This Book is Full of Spiders

million times from YouTube alone in the next month. It would air on CNN, Fox News, the BBC, Al Jazeera, all three broadcast networks and everywhere else. Amy couldn’t stand to watch it, and for a long time, it was everywhere.

If it had been me laying there, nobody would have given a shit. A big, chubby guy in a green prison jumpsuit and a weird reputation? The factions who were still calling for blood afterward, who talked of undetectable infection and for internment—if not extermination—of the town, would maybe have still won out. Same if it had been John, or Falconer, or Owen. They could have dug up dirt on us, claimed the corpse was infected, claimed we had killed a dozen orphans just prior to taking the bullet. We’d have just been one more body in the street.

But no one could argue against a dog.

The loyal dog, sacrificing itself to save its owner, laying there bleeding in the rain. Then add in the tiny girl kneeling over her—the dog’s owner that the bullet had been meant for—who couldn’t have appeared more harmless if she’d been made of kittens. The image doused the world’s bloodlust like a bucket of ice water. A perfect, undeniable symbol for the price the innocent pay for unchecked paranoia.

Eulogy

John wrapped up Molly in his jacket and laid her in the backseat of the pickup Tennet had driven out to this spot. A crowd was forming, and vehicles were now lined up bumper to bumper down the highway, an echo of the scene from the day of the outbreak. We were heading the other direction, though, back into town. In the distance, the column of smoke from the asylum inferno drifted into the sky. We passed one house where a guy was unloading suitcases from his trunk and glancing around in confusion, like he had just come back from a two-week vacation and was wondering what the fuck happened while he was gone.

We drove to my house, or the charred remnants of my house, anyway. Amy was pretty upset at the sight of it but John pointed out that we had in fact burned the place down ourselves.

I was exhausted down to my bones, but there was this last piece of business to take care of and no way to put it off. I grabbed the shovel laying in my yard and John and I took turns digging a grave for Molly, rain pelting our shoulders. The temperature dropped into the forties but Amy stood out in it the whole time, watching us, shivering.

I laid Molly in the ground and John volunteered to say the eulogy:

“This here is Molly. She was a good dog. And when I say ‘good dog’ I don’t mean it the way other people mean it, when they’re talking about a dog that never shit on the floor or bit their kids. No, I’m talking about a dog that died saving Amy’s life. By my rough count, that’s half a dozen times Molly saved one of our lives. How many dogs can say that? Hell, how many people can say that? One time, Dave was in a burning building, and Molly here rescued him by getting behind the wheel of his car and driving through the wall. You know that couldn’t have been easy for her.

“Anyhow, Molly died in the way that all really good things die, fast and brutal and for no apparent reason. They say that even though it often appears that God just really, really doesn’t give a shit about what happens down here, that that’s just an illusion and He really does care after all, and it’s all part of His great plan to make it appear that He doesn’t care. Though what purpose that serves I can’t possibly imagine. I think God probably just wanted Molly for Himself, and I guess I can’t blame Him.

“Well, God, here’s your dog back, I guess. We hereby commit Molly to doggy heaven, which is probably nicer than regular heaven, if you think about it. Amen.”

Amy and I said, “Amen” and I noticed she was crying again and felt utterly helpless to stop it. She buried her face in my chest and I stroked her tangled, wet mess of red hair.

I said, “Let’s find a roof.”

She said, “Let’s find a bed.”

We walked away from the ruins of my former house and John said, “Wait, what if Tennet arranged all of this as some elaborate form of therapy?”

EPILOGUE

It was December 22nd, or Christmas Eve Eve Eve as John so irritatingly called it. I was alone, staring out of the kitchen window of a cheap, mostly empty mobile home supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There was a single Christmas card on the counter next to me, laying on top of its mutilated envelope.

The trailer had come with furniture, but the sofa smelled so bad we had dragged it out into the yard. I think the trailer had previously seen service in New Orleans after the hurricane and I think it got moldy. In the corner of the living room was our Christmas tree, a two-foot-tall plastic tree with huge googly eyes and a mechanical mouth. John had found it in a thrift store, it had a voice box on the bottom and I think originally it was supposed to do a humorous Christmas rap when somebody walked by. When we put batteries in it, the mouth locked in the wide- open position and it uttered a high-pitched, electronic scream of garbled feedback until we pried the batteries out again.

Under the tree sat John’s gift, a wrapped object that was perfectly the shape of a crossbow.

I had a feeling it would take me years to piece together the whirlwind of lies that had obscured the incident the news media had finally decided to call the “Zulu Outbreak.” The consensus seemed to be that fewer than 70 people were ever actually infected with the pathogen, which they decided was some kind of rare form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, caused by the consumption of some kind of mutated protein from contaminated sausages. So the final death toll was, according to the final CDC reports, 68 dead from Zulu, 406 dead from the violence resulting from mass hysteria.

Plenty of people from in town came forward to dispute those reports. And plenty of other people came forward to dispute those reports. A hundred different versions came out and so the public just defaulted to what the guys in suits told them. In the end, They didn’t need to cover up anything—They just drowned it out in a blizzard of conflicting stories. The world eventually gives up and moves on. Like the whole thing with the envelopes of anthrax after 9/11.

Well. Whatever. Now it was a matter of seeing if there would be another outbreak, maybe in another town. But nothing so far.

Snow was inching up the little wooden cross we had planted at Molly’s grave. Every time I looked at it, I imagined replacing it with a little star and crescent, so my neighbors would think that somehow my dog had died a practicing Muslim. I was waiting for a call from Amy, but instead I got a knock at my door. I assumed it was a reporter, which kind of cheered me up because I was making a fulfilling hobby out of giving a completely different version of the story to each and every one of them I spoke to. Why let everybody else have all the fun?

But when I opened the door, there was Detective Lance Falconer, in a black turtleneck and looking cropped from a cover of GQ. It actually took me a second to notice the crutches.

Once inside my living room, I said to him, “You knocked. Usually you just let yourself in.”

“I spent five weeks in the hospital, Wong. I’m in no mood.”

“Merry Christmas Eve Eve Eve.”

“What?”

“I got some frozen taquitos in the oven, you want one?”

“I don’t even know what that is. Look, I’m not gonna waste your time. I just got off the phone with my agent and I’m talking about doing a book on the Zulu thing, and he informs me that there are no fewer than thirteen books on the subject in the pipeline.”

“Yeah, I know. Marconi is writing one, his will be the best. Though I got to admit, the one I’m most looking forward to reading is Owen’s.”

“And you’re writing one.”

“Well, Amy actually. She’s my ghost writer. They just put my name on the cover.”