This Book is Full of Spiders (39 page)

Fredo slumped over, dead.

A Trial by the Fire

Owen was pointing a gun at my head. An impromptu late-night tribunal had formed around the quarantine bonfire. I shivered. The fire had that campfire effect of making your front too hot and your back too cold.

Owen had waited in the boiler room for somebody to come crawling back through, fleeing whatever violence had erupted on the other end. He waited patiently through hellish echoes of shotgun blasts and screams, waited as the report of machine gun and shotguns ended the screams one by one. He waited while I screamed into the tunnel, for TJ, or Hope, or Corey, or anyone. He watched me throw up in the corner and waited while I put my head in my hands and heard those screams echo through my head over and over and over and over again.

Then I had a gun at my forehead and he was pulling me to my feet.

Five minutes later I was standing in a crowd of red jumpsuits. Everybody was out of bed. The echoing rattle of gunshots from a few blocks down the street—right on the back of the mysterious flares that came from the same direction—had everyone awake and at DEFCON 1.

From behind the nine millimeter, Owen said, “Now that you got everybody’s attention, why don’t you tell them what that shooting was about.”

I was so tired. It was the unique type of exhaustion that comes from failure on top of failure. Futility and fuckups take a lot out of a man—I should know, since that was pretty much my whole life up to this point. I didn’t have the energy to defend myself.

Those goddamned screams.

“Do what you want, Owen. But don’t make a show out of it.”

“A show. That’s what you think this is, bro?” He shook his head. “All right. Allow me to summarize for the fuckin’ jury. You and TJ found an escape tunnel. Instead of tellin’ the camp about it, you tiptoed around, gathered up your green clique, and tried to crawl out while everybody else was asleep. You left behind sick people, you left behind pregnant women, you left behind moms who ain’t seen their kids since the outbreak.”

“They still got drones buzzing around up there. If suddenly the population of this place goes from three hundred to zero, and a goddamned crowd spontaneously forms outside the fence, they’re gonna figure out what happened. And then they’re gonna rain holy hell down on that crowd. It was either a few of us go, or nobody.”

“And of course
you
get to make that decision, all on your own, don’t you? See, because none of us are as smart as you. We couldn’t have organized a way to do it without dooming the entire quarantine. No, only you.”

I shrugged. “You’d have stopped us, Owen. And you know it. You’d have started sticking that gun in everybody’s face. Same as you’re doing now.”

“And why would I ever do such a thing? Because I’m an asshole, right? Here, why don’t you tell everybody what happened to all your friends who crawled into that tunnel.”

“We don’t … necessarily know. We heard gunshots and—”

“What happened to them is
exactly what I have been saying would happen
to anybody who tried to make a break for it. It’s what I would have explained to you—
again
—if you’d asked. Because from the first day that gate closed on this quarantine, I said that anybody who crossed that line
was gonna die.
Because as far as anybody outside of that fence knows, every single one of us is tainted. And that fence is the only thing keepin’ back a tide that will turn the fuckin’ rivers into blood. That means all of us in here got to band together. But you, TJ and the rest of you greens, you never got that.”

I shook my head. “No. The difference is that we had a chance at freedom and were willing to take it. Unlike you.”

“Uh huh. And just to be clear, you were gonna be among the escapees, right? If I’d showed up five seconds later than I did?”

“Hell, yes.”

“You don’t even know what I’m saying, do you, you arrogant little prick? You’re
the only one who can sort infected from uninfected.
If you’d gone through there, what choice would you have left us the next time a truck full of people rolled through that fence? What choice would we have—would
I
have—but to burn each and every one of them? You crawling into that hole would have doomed every man and woman who got shoved through that gate,
bro
. And you’d have condemned me to have to do the killing, in the name of protecting the other three hundred swinging dicks who are trying to stay alive in this quarantine. I get to live with the final expression of every face I put that gun in, for the rest of my life, to smell their fuckin’ skin and hair burning, every night, for the rest of my life. And I bet you never even paused three seconds to consider that.”

“I don’t know. I … Amy…”

“And if you’d made it through and the feds started raining death on
this
end of the tunnel, all you’d have felt is relief. You’d never have given us a second thought. It’s all about saving your own ass. And that tells me that you’re gonna sabotage this operation again the first chance you get, for whatever selfish reason pops into your fat, arrogant head. And that means we can’t trust your judgment to be our ‘Spider-Man’ any longer. And that means that as long as you’re alive and walkin’ around in here, the three hundred—I’m sorry,
the two hundred and seventy
—men and women in this quarantine are in danger. Is there anybody standing here, including you, Wong, who can make a convincing argument otherwise?”

No one spoke. Not even me. The wind howled. The bonfire whooshed and crackled. I looked into the fire and the burning eyes of two dozen charred skulls stared back at me.

I said, “Nope.”

Mop-Up

Amy
spun out of her seat and crawled to the rear of the RV, knees and hand crunching over cubes of safety glass. She knocked aside the spilled laptop, her knee crushed a box of Pop-Tarts. She crawled and crawled and eventually ran out of RV.

She turned over and pressed her back against the rear wall. She pulled up her knees and made herself as small as possible. Frigid air blew in from the busted windshield and it felt like the tears and sweat were freezing solid on her face.

She huddled, in the cold and the darkness, staring at the dismembered and lifeless corpse of Fredo the RV driver. His right foot was twitching. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

The driver’s-side door yanked open. Amy screamed.

Fredo’s corpse was yanked out into the night. She screamed again. She pulled her knees tighter, and twisted her hair in her fingers, and squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make it all go away.

There were tearing and smacking sounds from outside, set to the tune of the open door chime from the RV.

*   *   *

Bing …

*   *   *

Bing …

*   *   *

Bing …

*   *   *

She needed to get out, to run, to hide. Or to get behind the wheel and stomp on the gas. Instead, she balled herself tighter, and clinched her eyelids.

Inhuman feet crunched through the glass in front of her. Warmth spread across her thighs and she wet herself for the first time since she was five years old.

The steps came closer, and closer, crackling through the broken glass until she could feel warm breath on her cheek.

*   *   *

Bing …

*   *   *

Bing …

*   *   *

Bing …

Book III

Posted on FreeRepublic.com

by user DarylLombard, Nov. 11, 1:31
P.M.

They laughed. They laughed when I stocked up on canned goods, they laughed when I stocked up on ammunition, they laughed when I said the storm clouds were gathering. Same as they laughed at Noah. And, as with Noah, they come clawing at my door as the flood rolls in. Sorry. This is why I was building an ark while you were doing drugs and watching reality TV.

I appreciate all of the prayers and expressions of concern from you over the last week (for those of who you don’t know, I live not three miles outside of Outbreak Ground Zero in [Undisclosed]). But we are safe because we have prepared. We have food to last a year. We have water from our own well. We have fuel to last three years. We have guns, and everyone in our family is trained to use them.

On the day of outbreak, one of my son’s (the “musician”) druggie friends and his little girlfriend came by. You can picture him even without my description—long hair, covered in tattoos, track marks on his arms, showing early signs of HIV infection. A pro-Atheism bumper sticker on his car.

He wanted to shack up with us, eat our food, drink our water, sleep under our protection while the pestilence and depravity ran rampant outside. I pulled him aside by his scrawny arm and said:

“What can you do?”

He looks at me with that slackjawed look and says, “What do you mean, dude?”

“I mean what can you do? Can you shoot a rifle accurately at fifty yards? Do you know how to gut an animal? Or make a fishing net and clean what you catch? Can you fertilize a garden? Or purify water? Can you repair a small engine? Or even gap and change a sparkplug? Can you wire an electrical outlet? Repair a roof when it leaks? Set a broken bone? Can you make your own clothes? Field strip and clean a rifle? Reload ammunition from spent brass? Disinfect and sew shut a wound?”

Of course he said he didn’t know how to do any of these things.

He had spent his life playing video games and doing drugs and had probably fathered five welfare babies, demanding the whole time that I pay for their health care. When a pipe leaks, he calls the landlord (at best) or (more likely) just lets it leak. Let the next tenant find out the floorboards have rotted and that every wall is covered with mold. His little girlfriend would be the type to cry about rights for animals because she thinks meat grows in the grocery store display counter. Smoking pot and spitting on our soldiers when they return home from fighting terrorists because she lives obliviously in a little cocoon built from our sweat and blood and tears.

I said to him, “Imagine there’s a meteor coming to destroy the world. But some rich men have pooled their resources and built a big rocket ship to get people off the planet. They don’t have room for everybody, but you want a seat on that ship. Now, your having a seat means somebody else doesn’t get one. Space is limited. Food is limited. What would you tell the man standing at the door? What case would you make for getting a seat on that rocket ship at the expense of another person? What can you offer that would justify the food you would eat, and the water you would drink, and the medicine you would use?”

He said to me, “I don’t know, dude. I don’t see no spaceship here.”

And I said, “What you didn’t realize was that you were always in that situation. Only the spaceship is planet Earth, and your creator built it for you. And you had your whole life to make your case for why you should be allowed to stay. Instead, you did drugs, and played video games, and collected welfare. Well, this ship is taking off without you.”

That boy walked away without a word.

Maybe I’ll see him and his little girlfriend again, out among the diseased and the starving, running from the riots and the chaos. And I will say, “You had your chance. All your life those ‘crazy’ preachers were trying to tell you that the day of reckoning was coming. You chose to ignore it. Now it is too late.”

This is the way it should be. There are two kinds of people in the world: producers and parasites. When a society gets too many parasites, we need the disaster, the tsunami, the earthquake, the war, the flood, the disease to wash away the garbage, to rinse the safety nets of the slugs that use them as a hammock. Let them fall into the fire, so that the strong, the faithful and the capable will be left behind to rebuild, and renew humanity.

That day has come.

They laughed at me when I stocked up on food and fuel and ammunition.

Who’s laughing now?

12 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John
was rocked out of unconsciousness by the blast of a shotgun and the warm splash of brains in his hair.

Hands were grabbing him from all over, tugging at the spindly legs of the unholy daddy longlegs creature. When he was free of the monster, John rolled over and saw a cowboy-looking dude in incredibly tight pants holding a smoking double-barrel shotgun. He was wearing earmuffs.

The crowd of people standing around John were surprisingly human-looking for infected, and were pretty well-dressed for zombies. The cowboy said, “You all right, buddy?”

John couldn’t think of how to answer that. His ribs hurt and it was kind of hard to breathe. The back of his neck was wet with monster blood, and he had gotten all worked up anticipating his own mortality only to find out it was on back order. He needed a drink so badly he was wondering if there was a gas station nearby that pumped ethanol, and if there would be a way to crawl into the underground tank.

Three burly guys were wrestling the spider monster. The human head at the center was shattered from the shotgun blast, but the parasite inside was still thrashing for life. A massive pickup truck sporting dual wheels and flared rear fenders backed up in the street. There was some kind of machine in the bed, a big red thing with a motor and chutes and wheels. Somebody started it. It sounded like a lawnmower. Only when they started cramming the giant, squirming daddy longlegs into the chute did John realize it was a wood chipper.

There was that terrible shriek, and red slush went spraying into the neighbor’s yard. When the last of the creature’s eight legs vanished into the jaws of the machine John thought,
well, that’s one way to do it.

John tried to get up, but Cowboy pointed the shotgun and said, “Now, just stay seated for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

From behind John, Falconer barked, “I’m a cop, asshole! See that on my belt? That’s a badge.”