The Hatching: A Novel (25 page)

Melanie had never understood the panic people felt about spiders. What was it that made people so afraid? Was it the eight legs, each limb both separate and a part of the spider? Or, with larger spiders,
was it the hair? Was there something about seeing something as familiar as hair on something as alien as a spider that made people take leave of their senses? Even if you knew that the
Mygalomorphae
infraorder of spiders, which includes tarantulas, had utricating hairs, it’s not as if utricating hairs were much of a threat to humans. At worst, they caused mild irritation. And the few species of spiders that could harm or even kill a human weren’t always the ones that looked the scariest to people. None of it made sense to Melanie. Dog bites sent close to a million people a year to the emergency room for stitches, but spiders—unless a brown recluse bit you, and that was still pretty damn rare—didn’t do much other than keep the mosquito population down. And yet, a spider in the tub was enough to make a grown man scream. Even as a kid, Melanie hadn’t been scared. She distinctly remembered being five and trapping a spider for her mother. She’d popped a glass over the spider, brushed the spider in, and then brought it outside. Maybe that wasn’t unusual; kids were taught to be afraid by their parents. But who had taught the parents to be afraid in the first place? No, Melanie had never understood being afraid of spiders.

Until now.

Finally, there was a reason for her to be afraid of spiders.

She’d explained all that to Manny when he called her yesterday, before Steph grounded civilian air traffic across the country, but she was going to her office right now and shutting the door behind her to call Manny, because after another night of studying them, she’d figured out that while one of these spiders was impressive, and the brood of them in the insectarium was kind of frightening, the way they acted together was scaring the shit out of her. She was beginning to worry that grounding the planes might not be enough.

Manny’s phone rang through to voice mail, but before she even
started leaving a message there was the beep of Manny calling her back.

“If it’s about our relationship, Melanie, we need to do it another time.”

“Fuck you, Manny. You called me on this,” Melanie said. She wasn’t really angry, though. She knew Manny. Knew he was making the joke because he was already worried about why she was calling. “It’s about the spiders.”

“Please tell me you’ve decided we’re overreacting. We’re getting killed on grounding the planes, Alex is freaking out, and we’ve actually deployed soldiers on US soil to get ready to enforce quarantine zones. The ACLU is pitching a fit, we’re breaking a half-dozen laws, and we still aren’t sure this is a real thing.”

“What about India?” Melanie asked. Manny didn’t say anything, so Melanie pushed it. “There’s been more news out of India, hasn’t there?”

“Not publicly,” Manny said.

“But you aren’t lifting the flight ban, and you aren’t calling back the troops.”

“No.”

“So it’s bad?”

“Melanie, why are you calling?”

“I think it’s bad, Manny. Some of this is speculation, and I’m going to need to study them a lot longer, get more information, really spend some time—”

“Melanie,” he said, cutting her off. “I get it. This isn’t for publication. This isn’t going into your tenure file or getting peer-reviewed, okay? Wait. Hold on.”

She could hear the muffled sounds of talking in the background. Manny’s voice distinct but the words unrecognizable, lost to ringing phones and a crowd.

Manny came back. “We’ve got other scientists and advisors and everybody and their mother telling us what they think is going on. None of it makes any sense, Melanie. This might as well be an alien invasion for all of what we understand.”

“It is.”

“What?”

“An alien invasion. I mean, not exactly,” she said, “but sort of.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Okay,” Manny said. “We came to you because Steph and I knew you’d be discreet and knew you were an expert, but right now what I need is someone I can trust. Which means you. So I don’t care if you haven’t done all the research you need to. I don’t care if it hasn’t been peer-reviewed or any of that other stuff. All I need to know is this: Is it solid?”

Melanie hesitated. She hated it. She was a scientist, and she wanted more information. She wanted proof. But it was solid.

“So spiders are basically hermits. Antisocial and aggressive toward other spiders. They like to be alone. But that’s not true for all spiders. Social spiders are rare, but they exist. Any spiders, in captivity, will form small colonies. Even black widows will do it. But out in the field, in the wild, there are only a few species that do it. The most well known is the
Anelosimus eximius
. They’ll have colonies of forty or fifty thousand spiders.”

“Fifty thousand? Are you fucking kidding me? Fifty thousand of those giant things in your lab?”

“No, that’s the thing.
Anelosimus eximius
are small. They work together to care for the brood—the babies—and to build webs that can catch bigger and better prey, but that only means large insects, the occasional bat or bird. It’s a sort of cooperative. They don’t really hunt together. Not in any real sense, or at least not in the way
people usually think of hunting. And they are social, not eusocial. But these are different. I don’t think they are just social. I think they are eusocial.”

“Meaning? What’s the difference?”

“Social means they work together, but eusocial means . . . Okay, so there’s the initial definition and then there’s the expanded definition that E. O. Wilson came up with.”

The voices in the background on Manny’s end suddenly got louder and then softer. “Melanie, I don’t have time for you to be in professor mode. I need this quick. Give me a rundown on the phone and then do me a favor: hop in a cab and come over. I’m going to want you to give this to Steph directly and be ready to answer questions. So, in a nutshell, what are we looking at?”

“Ants,” she said. “Ants and bees and termites. Two kinds of mole rats also, but really, think of them as ants. These spiders aren’t like spiders. They’re like ants.”

“Like ants?”

“Eusocial groups are characterized by each individual taking on a specific role in their colony. Digging tunnels, laying eggs, all that stuff. And at some point, for some kinds of eusocial animals, they reach a point where they can’t take on a different role. They become a certain kind of specialist, and all they can do is what they can do. Like a machine on an assembly line. They do one thing.”

“So you’re telling me that these particular spiders are specialized, that they’ve turned into little machines?”

“Look, we’ve dissected two, and they’ve been the same; neither one can lay eggs. So there’s no question that there are more than one kind of these spiders. They have to be able to reproduce. But the ones we’ve looked at are specialized. Again, I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty, or that all or even most of them are like this—”

“Melanie.” He wasn’t angry, but he was firm. “Enough. I get it. You might be wrong. But you might be right. What are we dealing with? People here are starting to panic. I’m willing to take the risk that you’ve got it wrong, because right now, right this minute, we don’t know what the hell is going on. The spiders in your lab are the same as the one that crawled out of Bill Henderson’s face, and we think they’re probably the same things that are on the rampage in India and caused the Chinese to drop a nuke. As far as I know, you’re the only person who’s actually studied one up close. When I was in your lab, you told me they were scary, but they were just spiders. And now you’re calling me to say maybe not. Maybe these spiders are something else. You’re saying these spiders are like little machines that can do only one thing. So please, just tell me, Melanie, what’s the one thing these spiders are designed to do?”

“Feed,” Melanie said. “They’re designed to feed.”

Y
esterday had started off like a normal day. Well, other than that terrifying video from India and rumors that mutant spiders were devouring people in Delhi, followed by the grounding of all air travel in the United States, it had started off like a normal day. Gordo made pancakes and then he and Amy took Claymore for a long walk. Then, while Amy watched two episodes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, Gordo worked out on the treadmill, showered, and scrolled through the Internet looking for information. There wasn’t much, however. He spent most of his time wallowing in rumors. After lunch, Shotgun and Fred invited them over to play Catan. A normal day. And then: a coup d’état.

It was a peaceful coup d’état, but it was a coup d’état nonetheless: Gordo and Shotgun were no longer in charge. After Amy beat all three men at Catan, which was a standard occurrence, Gordo and Shotgun went down to the workshop to take a look at Shotgun’s new band saw. When they came back up, the plans had changed: Fred and Amy had decided the two couples were going to ride out the next couple of weeks together, and that was that. One minute the plan was that, come the apocalypse—zombie, nuclear, environmental, or otherwise—the couples would retreat to their
respective homes for survival, and the next minute it had been decided survival was not something that should be done alone.

“Look,” Fred said, his arm around Amy’s waist, “if you both are going to insist on going into lockdown mode, it’s going to be a lot nicer if we do it together. Face it. This idea is much more fabulous.”

Neither Gordo nor Shotgun objected, because they both realized the immediate truth: it
was
much more fabulous.

Gordo had to hand it to Fred. Shotgun was an engineer and about the straightest gay man Gordo had ever met, and almost as if in response, his husband, Fred, seemed to go as far as he could in the other direction. It was as if the only way Fred knew how to be gay was loudly and stereotypically. Which, frankly, was a lot of fun. And Fred and Amy fed off each other’s energy. Fred was entertaining even by himself, but with Amy, the two of them were like a superhero social-hour comedy team. While Gordo and Shotgun could spend hours in the garage gapping spark plugs and checking bearings, Fred and Amy could spend the same time in the kitchen, whipping up appetizers and cocktails. Gordo loved his wife, but fair was fair: Fred and Amy together made things better than good. They made them, well, okay, fabulous. It was going to take a little emotional energy to get used to, because Gordo had always thought the end of the world as we know it to be a rather gloomy proposition—ashes and fire and corpses and all that Cormac McCarthy stuff—but with Amy and Fred running the show, it was a really well-thought-out music playlist and artichoke dip in an underground shelter that looked more like an incredibly hip loft without windows than the sort of sad bomb-shelter bunkers that were the standard fare for survivalists.

“So much of this is just waiting around,” Amy said. She stepped over and gave Gordo a kiss. “I’d rather wait around with company
than by ourselves. There’s only so much time I can spend watching television while you clean your guns and double-check the radiation seals on the shelter. I’m sorry, but it makes sense and you know it.”

“And we have the space,” Fred said. “Somebody, and I’m not going to name names, but we all know I’m talking about my husband, has us stocked to live out five lifetimes down here. I mean, come on. The man even has tampons in storage, for God’s sake. The only things we don’t have that you’ll need are clothing and dog food. Though, if Claymore doesn’t mind canned peaches,” Fred said, bending over to scratch behind the dog’s ear, “he’ll be fine.”

So Amy and Gordo went home to pack. Amy filled two suitcases with clothes while Gordo loaded up the back of his truck with forty-pound bags of dog food—if the shit really did hit the fan, Claymore could transition to human food, but Gordo knew from experience that it gave the Lab some pretty bad flatulence—and tried to decide what things he might need that Shotgun didn’t already have. By the time Amy was ready to go, Gordo had realized the genius of Amy and Fred’s plan was that there
wasn’t
anything other than dog food and their clothes that Shotgun and Fred did not have stocked. Ultimately, the only extra thing he took was his Cooper Arms Model 52 Western Classic rifle and a dozen boxes of twenty-round .30-06 ammunition. It wasn’t his most expensive rifle, but it was his favorite. He could cluster three rounds in a three-inch circle from five hundred yards with it. If it really came to it, Shotgun’s armory was loaded for bear with guns and a few other things that weren’t exactly guns and weren’t exactly legal, but the Cooper Arms 52, even if it had only a three-shot magazine, was a sort of security blanket. He wasn’t going to take on rampaging zombie hordes with it, but if he needed to take out one person from a distance, it was the rifle he’d choose.

They were back and unpacked in one of the spare bedrooms in less than two hours. By seven they were eating dinner, by eight they were pleasantly drunk and playing Scrabble, by ten Gordo and Amy were in bed, and by six the next morning Gordo was getting himself a cup of coffee and feeling good enough about the decision to move into Shotgun’s place that he was beginning to think maybe it had partly been his idea. Shotgun’s setup really was sweet, and they did have a better chance of surviving the end of the world if they were working together. Plus, even though Gordo hated admitting it, it really was sort of more exciting being prepared
with
Shotgun. Survival was great, but it was even cooler to have somebody to gloat with. What was the fun of surviving if you couldn’t take pleasure in being more prepared and smarter than everybody else? It was exciting to think that these years of getting ready, all this effort, were going to pay off.

Gordo poured some cream into his coffee, taking an extra moment to savor it. That would be the first thing to go: fresh dairy, fresh produce, fresh meat. Freeze-dried, frozen, shelf-stable. That’s what would come as soon as they had to bunker up. But in the meantime, there was fresh cream and no reason he couldn’t drink his coffee outside. Besides, Claymore was already dancing around his feet. He’d trained Claymore to do his business on a five-by-five piece of artificial turf, but it made sense to take the pup out for a run while he could. Gordo walked up the stairs, through the double set of blast and radiation doors, and into the shell house that stood over the shelter. As soon as he opened the front door Claymore darted out, down the porch stairs, and into the dirt yard. The chocolate Lab took a piss against a boulder and then started rolling around in the dust. He seemed pleased with himself. Gordo took a sip of his coffee and then turned at the sound of a scrape on the wood.