“What?”

“The green box, get it out of the toolshed and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Falconer ran to the shed and said, “Not here.”

“Shit! They took it. No, wait. Dave put it in the trunk of the Caddie while I was burning the house. We have to find it. What would they have done with an abandoned car? We left my Cadillac at the burrito place…”

“If it was blocking traffic, they’d have impounded it. Maybe. Who knows. Why do we need the box?”

“Trust me, we need it. Or rather, we need it to not wind up in the hands of somebody else. Oh, wait! Damn it!”

“What?”

“It just occurred to me that I could have written Dave a message on a wall using my own shit!”

Falconer didn’t ask for clarification on this, he just jogged down toward the garage that held the Porsche, with John in tow. This time John knew he was hearing footsteps. Fast steps. A lot of them. Out of breath, John hissed, “Detective…”

“I hear it. Move.”

It took both of them to open the garage door—it was old and the springs were busted, which meant it was heavy as hell without the lift system to help. John was left to keep it propped over his head while Falconer ran in to start the car.

Footsteps. A stampede. Something had been roused in the night, probably by the sound of the gunshots. John whipped his head around, squinting in the night, nervous mists of breath puffing into the night air.

A crowd rounded the corner.

Blocking the street.

Dozens and dozens of shambling figures, so many that no light slipped between them.

“DETECTIVE!”

The zombies approached fast, coming up the street like a tide. John turned and saw that they were coming from the opposite direction, too, converging like a hammer and anvil. The Porsche started and John was calculating the time it would take Falconer to back out, stop, let John in, pull into the street, and plow through the crowd—

The tires were flat.

It was so dark in the garage he almost didn’t notice. Both of the back tires had been slashed—shredded, in fact—and John was going to guess the same went for the front. He was just about to tell Falconer this but at that moment, John felt something touch his face. A caress, like a finger. Only it was definitely not a fucking finger.

That was all it took—John cursed and ducked inside the garage. The door slammed shut, sealing them off from all light.

“Detective! Your tires! Shit!”

From inside the car, “WHAT? GET IN!”

“NO! WE—”

Falconer flipped on the headlights, lighting up the interior of the garage.

There was a giant daddy longlegs spider covering the entire inner surface of the garage door—easily eight feet across. Where the body of the spider would normally be, was a human face.

The creature jumped.

125 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

I was in the middle of tying my shoe when an idea popped into my brain, out of nowhere. Somehow, I suddenly just knew that Molly was eating my beans.

“Hey! Stop that! Bad dog!” I slapped her snout away from the can. She licked bean sauce from her nose, sniffed the air, and took off, presumably to find someone else’s food to steal. I considered eating the rest of the beans even though they were contaminated with dog spit now, but decided I hadn’t gotten quite that low yet. I decided to go back to bed, and took one step inside the main entrance when a drum solo of rapid footsteps approached from the stairwell. TJ skidded to a stop on the tile and said, “Roof.”

I thought he had barked at me, but he headed for the stairs and I followed him all the way up. Two dozen people were up there, lined up along the ledge like pigeons. Hope met us as soon as we stepped out of the roof access door. She grabbed my elbow, pulled me to the edge like she was going to toss me over. She leaned close, 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.”