This Book is Full of Spiders

pointed and whispered, “Look. That’s the boom we heard earlier.”

I said, “The asylum.”

From behind me TJ said, “Now you see all them headlights, lookin’ like it’s rush hour in Atlanta? All them vehicles headin’ off to the north? That’s REPER buggin’ out. Headin’ for the highway.”

“Perfect. Let’s break outta here.”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘perfect.’ Means the situation out there has gone so much to shit that a few hundred men with body armor and assault rifles decided it’s not safe for them. Plus I don’t see any reason they’d take the rest of security offline. If anything they need it more, right? I bet tomorrow instead of two of them UAVs up there they’ll have six, or ten.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “if they’re just giving up containment of the quarantine, that means somewhere right now there’s a table full of guys with medals on their jackets trying to figure out exactly what type of bomb you need to vaporize several city blocks, and what would be a cool name for the operation. Something like Operation Cleansing Dawn.”

“Damn, man, that is a good name. I’d feel proud to get burned up in somethin’ called that.”

“You seriously don’t think that option’s on the table?”

“I don’t know, man. I didn’t ten minutes ago.”

I said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’re all gonna have to make our own decision here. Me? If I can get my dog to help me figure out how to get outta here, I’m going. And I mean tonight, if at all possible. Cover of dark, while they’re good and confused out there.”

“Uh huh. So you wind up on the other side of the fence and then what? You’re out on the streets, unarmed. You think you just show up at Wally’s tomorrow and clock in like nothing ever happened?”

“Like I said, do what you want. But for me the choice between inside and outside a cage is no choice at all.”

* * *

Goddamn I would not miss the stairs in this place. A hundred freaking stairs to get to the roof and it somehow seemed like even more to get back down. I had gotten down ninety-two of them when, from below me, Hope screamed.

When TJ and I got to the bottom, we found Hope staring terrified at Molly. The dog had something long and horrible and meaty in her jaws. It took me a moment to register that it was a very fresh-looking human spine.

Damn, she was hungry.

120 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John was screaming and trying to run directly through the garage door, hoping to smash through it like the Kool-Aid Man. The daddy longlegs creature landed on top of the Porsche, wrapping its legs around the entire body of the car.

Falconer was paralyzed by fear for a whole .5 seconds before he screamed, “GET DOWN!” and reached over the roof of the car with his automatic. He squeezed the trigger and filled the closed space with lightning and thunder. Chunks flew off the monster, but it held on.

“MOVE!”

John saw the rear lights flare up on the Porsche not six inches from his face. He threw himself out of the way as tires spun and the Porsche smashed backward through the garage door. Huge slabs of rubber flew in every direction as the Porsche flung off the ruined remnants of its tires. The car hobbled backward down the driveway, off into the grass, through a mailbox, and into a shallow ditch full of dead leaves.

Immediately John registered good news and bad news:

The good news was the spider was gone—the garage door had scraped it off.

The bad news was that he and Falconer were dead. The street was full of zombies. Fast zombies. The shadows were thick with crouching shoulders, tensed limbs and crazy eyes. The Porsche spun out helplessly, bare rims trying in vain to dig their way out of the muddy ditch.

For some reason, this was the moment the little flame of hope inside John blew out, everything inside him was oddly cold and dark and calm. The crowd washed in, swarming the Porsche. Detective Lance Falconer was yanked roughly from the car like a toddler and dragged away.

It was all happening in silence for John, the desperate screaming and cursing and everything falling apart.

John had time to think—

I am not the star of a zombie movie. I am the guy in the background who gets eaten in the first montage.

—when he was bear hugged from behind.

Eight thin, horrible arms wrapped him up from neck to ankles, squeezing the breath from his lungs, cracking ribs. The spider’s shriek filled the world.

105 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy jolted awake, ripped out of an awful nightmare that involved something terrible happening to the people she loved. She didn’t remember the details of the dream, but didn’t need to. That was the only nightmare she ever had.

She was shocked that she had drifted off. If you ever needed proof that we are prisoners of biology, there it is. These could be her last minutes on earth and her body decided to sleep through a bunch of them. Josh was rubbing his finger on the screen of his phone and Amy was pretty sure he was playing a game.

They were absolutely alone on the highway, not meeting a single car coming the other direction, no taillights as far as they could see. Amy moved up and took the empty passenger seat next to the driver, Fredo. He looked more scared than she was. She kept him company. She found out his last name was Borelli and that he was getting a degree in Public Relations, but was thinking of changing his major because a lot of the classes depressed him. Fredo’s brother was in the marines, as his father had been, as his father had been. Fredo’s dad had fought in Desert Storm, Grandad in Vietnam. Brother saw action in Afghanistan. Fredo took classes in PowerPoint. Fredo was really into Japanese anime, but none of the porn stuff, he assured her. He didn’t have any friends or family in Undisclosed, but hoped David was okay. They talked about Battlestar Galactica for a while. That made the time go by, as Amy knew it would, and soon Josh was telling Fredo to turn and exit the highway onto a country road that Amy knew would eventually take them around the lake, past the woods and the turkey farm/stench factory.

“Where are we going?”

Josh said, “We have to get off the highway before the army’s roadblock, this road circles around the lake and comes in behind the industrial park. The friendly checkpoints are there. Once we get through, then we meet up with OGZA.”

“Where are they?”

“They set up inside the building REPER abandoned, I guess they left a ton of equipment and supplies behind. But that means they’re right there outside of quarantine and they’ll be the first to get overrun if the quarantine fails. So the first order of business is to meet up with them and get a status update. But it’s a fortified building, and we’re all going to be armed. Everything is going to be fine.”

Josh turned out to not be full of crap on the subject of getting inside town—the army guys manning the checkpoint on the country road south of the lake let the RV through after a short conversation with Fredo. But then, a few miles later, they met a second checkpoint, one that was approximately ten times scarier than the first. It was a terrifying wall of black vehicles and men in equally terrifying black suits. They had night-vision goggles or something behind their visors that lit up red in the night, making them look like freaking demons.

“Josh? What is this? Who are—”