The Hatching

by Ezekiel Boone

  Gordo stuck out his hand to Flower. “Gordon Lightfoot, but everybody calls me Gordo.”

  “Gordon Lightfoot? Like the singer?” Flower shook his hand. She had a firm grip.

  “Yep, like the singer,” Gordo said. “But no relation. You might want to ask Burly over at the Lead Saloon if you need a place to stay. His brother’s place has been empty for a while. He’d probably let you rent it cheap. An old trailer over by the Grimsby homestead. Not much to look at from the outside, but if I know Burly, it will be clean and weatherproof.”

  He turned to take his beer off the counter and stopped. The television. He banged Shotgun on the arm. “Holy fuck. You see this?”

  Up on the screen, the game show was gone, replaced by a newscaster from the network. Gordo didn’t recognize the man on-screen, but it was easy to tell he was harried. On the bottom of the screen were the words “nuclear explosion.”

  “Burly?” the girl said behind him.

  “Just a minute. Hey, LuAnne, can you turn up the sound for a minute?”

  LuAnne lumbered over and obliged, and Gordo realized it had gotten quiet behind him, the eleven Grimsby children shushed by their parents.

  “. . . minutes ago. According to the White House, the Chinese premier has confirmed that the explosion was an accident during training exercises. Again, we apologize for cutting away from your regularly scheduled program, but in breaking news, a nuclear bomb exploded less than twenty minutes ago in the northern Chinese province of Xinjiang. While the scope of the destruction is not clear, the White House has informed us that this was an isolated incident. The Chinese government is reporting it as a military accident. At this time we believe a military aircraft carrying a live nuclear weapon crashed during a training mission. We don’t have much information, but we’ll go now to the White House where—”

  Gordo didn’t wait to hear what the reporter from the White House did or did not know. He and Shotgun glanced at each other then scrambled out the door, followed closely by Patty and Ken Grimsby and their brood. His last image of the inside of LuAnne’s Pizza & Beer was LuAnne tossing her white towel on the bar and spinning toward the kitchen while Flower and Baywolf looked around in confusion.

  All thoughts of the hippie girl and her angry boyfriend disappeared as he pounded the gas pedal against the floor of his truck. He saw Shotgun’s truck take the corner too fast, tearing up a cloud of dust, but he was too busy dialing Amy to worry about Shotgun. When he turned into his driveway, he hit the dip fast enough that he was pretty sure he got all four wheels airborne. He could feel his heart jackhammering as he slammed on the brakes and ran to get the shelter doors down.

  And then, after all that, it was just the three of them inside the shelter, doors secured: Claymore wagging his tail, Amy telling him he’d been right all along, and Gordo feeling a hollow nervousness in the pit of his stomach.

  He was ready for the end of the world.

  Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center,

  Twentynine Palms, California

  One little nuclear explosion and everybody goes batshit. The newscasters had been jabbering all night, talking heads talking out of their asses, but nobody seemed to have anything to add to the initial reports that it was a military plane crash during training except that the Chinese government was now stating that the nuclear blast had been part of “an internal matter” and they were “securing the affected area.” Not exactly comforting, Kim thought, but probably not worthy of this level of alert. They were locked and loaded and ready to be boots up at any minute, though she wasn’t really sure what she was supposed to do in the event that nuclear missiles started coming down. Duck and cover? Probably better to be on a plane headed somewhere when mushroom clouds started growing. But then she remembered she’d read somewhere that a nuke could cause electromagnetic pulses that shut down electronics. Being aboard a plane when the electronics were fried seemed like an unpromising way to spend a morning.

  Kim yawned and shifted in her bunk. Gunnery Sergeant McCullogh had spent the rest of the evening barking at the company until everything was as ready as it could be, and then Gunny did what good leaders do, which was allow them to get some rest. That was one of those military maxims that proved to be true: sleep when you can. Kim knew Mitts probably spent the night awake and overthinking the day to come. She wasn’t sure about Duran, but Elroy never seemed to have any trouble sleeping. Even though Kim had her nightmares—the usual one of making a decision that got one of the men killed, plus a new and not unexpected nightmare of having the flesh melt off her body as she was enveloped in a nuclear blast—she’d gotten some solid shut-eye. An hour of lounging in bed after waking up would have been nice, though. That was one of the things she missed most from civilian life. She loved the order, the discipline, the uniform, the weapons, the promise of violence, the sense of belonging to something bigger than herself that came with the Marines, but she sure as shit missed lolling around in bed on Sunday mornings and taking her time getting ready.

  She gave her head a quick scratch, sat up, slipped the elastic off her wrist, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She’d actually worried for a little while that she was going to have to shave her head as part of enlisting. Kim knew she would have been able to pull the look off. She wasn’t vain, just honest about the fact that she had a pretty face. She’d always been athletically built, but as a softball catcher, she sometimes veered more toward solid than sleek. Three months in the Marines had erased all the extra padding. It felt as if she’d gone through a metamorphosis, turning into the woman she always wanted to be. Even though there were times she was terrified about being a lance corporal, about being responsible for her unit, she was also the most confident she’d ever been. Of course, that didn’t mean she was in any hurry to cut her hair.

  She double-timed it to the mess and sat down with her unit, Duran sliding down the bench to make room for her. “What’s the scuttlebutt?”

  Mitts glanced up but didn’t slow down in shoveling his scrambled eggs. Kim took note of the dark circles under his eyes. The part of her that had wanted to sleep with him and could imagine dating him under different circumstances felt bad, but the part of her that was adjusting to having command over her unit thought that she had to make sure he was on top of his game. If he fucked up, at least in the eyes of their squad leader, it meant Kim had fucked up too.

  Elroy shook his head and took a sip of his coffee. “Heard a bunch of things. One of them is that it wasn’t an accident. The Chinese dropped a nuke on purpose.”

  Kim felt her mouth drop open and snapped it shut. “Wild-ass guess?”

  “Nope,” Elroy said. “Honky Joe, and if Honky Joe says it wasn’t an accident, I’m willing to believe it’s more than a WAG. Said he was online and there’s talk about the Chinese trying to cover something up. He said a lot of it sounds like the kind of stupid bullshit you’d expect, like a zombie outbreak, but he thinks it’s credible. Said it feels like there’s something real underneath it. He thinks it might have been something bio.”

  Kim toyed with the eggs. Mostly they’d been getting real eggs, but these were rubbery and specked with something pink. She hated powdered eggs, but sometimes they were extra funky because of cheese. The pink specks were probably supposed to be some sort of meat. Ham? She put off taking a bite and nodded at Elroy. Honky Joe was a weird dude, but he was smart as shit. Too smart by half. He’d either wash out or end up wearing brass. Despite his name, Honky Joe was actually a black kid out of Washington, DC. His dad was some sort of something important up on the Hill—Honky Joe wouldn’t say what—and Honky Joe said that after he’d been busted hacking into the Pentagon, his father arranged to have him join the Marines instead of joining the fine folks at one of the federal penitentiaries. Early on in boot camp Honky Joe had started a gambling syndicate that pooled money on bets at a local racetrack, and before it was shut down, everybody involved had turned their initial hundred-dollar kick-ins into something closer to two grand. That’s the
kind of kid he was, and even though he usually ended up getting his black ass handed to him in the end, they’d all figured out he was worth a listen when he decided to speak.

  “Anything else?”

  Elroy shook his head. “No official word beyond what you already know, but if I was a betting man, and you better believe I am, I’d put a ten-spot on us being on the move by nightfall.”

  Kim offered her bacon to Duran and he pinched the greasy pieces off her tray. “Any idea where?”

  “Outside the continental United States. Bet on that.”

  Mitts put down his fork and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He really did look like shit, Kim thought. She hoped that if Elroy was right about them getting shipped out, there’d be a chance for Mitts to get some sack time before they left. “I think they’re all freaked out over nothing,” Mitts said, then crumpled the napkin and put it on his tray. “Not that a nuclear explosion is nothing, but it’s not like they launched one on us. Maybe Honky Joe is right, that it’s something more than a training accident, but whatever it is, we’re not talking shots fired. Wherever they send us, we’ll be spending most of our time waiting for the brass and the general public to untwist their underwear. Same shit, different day.”

  Kim saw Gunnery Sergeant McCullogh hurrying across the mess and stopping to huddle with the company staff sergeants. Whatever he said had the effect of making the staff sergeants hop to their feet.

  “Might be you’re right, Mitts,” Kim said, nodding her head so that the three men looked across the mess to where she had been looking. “But judging from the way Gunny and the staff sergeants are starting to haul ass, it will be same shit, different day, and different country. I think Elroy’s right. We’re going OCONUS.”

  Henderson Tech Falcon 7X, over Minneapolis, Minnesota

  Henderson couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake. Since he’d stepped off the trail to take a shit in the jungle, everything had the gauzy quality of a dream. A bad dream. Neither of the pilots nor any of the flight attendants said anything to him to indicate that they thought he was acting funny, but then again, when you owned a Falcon 7X, you could expect a certain amount of discretion from your flight crew. At first, Henderson had felt guilty about spending more than $50 million to buy his own jet, plus another $27 million to customize it. It felt wasteful. But in the scheme of things, it just wasn’t that much money, and it was a lot easier to pay for it himself than to deal with the bullshit of doing it through the company. No matter that he’d founded the business, built it from the ground up to a market cap of more than $250 billion; once he’d gone public, he had to follow the rules. Not that he minded. Last year he’d been fourth on the list of wealthiest Americans, and with no wife, no kids, and no siblings, what the hell else was he going to do with his cash? Until recently he hadn’t given a shit about that sort of stuff, but he’d started the company when he was fifteen and had been going nonstop for more than thirty years. Now he wanted to spend some of his time and money not working. Until recently he’d just used one of the company’s jets, since all he did was business, but he figured if he was doing stuff for himself, one of the things he could do was buy his own plane. Frankly, though he’d been wildly successful for most of his adult life, he still thought it was cool that he could own one. He’d thoroughly enjoyed the process of customizing it, though he burned through five designers in the process, but the Falcon 7X was well worth the money he spent. The inside was gorgeous. At least, it was gorgeous when it wasn’t covered in spiders.

  He was pretty sure it was a nightmare, but it was too close to what had happened in Peru for him to be sure. He’d spent the last morning in Peru on the toilet, but he’d been game for the hike through the jungle. You didn’t become the fourth-richest American without having the fortitude to fight through the squirts. But it was embarrassing. The guide, Miggie, had been cool about it, but for Henderson, having to keep stopping to shit in the greenery while the women and his bodyguard waited for him was kind of awkward. He wasn’t deluded. He wasn’t a bad-looking dude. A little heavy. A lot heavy. Okay, kind of fat, and obviously on the wrong side of forty, but if he’d been just a doctor or something, he’d have been able to have a perfectly decent-looking wife. With billions in the bank, however, he rated three super-hot models. That still didn’t make him feel any better about having to cope with diarrhea. He’d been trying to drink water and get some salt into his system, but it had been hard going with the heat and the elevation. He could have canceled the hike, could have done pretty much anything he liked and nobody would have said anything. The rules were different for people like him. Money, at least on the scale he had, changed things. But for Henderson, it didn’t change the fact that he didn’t like excuses. Didn’t like to hear excuses—“Own your mistakes and move on, or pack your shit and get out,” was one of the company’s mantras—and didn’t like to give them. But man, his stomach had been killing him.

  He’d gone off the path for what must have been the fourth or fifth time, and he’d just finished wiping himself with some sort of foliage that he prayed fervently was nontoxic and was pulling up his pants when he heard the screaming. He took a dozen steps back toward the path, just close enough that he could see the guide being swallowed by a black tide. The three women clutched at one another and shrieked. His bodyguard turned to run but got tangled up in the women and fell to the ground with two of them. Henderson looked back to where the guide had been standing, but the man had disappeared. And then he saw the black wave wash over the body of the woman who was still standing. Tina. Her name was Tina.

  There was screaming, but there was more than that. There was a rustling sound, a sort of clicking and flicking. It sounded both lush and creepy. The bodyguard lumbered to his feet, but there were patches of black over his back, his arms, on his head. Henderson couldn’t figure out what the patches were, but then he realized they were moving, splitting and swarming, re-forming on the bodyguard’s body no matter how much he swatted and brushed at himself. And then Henderson felt his stomach go liquid again, because from where he stood in the woods, even with the foliage fracturing his view, it looked as if the bodyguard’s face was melting, the skin sloughing off to show flesh and muscle and then bone. The man was still standing, screaming, thrashing at the air, at his head, at his body, but the blackness only grew more solid.

  That had been enough for Henderson, and he turned and started to run. He had no idea where he was going, and with the thickness of the plants and the trees he couldn’t do anything other than crash blindly. He was sure he was moving at the speed of a slow walk, but however little speed he carried, he knew he needed to get out of there. At first, all he could hear was the sound of his breathing, the push and rattle of his hands and legs against branches and leaves, but then he heard the sound again, the clicking and flicking. If he thought he’d been moving hard before, he was desperate now. There was something sharp and then numbness on his ankle, a scrape on his arm that could have been a branch or could have been something worse. Henderson kept moving, swatting at his body, cursing and crying and barely able to stand. He tripped and rolled on the ground, knocking his elbow and waiting to be swallowed, but as he lay there, he realized that other than his ragged breath, the jungle was quiet.

  He scratched at his arm, and then at the numbness on his ankle, his hand coming back with a smear of blood. Something tickled at the back of his neck and he swatted it, feeling something solid burst under his hand. He grabbed whatever it was and held it in front of his face.

  Ew. He shuddered. He was afraid of spiders, and this one was black and hairy. Even though it was squished from his slap, it had been big. And then he had to clamp down on a scream as he realized this spider was part of the black wave that had washed over the guide, his bodyguard, and the three models. Jesus. A swarm of them.

  He’d gotten to his feet and done his best to walk in a straight line, hoping that sooner or later somebody would come looking for him. Billionaires didn’t just disappear without pe
ople noticing. After a period of time that he thought couldn’t have been more than an hour, he stumbled out of the jungle and found himself standing on a paved road. “What the fuck?” He looked around, but there was no indication of which way he should go. He turned around a couple of times and then just chose a direction. Miracle of all fucking miracles, within three minutes he was waving down a Jeep carrying two scientists from the research center in the preserve. He’d offered them thirty thousand dollars to drive him directly to the airport, no questions asked.

  By the time he was sitting in one of the leather seats on his Falcon 7X, he thought he’d already started having a fever. He’d made the scientists stop twice on the way to the airport so he could go to the bathroom, and the first thing he did upon boarding the jet was take some Imodium. That had done the trick with the diarrhea, but now he had the sweats and a pounding headache. His ankle was throbbing and he thought that maybe the cut was already infected. Fucking jungle. Fucking bugs. He couldn’t wait to get back to the USA for some good old American antibiotics. He was more than done with being an international adventurer. Who was he kidding? Why would he bother with hardship? He was sticking to nice hotels from now on. Hot water and gourmet food. If he was going to seek the company of super-hot models, he wanted to get his blow jobs while lying on six-hundred-thread-count sheets. That, Henderson thought, was a good way to spend some of his fortune. Screw the jungle.

  He knew there’d be some questions when he landed, though. No matter how many billions he had, there was the little matter of the missing guide, the bodyguard, and the three models who’d flown to Peru with him. Well, the guide probably didn’t matter much, and the bodyguard’s death had been an occupational hazard, but even he couldn’t just make three semi-famous models disappear. Fortunately, he wasn’t prone to drugs or violence and didn’t exactly have a history of leaving bodies in his wake. When the questions came, he’d direct them to his lawyers and simply tell the truth: some sort of animals had attacked them, and sick, injured, and disoriented, he’d panicked and fled. For right now, what he was most concerned about was whether the spiders he saw swarming over the interior of his jet were real or part of a nightmare.