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
“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
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—
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.
