This Book is Full of Spiders

“NO! Fredo, just go! We have to get out of here!”

Fredo yelled, “Josh! Donnie! Answer if you’re alive!”

Someone was out there, between the RV and the wall, a lumpy almost-human figure. Fredo peered out at it. Amy hissed, “Don’t, Fredo, don’t. Back up. Please. Back up the RV—”

Fredo reached inside his jacket and pulled out a serious-looking black handgun. He said, “Donnie?”

No answer. Fredo aimed the handgun at the figure, the glass of the driver’s-side door between him and his target. Amy could see Fredo’s face reflected in the glass. His eyes went wide. He had time to say, “Holy shi—” before a series of things happened so quickly that Amy’s mind couldn’t register them all.

While Fredo had been focused on the figure out of the driver’s-side door, something smashed through the windshield to his right. Something—a long, pink blur—whipped in through the glass, grabbed Fredo’s right bicep, and neatly severed it. The arm, with the hand at the end still clutching the pistol, was yanked through the windshield and out into the night. Before Fredo could scream or even turn to see what had happened, the arm poked back through the broken windshield, now with the gun end aimed at Fredo. Fredo’s own hand, now being operated by whatever was outside the RV, squeezed the trigger. Fredo’s skull exploded.

All of this occurred over the course of 2.5 seconds. To Amy, all she registered was the shattering of glass, a wet, meaty rip and a gunshot. Then she was covered in bits of glass and droplets of warm blood.

Fredo slumped over, dead.

A Trial by the Fire

Owen was pointing a gun at my head. An impromptu late-night tribunal had formed around the quarantine bonfire. I shivered. The fire had that campfire effect of making your front too hot and your back too cold.

Owen had waited in the boiler room for somebody to come crawling back through, fleeing whatever violence had erupted on the other end. He waited patiently through hellish echoes of shotgun blasts and screams, waited as the report of machine gun and shotguns ended the screams one by one. He waited while I screamed into the tunnel, for TJ, or Hope, or Corey, or anyone. He watched me throw up in the corner and waited while I put my head in my hands and heard those screams echo through my head over and over and over and over again.

Then I had a gun at my forehead and he was pulling me to my feet.

Five minutes later I was standing in a crowd of red jumpsuits. Everybody was out of bed. The echoing rattle of gunshots from a few blocks down the street—right on the back of the mysterious flares that came from the same direction—had everyone awake and at DEFCON 1.

From behind the nine millimeter, Owen said, “Now that you got everybody’s attention, why don’t you tell them what that shooting was about.”

I was so tired. It was the unique type of exhaustion that comes from failure on top of failure. Futility and fuckups take a lot out of a man—I should know, since that was pretty much my whole life up to this point. I didn’t have the energy to defend myself.

Those goddamned screams.

“Do what you want, Owen. But don’t make a show out of it.”

“A show. That’s what you think this is, bro?” He shook his head. “All right. Allow me to summarize for the fuckin’ jury. You and TJ found an escape tunnel. Instead of tellin’ the camp about it, you tiptoed around, gathered up your green clique, and tried to crawl out while everybody else was asleep. You left behind sick people, you left behind pregnant women, you left behind moms who ain’t seen their kids since the outbreak.”

“They still got drones buzzing around up there. If suddenly the population of this place goes from three hundred to zero, and a goddamned crowd spontaneously forms outside the fence, they’re gonna figure out what happened. And then they’re gonna rain holy hell down on that crowd. It was either a few of us go, or nobody.”

“And of course you get to make that decision, all on your own, don’t you? See, because none of us are as smart as you. We couldn’t have organized a way to do it without dooming the entire quarantine. No, only you.”

I shrugged. “You’d have stopped us, Owen. And you know it. You’d have started sticking that gun in everybody’s face. Same as you’re doing now.”

“And why would I ever do such a thing? Because I’m an asshole, right? Here, why don’t you tell everybody what happened to all your friends who crawled into that tunnel.”

“We don’t… necessarily know. We heard gunshots and—”

“What happened to them is exactly what I have been saying would happen to anybody who tried to make a break for it. It’s what I would have explained to you— again—if you’d asked. Because from the first day that gate closed on this quarantine, I said that anybody who crossed that line was gonna die. Because as far as anybody outside of that fence knows, every single one of us is tainted. And that fence is the only thing keepin’ back a tide that will turn the fuckin’ rivers into blood. That means all of us in here got to band together. But you, TJ and the rest of you greens, you never got that.”

I shook my head. “No. The difference is that we had a chance at freedom and were willing to take it. Unlike you.”

“Uh huh. And just to be clear, you were gonna be among the escapees, right? If I’d showed up five seconds later than I did?”

“Hell, yes.”

“You don’t even know what I’m saying, do you, you arrogant little prick? You’re the only one who can sort infected from uninfected. If you’d gone through there, what choice would you have left us the next time a truck full of people rolled through that fence? What choice would we have—would I have—but to burn each and every one of them? You crawling into that hole would have doomed every man and woman who got shoved through that gate, bro. And you’d have condemned me to have to do the killing, in the name of protecting the other three hundred swinging dicks who are trying to stay alive in this quarantine. I get to live with the final expression of every face I put that gun in, for the rest of my life, to smell their fuckin’ skin and hair burning, every night, for the rest of my life. And I bet you never even paused three seconds to consider that.”

“I don’t know. I… Amy…”

“And if you’d made it through and the feds started raining death on this end of the tunnel, all you’d have felt is relief. You’d never have given us a second thought. It’s all about saving your own ass. And that tells me that you’re gonna sabotage this operation again the first chance you get, for whatever selfish reason pops into your fat, arrogant head. And that means we can’t trust your judgment to be our ‘Spider-Man’ any longer. And that means that as long as you’re alive and walkin’ around in here, the three hundred—I’m sorry, the two hundred and seventy—men and women in this quarantine are in danger. Is there anybody standing here, including you, Wong, who can make a convincing argument otherwise?”

No one spoke. Not even me. The wind howled. The bonfire whooshed and crackled. I looked into the fire and the burning eyes of two dozen charred skulls stared back at me.

I said, “Nope.”

Mop-Up

Amy spun out of her seat and crawled to the rear of the RV, knees and hand crunching over cubes of safety glass. She knocked aside the spilled laptop, her knee crushed a box of Pop-Tarts. She crawled and crawled and eventually ran out of RV.

She turned over and pressed her back against the rear wall. She pulled up her knees and made herself as small as possible. Frigid air blew in from the busted windshield and it felt like the tears and sweat were freezing solid on her face.

She huddled, in the cold and the darkness, staring at the dismembered and lifeless corpse of Fredo the RV