting drunk and downing pizza and making a party out of it.

  Uh, everybody deals with crisis differently … I guess?

  They asked Amy if they could use her laptop and they both huddled over it, refreshing the news Web sites and all of the social networking hubs over and over and over again, even though nothing new was coming out of Undisclosed and Amy was pretty sure nothing new would come out until daytime. If nobody had reporters on the inside and the phone lines were down, then all that was coming out were the stupid rumors. Sitting there and sucking up the rumors wasn’t doing anyone any good, it was just following the crisis as a form of entertainment. The crisis that David was stuck right in the middle of. Amy didn’t think either of them even noticed when she got up, put on her jacket and walked out.

  There were still a lot of people in the common room. The channel got switched to Fox News and a panel of experts was desperately trying to fill airtime by finding ways to rephrase the nothing that they knew, over and over again. She thought it was fascinating how the coverage on the Internet and the coverage on TV were from alternate universes. TV was all “terror … terrorist … Al Qaeda…” and the Internet was “zombies … zombies … zombies…”

  Amy just kept walking toward the elevator and headed down, out of the building. She needed air.

  * * *

  The campus was buzzing. The hot dog truck was pulled up in front of the building and there was a line three wide and ten deep in front of it. Amy walked past because she wanted to wish Spiro the hot dog guy a happy birthday—his was one of the over two hundred birthdays programmed into the calendar app on her phone. He smiled and told her the hot dogs were free tonight, one per customer. Not because of his birthday, but because of the other thing.