The Hatching: A Novel (32 page)

“We’ve got a report of a dead spider. There’s actually been a ton of calls about spiders, but this one’s maybe a little different. It’s two blocks from where Henderson’s plane went down.”

Mike put his phone back in the cup holder on the center console and flicked the siren on. It was a quick ride across town, traffic still light and the cherries clearing the way.

The building was a warehouse for a plumbing-supply company. There were two black-and-whites outside, a pair of cops leaning against their cars and smoking. They gave Mike and Leshaun a wave as they passed. Inside the warehouse, Mike and Leshaun followed the sound of voices until they came to another pair of cops standing with a woman in her mid-fifties wearing civilian clothes.

“I called it in as soon as Juan called me,” she said. “Juan’s the night manager. We fill most of our orders at night so that our customers can be ready to roll out first thing in the morning. There it is,” she said, pointing.

Mike reached out to grab onto the shelf so he could balance himself to get a closer look. The cut on his hand was still uncomfortable, but he had pretty good mobility. Actually, between the stitches in his hand and Leshaun’s broken ribs and shot-through arm, he and his partner weren’t in the best shape. But you worked with what you had.

There was no question this was the same kind of spider.

“But it’s a warehouse.” The woman was still talking. “We get spiders and mice and the occasional squirrel. If it wasn’t for all the stuff on the news, I don’t know if I would have called it in. And there’s those awful-looking cocoon things too.”

Mike looked up at her. “What?”

“Oh, around the corner. They look like cocoons.”

Mike and Leshaun and the two cops followed the woman. She had a flashlight and pointed the beam near the rafters. There was a lattice of cobwebs. And from the ground, Mike could see at least three softball-shaped orbs. It took him a second, but then he realized what they looked like: they looked like whole versions of the split-open egg sac from the lab in Washington.

This was not good.

T
he SUV was still smoking a little.

Kim was hugely relieved that the two passengers, both young men, had jumped out of the car with their hands up, scared shitless but apparently unharmed. The captain had both men detained and then sent down the line to the temporary internment camp outside Desperation. Maybe ten minutes after Kim had fired her .50 cal, somebody noticed the white SUV was on fire, but the captain delayed the rush to put out the flames. “Let it burn,” he ordered. “Maybe it will stop the next idiot from trying to get past the blockade, at least until we start moving everybody off the highway and to the camp.”

It was morning now, and the rerouting of traffic had begun. Kim wasn’t sure why they weren’t just turning people around, but Honky Joe said that if Los Angeles was as bad as it sounded, they couldn’t send people back, but they also couldn’t let people just break the quarantine zone. Hence the wire fences and temporary holding pens. Or, as Honky Joe put it, not at all reassuringly, “Think of it as a short-term refugee camp.”

The sun made an angry promise about the coming heat of the day. A thin wisp of smoke twisted out of the burning hulk of metal
that had been an SUV just a few hours earlier. The Marines had opened the road toward the camp outside Desperation, and from where she sat in the driver’s seat of the JLTV, Kim could see every driver and passenger take a look at the smoldering SUV as they turned off the highway. Kim’s squad and all the other squads—including the two tanks—were ordered to hold their line; squads in Hummers and JLTVs lined the road to the internment camp, spaced out every hundred yards or so, but they barely seemed necessary. Once the traffic started moving, people seemed so happy just to be off the highway that nobody questioned where they were going. The American people, Kim thought, preferred to be sheep. They’d been funneling traffic toward the holding pens outside Desperation for close to an hour, and there had been only one report of a car trying to break the line. If anything, the civilians had an almost celebratory air. Sure, they looked a little startled at the sight of the smoking SUV, but for the most part, people were waving and smiling at the Marines as they passed. They’d been taught to see the military as heroes, even if, Kim thought, they were mostly acting as traffic cops right now.

She had the windows open in the tactical vehicle, but it was still pretty gamey, full-on FAN: feet, ass, nuts. Duran was in the passenger seat and had found a phone charger somewhere. He was reading the news, a frustrating endeavor given how shitty the signal was out where they were. Elroy was manning the .50 cal, and Mitts was taking a nap in the back. There wasn’t much to do other than watch the traffic merging painfully onto the side road. What exactly did the military plan to do once all the cars were there? How long was this quarantine supposed to last? There had to be what, forty, fifty thousand people backed up on the highway? Maybe more? Kim glanced over at the wrecked hulk of the SUV again, looking at the pockmarks where the bullets had punched through the hood.
She still couldn’t believe nobody had been killed. It made her feel sick. She’d been trained to open fire on hostiles, to take the shot before anybody could get close enough to detonate a car bomb. That was the world the military lived in now. But she’d never expected to have to operate on domestic soil. She was in the Marines to protect Americans.

“They’re saying Japan now too.”

Kim looked over at Duran. “Tokyo?”

He shook his head. “No. I’ve never heard of the place. Somewhere rural, in the mountains.”

“What about Los Angeles? Anything new?”

“Nothing. Phones and satellites and all that shit are overwhelmed. I mean, there’s stuff, but it all seems kind of sketchy. Guesses.”

Kim turned to check on Mitts, but he was still sleeping hard, his mouth open and the low whine of a snore coming out. “So, basically, nobody knows what’s going on?”

Duran put his phone on the dashboard. “It’s the military. Somebody probably knows what’s going on, but we’re going to be waiting a long time before anybody shares that information with E-1s.”

“Yeah, well, I’m an E-3. Since I wildly outrank you,” she said, her voice droll, “they’ll clearly tell me first.” She was pleased to see him smile. “So,” she said, “what’s next? We just going to sit here and babysit traffic for the next few days?”

“Honestly? I haven’t really thought about it.”

“How can you not think about it?”

“Well, I figure, as you are so quick to remind me, you’re the fire team leader, Ms. Lance Corporal, so it’s your job to think about stuff. I just follow orders.”

“Go fuck yourself, Duran.” She smiled when she said it, but that didn’t stop Duran from frowning and shaking his head forcefully.

“No, no. I’m
not giving you a hard time, Kim. I’m serious. We trust you. There’s a reason you’re the fire team leader instead of one of us. I kind of figured if there was something to worry about, you’d think of it. That’s not what I’m good at.”

“Fine. Okay. But there are some real questions, right? I mean, if these spiders are all over the world, can we really expect them to stay put in Los Angeles? And what happens when the camp fills up?” She gestured out the windshield at the traffic. It was moving slowly, at the pace of a brisk walk, but it was moving. “Because there are a lot of cars out there.”

“Kim, what’s that—”

“No, seriously. We need to worry about—”

“Kim.” He said her name sharply, holding up his hand. “Do you hear that?”

She was quiet, but the
pop-pop-pop
of a heavy-caliber weapon was easy to hear once she stopped talking. It was coming from her far left, toward the temporary holding area. She turned and gave Mitts a poke, waking him up, before opening her door and stepping out. Even with the heat, it was a relief to be out of the JLTV. The fresh air was good. She saw Elroy looking down at her from where he stood. He had spent shells under the triggers as safeties and his hands at his sides, but he didn’t look relaxed. There was a moment of silence, and then one, two, maybe three of the .50 cals went off, plus small-arms fire. It sounded a ways off. At least a klick. There was nothing on the radio.

“What do you say, Kim?” Elroy pulled his sunglasses off.

“Somebody jumping the line?” she said.

Elroy shrugged. “Maybe. A few rounds on a fitty, if that’s the case.”

He didn’t need to say that it was more than a few rounds out of a .50 caliber. Kim nodded. “Go ahead and pull those shells out
from behind the triggers,” she said, and then she walked around the back of the vehicle and over to where Sue’s squad was parked. Sue was outside her Hummer, sitting on the ground and leaning against one of the wheels. She was staring glumly at her cell phone, and when she saw Kim, she held it up. “Shit signal,” she said. “Shit phone. It’s all shit.”

“Could be worse, right?”

“Always,” Sue said, and pushed herself to her feet. “Firing’s stopped, yeah?”

“Yeah, but . . .” Kim trailed off. There was another sound, and it took her a second to figure out what it was. Honking? Down the highway this time. Far away. Far enough that she and Sue had to stand there quietly, straining to hear it. The beginning of a ruckus. Maybe screaming? It was hard to tell. And then whatever sound might have been coming from the highway was washed away by the sound of rotors. A pair of birds, AH-64 Apaches, missiled-up and moving like piss fire, roared overhead and down the straight shot of highway. Kim and Sue looked at each other for a second and then scrambled to get back into their vehicles.

Kim barely had the door closed when the birds started firing. The jackhammer retort of the guns—the AH-64s sported a 30 mm M230 chain gun that could fire three hundred rounds per minute from the chin turret—sounded almost dusty from a mile away.

“All units, all units,” the radio barked. “Prepare for hostilities.”

Kim started the JLTV, the thrum of the engine coming on just as the birds’ chain guns went quiet. She’d seen the ammo the Apaches took: each bullet was about the size of her hand. Behind her, she could hear Mitts scrambling, and in front of her, she could see more cars breaking out of line. There was a column of smoke coming from where the helicopters had been firing, and then there was a small explosion. The birds split, drifting to either side of the
road and spinning toward the center, dropping their chins so the pilots had a clear view of the road. And then, from the Apache on the right, there was the vapor trail of a missile and a much larger explosion.

There was a weird vacuum of silence following the missile, broken, a few seconds later, by Duran. “Okay,” he said. “This does not seem good.” He turned to look at Kim. “Well?”

“Holy shit!” From above them, Kim heard Elroy shouting, but she didn’t need to hear him call out “Fast mover” because she saw the jet spear past them. And then. Holy God. The jet launched a missile.

Chaos.

A fireball fifty feet high.

The slow, orderly movement of cars and trucks onto the side road toward Desperation broke down immediately. In front of them, cars and trucks and SUVs pulled into the desert wherever they could, and Kim could see people getting out of their cars and running. A couple hundred yards in front of her, she saw a man running across the dirt get plowed down by a sedan that had left the highway. The sedan didn’t slow down. The helicopters opened fire with their chain guns again. Kim could see more and more people getting out of their cars. They were running from the fury of the helicopters and the burning ash from where the jet had launched its missile. It was a sight she never thought she’d see: American citizens running from the might of the American military.

No. No. That wasn’t right. They weren’t running away from the gunfire and missiles. She grabbed the binoculars from the console and spun the wheel on the dial until the view came into a tight focus. “No,” she said. She could see moving shadows, see the way dark fingers were reaching up and sucking people down into the
maw. Men and women and children were running and screaming. The jet and the birds weren’t firing on civilians.

“They’re here,” she said. She didn’t scream it or yell. It was her normal tone of voice. Almost conversational. She felt . . . calm. She was scared. She was willing to admit that. How could she not be scared? But she also understood that she was where she needed to be. She looked at Duran and then at Mitts. She looked up and then at Elroy, standing with his hands on the butterfly triggers of the .50 cal. She’d never thought about deploying on US soil, but she’d wanted to join the Marines her whole life, and she was ready for this. She needed to be ready. Her men trusted her.

The radio crackled. “All units, you are cleared to fire. Do not, repeat, do not allow the quarantine zone to be breached. Fire at will.”

She wanted to ask what the fuck they were supposed to be firing at, people or spiders, but the Marines had already opened up. She felt the truck shiver from Elroy firing the .50 cal, the dead heavy thump of the gun spitting bullets. A semitruck that had made it off the highway and into the desert exploded and then tipped over. There was a huge mess of cars moving and smashing and trying to get anywhere but where they were. To her right, Kim could see that Sue’s Hummer was firing its .50 cal as well, and one of her crew, maybe Private Goons, was out of the truck and firing his M16. Next to her, she saw Duran reach for the door handle, but she grabbed his arm.

“Stay in the car,” she said. “We can stop cars and we can stop civilians, but what’s the point of shooting at spiders? I want to be ready to roll.”

She picked up the binoculars again. Without the binoculars, the spiders were a black mass, four hundred yards out now, but through the glass, Kim could see a woman flailing her arms, her
head shimmering with black beads. The woman dropped suddenly, and Kim wasn’t sure if it was from the spiders or a bullet. At first, it seemed like there was no pattern to it, but Kim realized most of the people were running from right to left. And the firing Marines didn’t seem to matter. The people were more scared of the spiders than of the guns.