Caught in the Web

by Jason R Davis

  Not like the child shouldn’t have been taken away from them anyway. She wished she had more evidence in the past to have persisted with getting CPS involved.

  Too late now.

  She looked at the two slabs of thick plywood they had put over the window. Rob had fought to get it up to the frame of the window. The bartender, the biggest of the three, stood there holding the bottom of the wood. The large truck driver had been using a pool cue as a dagger and a club to keep the hands from reaching in too far.

  Bruce had batted at the hands, but the things gnarled fingers were more like claws than hands. They had constantly been reaching for him, and she saw how one had almost grabbed his shirt. The big man could move, though. With that large stomach of his, he was much faster than she would have thought, and had quickly pulled from the thing’s grasp and had nailed it with the pointy end of the cue. Of course, the cue wasn’t sharp, but he had been able to find the empty eye socket of the thing, and with a hard push and a sideways tug, there had been a satisfying crack.

  The large man smiled as he pulled back the cue and saw that the tip of it had been broken into the zombie’s eye socket.

  The smile was short-lived and the thing had only fallen back for a second before it had time to recover and was reaching through again. This time, it was more vicious and flailed its arms as it reached in. Bruce dropped his make-shift club, as it was now too short, and picked up another cue. He came back, swinging it like a club.

  Rob called out for them to get out of the way and everyone stepped back as they rushed the board into place. Jason and Rob on the sides, the bartender holding the bottom, they pushed it against the window, Rob called over his shoulder for the large man to grab the electric drill someone had set down on the pool table.

  The driver was quick to act, and before the things could push in on them again, the sheet of plywood was up and they were securing it.

  Once Bruce was finished drilling it to the wall, Jason took the drill from him and went around the sides again and again until it looked like the outer frame of the wall would come down before that plywood would come off.

  “Just want to be sure. No need to take chances,” Jason said to the large truck driver.

  “Good, then tighten the one in your head,” said the bartender as he walked away from the back window. Denise still couldn’t believe how cheery the man was. He actually seemed to be enjoying this.

  Denise turned away from the plywood and looked back to the front of the bar. She hadn’t seen when, but Bruce had gotten another drink. The cop was staring in the direction of the back corner. She knew he couldn’t see the window from where he stood, but she had the feeling he was trying to. As though he was trying to look through the glass that was no longer there.

  Denise rocked back and forth, feeling the warm breath of Nadine on her shoulder. She was so small and innocent, and was being so good. She had stayed quiet for much of the day. Denise couldn’t believe something so small and precious came out of those two vicious people. They did not deserve her, were not good enough for her.

  Burp, came a little sound from the tiny mouth.

  Denise looked at her, a smile touching the corner of her lips. Those little blue eyes were open and were looking up at her with their sweet little innocence.

  She felt the warm breath on her shoulder.

  She felt the breath again…on the wrong shoulder.

  Nadine was cradled onto her right shoulder, but she was feeling the warmth on her left. She looked over, trying to look at the area, but she couldn’t see exactly where she felt the warming sensation.

  Tingles ran up and down her spine, and her left side started to itch, like there were tiny things crawling up and down.

  She looked down and saw a spider on the floor near her foot. She quickly stepped on it.

  Was it…? Could it have been one of those spiders? Was she…? But she hadn’t been bit. Could it have been one of those things? Was she imaging it? Were the spiders real?

  She pulled her foot away and looked down, but it was too dark in the bar. With one of the key sources of light now covered up, there wasn’t enough for her to see.

  Burp.

  If she was infected, there was no way she wanted to pass it on to the baby.

  She felt more tingling along her arm. Sure, she had been feeling tingly all day, but the sensation was stronger. She had to really fight to keep herself from itching at it. She wanted to dig her fingernails in and just scratch viciously.

  She looked over at the corner where the baby’s father was. He had stopped glaring at her and had his head down, looking at the floor. He seemed to be in a daze. Did he even realize that he was twitching? she wondered. Were they both infected?

  She felt another warm breath on her shoulder and tried to look again. This time, she thought she saw a slight movement as something small slipped underneath the neckline of her shirt and out of sight.

  * * * *

  Rob walked past the nurse and headed to the back alcove. He was glad she was there, and that she had chosen to look after the baby. Otherwise, he probably would have had to be the one to do it and, right now, he felt like there was enough on his plate. He wasn’t happy with how much Bruce was drinking. The owner’s kid, Jason, was unstable…fine one minute, breaking down the next. Sullivan, the kid’s friend, seemed okay, but he was enjoying himself too much. He had been one of those zombie apocalypse nuts before any of this had even gone down, and was overly ecstatic that he was finally proven right.

  He heard a thump on the floor and turned to look. Travis was still tied up in the corner. Sullivan was right. They should have left the bastard outside. He got his wife and that old man killed, exposed all of them, made the building accessible to get into by moving that damn dumpster closer to the back window, and could be infected. Even if only half of that was true, Rob still wanted to take the man by the throat and just squeeze. He had never felt so much hatred as he felt towards this man, and it burned inside his chest.

  Yeah, this wasn’t his pick of a dream team, unless it was for a quick one-way trip into hell.

  He kept his distance from the redneck and moved to the other side. He bent over and pulled the thick cord out of the socket, then straightened to look up at the big machine it was connected to. It was just your standard dart machine, nothing special, but he had an idea of a way to use it to secure the back window even more. Sure, the kid had gone nuts with the screw gun, but Rob could see the frame around the window was weak.

  He pushed and pulled, getting it into place in the center of the window. In and of itself, it wasn’t much, but now he had the second part of his securing plan.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” the redneck said from his corner.

  Rob looked and saw the man staring at him. Something about that glare told him the man had justified in his mind how this was all Rob’s fault. There was hatred there, but also accusation. Maybe it was just years as a cop in Chicago, but he knew this man blamed him for going out there and losing his wife.

  Rob shook it off and hurried around to the other side of the pool table, making sure to go around the opposite side from the man secured in the corner.

  “Blocking off the window you broke,” Rob said. He looked down at the legs of the pool table, relieved to see that it wasn’t bolted to the floor.

  Rob looked back at the man to see that he was twitching, his left arm shaking a little, and he wondered if the redneck even noticed he held it in his right arm, his right hand continually finding different little places to scratch. He could see a lot of red marks and grooves in various places on the man’s skin.

  “That dart machine ain’t gonna do shit.”

  “It will when this pool table is pushed against it to keep it in place.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Rob turned away and pushed against the table. From the layers of wax around the bottom of the legs, he knew it wasn’t hardly ever moved. He guessed the wax itself had formed a sort of glue, but he continued to
apply the force.

  His legs burned, his bad leg ached and pushed a dull throb in his lower back. He was about to quit because of the burning sensation in his right side tingling to a point in his lower back where fire was exploding. It wanted him to quit. He needed to give into it and just collapse. He wanted to fall into a heap on the floor, curl up into a ball, let the pain take him, and give up.

  Then the table broke loose and was quickly moving. He had to take lunging steps to keep from falling into it but within three steps, it was slamming against the dart machine.

  He stood up, his back screaming. The pain in his right leg flashed, but when it reached his lower back, the pain burned so intense that the sensation in his leg seemed to just disappear. He knew it was still there, but the rest of the pain made it pale in comparison. He heard the little pops as he stood straight, and some of the pain lessened.

  He’d definitely need to see his chiropractor tomorrow…if he lived to see tomorrow.

  Now it was time to get down to business. They had to think through this so they could get through this.

  He heard a stomping sound and turned to see the redneck looking at the ground. The man looked up at him, glared, then turned away.

  Yeah, Rob thought, we also needed to get out of here.

  He wanted to get out there and get home. His wife and son were waiting for him and they had no clue what was going on.

  He hoped they were safe, that none of this was near them.

  It had to be centralized to this area, right? After all, there had been that CDC guy. He had been there to see the doctor, then there was the phones being out, and his car hadn’t been able to be towed in, probably because the roads were blocked. They were in a quarantine of some kind so, following that logic, it had to be centralized to the town. His family had to be safe.

  He looked over at Denise. She had been about to say something when the kid had lost it. She knew more about what was going on here. He found out that her husband was the local doctor. It didn't take a detective to figure out that the CDC guy had been there to see her husband.

  Okay, so where was her husband?

  He watched as she handed the baby over to Tina. Then she turned, looked up, and caught him looking at her. She had a scared look on her face. He could see it in the raising of her eyebrows and that crease along her forehead. She looked like she had been caught doing something and was silently asking for forgiveness.

  “Can we talk?” he said. He had that professional cop tone to his voice. It conveyed that he was being polite, but it was also a demand, not a request. He motioned towards one of the tables in between the back alcove and the main room of the bar. She walked towards it.

  * * * *

  She eased into the seat across from him, and he tried to size her up. After all, he hadn’t really paid much attention to her. She had just kind of slipped in with the kid when he had gotten back, and had stayed pretty quiet since then. She was watching over the baby, but he got a sense she didn’t have kids herself. No, she was used to watching over other people’s kids. It’s what allowed her to be so hard on the redneck couple before the wife had been, well…taken away.

  Her hands were trembling. She was nervous. Not really a revelation as he was sure they were all a little high-strung right about then. It wasn’t every day zombies were knocking at your front door. No. He still refused to think of them as zombies. They were just things, or maybe even infected people, but he wasn’t going to start thinking of them as zombies. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

  She wasn’t meeting his eyes, which bothered him. Was she hiding something? Had she done something she was ashamed of? Was she afraid of him? She couldn’t be afraid he was going to arrest her, could she? Where would he take her even if he did arrest her? Or was it just that she had a general distrust for cops? That was more common in the big cities, but in smaller towns, the town doctor and their wives didn’t usually distrust the police.

  “You know something about what’s going on outside, don’t you?” he said. He watched her face and saw a little twitch around the corner of her eye and a slight jerk of her head that told him she had nearly looked up at him in surprise. “You were about to say something earlier, before the craziness started,” he went on. He was lowering his head, trying to get her eyes to meet his.

  She gave him a quick glance then looked down to the floor. “My husband is the town doctor. I don’t know if you know that or not, but he is…was one of them…things.” She had stuttered over the word. She wasn’t comfortable calling them zombies, either.

  “Okay. So he was the one who called in the CDC?”

  Now she did look up at him. Her eyes were wide with shock, and he could see the red puffiness around the corners that he had missed earlier. She nodded at him, so Rob went on, “Yeah. The guy had run into us outside of town, asking where the doctor was.”

  Rob shifted in his chair. The hard seat hurt his already sore back, making it difficult to sit in one position for too long. When he did, his leg sent electric bolts of pain to his back.

  “I guess I should have gotten us out of town then, but I’d been around enough false reports and near misses to get too spooked about it,” he said.

  He knew he was rambling on, but he was trying coax the information out of her. Get her feeling comfortable and start a conversation and, eventually, she would open up more. It was a tactic he used a lot when interviewing a suspect. He found it worked a lot better than threatening them, and he did not feel like she was somebody who could handle being threatened. And for what? Just because she knew something was going on and wasn’t telling? It would have been like beating up an old lady just to take her cane.

  She nodded. “Yeah, he came to the office. I had stayed outside, then I heard some pounding and a door slam. Before long, I saw my husband and the two boys coming out like…that.” She nodded towards the window. They couldn’t see out, but they both knew what was out there.

  “Two boys?”

  “Yeah, two boys woke us up this morning. Well, one of them. One of them was too sick to get out of the car without help. My husband had them meet him in his office and checked them out. He was with them about twenty minutes and I had gone into the office early to get some paperwork done.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, after he looked them over a little bit, he had gone into his office. When he came back out, he told me to lock up and get out of there. I don’t really know much more than that.”

  “Do you know how it got out so fast?”

  “Well, it probably had something to do with Lucy.”

  Rob looked from the nurse’s distraught face and over her shoulder at the woman who was now sitting at the table against the wall. She still didn’t look like she was all there. Her dazed eyes looked into the distance. She was rocking the baby, but he wasn’t sure she fully realized she was even holding the baby. He wondered if he was to take away the kid, would she still be rocking back and forth? It made him think of all those people in institutions. He knew there were just things people couldn’t deal with sometimes, and looking at the young woman, he had a bad feeling this was something like that for her.

  “Lucy. That’s the sister, right?” Rob said as he looked back at Denise.

  “Her niece. His sister,” she said, nodding in each of their directions.

  “Okay. They had been there?”

  “Yeah. Lucy hadn’t been feeling well, and her aunt didn’t remember what time the office opened so they were already outside when we got there. The moment the lobby lights came on, they were at the door. I let them in and had them sitting in the waiting room.”

  Rob nodded. This wasn’t telling him anything. Sure, he was starting to figure out why those two were losing it, but that didn’t tell him anything about the things outside.

  “Is there anything you can tell me about the ‘things’?”

  Rob watched her as she kept looking at the table. Her hands were out in front of her, tracing lines along the side of the table. He
re and there, she would mash her thumb down, as though smashing a bug. Then she would pull her thumb away and look at it. She seemed to momentarily lose herself in the motion.

  Then she looked back at him and caught his gaze. Her eyes seemed like they had gotten even redder in the short time they had been talking. He thought she was on the brink of letting loose a fresh bout of tears. Her bottom lip trembled and he could see the fear.

  “They kept saying things about spiders. That there were spiders in them, and they were trying to claw the spiders out. My husband didn’t see anything, but it was clear they could. They would scream about them and try to dig them out. They would gash deep into their skin. I think that really spooked Ray, so he hurried back to his office.”

  “So there is something with spiders?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay.”

  “There was also no blood.”

  “What?”

  “They would dig and claw deep into their own skin, but there was no blood. I had also heard Ray say something about them not having a heartbeat anymore. He thought he had made a mistake, but…”

  “You don’t think so.”

  She shook her head.

  He watched as she again smashed her thumb down onto something on the table. It was too dark in there for him to see it, but he watched her pull her thumb away and look at it.

  “Okay,” Rob said as he pulled himself back. “Anything else?”

  “Watch out for the spiders,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 18

  The body, or what was left of it, crashed onto the cold, smooth steel of the table with a wet, splattering kachunk. Westdale, the large man in the large alien-looking suit covered in pieces of human flesh and some other kind of dark gore, stood there huffing and puffing from carrying the thing back to the trailer.