The Hatching: A Novel (22 page)

He tucked the phone back into his pocket and walked down the corridor. The crew was already standing by the door. The scientists had raised all sorts of hell about the tremors, insisting they be allowed to go down, and presumably they’d gotten to see what the problem was, because he hadn’t heard any more complaints. And he hadn’t heard anything from his supervisor either. The man was probably out drunk somewhere again. He liked his supervisor,
but the truth was that the man, even if he had not been a drunk, was not particularly competent. He was also not particularly demanding, so that was good.

He nodded at the men standing by the door. The meters in the tunnel were going nuts, but the crew couldn’t get the door open to check. They’d tried everything, including a master reset of the code on the door, but it was stuck. He didn’t know what the hell the scientists had done to it—or, more likely, his supervisor—but there wasn’t really any other choice: they had to get in. He sighed. He really would have preferred for his supervisor to make the call, but it had to be done.

“Okay,” he said. “Break the pins.”

The men went to work on the hinges, and he watched for a few seconds before he felt his phone vibrate with a text:
Contractions. I think it’s time. Come home
.

He hesitated, but then he typed back
leaving now
. It would take only another minute or two to get the pins out, and then he would head right home.

The first pin went, and the crew held the door in place while one man finished the second pin. He could see the door was heavy. They strained to pull it off and move it to the side, but once they had, there was a lot of talking.

At first he thought it was dust or dirt or even coal, but quickly he and the crew realized what filled the tunnel nearly to waist height: dead spiders.

The black bodies were so thick that it was like a single mass. They’d pushed up against the door, but farther back the volume dropped, and as far as he could see down the tunnel, before the bend, they seemed to fall to knee height. On the walls, high up, and hanging from the ceiling, he could see chalky, white bundles. Spider silk. Most of them were the size of footballs, but a few were
larger. There was one close to the door, and while the crew stayed behind him, he shuffled forward a few steps, sliding through the spilled spiders as though they were dried leaves. He reached up to touch one of the bundles. It was sticky. And though he’d expected it to be cool, it was warm.

His phone pinged again:
I’ll meet you at the hospital.

He put the phone back in his pocket and turned around. The sound of the spiders crunching and popping under his feet made him feel sick. They were scary, but no more so than looking at a specimen pinned under glass. He toed one with his shoe. It was light, as if it were hollow. Dead. Dried out. Used up. Whatever these spiders were—thousands and thousands of them, tens of thousands—and however they’d gotten down into the tunnel, they were dead.

He knew what he should do: he should figure out where the hell his supervisor was and get the man down here. And if he couldn’t reach his supervisor, call his supervisor’s supervisor. Not only was this the stuff of nightmares, it was also clearly something that was beyond what he was supposed to handle on his own.

His phone again:
Hurry
.

But if he did what he was supposed to, it would be hours and hours. The prospect of making overtime was much more appealing when his wife was waiting to go into labor than it was with her actively
in
labor. If he didn’t get moving right away, his wife would hold it against him for the rest of his life.

“Okay,” he said. “For now, we leave it. You two stay here and keep everybody out of the tunnel.” The men he pointed to muttered and didn’t look at him, but he knew they’d do their job. “We’ll see to this tomorrow.”

He gave one last look at the mass of spiders and then turned to hurry to get to his wife.

Perhaps if he’d looked more closely, he might have seen the bones buried under the pile of spiders, three bodies stripped clean. He might have then realized there was a reason he hadn’t seen his supervisor since those two scientists had come. And, perhaps, if he’d been alone, if it had been quieter, he would have heard the sound behind him, back in the tunnel. A skittering. A tearing.

If he’d heard it, he would have realized that all the spiders weren’t dead. Perhaps then he would have yelled at the men to shove the door back into place, to hold it tight.

Perhaps.

But he didn’t.

Delhi. Second most populous city on earth. Including surrounding towns and villages, home to twenty-five million people.

W
ith a crew of only twenty-two men, the four-hundred-meter-long
Mathias Maersk
Triple-E could carry eighteen thousand containers, and, at a slow steam, use about a third less fuel than older and smaller ships. Modern efficiency at its best, already outdated: the
Mathias
was going to be outclassed soon enough. Scale. It was all about scale. As long as a ship was full, the bigger it was the more money it made. And the
Mathias Maersk
Triple-E was full. They’d loaded up in China, shipping container after shipping container. The manifest included everything from textiles to rubber ducks, all packed tight in their individual metal coffins, ready to hit the streets of America.

Calm seas and fourteen days of routine logs. If he’d been a religious man, he’d have given prayers of thanks. A good part of their cargo came from northwest China, where the nuke had gone off. He felt bad for the captains waiting in port in China right now. Their schedules were going to be thrown off. Routine logs were not in the offing for those captains. They were not going to cross the ocean anytime soon. Not like him. With the autopilot locked
in on the Port of Los Angeles, at a steady seventeen knots, he had about twenty hours to go. Or he’d had twenty hours to go. Unfortunately, it sounded like there was going to be a problem.

Even with only twenty-two men on board, there were nine languages spoken. The captain was a native speaker of Italian, but fluent in English. Which was more than could be said for the majority of the crew. Shitty pidgin English was the order of the day. It was difficult enough to get everybody to understand one another face-to-face, but with the noise of the engine and the normal static of the radio, the captain hadn’t been able to understand a single word from the engineer on duty. It didn’t help that the man had been screaming.

He double-checked the autopilot, glanced at the zoomed-out map showing Los Angeles dead ahead, and went to call the first mate. Whatever it was, they’d get it fixed when they hit the port tomorrow. With a little luck they’d be tied up in time for him to grab a late lunch in Los Angeles while the ship was being unloaded. He was ready for a day on the town.

“I
don’t know if it’s worth bothering yet,” Teddie said to her boss. Teddie Popkins—Theodora Hughton Van Clief Popkins, but she’d been Teddie since her first week on earth, and using the Hughton Van Clief part of her name instead of sticking with Teddie Popkins was a good way to make sure the only men who hit on her were gold diggers—played the video back again. It was shaky, but the quality was first-rate. She’d be the first to admit that cell phones had made her life as a producer a lot better. A piece-of-shit phone could still shoot HD video. Sure, when she had reporters out in the field, there was nothing better than a cameraman with a $20,000 Panavision. But she didn’t exactly have a crew just standing around in India waiting for . . .

What the hell was it exactly?

Part of her job as a producer, particularly on a boring weekday morning shift like this, was to fill time when things were slow. Okay. Associate producer. Not bad for somebody three years out of college. But the point was that on slow news days, part of her job was to help make news, and today was as boring as you could get during a week when China had set off a nuke.

That was the problem. The nuke had eaten all the news. For the first twenty-four hours, the entire building had been buzzing. She’d called an ex-boyfriend at FOX, and he’d said it was the same there: reporters and producers were all hands on deck, the same ten China policy experts on heavy rotation, total speculation, what little video they had on a constant loop. And then, nothing. The nuke story just fizzled out. Nothing new happened and it didn’t seem like there was much beyond the story: China had accidentally exploded a nuke in a sparsely populated part of their country. Basically, whoops.

That was the other reason the story faded so quickly: it was in China. Teddie wasn’t jaded. She’d graduated from Oberlin College, the kind of liberal arts bastion where you learn to care about everything. She’d been out of school long enough to start eating meat again and to learn to walk downtown without having to stop and talk to every homeless person, but despite coming from money and painfully conservative parents—Theodora Hughton Van Clief Popkins’s father was William Hughton Van Clief Popkins III after all, the kind of lineage that meant she would probably have been a better fit at FOX if not for, as her father put it, “youthful naiveté about the way the world works”—four years at Oberlin had done their job. She hated that a story about some Hollywood starlet overdosing on Botox could push a nuclear explosion in China out of the headlines. She hated it, but she was also realistic. Americans just didn’t care about foreign news very much.

Which brought her back to the problem of what to do about this footage from India. India was a hard sell. Every once in a while there’d be some sort of groundswell story they would pick up on, but they weren’t going to be the lead on something out of India. Particularly during a week like this, when they’d already used up
their quotient of foreign news with the China stuff. But still. The video.

“You might be right,” her boss said, “but just play it for me.” He leaned in over her shoulder so he had a better view of the monitor.

She had watched it slowed down and with the sound muted. At quarter speed, it was still barely a minute long, and it definitely lost the creep factor. A lot of sky and buildings and people running. In a few places, she could see what looked like black ribbons coming out of the train station, but nothing definitive. Near the end, there was a man stumbling out of a doorway and then falling down, the ribbons spreading over him, but even with a decent-quality cell phone camera, it was hard to tell what was going on. But at full speed, with the sound up? Even though the herky-jerky image telegraphed panic already, it was the screaming, the honking cars, something smashing, that really made it scary.

She played it at full speed and risked a glance at her boss. Don’s mouth had actually dropped open.

“Whoa. What the fuck?”

“Yeah,” Teddie said. “That’s why I’ve been going back and forth. There really isn’t much to see, but it’s kind of terrifying, isn’t it?”

“Okay,” Don said, “but what is it?”

“It sort of looks like it might be bugs, right?”

Don crossed his arms. He was a good boss, Teddie thought, though it wasn’t as if she had a lot to go by. She’d started at CNN right out of college as his assistant, and he’d been the one who’d given her her first shot as a producer. Associate producer. Once or twice she tried to imagine what she would do if he hit on her; her dad might be right that she had a youthful naiveté about the way the world works, but she wasn’t completely stupid. She knew how certain things worked. He wasn’t married and he wasn’t gay
and he was only in his early forties, young enough that it wouldn’t have been inconceivable. So she didn’t really understand why he never hit on her, never even hinted at it, except that maybe he was just one of those scrupulous people who didn’t mix business with pleasure. Or maybe he just didn’t do pleasure. Near as Teddie could tell, all Don ever did was work. So he was a good boss, in that he didn’t seem to think of her as some young thing he could take advantage of, but he was also a bit of a pain in the ass in that he didn’t seem to understand that she sometimes might want to do something other than work. He wasn’t much for amusements, and right now he was clearly not amused.

“Come on Teddie. Don’t waste my time. Bugs?”

“Don, I’m—”

She never got the chance to try to defend herself, which was good, because she was pretty sure she was going to say something lame. Instead, they were both interrupted by Rennie LaClair yelling at them across the office.

She followed Don over to the bank of monitors by Rennie’s desk.

“Is that Delhi?”

Rennie didn’t look at either her or Don. “Yep. NBC just put it up. They had a crew on the ground shooting B-roll, but now they’ve got a satellite linkup. Running it live. It’s complete fucking pandemonium on the ground there, and they don’t have an actual reporter working, just a cameraman, but man. Look at this shit.”

It didn’t matter that Teddie wasn’t able to recognize the New Delhi Railway Station. What mattered was that the camera crew was shooting from some sort of elevation. Maybe on top of a nearby building. And what mattered was that there was enough of an open expanse that they could capture the panic. People were running everywhere. No. Not running. Fleeing. They were fleeing.
For obvious reasons, none of the televisions had their sound on, but it wouldn’t have made anything more clear. The headline read
Panic in Delhi—Possible Terrorism?
Whoever was running the show at NBC was thinking of the Mumbai attacks in 2008.

They had it wrong. Teddie knew that immediately. She knew it even before the camera zoomed in on one of the building entrances.

A black thread.

The thread turned into a ribbon.

A river.

A flood.

M
anny didn’t usually run. He walked with purpose, and he was often walking and talking, but running inside the White House wasn’t normally part of the equation. Normally. But today was different.