Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  There was a reason why Melanie was telling him to get Annie out of the city.

  They were out of time.

  The White House

  For once, Manny wasn’t worried about the polls. Mostly, that was because they hadn’t bothered taking numbers since the cargo ship had hit Los Angeles and dumped a million of those vicious sons of bitches on American soil. What was he going to learn from a poll? That Americans don’t like being eaten by spiders? Yeah. That was useful information. He could manage a campaign with information like that: Steph, make sure you come out strong against spiders. You, as a candidate, and we, as a political party, are very anti-spider. Posters and lawn signs showing the black silhouette of a spider in a circle with a big red bar through it. Crowds chanting, “No more spiders, no more spiders.” Oh, it was a winning strategy. The only thing that could make it better was having whatever yahoo the other guys picked as their candidate come out as pro-spider. Against a pro-spider candidate, Steph could win hands down.

  He shook his head and then took a sip from his Diet Coke. He was getting loopy. It was too much to take in. There were men and women in military uniforms zipping in and out of the Situation Room, aides scurrying with folders and cups of coffee, cabinet members and analysts and pretty much everybody who could fit. In the corner, Ben Broussard, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was huddled up with the secretary of defense, Billy Cannon, and enough starred generals to make a constellation. And across the table, the national security advisor, Alex Harris, was conferring with a couple of CIA analysts. To Manny’s right President Stephanie Pilgrim was listening to two senior analysts explain the fallout from China. Literal fallout, since China had nuked half its territory into oblivion.

  Manny took another sip of his soda. At least he’d been able to get some sleep. Not a lot, but he really didn’t need much. It was funny how little he needed to get by. He was, let’s face it, kind of schlumpy. When he and Melanie had been married they’d gotten a few weird looks. She, six foot and athletic, stunning in a gown or just jeans and a T-shirt, and he looking disheveled even in a tuxedo. But if he wasn’t a chiseled specimen like some of the military men and women circulating in and out of the Situation Room, he could at least outwork them. That’s what Manny Walchuck did. He outworked you. He was a grinder. He sat up straighter and looked at the video screen. The burning of the Staples Center was running on a loop.

  He’d seen it dozens of times, but it was still hard to watch. The ruins of the stadium clear in glorious sunlight. That’s California for you, Manny thought. California didn’t care that spiders had come to eat the human race. California—Los Angeles in particular—was sunshine and eighty degrees. Not what you’d expect to see in the Situation Room. Eight different times since Steph had been sworn in, they’d come down to watch a military operation of one sort or another. A missile strike. A team of commandos going into a compound. But those videos all had the same thing in common: the grainy green-tinged hue of night vision, dark shadows, and flashes of light. To watch this, the Staples Center illuminated by daylight, was unsettling.

  There had been an argument over leaving the stadium alone for a few days. The idea was to try to catalogue it and count the egg sacs, but Manny had overruled them all. They had tanks on the streets of Los Angeles and a city in ruins. Best guess? Two million dead. Three? They didn’t know. There’d never been anything like it. And a stadium full of egg sacs that people wanted to study.

  No way, Manny had said. Burn the whole thing down. So they did. Cordite or thermite or some kind of -ite or other. The air force had suggested bombing the building, but there was concern that the spiders might ride the wave of an explosion. Air currents. So it came down to a good old-fashioned burning. Whatever engineer had been in charge had rigged it so that the blaze moved from the outer shell inward, driving any loose spiders toward the middle. According to the briefing, the temperature in there had been in the thousands. Hot enough that the air itself could have caught fire.

  Nothing could have survived it.

  Which would have been wildly reassuring if Melanie hadn’t been so damn right about there being tons of other places where the spiders laid eggs. If it was as simple as burning down the Staples Center, he’d be taking a nap right now, but it wasn’t. The egg sacs were everywhere around Los Angeles. They had a nice little visual of it too: a map dotted with infestation sites. The whole of Los Angeles was ringed with them. Some were small—fifty, sixty egg sacs—and some were of similar scale to the Staples Center. Which he maybe could have lived with, except that he knew there was no way they’d found all of them. Not with the city in ruins, not with so many people dead and such . . .

  Ah. Jesus. There was a part of Manny that wanted to stand up, say, “Well, to hell with it,” and just pack it in. Go take a suite at the Ritz and order room service and watch pay-per-view until the end came.

  But he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t a quitter. So he’d have to settle for watching the video of the Staples Center burn and die. He liked seeing the building buckle and fold in on itself. It was as close as he was going to get to some sort of reassurance.

  Plus, he’d always been a Celtics guy.

  He felt a tap on his elbow and looked up to see Steph.

  “A word,” she said.

  They left the room together and walked a few paces down the hall. They weren’t exactly alone—the president was never really alone in the White House—but there was a cordon of privacy, and she kept her voice low.

  “I need you to keep Broussard on a leash for me,” she said. “He and the other brass are starting to play their favorite tune—that I can’t possibly understand the military implications.”

  Manny sighed. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ben Broussard, was a dick even at the best of times. Not that this was the best of times. He’d been agitating for more military latitude. If the Chinese were dropping nukes, he said, shouldn’t the United States be ready to do the same? The guy was a heartbeat away from turning into Dr. Strangelove.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Manny said, though he knew it wouldn’t help. Broussard wasn’t a fan of his. Wasn’t a fan of Steph either. Broussard had been one of Manny’s blind spots. Something he’d realized too late. He’d known Steph for so long, worked with Steph for so long, that he often forgot that there were men who couldn’t stomach the idea of a woman being in charge. Sure, when everything was hunky dory, it wasn’t a problem. With the Russians just cartoon villains from Reagan-era movies, and the Chinese an economic threat more than an ongoing military worry, men like Ben Broussard were willing to let Steph play at being the president. Because that’s how they thought of it: as a thing they let her do. Like she was some cute little girl playing dress up. Steph had taken his advice on getting Broussard confirmed, and it had been a mistake. The bigger mistake, though, was when they’d decided to let Broussard stay in the post once they finally understood what kind of man he was. The problem was that it was too late to do anything about it. Now that it mattered, now that there was something real and vital and terrifying to face, now that Broussard thought it was time for men like him to be in charge, it was too late to replace him. Instead, Manny would have to work around him.

  “I’ll talk to Billy too,” he said. Billy Cannon. The secretary of defense. Maybe it was just a difference in confidence. Cannon was a military lifer, decorated and carrying a scar from combat. Smart enough to play politics and sure enough of himself not to give a shit about politics when things really mattered. Cannon recognized the truth, which was that Steph was a hell of a president.

  “You’re doing it, aren’t you?” Steph said. She nodded at some Marines saluting her as they walked past. “Moving the pieces on that little chessboard in your head?”

  Manny shrugged. “I can tell Broussard that you want to hear his contingency plan for evacuating the West Coast and sealing off everything east of the Mississippi. It’s bullshit, because there’s no way to actually make that happen, but I can direct him toward
Cannon. Cannon will play ball, and that will buy you a couple of days of having Broussard out of your hair.”

  Steph nodded and then turned through the doorway that led into the Oval Office. She called to her secretary to say that she didn’t want them to be disturbed, and then led Manny through the Oval Office into her smaller, more intimate private office.

  As soon as the door was closed, she pulled him close, kissed him, and said, “We’ve got maybe twenty minutes, tops. Make it good.”

  He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. He and Steph had slept together on and off for most of the time they’d known each other. On, mostly, in college, and in between her boyfriends and his girlfriends, and then totally off while he was married to Melanie. Mostly back on for the past couple of years. The First Hubby, George, was a nice enough guy, but that was all he had going for him. She’d never really been in love with George. Maybe in a different world Steph would have divorced him and found somebody else, but that wasn’t the world she lived in. The voting public wasn’t ready for a male president to get divorced, let alone a woman. As it was, her political opponents did their best to paint Steph as some sort of bitch-whore. She had to walk such a fine line. So it was an arrangement that worked well for both her and Manny. They both had high sex drives, even if their political engines revved at an even higher frequency. Steph wasn’t going to find anybody else as discreet as him, and as chief of staff he didn’t really have a lot of time to date. It was a convenient arrangement. They could never quite figure out how to be a couple—it just wasn’t in them, Manny suspected—but they were perfect as fuck buddies. He laughed at the thought. Such an undignified term. Fuck buddies. Could you really be fuck buddies with the president of the United States? Not that it would be the first time such unseemly things had gone on in and around the Oval Office.

  She leaned in to kiss him again and he pulled back slightly. “Really? Now?”

  “For God’s sake, Manny, if you’re trying to slut-shame me, we’re going to have some issues.”

  “No, I just . . . It just sort of seems like we’re in the middle of—”

  “Manny Walchuck, if you give me a lecture on what we’re in the middle of, I’m going to have you taken out in front of the White House and shot by a firing squad. Please do not try to tell me what is appropriate and inappropriate.” She leaned in to him again and this time he let her kiss him lightly on the lips. “How long have you known me? What’s the one thing that always relaxes me? Well, we’ve been working nonstop for more than ten days, and I need a break. But I’m not going to get a break, so this is what I want. I might be the president of the United States, but I’m also Stephanie Pilgrim. I suppose I could go swim some laps or get on the treadmill or even watch an episode of some stupid television show, but that’s not what I need right now.” She reached out and ran her fingers up the back of his neck and into his hair.

  “Sorry. It’s just that there are probably some calls . . .”

  “Manny, I am asking you, as my friend, to do this for me. I need to blow off a little steam, and this seems both quicker and healthier than scarfing down a pint of ice cream while I watch an episode of a reality show. So, this can go one of two ways. You are my oldest friend, my long-term lover, and one of the few people I trust completely. You can either make love to me right now because, in our own weird way, we love each other, or you can do it because I will order you to in my capacity as the president of the United States. What’s it going to be?”

  Manny grinned. “A powerful woman is a sexy thing.”

  “In that case,” Stephanie said, “as the president of the United States I am issuing an executive order. You, Manny Walchuck, are hereby ordered to make love to me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Manny said.

  “And make it good.”

  The perks of office.

  Càidh Island, Loch Ròg, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides

  Aonghas watched Thuy cut through the water.

  He couldn’t believe she could stand to swim. He was perched on a rock, wearing a thick Irish wool sweater and he was still cold. It was the kind of hand-knit sweater tourists paid a fortune for when they went to visit the Aran Islands. There were cheaper versions that came from China or Cambodia or wherever it was that people imported factory-made clothing from, but the authentic items were still hand-knit. Sometimes by old ladies, sometimes by men who needed a way to make money when the seas were too rough for fishing. He’d been told a number of times that every village had its own distinctive pattern, so that when you pulled a body out of the water—ears and eyes and cheeks nibbled to the bone by the fish—you could at least tell where the person had come from. The good sweaters, and this was a good sweater, were so tight knit the spray of water off the ocean beaded up on the wool instead of soaking through. But it wasn’t enough to keep him warm, and he didn’t understand how she could be in the water.

  She said it made her feel alive, vibrant. She’d been a swimmer her whole life. She was tall, particularly for somebody of Vietnamese descent, and even though she hadn’t swum competitively since she missed qualifying for the Olympics by barely one-tenth of a second, she still liked to get in the water every day that she could. Even here, on Càidh Island. Every morning since they’d been stranded here, she’d put on her suit, pulled on a swim cap and goggles, and slipped into the water. She was never in very long. Five minutes, maybe ten. Today was closer to ten.

  She pulled herself onto the rocks, teeth chattering and skin tinged blue. Aonghas stepped forward and wrapped the thick cotton bath sheet around her. He rubbed her shoulders and kissed her. She tasted like salt. Her lips were ice cubes against his.

  “Better?” he said.

  “Better.”

  It had been their little ritual for the past week. It felt like some sort of promise between them.

  She pulled the towel tighter around herself and held out her hand so he could slide the engagement ring back on. She was afraid it might fall off her finger and drop into the depths as she swam. He worked it over her knuckle and pushed it home. He liked the way the ring looked on her hand.

  From behind them, his grandfather’s voice boomed. “You’ve got yourself a crazy one, Aonghas,” Padruig said. “I like it. A woman as crazy as you.”

  That was part of the ritual, too. Thuy swam, Aonghas asked her if she felt better, Thuy said yes, and then Padruig told them they were crazy.

  Ritual was all they had. It was almost seven in the morning, which meant that Padruig would have breakfast on the table accompanied by a pot of steaming coffee. They’d sit and eat—granola and homemade yogurt with fruit out of the deep freezer and still holding a bit of ice, some sort of scone, savory or sweet depending on his grandfather’s mood, and orange juice made from frozen concentrate—and listen to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal. After breakfast, he’d do the dishes while Padruig and Thuy played a few rounds of Scrabble. It drove the old man crazy that Aonghas’s fiancée beat him every time, but still they played. Midmorning, he and Padruig would take care of any maintenance that needed doing. In the afternoon they would read or take naps, and then, after dinner, the three of them drank sherry and played cards. If it weren’t for what was waiting for them outside their little fortress, where Càidh Island stopped and the rest of the world began, it might have felt like vacation.

  That reality was there, though. In deference to it, Padruig allowed Thuy to keep her cell phone turned on. Insisted on it, actually. It had never even occurred to Aonghas to try to bring a cell phone to the island. His grandfather’s well-documented tendency to look at any piece of technology as though it were something malodorous aside, the fact that Thuy could even get a signal out here was quite the surprise. He barely got service in his town house in Stornoway.

  When they’d first landed on Càidh Island, before the world had gone to shit, she’d had enough of a signal to get at least one e-mail through. But now, despite her phone showing between one and two bars of service, nothing came through. The cell phone might a
s well have been a night-light for all the good it did. She couldn’t access the Internet, no social media, no news from her parents or her brother. Even though news reports on the radio were that communication systems were overloaded worldwide, each day without hearing from her family made Thuy’s jaw clench a little tighter. The BBC said that Edinburgh had been spared from spiders, but there’d been panic and looting, the panic resulting in at least a couple hundred people dead from fires and accidents. Both men had tried to comfort her, to point out how unlikely it was that her family had been caught up in the nonsense that came from the fear, but it didn’t help. Part of her anxiety, Aonghas realized, was that she was worried that her parents were worried about her. Which made sense to him. They’d seen a man explode with spiders at the Stornoway airport, and it was only luck that had let them get out of there. Thuy’s parents would have heard that the flights were grounded, would have spent the past week agonizing over whether or not their daughter was in Stornoway when it happened, maybe even mourning her death.

  Thuy smiled at Padruig and gave him a peck on the cheek before walking past him and toward the castle. If it was a miracle they were still alive, it was perhaps a greater miracle that his grandfather had given him and Thuy his blessing to get married. If anything, Aonghas suspected his grandfather might actually like Thuy more than he liked his own grandson. He went to follow her, but his grandfather took his arm.