“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
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.
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
He lowered his gun.
“Detective, only the three of us in this room understand what’s happening here—
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
