“Congratulations, Fanny,” he said. He hugged her, this time for real, with both arms, pulling her tight and holding on for an extra second. “I’m really happy for you. For you and Rich,” he said, and he understood that he really meant it.
Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton,
San Diego, California
Lance Corporal Kim Bock didn’t know what was going on, but she knew things were fucked. The day after China dropped the nuke they were told it was boots up, and then they were told to stand down. Yesterday there had been a hastily organized training session to review procedures for putting on bio suits and gas masks, and it looked like it was going to be boots up again. But then they’d been ordered back to barracks and after spending a couple of hours packing and repacking gear, they’d been left to their own devices. There wasn’t any news, and even Honky Joe, who had been on and off the phone with his father, had no real information to add.
And then, all of a sudden, the radio and television and Internet were exploding with news and everything was all India and spiders and every goddamned airplane in the country was grounded and then everybody with any kind of ribbons or medals was yelling at them to clean their weapons and gear up and board a bus. Go, go, go!
So here they were. On a bus. A school bus. An honest-to-God yellow school bus. Mitts had looked at Kim and she’d shrugged. It didn’t make a lot of sense to her either. They were good Marines, and so they had gotten onto the school buses, packs on their laps and M16s beside them. Elroy had his earbuds in and she could hear the music leaking out—the same old country shit he always listened to—and Mitts, Duran, and Honky Joe were playing cards with Goons. Kim squirmed around in her seat so she could talk to Sue.
To say that Private Sue Chirp came from a very different background from Kim was putting it mildly. Kim’s parents had met at Howard University. Her mom was a pediatric oncologist and her dad taught ninth- and tenth-grade history at the National Cathedral School. He liked to joke that he—and Kim, when she’d been a student there, which was one of his perks as a faculty member—was a nice splash of color for the school. As far as Kim could tell, she was the only person in her graduating class who hadn’t gone directly to college, and even though her parents had eventually come around to her desire to serve, they still expected her to go to college at some point. While Kim’s family wasn’t rich compared with most of her friends at the National Cathedral School, they were well-off, and that made them seem like billionaires compared with Sue.
Sue Chirp came to the Marines straight from the backwoods of West Virginia. Kim hadn’t really thought there was a backwoods anymore, but meeting Sue had convinced her otherwise. Sue was smart and she was going to be a good Marine, but that was only because she didn’t really have any other choice. She’d never met her dad, and her mom cycled through a series of boyfriends and was in and out of jail, usually for drugs. Once they’d gotten to know each other a bit, Sue told Kim that the scar on her arm was a burn from when she was six and her mom’s meth cooking had gone awry. But the Marines were a great equalizer, and despite their very different upbringings, with Sue white, poor, and mostly neglected, with the armed forces her only way out, and with Kim black, relatively wealthy, and the focus of her parents’ lives, choosing the Marines over the easier path that had been laid before her, the two of them had become very good friends. Maybe it was just that they were both women trying to make their way through what had always been a man’s world, or maybe it was just that Sue was nice and smart. And funny.
“How long do you think we’re going to be on these buses?” Sue asked. “Long enough for the brass to figure out that some of their Marines can’t piss in bottles?”
Duran, who had a bit of a thing for Sue, leaned back, holding his cards to his chest. “I’ll hold the bottle for you if you want to try.”
“You into golden showers, Duran?” Sue said.
That got Sue a laugh, and it made Kim smile. She’d been trying to persuade Sue to give Duran a chance. He was a good guy, and from what Sue had told her about her dating history, a good guy was something she wasn’t used to. Besides, with the Chinese dropping nukes and spiders eating India and this fucked-up deployment, why not?
Kim shoved her pack to the floor, turned all the way around, kneeled on the seat, and folded her arms on the seat back to make herself more comfortable. “Can’t be that long, right? No way we’d be on school buses if we were going to be traveling more than an hour or two. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”
Sue unclipped the gas mask that was bouncing off the outside of her pack. She held it up to her face. “You see this thing? It’s like three sizes too big for me, like they decided to make a gas mask that could fit a grizzly bear. If there’s gas or bio, or whatever it is they think they’re trying to get us ready for in such a hurry, it won’t matter if my mask is on or not. The fucking thing doesn’t fit.” She clipped the mask back to her pack. “We fought a war with Humvees that couldn’t withstand a basic blast from an IED, and we’ve spent the last couple of days getting on and off planes, jumping up and sitting down. And you’re banking on something making sense in the military? You’re telling me that putting us on school buses means we aren’t going very far?” She shrugged. “Want to put some money on it?”
“Yeah, but a school bus means—”
“A school bus means things are really fucked,” Sue said. “You know how people get about that sort of stuff. Armed troops of any kind on US soil make citizens freak the fuck out, so what do you think it’s going to do to people when they see us loaded up in little yellow school buses?” She reached down to touch her M16. “We ain’t exactly toting Scooby Doo lunch boxes here. If this is a big enough deal that they’re requisitioning school buses, something is clearly fucked. So yeah, I’m a little concerned that my gas mask doesn’t fit.”
“Come on. You know you’re not going to need a gas mask.”
Honky Joe held up three aces. Mitts swore, and Goons just calmly handed his cards to Duran. Honky Joe gave his cards to Duran as well, and then turned to Sue and Kim. “Gas mask? Maybe. Maybe not. But I agree that this is fucked up. With the nuke, deploying somewhere closer to China maybe makes sense, but we’re deploying stateside. That, my friend, is a big deal.” He leaned over Sue and tapped on the window. “You see that?”
They were driving past flatbeds loaded with chain-link fencing and posts. Each truck was loaded to the gills, the trucks themselves five abreast in a line that must have stretched close to a mile. It took the school buses more than two minutes to pass the trucks.
“You already know how big a deal it is to deploy troops on domestic soil,” Honky Joe said. “But that’s a bigger deal. What do you think that fencing is for? We’ve got to be setting up internment camps or something. Who for this time? Who we trying to keep locked up?”
Kim looked down at Sue’s gas mask as it jiggled atop her pack. The glass eyes and filter canister made it look menacing, bug-like. “No,” Kim said. “You don’t deploy troops in the United States unless you’re expecting an invasion. Or something. My bet is it’s a something. Gas masks? It’s not who. It’s what. And the fences aren’t for an internment camp. Think of it as a quarantine. The question isn’t who are we trying to keep out, but what are we trying to keep out?”
Sue held the oversize gas mask up to her face again. “Fuck,” she said, drawling the word out. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
American University,
Washington, DC
Bark was crying again. It was eight o’clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. Melanie had slept for maybe four hours, and Bark was crying again.
Unbelievable. Okay, Melanie was willing to admit that maybe she could have handled it with more tact, that given how little sleep they’d been getting and how hard they’d been working since the egg sac arrived, this wasn’t the ideal time, but the minute she’d told him it was over she felt nothing but relief. Relief and annoyance. Seriously. Unbelievable. He started crying li
ke she’d been his high school girlfriend. She was pretty sure Julie and Patrick weren’t aware of her and Bark’s affair before, but whatever hope she had of continued discretion had gone out the window because Bark just could not keep his shit together. The good thing, she supposed, was that neither Julie nor Patrick seemed judgmental about it. There was a time when they would have tsk-tsked her and called her a slut behind her back, but now they mostly seemed like they were annoyed by Bark’s constant crying. If anything, Julie seemed as if she might be impressed that Melanie had gotten a little bit of what she wanted. Score one for feminism, Melanie supposed. The downside of feminism was probably right in front of her, though: instead of putting a brave face on it, Bark was just standing there, in the middle of the lab, dripping tears. Like a leaky faucet, not even bothering to wipe his face. Julie was drawing the venom from the dead spider, Patrick was prepping the solution, Melanie was headed to her office to give Manny a call, and Bark was standing around crying.
Even though she had been intending to end things with him for a while, the reason she finally went ahead with it was at least partly Agent Rich. He wasn’t a dreamboat physically like Bark, but he wasn’t as unimpressive-looking as Manny was either. Not to dump on Manny, who was a good guy, but he wasn’t what Agent Rich was. Which was a man. Agent Rich was a true-blue man. With handcuffs. There was a real part of Melanie, even with all that was going on in the lab, that hoped he’d stick around DC and give her a chance to see what he looked like wearing nothing but his handcuffs.
There was only a part of her that had wanted Agent Rich to stay, however, because the bigger part of her wasn’t sure she’d ever want to leave her lab. These things were fucking incredible. And she’d started calling them “things” because she wasn’t sure they were really even spiders. At least not the way she’d come to think of spiders. There are thirty-five thousand species of spiders, and they’ve been on earth for at least three hundred million years. From the very origin of humanity, spiders have been out there, scuttling along the edges of firelight, spinning webs in the woods, and scaring the hell out of people, even though, with a few rare exceptions, they are no real threat. But these were something different.
Melanie had never understood the panic people felt about spiders. What was it that made people so afraid? Was it the eight legs, each limb both separate and a part of the spider? Or, with larger spiders, was it the hair? Was there something about seeing something as familiar as hair on something as alien as a spider that made people take leave of their senses? Even if you knew that the Mygalomorphae infraorder of spiders, which includes tarantulas, had utricating hairs, it’s not as if utricating hairs were much of a threat to humans. At worst, they caused mild irritation. And the few species of spiders that could harm or even kill a human weren’t always the ones that looked the scariest to people. None of it made sense to Melanie. Dog bites sent close to a million people a year to the emergency room for stitches, but spiders—unless a brown recluse bit you, and that was still pretty damn rare—didn’t do much other than keep the mosquito population down. And yet, a spider in the tub was enough to make a grown man scream. Even as a kid, Melanie hadn’t been scared. She distinctly remembered being five and trapping a spider for her mother. She’d popped a glass over the spider, brushed the spider in, and then brought it outside. Maybe that wasn’t unusual; kids were taught to be afraid by their parents. But who had taught the parents to be afraid in the first place? No, Melanie had never understood being afraid of spiders.
Until now.
Finally, there was a reason for her to be afraid of spiders.
She’d explained all that to Manny when he called her yesterday, before Steph grounded civilian air traffic across the country, but she was going to her office right now and shutting the door behind her to call Manny, because after another night of studying them, she’d figured out that while one of these spiders was impressive, and the brood of them in the insectarium was kind of frightening, the way they acted together was scaring the shit out of her. She was beginning to worry that grounding the planes might not be enough.
Manny’s phone rang through to voice mail, but before she even started leaving a message there was the beep of Manny calling her back.
“If it’s about our relationship, Melanie, we need to do it another time.”
“Fuck you, Manny. You called me on this,” Melanie said. She wasn’t really angry, though. She knew Manny. Knew he was making the joke because he was already worried about why she was calling. “It’s about the spiders.”
“Please tell me you’ve decided we’re overreacting. We’re getting killed on grounding the planes, Alex is freaking out, and we’ve actually deployed soldiers on US soil to get ready to enforce quarantine zones. The ACLU is pitching a fit, we’re breaking a half-dozen laws, and we still aren’t sure this is a real thing.”
“What about India?” Melanie asked. Manny didn’t say anything, so Melanie pushed it. “There’s been more news out of India, hasn’t there?”
“Not publicly,” Manny said.
“But you aren’t lifting the flight ban, and you aren’t calling back the troops.”
“No.”
“So it’s bad?”
“Melanie, why are you calling?”
“I think it’s bad, Manny. Some of this is speculation, and I’m going to need to study them a lot longer, get more information, really spend some time—”
“Melanie,” he said, cutting her off. “I get it. This isn’t for publication. This isn’t going into your tenure file or getting peer-reviewed, okay? Wait. Hold on.”
She could hear the muffled sounds of talking in the background. Manny’s voice distinct but the words unrecognizable, lost to ringing phones and a crowd.
Manny came back. “We’ve got other scientists and advisors and everybody and their mother telling us what they think is going on. None of it makes any sense, Melanie. This might as well be an alien invasion for all of what we understand.”
“It is.”
“What?”
“An alien invasion. I mean, not exactly,” she said, “but sort of.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay,” Manny said. “We came to you because Steph and I knew you’d be discreet and knew you were an expert, but right now what I need is someone I can trust. Which means you. So I don’t care if you haven’t done all the research you need to. I don’t care if it hasn’t been peer-reviewed or any of that other stuff. All I need to know is this: Is it solid?”
Melanie hesitated. She hated it. She was a scientist, and she wanted more information. She wanted proof. But it was solid.
“So spiders are basically hermits. Antisocial and aggressive toward other spiders. They like to be alone. But that’s not true for all spiders. Social spiders are rare, but they exist. Any spiders, in captivity, will form small colonies. Even black widows will do it. But out in the field, in the wild, there are only a few species that do it. The most well known is the Anelosimus eximius. They’ll have colonies of forty or fifty thousand spiders.”
“Fifty thousand? Are you fucking kidding me? Fifty thousand of those giant things in your lab?”
“No, that’s the thing. Anelosimus eximius are small. They work together to care for the brood—the babies—and to build webs that can catch bigger and better prey, but that only means large insects, the occasional bat or bird. It’s a sort of cooperative. They don’t really hunt together. Not in any real sense, or at least not in the way people usually think of hunting. And they are social, not eusocial. But these are different. I don’t think they are just social. I think they are eusocial.”
“Meaning? What’s the difference?”
“Social means they work together, but eusocial means . . . Okay, so there’s the initial definition and then there’s the expanded definition that E. O. Wilson came up with.”
The voices in the background on Manny’s end suddenly got louder and then softer. “Melanie, I don’t have time for
you to be in professor mode. I need this quick. Give me a rundown on the phone and then do me a favor: hop in a cab and come over. I’m going to want you to give this to Steph directly and be ready to answer questions. So, in a nutshell, what are we looking at?”
“Ants,” she said. “Ants and bees and termites. Two kinds of mole rats also, but really, think of them as ants. These spiders aren’t like spiders. They’re like ants.”
“Like ants?”
“Eusocial groups are characterized by each individual taking on a specific role in their colony. Digging tunnels, laying eggs, all that stuff. And at some point, for some kinds of eusocial animals, they reach a point where they can’t take on a different role. They become a certain kind of specialist, and all they can do is what they can do. Like a machine on an assembly line. They do one thing.”
“So you’re telling me that these particular spiders are specialized, that they’ve turned into little machines?”
“Look, we’ve dissected two, and they’ve been the same; neither one can lay eggs. So there’s no question that there are more than one kind of these spiders. They have to be able to reproduce. But the ones we’ve looked at are specialized. Again, I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty, or that all or even most of them are like this—”
“Melanie.” He wasn’t angry, but he was firm. “Enough. I get it. You might be wrong. But you might be right. What are we dealing with? People here are starting to panic. I’m willing to take the risk that you’ve got it wrong, because right now, right this minute, we don’t know what the hell is going on. The spiders in your lab are the same as the one that crawled out of Bill Henderson’s face, and we think they’re probably the same things that are on the rampage in India and caused the Chinese to drop a nuke. As far as I know, you’re the only person who’s actually studied one up close. When I was in your lab, you told me they were scary, but they were just spiders. And now you’re calling me to say maybe not. Maybe these spiders are something else. You’re saying these spiders are like little machines that can do only one thing. So please, just tell me, Melanie, what’s the one thing these spiders are designed to do?”
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