This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It (John Dies at the End, #2)

by David Wong

This was a special year because they were in the process of tearing down that old water tower to build a new, more modern one and it didn’t look like the new one was going to have the kind of platform that you could piss off of, because this is no longer a world of men.

I said, “I love you.” She said, “I know.”

My feet had never been so bare. Those little naked toes. That spider thing probably looks at those like the ears on a chocolate bunny.

The ground shook from it. My bowels quivered. I think I shat a little.

John and I have identified half a dozen of those doors around town, and we know where they lead: to each other. The only thing is you never knew to which of the other doors they were going to take you, it was basically doorway roulette. I mean, you’re not going step out in Beijing or anything, it’s always another door around town. All the ones we’ve found, anyway. But they never seem to go to the same place twice. Why? Because this whole town is fucked up, that’s why. I keep trying to tell you that. You don’t want to come here. It’s exhausting.

Just for future reference, if you’re ever at a party and a Rastafarian offers you a syringe full of a slimy black substance that crawls around on its own like The Blob, don’t take it.

The more you know.

It doesn’t do anybody any good. It just makes you look crazy. It makes both of us look crazy.” “Hey, aren’t you going to be late for your court-mandated therapist appointment?” “Fuck you.”

I woke up in my bathroom, startled. I had nodded off while pooping. Long goddamned day.

John had set up his life perfectly so that he could get in touch with me anytime he needed something, but all of my calls to him were carefully screened. Everything always on his terms.

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.

Maybe everyone would die. Maybe the parasites would own the planet. And it would all be my fault. It was the DVD sticker situation all over again.

John tossed his phone into my lap and said, “Call Shiva! Tell her to meet us at the water tower!” “Who?” “Shiva! My girlfriend!” “That’s actually her name?” “I think so!”

I said, “Listen! Listen to me! Everything that has happened has happened because they wanted it to.” “Who’s ‘they’?” “I DON’T KNOW! Find out! You’re goddamned Lance Falconer!”

The Action 5 News Team was finding as many ways as they could to say the same thing over and over—that there was some kind of unspecified crisis in the town, that they didn’t know the nature of it but that it was huge and terrible and that we should all remain calm but glued to our televisions.

The truck had stunk of rotten eggs for years for reasons no one could explain.

John noticed she had added a star to Japan since the last time he had seen it. He tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets of Tokyo. It was like picturing RoboCop in Middle Earth—

These guys would go out in the woods and train and shoot and defend to the death their right to stay in childhood until age thirty-five.

I went with him, and realized he hadn’t come alone. Four more green suits were with him. What, were we on teams? What the hell was this? Had I stepped into some weird alternate dimension? Again?

Note: Do not ask the author how the details of the following sequence of events were obtained. The explanation would only leave you more confused and dissatisfied than would any theory you could come up with from your own imagination.

“Magic door. No, seriously. Don’t get mad. The door is magic. It’s not my fault.”

Kind of hard to run for office later with a photo circulating of you warming your hands over a pile of glowing skulls.

The former Ffirth TB asylum and now former outbreak command center for REPER, was filthy with the shadow men. Moving, twisting through the air. Not frozen, like everything else—one thing John knew about the shadows is that they were unbound by time, which is what made them unspeakably dangerous. Well, that and the fact that they were assholes.

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

“You all right, buddy?” John couldn’t think of how to answer that. His ribs hurt and it was kind of hard to breathe. The back of his neck was wet with monster blood, and he had gotten all worked up anticipating his own mortality only to find out it was on back order.

I don’t beat myself up over my choices. My shame circuits burned out from overuse years ago.

Birds don’t give a shit about the apocalypse any more than we’d care about some species of bird going extinct in the Amazon. Which had probably happened twice already this morning.

Molly sniffed her again, turned, inspected the Pop-Tarts on the floor among the broken glass, then trotted over to the side door of the RV, staring at Amy and wagging her tail. Dog language for, I need you to open this door for me because I do not possess hands.

Amy said, “Then we will once again err on the side of not letting people be murdered. You take the choice in front of you. And then you keep picking the non-murder choice as long as you can.” I said, “And that is why I wanted you to stay home.”

The device made a sort of honking sound, like some people make when they blow their nose. There was a strange ripple in the air, like the heat-warped space above a fire. The beer bottle on the far right was suddenly five times bigger than it was before. John had cheered and whooped and declared the device to be an enlarging ray. He said he’d point it at cornfields and use it to cure world hunger. He fired it again, aiming at the next bottle. It stayed the same size, only turned white. When we approached it we realized the bottle had been turned into a bottle-shaped pile of mashed potatoes. John stated that he would still use it to cure world hunger, but more importantly, he pointed out that he had been thinking of mashed potatoes at the exact moment he had pulled the trigger, and speculated that the gun could react to your thoughts somehow. We fired it at the third bottle and it immediately turned into a double-ended dildo. A black one. John said this confirmed this theory.

With no hesitation, John rumbled down toward the area that was about to be bombed into scorched rubble. Somewhere, the ghost of Charles Darwin smiled and lit a cigar.

Plenty of people from in town came forward to dispute those reports. And plenty of other people came forward to dispute those reports. A hundred different versions came out and so the public just defaulted to what the guys in suits told them. In the end, They didn’t need to cover up anything—They just drowned it out in a blizzard of conflicting stories. The world eventually gives up and moves on. Like the whole thing with the envelopes of anthrax after 9/11.

“I’m going to tell the most ridiculous possible version of it I can think of. People are going to close it and be like, ‘What the fuck did I just read?’”

That would be the next book.

And social media, well, that shit feels specifically designed to cause our primate brains to overheat and go spraying out of our ears like a busted radiator: “Here is an out-of-context video of a stranger behaving horribly in a Dunkin’ Donuts 2,000 miles away; you are now required to spend emotional energy caring about this.”

He believes that this limitation serves as a Tower of Babel–style check on the ambitions of our species. I’m not sure I agree with him, but I do think it’s going to continue tripping us up as the world gets more complicated (did you notice that authoritarian regimes always promise a return to a simpler, less anxious past?).

So do conservatives!