“That’s taken care of,” Choi said. “Burned out.”
“So there’s this site and how many other sites in Los Angeles, so far?”
Choi leaned back to grab a tablet from his aide. “We’re up to five hundred and seventeen confirmed infestation sites, but the Staples Center was the largest. We’ve been burning the rest of them as quickly as we can. Last count, we’ve already taken care of one hundred and eighty. Nearly thirty-five percent so far. Some of the smaller sites have just a dozen sacs or so. We’re trying to figure out if we can just clean those up with flamethrowers.”
Melanie shook her head. “Reprioritize.”
“Pardon me?”
“Reprioritize. It’s not about the size of the infestation. It’s about the egg sacs themselves. If they’re active, those need to be taken care of immediately.”
“Active? What do you mean?”
“Sticky or warm. Some of them look more classically like what you’d think of as cobwebs. If they feel sticky or warm to the touch, and particularly if they’re making a sort of rattling or buzzing noise. Those are the immediate threat. I think we can expect those to be hatching soon.”
“How soon?” Choi asked.
“Maybe right this second, maybe in a couple of days. But take care of those first. The other egg sacs, the ones that are hard and almost dusty, that are chalk-white instead of the slightly creamy tinge of the fresh-looking ones, those can be taken care of after the fresh ones.”
Choi turned to his aide, nodded, and the aide booked it out of the room.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Melanie said. “Not really. The trouble is you can burn out all the infestation sites you find, but no matter how much you scour Los Angeles, you’ll never get them all, because some egg sacs are mobile.”
Manny leaned forward. “What do you mean mobile? You’re talking about the spiders breeding inside people? We know that. You were the one who suggested doing visual screenings, looking for entry points, any sign that people had been cut open by a spider. The checkpoints outside Los Angeles are all using visual screenings, and we’ve had really good luck with dogs, too. We’re catching them. The checkpoints flag anybody who is infested.”
Melanie shook her head. “What are your numbers? How many people are you pulling out?”
“I don’t have the exact number in front of me, but it’s low. Nowhere near as bad as we were afraid of. Maybe one out of every five thousand refugees. The dogs have been a godsend. They lose their shit when somebody who’s infested comes through.”
Manny stopped talking and stared at Melanie.
She just shook her head.
“Oh shit,” he said. He suddenly looked miserable. “How off are we?”
“Best guess?” Melanie said. “Ten percent infection rates.”
“As in ten percent of the people who made it through the attacks in Los Angles are carrying egg sacs inside their bodies?”
“The functional number is going to be less,” Melanie said, “because there are going to be a lot of survivors who had no contact with the spiders whatsoever, people who were outside the swarm zones. But, essentially, yes. Of the people who had direct, physical contact and who made it out alive? Ten percent. One in ten of those people passing through the checkpoints, best guess, are carrying spider eggs inside them.”
Manny said, “And we’ve been letting them through?”
The room was quiet for a few beats.
Then Steph said, “They’re out there, then. It’s too late. Containment isn’t an option.” She turned to Melanie and asked the question Melanie had been waiting for.
“How long do we have?”
“At best?” Melanie said. “My guess is that they all hatch at once. That’s what happened with the first wave. Again, it’s like cicadas. There’s some sort of mechanism that controls when they emerge, and I think it’s probably a good bet that the second wave, when it hatches, is going to come in one giant swell. So, best-case scenario, maybe another week. But keep in mind, and I know I keep saying this: we’re working with really incomplete information. I’m basing that best-case scenario on what I know about the first swarm, and we really don’t know enough. I think there is a very small chance it could be longer, and an infinitesimally small chance that they never hatch at all. But I think best-case scenario, which is really a guess, is a week.”
Steph stared at her. “A week, at best. Okay. And, at worst?”
“At worst? At worst, it’s already too late. They’re ready to hatch, maybe even hatching as we speak.”
Melanie could hear Steph, Manny, and the military people suck in their breaths. Which made this part even less pleasant.
“I don’t think that’s the really bad news, though,” Melanie said.
She touched her tablet again and sent a photo to the monitors. She knew that, at first glance, it looked like any other egg sac, oval and pointed at one end. At second glance, however, it was clear that the scale was off. The photo wasn’t particularly high quality and the lighting was bad. But it was not the same as the others. The egg sac was huge, at least three or four times larger than the others, and even with the dim lighting and the grainy quality of the photo, it looked almost gelatinous.
“This is from Delhi,” she said. “I haven’t seen the pictures yet, but supposedly the Koreans have found something similar. Or maybe even bigger.”
She paused and looked around the room. “I think it’s safe to say that whenever this next group of spiders hatches, we’re in for something different.”
Stephanie stood up, leaning in so she could get a closer look at the monitor. “Different how, exactly, Melanie?”
“I don’t know,” Melanie said. “But it’s hard to imagine that it’s going to turn out to be good news.”
Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii
Florence turned off the television and looked out the front window. She could see her nephews on the beach already, digging in the sand. They were shockingly obedient boys, six and nine, wearing baseball caps to keep the sun off their faces, wearing rash guards to keep the sun off their plastic-smooth arms and backs. She’d get some more coffee and go join them. Such a simple pleasure, digging holes in the sand and waiting for the waves to come and wash them away. The smell of the saltwater mist drifted through the screens, and the gentle swell of the waves was a soundtrack to the morning. The boys still hadn’t adjusted to the time change, so they were up at what might have been an unbearably early hour for other people, but both Florence and her sister had always been early risers. And it was a peaceful start to the day, particularly on a morning like this, when the waves weren’t coming in with enough vigor to draw out the surfers yet. The ocean was unusually gentle in front of the rental house today. There was nothing to see but her nephews, the water, and the wisps of cotton-candy clouds that seemed like they were hanging in the sky just to make the view even more beautiful. Florence honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so happy.
She spent a lot of time complaining to her friends about her shitty luck, how life wasn’t fair. She was thirty-seven and athletic. Good-looking. At least a seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, with long legs and bright blue eyes. And while she wouldn’t have described herself as rich to somebody else, that was only because she thought it sounded tacky. She’d been very successful. Maybe she wasn’t private-jet rich, but she was rent-a-house-on-the-beach-so-she-and-her-sister’s-family-could-take-a-vacation-in-Hawaii-and-have-all-of-them-fly-first-class-without-putting-much-thought-into-it rich. Which was, when all was said and done, rich. She owned a marketing firm. She’d started the company a decade ago, and for the first two years it had been just her, and then, for two more years, she had a few employees and could call herself boutique, but boutique had gone by the wayside a while ago. She’d just hired her sixty-third employee. Good-looking and rich and fun, she thought. If she preferred the theater and chamber music, she was also more than willing to head to the Cineplex to watch a superhero movie or to a bar to
hear a band that didn’t understand the concept of sonic moderation. She’d do karaoke and go bowling, she’d hike and bike and kayak, and she could fake a passing interest in most major sports. Florence was smart and funny and if she wasn’t up for absolutely everything in bed, she was at least reasonably interested in sex. So why was it that with all these things in her favor, she didn’t have a husband, didn’t have kids? She should have been a catch. She loved her nephews, but those should have been her kids out there playing on the beach. It wasn’t fair.
The part of her that still remembered the women’s studies classes she took at college hated it when she thought like that. She had all these other things to keep her happy. A good career, good friends, a loving extended family. Why did she yearn for a husband and kids? Still, all her good friends, all of them, to a one, were married now and starting families. They had a toddler holding their hands, sleeping babies against their breasts, matchbox houses with neatly clipped yards and husbands gone slightly to paunch. The unfairness of it all made Florence want to cry. She knew women who were truly happy in their childlessness—partnered and single women alike—but she wasn’t one of them. Her deep dark secret was that she just wasn’t happy in her singlehood no matter how much she should have been as a modern feminist. She’d always, always, been that girl fantasizing about a wedding and kids.
So when she went out with her friends, even though she knew they’d heard it all before and were tired of it, she would end up complaining about how it wasn’t fair, that she didn’t understand why she’d never been able to meet the right guy. She wasn’t jealous of her sister, but she was confused. How was it that her sister, Lynn, who’d never worked a day in her life, who was nowhere near as pretty as Florence, had managed to snag a guy like Grant while she was still in her early twenties, and then, like it was no big deal, pop out two little boys?
Her friends always went through the motions. It’s hard, they’d say. Guys are jerks. She’d done all the right things, they agreed, and she deserved a good guy who’d make her happy and help her churn out a couple of munchkins before she hit forty. They’d sympathize and empathize, and after a little while they’d start encouraging her. You’re so pretty, they’d say. You’re rich. Luck, they’d say, is a fickle thing, and you’re due for something to go your way in the guy department. Thirty-seven is young. It’s not too late.
But, Florence thought, as she looked out over the beach, it was probably too late now. The timing might be just a little bit off to meet a guy and start a family.
What with the spiders and everything.
For once, however, she wasn’t cursing her luck. Sure. No husband, no kids. But it could be a lot worse. She could have been eaten by spiders. Right now, being an aunt seemed plenty good enough. And there hadn’t been a single confirmed outbreak on any of the Hawaiian Islands, which seemed like a miracle. And given that they were on Kauai, one of the smaller islands, looking out at Hanalei Bay, which was literally almost the end of the road that went most of the way around the island, she figured there probably wasn’t a better place they could be. At first, of course, they’d all been annoyed when they’d packed up and gone to the airport and gotten there only to find that President Pilgrim had ordered the airlines to stop flying anywhere, but it had seemed like pretty great luck in short order. It made her feel unsettled that the owners of the rental house, who lived in Los Angeles, hadn’t responded to her e-mails or attempts to phone, but Florence was able to set that unease aside. Nobody else had shown up to claim the rental house, and she was happy to pay for the extra time they were staying. At times, Lynn and Grant were anxious about getting back to Seattle, but they’d mostly settled into the rhythm of their semipermanent vacation. It helped, of course, that while the rest of the world was freaking out, Florence had kept them busy. They’d gone hiking and taken surfing lessons. The boys were getting pretty confident on their scaled-down rental boards. They’d chartered a fishing boat one of the days, and she and Lynn went grocery shopping on a regular basis. That, actually, was becoming a concern. The shelves of the grocery store were starting to look almost bereft, and last time they’d gone there’d been a police officer there, limiting what people could by, but they’d stocked up when things had first gone to hell. Florence couldn’t believe that this crisis would last more than a few more weeks. They might run out of gourmet coffee and frozen chicken fingers for the boys, but they weren’t, by any stretch of Florence’s imagination, going to go hungry. Yes, for sure, Grant and Lynn spent a few hours every day watching the news on television or checking their phones, and yes, Lynn had burst into tears a couple of times, but mostly it had been fun. For the boys, it was an adventure with the added bonus that they got to miss even more school than originally planned, and whatever limitations their parents and Florence had originally put on them had been stripped away. Just yesterday, Florence had taken them into Lihue and bought the biggest television they could find to put in their bedroom in the vacation house, so they could watch cartoons while the adults were watching the news. Today, Florence had promised to buy them their very own surfboards. They’d gotten good enough—and the trip was now long enough—that rentals seemed kind of silly. As long as credit card terminals kept working, they were in good shape.
Florence rubbed some suntan lotion on her legs and arms, grabbed the wide-brimmed straw hat that she thought of as her “Julia Roberts hat,” and headed out the door to join the boys on the beach. Maybe she’d let them bury her in the sand.
Hanalei Bay wasn’t the worst place in the world to be right now.
Shinjin Prefecture, Japan
The worst place in the world to be right now, Koji thought, was here. He was wearing what the other scientists were calling, aspirationally, an “isolation suit.” Isolation, as in Koji isolated inside, spiders, hopefully, isolated outside. But it felt pretty flimsy. It wouldn’t stop a knife, let alone these things. He’d seen the video of the three men who’d tried going in without an “isolation suit.” That had not been a success. He was not thrilled to be the fourth man in, “isolation suit” or not.
He could have been on vacation, instead. In Hawaii. He was supposed to be on vacation, in fact. His wife had booked the tickets months ago and arranged to rent a condo a ten-minute walk from the beach. If she had planned their vacation to start only a couple of days earlier, he might have been on the beach at this very minute, the sand warm beneath his toes. But no. Instead, he was tiptoeing through an old Buddhist temple full of egg sacs.
Somewhere out in the sticks. A prefecture he’d barely heard of. A rural village so small it didn’t have a name. Or rather, its name was a bastardization of the closest village to it, which was named after a local river, so that the name of this particular village meant, literally, “up the hill from that other village that was named after a river.” It was ridiculous. Half the team was still working out of the university, but the other half had been flown here. Helicopters and soldiers and a weird display of military tribalism that made him very uncomfortable.
The temple itself had been cordoned off, with fencing and yellow tape, and was under guard. All completely useless in the event that these egg sacs hatched. Which was why he was inside the temple. To make sure none of these sacs were going to hatch.
Whee.
Koji pointed the flashlight to his left. He knew the team was recording everything. There were omnidirectional cameras on his helmet, rigged so that the scientists back in the other village—the one named after the local river from which this pissy, tiny village took its own name—could see whatever he saw and then some. Thermal and radiation cameras too. But they still needed some idiot to walk in and do the recording.
Couldn’t that idiot be a robot? No, they’d decided. Too much risk of it accidently causing damage, which might lead to the egg sacs hatching. Couldn’t that idiot be a soldier? No, because a soldier wouldn’t know what to look for.
No. That idiot had to be Koji. And it was his own damn fault. He’d been the one who’d
argued so vociferously that a robot was a bad idea, and that a soldier was a bad idea too. He was the one who’d argued the loudest that it needed to be a scientist in here, that only a scientist would know what to look for. Not really thinking through what that actually meant. So, of course, when it came time for a scientist to volunteer, everybody looked at him. There was no choice but for him to say he’d be the one to do it. Westerners thought the Japanese were about honor and saving face and all that sort of crap. Every time Koji hung out with English scientists he’d try to disabuse them of the notion. Maybe for older generations, like his father and his grandfather it was that way, but it’s different now. They’re modern. But when all the other scientists looked at him, Koji was too embarrassed to do anything other than volunteer.
And now that he was in the temple? Now that he was shining his beam of light on the egg sacs, stepping carefully, oh so carefully? Now that he’d won his own argument and was actually the set of scientific eyes inside the temple? Well, now he had no idea what he was looking for. Or, rather, he had only the tiniest bit of an idea. He’d seen the photo from India of the oversized, distended egg sac with the disturbingly gelatinous sheen, and he’d read the reports from Korea. The measurements they sent seemed suspiciously like they were missing a decimal point.
The sound of the respirator was a little disturbing. Like Darth Vader. The idea of a breathing apparatus seemed silly before he went in—this wasn’t Mars! This wasn’t a mile beneath the surface of the ocean! He could breathe just fine!—but now he was glad for the helmet’s glass faceplate. He knew that the thick rubber of the suit couldn’t possibly be a match for these monsters, but it was, in the tiniest possible way, a little bit reassuring to have this small barrier between him and the room. The problem was that the suit was hot. He’d been in it for less than five minutes, and already he could feel himself sweating, rivulets of salt and liquid sliding down from his temples, behind his ears and gathering in the small of his back. He was so hot inside the suit and the connected helmet that the glass faceplate was fogging over. If it got much worse, he didn’t think he’d be able to see through the faceplate at all. Which was fabulous. Exactly what he wanted: to be walking blind in the middle of this monster-movie set.
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