“Feed,” Melanie said. “They’re designed to feed.”
Desperation, California
Yesterday had started off like a normal day. Well, other than that terrifying video from India and rumors that mutant spiders were devouring people in Delhi, followed by the grounding of all air travel in the United States, it had started off like a normal day. Gordo made pancakes and then he and Amy took Claymore for a long walk. Then, while Amy watched two episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gordo worked out on the treadmill, showered, and scrolled through the Internet looking for information. There wasn’t much, however. He spent most of his time wallowing in rumors. After lunch, Shotgun and Fred invited them over to play Catan. A normal day. And then: a coup d’état.
It was a peaceful coup d’état, but it was a coup d’état nonetheless: Gordo and Shotgun were no longer in charge. After Amy beat all three men at Catan, which was a standard occurrence, Gordo and Shotgun went down to the workshop to take a look at Shotgun’s new band saw. When they came back up, the plans had changed: Fred and Amy had decided the two couples were going to ride out the next couple of weeks together, and that was that. One minute the plan was that, come the apocalypse—zombie, nuclear, environmental, or otherwise—the couples would retreat to their respective homes for survival, and the next minute it had been decided survival was not something that should be done alone.
“Look,” Fred said, his arm around Amy’s waist, “if you both are going to insist on going into lockdown mode, it’s going to be a lot nicer if we do it together. Face it. This idea is much more fabulous.”
Neither Gordo nor Shotgun objected, because they both realized the immediate truth: it was much more fabulous.
Gordo had to hand it to Fred. Shotgun was an engineer and about the straightest gay man Gordo had ever met, and almost as if in response, his husband, Fred, seemed to go as far as he could in the other direction. It was as if the only way Fred knew how to be gay was loudly and stereotypically. Which, frankly, was a lot of fun. And Fred and Amy fed off each other’s energy. Fred was entertaining even by himself, but with Amy, the two of them were like a superhero social-hour comedy team. While Gordo and Shotgun could spend hours in the garage gapping spark plugs and checking bearings, Fred and Amy could spend the same time in the kitchen, whipping up appetizers and cocktails. Gordo loved his wife, but fair was fair: Fred and Amy together made things better than good. They made them, well, okay, fabulous. It was going to take a little emotional energy to get used to, because Gordo had always thought the end of the world as we know it to be a rather gloomy proposition—ashes and fire and corpses and all that Cormac McCarthy stuff—but with Amy and Fred running the show, it was a really well-thought-out music playlist and artichoke dip in an underground shelter that looked more like an incredibly hip loft without windows than the sort of sad bomb-shelter bunkers that were the standard fare for survivalists.
“So much of this is just waiting around,” Amy said. She stepped over and gave Gordo a kiss. “I’d rather wait around with company than by ourselves. There’s only so much time I can spend watching television while you clean your guns and double-check the radiation seals on the shelter. I’m sorry, but it makes sense and you know it.”
“And we have the space,” Fred said. “Somebody, and I’m not going to name names, but we all know I’m talking about my husband, has us stocked to live out five lifetimes down here. I mean, come on. The man even has tampons in storage, for God’s sake. The only things we don’t have that you’ll need are clothing and dog food. Though, if Claymore doesn’t mind canned peaches,” Fred said, bending over to scratch behind the dog’s ear, “he’ll be fine.”
So Amy and Gordo went home to pack. Amy filled two suitcases with clothes while Gordo loaded up the back of his truck with forty-pound bags of dog food—if the shit really did hit the fan, Claymore could transition to human food, but Gordo knew from experience that it gave the Lab some pretty bad flatulence—and tried to decide what things he might need that Shotgun didn’t already have. By the time Amy was ready to go, Gordo had realized the genius of Amy and Fred’s plan was that there wasn’t anything other than dog food and their clothes that Shotgun and Fred did not have stocked. Ultimately, the only extra thing he took was his Cooper Arms Model 52 Western Classic rifle and a dozen boxes of twenty-round .30-06 ammunition. It wasn’t his most expensive rifle, but it was his favorite. He could cluster three rounds in a three-inch circle from five hundred yards with it. If it really came to it, Shotgun’s armory was loaded for bear with guns and a few other things that weren’t exactly guns and weren’t exactly legal, but the Cooper Arms 52, even if it had only a three-shot magazine, was a sort of security blanket. He wasn’t going to take on rampaging zombie hordes with it, but if he needed to take out one person from a distance, it was the rifle he’d choose.
They were back and unpacked in one of the spare bedrooms in less than two hours. By seven they were eating dinner, by eight they were pleasantly drunk and playing Scrabble, by ten Gordo and Amy were in bed, and by six the next morning Gordo was getting himself a cup of coffee and feeling good enough about the decision to move into Shotgun’s place that he was beginning to think maybe it had partly been his idea. Shotgun’s setup really was sweet, and they did have a better chance of surviving the end of the world if they were working together. Plus, even though Gordo hated admitting it, it really was sort of more exciting being prepared with Shotgun. Survival was great, but it was even cooler to have somebody to gloat with. What was the fun of surviving if you couldn’t take pleasure in being more prepared and smarter than everybody else? It was exciting to think that these years of getting ready, all this effort, were going to pay off.
Gordo poured some cream into his coffee, taking an extra moment to savor it. That would be the first thing to go: fresh dairy, fresh produce, fresh meat. Freeze-dried, frozen, shelf-stable. That’s what would come as soon as they had to bunker up. But in the meantime, there was fresh cream and no reason he couldn’t drink his coffee outside. Besides, Claymore was already dancing around his feet. He’d trained Claymore to do his business on a five-by-five piece of artificial turf, but it made sense to take the pup out for a run while he could. Gordo walked up the stairs, through the double set of blast and radiation doors, and into the shell house that stood over the shelter. As soon as he opened the front door Claymore darted out, down the porch stairs, and into the dirt yard. The chocolate Lab took a piss against a boulder and then started rolling around in the dust. He seemed pleased with himself. Gordo took a sip of his coffee and then turned at the sound of a scrape on the wood.
“Didn’t see you there,” Gordo said.
Shotgun nodded. He was sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, a cup of coffee on the small table next to him, a tablet in his hand. “Couldn’t sleep. Just wanted to catch up on the news.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Well, everything. Same as yesterday. I guess a little more news out of India. Giant spiders, supposedly. There are a ton of pictures, but I’ve got to be honest: it looks like somebody went to town with Photoshop. Hard to believe it’s not a hoax. That being said, the AP reported at least two really big explosions, and people are panicking. Evidently almost all communication systems in Delhi are overloaded. Clearly, something is going on.”
“And here?”
“Just rumors. Crazy stuff. A lot of reports that troops have been mobilizing. Conspiracy folks are freaking out: It’s the first step to the government enslaving us all. Hope you slept with that pretty little rifle of yours,” he said, “because according to the whack nuts, the president is sending the suits in to take away our God-given right to bear arms.”
Gordo laughed. That was one of the things he liked about Shotgun. He knew there was something a little crazy about preparing for the end of the world, about moving to Desperation, California, and building a shelter, but you could drive a truck through the gap between the real estate of a little crazy that Gordo liked to think he and Shotgun occup
ied and the lot of crazy real estate that some preppers lived on. Most preppers seemed to inhabit a world where the government was always one step away from turning us all into slaves, one step away from a massive global conspiracy led by the Jews, a plot by the blacks, an invasion by the Chinese, another terrorist attack. Some of it was racist or anti-Semitic or paranoid, but most of it was just downright loony.
“The black helicopter brigade is out in full force,” Gordo said.
Claymore got up from the ground and gave himself a full head-to-tail shake. A small dust cloud poofed off him.
“No kidding,” Shotgun said. “Black helicopters everywhere. Somebody posted that—”
“Hey,” Gordo said, cutting him off. “Do you hear that? It sounds like . . .”
They were both quiet for a second, but then Claymore started barking. His tail dropped down and curled between his legs. He was pointed at Gordo and Shotgun, but looking up, over the roof. Shotgun got to his feet and stood next to Gordo. The two of them glanced at each other and then jogged down the steps of the porch until they were out in the yard near Claymore. There wasn’t anything to see. Gordo reached down, rubbed at Claymore’s ear, and then wrapped his hand around the dog’s muzzle, quieting his barking.
Both he and Shotgun heard it. A soft thwap, thwap, thwap getting louder. The sound bounced off the dirt and desert and rocks.
The helicopter came in low and fast, buzzing the house and leaving a swirl of dust. It was too quick for them to do anything but turn and watch it fly past.
“What the fuck?” Gordo let go of Claymore’s muzzle. The dog sprinted twenty or thirty yards after the helicopter and then planted himself in the dirt, barking again.
“Okay,” Shotgun said. “That wasn’t just me, was it? That was a black helicopter.”
“Yep,” Gordo said.
“Huh.”
“Shotgun,” Gordo said. “How do you feel about taking your plane out for a spin, get a look at what we have around us?”
“Absolutely.”
Shotgun went to get the six-seater ready, and Gordo brought Claymore back downstairs, putting him in the room where Amy was still sleeping. He took a second to kiss her on the forehead before grabbing a pair of binoculars. By the time he was in the garage, Shotgun had the doors open and the plane ready to go. They were up in the air fifteen minutes after the helicopter passed over.
And two minutes after that, Gordo was worried.
Desperation, California
Kim probably wouldn’t have noticed the small airplane above them if Honky Joe hadn’t pointed it out.
“Civilian,” he said. “They better bug the fuck out of here or they’re going to be eating a missile.”
“Come on,” Duran said. “They aren’t going to shoot down some Cessna just for flying over us.”
They’d driven the convoy through Desperation, a pissant town, if you could call a few bars, a gas station, and a pizza place a town, and been ordered to halt about a mile out on an open plain of brush, scrub, and dirt. The only thing within shooting distance was a shitty-looking trailer, and sure enough, they’d barely gotten out of the bus before some redneck on an ATV came barreling toward them. Kim had been close enough to catch bits and pieces, but Honky Joe, as was his way, had the whole thing.
“Guy just about had an aneurysm. All ‘Get off my land this, and the Constitution that,’ and all that shit. I pointed out to him that he was actually on state-owned land and shouldn’t be there in the first place, and he started to argue against that until I also pointed out we had more machine guns than he did. Dude came pretty close to getting himself forcibly removed.” They all laughed, but Honky Joe shook his head. “You guys don’t get it. This isn’t right. Why the fuck are we setting up here? Why not on a base somewhere? This side of the road might technically be government land, but what’s here? Why outside this town? It’s the middle of nowhere. The only thing it’s got going for it is it’s kind of near the highway. I think we’re here because it will be an easy place to redirect traffic. It’s a holding pen.”
“For what?” Kim asked.
“People.”
Nobody said anything to that. They just looked at one another grimly and did their jobs.
They’d worked through the night, and the longer they’d worked under the portable floodlights, the more what Honky Joe said made sense to Kim. They unloaded fencing from the flatbeds and set it up in a great perimeter, and there was no getting away from it: it looked like a holding pen. No, actually, it looked like a clean version of a refugee camp. Trucks and troop transports kept coming in; support material, portable toilets, water trucks, and tents getting set up. There was a constant stream of traffic. Trucks with supplies and trucks that were mobile buildings. Kim couldn’t help but wonder where it all came from. Los Angeles? San Francisco? Las Vegas? All three? By six in the morning it was a terrifying sight: the US military mobilized. Near as Kim could tell, there were in the neighborhood of four or five thousand troops, a full brigade. It was fucked-up. This wasn’t some sort of make-work training drill.
She was tired, and grateful for the coffee. The food could be pretty bad sometimes, and the coffee occasionally tasted like it had been filtered through socks, but it was always full of caffeine. She looked up and watched the tiny plane doing a lazy circle around the small city they were building. A black helicopter was buzzing around maybe a mile away. There were a couple of AH-64 Apaches loaded with missiles and ready to be all badass, but they were on the ground, rotors stilled. The airborne helicopter wasn’t marked, but as near as Kim could tell, it was the sort of bird that muckety-mucks in suits liked to play in. After a few minutes of the plane circling overhead, the helicopter, which had been lingering out near where flatbeds were still pulling in, peeled off hard and up toward the direction of the plane. Whoever was in the plane, whatever civilian it was at the yoke, wasn’t curious enough to stay; the plane straightened course and headed out. The helicopter tracked it for a few more seconds then turned back to where it had been hovering, came in low, and settled.
The lieutenant gave a yell for the platoon to finish up. Kim drained her coffee, pulled her work gloves on, and looked at her squad, Honky Joe, Sue, and the few other soldiers around her. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever the fuck we’re doing, just look alive. Something’s coming down the pike.”
Point Fermin Park,
Los Angeles, California
Sparky was going nuts. To be fair, Sparky was a twelve-year-old coonhound, so he was kind of nuts to begin with, but he was braying as if there were a monster around the corner. He yanked on his leash again, but this time Andy was ready for it and didn’t stumble. Andy Anderson was rounding eighty years old, a retired entertainment lawyer and widower. With no grandkids and his friends dropping dead right and left, he had two things left that he cared about: baseball, and the damned dog. The two things intersected. He’d named the dog Sparky in honor of his favorite manager: Sparky Anderson, the man himself. Andy would have named the dog after one of his heroes anyway, but he liked the idea that Sparky Anderson was a Detroit legend who had grown up in Los Angeles. Not that many people knew Sparky Anderson had moved to Los Angeles as a kid. If they knew Sparky Anderson, they knew him only as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds or the Detroit Tigers. They sure didn’t know him for his utterly forgettable career as a major league player. But Andy didn’t hold that against him. Andy had never been much of a ball player either, blowing out his arm after only two years of mediocre pitching on a mediocre team at a mediocre college. But he was born and bred Detroit, and it was for Sparky Anderson’s time in Detroit that Andy had decided to pay homage to the man. The year the Tigers won, 1984, had been the best year of Andy’s life. And that was saying a lot, because Andy’s life had been good. But the year the Tigers won the World Series had been the best of all those years; everything had swung his way, including the Detroit hitters. Never mind that Andy had lived in Los Angeles since 1971, he still thought of himself as a scrappy Detroit kid. H
e never tired of the joke of having a dog named Sparky Anderson.
But Sparky—the dog, not the deceased MLB manager—was giving him fits today. The dog had started by taking a shit right in the middle of the kitchen sometime during the night, a thing he was wont to do once or twice a month. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered Andy. The dog was old, and there wasn’t much you could do about it other than make sure you had paper towels and spray cleaner at home. He was tired this morning, however. He’d stayed up late to watch the president’s speech and then the endless bloviating on cable news backed by crappy, boring footage of empty airports, parked planes, and that stupid, shaky video from India. The president said nothing of any substance—the threat was dire enough that she was willing to take “unprecedented action in defense of the country and our citizens, shutting down air travel and closing the borders as a temporary matter” even if she wasn’t willing to specify what the threat was beyond referencing “the recent events in China and India”—and the news people were left with nothing real. Just damned-fool speculation. Some of the talking heads were saying that China was setting itself up to try to invade Japan, and at least a few of the opinion pukers said it was some sort of virus, like the plague. But the consensus, if there was one, was that there were hordes of spiders on the loose. Or swarms of spiders. Whatever you call a bunch of spiders. What you should really call a bunch of spiders, Andy thought, was horseshit.
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