“They’re waiting inside,” she said. Her voice sounded muffled to her, but Cannon’s response, a crisp “Roger,” sounded good through the earpiece she was wearing.
They were maybe twenty feet from the entrance when the man on point held up his hand in a fist. With his orange hazmat suit, it looked almost comical. Almost. Because Melanie immediately saw why he’d stopped. There were twenty or thirty Hell Spiders skittering up and around the canopy that covered the entrance.
Melanie took a deep breath. “I’ll go.” Julie started to come with her, but Melanie held up her hand. It was okay. She’d go by herself. Only one of them needed to test the efficacy of the hazmat suits.
She stepped forward. This must be what it felt like to walk on the moon, she thought. The boots were too big for her, but the jumpsuit part fit fine. If she’d been a smaller woman, she probably would have been swimming in it. She was already warm and sweating, and when she stepped into the shade cast by the canopy, it was a bit of relief. Or it would have been if she hadn’t been so conscious of the Hell Spiders moving along the metal framework above her.
She felt the hot thud of something substantial hit her shoulder, and she froze. She was too scared to move her head, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the staccato movement of the spider’s legs. The weight shifted slowly from her shoulder toward her neck, spider legs pressing the material of the hazmat suit against her flesh. And then the ping of a leg tapping the glass of her face mask. The spider scuttled fully onto her face mask now; it was so big that she could see the world around her only in fragments.
“Steady now.” Cannon’s voice was calm. “Steady. There’s just the one. The rest of them are ignoring you.”
Melanie closed her eyes. She counted to ten, trying to control her breathing, and not for the first time wished she practiced yoga and meditation and all that hippie kind of stuff.
By the time she’d counted to seven, the weight of the spider had moved from her mask down to her chest. She opened her eyes to it flitting down her leg, over her boot, and across the ground toward the bushes that flanked the entrance.
“Okay,” she said, but her voice cracked, and she had to say it again. “Okay. I think we’re good with the suits.”
“You’d engender more confidence if you didn’t use the phrase ‘I think,’ Melanie,” Julie said.
“Ha ha.”
The rest of the group came toward her. She was impressed with how smoothly the men seemed to move even with the hazmat suits on. Once everybody was by the entrance, one of the men opened the door, and they went inside the building.
Pleasure Paradise Casino, Atlantic City, New Jersey
They’d been waiting for only five minutes, but it felt longer to Kim. First of all, the hazmat suits were uncomfortable. Second, trying to talk was exhausting. Everything came out muffled, and if you weren’t right next to somebody, it was pretty much impossible to understand what the person was saying. And third, and really the only thing that mattered: the lobby of the Pleasure Paradise Casino was positively dripping with goddamned spiders.
She was sure that, without the spiders and the dozens and dozens of bodies that were wrapped in cobwebs, the entranceway would have been a lot of people’s idea of classy. There were, like, an acre of marble, fluted columns, mirrors on the walls, and a round fountain with a stream of water flowing out of the tip of a cupid’s arrow, and it seemed like anything that could possibly have been gold plated had been gold plated. To her taste, however, it seemed kind of chintzy and vulgar. Although, to be fair, her parents had always been of the “If you’ve got money, you don’t need to prove it” school of thought.
Teddie seemed perfectly at ease, however. She was walking around with her stupid camera, filming everything. She’d even fitted everyone with microphones before they’d donned their hazmat suits. Unfortunately, the mics were connected only to the camera, so it didn’t help them communicate. Kim watched Teddie bring the lens of the camera ridiculously close to a spider that was chilling out on one of the pillars. It was one of the ones with red stripes across their backs. Kim didn’t know what the difference was between the ones with the red stripe and the ones that were completely black, but she figured if they didn’t all die, Teddie would have a heck of a documentary.
Shotgun and Gordo were huddled over the ST11, looking at the laptop screen and occasionally touching their helmets together to talk. She could hear the dull murmurs of their voices but couldn’t make out any words. Next to her, sitting on a plush red leather chair, Honky Joe tapped out a beat on the butt of his rifle. Elroy, Private Duran Edwards, and Mitts were standing a little closer in, near the edge of the casino floor. They’d already shown her that, in the first row of slot machines, there were at least two cocooned bodies. Two people who, even with this alien invasion, couldn’t tear themselves away from the machines.
That was the whole crew. She’d thought about recruiting Sue and her fire team, but in the end she couldn’t risk it. She loved Sue but she knew, deep in her heart, that Sue wasn’t the kind of girl who would disobey Rodriguez’s orders. Kim also knew that the bigger the group—the more people she tried to bring in—the greater the risk would be: not only was there a greater chance of somebody running to Rodriguez but it would also be harder to casually slip away. She finally decided to just stick with her fire team, but Honky Joe had sussed things out and invited himself along. Of course, Honky Joe, being Honky Joe, had more than pulled his own weight; he was the one who’d known that the Salem Nuclear Power Plant was more or less along the way and that it would be a logical place to score hazmat suits.
She walked over to where Gordo was working with Shotgun and was about to ask if he’d gotten any new texts, when a whole passel of people came breezing through the entrance. They looked as alien as Kim and her crew did, decked out head to toe in rubber and glass, carrying either M4s or . . .
“Hey! They made them!” Even muffled by his face shield, Gordo’s voice sounded bright and excited. He whacked Shotgun on the arm. “They made the flamethrowers!”
The hazmat suits blurred the details of the people entering so that aside from the weapons they carried, they all looked alike. The giveaway was that two of them were unarmed. Those two had to be Dr. Guyer and Dr. Yoo. Kim started to talk, but one of the new guys stepped in and presented a rucksack. He pulled out headsets. They were bulky, like what you’d see a coach wearing on the sidelines at an NFL game, with a heavy padded earphone on one side and a boom mic. Both Gordo and Shotgun slipped on a pair, and then Kim made sure that Mitts, Duran, Elroy, and Honky Joe were similarly equipped before she took a headset for herself. The hood of the hazmat suit was a heavy rubberized material, but as soon as she had the earpiece in place, she could hear fine.
“—like playing hot and cold. We’re in the right place, but we’re going to have to basically go room to room. Even without the ST11, it’s probably going to be obvious, though. The closer we get, the more concentrated the spiders seem to be.” Shotgun picked up the ST11 and handed Gordo the connected laptop to carry.
One of the unarmed figures grabbed Shotgun’s elbow. “You have no idea how much is riding on this.”
“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Shotgun said. He pointed at Kim. “Okay. Just like we talked about. You guys are going to be our eyes and ears while Gordo and I deal with the ST11.”
“We’re good,” Kim said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
One of the men who’d just come in held up his hand. “Hold up. I’m running this show.”
Typical, Kim thought. Guy walks in and thinks that because he’s got a pair of balls he’s in charge. She walked toward him, careful to keep her rifle pointed at the ground. “Who the hell do you think you are to just come waltzing in and—” She stopped. She’d gotten close enough to see his face. “Holy crap. You’re Billy Cannon.”
Shotgun had walked over with her. He shrugged and looked at Kim. “Whatever. I trust you.”
“Uh, Shotgun, I appre
ciate that, but Billy Cannon is the secretary of defense.”
Shotgun stuck out his hand reflexively and Cannon shook it. Shotgun held on. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “Now I’m in charge, and Kim and her crew are going to take point.”
There was an awkward static silence over her headset that was polluted by the sound of the games in the casino beeping and whirling. Kim glanced up and watched a line of seven or eight spiders with red stripes on their backs traveling across the ceiling. After a second Cannon nodded. “Fine,” he said. He looked at Kim. “What’s the drill?”
“Right. Okay. My fire team will take point, we’ll keep . . . Sorry. Who are the rest of you guys?”
They spent a moment on introductions. She’d been right that the two unarmed figures were the scientists Dr. Guyer and Dr. Yoo—Melanie and Julie—and she decided to corral all five civilians in the middle, between her fire team and the group of Rangers led by Cannon. The plan was to let Gordo and Shotgun focus on the ST11 while Kim worried about moving them safely through the casino and hotel. It meant that Melanie and Julie could concentrate on . . . well, Kim thought, science kind of stuff. She figured Teddie would have her camera going the whole time. That was fine. As long as the civilians stayed between her team and the Rangers, they’d be out of the line of fire.
They started moving, heading out onto the casino floor. It was a carnival of nightmares. Neon lights and flashing LED displays washing color across the glass of Kim’s faceplate. There were dozens and dozens of bodies wrapped in webs. Here and there, gossamer strands of silk floated and rippled in the air currents from the HVAC system. The gaming tables still had chips out, and there was a pile of bills on one of them, at least a thousand dollars in twenties spilled across the green felt. And through all of it there were spiders. Black spiders and the ones with the red stripes, skittering and dancing, moving in patterns that made sense only to them. They seemed uninterested in Kim and her party, but she stayed alert.
“Crap!”
Kim froze. She didn’t recognize the voice.
“Sorry. It’s Jones. I stepped on one. Squished it.”
“Okay.” It was a woman’s voice. Melanie. “Hold up a second. Let’s see if they react. Everybody just stay still. Hey, Julie, you seeing that over there? Have they started ecdysis already?”
Kim stood her ground, looking around the room. She wasn’t sure whether she imagined it or it was real, but it seemed like, for the first thirty seconds after Jones stepped on the spider, the others in the casino grew frantic, moving more quickly, crawling across the casino games and the carpet and the ceilings and the walls in whirling circles. Like they were searching for something, she thought. After maybe sixty seconds, Melanie gave them the go-ahead.
“Try to shuffle step,” Kim said. “I know they’re everywhere, but let’s do our best not to rile them up.”
Gordo gave directions as they walked. They passed through the casino into the hotel lobby, and Gordo asked for a few seconds so that he and Shotgun could fine-tune the ST11. “The closer we get, the more data we have,” he said. “Should be able to . . . Okay. Upstairs. Somewhere in the hotel.”
Kim reflexively went to the elevators and then realized that might be a bad idea. Being stuck on an elevator in a hazmat suit with spiders crawling around? Because, what, she wanted her nightmares to be even worse?
In the stairwell the sound of nearly twenty people slapping their boots on concrete was a hollow echo inside her suit. They climbed four flights and she waited until Shotgun indicated they should keep climbing. She paused again on the seventh floor and the tenth, and each time Shotgun motioned upward. Finally, at the twelfth floor, they reached the top. She opened the door and had to bite down on a scream. There’d been quite a few spiders in the stairwell, but on the twelfth floor it was something else. The walls and ceiling and floor were a moving quilt of spiders. There were enough of them that the lighting was obscured in fits and starts, giving an almost strobe-like quality to the scene. She stepped out into the hallway. “Watch your step,” she said, and then motioned to Honky Joe and Mitts to secure the right side. She went left herself with Elroy and Duran.
Gordo let out a whistle. “Holy crap. I think we’re in the right spot.”
“The ST11 is telling us . . .” Shotgun touched the screen with his gloved finger. “Left. Twenty meters. Must be near the end of the hall. Julie, Melanie? What do you want to do?”
“If you know this is where the signal’s coming from— Sorry, this is Cannon speaking. If you know this is where the signal’s coming from, let’s just get out, wire up the building with explosives, and take care of it that way.”
Kim had her rifle up, in firing position. She knew it was ridiculous. She couldn’t blast her way through these spiders. There had to be a thousand of them in the hallway. Still, she thumbed her rifle to full automatic fire.
Dr. Guyer’s voice came through her headset. “We need to see. We need to make sure.”
Cannon’s voice sounded absurdly like he was enjoying himself. “I figured you’d say that, but thought it was worth a try.”
“Okay,” Gordo said. “Down the hall. Kim? You ready?”
Of course, Kim thought. Of course down the hall. She moved forward in a shuffle step, trying to brush the spiders on the carpet out of the way instead of stomping on them, afraid of what she might unleash if she just started squishing their bodies under her boots. Through the hazmat suit she could feel spiders moving over her legs and arms and crawling across her back. One of them moved quickly across her face mask and she almost startled enough to squeeze the trigger.
As she approached the end of the hallway, the already thick and frantic concentration of spiders seemed to get denser and denser, until she couldn’t see any carpet through their writhing mass. She heard somebody swearing over the radio, a voice she didn’t recognize.
She was shoulder to shoulder with Duran. A trickle of sweat tickled down the back of her neck and she couldn’t stop herself from swatting at it. It was too easy to believe that maybe there was an open seam in her suit and that spiders were silently working their way inside.
“Through the door,” Gordo said over the headsets. “Straight ahead.”
Straight ahead was the Presidential Suite. The door was ajar, but it was so densely covered with spiders that it was a swirling vortex. The light in the hallway was dim and wavering, and she wished to god that she had a flashlight on the barrel of her rifle. She tried to get a better look at the spiders concentrated in the doorway without actually moving nearer. “Dr. Guyer,” she called out. “Melanie? Can you and Julie take a look at this, please?”
She listened to the sound of her own breathing as she waited for the two scientists. Once Julie and Melanie were beside her, Kim watched them lean in close.
“They’re in the process of molting,” Julie said. “Trying to shed their exoskeletons. That’s why they look—”
“There!” Kim pointed. “That one. Did you see that? It’s got a silver slash across its back instead of a red stripe.”
There was only one of them, or maybe there were two, it was hard to tell. The mass of spiders, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, swirling and pulsing around the doorway, was moving constantly. Kim saw a flash of silvery gray that disappeared and then reappeared a moment later elsewhere in the pile. Both Melanie and Julie saw it, too.
“Those are new,” Melanie said.
“Great. Because I’m sure they’re friendly, unlike the other spiders.” Kim shut up when she saw the look Dr. Guyer gave her through the glass of her faceplate.
“They’re not going to be a threat,” Melanie said. “Not with the hazmat suits on. We need to keep going. We need to see.”
“Okay. Fine,” Kim said. “Into the room?”
Gordo’s voice was warm and steady. “Straight ahead, Kim. The signal’s coming from in there.”
Kim realized she was holding her breath as she reached out with the barrel of her rifle to push the door open wider. The
room had to have more light, because there was a halo in the opening, and she stepped through, hopeful that whatever those new silver-slashed spiders were, they hadn’t evolved to recognize a meal through a hazmat suit.
It was better inside the room. Still gloomy, but compared to the narrow hallway, the spaciousness of the Presidential Suite lessened the feeling of claustrophobia. The main room was large and square, thirty feet by thirty feet, and two of the walls were almost completely glass. Spiders crawled over the windows in a moving horror show that the afternoon sun turned into a speckled and demented series of shadows. There were thousands of both the black and the red-striped spiders in the room, maybe tens of thousands, and here and there Kim thought she caught glimpses of the spiders with the silver slashes across their backs, maybe one out of every hundred. She scanned the room quickly, looking for what, she didn’t—
“Holy mother of . . .” Kim snapped her mouth shut. In the back corner, near an open door that must have led to the bedrooms, she saw the great glistening body of the giant spider twitch and shiver. There were twenty or thirty of the spiders with silver slashes crawling over the beast’s body, and it made her think of piglets trying to feed. She heard the sound of someone vomiting, and despite how scared she was, she was able to feel a moment of pity for the poor soul who’d been sick inside his hazmat suit. She slid sideways, careful not to trip as she moved all the way into the room. She stopped when she was right next to the window. Not once did she take her eyes or the barrel of her rifle off the giant spider in the corner. It was huge. A beast. Each leg was twice the size of one of hers, and the body . . . She would have bet the thing weighed two hundred pounds, dwarfing the silver-slashed spiders dancing across its body. It’s back was turned to the room, and all Kim could think of was that she didn’t want it to turn around, didn’t want its many eyes staring at her. As if being subjected to the spider’s gaze would mean a sure and instant death.
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