This Book is Full of Spiders (29 page)

I shivered. Couldn’t get warm. Or maybe the shivering was something else. So damned quiet. No TV. No ticking clock. No soft whoosh of heat blowing through vents. Not even the reassuring hum of countless electronic devices that you don’t even register until it’s gone.

Somebody coughed out in the hall. A dog barked way off in the distance.

I shivered.

I remembered getting into a drunken argument with a guy about American prisons, him talking about the injustice of the system, me talking about how it’s ridiculous that we spend forty grand a year per inmate to maintain what are basically super-clean hotels for rapists and crack dealers, complete with a computer lab and TV room and pool tables. But now I understood what he was saying. That knowledge that you can’t leave, it’s a twisting knife in your gut. All I could think about was that razor wire at the top of the fence, meant to slice your hands down to the tendons if you tried to climb over. My own government put that there, with my hands in mind. Those hundreds of vicious blades hanging fifteen feet over the bloodstains and brains in the grass of the last guy who tried to climb up. But even prisoners knew when their sentence was up, they could tick off days on a calendar, feel themselves progressing toward freedom. But this place? They could keep us here forever. Or poison our food, like Hope said. Or starve us out. Or let the drone operator use us for target practice. Or fill the yard with nerve gas.

I shivered.

I couldn’t stop. I laid on my side and brought my knees up, trying to control it. Where was Amy right now? Could she have gotten out of town? How the hell could she, the way they were locking the place down at the end there?

I thought I’d lay there, shivering, staring at the wall until the sun came up. I could sense no sleep on the horizon. But when I heard footsteps in my room later, I realized I had drifted off.

I didn’t move. I pulled open my eyes and stared at the wall. I heard nothing, decided I dreamed it. My eyes slipped shut—

My bed shifted. Weight. Gentle, settling in.

I thought,
Hope?

She was friendly earlier, but were we … friendly? Holy shit was that possible? I wouldn’t think I’d do that to Amy but … here, alone, in this cold place? Would I turn down a warm girl and soft skin and the chance to do the one thing that would let me forget all this? I admitted, I didn’t hate the idea. I stayed frozen, on my side, not sure what to do. I thought about reaching back, looking for a thigh or a hip. Casually, you know. Just to see who was there. I wondered if I would find her naked. An entire separate part of my nervous system roared to life at the thought. I moved my hand, slowly. My heart was pumping.

Now watch, you’ll roll over and it’ll be TJ, wearing a tiny leopard-skin thong.

I reached out and rolled over at the same time.

I grabbed a handful of red fur.

Molly

Note: Do not ask the author how the details of the following sequence of events were obtained. The explanation would only leave you more confused and dissatisfied than would any theory you could come up with from your own imagination.

*   *   *

Experienced pet owners know that if your pet ever goes missing, the first step is not to panic. The vast majority of the time, the pet will simply find its way back home on its own.

Molly
knew this, so she hadn’t been all that concerned when her male human first went missing nine days ago. In the beginning, things had been in a general state of agitation everywhere Molly went, so she figured it had something to do with that.

That was the day all of the people had been shouting at each other, and running, and falling down. It was hard to find a place to sleep quietly but eventually she found a shady spot between two buildings, and she curled up in the shadow of one of those huge green boxes humans use to store their extra food. This one had some great-smelling poultry in it, maybe four or five days old, but those boxes were hard to get out of once you got into them and she wasn’t hungry. She had just eaten the rest of the discarded meal that her human had forgotten to give her the night before.

What passes for language among dogs—made up mostly of a lavishly detailed sense of smell and a well-tuned but cautious sense of empathy for all living things—cannot be translated neatly into English. But if it could, the closest translation of Molly’s name for her human, the one other humans called David, was “Meatsmell.” His breath always smelled like meat—always, as if he had just eaten some recently, no matter when you encountered him. To a dog that spoke of an awe-inspiring accomplishment. She was proud of Meatsmell’s ability to always have access to such riches. She knew she had taught him well.

But she also knew that Meatsmell was always getting confused. Molly knew that he couldn’t look after himself, and that he depended on her. She guarded his house every night, keeping all of the predators and bad guys at bay. She sometimes let him pet her, feeling his stress and agitation melt way as he did so. She also kept dropped food picked up off the floor, and fished out the edible items when he would accidentally drop them into those big flimsy bags and take them out to the yard (where anyone could get them!). Molly was certain that Meatsmell would not last more than a day or two on his own.

On the evening of that day, the day when everything went wrong, Molly had woken up after dark, the hard ground having grown cold under her. It had started to rain a little. She made her way back toward home, but that took a long time. She kept having to stop and investigate smells. There was smoke that stung her nose everywhere she went, things were burning here and there and she knew that could not be good news because the humans were already riled up. When things started catching on fire that rarely calmed them down. She had stopped and sniffed a patch of fresh blood, and the freshly dead human laying next to it in the rain. A little way down the road, she stopped and smelled another one, sniffing around where some of its insides had spilled out onto the ground.

She got closer to her home and there were several such people laying around, with parts separated and some burned up. One of them was very small. None of them were Meatsmell, she would have known that from far away. The smoke smell was here, too. There was no fire now, but there had been recently. Now, everything was just smoky and cold and wet. She went into the house, because the door was open, and went right to her food and water dishes.

It was all wrong. Everything was all black and twisted. Her water dish had water in it, but it was rainwater that tasted like smoke. There was no food in her dish at all. That is when she knew Meatsmell was in trouble—he would not forget food time. If he had forgotten to feed Molly, who knew how long it had been since he had fed himself.

It was then that Molly had noticed that it was still raining on her as she stood over her bowls. This wasn’t right. The wind was still coming in, too. Where was the warmth and light and the endless food smells? She went looking for her bed but even it was cold and wet and strangely flat. She couldn’t get comfortable—she hated sleeping in the rain—and trotted around outside the house until she found the small entrance to the space under the floor where she sometimes went when she didn’t want to be bothered. It was nice and dry and shielded from the wind. She curled up on the dirt and drifted off, deciding that if Meatsmell came back soon she would let him sleep down here, too.

*   *   *

Light poured into the entrance to her sleeping spot and Molly instinctively moved to go somewhere darker. But then she realized Meatsmell still was not home and that he was probably somewhere scared and hungry and waiting for Molly to come get him.

Molly went on the hunt. Tracking Meatsmell would clearly begin with the last spot where she had seen him—at the little building down the road where he always bought his rolls of spicy meat. She set off down the street under the morning sun. She was disappointed to see that the humans had not settled down one bit after a night’s sleep—a lot of men who were all wearing the same clothes, with big coverings over their heads, were shouting at the other people who were all wearing different clothes, maybe telling them that they should all be wearing the same clothes, too. There was a terrible bang and Molly flinched. Noises that loud didn’t happen in the normal world, only people could make sounds like that. One of the different-clothed people fell over and they weren’t alive anymore.

Molly ran to get some distance from the shouting people, then turned one last time to get a look. She had noticed something curious and had to double-check. One of the people in the different-clothes crowd was not in fact people. He looked just like a person, but he was something else, just pretending to be one. It was the same for one of the same-clothes people, and she got the feeling the other same-clothes people did not realize this. This phenomenon was not new to Molly, but she always took note of it because it seemed to be the source of a lot of anxiety for Meatsmell and his friends.

Molly hurried down the street and arrived at the tiny spicy meat building. No one was there at this time in the morning, but the place was bursting with smells. Not just all of the exotic meat the place cooked in big heaping piles, but of people. Molly sniffed the ground, making a full circle of the hard, cold surface around the building. She picked up the scent of Meatsmell, and the angry man who was trying to hurt Meatsmell, and John.

She followed the scents right to the narrow door, now standing open. She sniffed her way into a little room full of items that were not food. She sniffed and sniffed, in an instant learning the long and dramatic story of a possum who had died nearby a few days ago, then someone stepped in the juices that leaked from his body, then they tracked it into this room. Then a cat slept in here not even one day ago.

Molly was so distracted by the drama of the tiny room’s floor that she failed to notice that the sun had gone away. She turned around and went back outside, only to realize she was no longer at the little building. She was now looking at a flat expanse of pavement exploding with fresh smells. Blood. Sweat. Smoke. Terror.

Molly had sniffed and sniffed, taking it all in, replaying through her nose the story of scared men killing other scared men.

There.

Meatsmell had been here. The scent led off toward where lots of the same-clothes men were gathered. Meatsmell was not among them. There was a fence that went both ways as far as Molly could see, and she sensed that Meatsmell was on the other side. So she just needed to find a way in. Shouldn’t be a problem. Molly went and found a sunny spot, and curled up and went to sleep.

*   *   *

It took a full week to find her way in. In that time she was chased by some of the same-clothes people, and other dogs, and was almost hit by cars more times than she could remember. But she made it, inside the big building full of terrible smells—layers upon layers of ancient sickness and slow death. Now she was curled up next to Meatsmell and it wasn’t raining on them and everything was back the way it was supposed to be. She fell into a deep sleep, inside this huge building full of anxious and tired people, many of whom she noticed were not really people.

4 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John
had lost track of how many consecutive days he had woken up not knowing where he was. This place was full of people and echoes and creaky boards and mold. Someone was shouting at him to wake up. He sat up on the cot and the first thing he saw was one of the terrifying Darth Vader guys holding a machine gun. John thought,
oh, right. It’s this bullshit still.

Two spacemen surged forward and lifted John off his cot and took him roughly out of the gym and into an old shower room covered in ancient chipped tiles held together by mildew. John half expected to see a dozen naked men in black space helmets snapping towels at each other. Instead he found himself alone, the long-dry shower room now piled high with boxes of rubber gloves and syringes and trash bags and every other thing. He was alone for ten minutes, until he was joined by—

“Detective Falconer! Shouldn’t you be wearing a space suit?”

Falconer was wearing his street clothes—jeans, a black turtleneck and an empty shoulder holster under his armpit. Cowboy boots. Little bit of beard stubble. John wondered if the guy would walk from one end of the street to the other without winding up covered in bitches.

Falconer said, “A suit wouldn’t help, would it?”

“Might buy you a few seconds. Where’s Amy?”

“Who?”

“Dave’s girlfriend? Redhead. Only one hand? They snatched her up. Both of us. But I think she got away, they don’t seem to know where she is. I don’t know if she’s in town, or…”

“Didn’t see her.”

“What about Dave?”

“I can ask but they won’t tell me either way.”

“Because you don’t work for the CDC.”

“Does this shit look like the CDC to you? You see what those guys were wearing? What they were packing? No, they’re not CDC and I’m not one of them. I’m being processed for infected, just like you. I turned myself in. I got them to let me talk to you because I said you might have information, but when we’re done, both of us will get tossed over the fence down at the hospital. And it sounds like nobody comes back out of there.”

“You turned yourself in? Great plan you had there, detective.”

“I am really trying to restrain myself here. Do you understand? This all happened because of you two shitbirds.”

“Man, fuck you. I don’t think Dave made it out. Did you know that? I’m pretty sure he got his brains blown out when everything went bad. Or if not, they got him after shit went to hell. Either way…”

“Well, I’m sorry if that’s true. But I can say that I don’t know that to be true, either. Some people were killed in that first round of riots but I never heard that he was among them.”

John shrugged.

“But, none of this is my main point.” Falconer moved to a spot where he could see the gym from where he was standing. Making sure nobody was close enough to listen.