by David Wong
“That’s right. Well, I caught Farmhand. He had an IQ of 175 but I caught him. And do you know why? Because I got in the same room with him. That’s all it took. See, I have an internal bullshit sensor that has yet to be beaten. And every time you open your mouth, Wong, all the lights start blinking read and smoke starts whistling out.”
Falconer rose from the chair. He was a good four inches taller than me, though part of that was cowboy boot. He continued, “Here’s my theory, as it stands right now. I think you knew Franky somehow, before all this. You and your friend. And I think you had something to do with his going apeshit.”
“Well, that’s your opinion,” I said, lamely. “Seriously, Franky and I didn’t know each other. I hadn’t seen him in six or seven years, probably since high school. And how exactly do you think I went about driving Franky crazy? Mind control?”
That’s right, have fun connecting these dots, asshole. Stick your hand in this hole and you’ll draw back a bloody stump.
“Maybe he wasn’t a friend. Maybe he was a fan.”
“I don’t have fans, detective. I work at a video store. John does, he has a band. Ask him.”
“I did. I’ve been asking him things for a couple of hours now. So, you guys believe this town is haunted?”
I sighed.
“No.”
“Really? You and John don’t talk about this? Because he’s full of crazy stories.”
“We’re not crazy. I’m not, anyway.”
“What’s Zyprexa?”
“What?”
“You have it in your medicine cabinet.”
“Oh. Yeah. That was … that was nothing. Just … stress. I’m seeing somebody about it.”
“And that guy you shot with a bow and arrow because you thought he was a monster?”
“A crossbow. It was a misunderstanding.”
“The guys down at the station, hearing them talk about you and your friend, they think you’re in some kind of a cult. They say three neighbors moved away in the last year alone, because they were scared of you. You were the last guy to see Franky before his episode and everybody had some bullshit excuse for why you hadn’t been interviewed yet. Like they’re scared of you.”
“People are … stupid.”
“You know, at the hospital Franky tore out an old woman’s throat with his teeth.”
I felt myself take an unconscious step back toward the door. This guy was breathing all my air.
“Is that right? That’s terrible.”
“He was also heard speaking another language.”
I didn’t answer.
“So here’s my theory, Wong. My theory is that last night wasn’t Franky’s first visit out here. I think he’s a part of your little cult following. I think you and your friend scrambled his brain, probably slipped him a drug and told him it’d give him magic powers or whatever it is you’re into. And I think he hurt a whole bunch of people because of it.”
“You claim to have a top-notch bullshit detector and you let that theory come out of your mouth? That a couple of local dumbasses have mind control powers? I kind of want you to charge me with that. The trial would be hilarious.”
He showed me the most unsettling smile I’ve ever seen and said, “I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I mean that. You’ve given me what I love most. A puzzle. See, I get bored, real easy. Most cases put me to sleep. Everybody knows who it is, the rest is just a grind, trying to fill a file cabinet with evidence for the prosecutor to take to trial. But now? I’m like a kid a week before Christmas, rattling gifts under the tree to find out what’s inside. I just rattled yours and, boy, there’s something cool in here.”
He opened the front door. A business card appeared in his hand.
“Call me if you decide you want to talk more about this and save us both some time. Otherwise, I’ll be seeing you around.”
When I heard the Porsche growl past the house ten minutes later, I was still standing in my living room, staring at the door the detective had passed through. I was sweating like a bottle of beer at the beach.
I dug out my phone. Dialed John.
Voice mail.
2 Hours Prior to Outbreak
It wasn’t the longest night of my life, but it was way up there. I’ve had my share of terrified, sleepless nights and I’ve developed a pretty good survival system involving nothing more than mental alertness exercises, positive thinking and amphetamines. Don’t worry, I have a prescription. Or at least the guy who sold them to me did.
I was in for a brutal crash later, but that was Day David’s problem. Night David was trying to stay alive. And, it worked. I was out on my porch when shafts of light started burning through the trees in my front yard, and I almost cried at the sight of it. It was the first time I could remember that I had seen two consecutive sunrises.
Ironically, at that point I was too jacked up to sleep. And not just from the orange capsules that were dissolving in my system. I had come up with a plan of action during my long wait. First, get the shit out of my toolshed and dump it somewhere. Maybe in the river. Then, get out of town for a while. Let all this blow over. Where would I go? Didn’t matter. I could do anything. Hitchhike to San Francisco and live on the beach. Join the circus. The where wasn’t important. I had been in a rut, that’s what I realized. I needed to shake things up. Lose this weight. Learn karate. Wait, did I accidentally take four of those pills instead of two? Wow.
It seemed like a good time for a shower. My laundry basket was still overturned. I lifted it up a few inches and stuffed all the clothes I was wearing under there. I made my way into the bathroom—
Molly barked. She was staring at the door and I heard a car pull up. I heard Creedence, and a look through the curtains revealed John’s old Cadillac. Thank Christ.
Footsteps on the porch. I yelled, “Don’t open the door yet, I’m naked. Give me one minute.”
The door opened behind me.
I turned and was face-to-face with Franky Burgess.
Franky opened his mouth. A thin stream of liquid squirted out as a greeting. I had the thought to throw up an arm to shield my face from whatever it was, but before the muscles could twitch into action there was a bang and a blueish flash. I felt the floor hit me in the back. I stared at the ceiling, ears ringing, vaguely realizing that the stuff Franky spat had combusted in midair with enough force to knock me on my ass.
I blinked, dazed. Franky stepped over me. He was carrying what looked like several red-and-white grocery bags in each arm. He went into the bedroom. From the floor I saw the Cadillac outside my open front door and had time to make the conscious decision to race out there and drive naked across America, before I felt the forearm close around my neck.
Franky, now with the strength of several Frankys, yanked me to my feet and marched me toward the bedroom.
Molly barked. She bounded toward us, past us, out the door, into the yard, into the distance, barking the whole way. She was not going to get help.
I could see into the bedroom now but couldn’t make sense of what was there. There were four huge, white, bleeding dead birds on my bed.
Chickens? Turkeys?
I was trying to puzzle through the situation. Were these birds for me? Like a gift, or an offering? They were laid out and dripping blood on my sheets, like some Aztec sacrifice on an altar.
I said, “Uh, thank you for the turkeys, Franky. Is your name still Franky?”
“Shut up.”
Franky’s voice was muffled, like he was talking around a mouthful of food. He held me in place, both of us watching the bed intently for … what? Franky’s arm—the broken one—felt weird. Something long and dry snaking around my torso. I didn’t look down.
Movement on my bed. The sheet was rippling, like somebody had poked their fingers up from under the mattress and was wiggling them. Several somebodies. Dozens of fingers.
I heard fabric rip. A slit formed in the sheet and a tiny version of one of those spiders, no more than two inches long,
crawled out. It went right for the nearest turkey. It was quickly joined by another. And another. Within seconds my bed was writhing with dozens of the spider larvae, like maggots on a slab of meat.
With every ounce of strength and adrenaline and terror I could muster, I twisted out of Franky’s grasp and spun toward the door. I made it into the living room before Franky tackled me. I twisted around and from a position flat on my back, punched him in the face as hard as I could. It felt like I broke my hand. He shrugged it off and pinned my arms, his legs straddling my chest. I looked right into his eyes, and saw the gaping stare of a terrified young man. He was hissing something at me, a whisper from deep in the throat. He leaned his face down close to mine. I couldn’t make out his words, they were just choking sounds like an old man on a respirator. He leaned closer. I could smell his breath.
“They are everywhere,” he hissed. “Do you understand me? They are everywhere.”
“Franky! Can you hear me? Get off me!”
Then, I saw it. When Franky opened his mouth, I was looking at the spider. Its tongue, where Franky’s tongue used to be, behind his teeth. It had simply taken over the lower half of his skull. I pictured the way its leg was able to glue itself to my shoulder and shuddered. The spider was a part of Franky now. Maybe the spider was Franky at this point.
Running footsteps, on the porch. Franky and I both looked and saw John hurl himself through the front door.
I screamed, “JOHN! IT’S A BREEDER!”
John didn’t stop. He hurdled the coffee table while screaming, “YOUR KEY! I NEED YOUR SHED KEY!”
Shed key? What was he doing? Borrowing my lawnmower?
“Listen,” Franky hissed, focusing back on me. I realized he was trying to talk through his parasite, and struggling to do it. “They’re everywhere. It could be anyone. Do you get it? Anyone.”
Franky screamed. A long, segmented thing came out from his mouth, out from the parasite hiding within. It looked like a black earthworm, but longer, with a little spike on the end like on a scorpion’s tail. I was expecting the thing to come down and sting me or something. Instead it curled up toward Franky’s own eye. Franky screamed again. The worm thing plunged into his eyeball.
I heard a small engine rev to life, from outside the house. I had the crazy thought that I’d see John racing around the house with my lawnmower, screaming, “Thanks for letting me borrow this!” before throwing it in his car and driving off.
Blood dripped down on me from Franky’s punctured eye. His hands found their way to my face and throat, clawing at me mindlessly. Fingers trying to pry open my mouth.
The engine sound was in the house now. Deafening. A shadow fell over us.
John.
Something in his hands, something loud.
The engine sound revved to a mechanical scream, then bogged down as if with effort. There was a sound like carrots in a blender. Wetness rained down on me.
The blurred metal teeth of a chainsaw ripped through Franky’s neck. John worked the machine down, rocking it back and forth as it tore through spine and muscle and tendons, his hands streaked with red. Franky’s head fell free from his shoulders, his wet hair bonking me in the face.
The rest of his body held itself above me for a few seconds, then pounded down on me with dead weight that knocked the air from my lungs.
The saw shut off and I could hear John yelling questions at me. His hand appeared on Franky’s shoulder and together we rolled the corpse off me. I sprang to my feet, looked down at my body in disgust. I looked like an infant somebody had inexplicably taken to all-you-can-eat rib night.
John said, “You, uh, all right?”
I sprinted to the bedroom door and slammed it shut. I struggled to catch my breath and said, “My bedroom! It’s infested with baby versions of those spider things, they’re all over my bed, eating turkey. My bed, John! They were in my bed! Larvae! This whole time! We’ve got to do something!”
“Did they … eat your clothes?”
“Listen. The army has quarantined the hospital but it’s not doing any good because the spiders are out. They’re here. Here, John! What are we going to do? If we let just one of those things out into the world…”
“Okay first of all we—wait, where’s the head?”
We both looked down at Franky’s headless corpse, now laying in the living room on a spreading pool of blood. There was no head. What the—
“LOOK! SHIT!”
Franky’s head was making a run for it.
The spider’s legs were protruding from the severed neck, and they were scurrying the head through the open front door. I ran, following the crawling head out onto the porch. I stomped on the head with my bare foot, pinning it to the welcome mat. I started to yell to John to get the chainsaw when the asshole head bit my foot.
I yanked the foot free of Franky’s teeth, then reared back with my other foot and kicked the head so hard I felt like I broke four toes. The head sailed ten feet through the air until it bounced off the windshield of Detective Lance Falconer’s Porsche, which had chosen that moment to pull into the driveway.
The head left a pink smear on his windshield, then rolled off his hood and back at my feet. I grabbed it in both hands, teeth facing away from me so it couldn’t bite my dick off. A hugely confused Falconer emerged from the car to the sight of me standing naked in my driveway, covered in blood and covering my crotch with a severed head.
I’m David Wong and I’m here with a special message about AMPHETAMINES.
“PUT IT DOWN!”
Falconer’s gun was out.
I said, “One minute.”
I ran back inside, made it to the bedroom, opened the door, threw the head inside and slammed the door shut again. My brief glimpse of the room revealed the hatchlings had made it halfway across the floor. I ran into the bathroom, grabbed two towels and stuffed them under the door. That wouldn’t hold long …
“ASSHOLE! PUT. YOUR. HANDS. UP. NOW.”
Falconer had come inside, gun still trained on me.
I said, “Okay. Calm down. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is we found Franky. The bad news is we got bigger problems.”
“Wait,” interjected John, from behind the detective. “You’re Lance Falconer!”
“Shut up or I will shoot you in the face.”
“That was driving me nuts all night. You’re the detective who caught the Father’s Day killer, right? Didn’t you throw him out of a helicopter?”
Falconer didn’t answer. John said to me, “He’s famous. I saw this whole thing about him on A&E—”
“Shut the fuck up. Did you kill Franky?”
John said, “It was self-defense. And he stole my car, he drove it here and I had to walk all the way from the police station. Got here just in time, he was raping Dave when I walked in.”
“He wasn’t—”
“SHUT UP. Both of you. You’re coming with me.” To me he said, “Put some pants on.”
“Fuck you. This is my house. I make the rules. You take your clothes off. John, get the Twister mat.”
Falconer asked, “Are you high?”
“A little.”
“What’s in the room? Why are you sealing it up?”
John, thinking quickly, said, “Infection. Franky had it. It’s the reason they quarantined the hospital. It’s—it’s like a virus that—”
“Stop. You’re lying.”
To me, he said, “What’s in the room?”
“Look. I respect your bullshit detector. Everything that I’m about to say is true. Read it in my eyes. There are factors at work here that you would not understand, and that we do not have time to explain. There is nothing more you can do here, detective, other than to get out of our way. You came here to find a man. You found him. He’s lying at your feet. Now go home.”
Falconer gave me a hard look. He lowered his gun, strode past me, and threw open the bedroom door.
His eyes went right to the bed. What he saw were four bloo
dy turkeys—no, that wasn’t right. What he saw were four bloody turkey skeletons, laying on my bed among piles of feathers. The larvae had all but stripped them clean, within minutes. What I saw, but Falconer did not, was that the spiders were now in the carpet, on the walls and crawling around the glass of the bedroom window. They were growing at an impossible rate, some already the size of a fist.
I felt a single drop of sweat fall down the back of my neck, trickling down my spine. I took a reflexive step back. One of the spiders crawled across Falconer’s shoe. He wouldn’t have noticed if he’d been looking directly at it.
“What is that in there, some kind of ritual? Voodoo bullshit? Trying to summon a ghost or demon or whatever you guys do?”
“No. I told you. Detective … you’re not going to solve this one.”
“Sure. I understand.” He holstered his gun.
Then, in a blur he grabbed my arm, spun me around, and slammed me against the door frame of the bedroom. He got my right arm up behind my back and pain exploded down my shoulder joint, the ligaments twisting around bone. I screamed.
To John, Falconer shouted, “BACK.”
Cold steel on my right wrist—handcuffs. Falconer pushed me into the bedroom. He shoved me to my knees, among the newborn spiders. I heard John shout, “NO! NO!” but Falconer spun and put his gun on him. With his free hand he looped the handcuff chain around the metal frame of the bed and snapped the remaining cuff around my other wrist.
I was on my bare knees, hands chained around the bed, and I could feel itchy spider legs crawling up one of my thighs, over my feet.
Falconer stood, held his gun on John and said, “Now. I’m not unlocking that until you’ve explained everything.”
100 Minutes Prior to Outbreak
Amy peed a lot when she got tense.
A nervous bladder and a three-hour-long bus ride don’t make for a great combination, but worrying wasn’t something she could just turn off (her roommate at school had taught her some tai chi but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could do on a bus without being asked to leave). She couldn’t get David or John on the phone, and that was weird. Really weird. David always picked up unless he was in the shower or his phone was dead, but she had been trying since early in the morning. And John, free spirit that he was, had Amy on his list of “must answer” calls. He knew she didn’t call him unless it was a big deal and/or she couldn’t raise David. She never abused this privilege.