The Hatching: A Novel (11 page)

He was pretty sure it was a nightmare, but it was too close to what had happened in Peru for him to be sure. He’d spent the last morning in Peru on the toilet, but he’d been game for the hike through the jungle. You didn’t become the fourth-richest American without having the fortitude to fight through the squirts. But it was embarrassing. The guide, Miggie, had been cool about it, but for Henderson, having to keep stopping to shit in the greenery while the women and his bodyguard waited for him was kind of awkward. He wasn’t deluded. He wasn’t a bad-looking dude. A little heavy. A lot heavy. Okay, kind of fat, and obviously on the wrong side of forty, but if he’d been just a doctor or something, he’d have been able to have a perfectly decent-looking wife. With billions in the bank, however, he rated three super-hot models. That still didn’t make him feel any better about having to cope with diarrhea. He’d been trying to drink water and get some salt into his system, but it had been hard going with the heat and the elevation. He could have canceled the hike, could have done pretty much anything he liked and nobody would have said anything. The rules were different for people like him. Money, at least on the scale he had, changed things. But for Henderson, it didn’t change the fact that he didn’t like
excuses. Didn’t like to hear excuses—“Own your mistakes and move on, or pack your shit and get out,” was one of the company’s mantras—and didn’t like to give them. But man, his stomach had been killing him.

He’d gone off the path for what must have been the fourth or fifth time, and he’d just finished wiping himself with some sort of foliage that he prayed fervently was nontoxic and was pulling up his pants when he heard the screaming. He took a dozen steps back toward the path, just close enough that he could see the guide being swallowed by a black tide. The three women clutched at one another and shrieked. His bodyguard turned to run but got tangled up in the women and fell to the ground with two of them. Henderson looked back to where the guide had been standing, but the man had disappeared. And then he saw the black wave wash over the body of the woman who was still standing. Tina. Her name was Tina.

There was screaming, but there was more than that. There was a rustling sound, a sort of clicking and flicking. It sounded both lush and creepy. The bodyguard lumbered to his feet, but there were patches of black over his back, his arms, on his head. Henderson couldn’t figure out what the patches were, but then he realized they were moving, splitting and swarming, re-forming on the bodyguard’s body no matter how much he swatted and brushed at himself. And then Henderson felt his stomach go liquid again, because from where he stood in the woods, even with the foliage fracturing his view, it looked as if the bodyguard’s face was melting, the skin sloughing off to show flesh and muscle and then bone. The man was still standing, screaming, thrashing at the air, at his head, at his body, but the blackness only grew more solid.

That had been enough for Henderson, and he turned and started to run. He had no idea where he was going, and with the
thickness of the plants and the trees he couldn’t do anything other than crash blindly. He was sure he was moving at the speed of a slow walk, but however little speed he carried, he knew he needed to get out of there. At first, all he could hear was the sound of his breathing, the push and rattle of his hands and legs against branches and leaves, but then he heard the sound again, the clicking and flicking. If he thought he’d been moving hard before, he was desperate now. There was something sharp and then numbness on his ankle, a scrape on his arm that could have been a branch or could have been something worse. Henderson kept moving, swatting at his body, cursing and crying and barely able to stand. He tripped and rolled on the ground, knocking his elbow and waiting to be swallowed, but as he lay there, he realized that other than his ragged breath, the jungle was quiet.

He scratched at his arm, and then at the numbness on his ankle, his hand coming back with a smear of blood. Something tickled at the back of his neck and he swatted it, feeling something solid burst under his hand. He grabbed whatever it was and held it in front of his face.

Ew. He shuddered. He was afraid of spiders, and this one was black and hairy. Even though it was squished from his slap, it had been big. And then he had to clamp down on a scream as he realized this spider was part of the black wave that had washed over the guide, his bodyguard, and the three models. Jesus. A swarm of them.

He’d gotten to his feet and done his best to walk in a straight line, hoping that sooner or later somebody would come looking for him. Billionaires didn’t just disappear without people noticing. After a period of time that he thought couldn’t have been more than an hour, he stumbled out of the jungle and found himself standing on a paved road. “What the fuck?” He looked around,
but there was no indication of which way he should go. He turned around a couple of times and then just chose a direction. Miracle of all fucking miracles, within three minutes he was waving down a Jeep carrying two scientists from the research center in the preserve. He’d offered them thirty thousand dollars to drive him directly to the airport, no questions asked.

By the time he was sitting in one of the leather seats on his Falcon 7X, he thought he’d already started having a fever. He’d made the scientists stop twice on the way to the airport so he could go to the bathroom, and the first thing he did upon boarding the jet was take some Imodium. That had done the trick with the diarrhea, but now he had the sweats and a pounding headache. His ankle was throbbing and he thought that maybe the cut was already infected. Fucking jungle. Fucking bugs. He couldn’t wait to get back to the USA for some good old American antibiotics. He was more than done with being an international adventurer. Who was he kidding? Why would he bother with hardship? He was sticking to nice hotels from now on. Hot water and gourmet food. If he was going to seek the company of super-hot models, he wanted to get his blow jobs while lying on six-hundred-thread-count sheets. That, Henderson thought, was a good way to spend some of his fortune. Screw the jungle.

He knew there’d be some questions when he landed, though. No matter how many billions he had, there was the little matter of the missing guide, the bodyguard, and the three models who’d flown to Peru with him. Well, the guide probably didn’t matter much, and the bodyguard’s death had been an occupational hazard, but even he couldn’t just make three semi-famous models disappear. Fortunately, he wasn’t prone to drugs or violence and didn’t exactly have a history of leaving bodies in his wake. When the questions came, he’d direct them to his lawyers and simply tell
the truth: some sort of animals had attacked them, and sick, injured, and disoriented, he’d panicked and fled. For right now, what he was most concerned about was whether the spiders he saw swarming over the interior of his jet were real or part of a nightmare.

He could hear a steady drone and see the spiders growing like black moss on the walls and ceiling of the jet. He could feel them crawling on him. His skin itched and he jerked and swatted. He sat up with a start and blinked hard. He’d been dreaming. A nightmare. A dark speck floated across his vision and he rubbed his eyes to clear them. Nothing. He saw one of the flight attendants, a brunette named Wilma or Wanda or something like that, staring at him, and he tried to straighten up in his seat. He knew he looked like a mess. The movement made him wince. His head, his stomach, his ankle, the fever. He felt like hell. Screw it, Henderson thought, and he stayed slumped in his chair, not even bothering to try to give her a smile.

She walked down the aisle and over to him to touch his arm. “We’ll be touching down in about ten minutes, Mr. Henderson. Can I get you anything before we land?”

He thought he saw something moving in the corner of his vision, another black spot, but when he flinched and turned, there was nothing there. Just his reflection in the window. He rubbed his eyes again, and that seemed to chase away the floating specks that teased him. “A tonic water would be good,” he managed. “And see about turning down the temperature. It’s hot in here.” She started to turn, but he called her back. “And get my assistant on the line. I feel like shit. Tell her we’re going straight to my doctor.”

She nodded and retreated to the galley. Henderson closed his eyes for a moment and then snapped them back open. The tonic water was on the table in front of him in a heavy cut-glass crystal
tumbler. He must have nodded off for a few seconds. He shook his head. He didn’t want to fall asleep again. As lousy as he felt, sleeping meant dreaming, and right now dreaming meant those goddamned spiders. He had been scared of spiders even before his trip to Peru, even before he watched his bodyguard’s face dissolve. At least here, on his jet, he knew that the only spiders were the ones inside his head. Which was killing him. The headache was a pressure that seemed as though it was centered in the middle of his forehead. He’d ask for some aspirin when Wilma or Wanda or whatever her name was came back.

He could feel the jet descending, and out the window were the first real outskirts of Minneapolis. He usually liked coming back to town, looking out over the city where he’d been born and raised and where he’d started one of the largest technology companies in the world. Today, however, when he tried looking out the window the light made him wince. It was like something pushing on his eyeballs. He could feel each beat of his heart like a hammer blow to his temple. Worse, he could feel something tickling inside his skull, a sneeze building up, and with this headache he knew that a sneeze was going to feel like the worst thing in the world. The pain in his head was suddenly enough to make black dots swim in his vision.

He sneezed. He saw a fine spray of blood coat the wall. Snot dripped from his nose. It felt like something was skittering around in there, and when he wiped at it, he realized something
was
skittering out of his nose. He felt the hairy, hard leg and pulled it. Holy fucking shit. It was a spider.

He just pulled a fucking spider out of his nose.

He had one of the spider’s legs pinched between his fingers. The bug swung and clicked at him. It was making an actual clicking sound with its mouth or its mandibles or whatever the hell
they were, and then the spider turned itself so that it was against his hand, biting into the flesh. It was a sharp pain, worse than a pinch, but oddly icy. He swore, and flung the creature away from him.

And then whatever pain was left in his head, the bite from the spider, the fact that he’d even had a fucking spider come out of his nose, was written over by the burning in his leg. It was worse near the cut he’d gotten in the jungle, as if somebody were holding a lit candle to his skin, and it radiated up and around his calf. He stared down at it, and for a moment he thought he might be having another nightmare, because he could actually see his skin bulging and rippling. He heard himself grunting and then screaming, and though he knew it was from the pain in his leg, it was both similar to and completely different from a dream: he was outside himself, watching. There was part of him that was writhing in his leather seat, straining against the seat belt, clutching at his calf and both shrieking and crying, and there was a part of him that seemed to be watching calmly as the flight attendant ran down the aisle toward him, followed by the copilot rushing from the cockpit. He wasn’t sure what part of him watched the skin around his ankle split open, a zipper of blood and blackness, as spiders spilled out onto the floor, swarming over Wilma or Wanda, over the copilot, leaving all three of them screaming and thrashing at the pain and the biting, and he didn’t even try to figure out what part of him watched as a thin line of blackness rolled toward the open cockpit door. And then he couldn’t see anything at all, but he could feel it when the plane pitched steeply forward.

M
ike flashed his badge at the uniform sitting by the door of Leshaun’s room. “Agent Rich. Mind if my daughter sits out here for a couple of minutes while I say hey to my partner?”

The uniform, a young Asian kid who looked fresh out of the academy and bored out of his mind at having to sit outside a hospital room all day, looked at Mike’s suit and badge.

“What’s she doing out of school?”

“She had a fever last night. She’s totally fine, but school protocol is for her to be fever-free for twenty-four hours. I’m off today, so we’re trucking around. You know how it is,” Mike said. The cop raised his eyebrows. “No, I guess you probably don’t know how it is. Just part of having kids.”

The cop nodded and motioned to the seat beside him. Annie didn’t even glance up from the game she was playing on Mike’s phone, sliding into the chair and continuing to make her little duck eat pellets or whatever it was the duck was supposed to be doing. The cop looked over Annie’s shoulder and crinkled up his brow. “Hey, how’d you get past level eight?”

Mike stepped into Leshaun’s room and closed the door behind him. He could see Annie through the glass door. He knew
the hospital wasn’t the best place to take his daughter, but he also knew that if his partner was up for it, he’d be pleased to see Annie. He wasn’t sure that Leshaun
would
be up for it, however. Two bullets. One to the vest and the other to his arm.

Mike hovered for a minute, watching Leshaun sleep, and then decided against waking him. The doctors had said Leshaun would be out of the hospital tomorrow, back on the job in a week or two. He was lucky as shit. The first bullet had gone clean through his biceps. Even though it had been a bloody mess, the bullet missed anything of real importance. It was probably going to take Leshaun longer to get over the second bullet, however. He had two broken ribs from where the vest caught the round, and those were going to nag for a while. Mike put the magazines he brought on the nightstand next to Leshaun and pulled out one of his business cards from his suit pocket so he had something to write a note on. As he clicked open his pen there was a loud sound from outside the hospital, a big
whomp
, and then the floor shook slightly. He looked out the window but couldn’t see anything, so he scrawled a quick note on the back of his card, telling Leshaun to give him a call and that he’d stop back later.