The Hatching

by Ezekiel Boone

  “The news channels and the Internet have been awash in speculation the last few days, and the truth is that the facts of this situation are not entirely clear.” Stephanie leaned in toward the camera, and despite himself, despite knowing the words that were about to come out of her mouth, Manny found himself responding in kind, leaning toward her. “What I know for sure, however, is that Americans are dying, and my job is to protect this country.” She paused to take a breath. Here it comes, Manny thought. It made him feel sick. He knew it was the wrong thought to have at a moment like this, but he was a political animal and he couldn’t help himself. All he could think of was that she was going to lose the election with the next sentence. “I am declaring the states of California, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada under martial law.”

  There was more. Curfews. Pleas for calm. A stern reminder to stay indoors with windows and doors closed, to try to seal any possible entrances. But above all, it was Stephanie sounding presidential. Authoritative. Manny was proud of the speech he’d written, particularly given how short a time he’d had to write it, but it was Stephanie who sold it. She did what the president is supposed to do, which is look into the camera, look into the eyes of the American people, and say, “We’ve got this under control.”

  But Manny knew she didn’t believe it any more than he did.

  Soot Lake, Minnesota

  A quarter past midnight and there was still traffic on the 6. He’d figured there’d be cars and trucks for the two hours up 169 from Minneapolis to Crosby, but they were already twenty-five minutes past Crosby, and the traffic was constant. It worried Mike. He thought he was being overcautious, a little crazy, even, to make Rich and Fanny pack up and head to Rich’s cottage with Annie, but it scared him a little that so many other people had the same idea, that he wasn’t the only person who wanted to get his family away from Minneapolis. He’d fought about it with Fanny for more than twenty minutes before Rich finally came in off the sidelines to say he thought Mike was right. For that, Mike begrudgingly liked his ex-wife’s husband even more than he already did.

  “I’ve got the vacation time,” Rich said, “and I don’t have any cases coming up for a few weeks.” Fanny started to protest again, but Rich shook his head. “Maybe he’s wrong, honey, but if Mike’s right, and things get worse?” He shrugged. “It’s not like spending a week or two at the cottage is a real hardship.”

  Mike had been at home, already a little anguished, when the president declared martial law out west. And then, five minutes later, even though he was supposed to be off the next day, he got the e-mail that he was on duty, that everybody was on duty, starting from the moment they read the e-mail until further notice. He hadn’t opened the e-mail. It was enough to read the subject line. Besides, if he opened it, there’d be a record of his reading it. Instead, he dropped his agency phone on the counter—he could argue he didn’t see the e-mail until the next morning—took his personal phone, loaded his truck with all the canned and dried food he had, plus a few other odds and ends, and headed over to Fanny and Rich’s. By the time Rich had come around to the idea and they’d loaded up Rich’s Land Cruiser and hitched up the boat, Annie was asleep. She’d barely woken up when Mike moved her to his truck—he’d left the agency car at home with his agency phone, another step toward deniability—and he was grateful she hadn’t asked why they were heading out of town in the middle of the week, late at night, why she was in Mike’s car instead of with her mother and Rich.

  The brake lights on the boat trailer glowed red and then the turn signal came on. Rich had said the BP station in Outing was the last place to get gas before his cottage. Mike turned the radio down a notch. There wasn’t anything new anyway, but what was on the radio was enough: Delhi, Los Angeles, Helsinki, Rio de Janeiro for sure. Suspicions in North Korea, but who the fuck knew what was happening there? More unconfirmed reports in rural areas all over the place. Scotland, Egypt, South Africa. But Mike didn’t care if they were confirmed or not. He’d seen that goddamned spider come crawling out of Henderson’s face, and he’d walked that spider into a university lab to find the president of the United States waiting, and then he’d flown home to a country that was on lockdown. Even before Los Angeles and the president’s speech he was feeling antsy.

  Rich turned off into the gas station, and Mike pulled his truck up to the pump on the other side of Rich’s Land Cruiser. He tried to be gentle closing the driver’s door so that Annie could keep sleeping, but she didn’t stir at all.

  As Fanny went to get them all coffee, Rich said, “You sure about this, Mike?” His tone wasn’t challenging.

  Whatever pissing contest there was between them had ended for Rich about the same time he and Fanny got married. For Mike, it had been harder to let go of the animosity. Mike liked to think he was the bigger guy, but it just wasn’t true. He still busted Rich’s balls occasionally, but this wasn’t the time and he knew it. It said something about Rich that he was the kind of guy who would do this, that when his wife’s ex-husband showed up at their house past a decent hour of night and told them it was time to head for the hills, Rich was willing to let himself be swayed, was willing to take Mike’s side against Fanny.

  “No, Rich. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure. But I’d rather be wrong about going than about not going.”

  Rich nodded, and other than a quiet thank-you to Fanny when she came back with the coffees, neither man said another word. Mike got back into his truck and took a sip while he waited for Rich to also fill the tank on his motor boat and then the two spare gas cans Mike had made him take.

  From the gas station, it was twenty-five more minutes of back roads and twists and turns and past one in the morning before they got to the boat launch. Once everything was loaded up, Mike came back to the truck. He thought about just scooping Annie up and carrying her to the boat, but instead, he gave her a gentle shake until she woke up.

  “Listen, Annie,” he said. “You awake?” She nodded, and even though Mike wasn’t sure she truly was, he had to trust that she’d remember. “You stay where you are for a little bit, okay? Stay with your mom and Rich. I’ll come to you. You don’t worry about me. I’ll be back.”

  “Promise?”

  Her voice was small and full of sleep, and it almost killed him. Two years ago, when an agent was killed in the line of duty and Annie had found out about it, she’d made him promise to wear his bulletproof vest anytime he was out on the job, but it hadn’t felt like anything big to do. Yet for some reason this request made him hesitate. Could he really promise he’d be back? He didn’t really understand what was going on, and it was terrifying him. But he looked at the way Annie was looking at him and he realized none of that really mattered. What mattered was making her feel safe.

  “I promise, beautiful. I promise I’ll come back to you. Back for you. I’ll come back for you, okay?”

  Annie nodded again, and then he walked with her over to the boat.

  It was all he could do to let her go.

  “Anything else?” Rich said.

  “Actually, yeah.” Mike lifted a duffel bag. “My backup pistol is in there.”

  “Jesus, Mike. You think that’s really necessary?”

  “I hope not.”

  “I don’t even know how to shoot a pistol.”

  “Fanny does. I taught her. The pistol is for her. It’s a Glock 27. It’s small. There’s two boxes of rounds in there and a spare clip,” he said. “There’s also a shotgun. That’s for you. Go out tomorrow and have Fanny show you how to load it and take a couple of shots to get the feel of it.”

  “Mike—”

  “Rich.” Mike stepped close, keeping his voice low. “There’s a quarantine out west. Martial law. I saw one of those fucking things come out of Henderson’s face. You’ve got my daughter with you. Do you understand what I’m asking of you here?”

  Instead of answering, Rich looked back over his shoulder at the boat. Annie was leaning into her mother. The light from the truck’s headlights
cast odd shadows, but both men could see Fanny and Annie clearly.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do, Mike.”

  “It’s a Mossberg 500. A twelve gauge. There are four boxes of ammunition in there. You learn how to use it. It will take out anything in front of you. Like spraying a hose. The loads will spread. Shit for distance with that ammunition, but for personal defense it will do fine. Just point and shoot.”

  Mike handed over the duffel bag. The two men shook hands.

  Mike turned to walk back to his truck, but then he heard Annie calling for him. He went back to them.

  “How come you aren’t coming with us, Daddy?”

  “I’ve got to work baby, okay?” He bent over the rail of the boat and Annie got up and came over to him. She leaned into him and pressed her nose into his neck. “Don’t worry. Your mom and Rich are going to take care of you.”

  “I’m not worried about me,” she said.

  He tightened his grip on her. “I’ll be fine, beautiful. I’ll be fine. And I’ll come for you soon enough. I promise.”

  American University,

  Washington, DC

  Melanie lunged for it, but her fingers only grazed the glass. There was nothing she could do but watch it fall.

  It was close to two in the morning, and they were tired. They were all so tired.

  They’d gotten the spider into the container safely enough, but Patrick put it down too close to the edge of the table, and then Bark’s hip banged against the side of the table. The container teetered. For a heartbeat, it looked as if it was going to be okay. One of those moments Melanie wished she could have back. But it wasn’t okay, and the container tipped and started to fall, and Melanie’s skin barely touched the glass before it spun off the edge, dropped, and smashed on the floor. The shattering sound woke them up. All four of them, yelling and fumbling and trying to catch the spider. It scrambled, alien and fast, up the table leg and across Julie’s lab coat and onto Bark’s shirt and then . . .

  A thin split in Bark’s skin. An ooze of blood. The spider gone. Inside him.

  They’d picked that spider out from the others because this one, Julie noticed, had subtly different markings from the others. They’d prepared and dissected three that were identical, plus the seven spiders that had died on their own, and those seemed to be the same as well. The only difference with the seven that had died—for no apparent reason—was that they were almost desiccated. As if they’d just sort of used themselves up. It didn’t make much sense to Melanie. None of it did.

  They’d started by feeding the spiders normally. All the spiders in the lab were fed on a strict schedule, crickets and mealworms and other insects, but these spiders didn’t seem interested in insects. From the beginning, they’d been after blood. It was grotesque and fascinating. The way they overwhelmed a rat, stripping the flesh from the bone was amazing. It looked like a time-lapse video gone horribly wrong. They had assumed that the food needs of these spiders would correspond to those of the spiders they were already familiar with, and they’d been wrong. These spiders were voracious. And they weren’t patient.

  When they first burst from the egg sac, they turned on one another, eating several of their kin in the frenzy of hatching, but they were quick to turn their attention to the rats. But then, yesterday, they’d counted again and realized that, even counting the dead ones, they were three spiders short. After a few minutes of panic, Julie suggested spooling back through the video, and they found footage of the spiders in the tank attacking and eating one another. The spiders that died on their own, the desiccated, used-up spiders, were left alone, but when it was time to feed, every living spider seemed like it was fair game. So instead of dropping in a single rat, Melanie decided to drop in a bunch of rats at the same time to see what happened. The spiders seemed pleased. The sound was disgusting, but it wasn’t long before there were a few more piles of bones.

  And one untouched rat.

  The surviving rat was pressed against the glass, huddled in the corner of the insectarium, radiating sheer terror. Melanie didn’t usually ascribe much in the way of emotional lives to her rats. She couldn’t afford to. They were things for testing, or, right now, for feeding, and she didn’t want to have a moral crisis every time she wanted to get some work done. There was no other way to describe it, however. The rat looked scared. It was squeaking and shivering and pushing itself as far away as possible from the spiders. The spiders, for their part, were ignoring the rat, which was bizarre to Melanie. They’d positively inhaled the other rats. It had looked like an unruly arachnoid wrestling match as they fed. But this rat seemed as if it were almost invisible to them.

  “Julie,” Melanie said. “How many rats have we dropped in?”

  “Today?”

  “No. Total. What number is this?”

  Julie scrolled through some notes on her tablet. “Nine. No. Ten. Counting the first one, and then the ones we just dropped in, we’ve fed them ten rats.”

  Patrick gently touched the glass on the other side of the rat’s body. “You think these spiders are counting or something?”

  “Or something,” Melanie said. “Why are they leaving this one alone?”

  “They didn’t,” Bark said. “Not exactly.”

  Melanie looked at him. He’d mostly pulled himself together since she told him she was ending things, but he hadn’t been particularly vocal. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s got a cut on him. On his belly.” Bark pointed through the glass.

  “Wait,” Patrick said. “We’re short another spider.”

  “What the fuck?” Melanie tugged at her ponytail and then pulled out the elastic. Her hair felt greasy. She couldn’t remember if she had even brushed it after her last shower. “Julie, pull the video back to when we dropped the new rats in.”

  They watched it on Julie’s screen and then watched it again, slower. What had seemed almost instantaneous earlier was terrifying with the frame rate dropped to a tenth the speed: the spiders were already leaping before the trap door had fully opened. They met the rats’ bodies mid-drop. The spiders were feeding before the rats hit the ground of the insectarium. Except for the one rat and one spider. It was so quick and there was so much chaos going on with the other spiders feeding that Melanie understood why they’d missed it. The spiders had swarmed over the other rats, but only a single spider had gone to the surviving rat. But that spider hadn’t fed. It had . . . disappeared? No. The rat’s body blocked the angle from the camera, but they could mostly make it out. The spider lunged forward, gave a sort of shiver, and then was gone. It had disappeared inside the rat’s body.

  “Scroll back again. Get me a clear frame of that spider before it burrows into the rat.” Julie found the frame, froze it, and then Melanie pinched at the screen, zooming in. “Look at that marking on the abdomen,” Melanie said. “Does that mean something?”

  They spent several minutes watching the other spiders move around the tank before Bark spotted another with the same marking.

  They were careful. They segregated the marked spider. They followed all the protocols. But something as simple as putting a container too close to the edge of the table?

  There was always human error.

  Sooner or later, but always.

  And now the spider was gone. Smashing glass. Yelling. Blood. Gone.

  Somewhere inside Bark’s body.

  Julie marked the time: 1:58 A.M.

  Highway 10, California

  Sometimes, Kim thought, being in the Marines meant just being along for the ride. First they’d been sent to Desperation, the shittiest town this side of, well, anywhere, to build what looked like an internment camp, and then suddenly, minutes before the president’s address, the company was peeled off from the brigade at full scramble. The whole company, nearly 150 Marines leaving behind close to five thousand, loaded up in a mix of brand-new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and old, sand-scarred Hummers. They’d heard the quarantine order over the radio as they busted down the road te
n miles back to the highway. And when they got to the highway, there were already two M1 Abrams tanks—tanks!—blocking traffic. Nobody in or out.

  The captain ordered them out wide, the two tanks on the road and the mix of JLTVs and Hummers bouncing off the shoulders of the highway out into the scrub, until they were nearly one hundred yards wide on either side, far enough out to discourage any drivers from getting cute and trying to glide past the blockade, because there was no question that somebody would have tried. The civilians were getting antsy. It was past two in the morning. By now, Kim figured, with the traffic piling up and piling up for hours and hours, it might reach as far back as Los Angeles, quarantine order or no quarantine order. Even out in Desperation, putting together fences and working their asses off, they’d started hearing about what was going on in LA. At first, it sounded as though things were confined to one neighborhood, and it seemed like crazy panic with nothing to it. Just people freaking out over the idea of freaking out. There hadn’t been much in the way of video: shaky images with lots of screaming. But then, suddenly, all the news—Internet, television, radio—was spiders, spiders, spiders. Spiders swarming over the city, spiders eating some people and leaving others alone, spiders drifting from the sky onto rooftops, spiders coming out of drains and scuttling under doorways. Private Goons said he’d heard from a cousin that all Los Angeles was on fire. Nobody else knew if that was true. And then they were bounced from Desperation to the highway, and Kim was facing down American citizens with a fifty-caliber machine gun. Kim’s fire team had landed one of the new JLTVs. They were all the way out on the farthest edge of the left side, in the brush and scrub and dust. At first she thought it was silly. There were tanks on the road. Who was going to try to get past those? Did they really need to be so far off the road? But as night came, Kim started to think that maybe a pair of tanks and a few Hummers and JLTVs might not be enough if all these people decided they weren’t interested in obeying the president’s quarantine. The towers of portable floodlights sent a white glaze a couple of hundred yards back, but past that, from her perch on top of the JLTV out at the wing of the blockade, Kim could see headlights for what seemed like forever. There’d been announcements on the radio and the captain had sent a couple of men out to a distance of two miles to make sure motorists knew the road was blocked off and to encourage them to turn around and go home, but it had turned into a clusterfuck—with the backup from the roadblocks, people started trying to drive the wrong way down the highway, so now it was backed up on both sides. Nobody could go forward. Nobody could go back. The only way out was past the tanks, past the Hummers and JLTVs, past Kim and her .50 cal, and they were under orders not to let anybody by. Not good.