This Book is Full of Spiders

48 Hours Prior to Outbreak

“I’m not crazy,” I said, crazily, to my court-appointed therapist.

He seemed bored with our session. That actually made me want to act crazy, to impress him. Maybe that was his tactic. I thought, maybe I should tell him I’m the only person on Earth who has seen his entire skeleton.

Or, I could make something up instead. The therapist, whose name I had already forgotten, said, “You believe your role here is to convince me you’re not crazy?”

“Well… you know I’m not here by choice.”

“You don’t think you need the sessions.”

“I understand why the judge ordered it. I mean it’s better than jail.”

He nodded. I guess that was my cue to keep talking. Man, psychiatry seems like a pretty easy job. I said, “A couple months ago I shot a pizza delivery guy with a crossbow. I was drunk.”

Pause. Nothing from the doctor. He was in his fifties, but looked like he could still take me in a game of basketball, even though I was half his age. His gray hair was cut like a 1990’s era George Clooney. Type of guy whose life had gone exactly as he’d expected it. I bet he’d never shot a delivery guy with a crossbow even once.

I said, “Okay, I wasn’t drunk. I’d only had one beer. I thought the guy was threatening me and my girlfriend Amy. It was a misunderstanding.”

“He said you accused him of being a monster.”

“It was dark.”

“The neighbors heard you shout to him, and I’m quoting from the police report, ‘Go back to Hell you unholy abomination, and tell Korrok I have a lot more arrows where that came from.’”

“Well… that’s out of context.”

“So you do believe in monsters.”

“No. Of course not. It was… a metaphor or something.”

He had a nameplate on his desk: Dr. Bob Tennet. Next to it was a bobblehead of a St. Louis Cardinals baseball player. I glanced around the room, saw he had a leftover Halloween decoration still taped to his window, a cardboard jack-o’-lantern with a cartoon spider crawling out of its mouth. The doctor had only five books on the shelf behind him, which I thought was hilarious because I owned more books than that and I wasn’t even a doctor. Then I realized they were all written by him. They had long titles like The Madness of Crowds: Decoding the Dynamics of Group Paranoia and A Person Is Smart, People Are Stupid: An Analysis of Mass Hysteria and Groupthink. Should I be flattered or insulted that I apparently got referred to a world-class expert in the subject of why people believe in stupid shit?

He said, “You understand, the court didn’t order these sessions because you believe in monsters.”

“Right, they want to make sure I won’t shoot anyone else with a crossbow.”

He laughed. That surprised me. I didn’t think these guys were allowed to laugh. “They want to make sure you’re not a danger to yourself or others. And while I know it’s counterintuitive, that process will actually be easier if you don’t think of it as a test you have to pass.”

“But if I’d shot somebody over a girl or a stolen case of beer, I wouldn’t be here. I’m here because of the monster thing. Because of who I am.”

“Do you want to talk about your beliefs?”

I shrugged. “You know the stories that go around this town. People disappear here. Cops disappear. But I can tell the difference between reality and fantasy. I work, I have a girlfriend, I’m a productive citizen. Well, not productive, I mean if you add up what I bring to society and what I take out, society probably breaks even. And I’m not crazy. I mean, I know anybody can say that. But a crazy person can’t fake sane, right? The whole point of being crazy is that you can’t separate crazy ideas from normal ones. So, no, I don’t believe the world is full of monsters disguised as people, or ghosts, or men made of shadows. I don’t believe that the town of—

*The name of the town where this story takes place will remain undisclosed so as not to add to the local tourism traffic.*

—is a howling orgy of nightmares. I fully recognize that all of those are things only a mentally ill person believes. Therefore, I do not believe them.”

Boom. Therapy accomplished.

No answer from Dr. Tennet. Fuck him. I’ll sit like this forever. I’m great at not talking to people.

After a minute or so I said, “Just… to be clear, what’s said in this room doesn’t leave this room, right?”

“Unless I believe a crime is about to be committed, that’s correct.”

“Can I show you something? On my phone? It’s a video clip. I recorded it myself.”

“If it’s important to you.”

I pulled out the phone and dug through the menus until I found a thirty-second clip I’d recorded about a month ago. I held it up for him to see.

It was a nighttime scene, at an all-night burrito stand near my house. Out front was a faded picnic table, a rusted fifty-five-gallon drum for a trash can and a whiteboard with prices scrawled in dry erase marker. Without a doubt the best burritos you can possibly get within six blocks of my house at four in the morning.

The grainy shot (my phone’s camera wasn’t worth a damn in low light) caught the glare of headlights as a black SUV pulled up. Stepping out of it was a young Asian man in a shirt and tie. He casually walked around the tiny orange building, nodding to the kid at the counter. He went to a narrow door in the rear, opened it and stepped inside.

After about ten seconds, the shot shakily moved toward the door. A hand extended into frame—my hand—and pulled the door open. Inside were some cardboard boxes with labels like LARGE LIDS and MED. PAPER BAGS—WHITE along with a broom and a mop and bucket.

The Asian man was gone. There was no visible exit.

The clip ended.

I said, “You saw it, right? Guy goes in, guy doesn’t come out. Guy’s not in there. He’s not in the burrito stand. He’s just gone.”

“You believe this is evidence of the supernatural.”

“I’ve seen this guy since then. Around town. This isn’t some burrito shop Bermuda Triangle, sucking in innocent passersby. The guy walked right toward it, on purpose. And he came out somewhere else. And I knew he was coming, because he did the same thing, every night, at the same time.”

“You believe there was a secret passage or something of the sort?”

“Not a physical one. There’s no hatch in the floor or anything. We checked. No, it’s like a… wormhole or something. I don’t know. But that’s not even the point. It’s not just that there was a, uh, magical burrito door there, or whatever it was, it’s that the guy knew what it was and how to use it. There are people like that around town.”

“And you believe these people are dangerous.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, I am not going to shoot him with a crossbow. How can you not be impressed by this?”

“It’s important to you that I believe you.”

I just realized he was phrasing all of his questions as statements. Wasn’t there a character in Alice in Wonderland who did that? Did Alice punch him in the face?

“Okay. I could have faked the video. You have the option of believing that. And man, if I could have that option, like if I could buy it from you, I’d pay anything. If you told me you’d reach into my brain and turn off my belief in all of this stuff, and in exchange I just had to let you, say, shoot me in the balls with one of those riot control beanbag guns, I’d sign the deal right now. But I can’t.”

“That must be very frustrating for you.”

I snorted. I looked down at the floor between my knees. There was a faded brown stain on the carpet and I wondered if a patient had once taken a shit in here in the middle of a session. I ran my hands through my hair and felt my fingers tighten and twist it, pain radiating down my scalp.

Stop it.

He said, “I can see this is upsetting you. We can change the subject if you like.”

I made myself sit up and take a deep breath.

“No. This is what we’re here to talk about, right?”

He shrugged. “I think it’s important to you.”

Yes, in the way that the salt is important to the slug.

He said, “It’s up to you.”

I sighed, considered for a few beats, then said, “One time, early in the morning, I was getting ready for work. I go into the bathroom and…”

… turned on the shower, but the water just stopped in midair.

I don’t mean the water hovered there, frozen in time. That would be crazy. No, the spray was pouring down about twelve inches from the nozzle, then spreading and splattering as if the stream was breaking against something solid. Like an invisible hand was held under the showerhead to test the temperature.

I stood there outside the shower stall, naked, squinting in dull confusion. Now, I’m not the smartest guy under normal circumstances but my 6 A.M. brain has an IQ of about 65. I vaguely thought it was some kind of plumbing problem. I stared stupidly at the interrupted umbrella-shaped spray of water, resisting the impulse to reach out and touch the space the water couldn’t seem to pass through. Fear was slowly bubbling up into my brain. Hairs stood up on my back. I glanced down, blinking, as if I would find a note explaining all of this taped to my pubic hair. I didn’t.

Then, I heard the spray change, the splattering on the tiles taking on a different tone. I glanced up and saw the part of the flow farthest from me slowly return to normal, the water shooting past the invisible obstruction in a gentle arc. The unseen thing was passing out of the stream. It wasn’t until the spray looked completely normal again that I realized this meant the invisible thing that had been blocking the water was now moving toward me.

I jumped back, moving so quick that I thought the half-open shower curtain had blown back from the wind of my rapid movement. But that wasn’t right, because the curtain didn’t return to its normal shape right away. It stayed bulged outward, something unseen pushing against it. I backed up against the wall, feeling the towel bar pressing into my back. The shower curtain fell straight again and now there was nothing in the bathroom but the radio static sound of the shower splattering against tile. I stood there, frozen, heart pounding so hard I was getting dizzy. I slowly put a hand out, tentative, toward the curtain, through the space the unseen thing had passed…

Nothing.

I decided to forget about the shower. I cranked off the water, turned toward the door and—

I saw something. Or I almost did. Just out of the corner of my eye, a dark shape, a black figure whipping through the doorway just out of sight. Like a shadow without the person.

I couldn’t have seen it for more than a tenth of a second, but I did see it, now imprinted in my brain from that flash of a glance. The form, black, in the shape of a man but then becoming formless, like a single drop of dark food coloring before it dissolves in a sink of running water.

I had seen it before.

“… I thought I saw something in there. I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

I slumped in the chair and crossed my arms.

“This is a source of anxiety for you. Having these beliefs, and feeling like you can’t talk about them without being dismissed.”

I stared out of the window, at my Bronco rusting in the parking lot, the metal eager to get back to just being dirt. Life was probably easier for it back then.

I said, “Who’s paying for these sessions again?”

“Payment is your responsibility. But we have a sliding scale.”

“Awesome.”

He considered for a moment and then said, “Would it put you more at ease if I told you that I believe in monsters?”

“It might put me at ease, but I can’t speak for the people who hand out psychiatrist licenses.”

“I’ll tell you a story. Now, I understand that with your… hobbies, people contact you, correct? Believing they have ghosts or demons in their homes?”

“Sometimes.”

“And I am going to make an assumption—if you arrive and tell them that the source of their anxiety is not in fact supernatural, they are anything but relieved. Correct? Meaning they want the banging in their attic to be a ghost, and not a squirrel trapped in the chimney.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So you see, fear is just another manifestation of insecurity. What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we’re being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.”

I didn’t answer. I glanced around for a clock. He didn’t have one, the bastard.

“So, a few years ago, while I was presenting at a conference in Europe, my wife called and insisted that the walls of our laundry room were throbbing. That was the word she used. Pulsing, like the wall itself was alive. She described a hum, an energy, that she could feel as soon as she walked into the room. I suggested it was a wiring problem. She became… let’s just say, agitated at that point. Three days later, just before I was due to come back, she called again. The problem was getting worse, she said. There was an audible hum now, from the wall. She couldn’t sleep. She could hear it as soon as she walked in the house. She could feel it, the vibration, like something unnatural was ready to burst forth into our world. So, I flew home the next day, and found her extremely upset. I understood immediately why my suggestion of a wiring problem was so insulting—this was the sound of something alive. Something massive. So, even though I was exhausted, jet-lagged and just completely dead on my feet, I had no other thought than to go out to the garage, get my tools and peel off the siding. Guess what I found.”

I didn’t answer.

“Guess!”

“I’m not sure I want to know.”

“Bees. They had built an entire hive in the wall, sprawling from floor to ceiling. Tens of thousands of them.”

His face was lighting up with the telling of his amusing anecdote. Why not? He was getting paid to tell it.

“So I went and put on a hat and gloves and wrapped my wife’s scarf around my face and sprayed the hive, I killed them by the thousands. Only later did I realize that the bees are quite valuable and a local beekeeper actually came and carefully removed the hive itself at no charge. I think he’d have actually paid me if I hadn’t killed so many of them at the start.”

“Hmm.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yeah, your wife thought it was a monster. Turned out to just be bees. So my little problem, probably just bees. It’s all bees. Nothing to worry about.”

“I’m afraid you misunderstood. That was the day that a very powerful, very dangerous monster turned out to be real. Just ask the bees.”

36 Hours Prior to Outbreak

I said, “Can you see me?”

The freckled redhead on my laptop screen said, “Yep.” Amy Sullivan had her hair in pigtails, which I like, and was wearing a huge, ironic T-shirt with a badly drawn eagle and American flag on it, which I hate. It was like a tent on her.

She asked, “How did your therapy go?”

“Jesus, Amy. You don’t start a conversation with your boyfriend asking him how his court-ordered therapy went. You have to ease into that.”

“Ah, sorry.”

“It’s a sensitive subject.”

“Okay, forget it.”

I said, “Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?”

“Yep. You miss me, don’t you?”

“You know I can’t function on my own.”

After a beat and another sip of tea she said, “Are you going to be all right? Not just with the therapy but that whole… situation?”

“Your, uh, roommate isn’t around, right?”

“No.”

“Okay. Yeah, it’s fine. Everything is quiet.”

She said, “That scared me, that night.”

“I know it did.”

“Nothing had happened like that for a long time—”

“I know.”

“If something like that happens again—”

“I’ll shoot it with a crossbow again. I told you that.”

“Did you talk to your therapist about that?”

“Subtle, Amy.”

“Well, I’m curious.”

“How did I find a girl who’s worse at conversation than I am?”

She took a sip from a teacup she pulled from off camera. She had to balance the cup with her left wrist. That is, the stump where her left hand should be. She was in a car accident when she was a teenager, before I knew her. The crash took her hand and her parents, and left her with chronic back pain and an implanted titanium rod in her spine. She refused to get a prosthetic hand because she thought they were “creepy.” But in my mind, between the titanium spine and a robot hand, she’d be like 10 percent of the way to a cyborg, an idea that I found more than mildly arousing.

Amy and I had “met” in high school, in a special ed classroom for kids with “behavior” disorders. Neither of us really belonged there, she was there because she had a bad reaction to pain medication and bit a teacher, I was there due to a misunderstanding (a bully kept fucking with me until I snapped and gouged out his eyes—you know how kids are). Our fairy-tale romance began by us completely ignoring each other for five years, during which I only knew her by a crude nickname some asshole had given her. Then one day, John and I were asked as a favor to look into her disappearance. It wasn’t a big deal, and only took us a couple of days to get to the bottom of it (she had been kidnapped by monsters).

Setting aside her tea she said, “So what’s he like? The psychiatrist?”

“It’s just like you’ve seen in the movies, Amy. They get you talking and wait for you to announce you’ve had an epiphany.” I thought for a moment, then said, “And the therapist was a she, not a he. She’s about twenty-two. Busty. She kept turning everything into some kind of sexual innuendo. Like she said she believed therapy should be ‘hands on’ and grabbed my crotch. Then we porked on the desk for a while and the time was up.” I shrugged. “Like I said, it’s just like in that movie. Anal Therapist VI.”

She sighed and sipped her tea. “So I guess you don’t miss me after all.”

“Wait… were we not supposed to be having sex with other people, Amy? I guess that was never made clear to me, sorry.”

She didn’t answer, or laugh, and I said, “Come on, you know if one of us wanted to sleep around you’d have a way easier time than I would. I’m the crazy guy who sees monsters and shoots delivery people. You’re the adorable redhead. You could go down to the guys’ floor of the dorm and say, ‘I’m a woman. I want to have sex’ and you’d have twenty guys lined up with roses and shit. I’d have to work at it.”

“Why do guys always say that? It’s just as hard for a girl.”

“That’s ridiculous. Every bar is full of guys desperate to get laid and girls desperate to fend off all the horny guys. It’s just the way it is, it’s biology. It’s easier for girls.”

“That’s actually impossible. Heterosexual sex takes one man and one woman. That means guys and girls have the exact same amount of sex. That means there are an equal number of sluts and desperate people on both sides.”

“That… can’t be right.”

She shrugged. “Do the math.”

“And yes, just to settle the issue, I do miss you.”

“I know.”

“There’s nobody here to ruin movies for me.”

Amy had a superhuman ability to pick out the one flaw in a movie that would make it impossible to ever fully enjoy it again. During a single weekend’s George Lucas marathon, she pointed out to me that if Indiana Jones had just stayed home, Raiders of the Lost Ark would have turned out exactly the same way—the Nazis would have opened the ark and gotten vaporized. Then, during The Empire Strikes Back, she paused the movie when a character referred to Luke’s ship as an “X-Wing,” which is impossible, she said, because there’s no way that ship should be called an “X-Wing” based on it being physically shaped like the English letter “X” since an ancient race of people in a distant galaxy would never have seen that letter before. Jesus, I’m making her sound like a bitch.

To the webcam window I said, “How are the classes going? Have you gotten to the part where they teach you to make computer viruses? Because I have people I want to send them to.”

“If by ‘virus’ you mean a program that accidentally freezes up your whole operating system when you try to execute it, then I think everything I’ve coded so far counts as one. Oh, did you know you could hack the phone system with a Cap’n Crunch whistle?”

“Uh, is that like hacker slang or…”

“No, the phones back in the seventies did everything by tones, the different frequencies and stuff told the system how to route the calls and all that. So there was a hacker named John Draper who figured out that the little plastic toy whistles they were putting in boxes of Cap’n Crunch had the exact same frequency and tone that the phone system was using to end charges on a call. He got free long distance for like two years just by blowing his toy whistle into the phone every time.”

“Holy shit, I’m going to try that. See, this is the type of stuff colleges should be teaching.”

“Well they’ve updated the phone system since then.”

“Oh.”

We sat in silence for a moment then she said, “Give me a second, I’m trying to think of a way to work the conversation back around to your therapy again.”

I said, “I love you.”

She said, “I know.”

“Actually, tomorrow’s a group session. I’ll probably have to wax beforehand.”

“Gross.”

“Sorry.”

“Though maybe I shouldn’t talk, since I’m sitting here on a webcam without any pants on.”

I said, “Oh, really?”

“Wanna see?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

30 Hours Prior to Outbreak

There exists in this world a spider the size of a dinner plate, a foot wide if you include the legs. It’s called the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider, or the “Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider” by those who have actually seen one.

It doesn’t eat only birds—it mostly eats rats and insects—but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, “Watch it, man, that thing can eat a goddamned bird.”

I don’t know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can’t fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it “sir” because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.

I’ve seen one of those things in person, at a zoo when I was in high school. I was fifteen, my face breaking out in acne and getting fatter by the day, staring open-mouthed at this monster pawing at the glass wall of its cage. Big as both of my hands. The guys around me were giggling and punching each other in the arm and some girl was squealing behind me. But I didn’t make a sound. I couldn’t. There was nothing but a pane of glass between me and that thing. For months after, I’d watch the dark corners of my bedroom at night, for hairy legs as thick as a finger poking out from behind a stack of comic books and video game magazines. I imagined—no, expected—to find strands of spiderweb as thick as fishing line in my closet, bulging with clumps of half-eaten sparrows. Or spider droppings in my shoes, the little turds laced with bits of feather. Or piles of pink eggs, yolked with baby spiders already the size of golf balls. And even now, ten years later and at the age of twenty-five, I still glance between the sheets at night before pushing my legs in, some part of my subconscious still looking for the huge spider crouching in the shadows.

I bring this up because the Goliath was the first thing that popped into my mind when I woke up with something in my bed, biting my leg.

I felt a pinch on my ankle, like digging needles. The Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider leapt out of the fog of my sleepy imagination as I flung the blankets aside.

It was dark.

Lights were off. Clock off. Everything off.

I sat up and squinted down at my leg. Movement, down by the sheets. I swung my leg off the bed and I could feel the weight of something clinging to the ankle, heavy as a can of beer.

A spasm of panic ripped through me. I kicked out with the leg, grunting in the chill air of my dark bedroom, trying to shake off the little biting whatever-it-was. The thing went flying across the room, passing through a shaft of moonlight spilling in around my blinds. In that brief second I saw a flash of jointed legs—lots of legs—and a tail. Armored plates like a lobster. The whole thing was as long as a shoe. Black.

What in the name of—

The creature that my panicked mind was calling a “spider”—even though it clearly wasn’t an arachnid or any other species native to planet Earth—flew across the bedroom and hit the wall, landing behind a basket of laundry. I bolted up out of the bed, squinting, edging around the room, feeling the wall with my hands. I blinked, trying to get my night vision, scanning for something to use as a weapon. I pawed around at the jumble of objects on my nightstand, saw something jutting out from under a copy of Entertainment Weekly. Round and slim, I thought it maybe was the hilt of a knife. I grabbed it and threw it, realizing only after it was airborne that it was my asthma inhaler. I reached again, grabbed for what looked like the heaviest object on the table—a jar of cheese sauce.

I spotted movement across the baseboard. I chucked the jar, grunting with the effort. A thud, a tinkle of broken glass. Silence. I grabbed the table lamp, a novelty item that consisted of a naked bulb jutting out of a stained-glass sculpture of a turkey. A birthday present from John. I yanked the cord from the wall and raised the turkey by the neck, holding it over my shoulder like a quarterback photographed in midthrow.

The spider(?) skittered across the floor, out the doorway, and into the living room. It had legs all over it, walking on half a dozen legs with another half dozen sticking up in the air like dreadlocks, like the thing was made to keep running even on its back. The sight of the thing froze me. That awful, primal, paralyzing terror that only accompanies an encounter with something completely alien. I lowered the lamp and forced myself to take a step forward. I tried to control my breathing. I risked a glance down at my leg and saw a crimson stripe leaking down from the bite.

That little bastard.

I felt a heat, and then a numbness, creeping its way up my leg. I didn’t know if the little monster was poisonous, or if it was just the shock of getting bitten. I took three steps toward the doorway and had developed a serious limp by the fourth.

I slooooowly peered into the living room. Not quite as dark in here, the streetlamps outside spilling halfhearted ribbons of light on the floor, writhing among shadows of windblown tree branches. No sign of the spider. I heard a scratchy rustle from the kitchen tiles to my left and spun on it—

It was the dog.

Molly stepped sleepily toward me, a knee-high reddish shape topped by two eyes reflecting bluish moonlight. I caught the faint blur of a wagging tail behind her. She was looking right at me, wondering why I was up, wondering why I smelled like terror sweat, wondering if I had any snacks on me. I glanced toward the front door. Ten feet of carpet between me and it. I had half made up my mind to pack Molly into the car and flee to John’s place, then regroup so that the two of us could come back here tomorrow with a shotgun and holy water.

My feet had never been so bare. Those little naked toes. That spider thing probably looks at those like the ears on a chocolate bunny. Where had I left my shoes? I brandished the turkey lamp and took a shaky step, my bitten left leg having fallen asleep. I willed it to hold up from here to the driveway.

A scream, from behind me.

I flinched and spun, then realized it was my phone. John had set my phone’s text message ringtone to a sound clip of him screaming, “TEEEXXTT!! SSSSHHHIIIIITTTTT!” I never figured out how to change it back. I snatched the phone from the coffee table and saw it was a blank message with an attached photo. I opened the image…

A man’s penis.

I quickly closed it. What the hell?

The phone sounded again in my hand. A call this time. I answered.

“Dave! Don’t talk. Listen. You have a picture in your inbox. DO NOT OPEN IT. I sent it to the wrong number.”

“Jesus Christ, John. Listen to me—”

“Man, you sound out of breath—”

“John, I—”

The phone slipped from my fingers, which were suddenly unable to grip it. I took a step toward the fallen phone, then another, and the room started wobbling in front of my eyes. Losing my balance—

NO NO YOU CANNOT FALL YOU CANNOT GO DOWN THERE WITH THAT THING!

I fell face-first on the carpet. My left leg was fifty pounds of dead weight dragging behind me. My right leg was tingling now, terror pumping the poison through my veins with horrible efficiency. I swung an arm around, finding the coffee table. I clawed at it, tried to raise myself. No grip with that hand.

Flat on the floor again. I didn’t even feel the impact on the shoulder I landed on.

“HELP! SOMEBODY!” I squealed. I wished I knew the names of my neighbors. “HEEELLLLPP!”

The last cry ended in a croak.

The cell phone screamed again.

Mustering every last calorie of energy from my right arm, I reached out for a phone that seemed to be ten miles away. I got my dead fingers on top of it, then dragged it across the carpet toward my face. It was as heavy as a bag of concrete. Manipulating the hand was like trying to fish a stuffed animal out of one of those claw games at the carnival. I saw that the incoming message was from John.

“JOHN!” I screamed at the phone, stupidly. I slapped at the buttons with my clumsy carnival claw hand. I fought to lift my head from the floor.

The screen changed. An image appeared.

Penis.

My arm went dead. My head bounced off the floor. Spinal cord totally unplugged now. I was staring across an expanse of carpet, seeing tumbleweeds of dog hair that had gathered under the TV cabinet across the room. Couldn’t look away—didn’t even have that much muscle control. Couldn’t close my eyes.

I could hear, though, and I detected the ever-so-faint rustling of carpet, many little feet stepping through the fibers. Hard, black, jointed legs shuffled into view. The spider completely filled my field of vision, no more than six inches from my eyes. Legs everywhere. A half dozen of them were coated in nacho cheese sauce.

The creature’s mouth was as big as mine, surrounded by needle-thin mandibles. Two lips parted and I saw with revulsion that it had a pink tongue, exactly like a human’s. It inched toward my face.

The spider was my world, its many glistening black legs extending past both ends of the horizon. I could count the taste buds on its lolling pink tongue, could see the wet ridges of the roof of its mouth. Its carapace glistened with some kind of slime. Two of its legs were touching my mouth. It tickled.

A huge, furry nose descended into my field of vision, like the fuzzy snout of God Himself. Molly had finally grown curious enough about the situation to wander in from the kitchen.

Her nose twitched as she detected the smell of nacho cheese. She licked the spider, discovered that her most ambitious doggy dream had finally come true: naturally cheese–coated prey. With a snap of her jaws and a quick twist of her head, she ripped off four of the monster’s legs and buckled down to the hard work of chewing them.

The spider shrieked with a piercing noise that made my bones vibrate. It sped from view so fast I had no idea what direction it went.

29 Hours Prior to Outbreak

Paralyzed.

Was this permanent? I pictured the venom turning my spinal column into mush. Molly glanced at me, quietly judging me for my laziness. She worked over her severed spider legs, realizing there wasn’t much meat inside the crunchy outer shell. She settled in and pinned the legs under her front paws, then started carefully licking the cheese off of them.

I lay there for an interminable amount of time that in reality was about one hour. I eventually felt a tingling across my torso as I sleepily imagined I had landed on an anthill. It was, however, the feeling returning to my body. Twenty minutes or so later I found I could twitch my fingers, a half hour after that I was sitting upright on the sofa, cradling my throbbing head in my hands. I devoted all of my mental energy to blocking out any thoughts of what the spider had intended to do to my immobilized body.

Well, the first step would be to lay eggs…

Oh, wait. The spider. It could still be here. Shit.

Three seconds later I was on the porch, peering back through the front door into my own living room. No sign of the spider, but then again it was pitch dark inside and I had a streetlight behind me, so all I could see in the little window was a reflection of my own stupid face. My hair looked like I had combed it with an angry cat. I reached for my cell phone, then realized it was still on the floor in the living room.

I flung open the door, sprinted in, rolled, grabbed the phone, and sprinted back out, slamming the door behind me. I dialed John. Voice mail:

“This is John. If you’re calling because you found the rest of my guitar, just bring it by the apartment. Sorry about the rug. Leave a message.”

I didn’t. Even on a Thursday night, the man was probably marinated and comatose by now. I glanced around the neighborhood, my nervous breaths barely visible in the November air. Why was mine the only house that didn’t have power? I raised the phone, but didn’t dial. The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one who you can call because you’re not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It’s a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society.

Enturdment?

There was a broom leaning by the front door, from when I had used it to knock a dead bird off the porch a few days ago. I clutched it in front of me like a spear and pushed through the door. Molly brushed past me in the opposite direction, presumably to find the perfect spot outside my car door to take a dump so that I’d be sure to step in it the next time I was in a hurry to get to work. I took one step inside, focusing on the floor to—

The spider thumped onto my head, twitchy legs tangling in my hair. I dropped the broom and threw my hands up as the monster climbed over my ear and onto my shoulder. Itchy little legs, all over my face and neck. I grabbed the spider around the body, rigid legs bending under my hands. I tried to pull it off. I couldn’t, the feet were latched on somehow. My shirt—and my skin—stretched away from my shoulder as I pulled. I heard a screeching like steam from a teapot, and realized it was me.

Sharp mandibles filled the view in my right eye. A stab of pain seared through my skull. I lost vision in that eye and thought the bastard had plucked out my eyeball. I let out a scream of rage and grabbed bundles of legs with both hands, ripping them away from the skin. I felt wetness and realized the monster had left one leg behind, the foot still attached to my shoulder. But I was free of the creature now, the unholy thing thrashing around in my hands, twisting its mouth toward me, trying to bite.

That freaking tongue! Goddamn it!

I frantically looked around with my one good eye, trying to find a container I could cram the creature into.

Laundry basket! Bedroom floor!

Into the bedroom. I kicked over the plastic basket, dumping the clothes. I dunked the beast inside and turned the basket over, imprisoning it. I knocked the shit off my nightstand and laid it sideways on top of the basket. Good and heavy. There were vertical slots in the basket and the spider stuck a leg through. It couldn’t crawl out but I suspected it could bite through the plastic eventually. Have to watch it.

I sat heavily on the bed, chest heaving. Face wet and sticky. Cringing, I lifted a tentative hand to the right side of my face, expecting to find a squishy eyeball laying on my cheek. I didn’t. I winced as I felt around the eyelid, raw skin stinging at my touch. Everything felt torn and ragged up there. I blinked and tried looking through the eye, found I could a little bit. I looked down, intending to dig my cell phone from my pocket, and let out a disgusted hiss.

The spider’s black leg, the one that broke off when I was pulling it off me, was still stuck to my shirt. I grabbed it and pulled it and it would not come free. It wasn’t stuck to the shirt, it was stuck to me, pulling up the skin like a circus tent. The foot was hooked in somehow, dug in like a tick. I pulled apart the hole in the shirt and pinched the skin between two fingers and tried to get a close look at it. I couldn’t tell the exact point where the severed leg ended and the patch of skin on my shoulder began. It was like the leg had fused to it somehow. I pulled and twisted. It was like trying to pull off one of my own fingers.

I was getting seriously pissed off at this point. I stomped out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. I yanked open several drawers until I found a utility knife, what some people call a box cutter. Molly came trotting in behind me, figuring maybe I was making a snack and she could get some scraps.

I pulled off my shirt, then grabbed a long wooden spoon and stuck it sideways in my mouth. I stabbed the tip of the utility knife’s short blade in at the point where the monster’s foot was fused with my skin, and started prying. I growled and cursed around the spoon, teeth denting into the wood. A thick drop of blood ran down my chest like candle wax.

It took twenty minutes. In the end I had the six-inch-long jointed leg in my hand, with a little dot of bloody skin and fat on the end that used to be part of me. I held a bundle of wet paper towels to the wound, smears of blood making my abdomen look like a finger painting. I put the monster’s leg in a plastic container from my cabinet. I leaned against the counter, eyes closed, taking slow breaths.

I had taken one step back toward the bedroom when a knock came at the door. I froze, decided not to answer it, then realized it may be John. I went into the bedroom to check on the caged beast. It had two legs through a slot in the plastic basket but had made no progress toward biting its way out. I made my way back across the living room, smacking my foot on the coffee table on the way. I yanked open the door—

It was a cop.

A young guy. I knew him, name was Franky something. Went to high school with me. I straightened up and said, “What can I do for you, officer?”

I saw his eyes go right to my torso, where I was holding a red wad of paper towels over a freely bleeding wound, and then back to my face, where one eye was swollen shut under a ragged eyelid caked with dried blood. He had a hand resting on the butt of his gun, alert in that way that cops are.

He began with, “Who else is in the house, sir?”

“It’s fine. I mean, nobody. I live here alone. I mean, my girlfriend lives here with me, but she’s away at school right now. So it’s just me. Everything’s fine. I just had a problem with, uh, something that, uh, came into the house. Some kind of… animal.”

“You mind if I come in, sir?”

There was no right answer to that, since he clearly thought I had a butchered prostitute in here somewhere. I stepped aside without a word. That “sir” shit was irritating me. He was my age. I went to parties with this guy in school, watched him play teabag twister with underwear on his head.

Burgess, I thought. That’s his name. Franky Burgess.

He walked past me and I said, “I’d turn on a light, but the power’s out. Must have, you know, blown a fuse or something.”

He gave me a look that suggested what I just said gave him a whole new perspective on my mental state. I could read his face perfectly because the living room light was on.

“Oh. Right,” I stumbled. “Guess it’s back on now.”

I blinked. Had it been on this whole time?

The place was a mess. I mean, it had been a mess before (the blood I dripped on the carpet actually blended with a nearby coffee stain) but where we were standing gave us a clear view into the kitchen, where drawers were flung open, a roll of paper towels had fallen onto the floor and a pile of plastic lids had spilled out of a cabinet. A couple of steps after that and he would have a view of the main bedroom, where it looked like a bomb had gone off. Oh, and there was an alien spider monster trapped under an overturned laundry basket with a piece of furniture piled on top of it.

The cop moved into the kitchen and I followed him. I heard a skittering noise from the bedroom and saw the spider trying desperately to escape between the plastic bars of his laundry basket prison. The cop gave no notice. He looked at the bloody box cutter on the counter, then glanced back at me and my several bloody wounds. I stepped casually backward, stopping in front of the bedroom door, leaning against the door frame as if I wasn’t somehow trying to block the view of the room with my body.

“Yeah, that,” I said, nodding toward the little knife, “I cut myself a few times, no big deal, I was… trying to get this thing off me. I think it was a possum or something, I couldn’t get a look at it. It was clawing me up pretty bad.”

He was looking past me, into the bedroom, and said, “Can you step aside, sir?”

Screw it. Let this thing bite his eyes out, what do I care? Go right in, Franky.

I stepped aside and Franky the Cop entered the bedroom. He surveyed the carnage, then finally looked down on the overturned basket. Five little armored legs writhed around between the plastic slats. The cop casually looked away, glancing into my closet with disinterest. Finally he looked back at me.

“So, did you kill it or what?”

The beast was right there in the basket. In full view. Jaws clicking against the plastic, a sound like a dog gnawing on a bone. It had gotten a few legs entirely through the basket and was now pulling its body through. All of this went entirely unnoticed by Officer Burgess.

He doesn’t see it.

“Uh, no. I tried to trap it.”

The thing had its head out of the basket now. Franky looked down. Nothing to see. He looked back at me.

“Have you had anything to drink tonight, sir?”

“Couple of beers, earlier.”

“Have you taken anything else?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what day it is?”

The spider had a third of its body out of the basket. There was a thick piece of armor around its abdomen that was wedged in between the plastic strips. It had four legs working on the problem.

“Thursday ni—uh, I mean, I guess it’s Friday morning now. November fourth, I think. My name is David Wong, I’m currently standing in my home. I’m not high.”

“The neighbors are worried about you. They heard a lot of noise in here…”

“You try waking up with some animal biting you in your sleep.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been out here, is it?”

I sighed. “No.”

“You put some weight on top of that basket there.”

“I told you, I was trying to trap it—”

“No, the basket was you trying to trap it. I’m thinking the weight is on there because you thought you had trapped it.”

“What? No. It was dark. I—”

The monster pulled the widest piece of shell through the bars. Halfway out. The difficult half.

“Is it possible you made all those cuts yourself? With that knife in there?”

“What? No. I—”

I don’t think so…

“Why do you keep looking down there?”

I took a step back out of the room.

“No reason.”

“Do you see something down there, Mr. Wong?”

I turned my eyes up to the cop. I was sweating again.

“No, no.”

“Have we been seeing things tonight?”

I didn’t answer.

“Because this wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

“That was… no. I’m fine, I’m fine.”

I focused on not looking down at the basket. The chewing sounds had stopped.

I couldn’t hold out anymore. I looked down.

It was gone.

I felt my bowels loosen. I glanced around the room, checked the ceiling. Nowhere.

The cop turned and left the room.

“Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Wong, and I’ll take you to the emergency room.”

“What? No, no. I’m fine. The cuts are no big deal.”

“Don’t look minor to me.”

“No, no. It’s fine. Put it in your report that I refused treatment. I’m fine.”

“You got any family that live here in town?”

“No.”

“Nobody? Parents, aunts, uncles?”

“Long story.”

“There a friend we can call?”

“John, I guess.”

I was glancing everywhere, trying to spot the spider, no idea what I’d do if I did.

“Well, tell you what, give him a call and I’ll hang out here until he shows up. Keep you company. In case the animal comes back.”

I couldn’t think of anything that would make this guy leave, short of punching him and forcing him to haul me to jail. That hardly seemed like a solution, though.

The cop can stay as long as he wants, I thought. As long as he doesn’t go to the toolshed.

Franky the Cop turned to me at that moment and said, “I’m going to have a look around outside.”

I let the cop go out the back door, but didn’t offer to follow him. I guess he wanted to do a walk around of the yard to make sure there wasn’t a corpse out there. Let him. As soon as he was out of sight, I moved back through the kitchen, into the living room and then through to the bedroom. I flipped on the light, checked the ceiling, checked everywhere. No spider. I heard the muffled sound of steps on crackling leaves and saw the cop outside, passing the window with a flashlight. I headed for the bathroom, soaked a washcloth and cleaned the dried blood off me. I got a Band-Aid on my shoulder and cleaned up the eyelid, flinching with every stinging touch. I went into the bedroom, searching for the monster, even looking in the laundry basket in case the thing had decided to return for some reason. I put on a shirt and tried to push down my hair, thinking I could present a picture of a stable citizen for the cop and make him feel better about leaving.

Before he asks to see the toolshed.

I grabbed my phone from the bed and dialed John one last time. Three rings and then—

“Hello?”

“John? It’s me.”

“What? Who?”

“We got a situation.”

“Can it wait until after work tomorrow?”

“No. There’s something in my house. A—”

I glanced around for the cop.

“A creature. It took a chunk out of my leg and then it went for my eye.”

“Really? You kill it?”

“No, it’s hiding somewhere. It’s small.”

“How small?”

“Size of a squirrel. Built like an insect. A lot of legs, maybe twelve. It had a mouth like—”

I turned and saw the cop standing in the bedroom doorway.

I nodded sideways toward the phone and said, “This is John. He’s on his way.”

“Good.” He nodded toward the back door. “Do you have a key to that toolshed outside?”

I pocketed the phone without saying good-bye to John.

“Oh, no. I’ve lost the key. I mean, I haven’t been out there in months.”

“I’ve got a pair of bolt cutters out in my trunk. Tell you what, let me open that up for you.”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary.”

“I insist. You don’t want to be stuck without your lawn implements. You can finally rake all these leaves out here.”

We stared each other down. Man, this just kept getting better and better. I found myself wishing the spider would jump down and eat this guy.

“Actually, I think I have a key.”

“Good. Get it.”

I went into the kitchen and plucked the toolshed key off the nail next to the back door, where it had been in plain view the entire time. Franky the Cop let me lead the way outside to the shed, staying a few steps back so that he could have time to shoot me in case I decided to wheel on him with fists of fury. I held out the key and took a deep breath. I slipped it into the padlock and snapped it open. I pulled the toolshed door slightly ajar and turned to Franky.

“What’s in here… I, uh, collect things. It’s a hobby, that’s all. And as far as I know, there’s nothing illegal here.”

Though you could say some of it is, uh, imported.

“Could you go ahead and step back, sir?”

He opened the little shed and stabbed the darkness with a flashlight beam. I held my breath. He went right to the floor with the light, where a body would be, I guess. There wasn’t one there, not right now, and instead he illuminated the crust of grass on the wheel of my lawnmower. Then he flicked the flashlight beam to the set of metal shelves along the back and side walls. The beam hit a glass jar the size of a can of paint and illuminated the murky liquid inside. Officer Franky Burgess stared at it, waiting for his eyes to register what he was seeing. Eventually he would figure out it was a late-term fetus, a head the size of a fist, its eyes closed. It had no arms or legs. Its torso had been replaced by a jointed mechanical apparatus that hooked around to a point like the tail of a sea horse.

I manufactured a chuckle and said, “Heh, uh, I got that off eBay. It’s a, uh, prop from a movie.”

The cop glanced at me. I glanced away.

He shined his light back onto the shelf. Next to the jar was an ant farm. The tunnels between the panes of glass had been dug neatly to spell out the word HELP.

Next to that was my old Xbox, the cables wrapped around it.

He moved the light down a foot, to the shelf below. He passed over a stack of old magazines, not noticing that the top one was an old, faded issue of Time depicting a swarm of Secret Service agents around a dead Bill Clinton, the words WHO DID IT? blasting across the picture in red. Next to the magazines was a stuffed red Tickle Me Elmo doll, the fur faded with dust. At the moment the light hit it, its sound box crackled to life and in a cartoony voice it said, “Ha ha ha! Five and three quarter inches erect!”

I said, “It’s, uh, broken.”

Franky the Cop inched the beam to the next object, a mason jar containing a twisted, purple tongue suspended in clear liquid. Next to it was a duplicate jar, only with two human eyes floating side by side, trailing a tangled tail of nerves and blood vessels. The cop didn’t notice that when the beam swept past the jar, the eyes turned to follow it. Next to the jars was an old battery from my truck, matted with smears of black grime. The light made it to the bottom, where it found a red plastic gasoline can sitting on the floor next to an old CRT computer monitor with a screen that had been shattered by a gunshot. Next to it was the one thing I didn’t want the cop to see. The Box.

We heard crunching leaves behind us.

“Yo, what’s up?” The cop and I turned to see a dark figure with one hand swinging the orange coal of a burning cigarette. John. “Hi, Franky. Dave, sorry I sent you all those pictures of my dick. I hope that’s not what caused you to injure your eye.”

The cop put the flashlight on John, maybe to make sure he wasn’t armed. John wore a flannel shirt and a black baseball cap with the word HAT on it in all caps.

Franky the Cop thanked John for coming over. I was hoping he would back out of the toolshed because each minute he stood there made me more and more nervous. My eye and shoulder were throbbing. The wind shifted and I picked up the scent of alcohol from John.

The cop swung the flashlight beam around and spotlighted the floor of the toolshed again. Light fell on the box, and I mean the box, the olive green box we’d found in the back of that unmarked black truck. It looked like a serious box. It looked like something you’d want to look inside of, if your job was to keep people safe. Franky nodded toward it.

“What’s in the green box there?”

“Don’t know.”

That was sort of true, I guess.

John said, “We found it. You can’t get it open.”

That was also true. Franky couldn’t get it open.

I said, “You can take it back with you, if you want. Put it in the lost and found at the police station.”

The cop clicked off the flashlight, then asked John if they could go inside and talk. He then gestured toward the toolshed with the flashlight and said to me, “You want to close that up while I have a word here with John?”

I said that seemed like a fine idea and their shoes crunched through the leaves until they reached the light of my back door. I closed the toolshed and clicked the padlock shut, then let out a sigh of relief. The relief lasted approximately four seconds, the time it took me to realize John and Franky the Cop were now back inside the house with the murderous alien spider. I hurried back inside and saw John and the cop in my living room having a low conversation out of my hearing, the cop I guess was asking John to babysit me and to call if I showed more signs of craziness. I moved closer and barely heard John say, “… Been real depressed lately…” and wondered what kind of portrait he was painting in there.

I scanned the kitchen for the spider, being sure to check the high ground. No sign of it. I closed some of the open drawers and cabinets, tried to straighten the place up. I made it all the way out of the room before I turned and realized that cabinets would be an ideal hiding place for the little bastard. I’d be getting out my cereal tomorrow morning and the fucker would launch itself at me. Could I search through them without drawing Franky’s attention? Better wait. Instead I checked the bedroom, again under the guise of straightening up. I looked under my blankets and then under the bed. I pushed around the clothes in my closet, I checked behind the door. No spider.

When I came out, I saw John and the cop were on the front porch. Progress. John was thanking the man for coming out, saying he hoped Franky would remember me in his prayers because I could really use it right now because my life was really a mess and I was just a complete pathetic loser struggling with my weight and financial problems and alcohol and erectile dysfunction. I decided to join them before John could defame me further.

The cop was already walking back toward his patrol car as John said, “… And his girlfriend is away and she’s only got one hand. She lost it in an accident. You can imagine the problems that causes.”

Franky was desperately trying to escape the conversation, talking into the little radio mounted on the shoulder of his uniform, letting headquarters know that everything was under control here. John and I watched him go. Then we heard a skittering by our feet and saw the goddamned spider run past our shoes. It vanished into the darkness, heading right toward the cop.

I jumped off the porch, waving my hands. “Wait! Franky! Officer Burgess! Wait!”

The cop stopped just short of the squad car and turned to me. I opened my mouth, but the words retreated back into my throat. A bundle of thin black legs appeared over Franky’s left shoulder, touching his bare neck. And he couldn’t feel a thing.

From behind me John said, “Franky! Franky! Don’t move, man! You got something on you!”

Franky put his hand on the butt of his gun again, looking alertly between me and John as if his crazy person troubles had just multiplied. The monster crawled over Franky’s shoulder and put legs on his cheek.

John screamed, “Franky! Do this!” John made a brushing motion on his own cheek, as if waving away a fly. “Seriously! You got something on your face!”

Franky, oblivious to his situation, did not follow these instructions. He started to say something about us not moving any closer. I lunged, throwing my hands toward the little monster. I never made it. Franky did something to me that dropped me to my knees, gasping for air. It was some kind of chop to the throat and man, it worked.

I looked up and for the second time tried to warn Franky and for the second time I was unable to. The spider crawled around to Franky’s chest and then, in a blur, burrowed into his mouth.

Franky flailed backward and flung himself to the ground, his head thunking against the squad car’s door on the way down. Franky clawed at his mouth with his hands, gasping, choking, spasming. I backed away, crawling backward on my ass through the leaves. As I retreated, John advanced, saying, “Franky! Franky! Hey!”

Franky wasn’t responsive. His arms were locked in front of him, fingers curled, like he was being electrocuted.

John spun on me and said, “We gotta get him to the hospital!”

I sat there in the grass, frozen, wishing I could just go back inside and crawl under the covers again. John threw open both back doors of the cop car. He dug his hands under Franky’s shoulders.

“Dave! Help me!”

I got to my feet and took Franky’s ankles. We wrestled him into the backseat of the squad car, John backing out through the opposite door. We closed it up and John took the wheel. I slid beside John as he hunted around the console for a switch. He found it, flipped it. A siren pierced the night. He shifted into gear and tore down the street, red and blue flashing off every window in the neighborhood as we raced past. We blew through an intersection. I pulled on my seat belt and braced my hands against the dash.

“That thing came into my house, John! It came into my house!”

“I know, I know.”

“I woke up and that thing was biting me. In my bed, John!”

We turned the corner, rounding a closed restaurant with FOR SALE painted on the windows in white shoe polish. We passed the blackened shell of a hardware store that had burned down last year, we passed a trailer park and a used-car dealership and a 24-hour adult bookstore and a skanky motel that never had any vacancies because lots of poor people lived there full-time.

“It was in my house, John! Do you get what I’m saying here? Franky couldn’t even see it. It was on his face and he couldn’t see it. It was in my house.”

I felt my body push against the armrest on the door. Tires squealed. John was taking a corner car chase–style. Two blocks up was the concrete parking garage for the hospital, the lit windows of the hospital itself looming up behind it. I peered back through the wire screen separating us from Franky, who was laying motionless across the backseat, eyes open. His chest was heaving, so at least he wasn’t dead.

“Almost there, man! Hold on, okay?”

I turned to John.

“It crawled in his mouth! Did you see it?”

“I saw it.”

“Are they gonna be able to help him? You really think the doctors can do somethin’?”

We squealed into the parking lot and followed a sign that said EMERGENCY. We skidded to a stop in a covered drive-up to the emergency room. We threw open the back door and dragged out Franky, then clumsily lugged him toward a set of glass doors that slid open for us automatically. Before we got five feet inside, a couple of orderlies came and started barking questions at us that we had no answers to. Somebody rolled up a gurney.

John started talking, telling the guys that the cop had had some kind of a seizure, that he had something in his throat, definitely to check his throat.

There was a flicker of red and blue lights out of the corner of my eye—a second cop car turning in fast across the parking lot. They probably saw John and me tearing ass through town and followed us here. The orderlies were rolling away Franky and a third guy showed up, a doctor I guess, taking his vitals. I turned to John to tell him about the second cop car but he had already spotted it. I followed him back out to the sidewalk.

“Think we should hang around?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. I’m already on probation.”

“Dave, they’re gonna come get us. They’ll wanna know what happened.”

“Nah, I don’t think this thing’s gonna be a big deal. Probably send us a nice card for getting Franky to the hospital. Come on.”

We took off walking, since it didn’t seem wise to go back home in the stolen cop car. We went around the edge of the lot as the approaching police car whooshed past us. It skidded to a stop next to Franky’s vehicle and two cops spilled out and went inside. We silently cut across the lawn and crossed a street with a traffic light blinking yellow. We cut through the darkened parking lot of a Chinese restaurant called Panda Buffet, which did not in fact serve panda meat as far as we knew. Behind it was one of the city’s many abandoned properties, the depressing twin buildings of an old tuberculosis asylum that had been closed since the sixties, the gray bricks tinged moss-green.

John lit a cigarette and asked, “So what do you think that thing was?”

I didn’t answer. I found myself scanning the dark plane of each parking lot we passed, studying the shadows, looking for movement. I noticed my steps were hurrying me unconsciously toward the pool of light under the next streetlamp. We passed into the parking lot of a tire place with a ten-foot-tall tire mascot standing by the street. The mascot was made of real tires, with mufflers for arms and a chrome wheel for a head. Some joker had used white spray paint to draw a penis on the front of it in the anatomically appropriate spot.

John said, “So that thing crawled into his mouth, what do you think it was doing?”

“How should I know?”

A blur of red and blue zipped by. Another cop car, lights flashing. Thirty seconds later, another one. John said, “Man, these guys really gather around one of their own, don’t they?”

We walked on, hesitant, a sick feeling in my gut. Two more cop cars flew by. One had different markings, state cop I guess.

“They’re just going there to check up on him, right? John?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Let’s get home, we’ll see if they got anything about it on TV.”

But he had stopped, saying, “No point, all you’ll get is the news after it gets filtered for the reporters. We’ll get better information if we go back down there.”

“We’d just be in the—”

I stopped at the sound of a distant scream.

John said, “You hear that?”

“No.”

Another cop car zipped past. How many of those did we have in this town?

“Come on, Dave.”

John took off walking back the way we came. I stood my ground. I didn’t want to go back there, but—and I’m not ashamed to admit this—I also didn’t want to walk back to my place alone, in the dark. I raised a hand to touch the spot on my eye where I had been bitten, raw flesh under a Band-Aid. I winced as the pain in my shoulder stopped me before I could get my hand up there. The chunk taken out of my skin there was getting sorer by the minute. I was about to tell John to have fun without me when—

*POP! POP-POP!*

The sound of distant gunshots, like firecrackers. John started jogging back across the tire store parking lot, toward the hospital. I let out a breath, then followed.

27 Hours Prior to Outbreak

We arrived on the hospital grounds to see that all hell had broken loose. Six cop cars were parked haphazardly around the emergency room entrance, lighting up the parking lot like a dance floor. There was an ambulance, its rear doors open. People were spilling out of the hospital entrance, their heads down like they were running the trenches in a war zone. One lady came out in aqua blue scrubs, one side of her blond hair matted down with blood. There was a clump of onlookers on the far side of the lawn that included three or four wheelchairs, maybe fifty yards from the hospital. It looked like they were gathering patients there, getting them away from the building. One cop was talking to them and gesturing with his hand, karate chopping the air with each barked command. His other hand held a pistol pointed at the sky.

*POP! POP! POP!POP!POP!*

More shots from inside. John, possessing a genetic defect that makes him walk toward danger, strode down toward where it looked like some cops were trying to set up a perimeter around the chaos. Somewhere, Charles Darwin nodded and smiled a knowing smile.

We came upon two cops blocking the sidewalk, a fat black one with glasses and an older guy whose face was all mustache. John stepped off the sidewalk as if to walk right past them on the grass. Black Cop put out a hand and told us to stop, in a tone that suggested if we didn’t he would Taser us until our blood boiled. We backed off, stepping aside as paramedics hustled the bleeding-head lady past us. She was crying, holding her head, saying over and over again, “HE WOULDN’T DIE! HE JUST WOULDN’T DIE! THEY SHOT HIM OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND HE—”

John tapped my shoulder and pointed. A boxy truck was pulling up, blue with white letters on the side. I thought it was some kind of paddy wagon but when the doors opened, a SWAT team spilled out.

Holy shit.

John moved off the sidewalk and up onto the lawn in front of the building. There were some benches there, and a ten-foot-tall bronze statue of a lady in old-timey nurse’s garb holding a lantern. Florence Nightingale? I followed John and we joined a small crowd of onlookers.

Gunshots. Rapid shots, dozens of them. Gasps from the audience. I could barely see down there but I could make out people running out of the building, frantic. One lady fell down and got accidentally kicked hard in the face. Then, a man came out supported on the shoulders of two hospital staff, his right leg missing from the knee down. Or at least that’s what it looked like, keep in mind we were still far enough away that the door looked about the size of a postage stamp, and I was trying to look through a growing crowd in front of me. That’s why I can’t be totally sure about what happened next.

First, a man in a black SWAT outfit came running out of the building, screaming something. I couldn’t hear him from where we were standing but to this day John insists the man was screaming, “Run away!”

Then, shots. Loud, sharp, close. Next came the screams. Screams from every single human being close enough to the lobby to see what was going on. Three cops near the entrance ducked behind the parked patrol cars and trained guns on the sliding doors.

A man lumbered out.

Every gun barrel followed him.

It was Officer Franky Burgess.

He was wearing his cop uniform pants and a red shirt… no, that’s not right. It was a white undershirt, stained with blood over 80 percent of its area.

People crowded around, blocking my view. John craned his neck and said, “It’s Franky. Everybody’s got their guns on him, like he’s dangerous. Did he shoot all those people? Hey, move, buddy. I can’t see.”

Frustrated, John went to the nurse statue and, to my horror, climbed it. He got up to where both hands were on her shoulders, his shoes planted on her forearms. Florence’s face was planted in John’s crotch.

I waved at him. “John! Get down from there!”

“I can see him. It looks like they’re talking to him. I don’t see a gun. Oh, shit. Look at his arm. Dave, his right arm is broken. And I mean it’s almost broken at a right angle, and Franky doesn’t even act like he cares—oh, wait. Something’s going on…”

A cop voice from nearby said, “Get down from there! You! Get down!” John ignored him.

A burst of gunfire. Everybody ducked.

“They’re shooting him!” shouted John. “They’re shooting a lot! You can see bits of him flying off! He’s still up! Holy shit he’s—HOLY SHIT! He just grabbed one of the SWAT guys. He grabbed him by the ankles and is swinging him around like a baseball bat! He’s knocking the other guys down!”

“Bullshit! John, get down from there!”

“He’s biting a guy now! He’s eating him! A cop! He’s got him by the neck!”

“WHAT?!?”

More shots. Screams. Suddenly I was awash in a panicked current of swinging elbows and shoulders. John jumped down from the statue, and ran with the crowd, as fast as he could. Over his shoulder he yelled, “DAVE! HE’S COMING!”

I took two steps, and somebody slammed into me. My face bounced off wet grass. I climbed to my knees in the stampede. A woman nearby screamed at the top of her lungs. I spun and between running figures saw a shirt stained red with blood.

Franky.

Standing right there, left arm jutting grotesquely just under the elbow, blood dripping to the grass from a protruding shard of bone.

Police were shouting in the distance, commanding us to get down.

How did he beat them here? He cleared half a football field in five seconds.

Franky’s torso was riddled with puckered bullet wounds, leaking red. His chest heaved with excited breaths, his punctured lungs whistling with each inhale. The broken arm was moving, twitching, the bones tearing free of skin and curling like tentacles.

What the shit?

Cops ran into position. I saw one SWAT guy fumbling to cram a new magazine into the little submachine gun he had. They shouted orders at each other, and at the crowd. Franky opened his mouth, opening wide like a yawn. And just for a second, I thought I saw the face of the spider, nesting there behind his teeth, filling the cavity with its black body.

Then, the Franky monster let out a noise like I had never heard before. It was a shriek, like microphone feedback. But more organic and pained, like the sound a whale would make if it were on fire.

The ground shook from it. My bowels quivered. I think I shat a little. I saw people hitting the ground all around me, saw guns fall from the hands of cops. I clapped my palms over my ears as the pained shriek of Franky the Monster filled my bones. Franky’s back arched, his mouth opened to the sky, howling. Blood was spurting from a dozen bullet holes. It was the last thing I saw before the world swam away and went black.

I came to and sat up. People were standing around, nobody running. No sign of Franky. Some time had passed. The horizon was shitting a sun, casting a glow on a layer of fog that was settling in the low areas like puddles of ghost piss.

I saw John about ten feet away, on his feet but bent over at the waist, gripping his pants at the knees. He was blinking, as if trying to focus his eyes.

“John? You all right?”

He nodded, still looking at the ground.

“Yeah. I’m thinkin’ that sound he made melted our brains. Did they get him?”

“Don’t know. I just came to.”

A white truck pulled up with a dish apparatus on the back. It had a TV station logo on the side. We were about to be on live TV. I tried to fix my hair with my hands.

Hospital staff in aqua scrubs were walking people back into the building. It looked like every policeman in the state was here, taking statements from people. I realized John and I should probably get going, before we got asked a bunch of questions that, once again, we didn’t have any non-crazy answers for. Not just about tonight, but everything. I turned toward John but John wasn’t there anymore. I went looking for him, giving one pair of cops a wide berth along the way. I thought about just going home without him, but then I saw him standing out by the street and talking to a goddamned reporter.

I stomped over there, walked right in front of the camera and was about to grab him by the collar and drag him away when John said, “Oh, shit!”

I followed John’s gaze and said, “Oh, shit.”

The reporter lowered her microphone and said, “Ooooh, shit.”

Army guys, a lot of them. National Guard, I guessed. They were wearing that grayish urban camo they wear these days. They had parked a green truck across the intersection where the hospital driveway met the road. Cars were lined up trying to get out, and soldiers were going down the line and issuing instructions to angry drivers.

Up by the truck a soldier raised a bullhorn and said:

“ATTENTION. DO NOT LEAVE THE AREA. THERE IS A SIGNIFICANT CHANCE YOU HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO A CONTAGEOUS PATHOGEN. LEAVING THE AREA COULD LEAD TO SPREADING THE INFECTION TO YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. BY ORDER OF THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL YOU ARE NOT TO LEAVE THE AREA. PLEASE GO BACK TO THE LOBBY OF THE HOSPITAL WHERE YOU WILL BE GIVEN FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE AND YOU WILL BE RELEASED AS SOON AS IT IS DETERMINED THAT YOU DO NOT POSE AN INFECTION RISK TO THOSE AROUND YOU. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. IF YOU ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE AREA YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE AREA.”

John tossed down his cigarette, stamped it out and said, “Let’s leave the area.”

“Yeah.”

We left the reporter behind and circled around, looking for a way out. We found the AMBULANCE ONLY entrance around the block had a Humvee across it. The soldiers were forming a perimeter, camouflage dots looping around the grounds. We looked around behind the building, where there was a little strip of woods separating the hospital grounds from town. Same scene, with the addition of some guys unloading spools of razor wire from the back of a truck.

John spat and said, “This might sound like an odd thing to say right at this moment, but I wish those guys were wearing hazmat suits.”

“Yeah or at least something covering their mouths.”

“There wouldn’t happen to be a door around here, would there?”

“A door…?”

“You know. One of the—”

“Oh. There’s not one in the hospital as far as I know. That would have been awfully convenient though.”

John thought for a moment, then said, “What about BB’s? It’s right on the other side of the trees there.” BB’s was a convenience store about two blocks away, but on the other side of that little wooded area. Among those trees was a deep drainage ditch we’d also have to cross.

“Man, I don’t know…”

He edged around to get a look at the Guardsmen standing between us and the woods. He said, “Come on, we wait ’til that guy goes to help unload some more of that wire, then run right through the gap there. But if we’re gonna do it, we have to do it now, before the sun comes all the way up.”

“And what makes you think those other guys won’t shoot us in the head?”

“They’re not gonna do that. All these guys know is they got up in the wee hours of the morning to fence off a hospital because a guy went on a shooting rampage and they’re afraid some diseases may have escaped. They don’t know there’s a, you know, monster situation going on.”

“And you know all of that how?”

“TJ Frye is over on the other side. You remember TJ? Came to that party a few years ago and stuck his dick in the jelly? He’s like a sergeant now. Said they haven’t been told shit.”

“Well, they’re gonna chase us.”

“Yeah but we just gotta make it to BB’s.”

John stripped off his shirt and started wrapping it around his face, like he was ready to join some riot in the Middle East. “Cover your face, unless you want them to identify you and show up at your house in an hour.”

Peering through a quarter-inch slit of wrapped T-shirt, we crouched low and stayed in the shadows until we reached the narrow stretch of lawn between us and the woods. We stayed like that for about fifteen minutes until one guard left his post to accept a cup of coffee from another. We sprinted. I immediately slipped in the wet grass and fell on my face. My shirt mask slipped over my eyes. I scrambled to my feet and just ran, as hard and fast as I could, nearly blind. I heard shouted commands but no gunshots.

A branch slapped me in the face and I knew I had reached the woods. I stumbled and clawed the shirt away from my eyes just in time to feel the ground give way under me. I was sliding down an embankment of wet grass and dead leaves, then splashed into freezing ankle-deep water. It was dark. There had been an early morning gloom out on the lawn but it was still midnight under the trees—no sign of John, or anyone else. I sloshed through the water and scrambled up the other side, pulling myself up with handfuls of weeds, knocking aside discarded grocery bags and flattened plastic Coke bottles.

A hand latched around my ankle. A different hand latched around my wrist. John up top, one of the soldiers on bottom. For a ridiculous moment I was pulled in opposite directions like a cartoon character, both men shouting frantic instructions at me. I tried to kick free and accidentally kicked the guy in the head in the process. It worked.

In three seconds, John and I were out of the woods and sprinting diagonally across a parking lot, through the bay of a car wash, down an alley and toward the gray bricks and rusting Dumpster that was the ass end of BB’s convenience store. I risked a look over my shoulder—

“SHIT!”

There were no fewer than ten soldiers following us now, the two in the lead carrying black plastic pistols with neon-green tips. They looked like toys, but I knew they were Tasers. I was eager to avoid my fifth lifetime Tasering if at all possible.

The restroom door was on the exterior of the store, around the corner to our left. I rushed up to it, grabbed a rickety knob and—

“Locked!” I said, trying to catch my breath. “The key! Inside! You have to get the key from the counter inside!”

John shoved me aside, reared back, and kicked the door. The whole knob and latch mechanism exploded. We crammed ourselves inside, pushing the broken door closed.

One… two… three…

“Hey! You two! Get the fuck out of there and lay the fuck down on the pavement before we have to—”

The soldier was cut off in midword.

I pulled open the door to find we were surrounded by panties.

We stepped out of the ladies’ dressing room at the Walmart on the opposite side of town. John and I had traveled about 2.5 miles in approximately zero seconds. Right now, at BB’s, several very confused National Guardsmen were staring at an extremely filthy, and completely empty, public bathroom.

We stepped into the aisle of the nearly empty store, two muddy men with T-shirts wrapped around their heads. John unwrapped his and said, “What is this? Walmart?”

So, I wasn’t completely honest with the psychiatrist about the whole thing with the mysterious door in the burrito stand and the Asian dude who disappeared into it. John and I have identified half a dozen of those doors around town, and we know where they lead: to each other. The only thing is you never knew to which of the other doors they were going to take you, it was basically doorway roulette. I mean, you’re not going step out in Beijing or anything, it’s always another door around town. All the ones we’ve found, anyway. But they never seem to go to the same place twice. Why? Because this whole town is fucked up, that’s why. I keep trying to tell you that. You don’t want to come here. It’s exhausting.

John and I didn’t draw much attention as we moved through the store since, at this particular store in this particular town, we weren’t even the filthiest people there. We just walked right out the front door and headed back toward town along the shoulder of the highway. It was a wet, chilled morning under a lethargic November sky that had rolled out of bed and thrown on an old, gray, grease-stained T-shirt.

John said, “Did you hear? They never found Franky.”

“Wonderful.”

“What do you think happened? You think that bug thing took over his brain?”

“Hey, why not?”

“You think he’s gonna turn up again?”

If you’re asking yourself why the men with guns chasing us couldn’t just use the magic door and follow us right to Walmart, it’s because for most people, the doors are just doors. Same as for most people, the spider monster in my house would have been invisible, just as it was for Franky. Same as how if you’d been in the bathroom with me all those months ago when I saw that shadowy shape outside my shower, you’d have seen nothing. You might have sensed something, just as in your everyday life you might sit in a dark house and feel like you’re not alone, or have a nagging suspicion that something slipped around a corner just a moment before you looked. The feeling can usually be expressed by the phrase, “Of course there’s nothing there. Now.”

To be clear, if you’ve actually seen a ghost, that doesn’t make you like us. A ghost sighting is usually nothing more than your brain trying to put a familiar face on something that does not have a face at all.

John and I, on the other hand, can see what most of you can only sense. We’re not special, it’s just the result of some drugs we took. Just for future reference, if you’re ever at a party and a Rastafarian offers you a syringe full of a slimy black substance that crawls around on its own like The Blob, don’t take it. And don’t call us, either. We get enough bullshit from strangers as it is.

25 Hours Prior to Outbreak

English should have a word for that feeling you get when you first wake up in a strange room and have no freaking idea where you are.

Hotezzlement?

I was cold, and every inch of my body was in pain. I heard a crunching, like the jaws of a predator grinding through bone. I pulled open my eyes. I saw a dragon standing proudly atop a hill before me.

The dragon was on a TV screen, beneath it was a video game console with a tangle of cords snaking across green carpet. I blinked, squinted at the sun burning in through a cracked window. I turned, hearing my neck creak as I did, and saw John sitting at a computer desk in the corner, staring into the monitor and holding a bottle full of a clear liquid that I’m sure you wouldn’t want to try to put out a fire with. I sat up, realizing I had been covered up with something in my sleep. I thought for a moment John had thrown a blanket over me but closer inspection revealed it to be a beach towel.

John glanced back at me from his computer chair and said, “Sorry, I used my spare blanket when I got that leak in my car.”

I looked around for the source of that animal crunching noise. I found Molly laying behind the couch, with her head crammed inside an open box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. She was eating as fast as she could, trying to use her paws to keep the box in place.

“You’re letting her do that?”

“Oh, yeah. Cereal is stale anyway. I don’t have any dog food here.”

The dragon sat frozen on the television, the intro screen for a video game John had apparently been playing while I slept on his couch.

“What time is it?”

“Around eight.”

I stood and felt my head swim. I rubbed my eyes and almost screamed in pain from the wound there. My shoulder felt like it had taken a bullet and it seemed like a pair of elves were trying to escape my skull through my temples using tiny pickaxes. It wasn’t the first time I had woken up at John’s place feeling like this.

My phone screamed. The display read, AMY. I closed my eyes, sighed and answered.

“Hey, baby.”

“Hi! David! I’m watching the news! What happened?”

“Shouldn’t you be in class?” Amy had failed a pretty basic English class last semester because it was a morning class and she kept sleeping through it.

She said, “They cancelled it. Oh, it’s on again. Turn to CNN.”

I talked around the phone to John, told him to switch over the TV. He did, and watched as an early morning shot of the chaos at the hospital filled the screen. The name of the city was displayed along the bottom. National news.

John turned up the sound and we heard a female reporter say, “… No history of drug use or mental illness. Frank Burgess had been with the department for three years. Authorities are combing the area for Burgess but police say the number of wounds he sustained in the standoff make his turning up alive, quote, ‘highly unlikely.’ Meanwhile, the hospital remains under quarantine due to unspecified infection risks that have only added to the anxiety in this shell-shocked community.”

They cut to a shot of our enormously fat chief of police, giving a sound bite in front of a bank of microphones.

To Amy I said, “Man, our chief of police is getting huge.”

Amy said, “They said thirteen people were hurt and I think three people died but there could be more. Did you guys hear about this last night? When it was all going on?”

A pause on my end. Too long. Finally I said, “We heard about it, yeah.”

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“David, were you there? Were you guys in on this?”

“What? No, no. Of course not. Why would you think that?”

“David…”

“No, no. It was nothing. Guy just went crazy, that’s all.”

“Are you lying?”

“No, no. No.”

She said nothing. She and the therapist knew the same trick. Filling the silence, I said, “I mean, we were there but we weren’t really involved…”

“I knew it! I’m coming down.”

“No, Amy. It’s nothing, really. It’s over. We just happened to be in the area.”

I heard John say, “Hey! It’s me!” I turned to the television.

Sure enough, John’s face filled the screen. The reporter’s voice-over covered the audio, saying, “… But for every hour Burgess remains at large, fear and paranoia are bound to keep growing in this small city.”

On TV, John’s voice faded in: “… And then we saw a small creature crawl into his mouth. I wasn’t two feet away, I saw it clearly. The thing wasn’t from this world. I don’t mean alien, I mean probably interdimensional in nature. I think it’s obvious from what happened tonight that this being possessed some powers of mind control.”

I closed my eyes again and groaned.

Amy said, “I’m coming down. I’ll take the bus.”

“Forget it, your classes are more important. If you fail English again I think they can kick you out of the country. I think it’s in the Patriot Act.”

“Gotta go, honey. I’m late for class.”

“You said you didn’t—”

“We’ll talk about it later. Bye-bye.”

I killed the phone and looked for my shoes.

“You goin’ back home?”

“I can’t stay here, John.”

“Yeah. But, you know. You had that thing in your house.”

“You think there’s another one?”

“I don’t know, but—”

“What do you want me to do, have the place sprayed?”

“No, I’m just sayin’. That thing, it crawled inside Franky and seemed to take him over. Well, that thing turned up in your bed. Are you assuming that’s an accident? Because maybe we should consider that it was there for you.”

I can always trust John to think of things like this.

“It don’t matter. Okay? Your couch isn’t long enough. It kills my neck on the armrest. So, it’s moot.”

“Well, you’re not gettin’ the bed.”

I took away Molly’s cereal box, which was now just empty cardboard bent in the shape of a dog head. I said, “You sounded crazy on the news, by the way. I hope you know that.”

“What? I was tellin’ the truth.”

“To what purpose, exactly? The only people who’ll be convinced by that are people who’re already nuts. I can see you’ve got your blog up right now. For what? So you can tell the whole nonsense story and be one more nutjob ranting on the Internet? It doesn’t do anybody any good. It just makes you look crazy. It makes both of us look crazy.”

“Hey, aren’t you going to be late for your court-mandated therapist appointment?”

“Fuck you.”

I glanced at my watch. He was right.

The drive through town was surreal. I had to go past the hospital (okay, I didn’t have to but curiosity got the better of me) and it had the air of a natural disaster. News vans were parked outside of barriers that were blocking the street. Cops were at a checkpoint, directing traffic away from the parking garage entrance. Three blocks later I had to wait at an intersection for five minutes while a row of green trucks rumbled past. Military. I suddenly wanted to get far away from there.

I had half hoped I would find the psychiatrist’s office closed today, as if the aftermath of a shooting rampage would be treated like a national holiday. No such luck. People got to make a paycheck I guess.

I barged in before I realized there was somebody else in the waiting room. Should have looked in through the window or something, I would have waited outside if I’d known, since the potential for really awkward conversation seems pretty high in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. I tried to think of a plausible excuse for turning around and leaving. The best I came up with was to grab the potted plant in the corner and just walk out, as if it was a rental I was repossessing. I decided not to.

The lady in the waiting room didn’t even turn to me when I came in, she was transfixed by a television in the corner tuned to Fox News, covering the shooting. Jesus, slow news day. People get shot all the time, right? I found a chair as far away from her as possible. I grabbed a magazine and held it in front of my face. Seemed to be a lot of articles about wedding dresses.

“It’s happening all over, you know,” said the woman from the other side of the room. She was probably forty-five or so, hair a desperate shade of blonde.

I said, “What’s that?”

“Demon possession. All over the world. You see news from the Middle East and such and you can see it spreading like wildfire.”

“Uh huh.”

“It’s easier now, now that all the souls are gone.”

“Hmm.” I flipped the page in my bridal magazine, acting engrossed in the ads. The only thing worse than always being the craziest person in the room is when suddenly you’re alone with someone crazier. She was still talking.

“Did you know the Rapture happened already? In 1961. The Lord called all the souls up to Heaven. But the bodies were left behind. That’s why the people walking around today don’t seem to have souls. It’s because they don’t. You see that story last week, the man who was being chased by the police in a stolen car? There was a newborn baby in the backseat? He just threw it out the window. A baby! People these days are just common animals. Because their human souls are gone, see.”

I lowered the magazine and said, “That’s… not a bad theory actually.”

“They called it the mark of the beast. But they don’t need a mark. They reveal themselves as beasts, with time.”

The door to the office creaked open and out walked a gorgeous teenage girl. For a baffled second I thought this was somehow my therapist, like maybe she was filling in today. But of course she was just a patient and Dr. Tennet was behind her. The crazy woman in the waiting room stood and thanked the doctor and walked out with the girl. The lady hadn’t been there for treatment. She was just giving her daughter a ride.

Right off, Dr. Tennet asked, “What happened to your eye?”

“Got in a fight with John. He said counseling was a waste of time and I told him I’d be damned if I’d hear him insult you and your profession.”

“You look like you haven’t slept.”

“How can I, with what’s going on? Have you been watching the news today? Do you know if they found Franky?”

“He wasn’t expected to live, was he? Did you know him?”

“What? No. Why would I have known him?”

“You called him Franky.”

“Well I went to high school with him. But that was years ago. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened if that’s what you mean.”

“Not at all.”

“Because I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry if I made you feel accused.”

I glanced out the window at the exact moment a green truck rumbled by on the street outside.

“Why are there so many army trucks? This all seems like an overreaction, don’t you think?”

Not letting me change the subject, Tennet said, “I would like to come back to what you talked about last time, about having to hide your true self from the world, and feeling like you are powerless to become the type of person who would not have to hide. Just now, you seemed to feel I was accusing you. I’d like to talk about that if we can.”

I stared out the window and chewed a fingernail. Man, I did not want to be here. In this office, in this town, in this life. I wanted to just walk out. I knew at some point the cops were going to scoop up John—he’d appeared on goddamned television right in the area they were trying to quarantine—and that meant eventually they’d come get me, too. What the hell was I doing here?

Because you have nowhere else to go.

I said, “I don’t know. Twenty-four hours ago I’m sitting here trying to justify believing crazy things, and one day later the whole town has gone crazy. So, in my mind the rest of the world has now caught up to my craziness which means I should be set free.” I rubbed my itchy eyes and said, “There are real monsters, doc. I’m too tired today to say anything else.”

He said, “I read some of the things you and your friend posted on the Internet. Sometimes you speak of yourself as if you are a freak, or a monster.”

“Well, metaphorically. I mean, aren’t we all? The woman in the waiting room just now basically told me the same thing.”

“An incident like last night always brings out those kind of feelings, I suppose.”

I considered for a moment, then said, “Can I ask you a question, doc?”

“Of course.”

“What would you say if I asked to use your computer there, on your desk? Right now, without you having a chance to delete anything.”

“Of course, there is confidential patient information that I couldn’t—”

“Let’s say I could promise I wouldn’t look at any of that. In fact, let’s say I just want to look at your Internet browser history. How would you feel about that?”

“It would be an invasion of privacy, of course. And I have credit cards and logins—”

“I’m talking about the porn, doc. Would I find nasty schoolgirl porn on there? Maybe interracial stuff? Incest fantasies?”

“I feel like you’re trying to get a reaction from me. If you’re not feeling like going through with the session we can continue on Monday—”

“No, listen. When I’m with Amy and I ask to borrow her computer, she passes it right over. No questions asked, no hesitation. She could sit there and look over my shoulder and watch me sift through every single file, and she wouldn’t flinch. She has nothing to hide. It’d be the same if I had a machine that could peer into her mind—she’d be fine with it. She’s comfortable with what she is. But, on the other hand, if she’s visiting and she asks to use my laptop? Man, there is so much depraved shit on there that if she saw it all, she’d call the cops. If she could see what goes through my mind when I see another girl walk by, she’d burst into tears.”

He nodded. “So you feel like you have to hide a part of yourself, and she doesn’t.”

“I’m saying it’s like that with everybody. There are two kinds of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day, that tension gnawing in his guts. But not Tony Stark, he’s open about who he is. He tells the world he’s Iron Man, he doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn’t have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You’re one or the other—either you’re one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you’re not one of those people. And the two groups aren’t even living in the same universe.”

“You believe you’re Batman.”

I closed my eyes. “What did you say the hourly rate for these sessions was again?”

“I mean you’re in that category, you feel like the people around you would react badly if they knew what you really thought and believed.”

“Not because they’ll think I’m crazy. They already think that. But because of how they would react once they knew the truth. You know how people are. That’s what you write books about, right? Group panics and all that?”

“You think the truth would cause mass hysteria.”

I shrugged, and nodded toward the window. “Look out there. You’ll see.”

He said, “That’s actually more true than you know. Don’t repeat this, but it appears I’m going to be called in to work on this case. The hospital shooting, I mean.”

“What, like as a profiler or something?”

“Oh, no, no. I’d be offering my assistance in dealing with the public. It’s the panic that is the primary concern, you see. Making sure no one gets a hair trigger, some poor soul waiting by their back door with a hunting rifle, shooting at a shadowy shape in the backyard that turns out to be their neighbor. Fear can be fatal and, as I suppose you see on my bookshelf, I’m… something of an expert.”

I thought, That has to be nice, to have a job where fear is something that happens to other people.

I stared out the window and said, “Do you ever get scared, Dr. Tennet?”

“Of course, but you know these sessions aren’t about me—”

“And besides, in your world, everything has some harmless explanation, right? It’s always bees. Even this thing with Franky. Your job will be, what, to go up to a bank of microphones and assure everybody that it’s all bees?”

“You feel like I was being dismissive of your fears. I apologize if so.”

“So does anything scare you, doctor? Anything irrational?”

“Of course. Here, I’ll volunteer my most embarrassing example. I feel like I owe it to you, to make up for the bee story. Are you a fan of science fiction?”

“I don’t know. My girlfriend is.”

“All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?”

“Yeah. The transporters.”

“Do you know how they work?”

“Just… special effects. CGI or whatever they used.”

“No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.”

“Sure.”

“That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.”

“Sure.

“So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this.

“Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.”

I stared at him.

“Why did you tell me that?”

He shrugged. “You asked.”

His face showed nothing. I thought of the Asian guy, casually disappearing into the magic burrito door, walking out somewhere else. And in that moment I almost asked Tennet what he knew, and who he was.

I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything.

18 Hours Prior to Outbreak

Hours went by, and the cops continued to not show up at either my house or John’s apartment. All morning I was worried sick about what I would say when they brought me in, but then afternoon came and I was even more worried about the fact that they weren’t coming after us. That meant things had gotten so out of control that we were no longer on their list of priorities.

Come midafternoon, I found myself at work, standing behind a counter, trying to peel the magnetic antitheft tag off a DVD with my fingernail (a DVD is a disc that plays movies, if they don’t have those by the time you read this). I know I’ve complained about the pain in my eye and shoulder more than once but I want to point out that the bite on my leg was also starting to hurt like a son of a bitch.

I would have called in sick, but I had used up all of my sick days for the year and couldn’t take off again until January. I take a lot of sick days, most of them self-declared Mental Health days, meaning I wake up in a mood that I know will lead me to assault the very first person who asks me if the two-day rentals have to be back on Wednesday or Thursday.

I had worked at Wally’s Videe-Oh! for five years, been a manager for two. I started right after I dropped out of college. At the time I had heard that Quentin Tarantino got discovered while working at a video store, and I think I had it in my head to try to work there and write a screenplay. It was going to be about a cop in the future with a sentient flamethrower for an arm. At age nineteen, that seemed like a pretty sound plan. The thing about not having parents is you don’t have anyone to tell you you’re heading down a path paved with grossly inaccurate expectations of what the world owes you.

The people who raised me—and I’ll leave their names out of this—they did what they could. Nice people, real religious. Kind of treated me like I was a little African refugee kid they had rescued. They knew my story, knew that I had never known my dad. Years later when I got in trouble at school and got kicked out because of that kid that died, they were real supportive. Took my side all the way through, then shortly after they moved to Florida and hinted that maybe things would be better if I stayed behind.

My birth mom is living in Arizona, I think, staying with a dozen other people in an arrangement that could be called a “compound.” She sent me a letter two years ago, thirty pages scribbled on lined notebook paper. I couldn’t make it past the first paragraph. I skipped down to the last sentence, which was, “I hope you are stockpiling ammunition like I told you, the forces of the Antichrist will first seek to disarm us.”

I scraped the plastic theft sticker off the DVD, put it back in its case, then picked another case off the stack. Pulled out the disc, started scraping off the tag. I looked around, saw there was only one customer in the store. A guy wearing a cowboy hat. His jeans looked like they were painted on.

The TV we had mounted in the far corner of the store was supposed to be playing a promotional DVD but I had switched it over to Headline News, with the sound down and the closed-captioning turned on. They had been going back to the “hospital shooting” every twenty minutes or so. The cowboy with the tight pants came up to the counter with a copy of Basic Instinct 2 and 2001: A Space Odyssey. How could he walk in those jeans? Did they inflate when he farted?

I glanced up at the TV and saw a reporter standing in front of a street barricade. Closed-captioning mentioned something about cops having to break up an angry crowd trying to get in to see loved ones at the hospital. The cowboy gave me his membership card and I punched in the number. His account came up as:

NAME: James DuPree

OVERDUE: ø

ACCT STATUS: A

COMMENTS: THIS MAN HAS WORN THE SAME TROUSERS SINCE HE WAS A TODDLER.

Many memos had circulated at Wally’s about abusing the customer comment box on the computer. We have John to thank for that. He worked here a few years ago, after I begged the manager to let him on. John was fired a few months later, but not before he managed to add something to the “Comment” field for pretty much every single customer he served:

NAME: Carl Gass

COMMENTS: If he doesn’t have late charges, and you tell him that he does, he LOSES HIS FUCKING MIND.

NAME: Lisa Franks

COMMENTS: Had sex with her on 11/15.

NAME: Kara Bullock

COMMENTS: Thinks I have an English accent. Don’t forget.

NAME: Chet Beirach

COMMENTS: Always smells like fish. I think he fishes for a living. He’s sensitive about it so don’t bring it up.

NAME: Rob Arnold

COMMENTS: It’s the white Patrick Ewing!

NAME: Cheryl Mackey

COMMENTS: Had sex with her on 7/16.

I gave the cowboy his change, glancing over his shoulder at the TV every chance I could get. They were back to old footage from the hospital, the camera showing close-ups of bullet holes in walls and shell casings on the floor. The cowboy turned to follow my gaze, saw the TV. “That’s some scary shit, ain’t it?”

I said, “Yeah.”

“Whole world’s comin’ to an end, that’s what I think.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Nigger in the White House.”

“Yeah.”

The cowboy left. He stuffed his wallet into his back pocket and I imagined it shooting back out again, squeezed by the sheer pressure of the fabric. I grabbed a DVD and went back to peeling off stickers.

I had gotten written up six weeks ago because more DVDs were stolen on my watch than either of the other two managers. Not sure what I was supposed to be doing to stop it, other than running out and tackling the kids who tried to walk out with the goods. The problem, I decided, was the magnetic antitheft tags that would activate the door alarm were in the DVD cases, not on the discs, so it only took the thieves minutes to figure out they just had to pop the disc out of the case and stuff it in their pocket, leaving the case and the theft tag behind. Yes, this town has people who are actually too poor to afford a computer and Internet connection to just pirate the movies that way.

So I wrote up this angry e-mail to the head office, saying the antitheft system was idiotic and that if they were serious about people not stealing discs, then they should put the antitheft tags on the discs themselves. They agreed, and I and two other employees spent about twelve hours sticking these stiff little stickers to all of the new releases in the store. The plan worked beautifully. That is, until last Thursday, when a customer brought in a disc that had been scratched to hell because the theft sticker came unstuck inside his DVD player. It jammed the little tray when it tried to eject the disc and he had to pry it out. Two days later, a customer brought in a broken DVD player. When his disc got stuck thanks to the sticker, he wound up breaking the disc tray on the machine trying to free it.

I wasn’t at the store that day, I was on one of my many “sick” days. But when I came back I was greeted by twenty-seven e-mails from managers and regional managers and other people I had never heard from before, telling me that every antitheft sticker had to be removed from every DVD by November 5th.

I bring this up in case you were wondering why in the holy hell I felt the need to come in to work in the middle of what appeared to be some kind of monster infestation. The answer is that if I took one more sick day I would be fired, and if I didn’t get these stickers off by the deadline I would be fired, and even if I could talk my way out of one firing I sure as hell couldn’t talk my way out of both. And if I was fired, soon after society would decide I wasn’t earning my electricity and water and my house and my food. And they’d be right. If you think that’s a bad reason to come to work in the middle of all this, then I’m guessing you’re still living with Mom and Dad.

I glanced up at the TV and saw something new. Security camera footage, from inside the hospital. In color, but in a frame rate that made the people appear to blink down the hallway, teleporting five feet at a time. There was a shot of a woman running in terror. They cut back to the studio and some older guy in a suit, an expert of some kind they had brought in. Then they cut back to the security video and I froze.

I heard the DVD I was holding fall to the counter.

Did I just see that?

They played it again. The first frame was Franky, in the hall of the hospital, holding a nurse around the throat. The frames rolled forward. A security guard came into frame, hand out, trying to talk Franky down. Next frame, same players, limbs in different positions. Looked to be about one frame per second. The next frame was what got me.

At the top of the screen appeared a man in black. And I mean all black, head to toe. A solid black shape. Next frame—one second later—he was gone.

I stared. They cut back to the anchor. The closed-captioning lagged behind but I didn’t think I saw any mention of the mysterious figure in the hall.

My cell phone screamed. I picked up.

“Yeah.”

John said, “Dave? Can you get to a television?”

“We got one on here. I saw it.”

“The thing in the hall?”

“Yeah. Man in black.”

“Shadow man.”

“Whatever.”

“Man, this isn’t a joke anymore.”

“It wasn’t a joke before, John. A bunch of people died.”

“You know what I mean. You better sleep with your crossbow tonight.”

“I don’t have the crossbow. The cops confiscated it, remember?”

“Okay, then I should come over. I’ll bring my lighter. We’ll sleep in shifts.”

“No. Wait, bring your what?”

“Come on man, how do you know Franky won’t show up there?”

“He’s surely dead by now.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

“I’m busy, John.”

“Sure. I’ll try to come up with a plan.”

“Whatever.”

“Watch the shadows.”

“Hey, John, don’t do anything stupid—”

I was talking to a dead phone.

17 Hours Prior to the Outbreak

DISCLAIMER: The following sequence of events was relayed by John to the author after the fact, and no attempt was made to corroborate this version of events through witness interviews. While there is no evidence directly contradicting any of this account, much of it seems highly unlikely.

John wound up needing five hours to find Franky Burgess.

That may sound impressive to you, considering there were rows of trained, uniformed men fanning out across several square miles around the hospital all day Friday without success, but it actually took longer than John was hoping. It wasn’t until 8 P.M. that he found himself face-to-face with Franky across a pane of dirty glass, and he had been hoping to have the whole situation wrapped up while it was still daylight. Night is when bad things happen in Undisclosed. Well, bad things also happen in the daytime but at least you can see where you’re going when you’re running away.

Anyway, in early November, night falls at around six. So after getting off the phone with Dave at the video store at three, John had spent an hour driving around in his Caddie and getting a sense of the situation around town. The manhunt, which seemed to involve several hundred police, volunteers and National Guardsmen, appeared to be focused on the wooded area east of the hospital, and the empty houses and trailers around it. It made sense from their point of view, he supposed. They were looking for a spot where a deranged and wounded man would crawl off to die. But they weren’t going to find Franky. It wasn’t going to be that easy.

There were local cops who had to know better, who had to know that the situation at the hospital had been that other thing, the kind of business that pops up in Undisclosed every few years when the town decides to start coloring outside the lines. John was picturing the chief trying to nudge the National Guard in that direction, maybe suggesting that they expand the search, and that maybe additional precautions should be taken with the quarantine. Special hearing protection, perhaps. Or hazmat suits. And instead of just the hospital, maybe rope off the whole town. Or state. But then that would lead to a lot of awkward questions and the chief would quickly back down and just pray that the whole thing would come to nothing. If only it ever worked out that way.

John, on the other hand, was thinking “monster” from the start since, you know, the situation was caused by a monster. It was just a matter of figuring out what kind of monster it was. There are really only two kinds of monsters in the world, which you already know if you’ve been watching horror movies: Breeders and Non-breeders. So for instance, Frankenstein’s monster would fall into the second category if he was real. He’s a freak, a singular being and once you kill him, he’s gone. Problem solved.

The Breeders are an exponentially bigger problem. Within that group you’ve got slow breeders like vampires (if they were real, which they’re not) which breed in a small-scale controlled way, but mainly to avoid extinction rather than spread. But then you’ve got the fast breeders, like zombies (if they existed, which they don’t) where breeding is all they do. They are basically walking epidemics, and are the worst of the worst-case scenarios, because such a creature could, hypothetically, wipe out civilization. This is humanity’s greatest fear, which is why at the moment half of the world’s horror novels, movie posters and video games have zombies on the cover. So in any situation like this, step one is to find out what category of creature you’re dealing with. Step two is to anticipate what the creature is going to do next, based on what you determined in step one. Then step three is you find out if the thing can be killed with a chainsaw.

This particular case was a fairly straightforward situation of a small creature taking over a man’s head and controlling his body. That is a really specific thing for a creature to do, John thought, requiring countless specialized biological adaptations. So it was unlikely that it was just some kind of Frankenstein-style genetic mistake with no goal beyond stumbling around biting people until somebody shot it enough times. So, logically that would mean it was a Breeder, and that the taking over of a human body was done to facilitate breeding. What had John worried was that the little shit looked like an insect, and in the normal course of things, insects are notoriously fast breeders. So it could be a worst-case scenario. John suspected that somebody up the ladder had already arrived at that conclusion, which is why on this fine autumn afternoon you couldn’t pull up to a stoplight in Undisclosed without finding yourself in a Humvee sandwich. It’s also presumably why the hospital had been roped off.

So, how do we find Franky?

In John’s estimation, that would come down to how much of Franky’s brain was still intact. His body still functioned despite the damage it had taken, so the basic nervous and muscular systems must still have been operated by his own human brain. So there surely had to be some remnant of Franky’s instincts and impulses in there. And Franky was a cop.

John could think of five shops in town that sold donuts, none of which said they had seen Franky when John called. Where else did cops eat? John drove past a half dozen fast-food franchises, and didn’t see Franky inside when he passed. It was getting frustrating. Only two hours of light left now. Then, John swung by a Waffle House and found what he was looking for:

Waffles.

He was good and hungry by that point and let’s face it, it had been a “eat breakfast for dinner” kind of day. Blueberry waffles, hash browns, washed down with a beer he found in his jacket.

Around five, John dropped by Munch’s trailer. Mitch “Munch” Lombard was one of the three bass players in John’s band Three Arm Sally, and had been since high school. He was also a volunteer firefighter which meant he had a police band scanner at his place. John figured he could stay on top of the manhunt and come up with a new plan.

There were a bunch of dudes there already and everybody was playing Guitar Hero and drinking that purple mix of 7Up and cough syrup that sent John to the hospital last year. Steve Gamin came by with a huge bag of frozen McNuggets he had stolen from the McDonald’s where he worked. They fired up the Fry Daddy and ate McNuggets for an hour. There was a Japanese chick there who was either drunk or just really goofy. Either way she could barely stand up and laughed at everything that happened. John took a hit of something that he realized gave him the ability to speak Japanese. Or at least he thought it did. He made words that sounded like Japanese to the girl and every time he did, she laughed so hard she almost pissed herself.

He hadn’t forgotten his mission. Occasionally John would hear excited voices over the police scanner and would make everybody be quiet. But eventually everybody got so fucked up they wouldn’t do it. Head Feingold and his girlfriend Jenny McCormick stopped by with a case of wine she won in a contest and it was a party all of a sudden. A while later, Head went outside to puke and fell asleep on the deck. John found himself making out with the Japanese girl but she started calling him by a different name and he suddenly realized she had been confusing him with another guy all night. Do all white people look the same to the Japanese? John got off the sofa and told her he had to use the bathroom, then quietly threw on his jacket and headed for the door.

Dark outside. Damn it.

John saw Head passed out on the deck, under the grill. He turned around, went back into the trailer, grabbed a comforter and a pillow. He went back out to the deck where Head lay and put the blanket over him and wedged the pillow under his head. Just as he was about to leave again, John heard the scanner crackle to life behind him. The dispatcher was reporting that staff out at the turkey farm west of town were complaining that some vagrant was stealing turkeys. The responding cop said in that coded way cops do, that they had bigger fish to fry.

John, on the other hand, jumped off the deck and threw himself into his old Cadillac. He buckled his seat belt, which he always did because he never knew when he would need to ramp something. He made the engine growl and told the headlights to fuck the night.

John had inherited the old Cadillac from a great-uncle who passed away the previous summer. There had been quite a heated debate among the family about who would get stuck with the terrible car, as no one wanted to have to deal with the process of scrapping it. John volunteered and had been driving it ever since.

Creedence Clearwater Revival blasted from an old cassette as John bumped down the highway. He hated Creedence, but Uncle Pat loved them, apparently. Or maybe that was just the last tape he had been listening to when all of the buttons on the ancient sound system stopped working. Either way, the tape was now in permanent play mode, playing through side A, reaching the end, automatically reversing and playing side B. Forever. As loud as it would go. You couldn’t stop it, you couldn’t eject it. Where there should have been a volume knob, there was only an empty hole, not even a little shaft that you could maybe grab with a pair of needle-nose pliers. On each end of the Caddie’s dash were large lumps where John had wadded up towels and held them over the speakers with electrician’s tape, hoping to muffle the sound. It did not. Creedence was determined to be heard.

John headed south down the highway, left onto a curve that transitioned to a rural paved road with no painted lines, and across the overpass. Then around the lake, heading toward a row of enormous, low, blue buildings. Turkey factory. There was a gravel lane to the right, and John took it so hard he thought he was going up on two wheels. The Caddie bumped and growled on the dirt road, rear end fishtailing like it was on ice, bits of gravel smacking the floorboards with a sound like popcorn.

John scanned the grounds for any sign of Franky. He wasn’t feeling so good, the waffles and hash browns and beer and McNuggets and wine and the Japanese girl’s ChapStick sitting hard in his gut—

WHUMP

“OH, SHIT! SHIT!”

He had hit somebody. They were writhing on the hood as John’s feet stomped around trying to find the brake pedal. A face was pressed against the windshield and it was—

“FRANKY! SHIT!”

John slammed on the brakes and the Caddie spun out on the gravel. Franky held on.

John reached into his backseat for the chainsaw, then realized there was no chainsaw in the backseat because he had forgotten to drop by Dave’s place to get it from his toolshed.

Franky reached around through the driver’s side window and snatched at John’s shirt. John shrugged away from the hand and dove for the opposite door, pushing his way out and rolling onto the ground. He ran. John’s fists pumped toward the light of the turkey building, pulling frozen breaths around the cigarette butts piled up in his lungs. He heard footsteps behind him.

John reached the building. There was the door. John yanked it open.

The fucking smell. Holy shit. It was one of those stinks that seemed to generate its own warmth. Mold and poop and rotten meat. It hit him like a wall. It looked for a moment like there was a foot of snow inside the building, just white as far as the eye could see in that impossibly huge space. Turkeys. Turkeys so thick you couldn’t see the ground, white feathers and thin little twitchy heads and, here and there, a rustle of flapping wings, birds jumping and thrashing and squawking and flailing through the air, demonstrating turkey flight as one of God’s failures.

John was running again, kicking through turkeys, sucking in air, accidentally eating a feather. Looking for a weapon. Where does a turkey farm keep the chainsaws? Thinking fast, John clutched at the nearest turkey, spun and hurled it at his pursuer. Franky caught the bird like a flapping medicine ball, studied it, then turned and ran out of the building.

“Goddamnit,” yelled someone from behind John. “You gave him another turkey! You’re payin’ for it.”

It was a couple of guys in gray coveralls. To the one who looked like he spoke English, John said, “Weapons! We need weapons! That’s the guy! Franky! He’ll be back after he eats that turkey! Get a chain—OW—”

A turkey bit him on the ankle.

Wait, not a turkey.

One of those fucking spider monsters.

“Shit!” John kicked the spider off his shoe, hard enough that he expected it to go flying like a punted football, but it was kind of clinging to his shoe and it only landed about ten feet away. One of the dudes in coveralls behind him started shouting something in Spanish.

John turned to them and said, “Kill it! Help me kill that thing! I think Franky shit it!”

The dudes seemed to be running away. Hopefully they’d come back with a chainsaw. John backed up, realizing he’d kicked the spider to a spot where it’d be between him and the door.

More flapping and gobbling. The turkeys were going crazy where the spider had landed. John could see the spider appeared to be attached to a turkey somehow. Then, one of the spider’s legs shot out, becoming rigid and ten times as long. It impaled four turkeys as if on a skewer, punching through them with little sprays of blood and feather. The spider extended another tentacle and did it again. Four more turkeys skewered. Again. Now there were four rows of turkeys joined at the central point where the spider’s body was.

The X-shaped cluster of turkeys rose as one body, as tall as a man. Two rows of turkeys forming legs, two forming arms. The turkey Voltron took tentative, lumbering steps toward John. He couldn’t help noticing that after a few steps, the two turkeys it was using as feet had been pulverized into a pink, feathery mess. John stood frozen for several seconds while he tried to decide if any of this was in fact happening. He decided that running was the best option either way.

He ran across the building, spotting another door on the opposite wall, kicking turkeys as he went. He shoved through the door and, as if in answer to a prayer he had been too drunk and stoned to pray, there sat a filthy white pickup truck with a faded cartoon turkey on the door, the engine running. John threw himself into the driver’s seat, grabbed the gearshift on the steering column and realized it was the turn signal. He looked down to find the stick on the floor when a bundle of wings, feathers and stench punched him in the face. He’d been hit in the jaw with a turkey fist.

John slapped at the turkey, trying to shove it back out of the window, unsuccessfully. He found the crank to roll up the window and the turkey gobbled frantically as it was squeezed by the glass. Behind it was the row of turkeys and the rest of the turkey man’s body. John threw the truck in gear and stepped on the gas, hauling the thrashing body of possessed turkeys alongside.

Steering with his right hand and punching a confused fist turkey with his left, John smashed through a chain-link fence and plowed through a stack of bags of turkey feed. He cranked the wheel, nearly crashed right into the building he had just left, and found himself heading back toward the overpass, wind gushing through the gap in the window and filling the interior of the truck with feathers.

The road curved but John didn’t, and suddenly he was bouncing over rough terrain, the turkey collective exploding in angry gobbles with each bump. And then the terrain was gone. He was tilting in the air.

Impact. The steering wheel punched him in the face. John heard a splash. He had time to think, Franky is alive and Dave doesn’t know it.

Before everything went black.

12 Hours Prior to Outbreak

At around 9 P.M. I locked up Wally’s. I hadn’t heard from John since he’d called in the afternoon, which I considered to be a good thing since it meant he had probably forgotten about the whole thing and fell asleep on his sofa watching UFC fights.

Watch the shadows.

That had been the advice from John. Please. This is freaking Undisclosed. That’s like reminding a passenger on a Brooklyn subway not to fondle the hobos in their bathing suit area. I went home and did a room-by-room search of the house. Nothing out of the ordinary. Also nothing in any of the closets, or in the attic, at least as far as I could tell from sweeping the space with a flashlight from the hatch in the hallway. I decided I should check the crawl space under the house, and then I decided fuck that.

Still, I left every light on. I remembered the power outage that accompanied the little bastard showing up last time and I was ready for that, too. I had an LED flashlight in my pocket—compact, but powerful enough to light up half the backyard—and a bundle of six red road flares next to the bed that I had grabbed from my stash in the toolshed. I sat on the bed so that my back was nestled in the corner, the whole room visible from there. I got out my laptop.

From the webcam window Amy said, “What happened to your eye?”

“I told my psychiatrist about you. She got jealous and came at me with a knife.”

“It was the hospital thing, wasn’t it?”

“No.”

“I got a bus ticket, I’m coming down tomorrow.”

“Amy. No. Get a refund. It’s nothing, the whole thing was overblown. A guy just went crazy and shot some dudes.”

“That’s not what John said on TV.”

“That’s between me and John. You know how he just says shit sometimes.”

“The news says the army is there.”

“It’s just the National Guard or something. They’re just trying to reassure people, after nine-eleven the strategy has always been to overreact to every little thing rather than risk being wrong once.”

“So what happened?”

“I just… it’s nothing. A guy went crazy and it was scary and now it’s over. Really.”

“Okay. I’m still coming down, by the way. You need me. You’re upset and I can tell. I’ve seen you like this. You’re scared and you’re trying to act like you’re not.”

I sighed. “If I tell you what’s going on, will you back off?”

“Maybe.”

After a long, dramatic, silence I said, “I saw something last night. It kind of disturbed me.”

Her eyes lit up. “Really? What?”

“John, he… he accidentally sent me a picture of his dick.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Ew. You sure it was an accident?”

“Ah, I knew you’d find a way to make it worse, dear.”

She said, “You look terrible.”

“I just need to sleep. I needed to hear your voice first, that’s all.”

“Ah, that’s sweet. What do you want to talk about?”

I glanced out of the window again. No stars tonight. I said, “Just hypothetically, you’d be okay without me, right? Seriously, if something were to happen to me, you’d move on? Find somebody better?”

“I hate when you get in these moods, David.”

“Just tell me you’d be okay. I’ll sleep better.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I’ll be down tomorrow.”

11 Hours, 45 Minutes Prior to Outbreak

John’s feet were wet. It was dark. He tried to remember where he was. Had he passed out in the kiddie pool again? Water was running over his shoulder.

Hey, there’s a steering wheel.

Okay, so he was in a vehicle of some kind. He couldn’t see shit out the windshield. Feet freezing. Something racing past the glass…

Bubbles?

John’s knees were getting cold now. He reached down and dunked his hand in water and thought OH SHIT I AM UNDER WATER HERE JESUS OH JESUS

His head was all muddled and he started slapping stupidly around the unfamiliar console. He turned the windshield wipers on. No effect. More bursts of bubbles flew past the windshield as his precious air escaped through a hundred cracks in a craft not made to be submerged.

MY AIR, thought John, crazily. THAT IS MY AIR LEAVING.

Belatedly he realized the water soaking his left arm was pouring in from the partly open window next to him. He turned toward the door and took a face full of wet turkey.

John shoved it aside and clutched at the door handle. He kicked at the door. It felt like somebody had stacked two tons of sand on the other side. He pushed with both feet and was shocked when more freezing water came raining in. Truck filling fast. Submerged to his chest now, the cold water like needles in every muscle. John was hyperventilating, crazily trying to pull the door closed again to keep the water out.

Five seconds later he was sucking air out of a tiny gap at the roof of the truck, slurping metallic-tasting, stagnant water with each breath. And then, silence.

Blinking. Under water. Frozen from head to toe. For the first time since he emerged from the womb, John wanted to take a breath and was not allowed.

MY LAST AIR HOLY SHIT I HAVE TASTED THE LAST AIR OF MY LIFE THE AIR THAT IS IN MY LUNGS IS THE LAST AIR I WILL EVER GET THIS IS BULLSHIT MAN

Suddenly there was open water to his left, the door that had been impossible to push open moments ago having gently drifted open on its own. A huge bundle of connected, drowned turkeys floated there. John lunged toward the door, found to his horror that he was glued in place and decided once and for all that this had to be a nightmare.

SEATBELT YOU STILL HAVE YOUR SEATBELT ON YOU STUPID BASTARD

His fingers were numb in the chilled water, making the task of freeing himself almost impossible. So dark. John realized he was seeing only by the dashboard lights, which were still on somehow. He mashed the seat belt clasp and after an eternity felt the belt loosen. He was so thrilled by this that he celebrated by releasing all of the air he had been holding in his mouth. John watched his life run away from him in a swarm of silver bubbles.

NO COME BACK MY LAST AIR COME BACK AIR

John frantically swam after his bubbles, shoving dead turkeys aside. Water in his nostrils, burning. The bubbles didn’t float up, but rather flew off to his left. The assholes. He chased them. Had to get the air back.

Seeing lights. Brain shutting down? John swam after the bubbles and toward the lights. Then he broke through the surface of the water.

He blinked water out of his eyes, and saw streetlights above him. He looked back and saw a pair of red taillights, only a couple of feet under the water, like the eyes of a lurking sea monster. The water was only about eight feet deep and he had only been about five seconds away from drowning in it. Jesus.

John sloshed through the water, climbing the embankment and clawing at weeds to pull himself up, as red and blue lights twirled their way toward him from the highway.

Now they show up.

An hour later, John found himself in handcuffs in the back of a squad car. He’d been totally unsuccessful in his attempts to impress upon the police that they needed to rope off everything in a ten-mile radius and set it on fire. He was equally unsuccessful in getting any of the cops to loan him a cell phone. His wouldn’t turn on and in fact there was still quite a bit of water dripping out of it. He needed to get in touch with Dave.

Another car pulled up. Not a cop car—a flashy silver sports car. A dude in plainclothes got out, flashed a badge and talked to the cops. Ah, finally they got the fancy police on the case. Now they’d get something done. The fancy policeman eventually came over to John’s squad car and pulled open the door.

“You’re John, right?”

John said, “Listen to me. You guys need to get to David Wong’s house.” John told him the address. “Franky is still alive, he’s mobile, and he’s got shit crawling out of him. He’s full of turkey now and I think he’s going to Dave’s place next.”

“Now why don’t you just calm down for a moment. I take it you’ve been drinking tonight?”

“No more than usual. We’re wasting time—”

“Who brought you out here?”

“I drove myself. I thought I’d find Franky here and I did—”

“What did you drive?”

“My Cadillac.”

“Well, it’s not here. You sure you didn’t come with your friend David? You two are the monster guys, right? With the Web site and all that.”

“Listen to me. I think David is at his house and if Franky is heading there, you want to get there first.”

“Uh huh. Because you think Franky will hurt Dave. Because he has ‘shit crawling out of him.’”

“I thought you said you had heard of us. Dude, if you don’t get over there, and fast, Franky is the one that’s in danger.”

6 Hours Prior to Outbreak

I woke up in my bathroom, startled. I had nodded off while pooping. Long goddamned day.

Three in the morning now. I tried to call John, got his voice mail, which was typical. John had set up his life perfectly so that he could get in touch with me anytime he needed something, but all of my calls to him were carefully screened. Everything always on his terms. I stumbled through the house, knowing that going to bed while it was still dark was out of the question, but at a loss as to what to do otherwise. The laptop was still on the bed, so I went to CNN’s Web site and found the video clip of the report with the security camera footage. The walking shadow, floating down the hall. Three other people visible in the frame, none looking at the shadow or reacting in any way. Just as Franky didn’t react when the alien bug thing was right in front of him. Invisible.

I moved the slider on the Web site’s video player back and forth. Rewind, play. Rewind, play. A black ghost floating down a hospital hallway. And nobody notices.

Forget it. This is ridiculous.

I closed the laptop. I threw on a jacket and stuffed the flashlight and one flare in an inside pocket. By the time I got to the front door, Molly was at my knee. Wagging her tail, sensing adventure. Together we strode into the night.

We walked six blocks to the late-night burrito stand. I leaned against a wall and ate from a wad of aluminum foil, occasionally grabbing chunks of chorizo and tossing them to Molly, who hurriedly swallowed each so she could immediately beg for another. There was a bottle of red Mountain Dew at my feet. I glanced at my watch.

Still more than three hours to kill until sunrise. I wrapped up the remaining half burrito and tossed it into the trash can. Molly watched this act of wastefulness with an expression like she had just seen her entire family die in a fire. I mopped orange grease off my hands with a half-dozen napkins.

At this hour, there were five other people eating at the tables in front of the burrito window—this establishment’s entire business model was catching the drunks who were pushed out of the bars when they closed at two. There was a pair of couples that looked college age—all four of them drunk off their asses, celebrating the fact that they would be young and pretty forever and ever. Then there was a short, fat guy off by himself in a biker jacket. I found his Harley behind him, in the parking lot. I wondered what his story was. Maybe he’s riding across the country, and will be in Ohio by this time tomorrow.

I wondered which of the five were Batmen, and what their secrets were. You couldn’t tell by looking. That was the point.

Molly and I were shuffling back toward my house when I noticed there was a silver Porsche parked on my street. To say that was unusual is a ridiculous understatement. This was White Trash lane, one house without a front door, another sealed shut with yellow police tape. My little bungalow had my 1998 Ford Bronco parked in the front. Sitting in the driveways of the next three houses was a 1985 Pontiac Fiero, a ’95 Geo Tracker and a 2004 PT Cruiser Woody. At least my property taxes were low.

The Porsche was crouched low along the gravel shoulder in front of the doorless house I thought was abandoned, three doors down from mine. The gleaming machine looked like it had been warped here right off a showroom floor. Even the tires looked scrubbed down to a pure layer of factory rubber.

I made it to the house and scanned around the yard. Nothing unusual. I was going to have to clean those gutters soon. The gigantic tree back there was dying and dropped every leaf by the first week of October. The leaves were ankle-deep but I knew they’d eventually blow into my neighbor’s yard. The old guy who lived there seemed to like doing yard work so I think that worked out for everybody. I let the dog poop in the yard and let myself in the back door. I passed into the living room and there was some freaking guy sitting there.

He sat in my tattered recliner, making himself right at home. Probably forty or so years old, dark hair with a little gray at the temples, about three days’ growth of beard stubble that followed an angular jawline. He had a chin butt. He wore a leather jacket that had been manufactured specifically to look worn and faded right off the rack, over a black button-up shirt that sat open at the collar with the top three buttons undone. He wore jeans and cowboy boots, legs crossed casually. He looked like he had been clipped out of a catalog and I immediately knew this was the owner of the Porsche.

I said, “I think you wandered into the wrong house, buddy.”

He did exactly what I knew he was going to do, which is reach into an inside pocket and pull out a little leather ID wallet. He flipped it open.

“Good morning, Mr. Wong. I’m Detective Lance Falconer. You and I are going to have a talk.”

5 Hours Prior to Outbreak

Molly went right to the stranger in my living room. He scratched her behind the ears, then she curled up at his feet.

“Pretty dog. How long have you had her?”

I hesitated, thinking at first this question was some kind of a trap. He was a cop, after all. Then I decided that was silly and that he was just trying to be polite. Then I realized his being polite was itself a method of getting me relaxed and accustomed to answering his questions, and that in fact it was part of a trap.

“She’s my girlfriend’s dog. She likes to bite people in the crotch, out of nowhere. You know it’s almost four in the morning?”

Lance Falconer glanced over at a framed picture on top of my television. It was a picture of me, looking chubby and pale and my hair looking like it was being blown around in a hurricane, standing behind Amy with my arms wrapped around her, looking over her, her mop of red hair under my chin. She wore sunglasses and a huge smile, I wore the expression of a man worried that a stranger was about to steal my camera.

“That your girl?”

“Yeah. We’re engaged.”

“She live here?”

“She’s away at school. Learning to be a programmer. What’s this about?”

“Can I ask what happened to her hand?”

The guy was good. Amy’s normal right hand was visible in the picture, holding a $5 stuffed elephant she had won at a carnival game using only $36 worth of tickets. Her left arm hung down almost out of frame. But if you were observant, down at the very edge of the photo you could see a little sliver of blue sky where the arm ended at the wrist.

“She lost it in a car accident years ago.”

“Did you go to see her? Is that where you’ve been tonight?”

“No.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Burrito stand. What did you do, break in?”

“Door was unlocked. I had reason to think you had been the victim of a violent crime so I let myself in.”

“I’m pretty sure you can’t do that, detective.”

“I’ll give you a phone number where you can call to complain. I have my own entry on the voice mail tree. Your friend had some concern that maybe Franky Burgess had come after you. You know, the guy who attacked twenty people at the hospital yesterday. Then I asked the local cops if anybody had talked to you yet, and was surprised to find that nobody had. In fact, around the police station any mention of your name just yields awkward silence.”

“Well, as you can see, I’m fine. That door you came in works as an exit, too.”

“A moment of your time, please. You understand we’re in the middle of the biggest manhunt this state has ever seen. I don’t see a whole lot of chance Franky is still drawing breath but you can imagine why we’d like to find him and put everybody’s fears to rest.”

“Why aren’t you out helping then?”

“I had to make sure he wasn’t here, didn’t I?”

“Well, you’re free to have a look around.”

“Thank you, I did. He was here, wasn’t he? Yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“Right before he started shooting and biting people at the hospital. Just minutes before, in fact.”

“Yeah.”

“And was he acting strange at all?”

I could feel my face getting hot, the heat radiating up from my jawbone. Starting to feel cornered.

Maybe you should have said Franky was never here…

“No, he wasn’t ranting or anything. He didn’t say much.”

“He was responding to a call from a neighbor saying you were making lots of noise and screaming.”

“Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t all that. There was a thing in my house, it woke me up. Bit me.”

“A ‘thing’?”

“I think it was a squirrel or a raccoon or something.”

“When officer Burgess left here, he seemed normal?”

“Yeah, yeah, like I said. Just told me to be careful. He was more worried about me than anything.”

“And you and your friend John didn’t drive Franky to the hospital? Because eight witnesses saw you. And they got you on a security camera. And your friend talked to a member of the staff, saying Franky had some kind of seizure. And he talked to a news crew, on camera, and said that Franky was infected with a tiny alien parasite.”

“Oh, right. John is… weird. You know. Drug problem.”

“But you say Franky seemed normal when he left.”

“I mean… he was normal when he walked out. It was out by his car, he started having problems. We loaded him in his car and drove him to the hospital.”

“Nothing led up to the seizure? No strange behavior? No tics or spasms or words not making sense?”

“No, no. He seemed fine. You know, he didn’t seem like he was on drugs or anything.”

“What was in his throat?”

I was taken aback. I had been looking around the room, avoiding the detective’s eyes. But when he said that, my attention snapped right to him. He noticed.

“What do you mean?”

“Your friend, John, he told the staff to check Frank’s throat.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know, when he started having his seizure or whatever it was, he started grabbing at his throat. Like he was choking.”

“Had he been eating something?”

“No.”

“Smoking a big cigar, maybe? Got surprised and swallowed it? Maybe he had a wad of chewing tobacco?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. We were just trying to help.”

“What are you hiding?”

“NOTHING.”

I almost screamed it.

I gathered myself and said, “I’m just—I’m just freaked out about this thing, like everybody. And now you’re here accusing me and I had nothing to do with it—”

“Have you heard of the Leonard Farmhand case?”

“No. Wait… was that the guy that was kidnapping women and performing surgery on them in his basement? Up in Chicago?”

“That’s right. Well, I caught Farmhand. He had an IQ of 175 but I caught him. And do you know why? Because I got in the same room with him. That’s all it took. See, I have an internal bullshit sensor that has yet to be beaten. And every time you open your mouth, Wong, all the lights start blinking read and smoke starts whistling out.”

Falconer rose from the chair. He was a good four inches taller than me, though part of that was cowboy boot. He continued, “Here’s my theory, as it stands right now. I think you knew Franky somehow, before all this. You and your friend. And I think you had something to do with his going apeshit.”

“Well, that’s your opinion,” I said, lamely. “Seriously, Franky and I didn’t know each other. I hadn’t seen him in six or seven years, probably since high school. And how exactly do you think I went about driving Franky crazy? Mind control?”

That’s right, have fun connecting these dots, asshole. Stick your hand in this hole and you’ll draw back a bloody stump.

“Maybe he wasn’t a friend. Maybe he was a fan.”

“I don’t have fans, detective. I work at a video store. John does, he has a band. Ask him.”

“I did. I’ve been asking him things for a couple of hours now. So, you guys believe this town is haunted?”

I sighed.

“No.”

“Really? You and John don’t talk about this? Because he’s full of crazy stories.”

“We’re not crazy. I’m not, anyway.”

“What’s Zyprexa?”

“What?”

“You have it in your medicine cabinet.”

“Oh. Yeah. That was… that was nothing. Just… stress. I’m seeing somebody about it.”

“And that guy you shot with a bow and arrow because you thought he was a monster?”

“A crossbow. It was a misunderstanding.”

“The guys down at the station, hearing them talk about you and your friend, they think you’re in some kind of a cult. They say three neighbors moved away in the last year alone, because they were scared of you. You were the last guy to see Franky before his episode and everybody had some bullshit excuse for why you hadn’t been interviewed yet. Like they’re scared of you.”

“People are… stupid.”

“You know, at the hospital Franky tore out an old woman’s throat with his teeth.”

I felt myself take an unconscious step back toward the door. This guy was breathing all my air.

“Is that right? That’s terrible.”

“He was also heard speaking another language.”

I didn’t answer.

“So here’s my theory, Wong. My theory is that last night wasn’t Franky’s first visit out here. I think he’s a part of your little cult following. I think you and your friend scrambled his brain, probably slipped him a drug and told him it’d give him magic powers or whatever it is you’re into. And I think he hurt a whole bunch of people because of it.”

“You claim to have a top-notch bullshit detector and you let that theory come out of your mouth? That a couple of local dumbasses have mind control powers? I kind of want you to charge me with that. The trial would be hilarious.”

He showed me the most unsettling smile I’ve ever seen and said, “I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I mean that. You’ve given me what I love most. A puzzle. See, I get bored, real easy. Most cases put me to sleep. Everybody knows who it is, the rest is just a grind, trying to fill a file cabinet with evidence for the prosecutor to take to trial. But now? I’m like a kid a week before Christmas, rattling gifts under the tree to find out what’s inside. I just rattled yours and, boy, there’s something cool in here.”

He opened the front door. A business card appeared in his hand.

“Call me if you decide you want to talk more about this and save us both some time. Otherwise, I’ll be seeing you around.”

When I heard the Porsche growl past the house ten minutes later, I was still standing in my living room, staring at the door the detective had passed through. I was sweating like a bottle of beer at the beach.

I dug out my phone. Dialed John.

Voice mail.

2 Hours Prior to Outbreak

It wasn’t the longest night of my life, but it was way up there. I’ve had my share of terrified, sleepless nights and I’ve developed a pretty good survival system involving nothing more than mental alertness exercises, positive thinking and amphetamines. Don’t worry, I have a prescription. Or at least the guy who sold them to me did.

I was in for a brutal crash later, but that was Day David’s problem. Night David was trying to stay alive. And, it worked. I was out on my porch when shafts of light started burning through the trees in my front yard, and I almost cried at the sight of it. It was the first time I could remember that I had seen two consecutive sunrises.

Ironically, at that point I was too jacked up to sleep. And not just from the orange capsules that were dissolving in my system. I had come up with a plan of action during my long wait. First, get the shit out of my toolshed and dump it somewhere. Maybe in the river. Then, get out of town for a while. Let all this blow over. Where would I go? Didn’t matter. I could do anything. Hitchhike to San Francisco and live on the beach. Join the circus. The where wasn’t important. I had been in a rut, that’s what I realized. I needed to shake things up. Lose this weight. Learn karate. Wait, did I accidentally take four of those pills instead of two? Wow.

It seemed like a good time for a shower. My laundry basket was still overturned. I lifted it up a few inches and stuffed all the clothes I was wearing under there. I made my way into the bathroom—

Molly barked. She was staring at the door and I heard a car pull up. I heard Creedence, and a look through the curtains revealed John’s old Cadillac. Thank Christ.

Footsteps on the porch. I yelled, “Don’t open the door yet, I’m naked. Give me one minute.”

The door opened behind me.

I turned and was face-to-face with Franky Burgess.

Franky opened his mouth. A thin stream of liquid squirted out as a greeting. I had the thought to throw up an arm to shield my face from whatever it was, but before the muscles could twitch into action there was a bang and a blueish flash. I felt the floor hit me in the back. I stared at the ceiling, ears ringing, vaguely realizing that the stuff Franky spat had combusted in midair with enough force to knock me on my ass.

I blinked, dazed. Franky stepped over me. He was carrying what looked like several red-and-white grocery bags in each arm. He went into the bedroom. From the floor I saw the Cadillac outside my open front door and had time to make the conscious decision to race out there and drive naked across America, before I felt the forearm close around my neck.

Franky, now with the strength of several Frankys, yanked me to my feet and marched me toward the bedroom.

Molly barked. She bounded toward us, past us, out the door, into the yard, into the distance, barking the whole way. She was not going to get help.

I could see into the bedroom now but couldn’t make sense of what was there. There were four huge, white, bleeding dead birds on my bed.

Chickens? Turkeys?

I was trying to puzzle through the situation. Were these birds for me? Like a gift, or an offering? They were laid out and dripping blood on my sheets, like some Aztec sacrifice on an altar.

I said, “Uh, thank you for the turkeys, Franky. Is your name still Franky?”

“Shut up.”

Franky’s voice was muffled, like he was talking around a mouthful of food. He held me in place, both of us watching the bed intently for… what? Franky’s arm—the broken one—felt weird. Something long and dry snaking around my torso. I didn’t look down.

Movement on my bed. The sheet was rippling, like somebody had poked their fingers up from under the mattress and was wiggling them. Several somebodies. Dozens of fingers.

I heard fabric rip. A slit formed in the sheet and a tiny version of one of those spiders, no more than two inches long, crawled out. It went right for the nearest turkey. It was quickly joined by another. And another. Within seconds my bed was writhing with dozens of the spider larvae, like maggots on a slab of meat.

With every ounce of strength and adrenaline and terror I could muster, I twisted out of Franky’s grasp and spun toward the door. I made it into the living room before Franky tackled me. I twisted around and from a position flat on my back, punched him in the face as hard as I could. It felt like I broke my hand. He shrugged it off and pinned my arms, his legs straddling my chest. I looked right into his eyes, and saw the gaping stare of a terrified young man. He was hissing something at me, a whisper from deep in the throat. He leaned his face down close to mine. I couldn’t make out his words, they were just choking sounds like an old man on a respirator. He leaned closer. I could smell his breath.

“They are everywhere,” he hissed. “Do you understand me? They are everywhere.”

“Franky! Can you hear me? Get off me!”

Then, I saw it. When Franky opened his mouth, I was looking at the spider. Its tongue, where Franky’s tongue used to be, behind his teeth. It had simply taken over the lower half of his skull. I pictured the way its leg was able to glue itself to my shoulder and shuddered. The spider was a part of Franky now. Maybe the spider was Franky at this point.

Running footsteps, on the porch. Franky and I both looked and saw John hurl himself through the front door.

I screamed, “JOHN! IT’S A BREEDER!”

John didn’t stop. He hurdled the coffee table while screaming, “YOUR KEY! I NEED YOUR SHED KEY!”

Shed key? What was he doing? Borrowing my lawnmower?

“Listen,” Franky hissed, focusing back on me. I realized he was trying to talk through his parasite, and struggling to do it. “They’re everywhere. It could be anyone. Do you get it? Anyone.”

Franky screamed. A long, segmented thing came out from his mouth, out from the parasite hiding within. It looked like a black earthworm, but longer, with a little spike on the end like on a scorpion’s tail. I was expecting the thing to come down and sting me or something. Instead it curled up toward Franky’s own eye. Franky screamed again. The worm thing plunged into his eyeball.

I heard a small engine rev to life, from outside the house. I had the crazy thought that I’d see John racing around the house with my lawnmower, screaming, “Thanks for letting me borrow this!” before throwing it in his car and driving off.

Blood dripped down on me from Franky’s punctured eye. His hands found their way to my face and throat, clawing at me mindlessly. Fingers trying to pry open my mouth.

The engine sound was in the house now. Deafening. A shadow fell over us.

John.

Something in his hands, something loud.

The engine sound revved to a mechanical scream, then bogged down as if with effort. There was a sound like carrots in a blender. Wetness rained down on me.

The blurred metal teeth of a chainsaw ripped through Franky’s neck. John worked the machine down, rocking it back and forth as it tore through spine and muscle and tendons, his hands streaked with red. Franky’s head fell free from his shoulders, his wet hair bonking me in the face.

The rest of his body held itself above me for a few seconds, then pounded down on me with dead weight that knocked the air from my lungs.

The saw shut off and I could hear John yelling questions at me. His hand appeared on Franky’s shoulder and together we rolled the corpse off me. I sprang to my feet, looked down at my body in disgust. I looked like an infant somebody had inexplicably taken to all-you-can-eat rib night.

John said, “You, uh, all right?”

I sprinted to the bedroom door and slammed it shut. I struggled to catch my breath and said, “My bedroom! It’s infested with baby versions of those spider things, they’re all over my bed, eating turkey. My bed, John! They were in my bed! Larvae! This whole time! We’ve got to do something!”

“Did they… eat your clothes?”

“Listen. The army has quarantined the hospital but it’s not doing any good because the spiders are out. They’re here. Here, John! What are we going to do? If we let just one of those things out into the world…”

“Okay first of all we—wait, where’s the head?”

We both looked down at Franky’s headless corpse, now laying in the living room on a spreading pool of blood. There was no head. What the—

“LOOK! SHIT!”

Franky’s head was making a run for it.

The spider’s legs were protruding from the severed neck, and they were scurrying the head through the open front door. I ran, following the crawling head out onto the porch. I stomped on the head with my bare foot, pinning it to the welcome mat. I started to yell to John to get the chainsaw when the asshole head bit my foot.

I yanked the foot free of Franky’s teeth, then reared back with my other foot and kicked the head so hard I felt like I broke four toes. The head sailed ten feet through the air until it bounced off the windshield of Detective Lance Falconer’s Porsche, which had chosen that moment to pull into the driveway.

The head left a pink smear on his windshield, then rolled off his hood and back at my feet. I grabbed it in both hands, teeth facing away from me so it couldn’t bite my dick off. A hugely confused Falconer emerged from the car to the sight of me standing naked in my driveway, covered in blood and covering my crotch with a severed head.

I’m David Wong and I’m here with a special message about AMPHETAMINES.

“PUT IT DOWN!”

Falconer’s gun was out.

I said, “One minute.”

I ran back inside, made it to the bedroom, opened the door, threw the head inside and slammed the door shut again. My brief glimpse of the room revealed the hatchlings had made it halfway across the floor. I ran into the bathroom, grabbed two towels and stuffed them under the door. That wouldn’t hold long…

“ASSHOLE! PUT. YOUR. HANDS. UP. NOW.”

Falconer had come inside, gun still trained on me.

I said, “Okay. Calm down. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is we found Franky. The bad news is we got bigger problems.”

“Wait,” interjected John, from behind the detective. “You’re Lance Falconer!”

“Shut up or I will shoot you in the face.”

“That was driving me nuts all night. You’re the detective who caught the Father’s Day killer, right? Didn’t you throw him out of a helicopter?”

Falconer didn’t answer. John said to me, “He’s famous. I saw this whole thing about him on A&E—”

“Shut the fuck up. Did you kill Franky?”

John said, “It was self-defense. And he stole my car, he drove it here and I had to walk all the way from the police station. Got here just in time, he was raping Dave when I walked in.”

“He wasn’t—”

“SHUT UP. Both of you. You’re coming with me.” To me he said, “Put some pants on.”

“Fuck you. This is my house. I make the rules. You take your clothes off. John, get the Twister mat.”

Falconer asked, “Are you high?”

“A little.”

“What’s in the room? Why are you sealing it up?”

John, thinking quickly, said, “Infection. Franky had it. It’s the reason they quarantined the hospital. It’s—it’s like a virus that—”

“Stop. You’re lying.”

To me, he said, “What’s in the room?”

“Look. I respect your bullshit detector. Everything that I’m about to say is true. Read it in my eyes. There are factors at work here that you would not understand, and that we do not have time to explain. There is nothing more you can do here, detective, other than to get out of our way. You came here to find a man. You found him. He’s lying at your feet. Now go home.”

Falconer gave me a hard look. He lowered his gun, strode past me, and threw open the bedroom door.

His eyes went right to the bed. What he saw were four bloody turkeys—no, that wasn’t right. What he saw were four bloody turkey skeletons, laying on my bed among piles of feathers. The larvae had all but stripped them clean, within minutes. What I saw, but Falconer did not, was that the spiders were now in the carpet, on the walls and crawling around the glass of the bedroom window. They were growing at an impossible rate, some already the size of a fist.

I felt a single drop of sweat fall down the back of my neck, trickling down my spine. I took a reflexive step back. One of the spiders crawled across Falconer’s shoe. He wouldn’t have noticed if he’d been looking directly at it.

“What is that in there, some kind of ritual? Voodoo bullshit? Trying to summon a ghost or demon or whatever you guys do?”

“No. I told you. Detective… you’re not going to solve this one.”

“Sure. I understand.” He holstered his gun.

Then, in a blur he grabbed my arm, spun me around, and slammed me against the door frame of the bedroom. He got my right arm up behind my back and pain exploded down my shoulder joint, the ligaments twisting around bone. I screamed.

To John, Falconer shouted, “BACK.”

Cold steel on my right wrist—handcuffs. Falconer pushed me into the bedroom. He shoved me to my knees, among the newborn spiders. I heard John shout, “NO! NO!” but Falconer spun and put his gun on him. With his free hand he looped the handcuff chain around the metal frame of the bed and snapped the remaining cuff around my other wrist.

I was on my bare knees, hands chained around the bed, and I could feel itchy spider legs crawling up one of my thighs, over my feet.

Falconer stood, held his gun on John and said, “Now. I’m not unlocking that until you’ve explained everything.”

100 Minutes Prior to Outbreak

Amy peed a lot when she got tense.

A nervous bladder and a three-hour-long bus ride don’t make for a great combination, but worrying wasn’t something she could just turn off (her roommate at school had taught her some tai chi but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could do on a bus without being asked to leave). She couldn’t get David or John on the phone, and that was weird. Really weird. David always picked up unless he was in the shower or his phone was dead, but she had been trying since early in the morning. And John, free spirit that he was, had Amy on his list of “must answer” calls. He knew she didn’t call him unless it was a big deal and/or she couldn’t raise David. She never abused this privilege.

David had sounded so ominous the night before, getting in one of his moods where he thinks the whole world depends on him and that he’s about to let everyone down. It was Amy’s job to take his mind off it when he got like that and it usually wasn’t all that hard. He was a guy, after all. A guy with a thing for red underpants. But nothing was helping this time and Amy was once again frustrated by the distance.

David needed her and there were things you just couldn’t do over the phone or a webcam. The school was only 130 miles away but she didn’t drive and, quite frankly, David couldn’t afford to make the trip. Not just because of the $60 in gas he burned every time, but the time missed at work. That’s why she had bought a Greyhound ticket within five minutes of getting off the phone with him the day before.

From the window seat on the bus, she dialed him again. With her phone to her ear, she stared out at the trees zipping by, imagining a little running man out there trying to keep up with the bus, jumping over obstacles as they flew past. Four rings, then voice mail. Again.

She tried hard not to be clingy. She had been on the other end of that with her last boyfriend, a guy who had never touched a girl before and therefore thought if she was cut open, a gush of rainbows and unicorns would spill out. Calling five times a day, showing up unannounced, kind of acting like one of those sleazy photographers who follow celebrities everywhere. It was no fun and David, more than most people, demanded distance. He was the type to reflexively push other people away, never figuring out that the gnawing feeling inside him is what the rest of us call “loneliness.” You have to ease people out of that. It takes time.

But, with David’s history, she had earned the right to assume the worst when she didn’t hear from him. It had come to the worst more than once.

She felt her bladder swelling. Where was her body getting the liquid from? She hadn’t drank anything since breakfast. She wondered how long it was until the next rest stop. The bus had a bathroom but it was gross. Really gross, like on a medical level. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Bush administration and there were probably things crawling on that toilet seat that she didn’t want anywhere near her private parts.

90 Minutes Prior to Outbreak

Alien spiders crawled toward my balls. I felt one on my neck and shook it off with a shrug. I thought I had another one in my hair. One got into my armpit and I crushed it against my ribs with my bicep. I tried to squash them with my knees. Falconer must have thought I was having a seizure.

John tried to construct an argument to dissuade Falconer, saying, “AAAH! SHIT! FUCK! DETECTIVE! NO! THIS IS BAD!”

Trying to control my voice I said, “Listen. Franky had something inside him that took over his brain. It laid eggs. They hatched. They’re in here. They—”

I paused to shake off a spider on my ear, like a dog flinging off water after a bath.

“—they’re crawling around but you can’t see them.”

“Because they’re invisible, right?”

“Yes! Yes, they AAAAHHH—”

One of them bit my ear. I squished it off with my shoulder.

Something crashed behind me. There was a scuffle, and grunts. I looked back and saw John had gone after Falconer. Falconer threw him off, hitting him hard in the nose with an elbow. He pointed his gun at John’s face.

“You’re fucking crazy. Both of you. What did you give him? What drug did you give Franky?”

“Goddamnit, we’re going in circles. They had him in the hospital long enough to get blood, they said so on the news! Did tests show anything? Anything at all?”

“So you understand my confusion.”

A spider crawled up my neck, over my chin. It tried to push its way into my mouth and I spat and tried to wipe it off by rubbing my face on the bedspread. I couldn’t dislodge it. Its tiny legs pushed it past my lips.

I bit it. I cut it in half with my front teeth and ground it up with my molars, spitting and gagging on an intense salt taste that made my whole body convulse.

One of the spiders crawled off the bed, across the handcuff chain, and onto the underside of my forearm. I started to scrape it off, then stopped.

I twisted my body around to face Falconer and said, “Look. At my arm. Watch.”

“I don’t see any—”

“No, I know you don’t, yet. Wait. Just wait. One of those things—they’re like little spiders or bugs—it’s sitting right there. It’s… going to start eating soon. And I’m pretty sure you’ll see—GAH!—”

I hissed in a breath and clenched my teeth. The inch-long larvae bit down with its tiny mandibles and ripped up a chunk of skin. Holding it with its two front legs, it started munching on me. A second later, it repeated the process, tearing with its mandibles, ripping up a tiny patch of tissue, eating. And again.

I pressed my eyes shut, trying to block out the pain, the itching of tiny legs on my feet and calves and thighs and ass and back. Tried to escape, to block out the fact that I was being eaten alive by arachnids. For some reason the only thing I could replace it with was the image of being eaten by tiny clowns.

Man, I’m not even sure those were amphetamines…

I opened my eyes and the expression on Falconer’s face almost made the whole thing worth it. From his point of view, a strip of skin the width of a pencil was spontaneously vanishing from my arm, leaving a trench of blood and pink fat behind. What did he think? That I had a flesh-eating virus? That John and I were faking the whole thing with horror movie makeup, as part of an elaborate and gruesome prank?

I said, “If you leave me here, by this afternoon I’ll look like those turkeys up there. Wet, red bones. They’re all over me. And I see at least three of them on your pants. There’s one on the sleeve of your jacket. If we don’t… exterminate these fuckers somehow, they’ll breed and they’ll be everywhere and nobody will be able to stop them because nobody else can see them.”

He lowered his gun.

“Detective, only the three of us in this room understand what’s happening here—AAGH!” I growled as the bug took another bite. Hungry little bastard. “And… only we can stop it. And if you don’t help us then it’s just me and John and we’re just a couple of dildos. Please, unlock these goddamned handcuffs.”

Falconer thought about it for what seemed like a day and a half but was probably just a few seconds. He dug in his jacket pocket for a tiny set of keys, tossed them to John and nodded in my direction.

Instead of unlocking the cuffs, John said, “Hold still,” then grabbed a nearby shoe and started slapping my arm with it.

“Ow! Goddamnit—”

The baby spider fell off and John ground it into the carpet with his foot. He went to work on the cuffs with the tiny key and was able to unlock them after only 137 or so tries.

I hurriedly grabbed some khaki pants and a T-shirt I found draped over a nearby chair and flew from the room. We slammed the door and crammed the towels under the gap once more. John squashed half a dozen bugs that had escaped into the hall, and cleaned off the ones we found crawling on Falconer. I yanked on the clothes and kept right on walking, out the front door.

With all of us standing in the yard, John said to me, “All right. Get everything you care about out of this house. I’ll get my lighter. Do you know what your insurance policy says about intentional fires?”

Falconer said, “Shut up. Don’t do anything. Let me think.” He dug a phone from his pocket. “I’m going to let you in on a secret. The whole world is not against you. We’ve got help in this town, pros who actually get paid to worry about public safety. I’ve got a fed hotline number they gave us, I dial it and describe what I’ve seen here and they’ll have this place surrounded and locked down in ten minutes. I’ll tell them what you told me and we’ll all figure it out like professionals. I’m tellin’ you, there’s a whole non–white trash world out there, fellas.”

Studying the ragged gouge in my forearm, I said, “You still don’t, uh, fully understand the situation, detective. There’s a reason we didn’t just do that from the start. There are… let’s just say some powerful people who not only know what’s going on in this town, but kind of get off on it.”

“What we’re saying,” added John, “is that the whole world is in fact against us.”

I said, “But either way, I’m gonna go gather up my stuff. I’m obviously not staying in this infested shithole.” To John, “You got room in your trunk, right?”

“Yep.”

“How about we go up to the burrito stand after this?”

“I was five seconds away from saying the same thing.”

Falconer had turned his attention to his phone call. He was still alert, though. I got the feeling the man was alert when he was fast asleep. This would be a delicate operation.

Studying the floor for any signs of wiggling, I hurried through the house and returned to the yard with my laptop, a garbage bag full of clothes I pulled from the dryer and a mostly full bottle of Grey Goose I found in the freezer. I grabbed a half-full bag of dog food from the kitchen, in case Molly showed up again.

I declared my packing finished and started to leave, then felt like slapping myself when I realized what I had almost forgotten.

On the wall of my living room was the one contribution Amy had made to the decor: a velvet Jesus painting that looked like it had been copied from an airbrush job on the back of a van, in the dark. It had belonged to her parents, who had probably bought it off of some roadside stand in New Mexico. Amy’s parents were gone, however, and this terrible painting was one of the only things she’d kept from their old house. I grabbed it off the wall and took one last look around. The rest of my stuff could pretty much go.

Outside, Falconer was putting away his phone and I said to him, “Come around back, I need to show you something. In the toolshed.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I don’t know what it is. That’s the point. I think you need to see it before the feds get here though.” To John I said, “Can you put my stuff in your trunk? I want to show him the box.”

John dug out his keys and started unlocking his trunk. I led Falconer around the yard, to the still-open shed. I gestured toward the green box on the gravel floor, at those weird hieroglyphic symbols across the front.

“Pretty weird, huh? Found it.”

“And?”

“It can’t be opened. Not by you and not by me. We’ve only had it open once and what’s in there is weird as shit.”

“Okay, well, I’ll show it to the feds when they get here—”

From the shelf Elmo said, “Eight inches erect!”

“—But I’m not clear how this is relevant to…”

Falconer stopped, probably because, like me, he smelled smoke. He gave me a look that would have made cancer apologize, then ran like hell. Falconer rounded the house in time to see John emerge from the front door with his “lighter,” a Vietnam-era flamethrower he had bought off eBay. Completely legal, by the way.

Behind him, flames were turning the rest of my worldly possessions into smoke and ash.

Falconer clinched his jaw and said, “Oh, you stupid white trash fucks. What have you done?”

I said, “We’ve taken care of the problem, is what we’ve done. Same as always. There was nothing for the cops to do here. Or the National Guard or anybody else.”

Sirens rose up in the background. I’ve got to say, nobody reacts faster than the fire department.

Falconer grabbed me, spun me around, and for the second time slapped on handcuffs. I could not have cared less. I felt relief for the first time in two days. All-consuming flames roared through the infested house, and the whole ordeal was finally over. Franky and the spider larvae would burn, and there would be no outbreak.

10 Minutes Prior to Outbreak

Falconer’s Porsche sat so low to the ground that I had to squat to get into it. The interior smelled like the leather shop at the mall. I saw I had dragged some muddy leaves from outside onto the spotless carpet and I felt like I had desecrated it. How could you drive a car like this without going crazy with worry? How could you eat a burrito in this thing? You’d be in constant fear of squirting refried beans everywhere. I have no idea how he afforded such a car and I thought it would be impolite to ask. Maybe he sold drugs on the side.

I sat awkwardly, the handcuffs digging into my lower back. I could see my bedroom window from where the Porsche was parked, orange flames licking up behind the glass, eating the curtains.

On the sidewalk in front of the Porsche sat John, another set of handcuffs holding his hands behind his back (actually, he got those white plastic zip tie cuffs—I got the metal ones, so clearly Falconer recognized me as the more dangerous suspect). John was watching my house burn to the ground as a dozen firefighters rolled out hoses from the two trucks. It was strangely serene. If this ordeal had been a movie, this would play under the credits.

But Falconer was pissed. He was moving from one fireman to the next, flashing his badge and shouting for them to back off. They were doing no such thing. I had gathered from Munch (John’s friend, bandmate and part-time fireman) that neither cops nor firefighters take kindly to the other group telling them how to do their jobs. This was a fire, they were firefighters, and by God they were going to put that shit out.

Neighbors were gathering. House fires are already good entertainment in a neighborhood like this, where the primary forms of recreation are drinking alcohol and inventing excuses to keep the unemployment benefits coming, but the address made this one a bigger deal. They knew who lived here. Everyone had heard the rumors. I saw two people filming the scene with their phones.

Another fire truck pulled up and one of the crew went up to John. I recognized Munch Lombard in his firefighting garb, his neck tattoos making him look less like a fireman and more like the lead singer in a novelty rap/metal band with a firefighter theme, maybe named something like Fahrenheit 187. The two men were having a surprisingly casual conversation, considering one of them was sitting on the ground in handcuffs and behind the other was a raging inferno slowly transmitting a bungalow into the atmosphere via a thick column of black smoke. Water arced into the air from one of the hoses. My bedroom window exploded and fingers of fire clawed at the siding, leaving blackened marks behind.

Falconer was on his phone again. More rubberneckers showed up. None of it mattered. At the end of the day, all that happened was Franky had a bad encounter with something nasty. Something Undisclosed. One of the risks of the job in this town. Some people got hurt, but now Franky was dead and the nasty things inside him were disintegrating in a twelve-hundred-degree house-sized blast furnace. As for Detective Lance Falconer, well, he was good and pissed, probably because his evidence was going up in smoke with it. He’d probably push to get John and me charged with two dozen crimes, everything from obstructing a police investigation to public nudity. Let him. It’d come to nothing. The chief knew what town he worked in. Sure, he’d put somebody on the case, then come back a month later and tell the prosecutor there’s not enough to take to court. Then it’d all quietly go away. Again. I’d been through all this before. Nobody wants what goes on in this town to get out. They’ll sweep it under the rug. Just like the incident with the pizza delivery guy—I take a few hours of mandated counseling, and in exchange I don’t tell people what’s really going on and start a panic.

I watched flames dance in every window in front of me. The house burning down wasn’t even that big of a deal in my life. I could stay at John’s place until I found an apartment or trailer somewhere. Besides, I still owned the hunk of land the house was about to fertilize with its ashes. Could sell that for a couple thousand dollars at least, right? See? Everything would be fine. My eyes slipped closed. So little sleep in those thirty-plus hours since the bedspider showed up.

My phone screamed, from my jacket pocket. That had to be Amy, since the only other person who ever called me was sitting on the sidewalk with his hands cuffed behind his back. As were mine, so the phone would just have to ring.

Something caught my attention outside.

Just around the corner from the bedroom, a firefighter was on the ground. Laying facedown, in the grass. I was about to yell at one of the firemen standing around to go help, but another guy was already heading over there. He got his companion up on his knees, but he was clutching his throat. Probably just swallowed some smoke. Or ate something too fast.

Nobody else was coming to help because out front, things were getting complicated.

A city cop car got there first, making a total of six vehicles parked along the street including my truck and John’s Caddie. An RV with a square blue logo on the side trailed right behind it, what I assumed was from the “feds” Falconer mentioned. I guessed the Centers for Disease Control. I suddenly realized how much inconvenience this whole thing had caused a lot of people.

Out from the RV filed guys in those white space suits they use to protect themselves from germs, with the hood and the big clear plastic faceplate. They kind of stood around aimlessly when they saw that the structure they were supposed to quarantine was in fact going up in flames, was being attended to by firefighters and was surrounded by a crowd of two dozen gawking Midwesterners. Some of the space suit guys approached the firemen, and were almost certainly explaining why they couldn’t remain on the scene unless they got some of those suits of their own, since there was an unknown flesh-eating biological pathogen on site and the place was under quarantine. The firefighters were presumably pointing out that they didn’t have any of those suits on hand and they couldn’t leave because, you know, the fire still wasn’t out. Then Falconer and the two local cops joined the conversation, presumably to explain that, oh by the way, this was also a crime scene, what with the dead headless cop, arson and willful destruction of evidence.

Behind them, a Humvee rolled up and the street in front of my house was now a goddamned stationary parade. Out stepped an officer from the National Guard, who I guessed was the guy put in charge of the manhunt for Franky, who appeared to loudly be asserting that this was his show since roasting behind those walls was the man he had been charged with finding. Behind them, a white channel 5 news van pulled up, shitting a cameraman from the rear doors before the wheels even stopped turning. Meanwhile, the crowd of bystanders was doubling every five minutes, as text messages flew furiously through the air to announce that the coolest freaking thing ever was going on down at the old Wong place right this very minute. The whole situation was devolving into what John would later refer to as “a fucktard circus.”

I shifted my gaze back behind the house.

Oh-oh.

The fireman was flat again, his protective hat laying a few feet away. His friend nowhere to be found. Maybe he went for help?

Suddenly, several things hit me at once:

1. That the fireman was missing his head;

2. The fact that the hat that was laying a few feet away still had the head in it;

3. The realization that this was not the body of the guy who was hurt earlier—this was the guy who came to help;

4. A fist, which smashed through the window and knocked me out cold.

When I came to a few seconds later, I was being dragged through glass and people were screaming. I landed with a thud on the grass outside the Porsche. A pair of arms coated in the black sleeves of a firefighter’s coat were clenched around my chest, dragging me across my lawn. Something was clasped in one of the hands, red and white and shaped like a horseshoe. My vision came into focus enough for me to realize it was a human jawbone, complete with a full set of teeth. One of the molars had a silver filling in it.

With each passing foot, things got a little warmer and a little smokier, which my bell-rung brain finally realized meant I was being dragged toward the fire. I thrashed to get out of the man’s grip, my hands still pinned behind me in handcuffs. The burst of panic-fueled strength got me free, for the moment anyway, and I tried to crawl away from him. A boot came down on my back. I fought and managed to roll over.

The fireman—a huge, strapping guy—was missing the lower half of his face. Where his jawbone should have been, and presumably had been all of his life until a few minutes ago, was the mouth and a dozen black wiggling feet of my spider. It looked a bit charred in places.

Halfface Firefighter threw off his fireman’s jacket. He lifted his right arm, and two thin, sharp, white protrusions emerged from his wrist, kind of like Wolverine’s claws except when Wolverine pushed his out, his hand didn’t immediately fall off, as happened here. From the wrist stump the two protrusions grew and sharpened. Then, a red split appeared at the man’s wrist, growing down to his elbow. With a wet tearing sound, his forearm pulled itself into two lengthwise halves, the two bones of the forearm splitting apart like blades opening on a pair of scissors.

Halfface Firefighter Scissorarms brandished his new appendage and leaned down.

His forehead exploded.

Gunshots hammered the air. Screams from all around. Halfface Bloodyhead stumbled back.

It was Falconer, advancing behind his enormous chrome handgun. It fired again, and again, shots punching bloody holes in a firefighter-issue T-shirt. But the man just would not go down.

I was up and on my feet and running, off balance and stumbling with my hands pinned behind me. I heard Falconer let out a frustrated, growling scream. I spun and saw Halfface grab the detective around the base of the skull. He forced Falconer’s head down to waist level, then turned his body away from him. Holding Falconer’s face directly in front of his buttocks, Halfface farted. Falconer collapsed to the leaves, as if dead.

Another gunshot smacked Halfface in the shoulder. Annoyed, he held up his scissored arm. The two sharpened bones rotated at the elbow joint. Slow at first, and then faster and faster until they were twirling at the elbow like a band leader’s baton, whizzing through the air and throwing off flecks of blood and meat.

Halfface Firefighter Bloodyhead Spinbones strode toward the burning house with purpose, directly toward my bedroom window, where a column of fire was rushing upward, causing the gutter above it to melt and sag like saltwater taffy.

Starting from the foundation, he angled his spinning appendage into the wall, tearing a ragged hole in the siding and insulation behind it, making a sound like a jackhammer. He made a vertical gash about chest high, leading up to the bottom left corner of the broken window.

Cops screamed commands around me. One was tending to Falconer, the other was shouting about backup.

Halfface finished his cut, then made another one a few feet to the right of it, again ending at the window. He was turning the window into a door.

“Hey! Dave!”

It was John. His plastic handcuffs were cut but he still wore the loops around his wrists like a pair of cheap bracelets. Munch came running up behind him, looking panic-stricken. He was carrying a huge set of bolt cutters.

“Turn around!”

Halfface bashed out the rest of the glass with his remaining fist. Then he reached through the window and pulled.

A burning section of wall fell at his feet. Behind it was the charred, melting springs and frame that had been my bed. The flames roared, fueled by the new rush of oxygen.

John took the bolt cutters from Munch and went to work on my handcuffs. To Munch he screamed, “RUN! TAKE DAVE’S BRONCO! THE KEYS ARE IN IT. DRIVE UNTIL YOU’RE SOMEPLACE NOBODY SPEAKS ENGLISH!”

My hands were free. Explosions erupted a few feet away—a cop going to work on Halfface with a riot gun. The monster was down on his knees. I saw a shot blow a hole in his neck and his head flopped over, dangling by a tendon.

There was victory, for about three seconds. Then…

The cop started screaming.

The cop next to him started screaming.

The nearest firefighter started screaming.

They were clawing and swatting and scraping at themselves, trying to knock away tiny biting monsters that they could not see. Then I looked back at my house, and understood.

I just killed the world.

Black wiggling shapes fanned out from the hole in the wall, spilling in waves over the broken boards and plaster on the lawn, disappearing into the grass.

A firefighter ran up with a bullhorn, raised it and shouted, “WARNING! WE HAVE TOXIC FUMES! EVERYONE—AND I MEAN EVERYONE—LEAVE THE AREA IF YOU DO NOT HAVE BREATHING APPARAAAAAAHHHH!!!”

A spider was eating his eyeball.

A bystander, shooting the scene on his phone, had a baby spider on his hand and another in his hair.

I couldn’t breathe. This was not happening. This was not possibly happening.

A hand on my elbow, pulling me away. John saying something I couldn’t hear. Everything was silent. My brain had frozen up. People were running.

It all seemed very familiar.

John was pulling me along. I caught the eyes of Detective Falconer, who was back up, now trying ineffectually to help a heavy teenage girl get the spider off of her neck. His look spoke clearly:

Take it all in, white trash. You did this.

He was right. Before the fire, we had the parasites imprisoned inside the house. The feds could have roped it off, sealed it up, kept all the bystanders safely away. They could have taken their time figuring out how to neutralize the threat. We could have told them what we knew, told them not to get within a hundred yards without mouth protection and to bury the house under a mountain of concrete. Instead, the fire had drawn a crowd. First the firefighters with no protection, and then the gawkers who crowded around like a goddamned all-you-can-eat parasite buffet. They would all die. Maybe everyone would die. Maybe the parasites would own the planet. And it would all be my fault. It was the DVD sticker situation all over again.

We ran. We bumped into CDC crews with holes chewed through their space suits. We shouldered past confused National Guardsmen. We dodged the Action 5 News camera guy and a lady reporter demanding an interview from someone, anyone.

We piled into the Caddie. It stank of turkeys, possibly because there were two turkeys in the backseat. Live ones, pecking at the seat cushions. John cranked the ignition and Creedence Clearwater Revival blared from the dash. He stepped on the gas and we ripped through a band of yellow police tape somebody was trying to string up.

Probably a little late for that, buddy.

Outbreak

Amy decided she was fighting mankind’s most ancient battle: physical impulse versus human dignity. Her bladder felt like it was filled with knives, but the bus toilet was not something a human should be allowed to touch without wearing a wet suit. Would she give in to animal impulse and surrender her human dignity? She would not. Actually, she tried to go back there about fifteen minutes ago but it was occupied and there was a guy in there making weird noises. So, she was back in her seat, counting the miles to the nearest bathroom. Not far, now. They were right outside of town, already past the tractor dealership.

On the seat next to her was a white cardboard box from a bakery not far from the university, containing what was probably the finest food ever produced by the human species. They were red velvet cupcakes with a cheesecake filling and a cream cheese icing. There were only half a dozen in the box but you could barely finish one of them before you had to go sit down somewhere and stare at the ceiling. It’d sit in your belly like a bag of concrete but you’d have no regrets. The fat and sugar hit your system so hard that with every bite you just wanted to give the world a hug—

Oh, no…

The bus was stopping.

Amy stood up and saw cars. Cars and cars and cars, stopped dead on the highway leading into town.

Her heart sank.

This was… surely just a car accident or something. Not every bad thing that happened revolved around David. Surely.

Surely.

She was already dialing. But this time, no voice mail—a recorded message from the cell phone carrier saying all circuits were busy.

A helicopter swept overhead. Low.

Ohhhhh… crap.

Across the aisle of the bus, a couple of college-looking guys in vintage clothes and thick-rimmed glasses were whispering frantically to each other, huddled over the screen of a cell phone.

“Excuse me. Are you guys getting a signal?”

“Internet still works. Look.”

The guy held out the phone and Twitter was up. If you’re reading this in a future where the Twitter fad has passed, Twitter was a Web site where people posted short little messages, usually from their phones, for the world to see. So, at any moment you could go on their site and see what the world at large was talking about, in real time. The main page of Twitter would always list what subjects were hot or “trending” at the moment. So when news broke, it broke on Twitter first—if a plane crashed near New York, people on the scene would start Tweeting about it within seconds, long before the first news camera showed up. Within minutes you’d see “#NYPlaneCrash” pop up on the trending topics.

The number one topic on Twitter at this moment was:

#ZOMBIEOUTBREAK

Exodus

John’s old Caddie had a huge engine that would qualify as a human rights violation if built today. It roared down the road, chugging gas and farting a blue cloud of dinosaur souls.

“They’re sealing off the town!” John screamed over John Fogerty. “Munch told me! They’ve got the highway and Route 44 both blocked.”

We weren’t heading to the highway, however. We would never have made it even without the roadblock—John’s Caddie wasn’t exactly hard to spot and we were being pursued. Fortunately, we knew a shortcut.

John tossed his phone into my lap and said, “Call Shiva! Tell her to meet us at the water tower!”

“Who?”

“Shiva! My girlfriend!”

“That’s actually her name?”

“I think so!”

“There are absolutely no bars on this phone.” I pulled out mine and said, “Shit! Mine, too!”

“Goddamn we get shitty coverage here!”

Burrito stand. The tires screeched us to a stop. We spilled out and I yelled, “TRUNK! TRUNK!”

John stopped in his tracks and said, “Molly!”

I spun and there she was. She was by the trash can, her paws pinning down a scrap of aluminum foil while she hurriedly ate the remaining half of a chorizo burrito.

John fumbled with his keys and got the trunk open just as we heard in the distance, “DON’T FUCKING MOVE!”

Goddamned Lance Falconer, sprinting down the street, gun in hand. Holy shit that man could run.

I abandoned my stuff and sprinted to the back door of the burrito stand. The good news was it would get us out of there. The bad news was that the destination was a crapshoot and only one would work.

Come on water tower, water tower, water tower…

We opened the door and squeezed into the utility closet. A blink later the door changed in front of us and we stepped out to—

“PANTIES! SHIT!”

We were at the Walmart dressing room. No good. If the feds had blocked off the highway at city limits, we were still on the wrong side of it. John said, “Back in! Back in!”

Back into the dressing room. A blink. The smell of burritos hit us. We stepped out of the door at the exact moment Falconer skidded to a stop in front of us. He leveled his huge automatic at my face and said, “FREEZE!”

We ducked back inside. I heard Falconer yanking the door back open a split second before we emerged at a destination that stank of liquor and disinfectant.

“Shit!” hissed John, surveying a display of Jägermeister. “We’re at the liquor store.” Specifically, the restroom at the rear of the store. “What now?”

“Maybe if we wait here, he’ll wander away.”

“He’s not gonna do that, he’ll search the burrito stand for a hidden hatch or something. Then he’ll search our car and interrogate the burrito guy to see if he’s in on it.”

I glanced around. “What’s going on?”

The liquor store was packed. People were hauling armloads of bottles up to the counter and somebody was arguing with the cashier.

“People stocking up.”

“Screw it. He won’t be expecting us to pop back out. We’ll go out and right back in. Third time’s a charm.”

We shoved back into the liquor store restroom just as a guy nearby piled Jäger and half a dozen Red Bulls into a shopping basket.

A blink. Burrito smell.

I peeked out of the utility closet. A hand grabbed my collar and threw me to the ground, knocking the air from my lungs. A knee was on my back.

Falconer screamed, “HOW ARE YOU DOING THAT?”

“WE TOLD YOU! Just fucking let us go!”

“Shitbird,” Falconer growled, “you need to understand that it’s going to be martial law and rioting within the hour. That means if I put a bullet in both of your heads and leave you here, nobody will fucking care.”

I said, “Listen! Listen to me! Everything that has happened has happened because they wanted it to.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I DON’T KNOW! Find out! You’re goddamned Lance Falconer!”

John said, “Don’t you get it? You’re wasting your time, we’re just a couple of inconsequential dipshits in this whole thing. The people behind this will take out all three of us. We’re all pawns. Well, you’re a pawn, we’re a couple of Gummi bears your retarded little brother stuck on the chessboard.”

I felt the knee lift from my back. I looked up at Falconer towering over me, I met his eyes and found it easier to look into the barrel of his gun.

He said, “See, I would let you go so you can try to jump the quarantine, but I would like to not be responsible for destroying the world today. I’d sooner let everybody in this town past those barricades before you two fucks. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but disaster follows you everywhere you goddamn go. Now we’re going to—AAAHHH!”

An orange blur had attached itself to Falconer’s crotch. It was Molly, her teeth buried right in the detective’s junk.

John grabbed my jacket and we stumbled into the closet. I pulled the door shut—

Cornfield.

“Yes!” screamed John.

We stepped out of a blue Porta-Potty, the middle one in a row of three at the edge of a construction site. To our right was the legs of a half-finished water tower.

In our various experiments with the doors over the months, we’d only found one—this one—that took you outside city limits. But not by much. No more than a quarter mile to the south of us we could see dots of military vehicles, parked along a road bisecting the field. A little bit of the cordon encircling the city. John pulled out his phone and said, “No reception. Man, you think they’re jamming the signal?”

“Dunno. If so we just gotta get far enough away, they’re not blocking it for all of America, right?”

“Well. Highway’s about a quarter mile that way.”

We went stomping across the expanse of broken cornstalks and mud of the harvested cornfield, tracing a similar path from that summer night when we saw the black convoy and found The Box. Fifteen minutes later, we got a good look at the traffic jam on the highway, a line of cars that extended across the horizon as far as we could see in both directions. In the distance to our left was the roadblock, a cluster of flashing police lights, Humvees and the muted echo of somebody shouting into a megaphone. They were trying to get cars to cross the median and go back the way they came, but due to people refusing to comply, or confusion, or just the general dipshit dysfunction of crowds, the whole process had resulted in gridlock. We both flinched as a helicopter swept overhead.

A day and a half ago I was at work playing browser games on the PC and trying to think of what to get Amy for her birthday. Suddenly it’s the freaking apocalypse.

John glanced at his phone, then stuffed it back in his pocket. Ten minutes later we made it out of the cornfield and onto the grass along the shoulder of the road. We took a right, putting Undisclosed to our backs. To our left was a wall of cars and semis forming an automotive Great Wall of China that snaked over the next hill.

When we crested that hill, we saw that the shopping center just outside of town—a U-shape strip of stores encircling three sides of a huge parking lot—had become a gathering place for refugees. The parking lot was packed with vehicles, and more were parked in the grass along the entrance leading in. As we got closer we saw people standing around, on their phones, trying to get in touch with loved ones behind the barricades.

That prompted John to pull out his phone.

“I’ve got bars! Well, a bar.”

He dialed and said, “Hey! Shiva. It’s me. Huh? No, no. Look, Sheila, Dave and I need a ride. We’re right outside that strip mall with the Best Buy. They got the roads all blocked—what? Yeah, I don’t know. Did you say zombies? No. Your friends are morons. What? No. Why would we have anything to do with it? Uh huh. That’s fine. Can you still pick us up? Hello? Shiva?”

He put the phone away and said, “Call got dropped. Also, I think she broke up with me.”

“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop but, uh, did zombies come up in that conversation?”

“Yeah, apparently the Internet is full of zombie rumors. People are stupid.”

“I guess that’s not any stupider than the truth.”

We made it to the shopping center parking lot. On one end was the Best Buy, on the other was a now-closed movie theater. Between the two was a row of storefronts, half of them unoccupied.

John said, “I didn’t know they had a Cinnabon out here.”

“We got to get a ride, John. My feet are killing me.”

We walked past a parked Greyhound bus and John said, “You think they’d let us on there?”

The bus was empty. I said, “I don’t know. Where’s it going?”

“Who cares?”

“Good point. Find the driver and see if you can buy a ticket. Or bribe him. I have four dollars.”

“I have zero dollars. You might have to blow him.”

I peered through the smoked front windows of the Best Buy and saw the store was absolutely packed with people, staring up at a massive bank of televisions along the back wall.

We went in and shouldered our way through the crowd. They were watching live news coverage of the chaos in Undisclosed on three dozen flat-screen TVs of various sizes. The Action 5 News Team was finding as many ways as they could to say the same thing over and over—that there was some kind of unspecified crisis in the town, that they didn’t know the nature of it but that it was huge and terrible and that we should all remain calm but glued to our televisions. Then they threw it out to star reporter Kathy Bortz, who was standing about one block from my house:

“Thank you, Michael. Look behind me. Fire trucks. Police cars. Military Humvees. A large RV that appears to be a mobile command center from the Centers for Disease Control. Numerous civilian vehicles. Behind them, a raging house fire. There is mass confusion here, folks. We heard gunshots when we first arrived, we have been told there are at least three bodies but that’s all we know. Personnel are—what was that? Did you catch that, Steve? Back on me. Ready? Personnel are swarming the scene. They’re trying to push back onlookers, as you can see quite a crowd has gathered around. Information has been hard to come by but what we know is that this is the same address where less than an hour ago neighbors called in reports of a shouting, bloody, naked man carrying what appeared to be—what’s that? Steve? No, there’s something on my—AH!”

Kathy swatted at her hair, like a woman who has realized a bee has nested there. Only two people in the Best Buy saw that it was not a bee.

She screamed. There was another scream, a man this time. Her camera guy, apparently, because the screen jerked and suddenly we were looking at the reporter’s feet. She wore tennis shoes. I always remember that part.

The knees of her pantsuit came into frame next. She was shrieking, convulsing. She fell flat into the grass. While the Action 5 News audience watched, the face of Kathy Bortz fell into frame. A three-inch-long strip of flesh was missing from her forehead, pink skull showing in the gash.

Gasps from the crowd around us. On the screen, Bortz shrieked, and shrieked. The strip of eaten flesh on her face grew, edging down, across her eyebrow. The invisible-to-everyone-else carnivore quickly chewed across her eyelid, then dug into her eyeball, spilling pale fluid down across the bridge of her nose.

The shot cut back to the male and female anchors. Perfect-haired anchor Michael McCreary blinked, looked off camera and said, “What the FUCK?” His female coanchor turned to lean behind the desk, and vomited.

The air in the store was charged with panic—that bottled-up, impotent panic of a crowd that doesn’t know how to act on it. Should they riot? Loot the place? Burn it down? Should they stampede out of there? To where? Cinnabon?

Instead, everybody just kind of stood shoulder to shoulder, mumbling to each other. A black woman next to me was crying, covering her mouth with one hand.

My cell phone screamed and half a dozen people around me almost shit their pants. On the screen it said:

AMY.

“Amy! Can you hear me?”

“Yes!”

“Did you hear the news?”

“Yes, David—”

“Listen to me! We’re okay. John and I both, we got out of town. Now, we may have to come up there and stay with you for a bit, we can’t go back to town because—”

“David. Stop talking. Did you not get any of my voice mails? I got on a bus to [Undisclosed] this morning—”

“Shit! Turn around! Amy, it’s chaos in there. Get off at the next stop and—”

The background noise had cut off from her end and I knew the call had gotten dropped. No bars on the phone.

“Shit! John, she’s on her way down here!”

“No, that’s good news, man. She’ll be coming in on the highway, right? We figure out how far the bus got and we’ll meet her there. Hell, if we head north we’ll run into her at some point.”

My phone screamed again. Text message this time, from Amy.

The message said simply, WHAT IS HAPPENING.

There was a photo attached. I opened it.

All of the warmth in my body drained out through my feet, all my life and strength forming a puddle on the tile floor.

The photo was of my burning house. Taken from not twenty feet away.

I sat down, an act that was not entirely voluntary. I was in a forest of legs. My head was swimming.

John was talking to me. “Dave? Dave. What’s happening?”

“She’s at my…”

I swallowed.

“She’s at my fucking house, John. Amy. She took the bus this morning and she went to my house. To find me.”

“She’s… I’m sure she’s fine. She’s smarter than both of us put together, she’ll—”

“I have to go back for her.”

“You’re damned right.”

He pulled me to my feet. I shoved my way through the crowd, knocking rudely through shoulders and elbows.

In the parking lot John said, “All we got to do is get back to the water tower, take the door, get back to the burrito stand. With any luck the Caddie will still be there—”

“We can’t walk. We have to, uh, borrow a vehicle. Something that can drive right the hell across that cornfield.”

“Look.” He pointed. “Left of the Greyhound.”

There was a very muddy pickup, on jacked-up suspension. In the bed was an equally muddy dirt bike.

I was praying that the keys were in the truck. They weren’t, and the truck was locked.

Looking around nervously, we rolled the bike out of the truck bed. I had only driven a motorcycle twice in my life, and hadn’t crashed either time. John had actually owned one a few years ago, but had crashed it twice. We didn’t discuss it, I jumped on and John climbed on behind me. I kicked it to life, and we were off. Across the parking lot, onto the grass, into the stubble and mud of the cornfield.

We bounced along the ruts and John had his arms around my rib cage so tight I thought he was breaking bones. I told him to loosen up because I couldn’t breathe. I aimed the bike right at the vertical columns of the tower, brown at the seams where they had been welding the plates together. I saw the blue Porta-Potty at the base, as it grew out of a speck in the distance. November wind froze my ears and cheeks. I felt like I was watching myself do all of it from afar.

They couldn’t have Amy. They could have me, they could have John, they could have Undisclosed and the Midwest and America. I’ll cede all of that to them, whoever they are. But they don’t get Amy. She’s off the table.

Amy had already lost her family, in that car accident years ago, the same one that took her hand and left her tethered to a bottle of pain pills she could never allow out of her sight. She lost her brother, she lost her home. The world owed her more than it would ever be able to repay but by God, it was going to have to try.

The reporter’s face kept flashing through my mind. A flesh-eating spider, chewing through her eye—

Stop it.

—and Amy was closer than that. Closer to the infested house than the reporter. How in the hell had she gotten so close? Why didn’t they stop her? Maybe the National Guard had gotten her by now, or the CDC. Maybe they’d just hold onto her until they got all of this under control.

They will never get this under control.

I was numb all over, a combination of the cold and the vibration and the panic and exhaustion. I couldn’t feel the bike jolting over the ruts in the field, I couldn’t feel John’s arms around me, I couldn’t feel the half-dozen wounds that had been complaining all over my body.

I pulled up to the Porta-Potty, found the kickstand and said, “If it looks like the feds have it under control, we find somebody in charge and—”

John was not there.

I jumped off the bike and looked back. There was a tiny figure way off in the distance, frantically waving his arms and running. He had fallen off somewhere around the first third of the trip.

No time to wait for him. I pulled out my phone and wrote out a message to him in an unsent text, telling him to give us thirty minutes to get back before getting as far away as he could. Somebody had to stay on the other side of those barricades. I left the message on the screen and laid the phone on the seat of the dirt bike. Couldn’t use it in town anyway.

I went to the door of the middle Porta-Potty and whispered, “Burrito stand.”

To be clear, the doors absolutely did not work that way. It was just wishful thinking, or a prayer.

I opened it, stepped inside.

The plastic Porta-Potty door clapped shut behind me. I knew I wasn’t at the burrito stand. There were no burrito smells. There was noise. Panic, from outside. I opened the door and had a split second to register that I was in the restroom at BB’s.

Shouted commands, panicked screams. Gunshots.

I wanted to turn back to the door, to retreat to the field. Instead I found a gun barrel pointed in my face. I threw up my hands.

“No! Don’t—”

Leviticus

John heard muffled gunshots as he approached the toilet, and they sounded close. Sound waves are a funny thing but he swore the noise was coming from inside the blue plastic shitter.

He reached the door and was about to yank it open when he had second thoughts. Wait, if there were dudes with guns at the other end of the “door” or portal or wormhole, could they shoot through it? Was that what he heard? If he opened it, would a hail of bullets fly out? Would a dude with a machine gun spring out at him? Or had some soldier or cop been taking a shit when Dave burst in, so now the two of them were having a gunfight, pressed chest-to-chest in the tiny booth?

Unarmed and with no other plans for the day, John took a deep breath and pulled open the door.

Filthy, chemical toilet. A crumpled bag of Doritos on the plastic floor. Empty toilet paper roll.

John climbed inside. Closed the door.

Nothing happened.

You could feel when the doors worked, there was a change in the air, and a slight smell like the gas that comes out of aerosol cans of whipped cream before the cream comes out. When he opened the door, he was unsurprised to find it was just the field again.

He tried it ten more times.

Finally he gave up and stepped out of the booth, and noticed something for the first time.

Blood.

Splattered on the inside of the door. Blood, and bits of pink something—

Brains.

—that he couldn’t identify.

In that instant the whole sequence suddenly made sense. John sat down in the cornfield and tried to think of a dozen ways to talk himself out of it. The same rationalization—the exact same—that was running through the heads of dozens and dozens of people inside those army barriers up ahead. The families of those firemen, and the friends and coworkers of that reporter, and all of the other people who had died in an instant when everything went to shit: death was something that happened to other people. Strangers. Extras in the background. We don’t die. They die.

John lit a cigarette. He finished it. He climbed on board the dirt bike and said, out loud,

“All those fuckers are going to pay.”

30 MINUTES EARLIER…

A half hour earlier, while Dave and John were still trudging across a cornfield after having emerged from the water tower Porta-Potty…

Amy was finding it hard to breathe. Everybody on the bus was restless and nervous, bottled up in there with each other, cut off from the outside world. The phones were dead. Traffic had stopped—cars in front, cars behind. She was sick with worry and she had to pee so bad she didn’t know if she could actually make it through the process of standing, walking to the back and sitting down again on a toilet.

The bus driver got up and announced that he had gotten word over the radio that the highway had been shut down for the rest of the day and maybe the next, due to a chemical spill. The two guys in the seats across the aisle scoffed. They really wanted it to be zombies.

The driver said there was a shopping center ahead, that traffic was being diverted there and that once there the passengers would have the option of arranging for other transportation, or reboarding the bus and taking it back through the stops in reverse order. All Amy knew was that there were stores at the shopping center and that those stores had bathrooms.

After that, it would just be a matter of finding another route into town. If she had to walk, she’d walk. She hadn’t brought walking shoes but it wasn’t that far. She’d show up at David’s front door with cupcakes and show him the blisters on her feet and he’d give her a hug and try to peel clothes off of her. Then they’d sit on his porch in the autumn chill and eat cupcakes and drink some of that amazing coffee from that Cuban place and they’d talk about… whatever this situation was, and laugh about the Internet dorks giddily whispering about zombies.

The bus veered off onto the shoulder and rode it until the turn lane for the shopping center. As soon as it rolled to a stop, Amy shakily headed for the nearest doorway. She wasn’t even paying attention to what store she walked into, she just knew that on her dazed trip to the restroom, she passed a lot of televisions and cell phone kiosks and a gauntlet of muttering, worried people. She sat the cupcakes on a shelf outside the door because it seemed weird to take them in.

It’s amazing how your body affects your outlook on the world. Using the bathroom and walking around and splashing some water on her face, it made all the difference in the world. With that physical tension gone, the situation seemed so much less bleak. She probably wouldn’t have to even make the hike into town, surely there had to be another route—one of those gravel back roads that looped around the cornfields if nothing else—then find somebody in the parking lot going that way. She wasn’t sure why the bus didn’t just take one of them, but maybe they had some kind of policy against leaving the main roads.

Amy emerged from the bathroom, grabbed her cupcakes and caught a new, weird vibe in the store. Everybody was standing and gawking in the same direction. She followed their gaze and saw they were watching Best Buy’s rows of huge TVs, all of which were tuned to the local news. It cut to the anchor, who said a curse word she had never heard used on the news before, and his co-anchor leaned over and started gagging.

What in the world?

Amy almost asked the lady next to her what was going on, but then she noticed somebody talking on their phone and pulled out hers. Ah, service was back. She dialed and—

“Amy! Can you hear me?”

“Yes!”

“Did you hear the news?”

“Yes, David—”

“Listen to me! We’re okay. John and I both, we got out of town. Now, we may have to come up there and stay with you for a bit, we can’t go back to town because—”

“David. Stop talking. Did you not get any of my voice mails? I got on a bus to [Undisclosed] this morning—”

“Shit!”

The phone cut out.

“David? Can you hear me? What’s going on? The Internet thinks there are zomb—”

Nope, call got dropped. She redialed, and immediately got that stupid “all circuits are busy” message.

The scene on the TV changed, and suddenly she was looking at David’s house and…

Oh my God.

It was on fire.

Why would that happen? Did David even know? She held up the phone, zoomed in on the TV screen and snapped a shot of the burning house. Juggling the cupcake box so she could text with her one hand, she sent David a simple message:

WHAT IS HAPPENING

It said it was sent. Who knows if it actually got through. Meanwhile, the room around her was freaking out. People were murmuring and crying and arguing and cursing at their phones. Somebody rudely slammed into her from behind on their way to the door. She dropped the cupcake box but it landed right side up so she thought it was okay. She needed to find a chair. She needed to sit, and breathe, and wait to hear from David, and focus on not crying.

They sold office chairs over at the far side of the store and there were people sitting in them but something about the sight of the short redhead fighting back tears made three different guys give up their seats at the same time. She took the one in the middle.

She waited, and waited. She tried to call, circuits busy.

It wasn’t as bad as she was making it out to be. Didn’t David say they had made it out of town? And that they were fine? That’s what mattered. She suddenly realized how hungry she was. Was there anything to eat at this place other than those disgusting cinnamon rolls at Cinnabon?

There wasn’t. Ten minutes later she sat at a table by the window, picking tiny bits off of an enormous sticky cinnamon roll and stared at people freaking out in the parking lot. She needed to keep an eye on the bus, it still had her suitcase on board and she needed to make sure it didn’t leave with it.

The driver was back at the bus, opening up the luggage compartment to drag out bags for people who were bailing out on the trip. A tall guy with long hair and muddy pants was bothering the driver about something, and the driver was telling him no. The guy reminded her of—

“JOHN!”

Amy ran out the door and across the pavement as fast as her designed-purely-with-cuteness-in-mind shoes would let her. John was startled to see her. Before he could speak, she threw her arms around his torso.

“Oh, thank God. Oh my God, John. I can’t believe you’re here.”

John still looked baffled and said, “Yeah, I fell off but… I mean holy shit, Amy, I thought that… Anyway. It worked out so, great. Great. Oh my god.”

“Yeah.”

John said, “We should head north, get as far away as we can, and just kind of regroup. Need a ride though, I’m trying to get a spot on the bus but apparently that’s not allowed…”

John looked around. Amy looked around. At the exact same time both of them said, “Where’s David?”

Revelation

Vultures. Big, noisy, circling, mechanical vultures. That’s what Amy thought of as she saw, for the first time in her life, half a dozen helicopters circling around in the same sky. A couple of them were news choppers, the rest looked like army. Buzzing, that soft thwupping fading in and out as their blades chopped up the air. If you ever see more than two helicopters over you, you can be sure that something terrible has happened.

Amy made John take her out to the water tower and the toilets. John went to the one on the far right and opened it, showing her that it was just a toilet, showed her that if he went and stood inside, nothing happened. She made him do this about twenty more times. She suggested he try the other two, he said that he had done that and that they, too, were just toilets.

Amy hated crying. She hated crying more than she hated puking. And she would rather puke on live television than cry in front of John right now. She wasn’t a large person under normal circumstances but when she cried she could feel herself shrink two feet. She instantly got demoted to child, everybody making soothing sounds and apologizing for things they didn’t even do. Strangers inviting themselves to put an arm around her shoulder like she was a five-year-old lost at the bus station.

And she was a crier. She cried when people yelled at her, she cried when she got frustrated, she cried during particularly sad commercials. But it was just crying. She didn’t get hysterical. She didn’t fall apart. But everybody treated her like she did, because her eyes were so quick to start leaking when things went wrong. And now, as John opened the toilet door and again she saw nothing but blue plastic walls and a whiff of poop chemicals, she felt that hot sting in her tear ducts and knew they were going to betray her for the ten thousandth time.

The thwupping got louder and one of the helicopters seemed to be swooping really low on its passes. It was a huge thing with two blades. She could feel their pulsing in her gut.

A black semi truck was turning down the lane, heading right toward them. Watching it warily, John said, “We have to get out of here. We’ll regroup and come up with a plan. But if they catch us then it’s over, we can’t help him.”

“One more time.”

John glanced back, toward the truck, and then toward the tiny army men in the distance and the bright orange fencing they were stretching across the field, sealing off the town behind them. Tiny shouts from a bullhorn were drifting through the air. Yells from angry and scared people. Honking horns. All of it playing under the terrible hollow drumming of the helicopters—the soundtrack of every worst-case scenario.

John obeyed. The toilet was just a toilet.

You haven’t really experienced the full range of human emotion until you’ve cried your eyes out while hanging on for dear life on the back of a dirt bike bouncing across a cornfield in the freezing cold. Amy and John made it back to the shopping center, which was clearing out fast. They returned the motorcycle to the pickup, propping it up by the tailgate because they couldn’t get it lifted up into the bed. Maybe the owner would think it just fell out.

Cars were filing out and heading up the highway, because rumor was spreading around that they were going to expand the quarantine to include the shopping center and everything for a few miles on the other side of it, but who knew if that was true.

The Greyhound was boarding, ready to just dump everybody off at the stops where they had been picked up. Amy thought she could get the driver to let John on board—the guy wasn’t made of stone—but John thought that would make them too easy to find if that detective came after them. It made sense, and she got her bag and watched the bus lumber down the highway without them. It was the right decision, but they were now stranded.

Amy would never be able to eat at a Cinnabon again for the rest of her life. They sat there, at the same table she was sitting at when she spotted John an hour earlier. John was on and off his intermittently working phone, first trying friends in town to see if they happened to be outside of city limits when everything went crazy. Those calls wouldn’t even go through. Then he tried some people he knew outside of town, but the ones who answered had their own problems.

Amy suggested getting a ride to the airport about ten miles away and renting a car there, but John said he had some things on his driving record that would ensure he would never be able to rent a car for the rest of his life. Amy didn’t have a license, so that shot down that idea. It was just so freaking frustrating, David needed breaking out from a military zombie quarantine and his saviors couldn’t get a ride from Cinnabon.

John paused in his phone calls to shove the remaining third of the cinnamon roll into his mouth when his phone rang. He picked it up and mumbled, “Munch! Where are you?”

John’s friend Munch Lombard had not in fact fled the country in David’s truck as John instructed him, but simply went to his parents’ farm outside of town. He promised to come get Amy and John in fifteen minutes or so, but John wasn’t comfortable waiting at the shopping center that long so they agreed to meet him at the John Deere dealership a mile up the street. They took off walking. Amy’s left foot felt sticky and she was pretty sure it was actively bleeding in her stupid shoes but she said nothing because broken blisters were unimportant when the world was in crisis. She kept telling herself that over and over again, wincing with ever step along the highway.

Fewer and fewer cars passed them going north. More and more green trucks passed them going south. She was fairly sure that by sundown there would be more military personnel encircling Undisclosed than there were people inside it. All of that, between her and David.

Soon, John was driving David’s Bronco, Munch in the passenger seat and Amy sitting in the smelly backseat. The truck had stunk of rotten eggs for years for reasons no one could explain. They turned off onto a gravel lane snaking into dense woods, the canopy of trees blocking the sun and fast-forwarding the clock to the mid-evening hours. The lane was barely wide enough for one vehicle and Amy wondered what they did when two vehicles met going opposite directions. Did somebody just have to slowly back all the way out? Did they flip a coin to decide who?

Amy tuned in to the conversation between Munch and John to hear Munch say, “Yeah, I mean, they’re playin’ that clip of the reporter’s face getting eaten every five minutes.”

“What are they saying it is?”

“Some kind of virus. Maybe something the terrorists released. Eats your skin. Eats your brain. Makes you crazy.”

“Jesus. That’s the story they’re putting out there to calm people down? That’s really worse than just saying zombies.”

“My dad and grandad have been huddled around the TV since it happened. They think it’s Revelations. Though I can’t remember anything that messed up even in the bible. The face-eating part I mean.”

They rounded some trees and came to a closed gate, and behind it sat a shiny black pickup truck. Behind the wheel was a big guy with a dark beard and aviator sunglasses, who Amy thought looked like John Goodman’s character in The Big Lebowski.

Munch muttered a curse and got out of the Bronco. The guy stepped out of the black pickup, then reached inside and pulled out a shotgun. John got out and Amy followed his lead, thinking that it had taken society all of two hours to degenerate to the Shotgun stage.

To the shotgun guy John said, “Hey, Daryl.”

“Daryl” nodded curtly but didn’t answer. Then Munch said, “Come on, Dad, don’t embarrass me. Let us through.”

Shotgun guy, who Amy gathered was Munch’s dad, and whose name was Daryl unless John had gotten it wrong, said, “They’re from in town, right? They were in the city when the outbreak happened?”

“John was, she wasn’t. That’s his friend, Amy.”

Amy waved.

Daryl Shotgun said, “Make you a deal. Drive him back to the National Guard checkpoint they set up outside town, let ’em check him over and if they give him a clean bill of health, we’ll talk. But until then he ain’t gettin’ past this gate. Him and nobody else. We already had refugees wandering around out here, tryin’ to see what they could steal.”

“Come on, Dad. They’re homeless. They can’t get back in town, they got nothin’, they left everything behind. Don’t be a dick.”

“Don’t push me, Mitchell. We talked about this.”

John said, “If it makes you feel better, if I was infected you’d know it. I saw a guy get it right in front of me and it took hold of him within one minute.”

“Who are you, again?”

Munch said, “Goddamnit, Dad. That’s John. From the band. You’ve met him half a dozen times.”

Daryl nodded and said, “From the band. Of course.”

John said, “Look, don’t let me in. It’s fine. But she needs a place to stay and she was never in town, she was on her way in when they shut down the highway.”

Amy was about to speak up. She wasn’t staying here with these nutjobs, the place had post-apocalyptic rape cult written all over it. Daryl rendered it moot.

“Maybe she wasn’t in the city, but she’s been with you all day. Right?”

Munch laughed, shook his head and said, “Unbelievable. Fuckin’ unbelievable.”

John said, “No, no, it’s fine. I’m not trying to sow discord in your family here. I shouldn’t have asked. We’ll be on our way.”

Daryl said, “That’s right, you will. And I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told everybody else who’s come up to this gate. ’Til a man in uniform comes and gives the all-clear, and maybe not even then, if you show up here again you ain’t gettin’ the courtesy of a warning shot.”

The look on John’s face said he was wondering if he could get the shotgun away from Daryl and smash in his nose with the stock. Amy was pretty sure John could do it, the guy looked fat and slow. But then John snapped out of it and they headed back to the Bronco.

As they did a three-point turn in the lane to head back out into the chaos, Amy sighed and said, “What now?”

“Back to plan A. We head north. Put some distance between us and the bullshit. If we get caught and thrown in jail or quarantine, it’s over. So for right now, the goal is to not do that.”

She crossed her arms and blew some dangling hairs out of her eyes and said, “I don’t like going farther away from him. I mean David could be hurt or running away or who knows what. And we’re just… leaving him.”

John was silent for a moment and Amy detected that there was something he wasn’t telling her. But either he’d tell her or he wouldn’t, she’d learned that she couldn’t press John like she could David. Every conversation took place on his terms.

John said, “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll be back. But we’re coming back strong. We’re coming back to veto all this shit. But we got to load up first.”

And Amy thought, he doesn’t believe that.

The Maps and Shit

As they drove, instead of the highway, John only saw blood and brains, splattered on a filthy blue plastic door.