This Book is Full of Spiders

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.