She felt a heavy bump against her side, but it was only Gordo. “Sorry,” he said. He looked back at the screen of the laptop and then angled it so Melanie and Julie could see it.
“Holy crap.” Dr. Guyer looked at the screen and then at the monster. “The signal’s coming from right there? It’s really coming from one of the queens? She’s controlling all these spiders!”
Kim wanted to look away from the spider, but she was afraid to. A queen. That’s what Dr. Guyer had called it. There was a hulking, shiny pile right next to the queen that looked menacing—an imitation of the shape of a spider—and Kim realized it was the thing’s shell. It had shed its skin. What had Julie said? That the spiders were molting? Was that why it seemed so feeble right now? The queen was shivering and shaking, like it was getting ready to . . . Oh, god. It was turning around.
“Uh, guys,” Kim said. “I think it knows we’re here.”
On cue, the smaller spiders started frantically closing in on them. It was such a rapid wave of movement that Kim could hear them. It sounded like a rake scraping pavement, like nails on a chalkboard. It sounded like death.
Hundreds of spiders crashed into her, enough weight that she staggered backward. She saw one of the men who’d come with Cannon try to move backward and trip in his ungainly hazmat suit. He fell hard, crashing through the surface of a glass coffee table, and even before he’d hit the ground, Kim could see spiders rushing through the gash the broken glass had rent in his hazmat suit. The man was screaming, and then Kim heard a whoosh and saw a great blooming burst of fire come out of the nozzle of his flamethrower. As her face mask went dark, she heard the added percussion of gunfire as the men around her pulled their triggers.
So far, the hazmat suit was keeping them away from her, but she had no idea how long that would last. She was completely covered. She could feel the weight of spiders on her back, on her arms, on her legs, could feel their heaviness on the hood of the hazmat suit and as they banged across the glass shield of the face mask. They couldn’t seem to get through, but the pinpricks of thousands of spider legs frantically galloping over her body made her feel as though she were in the middle of an ice storm. The weight grew and grew. She could feel her arm muscles start to burn with the effort of keeping her rifle steady. She didn’t care how many of those sons-of-bitches crawled on her—she wasn’t moving that rifle. Her aim was true, and she knew it.
She pulled the trigger and held it down.
The rifle bucked in her hands, the sewing-machine thump against her shoulder familiar from so many hours on the range.
The only things louder than the gunshots were the searing shrieks that came from the spiders. It was like ten thousand whistles, ten thousand diamonds breaking, and ten thousand drills boring into her skull. She felt her rifle run dry, and she let go so that she could clap her hands over her ears. As she did so, she was unable to stop herself from screaming in an attempt to drown out the sound.
At some point she realized she’d stopped screaming, that the whistling shrieks that had felt like they were tearing out her eardrums had stopped as well. Spiders were no longer weighing her down. Her eyes were scrunched tight, though she didn’t remember closing them. Slowly she squinted, letting in the bright sunlight that streamed through the windows. Then she let her eyes open fully.
The queen was shredded meat, her great, bulbous body leaking viscous goo out over the floor. One of her legs twitched oddly, keeping some syncopated rhythm that made Kim feel almost dizzy. She let her hands drop from her ears and turned to look around the room.
There were thousands of spiders littering the floor. They were ankle-deep in most places, knee-deep in some, with odd scattered spots along the carpet that were bare. One of the men took a step and his leg kicked up a movement of spiders. He spun, pointing his rifle down and firing a three-bullet burst.
“Hold fire!” Cannon’s voice brooked no dissent. Kim was more than happy for him to take over now.
“Oh my god. The queen. Who shot the queen?” Dr. Guyer turned first one way and then the other.
Kim realized she was shivering. No. Not shivering. She wasn’t cold. She was shaking. “I . . .” She tried again. “I did. I’m sorry. It was instinct. The normal spiders didn’t seem to care, but it was like she knew we were here. I’m sorry.”
“No. No, no, no,” Dr. Guyer said, spitting out the words rapidly. “It’s brilliant! Don’t you see? Look around. Look at this!” She kicked at a mound of spiders on the ground and then took a step and kicked at another pile. It was like watching a child skipping through autumn leaves. “It’s like they were just unplugged or something! It’s the queen! The queen was the signal. Kill the queen, you kill them all!”
Kim looked around the room again. There was no movement from any of the spiders. She didn’t know how to tell if a spider was dead but . . . “Oh, hell. Okay.” She reached up and pulled off her mask.
“Kim! What are you doing?” Elroy was right next to her and he grabbed her mask and started to put it back on.
“Stop,” she said. She said it calmly. She felt strangely calm all of a sudden.
Elroy hesitated, but then he stepped back and watched as Kim clumsily peeled off one glove and then the other. She waited, but there was no reaction, nothing from the spiders at all, and after a few seconds she started laughing.
And then she stopped. There were three bodies on the ground. The poor guy she’d seen fall through the glass coffee table, his suit sliced to ribbons and spiders flocking to him. He was on his back, but his face mask was a gory blur of red and other things that she didn’t want to think about. Over by the room’s bar, another body, another one of the men who’d come in with Cannon. There was a red starburst on his chest. Friendly fire, she thought.
But just a few feet from the coffee table. Another body.
Teddie.
She was neatly draped facedown over the arm of the couch, like a coat somebody had put down for a moment. Her camera was still in her hand, but there was a great jagged rip in the leg of her hazmat suit. A shard of glass from the coffee table. Maybe a lamp or something else broken from errant fire. Kim didn’t know and she didn’t care. She could see the ragged meat of Teddie’s leg stripped back to the bone, could see blood pooled in her glass face mask, could see that she was utterly and completely still. And then she looked away. She didn’t want to have to look at Teddie’s body, didn’t want to have to see the way the spiders had savaged her.
She realized that Shotgun was standing next to her, that he was seeing it, too. He reached out and put his arms around her, and Kim let herself collapse into him.
She cried for only a minute, but it left her exhausted. All she wanted to do was sit down somewhere and have a beer.
Cannon’s voice pierced her numbness. “Okay. Lance Corporal, I admire your courage in taking off your hazmat gear, but everybody else stay suited up. And I want two and two on each body. Julie? Dr. Yoo? You okay?”
“Yeah,” Julie said. “I mean no, not really. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay after that, but I’m fine. Just twisted my ankle a bit. But I’m good.”
“Okay,” Cannon said. “Rangers, Marines, two and two. Grab a body. We’ll bring them down and leave them in the parking lot for now. Let’s get moving. We need to tell the president what we know.”
The military men started moving to obey Cannon’s order, but Kim noticed that Gordo was staring at the screen of the laptop and looking like he might be sick. She reached out and tapped his wrist. “You okay?”
“No. No, not really. Hey, Melanie.”
Melanie didn’t answer. She’d sorted through the piles of dead spiders and shoved two of the ones with silver slashes on their backs into a heavy, clear plastic bag. Now she was over by the queen, poking at the monster’s bullet-riddled body, seemingly unbothered by the goo and viscera. Julie was limping over, interested.
“Melanie!” Gordo yelled. She looked up this time. “Melanie,” he said. “You left Amy with the president?”
“Yeah. She’s fine. They’re fine. They’ve got, like, a temporary White House going.”
“In New York City?” Gordo asked.
“You bet. Why?”
He held up the laptop. His hands were shaking. “The next closest signal we’ve got. It’s coming from New York.”
Moores Airport, Degrasse, New York
The airport was barely more than a grass field and a small hangar, but it had fuel. Mike did the grunt work under Rex’s direction while Leshaun took Annie, Dawson, Fanny, and Carla over to the outhouses behind the hangar. Mike figured he was being paranoid, but he felt more comfortable knowing they had an armed escort.
So far the trip had been easy—easy but wildly uncomfortable, because even though Rex’s Skywagon supposedly seated six, they had six plus Annie, as well as survival gear. Rex kept the plane low. Much lower, he said, than he would have if they were flying under normal conditions, but he was worried that the president’s no-fly order might still be under enforcement.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer not to be shot out of the sky. Don’t want to be eaten by spiders, don’t want to go down in a giant ball of fire.”
He’d been eating a bag of chips while he said it—which made Mike a little nervous, thinking that it would be good for Rex to keep two hands on the yoke—and he heard Carla mutter something that sounded suspiciously like “But you’re not afraid of a heart attack.”
The truth was that Rex seemed like a pretty good pilot. Not that Mike really knew what made a good pilot or a bad pilot, but Rex was both methodical and steady. They weren’t exactly rushing, but they’d overnighted at their first stop, somewhere in the hinterlands of Michigan, and Mike didn’t want to linger. For all that, Rex was no spring chicken.
“You sure you’re good?” Mike asked. He had a hand on the fuel hose, although Rex had said it would be a few more minutes at least before Mike needed to do anything.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Rex said, taking off his ball cap and whacking Mike in the chest with it. “Just because I’ve got all this gray in my beard doesn’t mean I can’t hold my own. One more hop, then we’ll be as close to off the grid as we can get. Next to being in space, an island off the coast of Maine seems our best bet.”
“And it’s near Portland?”
“Portland? No. Why on earth would you say that?”
Mike shrugged. “You said it was just off the coast of Maine.”
“Maine’s a big place, son. No. Up the coast. Kissing the border between Canada and the United States.”
Rex shut off the gas and they went through the whole process of cleaning up and readying the plane. By the time they were done, Leshaun was back with the group. Mike had been partners with Leshaun long enough to catch his look.
“What?”
“Natives might be getting restless,” he said. “Saw a couple of pickup trucks on the road there, and I think they noticed us going in and out of the outhouses. Might not be the worst idea to get moving.”
“Okay. You guys load up. Just let me take a pee.”
Rex clapped Leshaun on the shoulder. “Don’t forget about me. I’ve got an old man’s bladder.”
Mike pursed his lips. “You just got mad at me for insinuating that . . .” He trailed off. In the distance he saw two pickup trucks cruising on the main road toward the turnoff for the airport. “Hey,” he called out over his shoulder to the others. “Get in the plane. Rex, if you’ve got to take a piss, I think you’re going to have to do it right here and now.”
“Great,” Rex said with a harrumph. “Because I need that kind of pressure. Carla!” he yelled. “Fire up the engine for me.”
The trucks were only a hundred yards from the hangar by the time Rex was in the pilot’s seat and wheeling the plane around. “I’m skipping a few things on the checklist,” he called out, “so cross your fingers.”
The turf runway was a little bumpy for Mike’s taste, but they were in the air before the trucks reached them. He looked out the window, watching the trucks turn around and leave, and then he glanced back at where his daughter and the rest of the group were sitting.
“No harm, no foul,” Rex said.
Both he and Mike were quiet for the next ten minutes, and then Mike responded. “Do you think there’s any chance that was just an innocent drive-by?”
“Doubt it.”
“What the heck is wrong with people?” Mike said.
“Fear. People are afraid.”
Mike nodded. He looked out the windows again. They were on the outskirts of the Adirondacks. He wished they were flying higher so he could get a better sense of the land. Down low, all he could see were carpets of trees broken by the occasional glimpse of a lake. He had the sense that it might remind him of northern Minnesota from a greater height. It made him sad to think that he’d never be back there. His marriage had fallen apart in Minnesota, but he’d also had good years there, and Annie had no memories of ever living anywhere else. He wasn’t going to let it get to him. No point looking back. They were some of the lucky ones. He knew that.
“Can’t wait to get to this island of yours.”
“It’s supposed to be beautiful.”
“Wait—you’ve never been there?”
“Nope,” Rex said. “We used to fly down to Corpus Christi a couple of times a year to see Carla’s parents, but they both passed, and with the cottage on Soot Lake, I wasn’t real interested in going anywhere else. Oh, we went to Chicago sometimes, and to New York, and we took our honeymoon in Hawaii, but can’t say that I’ve ever made it to Maine.”
“But you’re sure we’ll be safe there?” He reached out and tapped at one of the dials with a jiggling needle. “What’s this?”
Rex glanced down at his instruments and reached out and gave Mike’s hand a hard slap. “Keep your hands off that. You’re no copilot, buddy.” His smile quickly turned serious. “Do you think anybody can really promise anywhere is safe right now? We’ll be welcomed. I can tell you that. An old buddy of mine from Vietnam is there. He’s good people. He can trace his family line back two or three hundred years on that island. From what he’s always said, it’s the sort of place where you were either born and bred or you’re from away, so I suspect they mostly closed up shop once this hit.”
“So why are we—”
“Like I said, he’s an old buddy from Vietnam. He owes me one.”
White House Manhattan, New York, New York
“All I’m saying is that I’m married to him,” Fred said, “so if he’s the hero in all of this, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that I get some recognition.”
Amy took a sip of her beer. Normally she would have been nervous about drinking a beer while walking down the middle of the street in New York City in the afternoon. She wasn’t much of a rule breaker. These weren’t normal times, however. She was pretty sure the cops had better things to do than write tickets for drinking in public.
Claymore gave a tug at his leash and then led her over to a lamppost. “Okay, buddy. Sure. You haven’t peed on that one yet. Seriously, Fred, I swear, he might be the happiest dog in the world.”
“To be fair to Claymore, this is all pretty exciting. Lots of new things to smell, lots of people petting him and telling him he’s a good dog, and he’s had more people food in the last few weeks than— Oh god!”
Amy grimaced as she watched the dog squatting again. “That’s why we don’t normally let him eat people food.” She sighed. “Anyway, I’m sure you’re right. Plus he doesn’t know he’s supposed to be scared. To him, this is all just one great big adventure. I’m sure he misses . . . Fred? Do you think those men are yelling for us?”
They both looked back down the block toward the town house that was functioning as the current White House. Neither she nor Fred had any real standing. They were tolerated only because of their connections to Gordo and Shotgun and that little machine they had made, and it was all a little unsettling. But it also meant there should h
ave been no reason that anybody was looking for them. Except that, it seemed rather clear now, the small group of men in suits running down the steps of the town house and yelling and waving were, in fact, trying to get their attention.
“Well, aren’t we popular!” Fred said. He couldn’t keep the delight out of his voice. “What do you suppose all that’s about?”
Amy gave Claymore’s leash a little tug and looked guiltily at the mess the dog had made. She’d come back and clean it up after she found out what the men wanted.
“Inside! Get inside!” the man was screaming, and he was almost even with Amy and Fred by the time they’d worked out what he was saying. He stuttered to a stop and grabbed Amy’s arm. “Come on! Run!”
He started to pull her, but she was already running. She spared a look for Fred. Despite all his silliness, he’d been a reasonably decent athlete in high school and had played soccer for two years at Pomona College before deciding he’d had enough. Pomona was a DIII school, but still, even after twenty years, Fred could book it; he was three steps ahead of her before she’d even run ten steps. Claymore, of course, thought all of it was a hoot, and he ran, ears flopping, tail wagging, the whole way.
The Secret Service agents outside the building had their guns drawn and were yelling, and the military men and women were carefully swiveling back and forth with their rifles as Amy ran up the steps behind Fred. As she passed through the door to the town house, one of the men stationed there grabbed her biceps and kept her moving.
“Clear the area! Clear the area!” he shouted, as if Amy was supposed to have any idea what he was talking about.
“Move! Move!” said a woman in a dark suit who stood at the door, waving the agents and troops inside the building.
Somebody, a civilian, pushed rudely past Amy. She didn’t fall, but she did have to grab onto a table in the grand entrance. Claymore was wagging his tail and was up on his hind legs, his front legs against the chest of a man wearing body armor and digitalized camouflage. He was carrying a nasty-looking machine gun that looked as if it had been compressed to two-thirds the normal size, but he was very calm and polite as he looked at Amy. “Ma’am, would you mind please getting your dog off me so that I’m free to take action as needed?”
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