The Hatching

by Ezekiel Boone

  Some prick in a black BMW Roadster three vehicles from the front of the line got out of his car and came to argue with Captain Diggs for what must have been the fifth or six time, and Kim couldn’t help smiling when she saw the man frog-marched back to his car. She kept her hands off the .50 cal. She had wedged an old shell casing under the butterfly trigger as an improvised safety. But still. The Browning M2 could barf out five hundred rounds a minute, and while it was one thing to accidentally punch out somebody overseas in a war zone, she didn’t want to be the one to accidentally light up some civilian.

  “Gum?” Elroy stuck his hand up out of the truck. Kim reached down to snag a piece.

  “Anything new?”

  Elroy popped his head up and showed her his phone. “No signal, and then no battery, so no, no news. Just what you hear on the radio.”

  Ten yards in from where her tactical vehicle sat on the outside of the blockade, Kim could see Sue’s Hummer. The Hummers weren’t in the best shape—they’d seen heavy use in the desert, and the army was taking its time with decommissioning—but Kim wasn’t worried about IEDs in Southern California. “Sue,” she called across. “You guys got anything?”

  Before Sue could answer, Kim heard the call on the radio.

  “White SUV leaving containment. Fire team leader Lance Corporal Bock, on your side. Copy.”

  “Copy,” Kim said.

  Down the line, maybe five or six hundred yards away, at the edge of where the portable floodlights made themselves felt, she saw a white SUV that had crept out of line and drifted off the highway into the dirt. They were doing that here and there, mostly trucks and SUVs, feeling out the line, trying to see what the holdup was, and then popping back into place as soon as they realized they weren’t going anywhere. Some people still had their cars running, and Kim occasionally caught the sound of music drifting from the distance, but most people had turned off their cars hours ago, which was good. That’s the last thing they needed: cars running out of gas on top of everything else. It seemed that most people had resigned themselves to the wait. Earlier in the night, some people had gotten out of their cars to stretch, to sit on their hoods, and in one case, to toss a Frisbee, but now, at two in the morning, it was quiet. People were sleeping in their cars, seats reclined, a freeway slumber party. But the driver of the white SUV wasn’t sleeping and he wasn’t getting back in line. It was going wide. Fifty yards. Maybe sixty. And it was moving toward them. Fast.

  “Fire team leader, if vehicle attempts to pass brigade, you are to engage.”

  She keyed her radio. “Sir? It’s a civilian.”

  There was a brief pause. “Fire team leader, fire a warning volley in front of the vehicle.”

  “Now?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Kim took a breath and then she tracked the white SUV. It was moving, kicking up dirt and heading at an angle. If it kept going, there was no question it was going to pass her. The SUV was maybe 150 yards in front of her now. She led it by ten yards to be safe, snuck the spent shell out from under the butterfly trigger, and let out a five-round burst. It had been a while since she’d qualified on the .50 cal, and she’d forgotten how loud it was. The flash from the muzzle looked like the sun, and one of the rounds was a tracer, but neither the light nor the sound seemed to matter. The SUV didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down.

  Kim hesitated.

  “Fire team leader.”

  She had her fingers on the trigger.

  “Bock. Take it out.”

  Kim didn’t lead the SUV this time. She lined up directly on the engine block and pulled the trigger.

  Desperation, California

  Accurate facial recognition—picking a moving person out of a crowd—was still only the stuff of movies and television, but detecting the sound of a gunshot was something that had been solved years ago. When Lance Corporal Kim Bock pulled the trigger on her .50 cal, the aboveground audio sensors outside Shotgun’s house sent a notice to the tablet he kept by his bed. Just a small ping. Not enough even to bother Fred on the other side of the bed, but enough to wake Shotgun up. He threw on a T-shirt and jeans and went out to the kitchen. Gordo was sitting at the table, a single light on above him, pooling over him.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  Gordo looked up from his computer. “Not really. This is bad, Shotgun. Seriously bad.”

  Shotgun nodded. “Yep.”

  Gordo paused, considered it, and then shrugged. “I’ve got to say, I guess I’m glad we did this. Glad Amy and I came over. I think we’re going to be riding this out for a while.”

  “Shots outside.”

  Gordo sat up straighter. “What? Seriously?”

  “Something big. Military.”

  “That’s what got you up?”

  “Yeah,” Shotgun said, but then he shook his head. “Yes, but not just that. I’m just going to check everything one more time. We’re good down here. Anything other than a direct hit by a bunker buster, but you know.”

  Gordo did know, and together they double-checked the blast doors, double-checked that everything was shut down and sealed tight. From the outside, no casual observer—or member of the military thinking of trying to force civilians to evacuate—would realize there was an entire bunker under Shotgun’s house.

  They were safe and sound underground. They could wait awhile before they had to poke their heads back up.

  The White House

  Manny was slumped in a chair. There was a point, and he didn’t want to admit he was at that point, where Diet Coke could do only so much. It had been a rough couple of days. He thought the fallout from shutting down all air travel was bad, but it had gone from bad to worse rather abruptly.

  For a few minutes, just after Steph’s speech last night, he thought it was going to be okay. The Indians reported that the spiders seemed to be dying out. No reason. They were just dying. There were dead spiders all over Delhi. Heaps and piles of them. Hundreds of thousands, millions of dead spiders, like waves washed to shore and frozen in place. He’d seen film shot from a helicopter: the wind from the rotors stirred up the piles, spider corpses drifting in the breeze. Manny had, just for a moment, allowed himself to believe it was going to be that simple. The spiders would just die out in the same way cicadas did. Melanie had brought up the idea of periodical cicadas as a potential comparison, and Manny hoped she was right. Around Washington, DC, the Brood II and Brood X cicadas hatched on seventeen-year cycles. They’d last come to the surface in 2013 and 2004, respectively. Maybe the spiders would do their thing for a few weeks and then melt away like the cicadas, leaving only their husks behind.

  But it wasn’t that easy. The spiders in Delhi might be dying, but now he had the spiders in Los Angeles to worry about, and then, in short order, reports from Helsinki, Rio de Janeiro, Lebanon, South Africa, and Russia. None of it made any sense anymore. Dawn was breaking in Washington, DC, and the entire world was falling apart. What was he supposed to do? They were treating it like a flu pandemic. A flu pandemic he would have at least understood. But spiders?

  What he really needed was a nap. Five minutes. He just wanted five minutes to close his eyes, to let the din of the room drift away. Just five minutes to hit the reset button. Five minutes of sleep.

  He got thirty seconds.

  China.

  Holy. Fucking. Shit.

  China.

  They all stood quiet watching the balloons of light on the satellite imagery. A roomful of colonels and generals. Two stars, three stars, four. The secretary of defense, the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the director of Homeland Security. The fucking president. Thirty or forty aides and attendants and all of them, including Manny, staring at the screen and watching what looked like a small field of beautiful flowers blooming in western China, a line of nuclear explosions stitching all the way down from Mongolia to Nepal. There were no human sounds in the room, just the constant chirp and chime and ring of e-mails and text messages and phone calls.

/>   “What the hell?”

  Manny didn’t know who broke the language barrier, but it opened a flood of yelling. First: denial. No way those were nukes. Second: confirmation. Nukes. The Chinese had just deliberately erased a third of their country. Third: silence again. The silence came slowly and then all at once, everyone in the room turning to look at Stephanie. To look at the president of the United States.

  Nobody needed to ask the question. It was in the air. The question was everywhere. What the hell were they going to do?

  It was not a good time for Manny’s cell phone to be buzzing, but as Steph started barking out orders—cabinet members to the conference room, military on full alert—and the room returned to noise and chaos, Manny snuck a look and saw Melanie’s name.

  He pressed the phone hard against his ear and cupped his free hand over his mouth. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

  “Manny,” she said. “You don’t understand. It’s worse than I thought.”

  Manny rubbed his eyes. He wanted to believe he’d heard her wrong. Worse? How could it be worse? China was going to be glowing for the next thousand years, Los Angeles was a war zone, and his ex-wife was on the phone saying it’s worse than that? He motioned for an aide to grab his stuff so he could follow Steph. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Just tell me, okay, Melanie? I don’t think you understand just how bad a time this is for me to talk. You’ve already told me these spiders are designed to feed. What’s worse than that?” He caught a quick glimpse of one of the screens cutting to live satellite. The image was full of static, but it was panned all the way back so that most of China showed up, and even that far back, the dust or dirt or smoke or whatever the hell nukes left behind was terrifying.

  “Okay. So stay with me. The timing doesn’t make any sense, right? They come out and they’re fully grown and eating like locusts. It’s accelerated.”

  “What’s accelerated?”

  “Everything. They’re like rockets. They feed until they burn themselves out. That’s what’s happening in Delhi. And it’s going to happen in Los Angeles soon.”

  Manny perked up. He’d been right. “So you’re telling me they’ll just die out? How much longer?”

  “No. You don’t understand. I was wrong before. When I said they were designed to feed, I was wrong. They’re colonizers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean some of them feed. But some of them lay eggs, and those things are accelerated too. They’ll hatch quickly.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m looking at a new egg sac. I’m absolutely sure this thing isn’t more than a few hours old, but it doesn’t look like it. It looks like one that’s going to hatch pretty soon.”

  “What? Where are you?”

  “The National Institutes of Health. Bethesda.”

  Manny stepped into the hall, following the bustle of suits and uniforms. He saw Steph holding on to Ben Broussard’s arm and talking at him as they walked.

  “Why are you at the NIH?”

  “You gave me carte blanche. And we needed a surgeon and a hospital with a biocontainment unit. There are only four places in the whole country with biocontainment units. The other three are at Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula, Montana. So Bethesda, Maryland, seemed like an obvious choice.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Manny asked. “No, never mind. That doesn’t matter. But why did you need a surgeon? Wait, what? Biocontainment? Please tell me these things don’t also carry disease.”

  “No, they aren’t infectious-disease carriers.” She stopped. “Well, at least I’m pretty sure they aren’t. Wouldn’t that be something, though? If they carried the plague? No. I don’t think that’s the worry, but we didn’t want to go to a normal hospital and then have the egg sac hatch and then have a spider, I don’t know, slip out an air vent or something. We needed a place that had procedures and the facilities to keep everything inside. So, NIH.”

  “Do I want to know why you needed a surgeon? No,” he said, answering his own question, “I probably don’t want to know, but okay, I have to ask: why do you need a surgeon?”

  “Because the egg sac is inside one of my students.”

  National Institutes of Health,

  Bethesda, Maryland

  Melanie looked down at Bark lying unconscious and cut open on the operating table. At first, they’d been relieved: the surgeon had opened Bark’s abdominal cavity and the spider flopped out. The thing was dead. Spent, really, as far as Melanie could tell. Like the ones that had died for no apparent reason in the lab. Like the spiders being swept up on the streets of Delhi. And soon, soon, she hoped, Los Angeles. The relief was short-lived, however, because the spider seemed to have spent itself on putting together an egg sac inside Bark. It was like the one that was shipped to her lab, except it wasn’t calcified. The silk was sticky as hell, and the whole thing was warm and buzzing. The surgeon looked terrified, and one of the nurses had tried to run from the room before remembering they were in a biocontainment unit—it was built for guarding against the spread of the kinds of diseases that made Ebola look like a kids’ game, and both entrance and exit required going through air locks and all kinds of decontamination—but Melanie couldn’t stop herself from laying her gloved hand on the sac. She knew she should have been freaking out. She and Bark had been sleeping together regularly until this week, and here he was now, the spider playing a game of hide-and-seek in his body that left him put under and cut open. And there was a part of her that was freaking out. She could feel it. There was a little piece of Melanie that wanted to scream and try to run from the room like that nurse, but that little piece was being outvoted by the part of her that was trying to understand the puzzle.

  Under the gloved hand, she felt the pulse of the egg sac, and in her other hand, the phone was warm against her ear. “Manny?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t . . . Okay. Why is there an egg sac in your student?”

  She gave him the quick brief. Dropping the container, the glass breaking, the spider slipping through Bark’s skin as if it were barely there, the panic and then the resignation that the only thing to do was to get it out. The rushed trip to the NIH, the Secret Service agents flashing badges and yelling and cutting through the red tape as if they’d never heard of it. “Aren’t you glad you left me with a bunch of suits and Steph’s presidential orders?” she said, but the joke fell flat. Which made sense. It wasn’t a time for jokes, but she wasn’t sure what else to do.

  “Feeders and breeders,” Manny said.

  “And there’s a pattern,” she said. She took her hand off the egg sac. Julie Yoo was suited up in scrubs, and Melanie watched Julie and the surgeon start to work through the cords of silk that connected the sac to the inside of Bark’s body. They’d brought an insectarium from the lab, and the egg sac was going into it the second it was out of Bark. “We figured it out from the spiders in the insectarium and the rats. And then Patrick—one of my students—noticed it on the video out of Los Angeles. The feeders stay away from the hosts. They’re marked somehow. This serves a dual purpose: the hosts are both places for the eggs and a way to spread the colony. The person, or, I guess, animal, can travel with the eggs inside them until they hatch. Whoever their host is will likely be able to travel farther than the spiders could on their own. Shutting down air travel was a really smart call.”

  Manny didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and Melanie could hear noise in the background on his end. She realized that while they were working away in her lab dealing with a few of these spiders, Manny’s job was to help Steph deal with all the spiders. She was an academic, but as much as Manny was a politician, sometimes that meant he dealt with the real world in ways she didn’t.

  “It’s bad out there, isn’t it?” she said. “We’re not getting the full story, are we?”

  “Melanie
,” he said. “Mel.” And that’s when she truly felt worried. He almost never called her Mel. The last time he’d called her Mel was when he told her he wanted a divorce. “I asked you earlier to come to the White House to answer some questions for us, but now I need you to come answer some questions.”

  “Okay. Like what?”

  “Like how to kill them.”

  The CNN Center,

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Teddie scrolled the video back and watched it again and again and again. There was a pattern, she was sure of it.

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  Leshaun looked like shit, but Mike was happy to see him. After he’d gotten back from dropping Annie off with Rich and Fanny at the dock, Mike went home, grabbed his work phone and agency vehicle, and headed in. He was the last one to the office.

  The bureau chief gave an uninspired speech relaying the national orders and then telling them the arsenal was open for business. “Gear up,” he said. “Urban unrest, basically. That’s the model we’re using. We’ve got nothing to worry about on the ground here yet, so we’re just going to help local law enforcement keep the peace. Make sure nobody gets too panicked.”