This Book is Full of Spiders

you. You’re little boys because you choose to stay little boys. You don’t become a man until you wake up one day and realize that today the world needs you to be a man. Josh, so help me, if you don’t step up, and become a man right now, people will die. Tonight. Not tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer. He had his MacBook open and was fiddling around with the touchpad, and he had that look on his face that had pulled Amy’s pin. A mask of feigned nonchalance. It took practice to come up with that look. Somebody who had been shamed so many times that he’d adapted to simply never showing it, rather than changing to not do things he was ashamed of. She wanted to slap him and slap him and slap him.

“Amy, all I’m saying is—”

“AAAAARRRGGGHHHH!” Amy bent over and screamed at the floor. She didn’t know what else to do. Mom was right, if the Lord had given her Jim’s body, she would have thrown this kid through the windshield of the RV.

“Fine,” she said. “All I want you to do is give me a ride down there. Drop me off at the barricades. I’ll figure out a way to get across. I’ll figure out a way to find David and anyone else who needs help in there and I’ll figure out a way to get them out and if I don’t, then I will die. And that’s okay because while I’m dying trying to save the people I love, you’ll be back here in your cocoon, playing your zombie video games and jerking off and dying would be better than watching you do that.”

The side door of the RV ripped open. A short dusky kid who Amy remembered was called Fredo leaned in and said to Josh, “Did you hear?”

“I couldn’t hear anything over her.”

“Outbreak inside the REPER command center. All hell broke loose, there was an explosion, the building’s on fire, all their containment breached. Infected pouring out of their holding area.”

“Holy shit.”

“OGZA says fire trucks headed one way, then ten minutes later REPER were going the other. Pulling out. Leaving the Green Zone. Leaving everything.”

“They’re pulling out of [Undisclosed]?”

“Looks like it.”

Amy said, “So what does that mean?”

Josh said, “It means all the manpower is now devoted to keeping anyone from leaving the city, and anybody left behind is now on their own.”

Fredo said, “OGZA put out a call for assistance, anybody and everybody with a gun. They said this is about to go from a class two to a class three zombie outbreak.”

Amy said, “Is a class three the one where you guys actually do something?”

Fredo said, “They said they can get us inside the city. They got friends on the cordon but that’s only until the feds change the guard rotations.”

Josh hesitated, studying the ridiculous collection of guns on the wall. Finally, he said, “Tell everyone it’s a go. The feds shit the bed, and now it’s up to us. We roll in thirty minutes.”

3 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John couldn’t help but notice that, while all of Undisclosed appeared to be the aftermath of a post–Super Bowl riot in Detroit, if you had woken up in Dave’s neighborhood you wouldn’t have noticed any difference. Same old busted windows and same months-old trash bags sitting on porches. John found this comforting.

The big change, of course, was where Dave’s little eleven-hundred-foot bungalow had previously stood, there now wasn’t much of anything. Just a floor supporting the black frames of two burned-out walls and piles of wet, charred debris. Blackened drywall and two-by-fours and roofing and gnarled wiring.

John really didn’t feel anything about this, one way or the other. And not just because he had been the one to burn it down. John didn’t get sentimental about houses. Maybe it was because he bounced around so much as a kid, thanks to three different divorces. But he liked to think it just made more sense to not get attached to things. The memories didn’t get burned up with a house, or transferred to the new owners if it got sold. A house was just wood and nails. Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

Falconer wanted the Porsche out of view, in case REPER came by or somebody tried to steal the stereo or something. One of the abandoned houses down the street had left its garage door open, and Falconer pulled in. John personally thought it was wiser to have the car within lunging distance in case they needed to make a desperate getaway, but apparently desperate getaways were what other people did in Falconer’s world, while Falconer chased them and told them they had the right to remain silent.

Once parked, John found the prospect of opening the car door and stepping out into the night erased any illusions he had that this was the same old neighborhood. In the rearview mirror, John saw curtains rustle in the dark house across the street. An infected? Or somebody hunkered down, scared that John and Falconer were infected? Who knows. If it was some terrified refugee crouched with a shotgun, John was hoping that the Porsche would put them at ease. No zombie’s gonna drive a Porsche.

There you go, with that zombie bullshit.

They eased the heavy garage door down, closing it behind the Porsche. They headed down the sidewalk, at which point John thought he saw somebody slip around a corner, but then realized he didn’t. He thought he heard footsteps, but it was a windy night and the sound was a strand of Christmas lights—from last year—tapping against a window at the neighbor’s place.

Falconer asked, “The Soy Sauce, was it in the house when it burned?”

“No. I’ll show you.”

John was afraid Falconer would say, “Great, I’ll wait here!” but instead Falconer led the way, striding into Dave’s yard like a man with a huge gun. Falconer glanced this way and that, alert but not scared. John followed and made his way around the yard to find the toolshed hadn’t burned. It was also still unlocked from when he’d grabbed the chainsaw the day everything went to shit. He reached inside and grabbed a shovel. He tossed it to Falconer.

“The sauce is in a little silver container, about the size of a spool of thread. Inside is a really thick, black liquid. When we find it, don’t open it. Not only will the shit kill you if it gets on your skin, but it will come after you. Have you seen The Blob? It’s like that. Only tiny.”

“And when you say it will kill ‘you,’ you mean ‘me.’ Because you can handle it for some reason.”

“Yes. You’ll see.”

“Uh huh. And judging from the shovel, I assume you buried it?”

“Yeah, around here somewhere. Don’t look at me that way, I need you to do the digging, you’ll see why. It’s not deep. Now, the container is somewhere here in the backyard. I know where. But I’m not going to tell you. I want you to walk to a random spot—what you think is a random spot, anyway—and dig down about a foot.”

Falconer didn’t move from where he was standing. He plunged the shovel into the dirt right in front of his feet. Three scoops and then—

“Look. Right there.”

Falconer looked down, and in the moonlight saw the glint of brushed steel, poking out from the mud. “All right, how did you do that?”

“I didn’t. It did. The Sauce. When we buried it, Dave just threw the shovel like a javelin and said wherever it landed, that’s where we’d bury it. That’s where it landed. Where you’re standing. Because the Soy Sauce wanted it to land there. Because it knew you would be standing there a year later.”

“‘It’ knew. So the Sauce is alive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now you’re going to swallow some of it.”

“That’s the least painful way, yeah.”