This Book is Full of Spiders

“What?”

“Say his personality remained exactly the same, but the parasite caused his head to transform so that his face was replaced with the face of a leech, complete with circles of tiny teeth for sucking human blood. Would you still consider him to be your old friend?”

“Are you saying he’s infected, or are you just fucking with me?”

Instead of answering, Tennet studied the screen on the device hooked to John’s fingers and made some notes on his clipboard. “Good. Now let’s say the opposite happened. Say he still looked, spoke and acted like David, but was, in reality, an inhuman predator. How would that make you feel? Please answer.”

“Are you serious?”

“Please, we have a lot of patients to get to.”

“It would make me feel bad.”

Tennet nodded and checked something off of his clipboard.

“Now let’s say that he was not infected, but was sent to quarantine with hundreds of people who are, and that their infection has dissolved the part of their brain capable of making moral decisions. And let’s say that they overpowered David, restrained him, defecated into his mouth and taped his mouth shut with duct tape, and left him there to writhe and slowly swallow feces all week, how would that make you feel?”

“Who are you?”

A check of the screen. A mark on the clipboard. “Almost done. Now, if you had to choose, either to have Amy Sullivan gang-raped by twenty-seven infected males in town over the course of ten days, or to have David’s digestive tract surgically restructured so that his large intestine fed directly into his mouth, which would it be? And please provide support for your answer.”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

Tennet glanced at his clipboard and said, “If you had to choose, and if you were not allowed to see either ahead of time and had no other information to go on, would you rather fight Mindcrow or Gonadulus?”

“This isn’t a government operation, is it?”

“If it wasn’t, tell me how that would make you feel.”

“You’re behind this. All of this. You people released that thing in Dave’s house. You set all this in motion. What’s your real name?”

Tennet casually glanced at another page on his clipboard and said, “All right, John, I think we’re in good shape here. What we’re going to do is observe you overnight—standard procedure, don’t read anything into it—and tomorrow morning we’ll do this all again, so we can cross-check the results. Between now and then I want you to really mull this over: if you were carrying the parasite right now, how would you know? ”

John didn’t answer. Tennet stood, pulled the clips from John’s fingers and as a good-bye, said, “You are now aware that your lower jaw has weight, and that it requires effort for you to hold it up. Good evening.”

7 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was in the Zombie Response Squad’s headquarters, aka an old RV Josh inherited from his parents. Parents who Amy suspected were fairly rich. One wall featured a rack of five guns that Amy had never seen outside of an action movie or video game. Josh insisted on showing them all to her, and the footlocker of bullets and shotgun shells they had stockpiled. She nodded and tried to act impressed but she had no idea what she was looking at. The guns all looked like they would knock her over if she tried to shoot one. Josh insisted this wasn’t the case and that he would show her how to shoot if she wanted. He asked her if she wanted anything to drink or to eat or, you know, anything else because he was there for her. Massages, boob inspections, whatever.

Amy couldn’t get John on the phone but at this point she expected that and, to be honest, hated his guts for it. Josh was on his laptop now, showing her a map of Undisclosed that somebody was updating with zombie sightings. There was a big red blob in one corner and Amy asked if that meant there were a lot of zombies there or if there was just one flamboyant zombie who was really easy to see.

“Uh, that’s the hospital there, they’ve fenced it off and used it as a quarantine. They’ve got the place built up like a supermax prison now, but it got so bad that not even the CDC staff could stay inside it. Now, it’s a dumping ground. When somebody in town turns up infected they move them there, behind the fences. So that area is pretty much one hundred percent infected, because if you’re not but they stick you in there anyway, well, how long are you going to last?”

“But they don’t know for sure who’s infected and who’s not?”

“Right.”

“So if your neighbor or whatever calls them and says they suspect you are infected, you get dumped into that camp or whatever. Which is full of hundreds of people who are infected and have turned into monsters and stuff.”

“That’s what we’re hearing, yes.”

“Oh, wow, that’s like the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s what I was saying at the meeting. If you’re the government, and your job is to make sure this thing doesn’t spread, and once you’ve finished sweeping the town and have everybody who might be infected all in this big red blotch here, and you know for a fact that they can’t be cured, what do you do with the red blotch? I’m thinking one MOAB would do it. Fuel-air bomb that will cook everything within a square mile to four thousand degrees.”

“I bet the guy who invented that had a really weird relationship with his mother.”

“What?”

“Do we know when they plan to do it?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“I checked the list on their Web site, David wasn’t on there at all. What do you think that means?”

“I think it means that keeping people informed isn’t their top priority. Look at this.”

Amy leaned over Josh’s shoulder and watched a black-and-white video clip play out. It didn’t look like anything. Some dark squares and tiny dots. At the center were white crosshairs, and some numbers were ticking off in the corners.

“It’s aerial video. A military pilot leaked it, I think it’s a gun camera. This big dark bunch of rectangles here, that’s the hospital. If they zoomed out, you’d see the REPER HQ buildings to the upper left, but it’s offscreen on this view. See this? You can sort of see the fencing and stuff around the edge of the quarantine. He’ll zoom in in a second, to get a view of the yard…”

The shot blinked in as the pilot upped the magnification. Much clearer now—Amy could make out the dots as people, and make out the shapes outside the fence as tents and trucks.

It zoomed in again. Now she could see the people in some detail, enough to tell the difference between someone sitting and standing, and when someone raised their hand to their mouth to smoke or eat something.

She said, “Wait, that’s inside the fence? Those are the infected monster zombies? They’re just standing around. They look like people.”

“No. See this blotch here? That white part in the middle, that’s heat. Fire. See all this stuff jutting out on all sides? Look close. Those are bodies. Skeletons, of uninfected victims they’ve killed. They seem to be burning them in some kind of primitive ritual—”

“DAVID! Look!”

“What?”

“That’s David! I see him!”

“Are… are you sure? At this resolution I couldn’t even tell you which ones are women and which are—”

“Oh my god, he’s right there. Oh my god. I have to tell John.”

Josh was still protesting, but Amy could have read David’s body language from outer space. He was staring at the fence, with his arms folded, and he was really really mad.

She said, “We have to get him out of there. Tonight. Or tomorrow morning. How soon can we get down there?”