Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  The man on the stepladder handed the empty gas can down to another guard and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a lighter.

  “Los Angeles is not safe, brothers and sisters. The spiders are not gone. This—this is what the federal government has locked us in with. This is what they are trying to burn in secret. I truly regret that I have to do this, but I need you to see the truth. I need you to see what is hidden in the fire. President Pilgrim says not to be afraid, but I am telling you, you cannot trust her. You need to trust me when I say, Be afraid. Be terrified.”

  It was almost beautiful. The yellow spark of the lighter setting off a blue stream of flame. The fire leaped off the roof of the cube and funneled down to where the woman was still lying unconscious.

  Bobby realized he was holding his breath. He could hear screaming, sobbing, gasps, but even with those noises, it felt as if the entire stadium was holding its breath with him. One second. Two. Just enough time for Bobby to wonder if maybe Macer was wrong. He could feel that the entire stadium was getting ready to turn against him. Things were horrible. A week ago, the city had been converted into a set from some terrifying movie. Men, women, and children eaten alive by spiders. Fires and looting and the fear of the unknown. It was too much to comprehend. But this in front of them, this was something else. It was just some poor old lady in a cage. The audience didn’t know what he knew. They didn’t know she was infested. They didn’t know what was inside her. If it didn’t happen soon, the crowd would turn against him. It was one thing to hang young men for looting, to make an example of them. That was keeping the peace.

  Three seconds. Four seconds. And then it happened. The old woman’s body started to shake and she split open. He knew it was wrong, but it made Bobby think of a hot dog on a grill, the way she opened up. And almost instantly, the spiders poured out.

  He was still holding his breath, but the stadium wasn’t. People were screaming. Yelling. Cursing. It was the sound of anger. Of terror.

  On the video screen, the cameraman caught the spiders spilling out of the woman’s body, zoomed in on their legs scrambling against the sides of the cube. The fire caught them, burning their bodies as they scrambled to get away. But even as they burned, some of them tried to feed on what was left of the old lady.

  He looked out at the crowd in front of him. People were screaming and shaking their arms in anger and fear. On the field, near him, a young Latina, maybe twenty-five and holding a baby, was crying. The woman was huddling against a companion, but she watched the burning cube.

  Bobby looked over at Macer, still standing at the lip of the tunnel. Macer nodded. It was time.

  “This is what’s waiting for us,” Bobby roared. “So I ask you, do you trust the federal government to keep you safe? Do you want to stay in the quarantine zone?”

  The noise of the crowd lifted him and carried him away. He could see it now. He and Macer would get out. They’d run a convoy of sacrificial lambs at the fence, draw the US military into a single spot, and then direct the bulk of their army to a different spot. He could see it now, could see soldiers and their tanks and guns trying to stop them and failing. How could you stop a river from flowing?

  Oh, the Prophet Bobby Higgs could see it, all right.

  Macer had found them a way out.

  They had their army.

  Rio de Janeiro Infection Zone, Brazil

  It was like watching dominos fall. Not the click and clack of tiles on the table when he played dominos with his friends over a few beers on a Sunday night, but the dominos a child sets up in a line. One goes down and then the next and the next. There was a connection to be made.

  Across the world people described it as a sudden occurrence: the bugs just died. There was more coming, however. He knew it. He was sure of it. He’d seen the live footage on the news: people sweeping the spiders out of the streets like so many dead leaves. Then a gust of wind and he’d seen, right there on the thirty-inch television in his apartment, how the top layer of the pile of spiders had caught the air, lifting and shifting. They looked so light. Insubstantial. How could anybody believe the horror they’d caused? That a swarm of them could move through a city like a summer storm, catching everybody in front of them in an unavoidable shower of blood and despair? How could you think these hollow things were a danger? They were only shells with legs, brittle and black, the dregs of a child’s nightmare. And like a child’s nightmare, ludicrous in the bright light of day.

  It was the same throughout the world. Helsinki and Delhi, Los Angeles and Seoul, the Italian Alps, and the terrible, terrifying, flame-filled zone in China. One minute the spiders had been an unstoppable force, a thousand million avatars of death, worse even than the nuclear weapons the Chinese had unleashed, worse than anything he could have imagined, worse than anything that had ever been imagined, and the next minute they dropped to the ground, empty and dead, as if they were consumed from within.

  The hand of God. Prayers answered. That was what the religious said. The spiders simply used themselves up in a frenzy of destruction, an unsustainable rate of growth and burn of energy. That’s what the scientists said. What both groups agreed on was that the spiders were gone.

  But that made no sense to him at all. He’d seen the way the spiders had spread through the city and then, at the same time, like a flower folding in on itself, had reversed course. They’d done that before they started dying off. The newscasters and the analysts discounted it. The spiders’ reversal was an afterthought, if even that. Most of them were so focused on the seemingly spontaneous die out that they didn’t seem to even notice that the spiders had begun a retreat. Or, if they thought and talked about it all, they said it was just a blessing. How much worse would it have been had the spiders continued to push forward and out in the last hours of their invasion instead of shrinking back toward the center of the outbreak? Were there not enough dead? He’d tried to bring up the question to his superiors, but they told him to shut up and just do his job as a police officer, to let the army and the scientists worry about the spiders. It was not a thing to concern himself with.

  He double-checked his gear: a hazardous material suit he’d borrowed from a friend who worked in a lab; a heavy Maglite flashlight that doubled nicely as a club; and his cell phone to use for pictures and video. It didn’t feel like enough, somehow, but he couldn’t think of what else he needed to bring with him. He’d worn his uniform and used his police identification to get past the cordon, carrying the gear in a small duffel bag.

  He’d been shocked at how easy it was to slip past the army guards and the other police officers. All he had to do was leave his bag open so the hazmat suit was showing, wave his badge, and assume the air of somebody who was supposed to be able to go into the infection zone, and no questions were asked. In he went. He supposed it was because he was sneaking in to an area that people wanted to flee from. Who in their right mind would sneak into the epicenter of such terror? Who in their right mind wanted to go into the middle of this mad labyrinth?

  If it was a labyrinth, did that make him the hero or was he the Minotaur, half man, half beast? It was a maze he’d gotten himself into. Nobody would listen to him, nobody would believe him when he said there had to be more to the way the spiders moved, that they had acted as if they were coordinated. Individually they might be nothing more than eight-legged emissaries from the depths of hell, but together, they were like an army. Invaders. Colonizers. Scouring the earth.

  He had no choice. If they wouldn’t listen to him, he had to show them. Past the roadblocks and the guards, past the burned-out shells of buildings and cars, into the heart of Rio de Janeiro. He looked at his watch. Two in the morning. He had until five to get in and out. Every television station and radio station repeated it, every cop car with a loudspeaker blared it, every surface that could be stapled with fliers screamed it in bold letters: five was when the bombs would fall.

  The center of the city was infested with egg sacs in building after building. Too ma
ny to count. Rio was a lost cause. The entire area was going to be blasted to hell, a radius of seven kilometers sacrificed to the spiders even though all the egg sacs had been found within less than a thousand meters of one another, a tight circle of promised doom. The army was going to take that seven-kilometer radius and turn it into nothing but smoke and ashes. No spiders could survive that. No egg sacs would remain. Conventional weapons only: the beaches would remain, no nuclear weapons to turn the sand into glass. But there would be fire and burning. Five in the morning. Not a minute before, the radio and television and fliers and speakers all said, but not a minute later either. If you are in the blast area, you will not be spared.

  He walked more quickly.

  He passed two buildings at the outer perimeter that had been marked with spray paint to indicate infestations. That wasn’t where he needed to go. He needed to see. Needed to prove he was right, prove that there was something to the way the spiders attacked that was worse than anybody had imagined. He needed to take pictures and shoot video and have evidence so that the authorities could not ignore him anymore. If they just burned everything down without understanding, they would never be saved. It was so much more complicated than the authorities thought! If only they would believe him without him having to resort to this. But they wouldn’t believe him without the video. With the video? They’d have to. And then he’d be a hero. He wouldn’t just be some dumb cop told to do his job and stay out of the way. He’d be the kind of person they made movies about.

  That’s what he was thinking as he hustled up the block toward the glass-fronted office building. His flashlight beam bobbed in front of him. He’d combed through the news reports and the Internet rumors, watched all the television reporting he could find, and in the end, he knew that this is where it had started in Rio de Janeiro. This building was ground zero. When they made the movie version of this, the hero—he imagined somebody like Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis had been when he was a younger man, when he’d filmed the first Die Hard—would have to work harder to get past the cordon, would maybe even have to fight his way into the middle of the infestation in order to serve as humanity’s last hope, but in real life, it was easy. The entire core of the city was deserted. A ghost town. Just him and a few million spiders waiting to be hatched.

  He better be right, he thought.

  He stopped for a minute outside the building to catch his breath. It was a bank. The windows had posters featuring bright, young, single people, happy families, sun-kissed couples in love. All that happiness with a simple loan. In the street, where he stood, however, there were grimmer signs. A car turned over and blackened by fire. Human-shaped lumps of clothing he was afraid to shine his light on. He reached out and pulled on the door. It was locked. The door was locked. Had somebody really stopped to lock the door to the bank amid all the chaos or was it just on a timer? Not that it mattered. He lifted the flashlight, flipped it around in his hand, and struck the glass in front of him with the heavy metal butt.

  Instantly he was covered in flashing white light, a wailing piercing through the night. The strobe alarm made him blink heavily, and he had to resist the urge to cover his ears. An alarm. It was a bank after all. He should have been expecting it. He looked around, almost expecting security guards to come rushing at him, but the streets stayed deserted. The siren was playing to an audience of one. He stepped into the building, walking gingerly on the broken glass. It crunched under his boots with every step. Then he stopped. Shit. He’d forgotten to put on the hazmat suit. Better safe than sorry, he thought, which was funny, all things considered. He worked the ungainly plastic coveralls on over his clothes. It didn’t seem like much protection once he had the hazmat gear on. It was basically a yellow rain suit with full helmet and glass face mask with a built-in respirator. When he pulled the mask over his face, though, it covered him; every centimeter of exposed skin underneath the suit. The mask seemed to amplify his breathing; he could hear each breath, in and out.

  The lobby of the bank was dotted with egg sacs. Softballs and footballs filled with spiders waiting to hatch. He was surprised at how little fear he felt. The egg sacs were foreign but unthreatening. There were more than he had expected, but he knew the real concentration was elsewhere in the building. He might only be a police officer, but he’d had access to the reports and he knew he had to head down into the basement. He walked through the lobby and past the chairs in the waiting area, around the counters and to the metal door that took him to the basement. His flashlight cut a path through the maze for him. The egg sacs were everywhere. Worse, there were bodies all over the floor. Not even bodies. Skeletons. He tried to keep his eyes on the sacs, to see what lay before him, but it was hard with the strobe lights of the alarm. It turned the bank into a scene from an eerie, stuttering movie. It was with a sigh of relief that he pushed through the metal door, and he sped up, rushing to get down to the basement, to get this all over with.

  He should have moved more slowly.

  He should have looked down.

  As he pushed through the door to the basement, he heard a snapping sound and then he stumbled. He was already falling down the stairs by the time he realized that what he’d tripped on had been a body. The snapping had been a bone breaking underfoot, and he was falling because his boot had snagged on the empty fabric that had once surrounded a human being.

  The strobe lights of the alarm were working here, too, in the stairwell, and the process of falling was disjointed. He was stumbling. He was reaching for the handrail with his free hand. The flashlight was in his hand and then it wasn’t. He was, for one brief, blessed, blinking moment of time, safe in the bright light that came from the same box that shrieked at him, and then, in the darkness that came between the strobes, he could feel himself flying. Falling.

  When he woke, the alarm was still blaring, the strobe light still flashing.

  How long?

  How long had he been unconscious?

  He turned his head. The motion made him want to throw up. Gingerly, he touched the back of his head with his right hand. He couldn’t feel anything but rubber. Of course. The hazmat suit. The respirator. His left arm was pinned under his body, and when he moved it to look at his watch, a wave of pain shot through him. My god. He’d broken his leg. There was no question of that. Just that slight movement, that twist to pull his arm free from under him had shifted his leg and been enough to make him nearly black out again. He used his right hand to peel off his left glove, and then held his wrist up in front of his face, but he couldn’t see the numbers. There was a great jagged crack across the faceplate that made it impossible to see. He wrenched the helmet off and looked at his watch again. No. It was impossible.

  He’d been unconscious for almost three hours.

  It was five to five in the morning.

  Five minutes until the bombs came down.

  He looked up, realizing that the door at the bottom of the stairwell where he lay was propped open by a body that had once belonged to a woman. He reached for his flashlight before he remembered that he’d lost it, that he’d dropped it when he fell down the stairs. But there was light in the basement. The strobe of the alarm, of course, white and hateful, like the beating heart of an alien, but something else too. He could almost see it.

  He tried pushing himself forward, but there was something wet and grinding in his leg. The wave of pain that shot through him almost made him faint. He didn’t have to look to know that a bone was sticking out, but he needed to see all the same. He immediately wished he hadn’t: he could see the ripped, bloody hole in his suit where his jagged thighbone had poked through. At least he couldn’t see the flesh. Still, it made him feel sick, and he had to look away.

  The siren continued its pulsing wail, but in the space between, he thought he heard something. A brushing. A skittering. And then, with horror, he realized that his head was bleeding too. He could feel blood trickling through his hair, down his neck. He reached for the helmet to seal the suit up again, but
he couldn’t find it. Could the spiders smell the blood from his leg? From his head? Were they in the basement, looking for a meal? Had they hatched or were they still safely in their egg sacs? Were they already inside him?

  Three minutes to five. The second hand of his watch looked even choppier than normal in the strobe. There wasn’t much time. He knew he was right. He knew there was a reason for him to be here. The hero wasn’t going to die in vain. If he couldn’t be Bruce Willis in Die Hard, he could be Bruce Willis in Armageddon, staying on that asteroid to save the human race, a worthwhile sacrifice. They’d build a statue to honor him. The whole world would know his name.

  He reached out to the door frame and pulled himself along the floor, scraping across the hard concrete. The blood dripping from his leg looked black in the flashes of the strobe. Ahead of him, he could finally see it. Glowing. He looked at his watch again. Two minutes. There were black spots dancing across his vision. His head ached where he’d smashed it on the stairs. He couldn’t pass out. He was Bruce Willis. He was the hero. There was still time to save the world. His leg hurt so much. His head hurt. The siren. If only the siren would be quiet, the strobe stopping the incessant punishment of light. How hard had he hit his head? The black spots moved through his field of vision, and he thought he saw flashes of red as well. Five spots. Ten. Dozens. He closed his eyes for a moment. No. No. Be Bruce Willis. Focus. He could see the glowing in front of him. All he had to do was take a video and upload it. Then they’d see.

  He reached for his phone where it lay on the concrete, but he never closed his hands around it.

  It felt like he’d been shot. The sensation was so strong and painful that any thoughts of his broken leg disappeared. The bombs? No, it couldn’t be the bombs, not yet. He was still alive, even if the pain made him wish he wasn’t. There was at least another minute before the bombs fell. He tried to look at his watch and he realized he couldn’t move. Not a muscle.