The Hatching: A Novel (30 page)

M
elanie lunged for it, but her fingers only grazed the glass. There was nothing she could do but watch it fall.

It was close to two in the morning, and they were tired. They were all so tired.

They’d gotten the spider into the container safely enough, but Patrick put it down too close to the edge of the table, and then Bark’s hip banged against the side of the table. The container teetered. For a heartbeat, it looked as if it was going to be okay. One of those moments Melanie wished she could have back. But it wasn’t okay, and the container tipped and started to fall, and Melanie’s skin barely touched the glass before it spun off the edge, dropped, and smashed on the floor. The shattering sound woke them up. All four of them, yelling and fumbling and trying to catch the spider. It scrambled, alien and fast, up the table leg and across Julie’s lab coat and onto Bark’s shirt and then . . .

A thin split in Bark’s skin. An ooze of blood. The spider gone. Inside him.

They’d picked that spider out from the others because this one, Julie noticed, had subtly different markings from the others. They’d
prepared and dissected three that were identical, plus the seven spiders that had died on their own, and those seemed to be the same as well. The only difference with the seven that had died—for no apparent reason—was that they were almost desiccated. As if they’d just sort of used themselves up. It didn’t make much sense to Melanie. None of it did.

They’d started by feeding the spiders normally. All the spiders in the lab were fed on a strict schedule, crickets and mealworms and other insects, but these spiders didn’t seem interested in insects. From the beginning, they’d been after blood. It was grotesque and fascinating. The way they overwhelmed a rat, stripping the flesh from the bone was amazing. It looked like a time-lapse video gone horribly wrong. They had assumed that the food needs of these spiders would correspond to those of the spiders they were already familiar with, and they’d been wrong. These spiders were voracious. And they weren’t patient.

When they first burst from the egg sac, they turned on one another, eating several of their kin in the frenzy of hatching, but they were quick to turn their attention to the rats. But then, yesterday, they’d counted again and realized that, even counting the dead ones, they were three spiders short. After a few minutes of panic, Julie suggested spooling back through the video, and they found footage of the spiders in the tank attacking and eating one another. The spiders that died on their own, the desiccated, used-up spiders, were left alone, but when it was time to feed, every living spider seemed like it was fair game. So instead of dropping in a single rat, Melanie decided to drop in a bunch of rats at the same time to see what happened. The spiders seemed pleased. The sound was disgusting, but it wasn’t long before there were a few more piles of bones.

And one untouched rat.

The surviving rat was pressed against the glass, huddled in the corner of the insectarium, radiating sheer terror. Melanie didn’t usually ascribe much in the way of emotional lives to her rats. She couldn’t afford to. They were things for testing, or, right now, for feeding, and she didn’t want to have a moral crisis every time she wanted to get some work done. There was no other way to describe it, however. The rat looked scared. It was squeaking and shivering and pushing itself as far away as possible from the spiders. The spiders, for their part, were ignoring the rat, which was bizarre to Melanie. They’d positively inhaled the other rats. It had looked like an unruly arachnoid wrestling match as they fed. But this rat seemed as if it were almost invisible to them.

“Julie,” Melanie said. “How many rats have we dropped in?”

“Today?”

“No. Total. What number is this?”

Julie scrolled through some notes on her tablet. “Nine. No. Ten. Counting the first one, and then the ones we just dropped in, we’ve fed them ten rats.”

Patrick gently touched the glass on the other side of the rat’s body. “You think these spiders are counting or something?”

“Or something,” Melanie said. “Why are they leaving this one alone?”

“They didn’t,” Bark said. “Not exactly.”

Melanie looked at him. He’d mostly pulled himself together since she told him she was ending things, but he hadn’t been particularly vocal. “What do you mean?”

“He’s got a cut on him. On his belly.” Bark pointed through the glass.

“Wait,” Patrick said. “We’re short another spider.”

“What the fuck?” Melanie tugged at her ponytail and then pulled out the elastic. Her hair felt greasy. She couldn’t remember
if she had even brushed it after her last shower. “Julie, pull the video back to when we dropped the new rats in.”

They watched it on Julie’s screen and then watched it again, slower. What had seemed almost instantaneous earlier was terrifying with the frame rate dropped to a tenth the speed: the spiders were already leaping before the trap door had fully opened. They met the rats’ bodies mid-drop. The spiders were feeding before the rats hit the ground of the insectarium. Except for the one rat and one spider. It was so quick and there was so much chaos going on with the other spiders feeding that Melanie understood why they’d missed it. The spiders had swarmed over the other rats, but only a single spider had gone to the surviving rat. But that spider hadn’t fed. It had . . . disappeared? No. The rat’s body blocked the angle from the camera, but they could mostly make it out. The spider lunged forward, gave a sort of shiver, and then was gone. It had disappeared inside the rat’s body.

“Scroll back again. Get me a clear frame of that spider before it burrows into the rat.” Julie found the frame, froze it, and then Melanie pinched at the screen, zooming in. “Look at that marking on the abdomen,” Melanie said. “Does that mean something?”

They spent several minutes watching the other spiders move around the tank before Bark spotted another with the same marking.

They were careful. They segregated the marked spider. They followed all the protocols. But something as simple as putting a container too close to the edge of the table?

There was always human error.

Sooner or later, but always.

And now the spider was gone. Smashing glass. Yelling. Blood. Gone.

Somewhere inside Bark’s body.

Julie marked the time: 1:58
A.M
.

S
ometimes, Kim thought, being in the Marines meant just being along for the ride. First they’d been sent to Desperation, the shittiest town this side of, well, anywhere, to build what looked like an internment camp, and then suddenly, minutes before the president’s address, the company was peeled off from the brigade at full scramble. The whole company, nearly 150 Marines leaving behind close to five thousand, loaded up in a mix of brand-new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and old, sand-scarred Hummers. They’d heard the quarantine order over the radio as they busted down the road ten miles back to the highway. And when they got to the highway, there were already two M1 Abrams tanks—tanks!—blocking traffic. Nobody in or out.

The captain ordered them out wide, the two tanks on the road and the mix of JLTVs and Hummers bouncing off the shoulders of the highway out into the scrub, until they were nearly one hundred yards wide on either side, far enough out to discourage any drivers from getting cute and trying to glide past the blockade, because there was no question that somebody would have tried. The civilians were getting antsy. It was past two in the morning. By now, Kim figured, with the traffic piling up and piling up for hours and
hours, it might reach as far back as Los Angeles, quarantine order or no quarantine order. Even out in Desperation, putting together fences and working their asses off, they’d started hearing about what was going on in LA. At first, it sounded as though things were confined to one neighborhood, and it seemed like crazy panic with nothing to it. Just people freaking out over the idea of freaking out. There hadn’t been much in the way of video: shaky images with lots of screaming. But then, suddenly, all the news—Internet, television, radio—was spiders, spiders, spiders. Spiders swarming over the city, spiders eating some people and leaving others alone, spiders drifting from the sky onto rooftops, spiders coming out of drains and scuttling under doorways. Private Goons said he’d heard from a cousin that all Los Angeles was on fire. Nobody else knew if that was true. And then they were bounced from Desperation to the highway, and Kim was facing down American citizens with a fifty-caliber machine gun. Kim’s fire team had landed one of the new JLTVs. They were all the way out on the farthest edge of the left side, in the brush and scrub and dust. At first she thought it was silly. There were tanks on the road. Who was going to try to get past those? Did they really need to be so far off the road? But as night came, Kim started to think that maybe a pair of tanks and a few Hummers and JLTVs might not be enough if all these people decided they weren’t interested in obeying the president’s quarantine. The towers of portable floodlights sent a white glaze a couple of hundred yards back, but past that, from her perch on top of the JLTV out at the wing of the blockade, Kim could see headlights for what seemed like forever. There’d been announcements on the radio and the captain had sent a couple of men out to a distance of two miles to make sure motorists knew the road was blocked off and to encourage them to turn around and go home, but it had turned into a clusterfuck—with the backup from the roadblocks,
people started trying to drive the wrong way down the highway, so now it was backed up on both sides. Nobody could go forward. Nobody could go back. The only way out was past the tanks, past the Hummers and JLTVs, past Kim and her .50 cal, and they were under orders not to let anybody by. Not good.

Some prick in a black BMW Roadster three vehicles from the front of the line got out of his car and came to argue with Captain Diggs for what must have been the fifth or six time, and Kim couldn’t help smiling when she saw the man frog-marched back to his car. She kept her hands off the .50 cal. She had wedged an old shell casing under the butterfly trigger as an improvised safety. But still. The Browning M2 could barf out five hundred rounds a minute, and while it was one thing to accidentally punch out somebody overseas in a war zone, she didn’t want to be the one to accidentally light up some civilian.

“Gum?” Elroy stuck his hand up out of the truck. Kim reached down to snag a piece.

“Anything new?”

Elroy popped his head up and showed her his phone. “No signal, and then no battery, so no, no news. Just what you hear on the radio.”

Ten yards in from where her tactical vehicle sat on the outside of the blockade, Kim could see Sue’s Hummer. The Hummers weren’t in the best shape—they’d seen heavy use in the desert, and the army was taking its time with decommissioning—but Kim wasn’t worried about IEDs in Southern California. “Sue,” she called across. “You guys got anything?”

Before Sue could answer, Kim heard the call on the radio.

“White SUV leaving containment. Fire team leader Lance Corporal Bock, on your side. Copy.”

“Copy,” Kim said.

Down the line, maybe five or six hundred yards away, at the edge of where the portable floodlights made themselves felt, she saw a white SUV that had crept out of line and drifted off the highway into the dirt. They were doing that here and there, mostly trucks and SUVs, feeling out the line, trying to see what the holdup was, and then popping back into place as soon as they realized they weren’t going anywhere. Some people still had their cars running, and Kim occasionally caught the sound of music drifting from the distance, but most people had turned off their cars hours ago, which was good. That’s the last thing they needed: cars running out of gas on top of everything else. It seemed that most people had resigned themselves to the wait. Earlier in the night, some people had gotten out of their cars to stretch, to sit on their hoods, and in one case, to toss a Frisbee, but now, at two in the morning, it was quiet. People were sleeping in their cars, seats reclined, a freeway slumber party. But the driver of the white SUV wasn’t sleeping and he wasn’t getting back in line. It was going wide. Fifty yards. Maybe sixty. And it was moving toward them. Fast.

“Fire team leader, if vehicle attempts to pass brigade, you are to engage.”

She keyed her radio. “Sir? It’s a civilian.”

There was a brief pause. “Fire team leader, fire a warning volley in front of the vehicle.”

“Now?”

“Affirmative.”

Kim took a breath and then she tracked the white SUV. It was moving, kicking up dirt and heading at an angle. If it kept going, there was no question it was going to pass her. The SUV was maybe 150 yards in front of her now. She led it by ten yards to be safe, snuck the spent shell out from under the butterfly trigger, and let out a five-round burst. It had been a while since she’d qualified
on the .50 cal, and she’d forgotten how loud it was. The flash from the muzzle looked like the sun, and one of the rounds was a tracer, but neither the light nor the sound seemed to matter. The SUV didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down.

Kim hesitated.

“Fire team leader.”

She had her fingers on the trigger.

“Bock. Take it out.”

Kim didn’t lead the SUV this time. She lined up directly on the engine block and pulled the trigger.

A
ccurate facial recognition—picking a moving person out of a crowd—was still only the stuff of movies and television, but detecting the sound of a gunshot was something that had been solved years ago. When Lance Corporal Kim Bock pulled the trigger on her .50 cal, the aboveground audio sensors outside Shotgun’s house sent a notice to the tablet he kept by his bed. Just a small ping. Not enough even to bother Fred on the other side of the bed, but enough to wake Shotgun up. He threw on a T-shirt and jeans and went out to the kitchen. Gordo was sitting at the table, a single light on above him, pooling over him.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Gordo looked up from his computer. “Not really. This is bad, Shotgun. Seriously bad.”