“Here?” she said to one of the young soldiers tasked with guarding the entrance. She couldn’t get over how young they all looked. The body armor and machine guns made them look pumped up, bigger than they were, but underneath it all, they were baby-faced men and women, the same age as the undergraduates she’d been lecturing to barely two weeks earlier.
The soldiers parted so that she and Julie could go up the steps and into the trailer. Inside, the president and Manny and two uniformed men she didn’t recognize were already seated at a long, thin conference table, chatting with doctors Dichtel, Haaf, and Nieder. It gave Melanie a little surge of irritation that the other scientists were there before her.
“Nice digs,” she said. “Is it a double-wide?”
Steph nodded hello, and Manny stood up to peck her on the cheek. Steph looked tired, Melanie thought. No surprise.
“It’s not elegant, but it works,” Manny said. “We’re shielded in here.”
“Shielded? From what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, actually. Conventional weapons and minor explosives, but more importantly, against listening devices, wireless equipment, and stuff like that. It’s a black box. Literally, but also in the sense that it’s a portable, secure area. One of the Secret Service’s toys.”
“Who, exactly, is going to be listening in?”
“Used to be the Russians, then the Chinese, but who knows.”
“Seems like overkill,” Melanie said.
Steph sighed. It wasn’t loud, but Steph was the president, and it was enough to signal everybody to look at her. “Melanie,” Steph said, “the black box is something the CIA and the NSA designed so I could meet with people without worrying about being overheard. It’s designed specifically for important meetings outside the White House or other secure installations. But you know what? I’ve never actually been in here. Do you know why I’ve never actually been in this black box?”
Melanie shook her head, even though she knew Stephanie wasn’t really waiting for a response.
“I’ve never been in this black box before because, as the president of the United States, I don’t go to people for important briefings. They come to me. If I do go somewhere, it’s the Capitol Building or an embassy or somewhere other than a parking lot in front of the National Institutes of Health. But here I am. I’m the leader of the most powerful country in the world, in the middle of a crisis, unlike any other crisis that has ever occurred in the history of humankind, wondering if the millions of people dead in Los Angeles and the tens of millions dead around the world is the worst of it or only just the beginning. I’m here because I need to know if what you said is true: Are these spiders getting ready to hatch again? I’m a busy woman, Melanie. But I’m here. I came to you. And why did I do that? Why did the most powerful woman in the world agree to come to you? Because right now you’re the person who knows the most about these spiders, which means I might be the most powerful woman in the world, but you’re the most important woman in the world. So when you called Manny and said you’ve figured some things out, and that no, this is not over, and this is, in fact, probably just the beginning, and you need to talk to me, the result is that I come to you. But it doesn’t mean I don’t have other things going on, Melanie, so as fascinating as this black box is, and as potentially unnecessary as this black box is, it’s not what I’m interested in right now. You said you needed to talk. So talk.”
Melanie talked.
Spiders, she began, are some of the oldest-known living things on earth. They’ve been evolving for more than four hundred million years. At that moment, there were upward of forty-two thousand known species around the world, and it was clear that these spiders, Swarm X, as she’d taken to calling them, were a distinct species. Nobody had ever seen anything like these spiders before.
“No shit,” Manny said.
Melanie shook her head. “But we knew about them.”
“That’s impossible.” This came from the man wearing a dress uniform decked out in medals. “How could we know about them? This was a total surprise.”
Melanie stopped pacing and sat down. “We’ve been looking at this too simply. We need to think laterally here. Of course, if we’d known explicitly about this species, we would have tried to prepare. Spiders that can reproduce rapidly, that use humans as carriers for their eggs, that can strip a man to the bone in less than fifteen seconds, and hatch by the millions? Yeah, I’m guessing the government might have planned for that if we’d known ahead of time this was coming. Don’t you guys have a contingency plan for an extraterrestrial invasion, for God’s sake?”
“Seven,” Manny said.
“What?”
“Seven, actually,” he said. “Seven different contingency plans for extraterrestrial invasions, depending on what kind of aliens and how they announce themselves and, oh, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Keep going.”
“Okay, uh, I was joking about the alien thing, but the point is, the gentleman . . .” She pointed to the uniformed man who had spoken.
“Colonel Choi.”
“Colonel Choi is right. If we’d known about these spiders in the way that he meant, we’d have tried to prepare for them. What I’m saying is that we knew about them without knowing about them. We knew they existed but only somewhere deep in our caveman brains. Think about it. Why are so many people afraid of spiders? There’s a decent number of poisonous spiders, but the chances of a human dying from a spider bite are remote. More people are killed by cows than by spiders in the US every year. The daddy longlegs? Toxic as hell, but a daddy longlegs can’t even bite a human.
“The reality is that the chances of a human getting killed or even harmed by a spider are so low that the meaningful number of poisonous spiders might as well be zero. And yet, most people are scared shitless of them. I think there’s a reason for that. You see something creepy crawling out of the corner of your eye, and it’s not your cell phone–talking, sushi-ordering, Internet-using brain responding. It’s that little nugget of gray that is an evolutionary holdover from when we thought banging two rocks together was a scientific accomplishment. That’s the part of your brain that’s screaming.”
She took a sip of her coffee and looked around the room. Julie had heard it already, and she’d talked most of it out with the other three scientists while working in the lab, but this was new to Manny and Steph and the two uniforms. “Near as we can tell, the Swarm X spiders have been a distinct species for at least two hundred million years.”
“And in all that time,” Colonel Choi said, “humans have never come across them?”
Melanie shook her head. “I don’t think that’s the case. Remember that what seems like a long time to us, one hundred years, five hundred years, one thousand years, is like the blink of an eye from an evolutionary perspective. It’s quite possible humans have come across these spiders before, maybe a bunch of times. But it happened before there were records. Either the entire population of the region was wiped out without a trace, or whatever people were left had no way to create a warning we’d understand. If there’d been an outbreak like this in the last fifty, hundred, two hundred years, of course we’d have known about it. Even in the last thousand or two thousand years, say. But we need to take the longer view. We’ve got a different idea of history from Mother Earth. When I say these things evolved a long time ago, in a different world from what we have now, I mean a long, long time ago.”
“But they wouldn’t stop evolving,” Choi persisted.
“Not entirely true. I’m not an evolutionary biologist”—she held her hand up to keep Choi quiet—“but even if you were going to make the argument that everything is still evolving, change can happen really slowly or really quickly. But the thing is, some species do stop evolving in any meaningful sense. Think about sharks. They’re a prehistoric animal. On an academic level, yes, they are still evolving, but on a practical level, not so much. They’ve evolved as much as they need to.”
Manny looked confuse
d. “What do you mean, as much as they need to?”
One of the scientists, Laura Nieder, spoke up. She had the name and voice of a lifelong Brooklyn Jew, but her parents were both Cambodian, and she had, apparently, been born and raised in a small town in Georgia, before going to Princeton and then getting scooped up by the military. “Dr. Nieder. I’m with the Pentagon. I specialize in the weaponization of animal behaviors. What Dr. Guyer means is that there’s no point in sharks evolving any more than they already have. Pop culture aside, sharks don’t really attack humans all that often, but there’s a reason we’re afraid of them. In the world that sharks inhabit, they are, in essence, the perfect killing machines. Any evolutionary changes would, at this point, probably be disadvantageous for them.”
“This is where I come in,” Will Dichtel said. “Dr. Dichtel. Harvard.” Dichtel was a large man. Solid and blond, the kind of Norwegian farm stock that grows out in South Dakota and Nebraska. He’d mentioned more than once to Melanie that he’d come from the sort of family that would not be impressed that he was giving the president a briefing. He’d tell them the next time he went home for a visit, and they might nod and tell him that was good, but the talk would almost certainly turn to the weather and seeds and crop cycles. He was a smart guy, and had done some extraordinary work, and Melanie wondered how much of it had to do with showing his family that there was a life outside the prairie. “I do entomological toxicology,” Dichtel said. “Basically, I study insect and arachnoid venom.”
The president rubbed a hand over her face. “Are you kidding? These things are poisonous too?”
“Not exactly.” Dichtel touched the keyboard in front of him and the monitors sprung to life, playing a series of images. A woman covered in spiders. A close-up of a brown recluse, visibly different from the Swarm X kind. A fly encased in a web. The remains of a human body, a trail of Swarm X spiders moving away. And more.
“There’s two things going on here. First, the breeding spiders secrete an anesthetic as they are biting, so when you see one of them open up the skin like this”—the image froze on a spider partway through a slit on the back of a lab rat—“the victim doesn’t even feel it. Zip, they’re inside the host. The anesthetic has antibacterial properties and seems to foster extremely quick healing. By the time the anesthetic has worn off, the entrance wound has almost completely knitted itself up. The host is none the wiser. It’s just a scab. It’s really fascinating. Can you imagine what it would mean to be able to synthesize an anesthetic that also fostered increased healing?” Dichtel looked around the room, clearly expecting the others to be as excited as he was. It made Melanie smile. Scientists. Always losing sight of the big picture.
Dichtel cleared his throat. “Second, spiders don’t chew. At least not in the way we fundamentally understand chewing. The classic image is an insect caught in a web, right? So there’s basically two different ways spiders eat. They vomit digestive fluids onto their prey, chew up the flesh with their chelicerae, and then suck the liquefied meat and fluid into their mouths. Or, more rarely, they bite their prey and then inject their digestive fluid, so they can eat their prey from the inside out.”
“That’s disgusting,” Manny said. He was grimacing, his eyes narrowed on the monitors. Melanie recognized the expression. It was how he watched scary scenes in movies.
Dichtel continued. “These spiders are a sort of hybrid. Their digestive fluids are incredibly powerful. Normally it takes some time for spiders, but with these, there’s almost no waiting period. If you watch slowly”—he touched his keypad and the monitor showed a close-up, slow-motion video of spiders on the back of a goat—“you can see that the flesh is almost sloughing off as they eat it. They are, quite literally, dissolving their prey as they are chewing it.”
It was a disturbing image, but Melanie had seen the footage over and over, in real time and on video, so she’d forgotten how disturbing it was until she heard retching. She turned to see the other uniformed man vomiting into a wastebasket. An aide whom she hadn’t noticed standing in the corner stepped forward and took the wastebasket away.
Manny had his hands partially covering his eyes now. He didn’t even seem to realize it. “Holy crap. So one of those things can just sort of melt you down and eat you?”
“No,” Melanie said, standing back up. “That’s the bright side of things, I guess. It takes a bunch of them. The Swarm X spiders—”
“A ridiculous term,” Dr. Haaf said. “A group of spiders is a cluster or a clutter, not a swarm.”
Melanie smiled. She liked Haaf, even if he did find it necessary to mention that he was at MIT about once an hour. Still, the man had no appetite for loose language.
“You’re correct, Dr. Haaf,” Melanie said, “but for our purposes, it will serve. As I was saying, the Swarm X spiders rely on overwhelming their prey. In theory, there’s no real limit to the size of prey they could hunt. If they can take down humans as quickly as they do, there’s nothing to say that if there was enough of them they couldn’t go after something bigger. Which brings us back to the question of evolution.”
Melanie looked around the room. Haaf and Nieder nodded at her, though Dichtel still seemed a little skeptical. Julie just shrugged. It made sense to the scientists, even if it sounded crazy.
“Remember how I said that these spiders have been around for at least two hundred million years? Well, that means they existed during the same time dinosaurs walked the earth.”
She stopped. After a few seconds Manny spoke. “Wait. Let me get this right. Are you saying that these things . . . You’re saying they hunted dinosaurs?”
“I admit, when you say it out loud it sounds kind of crazy.”
“But? Maybe not so crazy?” Manny said. “Because I’m hearing a ‘but’ in your voice.”
“Yeah. We think they may have evolved to hunt dinosaurs. That would explain a lot of their adaptations.”
Julie Yoo spoke up. She’d been quiet, but she’d been the one to come up with the theory in the first place. As much as they wanted to argue against her, the other scientists hadn’t been able to poke holes in it. “We think the Swarm X spiders may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.”
“Pardon me?” President Pilgrim looked aghast. “Dinosaurs? Are you shitting me?”
Colonel Choi leaned back in his chair. “Wasn’t it a comet or something?”
“In theory, an asteroid,” Julie said. “And this is just a theory, too. But it actually makes sense. The spiders wouldn’t have had to kill all the dinosaurs. Just enough so they died out on their own.”
“So how come there isn’t any fossil record of these spiders?” Colonel Choi asked.
Melanie looked at him. Huh. Not as stupid as she thought. Maybe he was here for a reason. “Good question.”
“And?”
“And, that’s it. Good question. It’s actually a really good question, and I’ll add it to the list of questions, because right now we have a thousand questions for every answer we may have come up with. The short answer is probably, we don’t know. Maybe there is a fossil record, but we just didn’t understand it.”
“Melanie,” Steph said, “can you cut to the chase here? What do you know?”
“Did you see the thing on CNN last night?”
Steph and Manny and the two uniformed men looked blankly at Melanie.
“They ran a story that analyzed the footage of people being attacked in Delhi, Los Angeles, Japan, anywhere there were cameras. I want, no, I need to talk to whoever figured it out”—Manny took a note—“because they found the pattern. It looked like the spiders ate everything in their path, right? But they didn’t. It was just the utter fucking chaos. One in five.”
“One in five what?” Steph asked.
“One in five people survived.”
Choi addressed the man next to him. “So we can expect civilian survival rates of twenty percent. We’ve been modeling ten percent, right?”
“No, you don’t understand,
” Melanie said. “These spiders have been around for two hundred million years, and we are sure that leaving one out of five isn’t new behavior.”
“So why,” Manny asked, “are they doing it? Clearly they could just eat everything in their path. What’s the point of leaving one out of five people alone?”
Melanie felt sick. She and Julie and the scientists had talked about this, and it all made sense, but they’d discussed it in the way that scientists can in the lab, divorced from the reality of the consequences. It was another thing to say it aloud. The spiders cared about only two things: feeding and breeding. Those one in five people were kept alive to either carry eggs or be the next wave’s lunch.
“I might be off on the numbers. You have to understand, they’re not leaving one in five people alone,” Melanie said. “One in five people survived, which isn’t the same thing.”
“What are you talking about, Mel?”
“What I’m talking about, Manny, is that the spiders were like some sort of giant tidal wave, washing over everything in their path. A tsunami. And at first look we think, how could anybody survive that? And then we realize some people did survive. Five percent, ten percent, twenty percent, we think that’s the only number that matters, but it isn’t. This isn’t about surviving the first wave. It’s never been about surviving the first wave. Right now, it looks like they are leaving one in five people alive. Not alone. Alive and alone aren’t the same thing.”
She touched her tablet to display a picture of the inside of the Staples Center, the familiar chalky-white egg sacs under the artificial lights of the stadium.
Skitter Page 9
