“What the hell, Macer?”
“I’m not going to ask again, Bobby,” Macer said. “Out of the car.”
So Bobby got out of the car and stood on the side of the road. Macer waved the gun at him, motioning for him to back up, so he took a few more steps back. Two cars and an SUV barreled past, probably moving close to a hundred miles an hour themselves. Macer reached out with his free hand to close the door, and Bobby couldn’t help himself. “But why, Macer? Why?” He could hear how whiny his voice sounded.
For a moment, Bobby thought Macer was going to just close the door and have Lita drive away without giving him an answer, but then Macer rolled the window down. He was still pointing the gun at Bobby.
“Why? Did you really believe I was interested in some sort of religious revolution, Bobby? Did you really think I wanted anything other than to get out of Los Angeles?” Macer looked at him, then laughed. “My god. You really started thinking of yourself as some sort of savior, didn’t you? You bought into it.”
Macer closed the window and Lita hit the gas, but Bobby thought he could still hear the acid of Macer’s laughter even after the car was out of sight.
He stood on the side of Highway 10. The sun felt like a hammer after the comfort of riding in the Audi, and he was suddenly very thirsty. There had been a cooler full of ice and water and soda inside the car. He looked down the highway. A black sedan blew past him, trailing a cloud of dust that made him cough, followed by a pickup and a couple more cars.
But then a minivan stopped for him. He watched it slow down and then back up to where he was standing. The passenger-side window slid down.
The driver, a woman in her late thirties, leaned toward him, talking over her passenger, another woman about the same age. They didn’t look like they were related, but Bobby spied a couple of kids in the backseat.
“What are you doing out here? I said to Celia, ‘My god, that’s the Prophet Bobby Higgs,’ and she said ‘No way,’ and I said ‘Yeah, it is,’ and then we passed you and it was you, so I stopped.”
Bobby looked ahead, wondering how much of a head start Macer and Lita had on him. The asphalt shimmered in the heat and sun. A red convertible sped past them. The two women in the minivan were staring at him.
“And I thank you for stopping,” Bobby said.
It was almost reflexive. The way his voice changed. He slipped into the cadence of the Prophet. His voice was calm, warm.
“But what are you doing on the side of the road?” the woman driving the minivan said again.
Bobby reached through the window, taking the hand of the passenger and reaching out for the hand of the driver. “Why,” he said, “I was waiting for you.”
The passenger got in back with the kids, and Bobby sat up front. He told the women he needed quiet to commune with God. They hushed the children and Bobby closed his eyes.
He knew there was a limit to how far Macer could run. Macer didn’t need him anymore? Macer thought he could just leave Bobby behind?
Well, Bobby thought, he’d see about that. Even without Macer, he could be the Prophet Bobby Higgs. He didn’t need Macer. He could rebuild his army on his own. He’d gather his flock to his side and then he would lead them . . . Where? He didn’t know, but it would come to him. He would lead them forward, and sooner or later, he’d catch up to Macer, and then Macer would pay.
Sixpence Bar, Atlanta, Georgia
It had never occurred to Teddie before to question why the place was called the Sixpence Bar. It was not British in any way. The beer selection skewed heavily toward Budweiser and other watery brews that would have horrified true Brits, and the menu didn’t make a nod to fish and chips or anything else that seemed like it belonged in a British pub. It was, unquestionably, a bar though. Not a very nice bar. In fact, it was kind of a dump, but it was also tucked into an alley around the corner from the CNN plaza headquarters, and seemed like a good place to get well and truly drunk. So, sure, it earned the word bar, but sixpence? No. She couldn’t figure that one out. It was a mystery.
It was also a mystery as to why her boss, Don, was now plopping himself on a stool next to her. He would have had to leave their building, cross the plaza, skip the dozen or so restaurants and bars that most people from the mother ship frequented after work, and ducked down the alley that held the Sixpence Bar.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” he said to the bartender.
“Triple shot of tequila?”
Don hesitated. “God, no.” He looked at Teddie. “Jesus, honey. Uh,” he said, looking back at the bartender, “I’ll have a Pimm’s Cup.”
“Does this look like that kind of a bar?”
Teddie looked around the Sixpence at the same time that Don looked around him. God. It really was a shithole. There was a television behind the bar playing a baseball game—seriously? A baseball game? Was Major League Baseball just going to pretend that things were normal? Apparently, yes—and a row of dark wooden booths stretching back toward a hallway that contained what she assumed would be the bathrooms. Not that she had any intention of going to the bathroom in here, at least not until she checked to make sure her tetanus shot was up to date. The whole place was dimly lit, not in the mood lighting way that dimly lit could be in certain places, but in the way that a bar can become dimly lit when the bartender doesn’t bother changing the lightbulbs that burn out.
Wow, Teddie thought. She really could have picked a better place.
“Fine,” Don said. “Beer. In a bottle, please.”
Teddie looked at her glass. It didn’t look very clean. “How did you find me?”
“Well,” Don said, “the last thing you said to me was that you were going to find the nearest bar and get sloshed.”
“Technically, this isn’t the nearest bar. It’s not even close to the nearest bar.”
“I know. This is the seventh place I looked.”
“Sorry. Why didn’t you just call me?”
“Is your cell phone on?”
She looked at her phone, which was sitting on the bar. It was not on. “Sorry.”
“You already said that.”
The bartender brought over a bottle of light beer and made a great show of taking the cap off. He looked at Teddie and lifted the bottle of tequila.
“Yes, please,” she said.
“Nope,” Don said, reaching out and covering her glass. “She’s good for right now.”
The bartender shrugged and turned away. This was not a man who seemed overly invested in his job. She looked at Don with a pout. “You seemed to hear me just fine back at the office when I said I was going to get sloshed.”
“Well, about that. I can understand why you feel the need to get drunk, but this might not be the best time.” He took a sip of his beer and made a face. “Blech. I’d forgotten how much I dislike piss water. Before I came in, when I saw the name, I was hopeful that there’d be a nice selection of English and European beers.”
Teddie perked up. “I know, right? With the name? You’d think they’d at least—”
“Teddie.” Don cut her off. “People have been looking for you.”
“Why? What people?”
“Let’s just say that your piece on the way the spiders move through crowds has garnered some interest.” He took her elbow and got off his stool. “Here,” he said, handing her a bag. “Your laptop. You’re going to need this.”
She took the computer bag and slung it over her shoulder. She wasn’t drunk, exactly, but she’d had a single shot of tequila before ordering the triple shot, so she wasn’t exactly undrunk either. That changed once they went out the door and walked out of the alley into the sun-dappled street.
There were two military helicopters, bug-eyed with chain guns hanging from the body, in the open square, plus a dozen or so police cars, and a mix of cops and uniformed soldiers. They were all looking in her direction. Waiting for her.
She suddenly felt very, very sober.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
&
nbsp; There wasn’t enough coffee in the world to make this feel like anything other than six in the morning after a night without sleep. Agent Mike Rich looked at himself again in the bathroom mirror and then waved his hands under the motion-sensing faucet so he could splash some more water on his face. It didn’t help that the institutional fluorescents made even a healthy guy look like a zombie coming out of a microwave, but he already looked like crud even without the lousy lighting. It was a bad sign when people could walk up to him and Leshaun, look at them, and tell Mike that he was the one who looked like he could use some rest. Leshaun had taken a bullet two weeks ago, for goodness’ sake. Admittedly, it wasn’t that bad of a wound as far as gunshot wounds went, but under normal circumstances Leshaun would still have been on medical leave for at least another week or two.
These weren’t normal circumstances, though. If they were, Mike might have gotten some sleep instead of driving through the night to make sure his daughter, his pregnant ex-wife, and her new husband, Rich Dawson, were all safe and tucked away in Dawson’s cottage in the woods. Again.
Safe. Mike pulled some paper towel from the dispenser and dried his face. Were they really safe? Was there such a thing anymore? The newspapers and television reporters kept swinging back and forth between hysteria and optimism, but Mike was seeing the information closer to the source, and even the best reading of it was scary. The truth was, they’d gotten off lightly in the United States. Los Angeles was a tragedy, but compared to China or even Delhi, it was nothing. He couldn’t believe how few people were giving the president credit for her quick decision to shut down air traffic. How much worse would things have been if people were jetting all over the country with those little beasts laying eggs inside their bodies?
He came out of the office bathroom, grabbed a stale donut from the table in the hall, and went into the conference room. It was packed. Six in the morning and the bureau chief had called every single field agent in Minneapolis into the office. They should have been out there doing the same thing they’d been doing since the first egg sacs had been found, which was looking for more, but instead they were crowded into the conference room waiting for new orders.
Leshaun had saved him a spot. As Mike sat down, he put one hand on the back of Mike’s chair and passed over a takeout cup of coffee with his other hand. “How’d it go?”
“Not bad,” Mike said. “Annie cried a little bit, but I think she was okay. I told her that when all this was over I’d get her a puppy.”
“Whoa. A puppy? Bringing out the big guns.”
“Yeah, well, I’m saving the pony for when I need to really impress her.” Despite himself, Mike grinned. He’d been partnered with Leshaun for a long time now, and they were a good match. Leshaun always knew when to push him to be serious and when it was time to lighten things up. And right now, Mike needed that. He’d thought the first time he’d driven with Dawson and Fannie and his daughter up to Soot Lake, the night Los Angeles turned into another ring of hell, had been the worst night of his life. He’d been wrong. He’d felt so good motoring across the lake in a borrowed—okay, temporarily stolen—fishing boat to bring them back home to Minneapolis, and when Melanie had told him to get his daughter back out of Minneapolis again, he’d felt sick. The first time, he’d thought of the evacuation as a precaution. A “just in case.” But this was different. He could hear it in Melanie’s voice. She was worried. This time, when he’d said good-bye to Annie and his ex-wife, Fanny, he’d been struggling a little bit not to cry, and kept going back to hug his daughter just one more time. He was okay with a firm handshake from Dawson.
The bureau director came into the room and they all quieted down. Jake Stigler hadn’t gotten his job by being the sharpest tool in the shed. He was more like one of those multitools with the pliers that a certain kind of guy likes to keep in a little nylon holster on their belts: good at most things, great at nothing. That was Stigler. He was profoundly, totally, competent. Nothing more, nothing less, and even though Mike had worked with plenty of cops and agents who could barely get over the bar of basic competence, he still wished they had a better boss. Stigler was good at following orders and filling out paperwork, at running the standard operations and investigations, but he wasn’t much of a lateral thinker. All the biggest wins for the Minneapolis bureau since Stigler had taken the job had come from an agent doing something that he or she hadn’t cleared with the boss first.
Right now, standing at the front of the room, Stigler looked uncomfortable. Mike glanced at Leshaun, who gave him a “heck if I know” kind of look. Mike took a sip of his coffee. It was only warm, not hot, but he and Leshaun had been partners for long enough that Leshaun had doctored it up just right for him: a cannonball splash of skim milk and two packets of natural artificial sweetener. One of Annie’s teachers had told her that artificial sweeteners caused cancer, so she’d made him switch to the natural kind of fake sugar back in the fall. Whatever the heck “natural” artificial sweetener was supposed to be. Probably dandelions ground into paste by hippies in Vermont, Mike thought. It still had that slightly funky, bitter taste the sweeteners in the yellow or pink or blue packets that he’d been using for years had, natural or not. Leshaun was a blended coffee drink with extra chocolate syrup kind of guy, which always made Mike feel both virtuous in his use of skim milk and natural artificial sweetener and at the same time completely annoyed that Leshaun hadn’t ballooned up into a pile of cream and sugar.
Stigler cleared his throat. “As of this evening, we’re ceasing all operations in Minneapolis. Not just us. Every single federal agent is being pulled out. We’re on a military transport plane headed to the East Coast in twelve hours. Plane leaves at six p.m. sharp.”
Mike choked on his coffee.
The room erupted into a clamor of agents trying to ask Stigler questions, agents talking to other agents, agents pulling out their cell phones.
“Hey!” Stigler’s voice was loud, cutting through the chaos and stilling the room. Mike wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Stigler yell before. It was surprisingly impressive. “Phones down! Put your goddamned phones down.” Mike saw a couple of agents guiltily lowering their cells. “The original orders were to confiscate your cell phones and keep you sequestered until four o’clock and then march you directly from here to the airport. There was a lot of pushback on that”—more yelling as Stigler held up his hand—“including from me. The pullout now includes family, which is why you are being notified now. Twelve hours. Next of kin only. Spouses, kids. I can’t promise you there will be room for parents. The plane is leaving at six o’clock. On. The. Dot. With or without you.” He wheeled and pointed at a younger agent in the corner, who was trying and failing to surreptitiously type on her phone. “Put your goddamn cell phone away. Now.”
“What the hell, Chief?” This from Beth Gomper. She was originally from New York City and resented being posted in Minneapolis.
“What do you think, Beth? Didn’t you hear what I said?” He looked out over the room, and Mike could see that Stigler looked exhausted. He wondered how long Stigler had known about the evac order. Did he know the night before, even as Mike was driving Annie up to the lake?
“Look, the truth is that we are working with seriously incomplete information here,” Stigler said. “But what we know is that people are coming east from Los Angeles. Too many of them to stop now. I think the army is still trying; they’ve got roadblocks and fences up, but there’s no point. Thousands of cars broke through. Too many to track. Too many to stop now that they are all spread out. Washington didn’t say how many they think might be infected, but it’s clear it isn’t going to be contained to California. At this point, they’re hoping we can just keep it to the western states and make sure it doesn’t reach the Midwest.”
Stigler rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “Every single fed is getting lifted out of here. Do you have any idea how big a deal that is? Washington is afraid that when the news gets out that we’re abandoning everything west of
the Mississippi it’s going to create a panic. They want to keep this as quiet as possible for as long as possible. So find your spouses, find your kids, and keep it quiet.”
“Do you really think it’s going to stay quiet?”
Mike didn’t see who asked the question, but he thought by the voice it might have been Finkelbaum. She was older, near retirement age. Divorced. Childless.
“For your sake,” Stigler said, “I hope so. For all our sakes. There will be riots if it leaks. It’s going to be crazy enough at the airport without the news spreading. This is the kind of thing that can create a panic. If you want to get out of here without having to wade through a riot, I’d suggest keeping this as quiet as possible while you go about the business of evacuating your family. The plane takes off at six o’clock, but the sooner you are at the airport and on board, the better.”
There was a chorus of voices again, but this time Stigler just held up a hand and let the voices come at him. Mike looked to Leshaun, who mouthed a single word as a question. Annie?
Mike nodded, but the embarrassing truth was that his first thought hadn’t been of his daughter. His first thought had been that if they were shipping every bureau agent to the East Coast, it damn well should create a panic, and then he had realized it was worse. What Stigler had said was not just every bureau agent, but every single federal agent. Good lord. The government was giving up half the country.
The next ten minutes were a blur of orders. No radio traffic. No phone calls or e-mails or texts. Pick up your kids and spouses and get your asses back in time. Family only. Don’t tell your neighbor, don’t tell your dentist. Don’t tell your kids’ teachers or breathe a word of it. The only goal here was to get the feds out without making it seem like they were abandoning the good people of Minneapolis. A tall order, since they were, for all intents and purposes, abandoning the people of Minneapolis. Abandoning everybody west of the Mississippi.
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