“A word,” Padruig said. “I’ve been thinking about your question.”
Aonghas looked at the old man, confused. “What question?”
“What you said when you came back to the island.”
Aonghas shook his head. “It’s a bit of a blur, I’m afraid. I just remember being scared and relieved. Scared at what we’d seen and what was happening, and relieved that you’re such a crazy coot that we’ve got our own private island.”
“Well, yes. But the question is important. You asked me why are they all coming to the surface at the same time. You don’t remember that?” Padruig waited until Aonghas shook his head again. “Why. That’s what you said. Not how is it that these spiders are suddenly appearing all over the world at the same time, but why.”
“So?”
“I wonder if I might just have an answer for that.”
First Forward Checkpoint, Greater Los Angeles Quarantine Zone, California
The fencing zigzagged back and forth creating a chute to funnel people. It stretched for miles. Farther than Lance Corporal Kim Bock could see. The line moved at a decent pace. Hundreds of people an hour. But it might as well not have been moving at all for how little it seemed to matter. The crowd never got smaller.
Mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Men in rags and men in suits. Families with suitcases and kids with their school backpacks hurriedly stuffed full of whatever they could grab. Refugees. Tens of thousands of American refugees.
And the worst thing was that she knew the mass of humanity before her was only a fraction of what there had been. These were the people who were left. These were the people who’d survived.
Kim’s platoon had been told there were ongoing army operations within the quarantine zone to find sites where there might be infestations. “Infestations,” Honky Joe told them, after talking with his father, some sort of hotshot on Capitol Hill, not an actual politician, but one better, one of those guys who gave the politicians the information, was military code for there being a whole ton of egg sacs full of baby spiders just waiting to hatch scattered throughout Los Angeles. Not to mention the very people walking in front of Kim and her squad, who themselves might be full of spiders. According to the latest reports, the spiders had spread to a distance of five miles from central Los Angeles before the creepy little monsters had started dropping dead. No, actually, that wasn’t quite accurate. Near as the military could tell, the spiders had gone out nearly seven miles before starting to pull back and stopping at five miles, some sort of an arachnid retreat, and then dropping dead.
“Like putting up fortifications,” Private First Class Elroy Trotter said. He cradled his M16 and looked out over the line of refugees sidling toward them.
Her team had been working the fence since 0400 and it was late morning. They were on duty until 1600 hours. Not bad, actually. The first couple of days they’d pulled shifts of eighteen, twenty hours at a time.
In some ways, the setup reminded Kim of security lines at an airport. Like passengers lining up to get through body scanners. Not a perfect metaphor, since they didn’t have body scanners, but good enough. Though body scanners would be nice.
“Fortifications? How’s that?” Kim asked.
Her platoon was close to the chokepoint. The fencing narrowed and narrowed until the refugees couldn’t help but go single file. At the end was a sort of holding pen you had to pass through, and here it really was like the indignity of going through an American airport. But worse. At an airport, you had to take off your shoes and pull out your laptop, but here nothing was allowed through. Not a bag, not a purse, not a phone, not a wallet. Not a stitch of clothing.
On one hand, it seemed like overkill, but on the other hand, as Private Honky Joe had pointed out, since they weren’t actually sure where on earth these spiders had come from, how could they be sure the spiders couldn’t hide their eggs in suitcases or in the hem of a pair of pants? Like bedbugs, only a little more bloodthirsty. Not that clothes or suitcases were their main worry, of course. The main worry was that one of these people was a walking time bomb, that some man or woman would just be moping along in line, dumping their clothes meekly, and waiting their turn when—blam!—they’d open up and it would be spider city.
Elroy motioned an old black dude forward into the holding pen. The man seemed skeptical. In the holding pen, people were ordered to strip down and throw all their possessions into Dumpsters. Each time a Dumpster was filled—which was as fast as they could shuffle people forward—it was replaced and hauled a couple of miles away, its contents added to the burn site. The smoke was a plume that fell over everything.
“You know, fortifications. Like castles and stuff. Think old-school war, not the modern urban tactical warfare bullshit we’re trained in,” Elroy said.
“Yeah, our training has been really helpful now that we’re battling an alien invasion.” Private Duran Edwards had spent the first couple of hours on his first shift ogling any decent-looking woman who stripped down, but he’d gotten bored with it. They weren’t really people anymore. Just widgets on an assembly line.
The thought of people being treated like widgets made Kim wince a little bit. It was a little too close to her idea of what the Nazis sorting Jews at concentration camps must have looked like. Which, when you added in the discomfort of stripping down completely and throwing away whatever small piece of your life you had managed to salvage while fleeing from an apocalyptic invasion of flesh-eating spiders, helped to explain why the line of refugees moved in fits and spurts. Most of the men, women, and children looked exhausted, their eyes glazed over in tiredness or even just in resignation. But not all of them, and there was a lot of shouting. The thing that made her feel better was that she’d seen what happened once the refugees made it through the sorting. Lines and lines of buses waiting to shuttle them onward. Bottles of water and military rations stacked in neat rows, blankets and basic clothing for people to grab. For all the bellyaching she and her squadmates were doing, the US military had stepped up. It was one hell of a feat of organization to have things running as smoothly as they were. She didn’t know exactly where the buses were headed—she’d heard Reno, and she’d heard Las Vegas—but wherever it was, it was away from the nightmare of Los Angeles, away from the bodies of the dead and the buildings stuffed full of egg sacs.
“They aren’t aliens, Duran. Jesus.” Private Goons shook his head.
Kim considered Goons for a second, and then looked at the rest of her squad and at the guys in Private Sue Chirp’s fire team, which was working alongside them. With their helmets and body armor, mirrored sunglasses and rifles and bulging pockets, she thought, it was the Marines who looked like aliens.
“Like the government would admit it if they were aliens,” Duran muttered. He’d been muttering a lot.
“What do you guys know about World War One?” Elroy stared around at the group, but nobody offered a response. One of the refugees, a sunburned man in his forties, overheard the question and looked like he wanted to respond, but the line moved again, and he shuffled past. Even Honky Joe was quiet. Honky Joe knew about everything and was almost never quiet. It meant that whatever Elroy was talking about was something Honky Joe had already figured out and decided was important.
“In certain parts of Europe, the Allies and the Axis fought—”
“Axis was World War Two,” Sue Chirp said.
“Whatever. Point is, the Allies and the Germans dug in and fought back and forth over the same ground. Sometimes for months and years. And what they’d do is dig trenches and put up barbed wire and there’d be this no-man’s-land in between. You could cross it, sure, but it was almost certain suicide. They’d see you coming and mow you down with machine guns.”
“And,” Goons said, “the point is?”
“The point,” Honky Joe said, pushing off the chain-link fence and handing a bottle of water to a little girl who couldn’t have been more than four or five, “is that the spiders didn’t retreat from
a radius of seven miles to five miles. I’m not even sure they’d understand the concept of a retreat, but even if they did, why would they? It’s not like the government was handing the bugs their asses back to them. As we figured out pretty quickly, bullets aren’t the most effective deterrent for these suckers.”
“So why’d they fall back to five miles before they died out?” Goons asked. “If it wasn’t a retreat, what was it?”
Honky Joe looked at Elroy and waited. That was one of the things Kim liked about Honky Joe. He’d probably figured it out days ago, but he wouldn’t steal the moment from Elroy. Elroy waited until all of them were looking at him. The truth was that the job was boring. Hand out water bottles and energy bars as needed, keep the line moving. Farther back, where the crowds were thicker, as the fencing started to narrow, there’d been some real unrest, and up ahead, where the sorting happened, there was occasionally the burst of gunfire, but right where they were was quiet. It was good to have something to talk about.
“It’s a defensive shift,” he said. “They’re setting up to play defense. They clear out a perimeter and secure it, just like the Allies and the Axis”—he waved at Sue—“Germans did. So you can see your enemies coming while you take a breather. It’s a no-man’s-land. Literally.”
Kim pushed her helmet back a little and wiped at her forehead. It was hot out there. “How would that work against fighter jets and mortars and stuff like that?” she asked. “And why set up a defense in the first place? They were winning.”
Elroy paused. They all paused. And then Elroy shrugged. They stayed quiet for a few beats. Not talking didn’t mean it was quiet where they were—tens of thousands of refugees and military men and women packed into a couple of square miles, the hum of machines and generators and the floating sound of boom boxes and dogs barking meant that it was never quiet—but the pause felt like something solid. After a couple of seconds Kim found that she was looking to Honky Joe again. They were all looking to Honky Joe.
He shook his head. “You can’t think of it that way. Duran might as well be right. We should treat this like an alien invasion. There’s no point trying to think of what they are doing as having a real-world strategic correlation to anything we might do. We don’t even know if it makes sense to think of the spiders as a ‘they,’ like an army that has a command structure. Each spider might just be doing its own thing, and we’re putting our own meanings on it, seeing patterns where there aren’t any.”
Private Hamitt Frank—Mitts—had been quiet for all of this. In fact, he hadn’t talked much the last few days, but he spoke now. “You believe that? You really believe there isn’t a pattern?”
Honky Joe considered. “No.” He shook his head. “No. I don’t believe it. There’s a pattern, but we haven’t figured it out. I do know this, however: there’s no point in thinking of these creepy little bugs as a conventional foe.” Right in front of him, a young man, a kid, really, pushed an older woman in the back. “Hey, watch it, asshole,” Honky Joe said. The kid looked like he wanted to say something back, but he was smart enough to realize that he’d gained the attention of a dozen men and women kitted out in full military gear. He moved on.
Honky Joe shook his head. “We’re asking people to put up with too much here,” he said, and then he looked at Kim. “When you ask what good is their defensive perimeter against modern weapons, you’re assuming that these spiders are thinking about modern weapons. Whatever these spiders are, they’ve never had any contact with modern humans.”
“How are you so sure of that?” Kim said.
Mitts laughed. “Don’t you think it would have made the news if they’d come out before? They aren’t exactly subtle little buggies, are they?”
“But the point is,” Honky Joe said, “them falling back had nothing to do with what we were doing in response to them. When do you retreat? You do it for two reasons. The first is because you’re losing, and it’s the only way to survive.”
“Well, given that they weren’t exactly losing, we can probably rule that one out,” Elroy said.
There was a small laugh. Kim smiled too. Black humor came with any job like theirs. Firemen and cops, soldiers and ambulance drivers. They all had the ability to laugh at the worst things you could imagine. There wasn’t another way to get through it all.
“You’re right,” Honky Joe said. “It’s hard to argue that we had the bugs on the run. So what’s the other reason to fall back?” He wasn’t really asking, but he paused for effect anyway. “Strategic decision. Either to fortify a defensive position or to build strength for the next offensive thrust.”
“So which is it?” Kim asked.
Honky Joe shrugged. “Maybe both. I mean, a defensive position would be the argument when you consider that there are supposed to be, at this point, hundreds of different places where they’ve laid egg sacs throughout Los Angeles. Pull back and protect your resources. Except that they pulled back and then they all seemed to die out, just leaving their egg sacs behind. So are those the resources? The egg sacs? Are they prepping to go on offense? Maybe. You could argue they are simply waiting to move forward. If you think about how quickly they spread just using humans as a breeding ground and establishing themselves on the ground? Well, the next time they start marching it’s going to make the first attack look like a friendly noogie. Not that any of it matters.”
“What do you mean?”
Honky Joe let out a mean-sounding laugh. “What’s the point? We’re here enforcing a quarantine that already failed.” He didn’t have to say it. He didn’t have to remind them about what had happened on Highway 10 after Los Angeles had fallen, the way they’d had to cut and run in the face of the spiders swarming toward them, the panic of cars and drivers and gunfire and explosions. “We can keep all these poor folk bottled up as much as we want, screen them until kingdom come, but the genie’s already out of the bottle. Somewhere out there, people who’ve fled from Los Angeles are carrying spiders. Or if they’re not, it doesn’t matter anyway. Those spiders dropped dead, but they laid a bunch of eggs, right? Which means they’re coming back. We’re guarding an empty hen house.”
Kim wanted him to be wrong, but she knew he wasn’t. Still, she couldn’t help herself. “So why are we here? If, as you say, there’s no point to this, then, well, what’s the point?”
Honky Joe shrugged. “The military does what the military does. America doesn’t always win, but we never lose. What else is there to do but make it look like we know what we’re doing?”
“So we just follow orders?” Kim asked. “Keep it orderly? Pretend we know what we’re doing?”
For her, it was a series of questions, but everybody around her took what she said as statements. Follow orders. Keep it orderly. Pretend they knew what they were doing.
None of them talked for a little while after that. At least not to each other. Here and there one of them would exchange a few words with a refugee. Hand out a bottle of water or some rations, or simply encourage people to keep moving forward. After twenty minutes or so, Kim took a break, slipping through the gate and out of the funnel chute. She stopped in a portable latrine and then went to sit in her Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. She turned the engine on and let the air-conditioning blast over her. She tried checking her phone but there was no signal. The circuits were still overloaded.
She noticed Sue next to her, climbing on top of her Hummer—they had a patchwork of old and new vehicles—and staring toward the sorting area. Kim got out and joined Sue on the roof of the Hummer.
They could hear the dogs barking. Baying. Howling.
The sorting was a simple process. Enter the holding area and strip down. What the refugees didn’t realize was that the reason they had to go naked was more complicated than it seemed. Sure, there might be spiders hiding in your backpack or nested in the hood of your sweatshirt, but that’s not what they were really worried about.
Once naked, each refugee was stopped and given a quick physical exam by a Marine. Mayb
e twenty years ago it would have been a problem, but this was the new military, and there were enough female Marines so that the inspections were sex segregated. No marks on your body? No problem. You went through the secondary screening—past the dogs—and on to freedom. But if you had cuts or scrapes or other sores that couldn’t obviously be explained, you were in for a more thorough examination. Those refugees were taken off to the side, to a secondary holding area. It was quick, actually, since not that many people needed the extra screening, and if you were part of a family, you could wait for your mom or uncle or daughter or whomever to finish their screening before being led out—also past the dogs—to the buses and the supplies.
They’d had a few false alarms. Some idiot had made a joke about swallowing some spiders, and that had almost gotten him shot. The same kind of guy who thought it was funny to make a joke about carrying a bomb or smuggling coke while going through security at the airport. The physical exams hadn’t turned up anyone who was infested.
But the dogs had.
Every hour or two the dogs would go crazy.
Yesterday, they’d been stationed by the final screening area, where the dogs worked. A pregnant woman had gone through the gate. She was a beautiful woman. Even Kim could appreciate that. Part of it was because she seemed so unafraid and so proud of herself. Most people tried to cover themselves with their hands and hunched over and rounded their shoulders, consciously or unconsciously trying to hide their nakedness. But not this woman. She was of Japanese or Korean descent—Kim wasn’t good at telling the difference—and pretty far along. Seven or eight months pregnant. Her hair fell to her mid-back, and her breasts were swollen and ready for the baby that was coming.
When she stepped through the gate, the dogs went berserk.
There were between five and ten military dogs working in the final screening area at any one time, people walking through tight aisles of fencing, separated from the dogs by chain-link and little else. Elsewhere, farther up the line, Kim had heard that handlers were trying to move through the mobs of people waiting to get into the funneled area, to prescreen when they could, but here it was much cleaner: one refugee, one dog, one second. Usually. But not now.
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