It was already hard enough to see inside the temple. Some genius had cut the power in case the electrical frequencies, the hum of the wires running through the temple, might accelerate the growth of the spiders or perhaps enrage them. There wasn’t any real evidence of this, but there was no real reason not to cut the power, so somebody somewhere had flipped a breaker, and that left Koji wandering through the dark temple relying on a flashlight to see. Of course, nobody had thought to point out that Koji himself would be wired for sight and sound, so if the spiders reacted poorly to electronics . . .
The main room was larger than he’d expected. He’d seen the drawings and measurements and looked at the early video footage and photographs from the first people who had tried going into the building—and the way those videos ended was always disturbing—but now, with dust motes flitting nervously in the miserly streams of light that gleamed in thinly through the clerestory windows, Koji understood that the relative size of the building didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if the size of the main room was comparable to a football stadium or a basketball court or a tennis court, or that, in truth, it wasn’t even big enough to accurately be compared to any sporting venue. What mattered was that it was big enough so that if he shone his flashlight in one direction, great swaths of the room around him were still in shadow and darkness. What mattered was that the room was large enough so that he couldn’t see everything around him. Couldn’t they have just put in some more windows whenever it was they’d updated the temple for power and water?
He looked down at the thick sausage fingers of his glove and squeezed a little tighter around the handle of the flashlight. He couldn’t really feel the metal tube, which was unsettling. It had never occurred to him how much holding something required tactile feedback from your body. Your skin telling you, yes, we are touching this metal, and your muscles and nerves telling your brain, yes, we are squeezing this hard enough. Probably squeezing harder than necessary, he thought, but with the gloves on, better squeezing too hard than accidently dropping the flashlight. He didn’t like the idea of scrambling around on the ground chasing after it.
The fog on his face mask was about a third of the way down now, low enough to start getting in the way of what he could see. He tried to wipe at the glass with his free hand. His stupid, meat-thick gloved fingers squeaked uselessly across the glass. Of course. It was fogging up from the inside. The issue wasn’t the room, but rather the temperature difference between inside the suit and out. All he had to do was take off his helmet and wipe the glass from the inside.
He chuckled. Not a problem! Why wouldn’t he take his helmet off while inching his way through a room full of egg sacs containing hundreds of thousands of murderous spiders? Why would it matter that it took two different technicians to get him securely into his suit? Why, sure, he’d just pop that helmet off and wipe the visor clean!
“Koji, did you say something?”
Even with the headset and a throat mike and the cameras all wired with microphones, they’d agreed to try not to communicate unless absolutely necessary. The same argument that had necessitated cutting the power to the building could be made for radio communications: Who knew what might wake the sleeping beasts? They were going to stay quiet if they could.
“No,” he whispered. “Now shut up.” Assholes. Sitting in their comfortable, air-conditioned command center down the hill, across the river, in the slightly less provincial village. Oh, Koji, you’re so brave, we’re so proud of you, but no, we don’t really want to volunteer in your place. He wished his wife were in the command center so that she could see what he was doing. She often made passive-aggressive comments at parties about how boring Koji’s job was, about how nobody wanted to listen to the work stories of an entomologist. Well, how boring was his job now?
He wanted to vomit. Ugh. That would be unpleasant inside this hot suit. He swallowed hard.
He took another step and then swept the flashlight from one side of his body all the way to the other, covering an arc of one hundred and twenty degrees or so. A wide cone of what lay before him. He tilted the flashlight up. With the fog on his mask, he had to lean his head back to see the egg sacs laced into the rafters above him. They were such foreign-looking things and yet familiar at the same time. Loose cobweb strands hung down, drifting lazily in the air. He couldn’t feel it inside his suit, but there must have been a slight breeze moving through the temple. He looked back down. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to the way the egg sacs were deposited. They were globbed in the rafters, sewn against the walls, and stacked on the wooden floor. In places, the sacs were piled so high they almost reached the ones in the rafters yet much of the floor was clear. He had to be careful where he stepped, and the path wasn’t straight—Koji found himself breathing hard inside the suit as he sometimes had to take four steps sideways and three steps back to move one step forward—but it was possible for him to pick his way to the far side of the room. That’s what he and the other scientists were interested in. The far side of the room. Because there, behind stacks of egg sacs that were easily as tall as he was, there was something giving off a light of its own.
What had he been thinking, arguing against a robot with a camera, or even using one of those fiber optic cable cameras that detectives used in every television show? It looked so easy in the movies, didn’t it? Cops could slide a cable underneath a door or through an air vent and have perfect clarity. Why couldn’t they have done that here, snaking one through the piles of egg sacs? Or a little toy helicopter! Couldn’t they have just flown one of those in, watched from relative safety? But they couldn’t. Not according to Koji. Oh, no, Koji had to open his big mouth and blah, blah, blah, and now Koji found himself trying to work his way through this deadly maze.
The isolation suit was a weird mix of high and low tech. The specialists had actually finished off the whole procedure of getting him into the suit by wrapping duct tape around the seams where his gloves and boots met the suit. But then, also, inside the glass visor, low and on the right, a digital heads-up display projected how long he’d been in the suit, how much air he had left, and another number that nobody had bothered to explain to him. What mattered was that he had plenty of air. He turned his head left and took a sip from the rubber straw. The water was already lukewarm and slightly brackish. But he was seriously sweating now and even a little out of breath. That’s probably why the faceplate was fogging so badly. Maybe if he could get his breath under control?
As he was thinking this, he brushed past a pyramid of egg sacs and heard a loud, crystalline crunching sound. He froze in horror.
“Koji?”
“Shut the fuck up, okay?” he hissed. Who knew if the spiders could hear or if they reacted to radio waves or microwaves or electrical pulses or anything other than the presence of human flesh? Also, who gave a shit? Having them yammering in his ear wasn’t something he needed at that second.
He pointed the flashlight at the ground. There. Under his boot. He hadn’t even felt it. If he hadn’t heard the sole of his boot grinding the web of the egg sac, the glass-snapping sound of spiders being broken under his foot, he might not have noticed. But under the glare of the flashlight, it was obvious that he’d stepped on an egg sac. There was larval goo leaking out the edges, and he saw dozens, perhaps hundreds of pieces of black thread—legs—poking out. Oh. Oh. No. Was one of those black threads moving?
He waited. And waited. He silently counted to one hundred.
Nothing.
“Koji?”
“Stepped on an egg sac,” he whispered.
“Be careful.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“There’s no need for that language.”
“Are you the one in this fucking suit?” he hissed. “I hope spiders come out of your rectum, asshole.”
The radio went quiet for a moment. And then, gently, the voice said, “Keep going, please.”
It made him feel better to think of the horrible things he wanted to keep
saying in response, but he stayed quiet and moved forward. Step, by step, by step, each one closer to the glowing corner. It wasn’t a bright light. It was more like the moon through thin clouds on a summer night. Silvery and filtered and almost soothing.
And then he cleared the last pile of egg sacs.
He swallowed the scream before it could come out as anything other than a weak bark. Because of the cameras mounted on his helmet, the scientists monitoring back in the village had the same view he did. Thankfully, they stayed quiet.
Apparently, the Koreans had not, in fact, misplaced a decimal in their measurements.
In front of him, the glowing light came from a singular, giant egg sac. It was the size of a pickup truck. Ten men could easily have fit inside the silk cocoon. It was pulsing, almost like it was breathing, and now that he was closer Koji could see that the light pulsed too. He couldn’t see what was inside the egg sac, but that wasn’t what terrified him. What made him want to scream, what made him want to vomit inside his isolation suit, was what was outside the sac: spiders. Thousands of them. Some of them were black, and some were red-striped spiders, but all of them were skittering up and around the giant egg sac, crawling on the normal-sized sacs arrayed in piles and columns and hanging from the ceiling above. The rest of the room had been quiet, a cemetery made of egg sacs instead of tombstones, but here, in the corner, surrounding this giant pulsing embryo, there was life.
He stayed as still as he could, knowing that the scientists back in the village could see all of it. They could hear it too, because Koji realized the quiet of the temple was an illusion. The sound had been dulled by the rubber suit and the helmet, but it was there. A soft, skittering drag of eight legs across spider silk, eight legs moving over the wooden floorboards, eight legs crawling into the rafters above him.
Above him.
He tried to look up, but his visor was so fogged now that there was only one small, coin-sized area of clear glass near his chin. He couldn’t see what was above him.
“Koji,” the radio said. “Koji, get closer. We need to see what’s in the egg sac.”
The spiders moved around and past him. He had to keep his head tilted back to look through the unfogged circle. He saw a spider crawling up the leg of his suit. He didn’t move. He just breathed in and out, watching the spider—and another, and another—moving over the orange rubber. He kept waiting for something to happen. For the spiders to swarm over him. For one of the spiders to start tearing through the rubber. For the small, clear circle of glass to fog over like the rest of his visor. Miraculously, none of these things happened.
“Koji,” the radio said again. “Move forward.”
Somehow, despite himself, Koji did.
Forward Checkpoint, Greater Los Angeles Quarantine Zone, California
The army wasn’t entirely stupid.
Sure, this wasn’t the same kind of operation that Lance Corporal Kim Bock and her squad had trained for, but they had scout teams and surveillance in place. They had a good fifteen minutes’ warning after the first part of the convoy—minivans and sedans, pickup trucks and SUVs—blew through the outer cordon to be ready for them.
Kim’s entire platoon had been sacked out one second, and the next, they were awakened under orders to scramble, the sound of blaring sirens getting their attention. There weren’t that many places the convoy of civilians could come through, so by the time the first car came into range, a blue Ford Focus, every goddamned Marine from a mile around had their safeties off and was ready to fire.
It was a bloodbath.
Hundreds of civilian vehicles trying to rush the fence, tires spinning, and then turning to fire and melted rubber as Kim and the Marines around her lit them up, dancing the vehicles off the road like tin cans. M16s and .50 cals and at least one Abrams tank getting in on the action. Despite how many cars were rushing the line, it was no contest. The Marines had pulled in every available unit and outnumbered the civilians. Maybe if they’d only been using rifles, a few cars would have slipped through, but they were firing heavy guns, the kind of weapons that could put bullets through engine blocks, leave cars looking mangled.
When the firing stopped, the tip of the .50 cal on the JLTV was glowing red.
She realized she was crying. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for.
“It ain’t right,” Mitts said, speaking for all of them.
“What the hell were they thinking?” Elroy said. “Why now? There aren’t any spiders chasing them.”
Kim wiped her eyes. She noticed that Honky Joe was staring out at the burning wrecks of cars and trucks, looking grim. Teams of medics and other squads were already moving out, looking for survivors, but Honky Joe was just staring. “What?” she asked.
“Look at the cars.”
“I don’t want to look,” she said. But she did anyway. “What is it you want me to see?”
“They’ve all got one driver—and only one driver—in each car. No passengers,” Honky Joe said. “They knew we were going to light them up. This wasn’t a real attempt to get through the fence. These people weren’t desperate. This wasn’t a move of last resort. This was deliberate. Somebody thought this up. They came here ready to sacrifice themselves. This was a suicide mission. A distraction.”
He shook his head. “We got played.”
Highway 10, California
“Well, that was easier than I thought it would be,” Macer said, staring out the window at the passing scenery.
He was sitting next to Bobby in the back of a black Audi A7. Up front, driving, Lita had the car humming along at close to one hundred miles per hour. It was a smooth ride. When Macer had told him the plan, Bobby had figured they’d be in a pickup truck or something suitably semi-militaristic, the sort of vehicle you could easily imagine in a postapocalyptic road movie, but Macer had preferred a certain level of luxury. “It’s not like the owner will miss it,” he’d said.
Fair enough. In the ashes of the spider invasion of Los Angeles, there had been so many vehicles just abandoned that there really was no reason to settle for anything less than leather seats. Plus, Macer had said, “If it comes to that, would you rather be in something designed to haul boxes or in a vehicle designed to haul ass?”
The plan had worked so well that Bobby could barely believe it. Supposedly, if you were willing to strip naked and subject yourself to inspection—and possible immolation—you could pass through a government checkpoint and leave the quarantine zone, but that seemed more like a myth than a real option. No, to get out required ingenuity, which Macer had in spades. It was simple, really: have a couple hundred volunteers run a feint at the main chokepoint, wait for other troops to be called in as reinforcements, and then drive like hell through one of the more minor checkpoints.
It had been forty minutes since they’d gone through the fence, and Bobby kept expecting to hear a helicopter gunship overhead, kept bracing himself for the car to explode into a ball of flame. But Macer seemed relaxed, just looking out the window. They zipped past several burned-out hulls of cars. Lita was really cruising. Oh well, Bobby thought, a speeding ticket wasn’t at the top of his list of worries.
Bobby had been skeptical of Macer’s plan, but he’d admitted that he didn’t have a better idea of how to get out of the quarantine zone. After their little pep rally, it had been surprisingly easy to find a few hundred volunteers willing to drive their cars and trucks, in unison, directly at the main chokepoint set up by the army. All Macer—or, rather, the Prophet Bobby Higgs—had to do was promise that the family of every volunteer would get guaranteed safe passage in the main caravan. There were a lot of crying husbands and wives and children, but it turned out Bobby was right to have faith in humanity: people were surprisingly willing to sacrifice themselves so that their loved ones could live.
And when those hundreds of volunteers attacked the checkpoint, it happened just as Macer predicted: the army overreacted, pulling their troops away from the secondary roads. Bobby and Macer and the res
t of their followers had been able to breeze right past. Sure, there’d been a few casualties—the pilgrims in Macer’s convoy who took the point had to face the skeleton crew of Marines left to man the barricade—but the rest of them were through the fence and on the open road fast enough that it was oddly anticlimactic. The hardest part, honestly, was the first ten minutes past the fence, once they’d broken through but all the vehicles were still clustered together, thousands of cars full of US citizens fleeing the government.
Bobby knew he should feel bad about sacrificing so many people, but in the scheme of things, it was such a small number. What did it matter that a few hundred more sheep were fed to the wolves when millions had already died? It was certainly worth it if it meant he was no longer trapped in Los Angeles, just waiting for the spiders to return. That was worth any cost. And besides, he’d done something truly noble. He had rescued thousands of trapped people. The drivers who had sacrificed themselves for the diversion had done so willingly. They were heroes. He was a hero. He was the reason why the long line of cars behind them was able to drive away from Los Angeles, from those horrifying spiders. He’d delivered his flock to safety, he thought.
And then he felt the car start to slow. Lita pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Get out, Bobby,” Macer said.
Bobby turned to give Macer a harsh word, but then noticed that Macer was pointing what looked like a gun at him. Small, black, sinister, and very much shaped like a gun. Ergo, it was, actually, a gun.
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