The Hatching: A Novel (26 page)

“Didn’t see you there,” Gordo said.

Shotgun nodded. He was sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, a cup of coffee on the small table next to him, a tablet in his hand. “Couldn’t sleep. Just wanted to catch up on the news.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Well, everything. Same as yesterday. I guess a little more news out of India. Giant spiders, supposedly. There are a ton of pictures, but I’ve got to be honest: it looks like somebody went to town with Photoshop. Hard to believe it’s not a hoax. That being said, the AP reported at least two really big explosions, and people are panicking. Evidently almost all communication systems in Delhi are overloaded. Clearly,
something
is going on.”

“And here?”

“Just rumors. Crazy stuff. A lot of reports that troops have been mobilizing. Conspiracy folks are freaking out: It’s the first step to the government enslaving us all. Hope you slept with that pretty little rifle of yours,” he said, “because according to the whack nuts, the president is sending the suits in to take away our God-given right to bear arms.”

Gordo laughed. That was one of the things he liked about Shotgun. He knew there was something a little crazy about preparing for the end of the world, about moving to Desperation, California, and building a shelter, but you could drive a truck through the gap between the real estate of
a
little
crazy that Gordo liked to think he and Shotgun occupied and the
lot
of crazy real estate that some preppers lived on. Most preppers seemed to inhabit a world where the government was always one step away from turning us all into slaves, one step away from a massive global conspiracy led by the Jews, a plot by the blacks, an invasion by the Chinese, another terrorist attack. Some of it was racist or anti-Semitic or paranoid, but most of it was just downright loony.

“The black helicopter brigade is out in full force,” Gordo said.

Claymore got up from the ground and gave himself a full head-to-tail shake. A small dust cloud poofed off him.

“No kidding,” Shotgun said. “Black helicopters everywhere. Somebody posted that—”

“Hey,” Gordo said, cutting him off. “Do you hear that? It sounds like . . .”

They were both quiet for a second, but then Claymore started barking. His tail dropped down and curled between his legs. He was pointed at Gordo and Shotgun, but looking up, over the roof. Shotgun got to his feet and stood next to Gordo. The two of them glanced at each other and then jogged down the steps of the porch until they were out in the yard near Claymore. There wasn’t anything to see. Gordo reached down, rubbed at Claymore’s ear, and then wrapped his hand around the dog’s muzzle, quieting his barking.

Both he and Shotgun heard it. A soft
thwap, thwap, thwap
getting louder. The sound bounced off the dirt and desert and rocks.

The helicopter came in low and fast, buzzing the house and leaving a swirl of dust. It was too quick for them to do anything but turn and watch it fly past.

“What the fuck?” Gordo let go of Claymore’s muzzle. The dog sprinted twenty or thirty yards after the helicopter and then planted himself in the dirt, barking again.

“Okay,” Shotgun said. “That wasn’t just me, was it? That was a black helicopter.”

“Yep,” Gordo said.

“Huh.”

“Shotgun,” Gordo said. “How do you feel about taking your plane out for a spin, get a look at what we have around us?”

“Absolutely.”

Shotgun went to get the six-seater ready, and Gordo brought Claymore back downstairs, putting him in the room where Amy was still sleeping. He took a second to kiss her on the forehead before grabbing a pair of binoculars. By the time he was in the garage, Shotgun had the doors open and the plane ready to go. They were up in the air fifteen minutes after the helicopter passed over.

And two minutes after that, Gordo was worried.

K
im probably wouldn’t have noticed the small airplane above them if Honky Joe hadn’t pointed it out.

“Civilian,” he said. “They better bug the fuck out of here or they’re going to be eating a missile.”

“Come on,” Duran said. “They aren’t going to shoot down some Cessna just for flying over us.”

They’d driven the convoy through Desperation, a pissant town, if you could call a few bars, a gas station, and a pizza place a town, and been ordered to halt about a mile out on an open plain of brush, scrub, and dirt. The only thing within shooting distance was a shitty-looking trailer, and sure enough, they’d barely gotten out of the bus before some redneck on an ATV came barreling toward them. Kim had been close enough to catch bits and pieces, but Honky Joe, as was his way, had the whole thing.

“Guy just about had an aneurysm. All ‘Get off my land this, and the Constitution that,’ and all that shit. I pointed out to him that he was actually on state-owned land and shouldn’t be there in the first place, and he started to argue against
that
until I also pointed out we had more machine guns than he did. Dude came pretty close to getting himself forcibly removed.” They all laughed, but Honky
Joe shook his head. “You guys don’t get it. This
isn’t
right. Why the fuck are we setting up here? Why not on a base somewhere? This side of the road might technically be government land, but what’s here? Why outside this town? It’s the middle of nowhere. The only thing it’s got going for it is it’s kind of near the highway. I think we’re here because it will be an easy place to redirect traffic. It’s a holding pen.”

“For what?” Kim asked.

“People.”

Nobody said anything to that. They just looked at one another grimly and did their jobs.

They’d worked through the night, and the longer they’d worked under the portable floodlights, the more what Honky Joe said made sense to Kim. They unloaded fencing from the flatbeds and set it up in a great perimeter, and there was no getting away from it: it looked like a holding pen. No, actually, it looked like a clean version of a refugee camp. Trucks and troop transports kept coming in; support material, portable toilets, water trucks, and tents getting set up. There was a constant stream of traffic. Trucks with supplies and trucks that were mobile buildings. Kim couldn’t help but wonder where it all came from. Los Angeles? San Francisco? Las Vegas? All three? By six in the morning it was a terrifying sight: the US military mobilized. Near as Kim could tell, there were in the neighborhood of four or five thousand troops, a full brigade. It was fucked-up. This wasn’t some sort of make-work training drill.

She was tired, and grateful for the coffee. The food could be pretty bad sometimes, and the coffee occasionally tasted like it had been filtered through socks, but it was always full of caffeine. She looked up and watched the tiny plane doing a lazy circle around the small city they were building. A black helicopter was buzzing
around maybe a mile away. There were a couple of AH-64 Apaches loaded with missiles and ready to be all badass, but they were on the ground, rotors stilled. The airborne helicopter wasn’t marked, but as near as Kim could tell, it was the sort of bird that muckety-mucks in suits liked to play in. After a few minutes of the plane circling overhead, the helicopter, which had been lingering out near where flatbeds were still pulling in, peeled off hard and up toward the direction of the plane. Whoever was in the plane, whatever civilian it was at the yoke, wasn’t curious enough to stay; the plane straightened course and headed out. The helicopter tracked it for a few more seconds then turned back to where it had been hovering, came in low, and settled.

The lieutenant gave a yell for the platoon to finish up. Kim drained her coffee, pulled her work gloves on, and looked at her squad, Honky Joe, Sue, and the few other soldiers around her. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever the fuck we’re doing, just look alive. Something’s coming down the pike.”

S
parky was going nuts. To be fair, Sparky was a twelve-year-old coonhound, so he was kind of nuts to begin with, but he was braying as if there were a monster around the corner. He yanked on his leash again, but this time Andy was ready for it and didn’t stumble. Andy Anderson was rounding eighty years old, a retired entertainment lawyer and widower. With no grandkids and his friends dropping dead right and left, he had two things left that he cared about: baseball, and the damned dog. The two things intersected. He’d named the dog Sparky in honor of his favorite manager: Sparky Anderson, the man himself. Andy would have named the dog after one of his heroes anyway, but he liked the idea that Sparky Anderson was a Detroit legend who had grown up in Los Angeles. Not that many people knew Sparky Anderson had moved to Los Angeles as a kid. If they knew Sparky Anderson, they knew him only as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds or the Detroit Tigers. They sure didn’t know him for his utterly forgettable career as a major league player. But Andy didn’t hold that against him. Andy had never been much of a ball player either, blowing out his arm after only two years of mediocre pitching on a mediocre
team at a mediocre college. But he was born and bred Detroit, and it was for Sparky Anderson’s time in Detroit that Andy had decided to pay homage to the man. The year the Tigers won, 1984, had been the best year of Andy’s life. And that was saying a lot, because Andy’s life had been good. But the year the Tigers won the World Series had been the best of all those years; everything had swung his way, including the Detroit hitters. Never mind that Andy had lived in Los Angeles since 1971, he still thought of himself as a scrappy Detroit kid. He never tired of the joke of having a dog named Sparky Anderson.

But Sparky—the dog, not the deceased MLB manager—was giving him fits today. The dog had started by taking a shit right in the middle of the kitchen sometime during the night, a thing he was wont to do once or twice a month. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered Andy. The dog was old, and there wasn’t much you could do about it other than make sure you had paper towels and spray cleaner at home. He was tired this morning, however. He’d stayed up late to watch the president’s speech and then the endless bloviating on cable news backed by crappy, boring footage of empty airports, parked planes, and that stupid, shaky video from India. The president said nothing of any substance—the threat was dire enough that she was willing to take “unprecedented action in defense of the country and our citizens, shutting down air travel and closing the borders as a temporary matter” even if she wasn’t willing to specify what the threat was beyond referencing “the recent events in China and India”—and the news people were left with nothing real. Just damned-fool speculation. Some of the talking heads were saying that China was setting itself up to try to invade Japan, and at least a few of the opinion pukers said it was some sort of virus, like the plague. But the consensus, if there was one, was that there were hordes of spiders on the loose. Or swarms of spiders.
Whatever you call a bunch of spiders. What you should really call a bunch of spiders, Andy thought, was horseshit.

So he’d been up late, and then Sparky woke him up before 5:00 
A.M.
by starting with his coonhound’s warbling bark, calling out with some real distress before taking a dump on the kitchen floor. Andy had cleaned it up and then parked himself in his chair to watch the same cycle of drivel on the news until, just before it was time for their noon walk, Sparky took another dump on the kitchen floor. Even if it hadn’t been time for their walk, the smell, even after it was cleaned up, would have been enough to force Andy out of the house. He drove the two of them to Point Fermin Park. The dog howled the whole way. Sparky seemed intent on being a little prick all day long. He was an old dog, and normally content to sniff at things, lift his leg occasionally, and amble down the path, but today Sparky was yanking on his leash. It was giving Andy fits. Andy didn’t have many worries left—he had had plenty of money, and he was healthy enough that he figured he’d be fine for a while and then just go ahead and die of old age—but breaking his hip was one of his few real terrors. It was one thing to grow old and lonely, but it was another to finish out his days bedridden and in pain.

Even with Sparky being a prick, the day was beautiful. But it was Los Angeles. It was always beautiful. The end of April meant it was cool enough for Andy to slip on his leather jacket, but by one or one thirty, it would be warm enough for him to sit outside with Sparky at the café. They went to different parks on different days, but most of the time he tried to go for their noon walks near the water. That was the other thing about Los Angeles. It had movie stars and palm trees and sunny skies, and it had the ocean. They’d started at one end of the park, and Andy had almost dragged Sparky the whole way to the other. The damn dog lunging against the leash and baying away. Maybe an earthquake was coming, Andy
thought. He knew dogs did that. Predicted things like earthquakes and tornadoes. And wouldn’t that be a ball of crap, if the big one came when he was walking in a park at the edge of the ocean. The whole thing would slide right in.

Sparky started to move toward Andy and then turned and yanked at the leash again. Andy figured he should just give up on the walk, but he didn’t want the dog to think he could win. He reined in the leash and then leaned over and scratched the dog under his jowls. “Come on, boy,” Andy said. “Can we just finish our walk without you turning me into a cripple? You walk like a good dog, and when we’re done we’ll stop for a burger and some French fries. How does that sound? French fries? Who wants French fries?”

Sparky, evidently, wanted French fries. It wasn’t enough to suddenly turn him back into a good dog, but it was clear to Andy that he recognized the words. He should have. It was part of their routine. Hop in the car, a walk in a park along the water somewhere, Sparky taking a little nap while Andy sat on a bench and read or just stared out into space and let the time tick away, and then a stop for a burger and fries on the way home. They always stopped somewhere with outdoor seating and Andy would end up giving as much of his lunch to Sparky as he ate himself. It wasn’t healthy for either of them. Andy didn’t try to kid himself that their ambling walks made up for the greasy lunches he shared with his dog, but at this point, he wasn’t sure he cared. There was nothing like a burger, and feeding Sparky French fry after French fry, the dog daintily nipping them from his fingers, was one of life’s little pleasures. But first, they had to finish their walk. That was the way it worked.