This Book is Full of Spiders (35 page)

Josh laughed.

“I’m not joking. You’re not pixels on a screen. You’re flesh and blood. If you get spooked and shoot your friend, he’s dead, and dead forever, or in a wheelchair. You’ll live with that the rest of your life.
Leave the guns behind
. If there’s something in there, we are way, way,
way
more likely to survive if we just run as hard as we can back here, than if you try to stand and act out some video game fantasy. The guns will just weigh you down, Josh.”

“We’ll be careful, I promise.”

“No, you won’t, because you don’t have the training to understand what ‘careful’ is. Josh, I’m begging you.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“If you leave the guns here, when we get back,
I will have sex with you
. I’ll put that in writing. I am not kidding at all. Your friends can watch. You can videotape it.”

“Stop it. We’re not going in there without protection, and that’s that. And this isn’t a video game fantasy, you’re insulting all of us when you say that.”

As he spoke, Josh was affixing some small electronic device to his shotgun. Amy thought it was some kind of fancy scope, but Josh tapped away at his laptop, and a video window appeared. He swung the shotgun around and the video image swung around with it. Josh had a wireless gun camera.

He handed the laptop to Amy and said, “If we don’t make it back, make sure the video gets uploaded to the YouTube channel. The world needs to know what’s happened here.”

Amy said, “Oh, so I’m not going now?”

“We’ve got the guns—no, listen—we’re going to go make sure it’s all clear first. Then we’ll come back for you. Don’t look at me like that. We’re not being sexist here, Fredo’s going to wait behind, too, and he’s male as shit. He’s going to stay behind the wheel, engine running, in case we have to make a quick getaway. You’re going to be watching it live, on my gun cam. If things go bad in there and it looks like we’re not going to make it out, don’t hesitate to just g—”

“I won’t. Fredo, you hear that? If I say go, we go, right?”

“Yeah, I’m hitting the gas at the sound of gunshots and screams.”

To Amy, Josh said, “Okay, your new job is now to make sure Fredo doesn’t leave
unless it’s absolutely necessary.
”

To the men in the RV, Josh said, “Regulators, mount up.”

Everyone stood. One guy had a little flashlight attached to his gun, and he clicked it on. The kid in back strapped on his bulky night-vision goggles.

Josh said, “Remember, save your ammo. This isn’t a video game, we’re not going to pick up more along the way. Short, controlled bursts.” He turned to Amy and said, “I’ll be back. I promise.”

Josh took a deep breath and opened the side door. A blast of cold air shouldered its way in. Outside was the sound of wind whistling through the wounded building and suddenly Amy badly wanted that door closed and locked again, to have the warm, metal cocoon sealed off from whatever was out there.

Stop it.

The boys started filing out into the darkness and Amy heard Josh say, “Get your ears on.” Everybody pulled out earmuffs or plugs. Protecting against that debilitating monster shriek John had talked about.

The door clapped shut behind them. Amy looked down at the laptop and saw the asylum grounds on the shaky, grainy image from Josh’s gun feed, the barrel protruding into the bottom of the camera’s view. It lent a feeling of unreality to the whole thing. She wasn’t sitting in the middle of a clearly haunted abandoned TB asylum crawling with monsters. It was all just some stupid video she was watching on a computer.

The view bounced along the grounds, approaching the front doors of the old building. The guy to the left of Josh had the flashlight on his gun, the beam whipping wildly around the front lawn like the guy holding it was riding a mechanical bull. The view steadied as Josh arrived at the big, wooden front doors. Flashlight guy grabbed one of the old, tarnished brass handles and pulled. Locked. Josh knocked and said, “Hello? My name is Josh Cox, I’ve got a team of six armed uninfected out here. We’re offering our assistance to OGZA. Is anyone in there?” Nothing. They all stared at the locked door like a bunch of chimpanzees looking at a car engine. “We’ve, uh, been following your updates until the feed cut out a little while ago. Are any of you still at this location? Princespawn? Direwolf?”

Amy’s view whipped downward, as Josh apparently pointed the gun at the ground. The kid with the flashlight shouted, “I can pick the lock.” Another voice yelled, “No, you can’t.” Everyone screaming to be heard over their ear protection.

Josh yelled, “They probably got it barricaded. There’s probably some other door they come and go out of. Let’s go around. Everybody stay sharp.”

The view swung back up to shoulder level again, and the Hipster Zombie Squad edged along the wall of the building, the flashlight beam flashing back and forth, illuminating boarded-up windows and drifts of dead leaves blown against the foundation. Looking for another entrance.

Watching through the video feed was frustrating. Whenever the flashlight beam would swing out of view, the video window would go completely black—the little wireless camera had no night-vision capability. She peered up over the laptop and out of the windshield of the RV in time to see the gang disappear around the corner of the building. The trailing guy, the one who had the night-vision goggles and looked about thirteen years old, was sweeping his gun behind them. Watching their six, just like he saw somebody do in a movie. Or cartoon. He rounded the corner and Amy and Fredo were now truly alone.

“So,” she said. “How fast can this thing go?”

Fredo said, “Depends on how much stuff you want me to run over when I do it. Thing handles like a blimp.”

Amy returned to her laptop and in the video feed window saw the group had stopped moving. The mic on the gun camera was weak and she could barely pick up words over the background noise. Every time the wind blew, everything was drowned out by a sound like crashing ocean waves. The noise cleared up enough for her to hear Josh say “Where?”

She faintly heard Flashlight Guy yell, “Right there, man. Behind the wheelbarrow.”

She couldn’t see what they were looking at, Josh had a frustrating habit of pointing the gun camera at the most irrelevant spot possible, lazily aiming the gun at his feet, or the cloudy sky, or right at the head of one of his friends. By the time the camera angle settled on the spot, Flashlight was on his hands and knees, studying the ground in front of him. Did he lose a contact lens? Josh edged in closer, around a rusty wheelbarrow somebody had pulled out of the way, and Amy saw that they had found a basement window. The glass had been bashed out, probably decades ago. But if it had been boarded up, it wasn’t now.

Wind howled into the mic, obliterating bits of their conversation.

“—no way they just left it like this—”

“—don’t see anybody—”

“—hello? Can anyone hear me? My name is Josh Cox—”

“—No, let’s go in—”

Flashlight aimed his beam through the window while the guy with the Vietnam gun—Donnie—got down on his hands and knees, and writhed into the building, the jagged bits of broken glass making it look like a brick mouth was swallowing him whole.

For a moment, nothing happened. Amy could feel her bladder seizing up as she watched the dark basement window bobbing in the gun-cam feed. Finally, Donnie’s hands emerged and gestured that the coast was clear. Josh was next, but the camera stayed behind as he handed his gun to somebody so he’d have his hands free to crawl in. The view swirled around as the gun was handed back and forth, and then a moment later Amy was looking at a dim room that looked like an old cafeteria with a faded black-and-red checkerboard tile floor. The view swung back around to the window, then to the floor nearby where a sheet of ancient plywood bristling with curled nails had been tossed aside.

Josh yelled, “They did have it barricaded. Somebody took it off from inside.”

As another guy crawled through the window, someone off camera said, “Told you, man. They evacuated, prob’ly for the same reason the feds did. We prob’ly passed ’em on the road comin’ here.”

Josh said, “You sound relieved, Mills.”

“Man, when we didn’t get an answer I thought we were gonna find this place full of dead bodies.”

“Me, too.”

“Hey, if you’re suggesting we abort, you convinced me.”

Loudly and clearly, Josh said, “Not until we do a sweep of the building.” Amy decided Josh just now remembered that everything was being recorded for possible posthumous YouTubing.

The whole gang of six was inside the cafeteria now. Somebody shouted, “Well, we know they was here. Left a lantern behind.”

The camera found a green propane camper’s lantern in the corner. Someone yelled, “Anybody know how to light it?” They didn’t. After about ten minutes of them farting around and Amy yelling into the laptop monitor to just leave it, Jesus Christ people, they got it lit.

Lantern in hand, they ventured out of the cafeteria and into a hallway. Flashlight Guy went first, Josh right behind him with the camera gun. The lantern carrier followed, casting a soft glow and distorted shadows around the group. The team investigated two other rooms, each time going through this ridiculous SWAT team procedure that Amy had seen in movies, where guys with guns would lean on opposite sides of the door frame while Josh kicked in the door. Both times the rooms revealed themselves to be empty. Amy knew exactly nothing about SWAT procedure, but knew from where Josh’s gun camera was pointing that he never checked the corners to his right and left when he entered the new rooms. It seemed even to her untrained eye that this would make these guys really easy to ambush, and this further solidified her opinion that these guys knew even less about how to walk through a building with guns than she did. They reached a door marked
STAIRS,
did their room-entering dance again, and took a flight of stairs down to a subbasement. They reached a short hallway with some office type rooms—empty—and one serious-looking metal door. Big lock, a steel grate instead of a window. The kind of door you saw in a prison.

It was standing open.

Through the door, the guys entered a hallway that to Amy looked a lot like a prison block. Rusting metal doors lined up on each side, a few standing open. Inside each one they checked was a bed, a sink and a toilet.

Amy thought,
they were not keeping tuberculosis patients down here.

On camera somebody said, “What’s that?” and Josh’s gun cam focused on the floor. What was laying there was, for some reason, far creepier to Amy than anything short of a severed clown head.

A tattered, old teddy bear.

A chill ran up her spine, and for the first time she considered asking Fredo if there was a way to contact the guys, to get them to come back, to think up a different plan.

Somebody off camera shouted, “Man, what’s that smell?”

“Maybe the old sewer backed up down here somewhere?”

The flashlight beam bobbed down a creepy hallway. Somebody tried one of the closed doors. Locked. They peeked inside each of the open ones. No people, or zombies.

From a foot away from Amy, a voice said, “Anything?”

She almost jumped through the roof of the RV. It was Fredo, peering over her shoulder at the laptop screen.

“They’re inside. They found a window to crawl through. Empty so far. They’re on the next floor down.”

On the video screen, somebody said, “Guys, guys. What’s that? There, on the floor?”

The gun camera swept across the floor, finding nothing until it reached one particular door. Something was oozing out from the bottom.

“Oh my God, what is it? Is it blood?”

“That’s not blood, man. Smell it.”

“Is there a sewer line back th—”

“Shhhh. Listen.”

Amy could hear nothing over the laptop’s speakers. Donnie, the only guy in the view of the camera, pulled back one ear from his earmuffs, listening intently like a dog.

“There’s something in there.”

Everyone fell silent.

“You hear it? Something scratching.”

Somebody said,
“Jesus fuck.”

Josh aimed the camera, and thus the shotgun, at the door and said, “It’s not locked. Look, it’s open just a crack. Donnie, open it up. Open it and get out of the way fast.”

Slowly, a hand reached in, presumably belonging to Donnie. It pulled the latch on the door and jerked out of the way. The door swung open and—

“OH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!”

Panic. The camera swung around.

“WHAT IS IT MAN WHAT IS IT? OH MAN THAT’S SHIT MAN THAT’S SHIT COMING OUT—”

“IT’S ALIVE, JOSH, IT’S ALIVE! HOW IS IT STILL ALIVE?!”

“KILL IT, MAN! KILL IT!”

There was the sound of banging on metal. The doorway swung back into view and somebody was kicking the door closed. The camera was pulling back—Josh was backing away. Somebody was whimpering, “Jesus, man. Jesus. Was that his mouth? What was that? Was that a man? What did they do to him?”

Somebody else said, “Was that OGZA? Was that one of the OGZA guys?
Motherfucker
.”

“We can’t just leave him like that, man, we can’t. Jesus…”

The camera view was looking at the floor, at the brown puddles. Then it tracked sideways, following the floor and the other doors down the hall.

All of the doors were oozing.

The camera tracked the ooze all the way to the end of the hall, where there was a single closed door, a partially obscured sign that said
MAINTENAN
at the top.

The door was riddled with bullet holes.

Josh whispered, “Guys. Guys. Pay attention.”

The flashlight swung around and lit up the door. Somebody off camera said, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

Josh said, “Amy, if you can still see this, make sure it’s saving the feed for playback later. If I don’t get back, tell my parents and sis that I love them. Safeties off, everybody.”

Amy said, “Josh! Come back! Come back to the RV! Now.”

Fredo said, “He can’t hear you.”

The camera view wobbled down the hall, the
MAINTENAN
door growing in the video window. Josh gestured with his free hand, and two guys, Donnie and another guy Amy hadn’t seen on camera yet, did their thing, laying against the wall at each side of the door. Josh stood in front of the door. Gun barrels edged into view on his left and his right.