The Hatching

by Ezekiel Boone

  Kim heard her name being called over the loudspeakers. “Okay,” she said to the unit. “We’re up in one. Remember, rifles on burst. Live fire, so extra careful here. Take your time and make good decisions. Quick action isn’t good unless it’s the right action.” The three men scrambled to their feet while Kim rose from her crouch and they all put their hands in, making a small pile of different shades of skin. “Be smart,” Kim said, “be strong, be Marines.”

  She loved the sound of the four of them shouting “Oorah!” and the way their hands shot down and up. Loved the feel of the M16 in her hands, the click as she flipped the rifle from safety to burst fire. She loved the way she looked in her utility uniform, surrounded by other Marines, and as she felt the first hit of adrenaline spiking through her chest, loved the way it felt to be a Marine. Her parents had never understood her fascination with it, still didn’t understand why she was in uniform while all her friends from high school were off at college, drinking beer in dormitories and getting date-raped at frat parties. Well, Kim was pretty sure that’s not the way her parents thought her college experience would have gone, but for Kim, college was something she would do only as part of the Marines. She’d wanted to be a Marine since they first started letting women into combat units, and from the minute she first put on a uniform and laced up a pair of boots she understood the saying, “Once a Marine, Always a Marine.”

  They got the green light and funneled down the chute. Duran and Elroy split left, taking cover behind a concrete barrier, while she and Mitts went right, taking cover behind the corner of a building. This was supposed to be an urban environment, and she had to hand it to whoever had built the set. It felt like being in a city. The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center might be in the middle of nowhere—the going nickname for Twentynine Palms, the city adjacent to the MCAGCC, was Twentynine Stumps, for its wonderful lack of fun stuff to do—but the training was great. The talk among the other Marines was that there was a reason the training had been intensified: they’d be boots on the ground in Somalia sometime in the next couple of months. Kim believed the rumors. If the increased schedules of training had been just for her and the other green recruits, she might have dismissed the talk, but it wasn’t just the new Marines. Everybody had been gearing up.

  She signaled for Duran and Elroy to cover, and she and Mitts hauled ass to the next barrier. Two civilian silhouettes popped up, and though she started to squeeze, she laid off the trigger. Then, as she saw Duran and Elroy leapfrogging past them, a target showed in the window of a building up ahead. Mitts didn’t see it—he was scanning low—but Kim swiveled and fingered the trigger. Set to “burst,” her rifle sent out three bullets with a single pull of the trigger, and she saw the target splinter and fall. Ahead of them, Duran and Elroy were already crouching and raising their weapons, but as she and Mitts started to rise to run forward, there was a voice over the loudspeaker.

  “Cease fire. All Marines, cease fire. Lower weapons. Exercise terminated. Cease fire.”

  Kim hesitated. Was this part of the exercise? She knew they occasionally liked to throw wrinkles in to simulate the unpredictability of real life in the field, but this seemed a little too self-referential for the Marines. Besides, the guys in her unit were already standing up and flicking their M16s to safe.

  She rose, put her rifle on safe, and then looked at Mitts. “What the fuck?”

  Mitts shrugged. “Who knows? I thought it was going well. We were moving nice. Good job with the shooting. Things were clean. Maybe somebody was still in the arena, one of the techs not all the way out before we started the exercise?”

  Elroy and Duran wandered over, and though Duran had a dour look on his face, Elroy was his usual unflappable self. “Suppose we’ll have to start over,” Elroy said.

  Kim sighed, because Mitts was right, they’d been doing a good job, and it was going to be hard to get themselves psyched up for another go. She started to tell the unit to head back to the chute when the loudspeaker crackled on again. This time it let out a long, piercing siren. This wasn’t just for the arena. This was for the whole base. And then, when the voice announced that all units were ordered to report immediately, when it said “This is not a drill,” she got concerned. Not because of what “This is not a drill” might mean or not mean, but because, for the first time she could remember, Private First Class Elroy Trotter looked worried.

  Hindu Kush, Afghanistan-Tajikistan Border

  She was tired of the prospectors. Occasionally they’d come to visit her and ask her for information about the area, though she wasn’t sure exactly what they were looking to find. Other times they’d trade with her for one of her sheep, and once they invited her to share a meal. But they’d mostly left her alone. That had changed since she’d shown them the rocks that she brought down from the old cave she sometimes sheltered in if she was caught up on the pass.

  Until they’d seen the rocks, the prospectors themselves did not seem to want to be there either. From what little language they had in common, she’d gathered that they found it cold and inhospitable. Which was not short of the truth. She had a good touch with the sheep, and she was more prosperous than some, but even when her husband and daughter had still been alive, it had been a difficult place to live. The prospectors made things easier in some ways—they’d given her a knife and a new jacket that she was quite happy with—but mostly they’d been an annoyance. They liked to play loud music at their camp, and they used explosives in some of their attempts to find whatever it was they were looking for. They were friendly but disruptive, and she would not be sad to see them leave.

  Today, however, they were paying her. They seemed to have no concept of how much to offer, and for what they had been willing to pay, she would happily lead them wherever they wanted to go for as long as they wanted. And so she was taking them up the pass to help them find the old cave, to show them where she’d gotten the rocks. She wasn’t sure why they were so excited about the rocks. There wasn’t any gold or silver in them. But really, she didn’t care. What she cared about was that they were paying her handsomely.

  Despite being older than most of the men—she was nearly forty, and the men seemed much younger, though most of them were older than her husband had been when he died—she kept outpacing them. Every few minutes she would stop and wait for the prospectors to keep up. They carried small packs filled with electronic gear, shovels and picks, and other tools, but she didn’t think the bags were so heavy. She carried one of the packs herself. They told her, best they could, that they were having trouble breathing so high up in the mountains, so she slowed down and took breaks for them to catch their breath.

  By the time they reached the cave, it was late morning. The sky was still clear. The lead prospector, a man named Dennis, had told her the weather would be good all day, that they would have nothing to worry about. He had put her in front of his computer and showed her a map full of colors and said there was no snow coming until the next day. She was not so certain. She’d lived there long enough that she had respect for the suddenness with which the sky could burst. If they got stuck in a storm, it would be a difficult descent. They wouldn’t have a choice, however. None of the men carried the kind of gear that would see them through the night. They were idiots.

  She had no trouble leading them to the cave. A few times every year she ended up seeking shelter in it, guiding her sheep in there with her when the weather caught her out too far from home. It was large enough for the entire flock, and the entrance was narrow with a jutted lip that held the wind at bay. The cave was normally dark, but that had never bothered her. She would spend the nights huddled close enough to the entrance that she could see the stars, but far enough back so that she was sheltered from the wind and the snow.

  It was different with the prospectors. The cave had high ceilings—the half-dozen men could stand easily—and they all had powerful lights that they splayed along the walls and the floor. She’d never seen the cave lit up like this. One of the
men shined his light on the floor along the wall and picked up a rock similar to what she’d shown them the day before. They murmured excitedly, and Dennis took the rock and looked at it. He brought it over to her. “You weren’t kidding,” he said then nodded at her. “This could be very good. If we find more, we’ll pay extra.” He rubbed his fingers together in case she didn’t understand, but she knew what it meant: more money for her, but also that the prospectors weren’t leaving.

  There was a slight wind outside, and she glanced at the sky again. It still looked clear, but even with Dennis’s assurances, she didn’t trust the clouds to stay away. She’d had too many close calls with the weather, and it was on a day like this that the snow had swept through the valley and the mountains and left her both a widow and a woman without a child. She moved farther into the cave, around the lip of the entrance and out of the touch of the wind. She bent into a crouch and leaned against the wall. She did not know how long the men would want to spend in the cave, but she settled herself in for a wait.

  From her perspective, they seemed to be both hurrying and doing nothing. They pulled small machines from their backpacks, some she recognized, and others she hadn’t seen before, and proceeded to gather samples from the floor of the cave. One of them took something that looked like a wand and ran it against the wall. The wand had a series of lights and let out a regular pattern of beeps that seemed to speed up as the lights changed from dull yellow to a piercing red. When the beeps settled into a steady tone, the man lowered the wand and called Dennis over. All of them stopped what they were doing, and from her spot crouched against the wall, she watched. After a few minutes, one of the men went and sorted through the pile of tools and shovels, taking the long-handled pickax. He started banging away at the rock.

  She lost interest, however, because she’d seen something illuminated by the lights moving around the cave. She walked over to the packs on the floor and took one of the lanterns. She held it up, searching for what she’d seen. The light flared against the wall, moving the shadows around her. It took her a moment to find it. There. Up on the opposite wall. Far enough back that she’d never been able to see it before when she spent nights huddled in the near darkness with her sheep. It was as high as she could reach. Coal-black smeared on the wall. It was ash, she thought, but then, no. She lifted the lantern up and knew it was something else. Something older. She’d seen pictures painted in the caves before, but this one was different. It was simple. The sight of it made her shiver. A spider.

  Behind her, the sound of the pickax striking the cave wall was constant, the man breathing hard as he swung.

  The woman let the light of the lantern play over the wall, but there were no more paintings, no more pictures. Just the single spider. It made her uneasy. She was not afraid of spiders. There was no reason to be afraid of spiders. But still.

  There was a small cheer and some applause. She looked over her shoulder. The man with the pickax was smiling. He’d broken through the wall. There was dark space behind it. Another cave. A tunnel. She couldn’t see. A different man took the ax and started swinging, and the hole widened rapidly. It would be only a few minutes before it was large enough to admit a person, she thought.

  Outside the entrance of the cave she saw something float by. A flake of snow? She looked out anxiously. How long had they been in there?

  The sky, which had been blisteringly clear, was littered with clouds. The temperature had dropped. She could feel the damp cold of a coming storm. Behind her, the sound of the ax against the rock had stopped, but there was something else. A rhythmic thumping. The men were talking, and she turned to find Dennis. To tell him they needed to leave. A storm was coming.

  And then she was no longer sure if she was looking at the sky or at the roof of the cave. But it was dark. And she was screaming.

  Desperation, California

  Seven minutes.

  Seven minutes from seeing the news about the nuke until he’d secured the entrance to the shelter. Gordo was sweating and had to piss, but he’d called Amy from his truck, and she and Claymore were waiting for him underground by the time he came down the stairs at full tilt. Amy looked grim but determined, and Claymore, who had spent a lot of time down in the shelter with Gordo—Gordo had gotten into the habit of watching baseball out here instead of in the house where it drove Amy to distraction, and usually brought the dog with him—seemed to notice nothing out of the ordinary. Claymore did what he always did when he saw Gordo, which was wag his tail and then roll over onto his back and wait for some tummy rubbing.

  Gordo checked the shelter doors one more time—this was the real deal, and one mistake would be the last—and then pulled his T-shirt up to wipe the sweat off his face. He bent over and scratched the chocolate Lab’s belly and then looked at his wife. “Say it,” he said. “I want to hear you say it.”

  Amy’s mouth puckered in a little smile. He knew one of the things she loved about him was his ability to lighten things up. Even in a moment like this, less than twenty minutes before nuclear weapons were going to start raining from the sky, Gordo could make things feel better for Amy.

  “You were right,” Amy said.

  Gordo straightened up and put one hand to his ear. “What was that? It sounded like . . . no. I didn’t quite catch that.”

  He could see Amy trying to keep her face still, but it didn’t work, and her small smile got bigger. She shook her head. “I said, you were right.”

  He stepped over to her and put his hands on her waist. He leaned down so that his chin was resting in the nook between her shoulder and her neck. “The score, my dear, is now eighteen million, six hundred and forty-eight thousand, three hundred and two for you,” he said, “and eleven for me.”

  “Gordo,” Amy said, and he could feel her relaxing into his body, “you are the strangest fool I’ve ever married, but I’ll say it again. You were right.”

  “And what was I right about, my sweet little bride?”

  Amy moved back so she could place her palms on his chest and then gave him a gentle shove. “Right about moving out to this godforsaken little town. Right about building a bomb shelter. Right about the fact that sooner or later things were going to go to hell.” She walked over to the television and turned it on. “But you were wrong about it being zombies.”

  “Well, that still remains to be determined,” Gordo said, but he figured he’d probably lost that one. No zombies. Yet.

  He’d gone into town to pick up pizza, their weekly ritual. It was more for him than for her. To their mutual surprise, Amy had adjusted quickly to the move from New York City to Desperation, California, or, as Amy sometimes called it, “Desolation.” She had grown up on a horse ranch in Wyoming, and went to college at Black Hills State in Spearfish, South Dakota. Compared with Desperation, Spearfish was a decent-sized city, with a population close to twenty thousand when the university was in session, but her upbringing meant she was a lot more ready for small-town life than Gordo was. He was a born and bred New Yorker, and though he’d been the one to push for the move, the change had been harder for him.

  In terms of their jobs, it didn’t make much of a difference. Amy was a technical writer, which she could do from anywhere, and Gordo was a day trader. He worked market hours, hunched in front of his computer and running the program he’d written himself to exploit minor variations in the currency markets. He was consistent in his returns, and he’d have made a lot more money if he’d let everything keep riding, but he didn’t have any faith that the digital zeros at the end of his balances would be of any worth once the apocalypse came. No, he much preferred keeping at least two-thirds of their money in a form he could hold. Right now he felt pretty damn good about the safe in the back of the shelter: one hundred thirty-one pounds, four ounces of gold. At current prices, near eighteen hundred dollars an ounce, it was worth close to three million, eight hundred thousand dollars, and he figured that with the nukes coming down and the inevitable collapse of paper currencies, gold w
ould skyrocket.

  No, it wasn’t the work that had been an issue. It was the day-to-day reality of living in Desperation. It was an aptly named town, and Gordo was afraid Amy was going to realize how relieved he was that the world as they knew it was finally coming to an end. He’d been so excited when she first agreed to leave New York City behind that he’d thrown himself into the planning. First, he’d researched all the places they could move to, trying to determine where they would best be able to ride out the apocalypse. Fortunately, the Internet made things remarkably easy. It was easy to rule out some places: anywhere too close to a military installation was sure to be hit if it was nuclear war, and anywhere too close to a major civilian population was going to be overrun if it was zombies. Their refuge had to be easily defensible, close enough to some sort of small town and basic infrastructure that they could build the house and the shelter, and ideally, have some like-minded folk already in place who could help mount a defense after things had collapsed and the ravaging hordes were at their worst. Gordo knew it would be every man for himself, but he also knew there were certain situations when it could be good to have allies. If he and Amy were going to rebuild humanity, it would be nice to have a few helping hands.

  He had immediately ruled out survivalist places that were settled with some sort of philosophy that he or Amy found distasteful, like the white supremacist compounds that seemed to dot the mountain states, or even worse, the hippie, vegan, peacenik, environmentalist survivalists who built their shelters out of sustainable materials and refused to stock even basic weapons of self-defense. When he found Desperation, however, a place already popular with independently minded survivalists, he knew it was the place. Next, he’d thrown himself into building the house and the shelter. They’d found the plot easily enough, just three miles outside of town. Or, as Gordo still thought of it, outside “town,” the quotation marks necessary for a town that consisted entirely of four bars, Jimmer’s Dollar Spot—a business that served as convenience store, gas station, grocery store, gun shop, post office, hardware store, clothing store, and coffee shop all in one, and despite its name, sold very little for a dollar—and lastly, LuAnne’s Pizza & Beer. Which, Gordo realized, meant you could also argue that Desperation had five bars instead of four.