This Book is Full of Spiders

kind of undetectable monster. We gonna us that same standard on the next human who walks through those gates? Where does that shit end, Owen? Government shows up to give the all-clear and it’s just you and a mountain of bones?”

Owen had no rebuttal for this and I have to be honest, I detected relief in his face. He didn’t want to have to shoot a dog.

“She monsters out, and it’s your ass.” Owen stuffed the gun into his pocket and apparently that signaled that the meeting was adjourned. The reds huddled among each other and the greens headed back inside.

I walked with TJ and said, “There’s somethin’ else to this, but I don’t want to jump to any conclusions or anything. Molly really belongs to my girlfriend, Amy. I think Molly showing up here, it’s not coincidence. I think she was sent here, as a signal to me. John and Amy—hopefully just John, I guess, with Amy in some safe place—I think one or both of them are out there, and are trying to bust me out or trying to show me how to sneak out.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Means I have to figure out what the plan is. But I feel like they definitely have a plan.”

Somewhere beyond the fence, an explosion lit up the sky.

3 Hours, 30 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John sprinted across the asylum parking lot screaming, “SHHIIIIIIIT!”

Black smoke poured through the house-sized hole that had been blown in the gymnasium wall. Screams and gunshots chased him. Nearby, a car windshield shattered. There was another explosion, and the shock wave threw John to the ground, scraping his palms on the pavement. Falconer grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him to his feet.

They made it to the Porsche parked a block away and ten seconds later were tearing through the streets of Undisclosed, drawing the attention of every gun-toting spaceman they passed. And there were a lot of them, clusters of them seemed to populate every corner.

Falconer growled, “That was liquid oxygen, dumbass! That’s why those tanks had those huge orange warning stickers all over them. They use it in rockets.”

“I didn’t know! Jesus.”

“You didn’t know oxygen burns? Where did you go to school?”

“Here! Look around! It’s a shithole!”

The Porsche smashed through wooden barricades set up in the street, and on the other side was a ghost town.

Broken glass in the streets. Garbage piled on the sidewalk. The Porsche turned down an alley and John realized that what was crunching under the tires like gravel were brass shell casings from machine guns.

John said, “Holy shit. Is everybody dead?”

“There’s a twenty-four hour curfew outside the Green Zone. Inside those barricades we drove through, they’ve still got military doing foot patrols. But out here, it’s lockdown. Nobody on foot, just armored Humvees making sweeps every now and then. Anyone seen roaming the streets out here is presumed infected and either shot or hauled off to quarantine, depending on how far gone they are.”

“Christ. How is that legal?”

Falconer shook his head. “I have never seen anything like this in all my days. Everybody you see inside town, all hazmat suits, all the vehicles—that’s all REPER. Everybody else has withdrawn outside of town. If we turned right here, we’d eventually run into a REPER cordon at city limits. Get past it, and you’re in the Dead Zone—it’s a five-mile-wide ring around the city where nobody is allowed. All the houses in that ring have been evacuated, all the businesses shut down. REPER patrols it in armored vehicles. It acts as a vacuum seal between the city and the outside world. At the end of the Dead Zone, you find the National Guard. I’m talking tanks here. Rows of them, guns aimed at the city like they expect Day of the Dead to come pouring out at them at any moment.”

Falconer pulled off into the yard of an abandoned house, and parked in a spot behind the garage where the car wouldn’t be visible from the street.

He continued, “But you see what they’ve done. What the outside world knows about what’s going on in town, is only what REPER tells them. There is no one else. All the phones are jammed. No news crews, no Internet access. The military, they’re on the other side of five miles of no-man’s-land. Whatever the people are hearing, whatever the government is hearing, comes from REPER. It’s their show.”

John said, “And I’m pretty sure at least one of the guys in charge is crazy.”

“I’ll agree with that assessment. Let’s just say that I’ve heard some shit. About what goes on in that asylum.”

John said, “Well, what now?”

“We wait to make sure they’re not still after us. I’m hoping the shitstorm you left behind back there makes us a low priority. They got to get containment back in place first.”

John said, “Can we get to Dave’s place? Are they… guarding it or anything?”

“Why would they?”

“They would if they knew what was there.”

Falconer said, “The drug, you mean. The Soy Sauce.”

“Let me apologize ahead of time, detective. Because shit is about to get weird.”

3 Hours, 15 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was about to explode. She didn’t get mad often, and it took a lot. But once the pin on that grenade had been pulled, there was no containing it. This was something she had in common with David, though he didn’t realize it.

Amy’s mom, back when she was alive, had said God had made sure to give her brother Jim all of the size and Amy all of the temper. He had been as big as a bear, but was always the voice of reason in an argument—the only time she had seen him fight, it was to defend her. Amy was literally less than half of his size but had that grenade inside her. Her mom called it her “Irish” as in, “now calm down, your Irish is coming out” which, ironically, made Amy furious. Wasn’t that racist or something? But the look on Josh’s face right now, it was about to get all Irish up in here.

“We have to go now. We should have left two hours ago. Fine, you don’t care about David, you don’t care if he gets eaten by a zombie or burned up to ashes, but who knows how many more are in there? Women, kids, who knows? We have to get them out. As many as we can.”

Josh, not making eye contact, said, “I totally understand you’re upset, but we have to be smart about this. Mike and Ricky aren’t here, they’re helping their families move before the quarantine swallows this place. And I told you about Zach, he’s got food poisoning. He’s already in bed. That’s three guns we’re short. But tomorrow—”

“Oh, for the love of— You know what you are? All of you? Children. Little kids playing pretend, with toys. You’ve spent years obsessing about this and now it’s here, much to everyone’s surprise, it’s actually here, and it’s ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Tomorrow, when the sun comes up. Tomorrow, when the weather’s warmer. Tomorrow, when we have more help, when things aren’t so bad, when everything is aligned just right so that there’s no risk of anything bad possibly happening.”

“Calm down.”

“Screw you!” Amy shrieked it, a sound that tore a hole in the air.

Grenade, Amy, watch it.

“You want to sit here in your little fantasy, your little suburban womb. With your laptop, in your little clubhouse, rubbing oil on your guns and congratulating yourself on how brave and strong you turned out to be in the stupid zombie war fantasies that play in your head. You’re not a man. You’re a boy. All of