No! Again. It was as if there was some sadist standing above him with a burning iron rod, piercing his body. He’d never imagined a pain like this. And it was made worse by the way his body was frozen. He couldn’t grimace, couldn’t curl up to defend himself, couldn’t even cry out in pain. Whatever thoughts he’d had of being the hero disappeared. All he could think of was the pain.
It didn’t last long, though. Five o’clock came, and with it the bombs and fire.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
That’s what nobody told you about joining the agency. There were moments of abject terror, sure. Agent Mike Rich had had plenty of those in the last two weeks. Going into Henderson’s crashed plane and seeing a spider crawling out of the billionaire’s face? Scary. Taking said spider to Washington, DC, and bumping into the president and her chief of staff? Scary. Okay, maybe meeting Melanie Guyer, hot, brilliant scientist who was all legs and a great smile, wasn’t so scary, but Melanie did specialize in spiders, so then again, sort of scary. And then all the shit that went down in India, China, and Los Angeles, and realizing it was absolutely, positively connected to that same spider that he’d trapped under a cut glass tumbler in the wreckage of the billionaire’s plane and carried to Washington? Scary. Having to drive his daughter and pregnant ex-wife and her husband out to a cottage in the woods because he thought there was a better than even chance that they were screwed? Scary.
But this was worse.
That’s what they never told you. The moments were scary, but you didn’t have time to really think. It was between the moments, when you did have time and you had to make the big decisions, that was truly the most terrifying. Reaction was always easier than action.
“What do we do, Mike?”
Agent Rosario leaned toward Mike. She kept her voice down, and his partner, Leshaun, leaned in with her. The three agents were huddled at the back of the garage, near the egg sacs. They’d cleared everybody else out.
If you didn’t count the man-eating-spider egg sacs, Mike thought, the adjoining home was kind of nice. Typical suburban brick house. A mile from where Henderson’s plane had crashed after the tech tycoon and his pilots had been eaten by spiders. The house was on a quiet street off another quiet street that led to a slightly busier street, and it was painted a jaunty buttercup yellow with blue shutters. Well maintained, with a neat lawn and mulched flower beds. One of the flower beds already showed the first promise of tulips. Inside the garage, everything was clean and organized. The owner kept the concrete swept, with sporting equipment hung from pegs on the side wall, and the back wall lined with the kind of stainless steel cabinets you could buy at a home improvement store and install yourself. Really, aside from the presence of the eggs, it was the kind of home Mike wouldn’t mind having for himself. His condo was fine, but a real yard would have been terrific, a place for him to play catch with Annie or to kick around a soccer ball. This place was probably in his price range, too. If he’d been here for an open house—and there were no spiders—he’d be calling his bank to see if he could prequalify.
Unfortunately, there were spiders. Or the promise of spiders. Maybe ten, twelve egg sacs. Each one the size of a basketball, knitted together and tucked against the dark corner of the garage. He could understand why the owner hadn’t noticed them until today. Without the portable klieg lights burning through the shadows, they’d be nothing more than a shape lurking in the corner of your eye.
Except for the fact that, in the last hour, the shapes had started to make noises. A sort of buzzing rattle.
And now, his partner and Rosario wanted to know what Mike thought they should do. He looked past them, out toward the driveway. There was a clump of cops milling around, a fire truck, an ambulance, and several members of the Minnesota National Guard in full uniform and carrying rifles. He had to squint a bit. The spotlights were unforgiving.
“What do you mean, what do we do?” he said, walking a few steps over to the side. He turned off the blinding klieg lights. Better. The overhead fluorescents were on, but the garage felt normal. Small and clean and comfortable. It was almost possible, for a few seconds, to forget about the giant packet of doom in the corner. Almost.
“Pretty obvious question,” Rosario said. “What do we do about these egg sacs? They’re what we’ve been looking for, and now we’ve found them. So?”
“Why are you asking me?”
Leshaun raised his eyebrows. “Because it’s humming and vibrating and scaring the living shit out of me. And because you already caught one of them. Like it or not, Mike, that makes you the expert.”
It was all Mike could do to stop himself from laughing in panic. If he was what passed for an expert, they were well and truly screwed. His experience with these spiders could be classified as limited, at best. Basically, he’d grabbed a highball glass off the floor of a jet and tipped it over a spider. And that meant he was going to have to answer this question? So what if the spider came out of the wreckage of a plane crash, limping and damaged and still going after his flesh like some unstoppable machine? So what if he didn’t happen to notice that a few other spiders must have made their way out of Henderson’s plane, skittered three or more blocks away, and started laying eggs? Whoops! There goes the neighborhood! Before all this happened, the only thing he knew about spiders was that they creeped him out. But absolutely none of that mattered. Nope. He was the expert now. Jesus.
“What did you do with the other egg sacs you found at the warehouse?” Rosario said.
He shook his head. “I just did what Melanie told me. She asked me if they were warm or not. When I said they weren’t, she had me call some scientists at the U. The scientists came out and put them in these bug aquariums.”
“Insectariums,” Leshaun said.
“Whatever,” Mike said. “Point is, I didn’t do anything.”
Leshaun glanced at the sacs. “So why’d she ask if they were warm?”
“Beats me.”
“So the ones at the warehouse weren’t warm?”
“No,” Mike said. He shook his head for emphasis. “I already said that. They were cool, if anything.” He stopped for a second and then walked to the corner. He held out his hand and then hesitated. He really didn’t want to touch them. “Which seemed to reassure her, though, so I guess warm is bad?”
Rosario and Leshaun both just stared at him. Waiting.
“Seriously?” he said.
Rosario shook her head. “I’m not touching them, and come on, you’re right there.”
“Leshaun?”
“Hey, man, I’m still recovering from a gunshot wound. Be my guest.”
“Fuck both of you,” he said. He meant it, too.
It gave him the heebie-jeebies to raise his arm again, to reach out and touch the egg sacs, but there you go.
They were warm. Like bread cooling from the oven. And though they looked chalky, they were slightly tacky. They felt like the pebbled leather on a basketball.
There was a protocol they were supposed to follow. Sort of. It wasn’t much of a protocol, really. In the week since Mike had come across the first colony of egg sacs in the warehouse a few blocks from the plane crash, it seemed like the agency had called in every cop, firefighter, EMT, security guard, crossing guard, Boy Scout, and Girl Scout in the greater Minneapolis area. If you could walk and follow anything resembling an order, you were thrown into the hunt. Everybody got a glossy photo of the sacs and strict instructions: Call it in. Set up a perimeter and make sure nobody touched the egg sacs. That’s it. Call it in and then wait. The bigwigs in Washington were still trying to figure out the protocol for dealing with them.
With all the people out looking, they’d still only found five sites in Minneapolis: the original trio of egg sacs in the warehouse, a single egg sac in a tree on the edge of the school grounds where the plane had crashed, two sacs underneath a panel van parked in the back of an office supply company, nine in a long-shuttered restaurant, and the dozen or so here, in the garage of this
cute house. At first, they’d searched the old-fashioned way, fanning out and looking here and there. They’d run it like a missing persons case, gridding out the area around the crash site and moving in a larger and larger circumference, systematically checking each part of the grid. But after the second and third finds things had gone to the dogs. Literally. Dogs went totally batshit crazy when they came near the egg sacs. And it didn’t have to be trained K9 units or bomb sniffers or anything fancy. The egg sacs under the chassis of the panel van were discovered by some college student taking her Chihuahua for a walk. Her dog just lost his mind, barking and growling and spoiling for a fight, as if his seven pounds was going to fare well against these spiders.
So they’d used dogs, and the dogs had found these other infestation sites, and then they’d . . . waited.
That’s it. Get agents on-site and sit tight. It seemed crazy to him. These things were lethal, and they were supposed to just wait? But what did he know? He was no expert.
The problem was that sitting and waiting might be an acceptable course of action at all the other locations, where the egg sacs were chalky and dull and cold and exactly like the ones in the warehouse, but these were warm and they were humming. There was no way that seemed like a good thing. Maybe he would have been willing to believe it was going to be okay if Melanie Guyer was standing next to him and smiling and promising it was going to be okay.
But she wasn’t.
He didn’t have any reassurances. What he had was his partner Leshaun, Agent Rosario, and a couple dozen guys with badges and uniforms standing around with their thumbs up their asses. And he had a group of egg sacs that were warm and vibrating and making noise.
So he had a choice. He could wait and watch, knowing that there was something seriously wrong here, or he could act. But if he acted, what the hell was he supposed to do?
He thought about the first spider he saw. He’d been visiting Leshaun in the hospital when he’d gotten the call from the director of the agency that the jet of one of the richest men in the world, tech billionaire Bill Henderson, of Henderson Tech, had crashed just a few blocks away. The twisted wreckage had been gruesome, but Mike figured it was just some billionaire’s luck gone to crap. Until he had seen the spider eat its way out of Henderson’s face. There was something undeniably scary about that, made worse by the way the damaged spider had kept coming toward him, dragging two useless legs but still relentless. He’d had a bad cut on his hand, and as it bled, drip, drip, dripping onto the floor, it was like the blood was a siren call for the little monster. He remembered that with stunning clarity. And God, the sound of walking through that plane? He would hear that in his nightmares for the rest of his life, the crunching, popcorn crackle of the burned-out spiders underfoot.
No. Wait. He had something there. Fire.
“We burn them out,” he said.
Maybe he was the expert.
He certainly felt that way for the next forty-five minutes. They didn’t have anything approximating a flamethrower, though some chucklehead cop suggested using the homeowner’s Weber grill. Fortunately, one of the firefighters on the scene ran the training sessions for the department. He was, to an almost concerning extent, skilled at setting fires. Mike had the cops set up a cordon and evacuate everybody within a one-block radius, and then directed the additional fire trucks called to the scene to wet down the surrounding houses. This cute little house was going to be a sacrificial victim. There wasn’t much he could do about that. But he was pretty sure that burning down the entire neighborhood seemed like overkill. Probably. Maybe not.
“I think we’re good,” the fireman said. “I’ve got it set to go really fast and hot. There’s plenty of airflow, so it’s going to be an absolute inferno. There shouldn’t be time for anything to get out. Probably.”
“That ‘probably’ you added at the end there was incredibly reassuring.”
“Sorry. Let me take one last check,” the fireman said.
After a few minutes, the fireman gave him the signal. Ready to go. But Mike wasn’t sure. He motioned for him to wait.
Screw it.
He pulled out his cell phone and called her.
The phone rang three, four times, and just as he was expecting the click through to voice mail, Melanie picked up.
“Not a good time, Mike.”
“I’m not calling to ask you out to dinner,” he said, and he was gratified to hear the small snort of a laugh. “We’ve got some egg sacs here I’m worried about.”
“What is that? Third site? Fourth?”
“Fifth.”
“Look, I’m sorry, Mike, but I’m kind of dying here.” There was a sound in the background that Mike couldn’t quite make out. Some sort of buzzing noise. “I’m not getting a lot of sleep and people are counting on me, and I’d love to chat, but I can’t. Just keep doing what you guys have been doing. Keep an eye on them and let us know if anything changes.”
“Uh, yeah. That’s the thing.” He moved across the grass and up toward the porch where he had some privacy. There were two white painted rocking chairs on the porch, and Mike sat in one. “These ones are warm and sort of vibrating.”
Mike held the phone to his ear. The background noise was still there, but nothing from Melanie. “Hello? Melanie?”
Her voice came at last. “Vibrating?”
“You know. Like if you have music up loud and you put your hands against the speakers, you can feel the thump, thump, thump. So, anyway, I know we’re supposed to just watch and stuff, but I’ve got to be honest, this is kind of stressing me out.” He saw the fireman come out of the garage and start shooing the other men and women in uniforms back. The fireman looked at Mike, clearly impatient, but Mike held up his hand to tell him to keep waiting.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit,” Melanie said.
“Yeah, I was afraid you were going to have that kind of reaction.” He paused for a second. “To be clear, we’re both on the same page here, right? These things are getting ready to hatch?”
“What about the other sites in Minneapolis?”
He shook his head and then remembered he was on the phone. “Nothing. Cold and chalky.”
“And you’ve still only got five sites in Minneapolis? And they’re all relatively small infestations? Nothing more than a few sacs at each one? A couple dozen at most?”
“Yeah. Wait. What aren’t you telling me?”
He listened to the background noise through the phone, wondering what Melanie was doing, wondering how much worse it was out there.
A lot worse, evidently.
She hesitated but told him. He was pretty sure, as he listened to her tell him about the infestations in Los Angeles, the reports out of Korea and India, out of England and Japan, that she was supposed to be keeping the news to herself, but it was clear she was overwhelmed. The gist of it was that they were lucky in Minneapolis. A few egg sacs here, a few egg sacs there? In the scheme of things, a smattering of egg sacs that weren’t hatching wasn’t something to worry about.
“Mike,” Melanie said. Her tone was serious. “That’s the problem. We are on the same page. I’d like to say it’s not a big deal. It wouldn’t be, if you only had a couple of sites with a couple of egg sacs, because compared to everywhere else that’s almost nothing. But that assumes the egg sacs are cold. What you’re telling me is that you’ve got a few egg sacs that are ready to hatch. You’re going to have to take care of them. Now. You can’t wait.”
“I was really, really hoping you weren’t going to say that, but okay. I’ll take care of it. Just hold on a second.”
“No. You don’t understand. You don’t have a second. Now. Right now.”
“You got it,” he said. “Literally, right now.”
He lowered the phone and caught the eye of the fireman again. He gave the thumbs-up and then waited until the first flames began to shoot out of the garage.
It was pretty in a strange sort of way. He stood up from the rocking chair and got as close as he c
ould. The heat pushed him back, but he described to Melanie what he had done and what he could see through the flames: the egg sacs flaring up and then melting, a few black balls opening and skittering toward the garage door before sinking into the blaze. Soon, the entire cavity of the garage was like a blast furnace, and it was only a few minutes more before the house itself was captured by fire.
“Well,” he said, “at least we’ve got that going for us.”
“What?” Melanie said.
“The bastards aren’t fire resistant.”
“You better double-check the other sites around town, to make sure none of the sacs are getting warm,” Melanie said. “If one of those things hatches . . .”
“I know. Already on it.” He thought he should hang up, but he didn’t. He knew she was busy, that she had more important things to do than talk to him, but it was reassuring to just hold the phone against his ear and breath in and out with her.
“Mike,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Thoughtful. “What’s your kid’s name again?”
“Annie. She’s at her mom’s right now. Or maybe on her way to soccer.” He laughed. “Things aren’t exactly normal, but even spiders taking over the world isn’t a good enough excuse for her soccer coach. Two practices a week plus games, spiders be damned. She’s only nine. Can’t wait to see what her schedule is going to look like once she’s in high school.”
“Can you get her out of the city?”
“Pardon?” Mike turned his back to the burning house and walked farther away.
“Can you get Annie out of the city?”
“Her stepdad has a cottage up on Soot Lake. It’s two hours north of the city. Pretty remote. I sent them up there last week when shit went to hell. But I brought them back after the spiders started dying out. I just figured—”
He spun around, looking at the house enveloped by flames. It was so obvious. It wasn’t just this one infestation. It didn’t matter that the other sacs they’d found in Minneapolis showed no signs of hatching as of yet. How could he have thought it was just this one house? They could look all they wanted, and maybe they’d find every egg sac in Minneapolis. And maybe they’d be lucky, and the egg sacs would all be dusty and cold, waiting for some later time. But they’d never find all the egg sacs. Or if they found all the egg sacs in Minneapolis, they would miss some in Los Angeles. And if not Los Angeles, then somewhere else. They’d already spread past the point of containment. There were more. Of course there were.
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