Amy grabbed Claymore’s collar, hauling him back down on to all fours. She looked at Fred. “What was that?”
The woman at the door waved the last man in and then hauled the door shut. “Lock it down! Lock it down!”
The men and women in suits and uniforms who had crowded into the entranceway took off, streaming in different directions like so many eager worker bees. It was all a bit overwhelming. Amy realized that despite everything that had just happened, she was still holding her beer. She took a sip. It was very foamy.
Fred held out his hand and obediently she handed him the bottle.
“I have no clue,” he said. “But this isn’t the most reassuring thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Approaching Manhattan, New York, New York
The Osprey was positively screaming. Gordo had no clue what the top speed of the aircraft was supposed to be, but it was clear that the pilot was pushing it. He looked at the laptop again. The information they’d been able to gather in Atlantic City meant that he and Shotgun could dial in the reading to a radius of a couple of blocks while they were outside the city. Accuracy would improve as they got closer . . . Okay. There it was. He had it nailed down to a circle of about one hundred yards.
“Where are they—” He stopped, frustrated, and then put the headset back on. He yanked at Melanie’s sleeve. “Where are they set up? Where’s the temporary White House?”
She had the plastic bag on her lap and had taken one of the silver-slashed spiders out and was staring at it. With her hazmat gear still on, it was clear that she was having trouble manipulating the spider the way she wanted to, but after finishing a lightning debrief with the president, she’d been consumed with staring at it.
“Upper East Side. About a block off Central Park. I think Seventy-Seventh or Seventy-Eighth.”
“Just across the park from the American Museum of Natural History?”
“Sure. I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t really know New York all that well. Is that good?”
“No,” Gordo said. Or, rather, he yelled. He realized he was yelling even though he had his headset on, and he tried to calm down. “No, that’s not good.” He tapped the screen of the laptop with his gloved finger. “That’s where the signal’s coming from. The museum. It’s just across the park.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s not good,” Melanie said, but she was clearly distracted by the spider she was holding. She moved it so Julie could see. “Am I imagining that?”
Julie bent her head to get a closer look and banged her face mask against Melanie’s. “Are you kidding?”
“Please,” Gordo said, “I know I’m going to regret asking this, but what is it? What do these new spiders have?”
Melanie looked up at him and Gordo recognized the fear on her face. “Teeth,” she said. “They’ve got teeth.”
Gordo shrugged. “They all have teeth. Haven’t you seen the way they can rip through people? But they don’t seem equipped to go through a hazmat suit. As long as we can get to the queen in New York before the spiders decide it’s feeding time, we’re fine.”
“No,” Julie said. “We’re not fine. Spiders don’t have teeth. They use venom to dissolve the flesh of their prey and then drink it.”
“Which is why they haven’t been able to get through the hazmat suits,” Melanie explained. “Their venom is designed to work on organic matter. It melts flesh. It can’t get through plastic or rubber or glass. The first-wave and the second-wave Hell Spiders don’t have teeth, and they can’t get through plastic or rubber or glass. But we’ve got a new wave.”
Gordo shook his head. “Sorry. What?” He glanced out the window. They were losing altitude, and he saw the engines starting to tilt around to put the Osprey into helicopter mode. It was a rather disorienting sight.
“First wave are the black spiders. Second wave are the ones with the red stripes across the back. I figured the queens were the third wave, but, really, the queens are something separate.”
Gordo nodded. He realized that Shotgun was nodding along. So was Billy Cannon. Everybody was listening. Cannon held up his hand and spoke. “One minute. Pilot says touchdown in one minute. Right on Central Park West. Get ready to move.”
The soldiers all started double-checking their weapons, but Gordo grabbed Melanie’s sleeve again. “Okay. First wave, second wave. So these new ones, the ones with the silver slashes on their backs, they’re the third wave? And they’ve got teeth?”
“Right. They’ve got teeth.”
“Okay. Again: So?”
“So,” Melanie said, “the first-wave and the second-wave Hell Spiders don’t have teeth, and their venom is ineffective against the hazmat suits.”
Gordo felt the Osprey hit the ground. He hadn’t even unbuckled himself before the military men were boots on the ground. He and Shotgun moved the ST11 carefully. They could build it again if they needed to, but that would take time. And right now what he wanted to do was get to this queen, stomp her out, and then get his wife far away from whatever signals the ST11 said were still out there.
He turned around and looked at the American Museum of Natural History. He watched Kim and her men fan out, watched the men who’d come from New York with the scientists spread out as well. With their hazmat suits and machine guns and flamethrowers, they looked menacing. That queen wasn’t going to know what hit—
“Wait a minute.” He looked at Melanie. “If they have teeth . . .”
“Yeah,” Melanie said. “Seemed like the queen recognized us as a threat, even with the suits on. I think if there are more of the third-wave spiders in there, we might be screwed. You saw what happened in the hotel room. A small hole in the suit is a big problem.”
The source of the signal almost leapt off the laptop’s screen. There was no question in Gordo’s mind that another queen was inside the building. And as he looked up again, he saw thick tendrils of black beginning to stream out of an open window on an upper floor. He pointed it out.
Whatever the spiders had been waiting for, the time had come. They were descending upon New York City.
Kraków, Poland
The queen tasted the acid smell of the night. It was full of hunger. Her little ones brushed past her in endless waves, emerging from the cellar where she had been letting her body recover from its transformation. She could feel more of her little ones emerging throughout the city from attics, from closets, bursting forth from the very bellies of those that served to carry her eggs. The alleyways and the shadows were made darker by the bodies of the little ones going forth. She was hungry. Always hungry.
White House Manhattan, New York, New York
“We’ve got to get this out there,” Steph said. “London. Berlin. Everywhere.”
“There’s nothing to get out there yet, Steph. We’ve got what Melanie’s telling us, but we don’t have the details for this machine they’re using. We need to be able to give people something concrete. What we need to do . . .” He spun and looked at Steph. “Broussard.”
“What about Broussard?”
“We need to make sure Broussard knows what we’ve got.”
“Manny, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Broussard right now. The guy tried to engineer a coup.”
“Look, Steph, when all this is done, Broussard isn’t going to come out so well. But right now he’s the man who’s got his thumb on the US military. We take this machine, this ST11 that we’ve got, and we pinpoint where the signals are coming from, and we don’t need to send in teams in hazmat suits. We send in bombers and jets and just blow them to hell.”
The office door banged open and three men in military uniform scrambled into the room. They didn’t stop to acknowledge Manny or the president. Not even a hasty salute. Two of them ran to the windows, taking duct tape and loudly ripping it off the roll as they hit every seam. The third dragged a chair to the wall, climbed up, and started sealing off the air vent.
Steph considered for a second. “Fine. Get in touch with him. But you’re
forgetting, we can’t just bomb and rest easy. We’re limited to conventional weapons.”
Nazca, Peru
They’d spent the night sharing a room in a dingy hotel that was at the edge of town. The hotel was empty, which was a relief. He’d gone into two other hotels but had immediately turned around when he saw the piles of bones and the swarming spiders that seemed to be making sure they hadn’t missed a morsel of meat. This hotel didn’t seem to have any corpses—at least not in the lobby or in the room they shared—nor did it seem to be infested with spiders. They’d both used the bathroom, and he’d showered, and when he came to bed, Bea had gotten on top of him. The sex was about the same as it had been the entire time they’d been hooking up: better than nothing, but not by a wide margin. In the morning, however, Bea treated him like she hated him.
He’d slept surprisingly late. It was almost eleven. He took another shower, luxuriating in the lukewarm water. By the time he was dressed in the pants and shirt from the day before, his boots laced and his trusty hat in his hand, he was ready to eat. Fortunately, the small dining area in the hotel’s restaurant was also free of bones, and he found Bea sitting on a chair, drinking a cup of tea and watching a show on one of those VCR-television combos that would have seemed cool back before Pierre was born. It was a movie he didn’t recognize, the dialogue all in Spanish. He greeted her, but she ignored him, so he helped himself to the food in the kitchen. Finally, when he was finished eating, he said, “Well, want to head back to camp?”
She rolled her eyes, but she stood up and walked out onto the street.
The entire walk was like that. It felt interminable. It would have been a lousy walk anyway, what with the death and mayhem and destruction. He understood she was upset, and he did feel bad for her, but he didn’t understand how she could possibly be blaming him for anything. They weren’t even dating! They’d never been dating! It’s not like she’d been in love with him and thought of him as some sort of perfect guy and he’d let her down. They’d both been clear from the beginning that they were hooking up because they were stuck in the field together for months and everybody else was already coupled. Heck, she had actually said to him, on more than one occasion, that the only reason she wanted to sleep with him was that she was bored of being alone in her tent, watching reruns of Modern Family. He’d joked that she should give Game of Thrones a try, but that only earned him a baleful stare.
He would have understood if she was simply upset because she’d seen Dr. Botsford and the other PhD students devoured by spiders. Heck, he would have understood if she was upset for any other reason: because they were thousands of miles from home, because the world appeared to be ending, because there were flesh-eating spiders everywhere, even because all their studying and work on the Nazca Lines and their commitment to getting their doctoral degrees was for naught. But she seemed to be upset over none of those things. What she seemed to be most upset over was the fact that the two of them had somehow survived together.
It was like the world’s crappiest miracle, he thought. He knew there had been reports of people being passed over, that the spiders didn’t eat absolutely everybody in their path—or, worse, put eggs inside the bodies of everybody in their path. And don’t think that Pierre didn’t spend a bunch of time in front of a mirror looking for anything approaching a cut or a scrape or a sign that he’d had a spider zip inside him. But the weird, colossal luck of it? That of all the people left behind in that restaurant and on the streets in town, somehow the two of them had been left alone together . . .
Honestly, it was like she was blaming him for the fact that she was still alive.
The walk felt like it lasted forever. For some reason Bea was not only angry at him but also insisted they walk instead of borrowing one of the scooters that had been abandoned on the roadside. Maybe not abandoned, exactly, but it made Pierre feel better to think of it that way.
He did his best to ignore her passive-aggressive grunts and the way she rolled her eyes anytime he said anything, and he took the high road when she made snide comments about how he was either walking too slow or walking too fast; obviously, he couldn’t even manage to walk properly as far as she was concerned. He even managed to act like it didn’t bother him when she started kicking or stomping on the spiders they passed. Although, of course, that scared the crap out of him. What was she thinking? That they were magically immune?
When they got back to their campsite, he sat on one of the field chairs and just stared at the sky for a while, listening to her stomping around and swearing. Which was unusual, since Bea had grown up pretty conservatively.
It felt sort of like giving up to just sit in the chair like that. The spiders, which had thinned out as they left town, started appearing in greater numbers again the closer they got to the campsite; it wasn’t like he was wading through them or anything, but they were hard to ignore. Every few minutes one would climb up his leg or come crawling over the arm of the chair and hang out on his arm for a bit. At one point, a spider with a silver slash on its back—he wasn’t sure whether he’d seen one of those before, he thought idly—tried to go up under his pant leg, but he brushed it off and tucked his pants into his boots. He kept waiting for the worst—for the spiders to decide that they were ready to eat him now—but at some point, he stopped being afraid and just got bored. Eventually he closed his eyes and must have fallen asleep for a bit. By the time he woke up, the sun had started ducking below the horizon, and his neck was stiff.
Bea was standing directly in front of him, her hands on her hips. She looked even angrier. “I’ve been thinking about it, and we’re done.” Without another word, she spun around and stormed off, zipping herself back into her tent. After a few seconds Pierre heard the tinny voices of her playing some sort of show on her laptop.
He reached up and rubbed at the muscles in his neck. There was a part of him that sort of wished the spiders had just gone ahead and eaten him.
American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York
Melanie was glad she’d stayed in shape. She was out of breath, sweating, and terrified, and if she’d been in poorer shape, she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to keep control of herself. She glanced over at Julie, who was limping and clearly struggling.
The museum was a maze. It was one of those old-school buildings that had been added onto and connected in such a way that it was easy to feel lost. If they hadn’t been in a hurry, it wouldn’t have bothered her. She was a nerd at heart, and she would have been more than happy to linger in a cool museum, reading every card and staring at every exhibit. But even as they wove their way deeper and deeper into the museum, Hell Spiders went past them in great floods. They turned left again, Gordo carrying the laptop and pointing the way, and she saw a pile of shed exoskeletons. It looked like a basket of laundry, as if the Hell Spiders had shrugged off their skins and left them for the maid.
Julie saw, too, and she shook her head. Melanie could see her grimacing as she hobbled along.
Suddenly, Gordo halted. Shotgun barely stopped in time to avoid yanking out the cable that connected the laptop to the box that was the ST11.
“We’ve got a problem,” Gordo said. “Something’s wrong.”
The Rangers and the Marines were pros. Melanie had to give them that. While she and Julie went over to stand by Shotgun and Gordo and stare at the laptop’s screen, the people with the guns and flamethrowers formed a tight circle around them, facing outward and ready for any signs that the spiders’ behavior was about to change.
“Are there supposed to be two blinking dots?” Melanie asked.
Gordo hit the escape key repeatedly. “No. Something’s glitching. Might need to reboot.”
“This,” Julie muttered, “is why I don’t trust self-driving cars.”
“Close it out and restart the laptop and I’ll have the ST11 cycle through a restart as well,” Shotgun said. “Maybe it’s a ghost reading. This building is old enough and has enough crap in it that it might have
been just an echo or something.”
Melanie had the sinking feeling in her stomach that had begun to feel all too familiar. “Don’t bother,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a glitch.”
Julie and the two men looked at her. Shotgun was the first of them to figure it out. “Oh, great. Two queens.”
That, evidently, was enough to make the Rangers and the Marines unprofessional for a few seconds. There was a lot of swearing over the headsets.
“Well,” Gordo said, “if it’s not glitching, then I think we’re about fifty yards away. Turn right at the end of the corridor.”
Melanie looked down at the museum map she’d snagged when they ran through one of the rooms. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s the special exhibition room. And the exhibition? Spiders.”
There was another chorus of swearing. Melanie felt like joining in, but she was distracted. Something had changed. It took her a beat to realize what it was. The spiders. Where before there had been a steady file of first-wave and second-wave spiders with the occasional third-wave silver-striped spider thrown in, now it was more heavily tilted toward the third-wave spiders—perhaps half of them now—and they were starting to come closer and closer, as if they were now curious about these hazmat-suited entities among them.
“We better hurry,” she said. “And listen, if it’s anything like at the hotel, as soon as the queen—or, in this case, queens—recognize that we’re a threat, all hell is going to break loose.”
She saw Gordo shake his head, and even though he muttered it, she could hear the words picked up through the radio: “Frickin’ teeth.”
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