The dogs were barking and snarling. One of the dogs lunged and pulled her handler to his knee. Kim could see flecks of spittle coming out of the dogs’ mouths as they howled and barked and strained at the pregnant woman. The handlers were outside the fence, thank god, because otherwise Kim wasn’t sure they would have been able to keep the dogs off the woman.
The reaction was frighteningly quick. A team of four men in biohazard suits—they could have been women, really, for all that Kim could make out under the orange rubber suits—swept into the enclosure, grabbed the woman, and hustled her to a waiting van.
Outside the enclosure, a young man had made it through one of the parallel screening areas. Nobody needed to tell Kim he was the woman’s husband or boyfriend. He screamed and ran after her, banging against the back of the van until a Marine Kim didn’t recognize took mercy and smashed the man in the back of the head with the butt of her M16.
The unconscious man was scooped up onto a litter and taken to the first aid tent.
The van with the pregnant woman in it drove away. It didn’t come back.
From where she stood on the roof of the Hummer with Sue, Kim didn’t have a clear view of the final screening area. Which was fine with her.
Hearing the dogs was bad enough.
She could hear the barking.
She could hear the wailing of another human being having someone they loved torn away from them.
The CNN Center, Atlanta, Georgia
Teddie Popkins woke with a start. She’d fallen asleep with her head on her keyboard. How long had she been out? She could feel the imprint of the keys on her face. A little roadmap of her napping habits. Thankfully, her computer was off. One time, at Oberlin, she’d fallen asleep in the middle of writing a paper, and she’d woken up with nearly five hundred pages of gibberish, the side effect of having her cheek pressed against the keyboard. Another time, she’d fallen asleep while holding a soda and spilled it on her laptop. She’d needed to get her dad to buy her a new one.
But no harm, no foul this time. She’d probably only been sleeping for ten minutes. It had been a terrifying week—no, ten days? Two weeks?—what with the spiders in Los Angeles and Delhi and the nuclear explosion in China and the general sense that things were totally out of control, but it had also been good in some ways. For one thing, she’d gotten a promotion. The word associate had been stripped away from her title of associate producer. And for another thing, while the horror was pretty horrible in a horrible sort of way, it was also a generic sort of horrible. From where she was, it was a bit like watching a movie. She didn’t know anybody personally in Los Angeles or South Africa or China or Russia or anywhere else the spiders had invaded. It was all at a remove. Maybe if the spiders had come to Atlanta or erupted in Manhattan and eaten her dad, William Hughton Van Clief Popkins III—the name alone would have been a mouthful—and his new wife, Bitsy, a former yoga instructor, it would feel more real. As it stood, however, she discovered that she had a skill that some of the other producers lacked: she could put aside whatever fears she might have—though she really was strangely settled—and work her ass off.
Her boss, Don, had told her to go home and get some sleep, but she wanted to see the tape roll.
It had taken her close to a week to get the piece ready to go, but she was excited about it. Nobody had believed her, even Don, who was unreasonably supportive of her other work, but once she’d done the editing and showed them the reel, they all saw what she was talking about: the spiders hunted as a pack. They had a strategy.
She looked at the monitors that showed the live set and then glanced at her watch. Any second.
She smelled Don before she heard him. He’d started smoking again sometime in the past week.
“You ready?” he said.
“Polishing up my trophy case for the eventual Oscar.”
He laughed and then stopped. “You’re joking, right?” She nodded. “Okay, good. Sometimes I can’t tell with you kids. You actually had me worried for a second that you thought you could win an Oscar for news reporting.”
“How about a raise?”
He shook his head. “You just got a promotion that came with a substantial raise, Teddie. Besides,” he said, turning to look at the monitor, “let’s see if we survive this thing. If we’re all still alive in a month, sure. Whatever. You can have another raise.”
“I still kind of think we should go with the other thing—”
Don shook his head. “No. The counting is enough. I’d like to think that despite everything, by which I mean working for a cable news network, I still have some journalistic integrity. We can’t run something that’s a complete hunch.”
She was quiet, and he gave her a reassuring smile. He was a good guy and a good boss. “You think we’ll all still be alive in a month?” she asked.
“I hope not,” Don said. “Do you know how hard it’s going to be for me to justify boosting your salary again so soon?”
“It’s got to be over, don’t you think? There hasn’t been a report of a new brood hatching since Los Angeles went quiet.”
“It’s not a brood. Wrong word.”
“Tell that to the anchors,” she said.
“Yeah.” He leaned against the corner of her desk to watch the monitors play the loop she’d made. “I’ll get right on that. Here we go.”
Desperation, California
Fred groaned and threw his cards on the table. “I’m out,” he said. “I give up. I cannot play one more game of Uno with you. It’s torture. I thought this game was basically supposed to be pure luck. If it was poker, I’d at least understand how you keep winning, because you cheat when we play poker,” he said, pointing at Gordo. “Oh, don’t look so surprised, mister. I’ve seen you trying to sneak a look in the mirror so you can see what cards Amy’s got.”
Amy gave Gordo a hard look, and he offered up an embarrassed grin. All teeth. “If it makes you feel any better, baby,” he said to his wife, “you’re still up about nine hundred million dollars.”
They’d taken to gambling in increments of a million dollars at a time. There hadn’t really been a discussion of how they’d settle up when they got out of Fred and Shotgun’s shelter; even at pennies on the dollar it was a lot of money. That is, if there was anything approximating money in the new world now that the shit had hit the fan. The good news, Gordo figured, was that all three men were in the hole to Amy, and he and Amy had a communal approach to money.
“I don’t actively try to look at your cards,” he said. “But sometimes you kind of . . .” He trailed off. It was clear from Amy’s face that he wasn’t helping himself.
Fred let out a huffy sigh. “Well, I’ve had my suspicions with Uno, but as far as I can tell, you aren’t cheating. So why do I keep losing?” Fred stopped and held up his hand to his husband. Shotgun was standing nearby, his hands clasped behind his back, not part of the game but still opening his mouth to answer Fred. “Rhetorical question,” Fred snapped. “But I’m done. I’m going to go get on the exercise bike.”
Fred pushed his chair back and left the kitchen, followed quickly by Amy, who shot Gordo another dirty look.
“A little too much together time, huh?” Shotgun said.
Gordo laughed. “You could say that. I was a bit farty last night”—they’d had enchiladas for dinner, and the beans hadn’t been cooked enough—“and she threatened to send me out as spider bait.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Shotgun said.
“About sending me out as spider bait?”
“No. About our dilemma.”
“Which is . . . what, exactly?”
“Boredom,” Shotgun said. “I’m afraid I did too good a job here.” He waved his hand to indicate the kitchen, but Gordo knew that he meant the entire shelter. He also knew, immediately, that Shotgun was right.
Oh, there was plenty they could do. A catalogue of thousands of movies to watch, thousands of books to read. A fully stocked workshop. An exercise room
with a spin bike and treadmill and free weights. There was even a squash court that Gordo hadn’t known about. A squash court! But the only person who didn’t seem to be bothered by being locked up in here was Claymore, who was, technically, not a person, but rather a chocolate lab.
Gordo reached down and gave Claymore’s ear a scratch. The dog had four humans paying attention to him and digs big enough for him to run around like a maniac when it suited him. Shotgun had rigged up a tennis ball launcher and then trained Claymore to drop the ball into the hopper. The whoomp of the launcher flinging a ball down a hallway was always followed by the scrambling sound of Claymore’s claws on the polished cement floor. No, Claymore was a happy dog. Fed and petted and exercised. What more was there?
For the four people, plenty. There had to be a sense of purpose. But they were just killing time. That was the heart of the matter. If Shotgun had started with a smaller budget or had been less thorough, it would have been better for them all. But Shotgun was a self-made man, rich as hell and analytical. An autodidactic engineer who’d built whatever he couldn’t buy. The whole shelter—and to call it a shelter seemed silly, given the immensity of the space—was self-maintaining. Lights dimmed and turned on and off depending on who was in the room, the HVAC system kept the temperature at a comfortable seventy-two degrees during the day, and dropped it five degrees when they were sleeping. There were even sleek, disc-like automatic vacuums that scurried around the shelter sucking up dirt and dog hair. They barely had to worry about cleaning.
So the problem was that even though there were all sorts of things they could do, there really wasn’t anything that they had to do.
“We’re just sort of waiting,” Gordo said.
Shotgun nodded. “Not a condition that the human race is well suited for. Hence Waiting for Godot.”
“Never seen it.”
Shotgun looked chagrined for a moment. An odd expression on such a tall, thin man. “Me neither. But you know what I mean. There’s an absurdity. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve all been drinking. A lot. Fred, particularly, always seems to have a drink in his hand. I’m worried.”
Gordo reached out and pulled all the Uno cards into a pile, carefully stacking them and sliding them back into the box. “And?”
“What do you mean, and?”
Gordo glanced up, trying not to smile. “And,” he said, “I’ve known you long enough to know that you wouldn’t be raising this topic if you didn’t already have an idea how to solve it.”
“Perhaps.” His hands were still clasped behind his back. “I might just have a task for us to take on,” Shotgun said. “At least for you and me. And maybe, eventually, Fred and Amy will get interested. An idea how we might keep ourselves busy.”
“Just an idea?” Gordo asked. “Because I can’t help but notice that your hands are clasped behind your back.”
“You’re an observant man.”
“Well?”
A smile bloomed over his face. He put his hands in front of him and placed a small, metal cylinder on the table.
The metal was shiny and polished in some places, but still bore the rough, milled marks that told Gordo that Shotgun had fabricated the piece in the shelter’s machine shop. The cylinder looked like a valve for a hose, the sort of thing you’d use to spray down kids with water on a hot summer afternoon. It was heftier, though, with a series of step filters and several drilled ports for airflow.
It took him a minute, but then he looked back at Shotgun to find him positively beaming.
“You know what it is?” Shotgun said.
“I do.”
“And you know what it’s for?”
“Self-defense,” Gordo said. “I mean, seriously? What’s cooler than a homemade flamethrower?”
Chicago, Illinois
It felt like he had eaten glass or something. Good lord, his stomach hurt. He couldn’t stand it. Food poisoning. Had to be. The chicken at lunch must not have been cooked properly all the way through. That was it.
He rolled over on the rough cot. It wasn’t comfortable, but he wasn’t about to complain. He’d gotten out of Los Angeles by the skin of his teeth, and getting out was all that mattered. The entire high school gym was full of people like him. It was night, and the lights were off, but the gym was alive with the sound of a thousand refugees. It was better with the lights off. He didn’t have to see the glassy stares of women who’d lost their children, of men looking for their wives, of children looking for anybody. And with the lights off, he could clutch at his stomach without having to hide it. It might be a simple case of food poisoning, but he didn’t want to call attention to himself.
He’d seen what happened to people who garnered attention. When he’d gone through the final screening, right in front of him, a pregnant Korean lady had been yanked out of the screening area. The dogs had started barking and howling, and in less than thirty seconds a squad of hazmat-suited goons had scooped the lady up and put her in a van. Her husband had been in the adjacent screening area, and he’d started screaming and kicking and fighting with the guards until he’d been knocked out.
Start to finish, thirty seconds.
So when he went through the screening without causing a single whimper from the dogs, he mouthed a silent prayer.
Oh. Jesus. He curled in tighter on himself. It hurt so bad. He needed to see a doctor. Needed something. But he wasn’t a dummy. Somebody had asked about the pregnant woman, and one of the soldiers said she was getting an extra screening, that she and her husband would be back in an hour or so. There were buses leaving all the time, to take the refugees on to Reno and from there to Denver, the soldier said, and the pregnant lady and her husband would just be on a later bus. No big deal, right?
Wrong. He wasn’t stupid. The soldiers had everybody throw their clothes and possessions into Dumpsters, and the Dumpsters were then dragged away to a burn site. The soot and smoke hung greasy against the sky. The van with the pregnant lady had gone in the same direction. No way she was coming back.
The bus took him to an additional screening area in Reno, and once he’d passed through that, to the refugee center in Denver. First chance he’d gotten, he’d taken another bus on to Omaha, and then from Omaha to Chicago. Just as he figured, he didn’t see the pregnant woman or her husband again, but he saw faces that looked familiar, a woman who had been lined up behind him, two men who looked like they were brothers.
Chicago turned out to be the end of the road as far as free buses and shelters went. So he was stuck in Chicago, and at least for now, stuck in this shelter, clutching at his stomach and trying not to groan. What else was he supposed to do? Where else could he go?
The wave of nausea shot through him again, and he could feel the shit gurgling in his intestines. It was like somebody had a hand inside him, twisting his gut.
He tried stretching out on his back, but that didn’t give him any relief. The gymnasium was hot, and he was sweating. Why was it this hot in May?
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Sergeant Faril, a large, muscular woman who’d been assigned as Melanie’s personal bodyguard, woke her up by gently shaking her shoulder. Melanie didn’t really think she needed a bodyguard—the NIH building was surrounded by military—but Manny and Steph had insisted. There were reports of riots across the country, the very clear beginnings of societal breakdowns. Sure, there were other scientists working on the spiders, but in the USA, she was the lead, and that meant she was suddenly a very important person. The kind of person who rated special protection. It was all very odd and seemed unnecessary, but it was also convenient, since Melanie had forgotten to set her alarm.
“Sorry, Dr. Guyer. It’s time. You told me to make sure you were up by 0610.”
Melanie groaned and threw her arm over her eyes. “I’m hitting the snooze button.”
“For how long, ma’am?”
“Five minutes, okay?”
Melanie didn’t know if she actually fel
l back to sleep or not, but when Sergeant Faril shook her arm again, at six fifteen on the dot, she knew she didn’t have any more time to waste. She jumped in the shower and told Faril to call out the countdown in fifteen-second increments so she wouldn’t linger. Two minutes of hot spray. Her bedroom was a repurposed hospital room, one floor down from where her lab had been set up, and though it had all the usual hospital charm, which meant none, it did have good water pressure. When Sergeant Faril told her that two minutes were up, Melanie was feeling vaguely human again. She’d twisted her hair up to keep it dry, so it took her barely a minute to dry off and slide on a clean—cleanish, really—pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Three minutes from getting into the shower to completely dressed? Not bad.
Sergeant Faril was by the window, staring out at the parking lot. “The president is here, ma’am.”
Melanie nodded. No time to brush her teeth. She took a quick slug of mouthwash, spit it in the sink, wiped her face, unplugged the charger from her tablet, and headed out of the room. Julie Yoo was waiting outside the door with a coffee.
“Cream and sweetener,” Julie said.
“I like it black.”
Julie’s smile dropped and she looked like a kicked puppy. “Sorry, I thought—”
“I’m kidding, Julie. Cream and sweetener is perfect. Just trying to keep things light.” Melanie counted as they went down the hall and took the stairs: eleven uniformed and armed soldiers on this floor alone. Seriously? Why was it she needed Faril to watch over her?
“I’m a little nervous,” Julie said, trotting beside her.
Fair enough, Melanie thought, as they came out the institute’s front door. It looked like half a battalion was in the parking lot. Or something. She didn’t actually know how big a battalion was. But there were a couple of tanks and a helicopter and at least two hundred men and women in camo milling around with M16s. Not to mention blue-suited Secret Service agents and a couple of limousines parked near a white canopy tent that stretched from the limos to a black rectangular trailer, so that the president could exit her ride without having to suffer any direct exposure to a sniper. Of all the possibilities, Melanie thought, the Secret Service was still worried about somebody with a rifle?
Skitter Page 8
