The Hatching: A Novel (33 page)

“Kim?” Mitts leaned forward. He had his hand on her shoulder. “Kim? What are we supposed to do?”

She didn’t know, but there was something bothering her. Something about the way the spiders were moving. It reminded her of a sort of dance. Liquid spilling forward and back, waves of black washing forward over certain people and then tucking back under, like the ocean pulling sand into the deeps. And some people, inexplicably, left standing, the bugs splitting around them, desert islands. Three hundred yards out now, and with the binoculars, she could see the spiders as individual drops, but without the binoculars, they were a single flood of liquid, moving together.

And then the radio came to life: “Fall back! Fall back!”

She didn’t hesitate. She shoved the JLTV into drive and hit the gas. Because they were out on the wing, the last vehicle in the barricade, all she had to do was crank the wheel all the way to the left to spin a spitting semicircle of dirt, stone, and dust before she was turned in the other direction.

“What the fuck?” Elroy ducked down, holding tight to the edges of the turret. “We’ve got orders to—”

“They’re calling for us to fall back. It’s too late,” Kim yelled. “They fucked up. This isn’t the flu. We can kill as many civilians as you want, fire until you’re in the black, but it isn’t going to stop the spiders. We can’t shoot our way out of this one.” She kept the gas pedal tight to the floor, and the JLTV was picking up speed now that it was moving straight. On the highway, she could get the
fourteen-thousand-pound beast up to seventy miles per hour, but on the sand and dirt, she’d be happy with thirty. In the rearview mirror she saw Sue’s Hummer tracking behind her, the rest of the line in a mix of chaos. Mitts scrambled across the seat to the other side so he could look out the window and back at the barricade.

There was another explosion, bigger this time. The entire JLTV bounced and bucked, but the tires bit back into the sand and it kept moving forward. The fast movers screamed over them again, from the other direction, payloads emptied, and Kim risked a look in the mirror again. All she could see was smoke and fire.

M
elanie figured she had another ten minutes or so before the helicopter got there. Manny had been insistent. Despite the president’s speech and all indications that the infestation was only in LA, people were starting to stream out of DC to go . . . To go where? Where did people think they were going to run to, Melanie wondered, a hotel in the Hamptons? It didn’t matter, though, because the end result was that the normally bad traffic around the DC area was even worse, and the half-hour drive to the White House was going to take a lot longer. So. Helicopter.

She leaned into the window of the isolation unit to try to get a better view of what the surgeon was doing. At first, she thought it was going to be a simple thing. They’d cut Bark open, the dead spider had flopped out, and the egg sac had presented itself. Snip some threads, pull the sac out and drop it in the insectarium, sew Bark back up, call it a day. But it wasn’t so easy. The strands of silk weren’t just tacked around the sac. They were literally sewn through Bark’s body. And worse. The threads were dotted with eggs, like mini egg sacs on a highway throughout his body. Nasty little surprises, and the surgeon had to track each thread and make
sure he caught each of the eggs. The big egg sac was still in there; the surgeon wanted to work around it, to make sure he didn’t lose any of the precious threads. As an added bonus, the egg sac, all the spider silk, was incredibly sticky. It was nothing like the sac from Peru. That thing had been hard, designed to go the distance. But this egg sac was different, and the surgeon had to be careful to avoid getting tangled up.

Plus, as a final bonus, it was vibrating and getting warmer.

None of it made any sense to her. Normally it took two or three weeks for an egg sac to hatch, and the spiders that came out were hatchlings, growing slowly to their full sizes. But these things could lay eggs and have full-sized spiders popping out in twelve hours. Or twenty-four? She didn’t actually know. She would have said twenty-four based on what was happening everywhere else, but this egg sac seemed as though it was moving faster. It would hatch within twelve hours for sure. Maybe even quicker. It was like they were speeding up. One generation burning out quickly and the next even more so. Maybe the way she’d described it to Manny had been the best: like a rocket burning itself up.

But that didn’t make sense either. What evolutionary advantage was there in dying quickly? The parasitic part made sense. By laying eggs inside hosts, the spiders had guaranteed food sources once they hatched. But the fact that they could eat their hosts wasn’t normal either. Most spiders dissolved their prey and ground it up with their pedipalps since they didn’t have teeth. She’d described it once to Manny as having a broken jaw and needing to run everything through a blender before slurping it up through a straw. But these spiders? They had more in common with piranhas than anything else. Actually, Melanie thought, that might not be a bad comparison, though she didn’t know much about the fish other than what she’d
seen in a couple of bad horror films. The spiders were uncommonly social and coordinated, swarming together and almost organized.

There had to be a reason for it. There had to be more to it. She was sure of it. The answer was a sort of itch she couldn’t reach. She knew she’d figure it out if she had enough time, but that was the problem.
Did
she have enough time?

Inside the containment unit, the surgeon was still bent over Bark’s body, assisted by three nurses and an anesthesiologist. Patrick was in there too. He had the lab’s expensive SLR camera plus a video camera, and he was alternating between taking pictures and shooting film. She tapped on the glass to try to get his attention. Video was fine for now. It was high-definition. She wished they’d brought a tripod from the lab. If they’d had a tripod, Patrick could have left the video camera running and bounced around with the SLR, but a tripod was another thing they’d forgotten. It was a miracle they weren’t shooting video on a cell phone. Like idiots, they’d rushed Bark from the lab without thinking it through other than to get him to the biocontainment unit. Nobody brought a laptop or a tablet, which didn’t seem like a big deal at first, until they realized that, with the egg sac starting to hum and heat up, it might be a good idea to look back at the data from the other egg sac. When Melanie stepped out of the isolation unit to get ready for her Manny-mandated helicopter pickup, she sent Julie scurrying to get on a computer to see if she could access their data remotely. The big question was: How hot was too hot? How soon was this sucker going to hatch? It was one thing to watch the egg sac in the lab hatch, another to actually have the numbers in front of you for comparison. Julie needed to get her ass back there as quickly as possible so that Melanie could crunch the numbers. She wanted to make sure that, if necessary,
she could get Patrick and the medical team out of there with time to spare.

She leaned her head against the glass, suddenly exhausted. There was so much she didn’t know or understand about these things, but it wasn’t exciting anymore. It was just scary. She knew she could be detached sometimes, that she didn’t always get upset the way some other people did, but in there, through that glass, lying on the operating table, his chest and abdomen split open, was a young man she’d been sleeping with—okay, dating—until a few days ago. And she was being called to the White House to tell a bunch of generals and cabinet members and the president how to kill spiders. A rolled-up newspaper? Would that joke go over? Probably not. She didn’t know what she could say.

It would be different if there were just a few of them. If she had them in her lab and had the time to study them. There were so many questions. Just the egg sacs to begin with. Why were there two kinds? One for longer incubations and a softer, sticky one for immediate delivery. How could some of the spiders hatch so quickly? It was as if some of the spiders were on fast-forward.

“Doctor Guyer?” She turned, expecting to see a suit, but it was a man in full army combat gear. Or maybe navy or Marines. In their fatigues, she didn’t know how she was supposed to tell them apart. She nodded. “Your ride’s here, ma’am,” the young man said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t hear the helicopter come in. Let me just . . .” She trailed off. She was about to say that she needed to tell Patrick she was leaving, but she caught sight of Julie coming down the corridor, running.
Running
.

No. It was too soon. Not twenty-four hours or even twelve hours yet. They should have more time! But Julie was running and screaming and Melanie knew it meant she’d gotten access to the
data from the lab. Melanie turned back to the glass and started to bang on it with her fists, to get the attention of the nurses and the surgeon and the anesthesiologist and Patrick, to get them the hell out of there.

Too late.

M
ike knew he was out of his depth. But sometimes, when you’re thrown in, the only thing you can do is swim. Or, phone a friend.

They cordoned off the whole block, cleared the warehouse of anybody who wasn’t wearing a badge, and called in four more agents plus the bureau chief. But then, honestly, they just sort of stood around. Nobody knew what to do. They all stared at the egg sacs and made serious faces and serious sounds, but there wasn’t really a protocol for it. One of the junior agents came back with a big glass jar and scooped the dead spider from the floor into it, but other than that?

And then Mike remembered the card from the scientist in DC. He pulled it from his wallet. Melanie Guyer. Dr. Melanie Guyer. She’d written her cell phone number on the back. It was 8:30
A.M.
Minneapolis time, so 9:30
A.M.
in Washington, DC, but Mike figured that with all that was going on and with a lab full of those suckers, she was probably out and about. What he didn’t expect was for her to be on a helicopter.

He had to speak loudly, and with the hush in the warehouse—it was easier to look serious if you were kind of quiet—everybody
turned to look at him. He held up his hand in an awkward apology and headed outside.

“Agent Rich—”

“Mike.”

“Mike, listen, not really a good time right now.”

“I found a few, well, I guess egg sacs? I can text you a picture.” There was no response for a few seconds. He listened to the staticky chop of the helicopter blades. “Hello?”

“Sorry. I’m just . . . I just watched spiders hatch from a living human.”

Mike pulled the phone back from his ear and looked at it. He knew it was a strange thing to do, but it was also a strange thing to hear, and he needed to make sure it wasn’t something he’d imagined. He put the phone back to his ear. “In DC?”

“Maryland, actually, but it doesn’t matter.”

“They’re loose in DC now?”

“Maryland. But no. He was in a biocontainment unit. There was an egg sac inside him. They were trying to get it out. It shouldn’t have been . . . It shouldn’t have hatched so quickly. None of this makes sense.”

“Yeah, well, I’m hoping you can tell me what to do.”

“I don’t think anybody can tell you what to do,” she said. “You’re in Minnesota?”

“In a warehouse.”

“Is it as bad as Los Angeles?”

The phone was muffled for a second and he heard her shouting something. Then she was back. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing. It’s calm here. The only thing we’ve got is a dead spider and three pod things. As far as I know, there aren’t any other spiders on the ground here. We’re only a couple of blocks from where Henderson’s plane crashed, so I’m sort of figuring there must have been
another spider that survived, that came over here and made these egg things.”

“Are the egg sacs warm?”

“I didn’t, uh,” Mike stammered, “I mean, nobody’s touched them. We set up a few barricades and taped the area off.”

“Like, with police tape?” She actually laughed. “That’s not going to do much.”

“That’s funny? I guess it’s a little funny. We’re a federal agency. It’s kind of what we do. But no, I don’t know if they’re warm or what.”

“Okay. Listen, Mike, I’ve only got a couple of minutes before I land, but I need you to go touch one, tell me what it feels like.”

“Give me a minute.” He walked back into the building, ducked under the police tape, and walked over to the shelves. He tucked the phone between his ear and his shoulder and pulled a wheeled platform ladder over. He went up a few steps, reached out his hand, and then hesitated. “Just touch it?”

“What does it feel like?”

From a distance, it looked smooth and white, almost like an egg, but up close he could see the individual strands, the way the silk threads were wrapped in layer after layer to create the sac. He shivered and then let his hand fall on the orb. He expected it to be sticky, but it wasn’t. It was a little rough, maybe a little bit tacky, but it was nothing like what he’d been afraid of. There’d been a part of him that was terrified his hand was going to stick to the thing. “It feels a little bit like one of those jawbreakers, after they’ve dried out again.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a kid. You know those big jawbreakers? My kid will eat one for a while and then stick the thing in a bowl and come back to it later. They’re basically pure sugar and chemicals and don’t go
bad, but once they dry out, they’re sort of smooth and rough at the same time.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Lady, you work with spiders,” he said. Even with the sound of the helicopter and everything else, he imagined he could hear her smiling. Definitely, he thought. If they managed to survive all this, he was going to fly back to DC and take her out on a date. What the hell?

“It’s not sticky?”

“No. A little tacky, sort of, I don’t know—”

“Calcified?”

“Yeah. Good word. And it’s not warm at all. Cool, really.”

M
elanie kept the phone pressed to her ear, her other hand covering her free ear. She was talking somewhere between loud and shouting. Below her, she saw the South Lawn of the White House looming up. They were landing.