This Book is Full of Spiders

from a PA system told me to go through. I obeyed, and entered quarantine, apparently for the second time.

* * *

I don’t know what I was expecting to find inside the gate, but it was just the hospital lawn. The building itself was immediately to my right, the front lawn of the hospital stretching off to my left. The sun hatefully spat daylight into my eyes—how long had it been since I’d seen the sun?—and I gathered it was probably midafternoon or so.

My first thought was, “Ribs.” Meat smoke hit my nostrils, like being downwind from a barbecue joint. I heard voices. Somebody laughed.

Hell, it’s a party.

What was stranger than that was what wasn’t there: men in space suits carrying guns. I assumed I would be roughly dragged in and told to go report to this tent or to submit to some tests or shit. But I was on my own. No soldiers. Nobody who looked official. No staff.

Instead, a smattering of tired-looking people in jumpsuits, some with hospital blankets wrapped around their shoulders, were staring at me like they were expecting someone else. When they saw it was me, they all shambled away without a word.

Well, screw you, too.

I spotted a pillar of smoke a hundred yards or so away, off near the fence that wrapped its way around the perimeter of the hospital grounds. A fence that did not exist the last time I was here, and that was covered entirely in garish ads that were each… wrong somehow, like they didn’t have a big enough tarp and covered it in rejected billboards somebody had laying around in a warehouse (SUBWAY: COME TASTE OUR NEW BEARD!). I wandered toward the fire, having absolutely no idea what else to do. It was the same strategy I employ at parties: find the food first. My lungs quivered at the contact with the chilled air. Not an unpleasant feeling. Kind of felt like freedom.

“Hey! Spider-Man! Spider-Man’s back!”

The voice came from above me and I admit my first reaction was to glance around for the actual Spider-Man. Why not?

He wasn’t here. I found the source of the voice, a black dude poking his head out of a fifth-floor window of the hospital. I had no idea if he was talking to me or somebody else, so I kept walking. I couldn’t help but notice the window he was yelling from was not open—the glass was busted out. That seemed weird to me.

I passed a fat lady in a dark green janitor’s jumpsuit like mine, sleeping under a blanket on what looked like a waiting room sofa that had been dragged out into the yard. The upholstery was discolored, like it had been rained on. I kicked an empty water bottle. It skidded and bounced off another one. Trash was everywhere. I noticed somebody had knocked over the Florence Nightingale statue, laying on its side like they had just toppled a dictator.

I shuffled toward the bonfire, a lot of people were congregating over there. Everybody wearing jumpsuits, either green like mine, or blood red.

Tennet, tell me this is not a goddamned prison yard.

I passed the main entrance to the hospital. The sliding glass doors were propped open with two overflowing garbage cans. From the dim reception area inside it appeared the whole building was without power. Postapocalypse. How long has it been? A year? I wondered if the White House was trashed like this, the Lincoln Bedroom full of refugees. Or zombies.

I caught a whiff of that meat smell from the fire and my stomach growled. How long since I’d eaten? I felt slightly thinner, though that could have been due to the huge jumpsuit I was wearing. A clump of red jumpsuit guys were up ahead, talking and eating from bowls. I was going to ask them where the food table was but at the sight of me they all stopped talking, giving me a look like I was a cop and they were all hiding joints. Everybody had patchy beards. Greasy hair. Nobody shaving, nobody showering. On the ground were discarded plastic forks and paper plates tattooed with old grease stains and muddy shoe prints where they’d been stepped on a dozen times.

The huddle of red suits on the opposite side of the bonfire also fell silent. The bonfire, by the way, was a crackling pile of smashed furniture, wooden pallets, at least one mattress and bundles of what looked like blackened sticks.

Everybody looking at me now. I scanned around for some fellow green jumpsuits but there was just one guy who looked about eighty years old and another middle-aged woman who looked like a schoolteacher. Her eyes showed no signs of even vague interest in this situation. The biggest of the reds, a guy with shoulder-length blond hair and more neck than head said, “We about to have a problem here?” He had the voice of a man with four testicles. His jumpsuit was zipped down to reveal an Iron Cross tattoo on his sternum.

“Not that I know of. Can somebody point me toward the food?”

Nervous glances. Was the food a sensitive subject around here? Nobody seemed to have barbecue ribs.

Four-balls said, “You playin’ a fuckin’ game here, bro?”

“Have we met?”

“Man, just fuck off.”

“If I agree to fuck off will you tell me where the food is?”

The man scowled and said, “Ask Sal where the food is. Go ahead. He’s right there.”

He nodded toward the bonfire. A skinny guy with a bandage covering one eye said, “Let it go, man. Walk away.” He said it to me.

“Why am I the one who has to walk away? Maybe I wanna enjoy the fire?”

Four-balls stepped toward me and said, “Dude, you got five seconds to walk away or else you’re goin’ in there with Sal. I don’t give a shit what anybody says.”

“Wait, do you have me confused with someone else?”

“Whoa, whoa!” from behind me. It was the black guy from the window. Green suit. “Easy, man. Easy. Dude just got outta the hole.”

Four-balls said, “I don’t give a shit.”

Black guy grabbed my sleeve and pulled me away, saying, “Let’s go inside, it’s cold out here.”

I went with him, and realized he hadn’t come alone. Four more green suits were with him. What, were we on teams? What the hell was this? Had I stepped into some weird alternate dimension? Again?

“Man, we didn’t think you were comin’ back,” he said. “This is just in time, too. We got the warning buzz about forty-five minutes ago so truck gonna be here any time.”

I said, “I didn’t understand one word of that.”

Just short of the front door he stopped, leaned into my ear and screamed, “WE GOT THE WARNING BUZZ FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AGO SO THE—”

“My hearing is fine. I don’t know who you are. I’ve lost time, I have no memory of all this. Last thing I remember everything was going to shit out there, out in the town. Then I woke up in the basement of the old creepy-ass TB asylum down the street. In the ‘hole,’ is that what you called it?”

The black guy rubbed his head and said, “Shit. You get knocked over the head or somethin’?”

“No, they said it was a side effect of whatever they did to me over there.”

He let out a breath, glanced around nervously and pulled me inside the hospital. The place was absolutely trashed. Once upon a time, there had been a huge oval-shaped desk right inside the doors where you could check in with a row of secretaries who’d log you into their computers and put a band on your wrist, filtering out the people who didn’t have insurance. Now there were just ragged splinters and deep gouges in the tile where the desk had been roughly ripped from the floor.

The black guy said, “Firewood. See, their plan is to take the easy stuff first—stuff close to the door—and burn it. That way, when we’re all more tired and sick a month from now, the only wood left will be the shit that’s hard to get to on the tenth floor. Makes good sense if you’re a fuckin’ idiot.”

“How long? Tell me. How long since the outbreak happened?”

“’Bout nine days. You don’t remember nothin’?”

“Holy shit, we trashed the hospital this bad in nine days?”

“Oh, no, man, the CDC had staff here keepin’ things in order for the first few. Then they bailed out. We done all this since Wednesday. This is Sunday.”

“And no, to answer your question, I don’t remember anything after showing up here. I don’t even know your name.”