The Hatching

by Ezekiel Boone

  So he’d been up late, and then Sparky woke him up before 5:00 A.M. by starting with his coonhound’s warbling bark, calling out with some real distress before taking a dump on the kitchen floor. Andy had cleaned it up and then parked himself in his chair to watch the same cycle of drivel on the news until, just before it was time for their noon walk, Sparky took another dump on the kitchen floor. Even if it hadn’t been time for their walk, the smell, even after it was cleaned up, would have been enough to force Andy out of the house. He drove the two of them to Point Fermin Park. The dog howled the whole way. Sparky seemed intent on being a little prick all day long. He was an old dog, and normally content to sniff at things, lift his leg occasionally, and amble down the path, but today Sparky was yanking on his leash. It was giving Andy fits. Andy didn’t have many worries left—he had had plenty of money, and he was healthy enough that he figured he’d be fine for a while and then just go ahead and die of old age—but breaking his hip was one of his few real terrors. It was one thing to grow old and lonely, but it was another to finish out his days bedridden and in pain.

  Even with Sparky being a prick, the day was beautiful. But it was Los Angeles. It was always beautiful. The end of April meant it was cool enough for Andy to slip on his leather jacket, but by one or one thirty, it would be warm enough for him to sit outside with Sparky at the café. They went to different parks on different days, but most of the time he tried to go for their noon walks near the water. That was the other thing about Los Angeles. It had movie stars and palm trees and sunny skies, and it had the ocean. They’d started at one end of the park, and Andy had almost dragged Sparky the whole way to the other. The damn dog lunging against the leash and baying away. Maybe an earthquake was coming, Andy thought. He knew dogs did that. Predicted things like earthquakes and tornadoes. And wouldn’t that be a ball of crap, if the big one came when he was walking in a park at the edge of the ocean. The whole thing would slide right in.

  Sparky started to move toward Andy and then turned and yanked at the leash again. Andy figured he should just give up on the walk, but he didn’t want the dog to think he could win. He reined in the leash and then leaned over and scratched the dog under his jowls. “Come on, boy,” Andy said. “Can we just finish our walk without you turning me into a cripple? You walk like a good dog, and when we’re done we’ll stop for a burger and some French fries. How does that sound? French fries? Who wants French fries?”

  Sparky, evidently, wanted French fries. It wasn’t enough to suddenly turn him back into a good dog, but it was clear to Andy that he recognized the words. He should have. It was part of their routine. Hop in the car, a walk in a park along the water somewhere, Sparky taking a little nap while Andy sat on a bench and read or just stared out into space and let the time tick away, and then a stop for a burger and fries on the way home. They always stopped somewhere with outdoor seating and Andy would end up giving as much of his lunch to Sparky as he ate himself. It wasn’t healthy for either of them. Andy didn’t try to kid himself that their ambling walks made up for the greasy lunches he shared with his dog, but at this point, he wasn’t sure he cared. There was nothing like a burger, and feeding Sparky French fry after French fry, the dog daintily nipping them from his fingers, was one of life’s little pleasures. But first, they had to finish their walk. That was the way it worked.

  Near the end of the path, Sparky started being a prick again. The dog stopped walking and pulled back on his leash hard enough to make Andy stumble. At the same time, Sparky started howling again. Normally, Andy thought of Sparky’s noise as a sort of singing, but today he was through with it. He was about to just pack it in and let Sparky lead the way—he was sure pulling on his leash, in a hurry to get somewhere—when Andy noticed the ship.

  It was one of those container ships. Not particularly remarkable here, overlooking the Port of Los Angeles. At least, not normally a remarkable sight. It was huge. One of those new superfreighters, probably coming from China. He couldn’t imagine what the thing would look like up close. Given the size and where he was standing on the coastline, Andy figured it was maybe a mile out from port. A mile and a half at most. And it was really moving. The size of the ship wasn’t what captured his attention. It was a behemoth, but there were other ships out in the water big enough that this one didn’t really stand out as that much bigger. The difference was that this one was moving fast. Andy didn’t know much about shipping, but it just didn’t look right. Like a bus coming into a parking lot at full speed. Except this bus was loaded up with containers. Each metal cube was a different color, the ship a kaleidoscope, a beautiful puzzle.

  Andy pushed his glasses up on his nose. There were some weird shadows on the boxes. They didn’t look right to him. They were more like lines, or streaks of paint. No. Like some kid had scribbled here and there with a thick-tipped marker, leaving marks on top of the picture. Except . . . Were the lines moving?

  Sparky was really howling now, almost crying, and pulling hard against the leash. Andy had to dig in to hold his ground. “Come on, Sparky,” he said. “Give me a break, you little monster. I just want to see . . .” He trailed off, because he suddenly understood just what it was he was going to see. Shadows or lines or whatever they were, the ship was still bearing ahead. He had no real idea how fast it was moving. Fifteen, twenty miles an hour? Fast enough that it looked quick against the backdrop of the ships that weren’t moving. Fast enough that it wasn’t a mile offshore anymore. Fast enough that Andy knew there was no chance of the ship stopping in time.

  The dog was still pulling him hard away from the path, toward where he had parked the car. After another quick look at the ship, Andy turned and let Sparky lead him away. The thing with the boat seemed bad.

  It quickly went from bad to worse.

  The Mathias Maersk Triple-E was loaded with goods from all over China. Electronics and T-shirts and kitchen knives. Eighteen thousand containers to fill America’s malls and homes. But some of those containers originated in Xinjiang Province, and now there were no crew members left alive to stop the ship from smashing into the Port of Los Angeles.

  It would have been basic back-of-the-envelope math for guys like Gordo and Shotgun. The ship was coming in at eighteen miles per hour with a total deadweight of near 160 million tons when it ran aground. To calculate the kinetic energy, they would have simply plugged in the numbers: 1/2MV2, or 1/2 (160,000,000 kg × (8m/s × 8m/s)). Roughly 5,120,000,000 joules. Or, to put it more simply, when the Mathias Maersk Triple-E plowed into the port at 12:47 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, the impact was the equivalent of an explosion of 2,500 pounds of TNT.

  But Gordo and Shotgun were back in the shelter, talking to Amy and Fred about what the army was doing setting up fences in their backyard. Neither of them was there to run the math or to see the Mathias Maersk Triple-E run aground. The truth was that almost nobody was watching. So many things were automated at the port that during the lunch hour, there was barely anybody there. The first person to die from the actual impact was Cody Dickinson, who was also the only person who should have figured out there was something wrong with the Mathias Maersk Triple-E. But instead of doing his job, Cody Dickinson had smoked twenty dollars’ worth of pot and fallen asleep in his seven-hundred-dollar Herman Miller Aeron chair. He had the cushy office job because he had seniority, and he had seniority because he was sixty and had been a longshoreman for forty-two years, and because he had been working as a longshoreman for forty-two years, he’d worked as a longshoreman when working as a longshoreman actually meant working, which meant his back was wrecked, which was why he had the seven-hundred-dollar Herman Miller Aeron chair, but his back still killed him, and smoking a ton of pot was the only thing that really helped. So he was asleep when the ship ran aground and the impact caused the roof to collapse and kill him where he sat.

  The shock wave was enough to easily carry the eight hundred yards from the point of impact to where the P. Lanster Insurance Agency sat just outside the fencing securing
the Port of Los Angeles. The P. Lanster Insurance Agency was a low-slung office building, and at 12:47 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, Philip Lanster Jr., the son of P. Lanster himself, was the only occupant of the office. Philip Lanster Jr. had been trying to get his dad to move the agency to a better location for years. The office was inconvenient for everybody, dingy and too big for them, since they had only five employees. The benefit was that there were windows everywhere, and they all had views of the ocean. This afternoon, however, Philip Lanster Jr. was glad the office was inconveniently located. It meant that when his dad and the other employees went out for lunch, he’d have more time to finish cooking the books. He’d skimmed off only six grand, just enough to cover what he’d lost in Las Vegas the weekend before. A little creative paperwork, and problem solved. He was feeling pretty good about himself and had just stood up from the bookkeeper’s desk when the impact of the Mathias Maersk Triple-E’s crash made the window beside him explode into the room. If he’d still been sitting, he might have been fine, but he was just tall enough that one of the shattered pieces of glass hit him in the side of the neck. He bled to death in sixty seconds.

  He was lucky to bleed to death in sixty seconds. The first spiders were crawling through the broken window in eighty.

  Up on the hill, Julie Qi was catching her breath when the ship hit. She fell on her ass. She’d just finished a hard five miles. She fucking hated running. What kept her going was the knowledge that the only thing she hated worse was the idea of her husband leaving her for somebody younger and fitter, and in LA, unless she busted her ass, that meant almost every woman out there. Well, the fitter part. She couldn’t do much about being younger. Bradley was forty-seven, however, and Julie was only thirty, so she figured she had a little bit of a cushion with age, if not with cellulite. So it was morning aerobics, running before a late, light lunch, and then yoga in the afternoon. Bradley worked and she didn’t, which meant her job was to look good.

  It took her a moment to realize she hadn’t just fallen over for no reason—the shudder of the ground was enough to make her stumble and end up on her backside—and another moment to realize it wasn’t an earthquake. The ship was a mile away. It had run aground, but the weight and momentum were enough to drive it far enough out of the water that it almost looked comical. Julie got back to her feet and pulled her earbuds out, the music leaking into the air. “Jesus,” she said. There weren’t any flames or anything, but there didn’t need to be: the thing was like a quarter of a mile long. It looked spectacular just mangled and eating the coast. There was weird black smoke, however, Julie noticed. It sort of spilled off the ship, but instead of floating into the sky, it rolled over the edges and across the pavement.

  She unzipped her waist belt and pulled out her phone. She thought about photos, but decided instead that she’d just shoot some video. The phone had a good enough camera that she could just pull a still from the video if she wanted, and she had a partially formed thought that maybe she could sell the footage to a news station. Not that she and Bradley needed the money, but you know, it was a fun idea. Through the screen, however, it didn’t look quite as cool. The boat looked too much like some sort of toy. The image just didn’t give the right sense of scale.

  She looked up from the screen and noticed the smoke had mostly stopped coming off the ship. There were just a few tendrils dripping down the sides. But the smoke that had already come off the ship was still drifting across the ground. It had spread out a little, so it was less a single carpet of smoke than larger patches and fingers spreading out over the road and the hills, pieces taking in some of the smaller office buildings outside the fence, near where the ship had hit. She remembered from 9/11 that a lot of the workers ended up having health problems from breathing in all the bad air, and she wondered if the workers on the docks were going to have issues.

  She didn’t notice the finger of black crawling up the hill toward her.

  In the parking lot of Cabrillo Beach, Harry Roberts was pissed. He didn’t like blacks—sorry, African Americans—and if that made him racist, he was fine with that, and he didn’t like cops either, even if he liked to think of himself as a law-and-order Republican, so being arrested by two black cops was the sort of thing that got him seething. Sure, his lunch had really been more of a liquid brunch consisting entirely of Bloody Marys, but who wouldn’t want a few extra drinks with what was on the news with that crazy stuff in India, China getting ready to invade Europe, and that cunt president grounding the flights? Admittedly, he didn’t really remember leaving the restaurant and driving his car over from Manhattan Beach, and admittedly, he sure didn’t remember crashing it into the light pole, and, okay, admittedly, he could understand their initial concern, since the air bag had evidently given him a bloody nose, and his face and shirt were covered in blood, but he couldn’t believe they cuffed him and put him in the back of their cruiser. Pricks. And then, worse, as they were writing something up, there was that incredible noise, some sort of an explosion across the water.

  “Sit tight,” one of the cops had said to him. They left the windows partially open for him, but they walked across the parking lot and headed out of sight through the brush. And then, nothing for the last few minutes. Well, nothing other than the sounds of sirens, car alarms, a few screams. Harry had no clue what was going on except that he was pissed.

  Then he heard two gunshots. Two. That was all. And then one of the cops burst through the bushes, running toward the squad car but looking back over his shoulder. He made it maybe ten feet into the parking lot before he started getting covered in . . . Harry couldn’t figure it out, but the cop kept running, closing the gap from thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen feet. By the time the cop fell, barely ten feet from the cruiser, Harry had figured out the cop was covered in insects of some kind. No. Spiders. But that was all he had time to realize before they broke off from the body and came for him.

  Five minutes from the time the ship ran aground, Cody Dickinson, Philip Lanster Jr., Julie Qi, and Harry Roberts were dead. Close to a hundred other people as well. None of them able to see the threads of silk starting to twist into the air, catching and colliding, the soft breeze lifting spiders above the sand and surf and concrete that was the coast of Los Angeles, wafting over approaching ambulances and fire trucks and squad cars, sending them into the gentle noonday sun, south toward Compton and Lynwood and Chinatown, toward the 405 and the 10.

  Stornoway, Isle of Lewis,

  Outer Hebrides, Scotland

  “Perhaps a phone call or an e-mail or—”

  “Sir,” the British Airways agent said, cutting him off, “it was not our decision to cancel your fiancée’s flight, and there is nothing I can do about rescheduling her at the moment. Haven’t you heard the news?”

  Aonghas had not, in fact, heard the news that the prime minister had grounded all flights. While on Càidh Island they’d been listening to the BBC and following the news in China until that was eclipsed by the news out of India and the hysteria about spiders, and they’d heard about the American president’s overreaction in deciding to stop air travel. Typically American, Padruig said. But it turned out the UK was following in America’s panicked footsteps again. The plane that had just landed was the last one in or out until the ban was lifted. Normally, Aonghas would indeed have heard the news: in Stornoway by himself, he would have started the day as he usually did, by reading the news, and had he and Thuy still been on Càidh Island, Padruig would have had the BBC on the radio. But he wasn’t on Càidh Island with his grandfather, and he certainly wasn’t in Stornoway by himself: they’d left the island at the first hint of dawn. It was a flat-out lie to Aonghas’s grandfather. They told Padruig that Thuy’s flight was early, but the truth was her flight wasn’t until the evening: they just wanted to spend the day alone together, in bed, without worrying that the old man would wonder what they were up to. Not that Aonghas’s grandfather was a prude, just that Aonghas knew he wasn’t going to see his girlfriend—no, his fia
ncée—again for two weeks once Thuy boarded her flight back to Edinburgh.

  He was still sort of amazed at how well the trip had gone. Sure, his grandfather had accidently asked Thuy to marry Aonghas for him, but she’d said yes, so there was no real harm in that. And for all his worry that Padruig might not take to Thuy, by the time they said good-bye to him, his grandfather dressed impeccably even just for the early-morning trip to the dock, Aonghas had a niggling fear Padruig might like Thuy more than he liked Aonghas himself. And Thuy had fallen head over heels in love with Càidh Island and the castle. She loved sitting in the library reading by the fire, spent a full hour down in the wine cellar with his grandfather, sat on the rocks and looked out at the waves. The trip was an unqualified success. The only problem was that, after they had gone to the trouble of sneaking away early for a little private time, it looked as though Thuy wasn’t going to be able to leave after all. Really, though, was that such a bad thing?

  The good news was that at an airport as small as Stornoway’s, it wasn’t much of a walk to the parking lot, and even with the passengers getting off the last plane to land on the island, it was easy in, easy out. “We can pick up some pasta and vegetables, maybe watch a movie. I’m sure you’ll be able to fly out tomorrow. I can’t imagine the prime minister is going to swallow this spider bollocks much longer. The upside is that you’ll never have a better excuse for missing a little school, and you won’t exactly have a glut of free time once you start your residency. Plus, you know,” Aonghas said, loading her bag back into the Range Rover, “there are worse things than being stuck with your fiancé for another day. Fiancé,” he said again, rolling the word in his mouth. “I like the sound of that.”