This Book is Full of Spiders

Suddenly, hovering there before us, in midair, was that stupid painting.

The painting swiveled, facing the dark hordes. The eyes on the face of Velvet Jesus burned with white fire. The mouth opened, and let loose an inhuman roar.

Velvet Jesus faced a shadow man to my left. Laser beams fired from his eyes.

The shadow man exploded.

The eyes lit up again, and fired. Another shadow man left the world. The painting turned in midair, we hit the dirt. Beams of white fired left, then right, clearing swaths through the shadows, piercing the blackness with a glare that was somehow equally terrible, a white-blue light that I knew would leave me blind if I looked too long. The terrible light chewed through the shadows with a sickening righteous energy that genuinely made me pity them. I suddenly knew how the scientists of the Manhattan Project felt the first time they saw a nuclear detonation, witnessing the power of what they had unleashed, the reflection of the light off of the surrounding sand bright enough to blind a man wearing dark glasses. Power so astonishing that it became hideous.

And then, there was only one shadow man left, my shadow man, the one in front of me that had taken Amy’s hand, or made it so that her hand was already gone.

Velvet Jesus flew toward the shadow man, then circled behind him. The painting screeched like an animal and the mouth on the painting opened wide. The painting launched itself at the shadow man.

Velvet Jesus bit his head off.

The shadow man’s body evaporated like a cloud of car exhaust.

Then there was a flash, so bright that I couldn’t close my eyes to it because they were already closed, but the brightness penetrated to the back of my eyeballs, burning all through me. There was a thud in the ground, a shock wave that sent a ripple through reality. The painting disappeared. The furgun exploded in a miniature supernova of blue light.

I don’t know how I ended up flat on my back, but I was staring up at the still, gray clouds and trying to blink spots out of my eyes. All was silent.

John appeared over me and said, “When they write the sequel to the Bible, that shit is definitely gonna be in there.”

My ears were ringing. Somehow, all of my senses were ringing. Overload. Then John was pulling me to my feet and saying, “Look! Look at that one’s face.”

He was pointing to one of the still life–infected REPER men, one I didn’t even know had been standing there when the world froze. It had been in the process of rounding the burning truck, running toward us. It would have reached Amy in about three seconds if John had not called his Soy Sauce time-out. I walked over to the infected spaceman. His eyes were a pair of road flares, sizzling and crackling and smoldering with white light.

The parasites were burning.

All of the parasites were burning—at least the ones around us. The white, crackling pinpricks of light were twinkling from the infected spacemen, the sizzle of the frying spiders filling the preternatural silence in that still world.

And then the lights blinked out, one by one, the sizzling of the flesh fading, as the last of the parasites in the field died. The men they had lived in would not suddenly wake up and find themselves cured—happy endings like that never happened in Undisclosed. When time sped up, they would collapse, dead. But they would be free. And they would be no threat to us.

* * *

In the stillness of the aftermath I said, “Man, I need a nap.”

I looked around at the frozen battle, one that nobody involved in knew had just taken a radical turn in the infinity between ticks on the clock. “What happens now?”

John surveyed the landscape and said, “We just got to get out of the way, right? Time starts back up and the army realizes the zombies are all down and they’ll stop shooting and then they’ll give us all medals.”

I said, “Amy is still out in the open. If I position myself so that I’m kind of pushing her over, when time starts back up we’ll tumble down into the ditch, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Try not to break her neck.”

“Go down there and get ready to catch us.”

John jumped down into the ditch, looking over Falconer, who had been shot multiple times. He certainly looked dead because he wasn’t moving, but nobody was moving so we couldn’t know for sure. I walked toward Amy, her frozen arms outstretched toward me like she was trying to ward me off.

Something hit me in the chest.

Actually, I ran into something. Something hovering in midair, something small and sharp.

A bullet.

An inch long and as thick as a pencil. Fired from one of the many guns bristling out of the line of green vehicles behind me.

There was no mistaking the trajectory. It was heading right for Amy. Specifically, right for Amy’s heart. In the frantic fog of zombie combat some guy—who had probably enlisted to help pay for his college education—had taken a shot at the waving figure next to the ditch, and the shot was good. It was going to take her right out.

John saw me standing there, slackjawed, looking at this frozen projectile, this little copper-jacketed death warrant hanging in the air about eight feet away from Amy. He looked back and forth between the bullet and the frozen Amy and didn’t need me to mutter, “Headed right for her,” though I did it anyway.

He said, “Okay, okay. Let’s think it through. What if we—”

“One of us has to die.”

“Now, that’s not true—”

“Either it tears through her heart, or one of us stands in front of her and lets it tear through ours.”

“Bullshit. It doesn’t have to be your heart. You can, like turn sideways to it, press your bicep against it, get that big bone in your arm in front of it.”

“A bullet like this… John, this thing is traveling at half a mile per second. They design them to punch through military-grade helmets and body armor. It’ll smash through the bone and rip through your lungs and take out your heart anyway.”

“You don’t know that—”

“I do, because, Marconi was right. I knew he was right. They still need their freaking sacrifice. Otherwise this thing won’t end. It’s a bill that needs to be paid. Somebody has to die.”

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Dave…”

“If you don’t understand the symmetry here, well, just think about it. It has to be me. It’s right. It fits. You said yourself that time won’t resume until we do what we’re supposed to do. If you stand here, in front of this thing, you’re going to be waiting forever. It won’t go off pause until I do it.”

He said, “Fine. Then leave it on pause. We’ll go do, whatever. Whatever we want. Piss off the top of the Statue of Liberty. Walk across the ocean and screw with frozen tourists in Paris. We got all the time in the world. We’ll use it. We’ll tour the world, you and me.”

I shook my head. “And leave her here, this thing hovering in front of her heart? Knowing things could suddenly snap into action at any second? No, I’d never be able to relax, knowing that. We’re screwing around somewhere on the other side of the world and suddenly she takes a bullet and she dies here, alone? Calling for me, her last thought to wonder where I am? No. I spent my whole life putting off what I knew I needed to do. No more of that.”

“Well fuck you, then.”

“Yep. Fuck me.”

“Wait! You can leave a note. Like, a final message to her.”

“I don’t have anything to write with.”

“You have the contents of your own body. Smear the note onto the street. With your shit.”

I stared at him. “Yes, John, let’s have that be Amy’s last memory of me. I mean, once time starts again all of this is going to just be instantly in front of her. So from her point of view, she stood up, then in the blink of an eye suddenly I’m sprawled dead in front of her and I LOVE YOU BABE spontaneously appears onto the pavement,