“It’s a lot easier because the strikes we already carried out were authorized by the president. The door is already open. We’re well positioned in key places, but there are some holdouts.” Roberts lowered his voice and leaned close to Broussard. “Things are fragile, sir. I think if we get into firefights with our own men, this will all fall apart. Even though we both know it’s the only option, using more nuclear weapons on our own soil is a hard sell. I’m not sure we’ll be able to keep things together if we engage in broad action.”
“I don’t want to spill the blood of any of our men and women,” Broussard said. He flashed to Alexandra Harris’s body hitting the ground. That had been a shame.
Roberts nodded. “Yes, sir. But that brings me to Operation SAFEGUARD.”
“How much longer will it take for us to have control?”
“Forty-eight hours until we’ve compromised it. We’re making progress. There’s a chance we can speed that up, though.”
“How?”
“We’ve managed to establish contact with the men working inside, and it’s not a straight ticket for Pilgrim. The commanding officer, Brigadier General Yoats, is a die-hard loyalist. There’s definitely dissent, however, and I think we could leverage that. But . . .”
“What?”
“Sir, if you want to minimize action against our own troops, we’ll have to allow things to play out. Forty-eight hours and Operation SAFEGUARD should be off-line and we can proceed as you wish.”
Broussard rubbed at his eyes. They’d already gone this far, he thought. It was too late to stop. He had never been the kind of man to look back. Once he considered all the variables and determined a course of action, Broussard kept going until he achieved his goals. It was how he’d risen through the ranks. Sheer, brutal stubbornness and determination. First it had been physical. He’d never been the fastest or the strongest man, but he learned a trick early on: he could swallow an endless amount of pain. There was always a point when other men would succumb to that voice inside their head that said, Enough, I can’t keep going, but Broussard drowned that voice out. When he was qualifying for his Special Forces training, he had to complete a wilderness course in less than one hundred hours in order to move on. Broussard finished in seventy-one, setting the course record by forgoing sleep and walking without stopping. When he peeled off his boots afterward, enough flesh pulled away that he was confined to a hospital bed for a week.
But this was the hardest thing he’d ever done.
He’d never liked Pilgrim. Never trusted her. He probably had to admit that there was some truth to the accusation that it was because she was a woman. He was old-school and old enough that women in leadership and combat roles rankled him a bit. He accepted that the world was changing, but taking orders from a female president . . . No, that wasn’t the part that was really the problem. It was that she was a civilian through and through. He understood that there were plenty of times where diplomacy was called for over military strength, but soft power was not always the way to go. Sometimes the only thing people understood was a good old-fashioned ass kicking, and that was something that the American military was good at.
For all that, Pilgrim had been his commander in chief. His job had been to give her the best advice he could. To speak honestly and clearly and make sure that when she made decisions that required his input, he had given her the best information he could. No matter how angry she had made him, how often he disagreed with her orders, he’d never questioned that they were her orders to give.
This was different, though. This wasn’t some spat over oil or the Russians getting frisky. This was the end of the world. If she’d listened to him and the military right away . . . if she’d only acted . . . And then, when he finally could get her to act, to implement the Spanish Protocol, even then she’d held back at first. When she finally authorized the use of nuclear weapons—those were the United States’ trump card, and if there was ever a time to play the trump, wasn’t it now?—he’d almost yelled out, “Praise Jesus!”
And even then she’d held back. Instead of trying to make up for her mistakes—to make damn sure there was no way those little monsters kept coming, kept tearing the country apart—she did as little as she could. Best case, he figured, she’d bought them a little time.
Time.
Roberts was telling him that it was going to be another fortyeight hours until Operation SAFEGUARD was off-line, which meant it was going to be forty-eight hours until Broussard could finish the job that Pilgrim had been too cowardly to complete.
Did he have forty-eight hours?
“No,” he said.
“Sir?”
Broussard placed his hands firmly on his desk. He was a man of action, and he wasn’t going to wait. Better a little blood be spilled than for those spiders to come back and capitalize on the president’s weakness. “If we’ve got men inside, give the orders. Whatever the cost. I want Operation SAFEGUARD taken down.”
Oxford, Mississippi
Santiago had expected to be hot and uncomfortable wearing his homemade hazmat suit, but he hadn’t really expected it to be this bad. The worst, honestly, was his hands. He was wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, and the heat was just trapped inside, aggravating his poor, burned, blistered hands. They ached miserably, and he wondered if he somehow managed to survive all of this he would bear permanent scars. The good thing, however, was that the soreness of his hands occasionally distracted him from how much he was sweating. He could feel rivulets of sweat running down from his head and down his back. He was sure that he must have soaked through the clothing he was wearing, and every step gave him an unpleasant squishy feeling in his boots.
For all that, he’d take the discomfort over being eaten by spiders, because, at least so far, the getup appeared to be working. For the first few blocks after he left his house to go after Mrs. Fine, he hadn’t seen any spiders. It actually made him panic. Was he dreaming? He was already hot and sweaty, and there was a part of him that wondered if this had all been part of some fever dream, delirium, a nightmare brought on by some illness. But when he turned onto North Lamar Boulevard, he was quickly assured that he was not, in fact, dreaming.
All the spiders he’d seen up close so far had been burned and charred, empty husks and damaged shells that were no match for the fiery moat he’d built around his property. The spider in front of him was very much undamaged, though. It was alive and skittering across the sidewalk and directly in his path.
He couldn’t stop himself from freezing, one foot forward, his body stopping in an awkward impersonation of a man on a walk.
The spider went past him without stopping. It was as if he weren’t even there.
He crossed himself, an action he hadn’t performed in many years. The news, such as it was, had been so sketchy and so full of obvious falsehoods that he hadn’t dared to be honest with his wife about how hopeless this quest seemed to be. But here he was, a knight in armor made of rubber boots, a raincoat and rain pants, a pair of dishwashing gloves, a full-face respirator, and almost an entire roll of duct tape. He was pretty sure he didn’t look like a knight, however. Not with the raincoat’s hood completely covering his head and the full-face respirator. If anything, he probably looked more like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when he snuck into his dad’s bedroom and used his Walkman to . . . Santiago paused. Why was it exactly that McFly had snuck into the bedroom and put the headphones over his father’s ears? He could remember the scene clearly, the visual of Michael J. Fox looming over the bed, appearing alien and menacing, playing loud rock and roll as a scare tactic . . . but what the heck had that been about?
He shook his head. Not the time or the place. He was on a quest. Mrs. Fine. The problem, he realized, was that even if his homemade hazmat suit did work as he hoped, he didn’t actually know where Mrs. Fine had gone. He had to get to her before—
Oh. Crap. He knew where she’d gone. Of course.
He was about to start walking again when he felt so
mething on his leg. He looked down and let out a scream that turned into a wild laugh. The spider was one of the ones with red stripes across its back. It skittered up his leg, across his crotch—that was a sensation he hoped to never feel again—and back down his other leg and over his boot before continuing on its merry way. The eight-legged demon had felt so heavy on his body, and yet the only thing he could think to compare it to in terms of size was one of the rubber duckies that his son, Oscar, had so loved when he was a little boy. The spider was larger, of course, if you counted its creepy, knuckled, and hairy legs, but its body was the same size as a duckie’s. Of course, one of these terrible spiders bobbing in a bathtub would have been unlikely to bring Oscar as much joy as the yellow duck he’d had that was decorated as an Ole Miss football player.
He realized he was still standing in his tracks and wondered if it was because he knew. Here, still blocks away from the university, he was starting to see spiders, and if he kept going, how long until he saw Mrs. Fine’s body? Or something worse?
But he couldn’t stop. He’d proven to himself that this hodgepodge getup would keep him safe. Now he owed it to the woman who had treated him like a son and who acted like a grandmother to both his children. Because that meant something. They had plenty of friends. His wife, in particular, was social. And, of course, Oscar was never a problem. But Juliet? He loved his little girl so, and he understood why some people looked at her without seeing what was wonderful about her. Understanding and forgiving were two separate things, however, because if Mrs. Fine treated his kids as though they were her own grandchildren, his mother-in-law had not. He would never, ever forgive his wife’s mother for saying that she wished they had decided on an abortion when they’d found out Juliet was going to be developmentally disabled. It didn’t matter that there had been times, in the deepest, darkest corners of the night, when he himself admitted that their lives would have been easier if Juliet had never been born. It didn’t matter, because he understood that while it would have been an easier life, it would have been a life lived less fully. Although they’d never talked about it, not in so many words, it seemed as if Mrs. Fine had always understood that, too.
From the very beginning, Mrs. Fine had been there for them. Before Juliet was born, she’d babysat only occasionally for Oscar. But in those first few months after Juliet came, when Santiago and his wife were constantly at the hospital, Mrs. Fine was an extension of their family. She brought them food at the hospital, took Oscar to the park, even worked at the gas station when Santiago couldn’t find coverage for certain shifts, sitting at the register and knitting a blanket for Juliet, just as she’d made a blanket for . . .
Oh, goodness. He was crying now. Mrs. Fine. She had been a glorious, giving woman. She deserved better than this, and he realized that in all the years he’d known her, with all the things she’d done for them, he’d never once told her that he loved her.
It was too late for that.
He set himself walking forward, however, because it was not too late to do right by her. He would find her body and he would bring her home and bury her and if he and his family lived through this, they would keep her memory alive with every breath they took.
He turned right on Jackson, left on Ninth, and right on University. As he walked, the mass of spiders grew thicker, from a few here and there to scattered groups to dozens and dozens. By the time he was on campus proper, they were everywhere. No matter where he looked, he saw them skittering about. And yet there was no sign of Mrs. Fine’s body. He passed a hundred, maybe two hundred bodies, all of them wrapped in cobwebs, but he checked each and every one of them. Most of the time, there was enough exposed that he could rule out the body as Mrs. Fine’s, but on twenty or thirty occasions—enough for him to lose count—he swallowed his disgust and used his rubber-gloved hands to part the spider silk to get a look.
He wondered if he was wrong—if perhaps Mrs. Fine had gone in a different direction—but by that point he was close enough to the stadium that it seemed silly not to at least look.
He was surprised to see the gates standing wide-open. He’d never been much of a sports fan, but he assumed the football field was off-limits. When he got close enough to see the field, he stopped dead. The field was littered with bodies. Piles of them. There had to be at least a hundred, perhaps a hundred fifty silk-swathed bodies on the field, and another fifty or so that had managed to get some distance before being overtaken. There was even a golf cart with the Ole Miss logo on it that was overturned in the end zone, a body splayed on the ground beside it, half-covered in white spiderwebs.
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?”
He shrieked and jumped at the same time, catching himself just before he fell.
“Mrs. Fine?”
She was in the stands, barely twenty feet away. She looked . . . normal.
But all around her he saw black skittering shadows moving across the seats, crawling up and down every vertical surface. Where she was standing, there were a lot of spiders; but in the far corner, up and away from Mrs. Fine, there was an uncountable number. A black, glistening mass that pulsed and swirled. It was hypnotic and horrifying. It reminded him of the time he’d found a dead raccoon in the alley between his house and the store and he’d nudged it over with his foot. The raccoon’s belly had been a snarled, teeming mess of maggots that made him retch.
“How are . . .”
He trailed off and just stood there, waiting, as she slowly made her way toward him. It was not until she was standing right in front of him and wrapping her arms around him in one of her warm hugs that he allowed himself to believe it was true.
“I don’t know,” she said, releasing him. “The entire time, I kept waiting and waiting. There was a moment, right when I came in here, when I started walking up there.” She didn’t have to point or motion for Santiago to know she meant the swarming sea of black at the top of the stadium. “I could see a wave of them rolling toward me, but then I stopped, backed up, and it was like I ceased to exist. As long as I stayed over here, they left me alone. Oh, here and there a few of them crawled across me, and I can tell you,” she said, shaking her head and giving a short, clipped laugh, “I didn’t like that. But I might as well have just been a part of the stadium for any interest they showed in me.”
She reached up and gave a gentle knock on the faceplate of the respirator. “That doesn’t look too comfortable in there. You’re all sweaty.”
“It’s hot,” he allowed.
“Well, the news did say that some people have been left untouched. I suppose I’m just lucky.” She gulped and then she started to cry. “I’m so, so sorry. Some luck, huh? I thought I was doing something noble, and instead you put yourself at risk to look for me. I was trying to make sure I wasn’t a burden on you, and I couldn’t even get that right.”
He reached out and swept her into his arms as though she were one of his children. He just held her while she cried.
When she’d composed herself, she took a few steps back, pulled a tissue out of her purse, and blew her nose with a great honking noise that belied her size. “I can’t believe you came for me,” she said.
“Of course. It’s what you do for family. We love you. I love you. We don’t call you abuela for nothing.”
A line of spiders—twenty, thirty, perhaps forty—came bristling past them, but although they passed close, they seemed to take no notice of the two people, one old, one not as old, standing and looking out over the football field.
“Well, then, we should head home,” Mrs. Fine said. “But Lord, oh, Lord. What a shame about them boys.” She waved her hand to indicate the lumpy, cobwebbed remains of the Ole Miss football team. “How about that? The world’s falling apart all around us, but Coach had the boys out here practicing. He always favored getting spring practice started later than I liked, and I guess nothing was going to stop him from putting them through their paces, not hell nor high water nor spiders. What a waste.”
She pointed to som
ewhere near the twenty-yard line. To Santiago, it just looked like a mess of bodies and cobwebs, with a steady stream of spiders going back and forth, but to Mrs. Fine, it was the glorious future of Ole Miss football lying in ruins.
“We were returning eighteen starters. Eighteen! And this was a stud recruiting class, I’ll tell you that. Giles was supposed to sit on the bench his freshman year, but I saw his first couple practices he graduated high school early and enrolled in the spring just so he could get on the field for spring practices and get the reps—and he was electric. He threw a pretty ball, just a spiral for the ages, but even from up in the stands you could see the velocity. If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn I heard the zip on the ball as it left his fingers. With a quarterback like that? If my husband had been alive to see Giles throw that ball, he would have had another heart attack.”
Santiago nodded, but the truth was, he was a rarity in Oxford. He didn’t care one whit about football. He looked at the writhing mass in the stands. “What do you think is up there?” he asked. “Why are they clustered up there?”
“Oh, who knows? And who knows why my old bones weren’t tasty enough for them? Let’s head home and you can get out of your crazy getup and I can sit with Juliet for a spell and maybe read her a story.”
That seemed like a good plan to Santiago, and so they turned and began walking.
Oslo, Norway
She had yet to venture outside the high school auditorium. She’d felt the burning destruction of the egg sacs that had been in the barn only a few miles away, and so she had kept to the darkness and the deep safety of the auditorium. Her little ones could seek the light. They could bring her what it was that she required.
Zero Day Page 17