The Hatching: A Novel (34 page)

“Keep track of the temperature. Far as we can tell, when it gets hot, it’s ready to hatch. Don’t touch them in the meantime,” she said. “No. Wait. Scratch that. Find one of the local universities that has an entomology program and have them bring over some insectariums. Get the egg sacs in there, and then make sure they’re somewhere contained. Somebody has to have a lab in the area that will work. I think you’re safe for now, but I don’t know.”

She felt the jolt of the struts hitting the ground, and the battle-dressed soldier next to her grabbed her arm. “We’ve got to go, ma’am.”

She ducked her head instinctively as she ran out from under the chopper blades. “Let me know if anything changes,” she yelled into the phone. It was louder outside the helicopter. “And good luck.”

The soldier handed her off to a pair of Secret Service agents, and they hustled her through the halls and toward the Situation
Room. It was overwhelming, and as they passed a bathroom, she stopped. One of the Secret Service agents tugged on her arm, but she shook her head.

“I’ve got to use the restroom.”

The agent, a young Latino man, kept his hand on her biceps. “We’re under orders to take you to Mr. Walchuck immediately,” he said.

She gently peeled his hand off. “I’m forty and have a doctorate. I’m the one who gets to decide when I pee.”

The hallway was buzzing with people moving back and forth, some of them running, all of them looking harried, and the bathroom felt cool and quiet. She ducked into the stall and peed. It was a surprising relief. For that matter, when had she last had something to eat or drink? She needed a coffee or a Diet Coke. She needed a few minutes to get herself together before she faced Manny and the president and a roomful of uniforms, she thought.

Dead spiders in the insectarium. Dried out. Used up. And the other spiders. Feeding machines. The egg sac in Bark, sticky and ready to hatch, and then the egg sacs in Minneapolis? Mike said they were cool. A little rough. She tried running the numbers in her head, thinking over the data. It was . . . something. There was something she was missing. She was so close. She needed her lab. She needed a nap.

She closed her eyes and then heard the door to the bathroom. She opened her eyes and stared at her knees, sitting on the toilet for a few more seconds, savoring the time to herself, before she finished up and stepped out of the stall. Stepped out of the stall to find Manny leaning against the sink and waiting for her.

“Jesus, Manny. Come on.”

“We were married for eleven years,” he said, and then shrugged. His version of an apology. “I needed to talk to you before you go in.”

She brushed past him to wash her hands. “What am I doing here, Manny? This is way past me at this point. I’m a lab kind of girl. What do you expect me to do?”

“I expect you to do your job,” he said. “You know spiders. That’s all we need. Tell us, as best you can, what we’re dealing with.”

“Minnesota,” she said.

“What?”

“They’re in Minnesota now. You knew that, right?” Manny turned pale, and Melanie had the answer to her question. “Mike—Agent Rich, the one who brought the spider from Minneapolis—called me when I was on the way here. They found a dead spider in a warehouse near the crash site and some egg sacs.”

Manny took a deep breath. “How many? How many egg sacs?”

“I think he said three. Three? But the good news is that they’re cool, and we might have some time before they hatch.”

“There’s something you need to see,” Manny said.

He walked her out of the bathroom and down the hall. As they passed the Situation Room, a young woman in army dress bounced through the doors, a cacophony of voices following her. Manny didn’t glance in. He turned, four doors down, and took her into a smaller, quieter room. It was nearly empty. Just Billy Cannon, Alex Harris, and a couple of aides.

“Show her the footage,” Manny said.

Melanie sat down in one of the chairs around the table. They all faced the same large screen on the far side of the room. One of the aides turned down the lights, and the screen lit up.

“We shot this forty minutes ago. Marines in Los Angeles.”

“Don’t worry,” Billy said dryly, “we’re not going to show you the Hollywood sign covered in spiders.”

The video was shaky and poorly lit. There were dark shadows
and whoever was holding the camera kept moving it back and forth. She realized it must have been mounted on his helmet. Melanie caught a glimpse of someone in a military uniform—one of the other Marines, she assumed—and a shape on the ground that she realized was a body. The camera stopped moving, the light showing a dark carpet. No. It wasn’t a carpet. It was a layer of dead spiders. A foot reached out and poked at the spiders, pushing them aside.

“They’re dying?”

“Some of them. Most of them. But that’s not the point of the video,” Manny said. “This. Watch this.”

The video moved forward again, out of the mouth of a hallway, opening out into a cavernous space. There were sections of seats. The camera panned over and she saw a Los Angeles Lakers logo.

“Is that the Staples Center?”

“She’s a basketball player. I told you she’d recognize it,” Manny said to Alex, but Melanie barely heard him. She was leaning toward the screen, reaching out with her finger.

“Oh my god.”

The egg sacs closest to the light on the camera were white and dusty looking, casting shadows on the ones behind. What should have been the hardwood court was covered in white lumps, and there were more of them up in the stands on the other side, until the light gave way to darkness. Thousands of egg sacs. Maybe tens of thousands.

“Near as we can tell,” Manny said, “the spiders are all dying out. There was a respite last night, late, and then a fresh wave with a break in the middle of the night, and then another wave, but they’re dying. We’ve got boots on the ground, and we’re getting the same report over and over. The spiders are just keeling over. Spider bodies everywhere.”

Melanie’s phone started ringing, but she ignored it. “All of them?”

“All of them,” Manny said. “We’ve got a couple of coolers full of spiders on ice being rushed back to you now to take a look at. But right now, it’s suddenly weirdly calm. Which means the question is: What do we do about this basketball stadium full of spider eggs?”

“For starters,” Billy said, “we should probably cancel tonight’s game. Though the Lakers probably would have lost anyway.” No one laughed.

Alex touched her arm. “Are we fucked?”

Coming from the national security advisor, who looked as if she could be cast as the grandmother in some sort of feel-good Christmas commercial, the question was almost funny. Almost.

“It depends,” Melanie said. Her phone stopped ringing, kicking to voice mail, but then it dinged with a text. And then another. And another.

“I’d say it probably doesn’t depend,” Billy Cannon said. “I can make all the jokes about the Lakers I want, but when those things hatch, we’re talking how many? Millions more? And what does it mean that one day we have this swarm in Los Angeles, and the next they’re all dying or dead?” He pushed his chair back and launched his coffee cup at the trash can, missing by a good two feet. “Fuck,” he said. “What happened to regular war?”

Melanie fished her phone out of her pocket to read the texts, suddenly realizing they had to be from Mike in Minneapolis. If those egg sacs were getting warm, getting ready to hatch, then . . . But no. The texts were from Julie.

She’d left Julie a sobbing mess outside the biocontainment unit back at the National Institutes of Health. Not that she could blame Julie. To see the nurses and the surgeon go down under the swarm
of spiders, let alone Bark, still opened up on the table, and Patrick. At some point, Melanie knew, the scientist part of her was going to get overwhelmed, and she’d be crying heaps too.

Spiders at NIH dying.
The first text.

Call me!
The second text from Julie.

And the third, longer:
The spiders behind the glass are all dying. Just falling over. Almost all of them. All at once. Called lab. Some dead. Some alive. But Melanie: egg sac at lab! Got to see it.

“No,” Melanie said. “We’re not fucked. Or, maybe we are. Like I said, it depends. Manny, you’re wrong. The problem isn’t what to do about a stadium full of eggs. Though you’re going to need to start searching to see if there are other infestation sites in Los Angeles. The question that really matters, however, isn’t
what
you need to do, but
when
you need to do it. For now, you’ve got to get somebody into the Staples Center to take the temperature of the egg sacs. Before they hatch, there’s a spike in temperature. Maybe this will give me a sense how much time we have,” she said. “Oh, and I want somebody in Minneapolis.”

“Minneapolis?” Alex Harris looked alarmed. “Why Minneapolis?”

Los Angeles, California

A
ndy Anderson never thought he’d be pleased to have his dog take a shit on the kitchen floor, but all things considered, he was happy not to take Sparky out for an early-morning walk. He’d spent the night huddled under the covers with the dog, listening to the sounds of sirens and gunshots and screaming. But for the past hour, it had been quiet.

He decided to risk it. He clipped the leash to Sparky’s collar, gingerly opened the door, and stepped out onto the walk. The sun came down unfiltered, but there was a nice breeze to cut the heat. He took a few more steps until they were on the sidewalk. Sparky seemed unconcerned, so Andy decided to walk past a few houses. Nobody was out, though he could see a station wagon that had smashed against a tree partway down the block, and past that, two lumps in the middle of the street. He started to walk closer but then, realizing what the lumps were, stopped. The breeze gusted into a stiff wind, and he heard something skitter and bounce behind him.

He stumbled and twisted, trying to turn, knowing he’d made
a dumb mistake, that the spiders were still out there, but it was nothing. Just a few leaves skating across the pavement. One of them landed against his shoe and he realized it wasn’t a leaf. It was a dead spider. A husk. He looked around him more carefully. There were carcasses everywhere.

M
ike had never seen so many uniforms in one place. As near as he could tell, every cop, fireman, EMT, National Guardsman, and federal agent in three states was painstakingly searching each and every inch in the two square miles surrounding where Henderson’s jet had crashed. But so far? Zip. Nada. Nothing. Just the three egg sacs from the warehouse, and those were already in insectariums and winging their way to Washington and Melanie’s lab.

He double-checked with the bureau chief that he was good to go, told Leshaun to head home and get some rest, and started driving north.

A
nd there it was, in the insectarium at the lab. An egg sac. Chalky looking, a fresher version of the one that had been sent from Peru. She wanted to put her hand in, to feel it, to make sure it was as cool as she expected it to be, but there were still two spiders alive and moving around the insectarium. The rest were dead. The two live ones didn’t have the markings, but they were big—bigger than the dead ones—and after what had happened with Bark, she was keeping the fucking lid closed. There were more egg sacs coming, from the microsite in Minneapolis and from the giant brood in Los Angeles, plus a sampling of dead spiders from all over the world. Manny promised he had jets scrambling everywhere to get her what she needed.

But it didn’t matter. She’d figured it out.

It was worse than she expected. Much, much worse.

Alex Harris had called it: they were fucked.

A
onghas put his hand on Thuy’s shoulder. She was sipping a cup of tea and pretending to read a mystery. A rather inferior mystery, in Aonghas’s opinion, but he knew he was biased. Not that Thuy was actually reading it. She was doing the same thing he was, which was keeping part of his attention on the BBC and part on looking through the windows at the old man walking circles around the rock.

G
ordo was pretty sure Amy had thrown the last round of Catan. Fred never won, and he seemed extraordinarily pleased with himself, but they were all glad for the distraction.

Shotgun tapped his tablet and changed the music to Lyle Lovett while Gordo filled a bucket with ice and beer. Amy and Fred reset the game. In the corner, Claymore let out small moans in his sleep, his legs twitching, running from something in his dreams.

“I
don’t know, Teddie.” Don played the loop again. “I don’t think we can go with it yet. It’s barely been twenty-four hours since Los Angeles got quiet, and it’s time to start thinking about stories of the aftermath. We’ve got dead spiders everywhere. People want to see positive stories. Stories of survival. It’s over.”

“Come on,” she said to her boss. “You can’t tell me you don’t see the pattern?”

He shook his head. “It’s not that. It’s just . . . What’s it mean?”

She let her chair rock back. He was the only real boss she’d ever had, and he’d told her to go for it, but she knew this was a little out there. Still. She could feel it. She was right. “They aren’t moving randomly. Like stupid bugs.”

Don hit the button again, the loop playing across the screen once more. “Okay. But what does it mean?”

“They’re hunting.”

“We already know they’re killing people and—”

“No,” she said. “Watch the way this group moves to the side and this other string funnels them in. It’s not just a bunch of spiders attacking people. They’re hunting as a group. Like a pack. It’s coordinated.”

S
he couldn’t sleep. Kim got out of her bunk and wandered outside. She figured she’d be the only one up that time of night other than the patrols, but Mitts was leaning against the side of the barracks, drinking a beer. He nodded at her, reached down to the six-pack at his feet, and handed her a bottle. The beer was warm, but it was good.