Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  By six thirty in the morning, Mike and Leshaun were out in their agency car. It was, ironically, a beautiful morning. Unseasonably warm again, the sun turning building glass into a mirrored playground.

  “I never thought I’d be glad that my family all lives in the back hollers of Tennessee,” Leshaun said. “But I guess that’s as far away from everything as you can be and still live on this same goddamned earth. They’re probably as safe as anybody can be in all this. It’s so backward out there that if the world ends, they won’t hear about it for another thirty years.” He looked at his cell phone and then slid it back into his pocket. “This won’t stay quiet. You know that. It’s going to leak before the planes take off. Somebody, somewhere, is going to make a phone call or send an e-mail. Washington was right in their initial idea to sequester us and then march us to the airport. Just don’t give us a chance to mess it up.”

  “Wouldn’t have worked,” Mike said. “Maybe for agents like you, who don’t have family, but you think I would have just left Annie behind?”

  “How many people you think we’re talking about? All the feds west of the Mississippi? Even if you’re not talking support and office staff and locals who happen to work with federal agents? Plus spouses and kids? It’s going to get out. No question. And once it does, it’s going to explode. Riots. Panic. People looting and shooting each other. Highways and streets are going to be jammed. Doesn’t matter that there isn’t a place to go. Running seems better than sitting still.”

  “You know that driving with me to go get them might mean we get caught out,” Mike said, “right? There’s a really good chance we get to the cottage and by the time we turn around, the roads are blocked up and we can’t get to the airport. It’s a risk. You sure you still want to come with me to get Annie?”

  “Family isn’t only blood.”

  Mike nodded, and they were quiet for a few minutes.

  The quiet gave Mike time to think. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Sure, it was terrifying, but we’ve only found five sites in Minneapolis with egg sacs, and we haven’t even heard a whisper about sacs being found anywhere else other than Los Angeles. And since the spiders dropped dead, there hasn’t been a single confirmed attack. So why are they pulling everybody out? I mean, it would make sense out West, in California, Nevada, Oregon, but here, in Minneapolis?”

  “You heard what Stigler said: the quarantine line is broken. You think people need any more of a reason than they already have to start panicking again? Two million people dead in Los Angeles? China’s going to be glowing nuclear green for the next forty thousand years. It’s not going to take much of anything to get people streaming for the exits. Just the news that the quarantine zone has broken down is going to be enough to get people trying to run away.”

  “No,” Mike said. “You’re right about civilian panic, for sure. It’s a powder keg and there are a lot of matches. I meant about Washington. It doesn’t make sense that they’d pull us all east. There’s nothing to cause this. Nothing has happened yet. Shouldn’t they want us out in the field trying to enforce a secondary quarantine zone? There’s going to be a second quarantine line, isn’t there? Sure, Stigler said keeping people in LA is a bust, but he also said the new goal is to keep it from spilling out of the West and completely across the country. With all nongovernmental air traffic grounded, it will still take a couple of days for people to get from California to Minnesota. If it was pretty much contained to LA in the first place, there’s something we’re missing.”

  “What about your lady scientist out in DC? Can you call her?”

  Melanie. Oh, shit. Melanie. Mike had called her to tell her about the pulsing egg sac, and she’d told him to get Annie out of town. And Melanie was talking with the president. Had he caused this? Had she gotten off the phone with him and done the math and realized that it might not be just Minneapolis? Did it mean that the real fear was that there already were infestations in other parts of the country? Or that something worse was on its way?

  “Oh, man. It’s not what’s happened,” he said. “It’s what’s going to happen. Something’s coming. How long?” He looked at Leshaun. “How long until you think word leaks that the government is pulling back and people start panicking?”

  “Hours, maybe,” Leshaun said. “Maybe less. Hopefully long enough to get us to Annie and back.” He started the car, flicked on the cherries, and mashed the gas.

  Desperation, California

  It was weird to be above ground again. The beauty of Shotgun’s shelter was that it was completely self-contained. Even if they weren’t in the middle of a spider apocalypse, there wasn’t really any need to go outside. Shotgun was, if anything, overly prepared. To the point where it was boring. Sure, Shotgun’s digs had a vibe that was closer to a billionaire’s hip, urban loft than to the traditional survivalist’s bunker. It was, undeniably, the coolest end of the world hideout Gordo had ever seen. But it was so well thought out they were basically just killing time. There wasn’t much to do. Other than invent a homemade flamethrower.

  Gordo pulled the trigger and sprayed another great scathing swath of fire into the night.

  He was surprised at how loud it was. Something to do with airflow, he supposed.

  “Well,” he said, letting go of the trigger and watching the last of the gasoline breathe itself into a bright nothingness, “looks like we’ve got one hell of a homemade flamethrower. I was a little afraid it would be anticlimactic, but nope. Shooting a flamethrower is exactly as cool as I thought it would be. Want to go ahead and post the plans up online so the good people of the world can make their own?”

  “Let’s do it,” Shotgun said.

  They shut and sealed the blast doors behind them, trundled through the garage—Gordo stopped to run his finger across the paint of Shotgun’s midnight-blue Maserati and to glance in admiration again at the twin-engine, six-seater plane—and into the workshop. They uploaded the plans from Shotgun’s laptop to several online maker communities. If you didn’t have a 3D printer that could work with metal, or you didn’t have access to your own personal machine shop, it wasn’t like you could whip up a homemade flamethrower with off-the-shelf parts from your local hardware store, but there’d be at least some people who could put the weapon together. It wasn’t a real answer, though: the flamethrower had a limited range. It was good for clearing a small swath around you. It was personal protection, not an actual way to win the war. Still, it was better than nothing, and they both had a sense of satisfaction after they uploaded the plans.

  And then they were bored again. Fred and Amy were watching some sort of Swedish art house film and drinking, so Gordo and Shotgun were left to their own devices.

  “A bigger flamethrower?” Shotgun suggested.

  “It’s not exactly the kind of thing that scales up in any sort of useful fashion,” Gordo said. “You can turn up the volume and turn up the volume, but at some point, you’re going to cook yourself. A flamethrower can only go so big before it’s just as harmful to the user.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What we need to come up with is a way to kill spiders from a distance.”

  “You mean like, I don’t know, bombs?”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass,” Gordo said. “The point is to come up with something that the military hasn’t already come up with, because all that stuff was designed to fight humans. Not little spiders. Like a ray gun or something. I don’t know. I’m just your assistant. You’re the engineer with all the patents.”

  “The spiders aren’t so little.” Shotgun considered for a minute. “But maybe you’re onto something.”

  “With what?”

  “You said you can only turn the volume of the gas flow up so high before you cook yourself, right?” Gordo nodded, and Shotgun continued, “But maybe we could try something where you really turn the volume up.”

  Gordo was confused. “Like an audio weapon?”

  “Subsonic,” Shotgun said. “And we turn the volume
up as high as it goes. To eleven.”

  Càidh Island, Loch Ròg, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides

  Thuy was talking on her cell phone, standing on the rocks outside the castle, and Padruig looked happy about it. That was odd enough for Aonghas, but odder still was the knowledge that once Thuy hung up, Padruig was planning to make a call of his own.

  “Love you too,” Thuy said. She lowered her phone and then burst into tears. Aonghas had seen her cry before—after a truly stressful few weeks of medical school, after she found out her aunt had passed away, and even out of joy, after he asked her to marry him—but not like this. She was crying so hard it sounded like a sort of barking, a seal waiting for its supper, a dog afraid of its own shadow. Great tears were billowing out of her eyes, and her shoulders leaped and shook so hard that Aonghas was afraid she might drop her phone. He looked at Padruig, unsure what to do, and his grandfather gave him a look that meant, How did I raise a boy who is as big an idiot as you? Go hold and comfort your fiancée, you blasted moron!

  So Aonghas held and comforted Thuy until she stopped crying, which was several minutes at least. She leaned into him and seemed to find a real comfort in him, which made him feel like a little bit less of an idiot, even though he didn’t understand why she was crying now, when she’d finally heard that her parents, her brother, her brother’s boyfriend, and even her brother’s boyfriend’s dog, a German shepherd named Terrance, were all safe. It would have made sense to him if she’d cried before, when she hadn’t heard. Or it would have made sense that she was crying if she’d just heard some of them had been, well, eaten. But she’d just gotten good news, right? He looked over Thuy’s head at his grandfather, and Padruig gave him a different look, this one saying, Your job as a husband will be to accept your future wife as the complicated, wonderful woman that she is. Or something like that.

  After a few minutes, Thuy had cried herself out and said she wanted to go inside to make herself a cup of tea and sit on the couch and stare at the ocean through the grand window for a while. She handed Padruig the cell phone and left the two men standing out on the bare rocks, the wind surprisingly gentle, an occasional gust lifting a drifting soft spray of seawater over them.

  Padruig held up Thuy’s phone, a Henderson Tech 4600 that she’d gotten the weekend before coming to visit Aonghas in Stornoway. “Are you sure they’ll be able to send the documents on this thing?”

  “I’ve told you, yes. She can check her e-mail on there. If we’ve got a cell signal and if the circuits aren’t overloaded, it will come through.”

  Padruig looked skeptical, but evidently he decided to believe his grandson, because he started poking at the phone. It looked like a chicken pecking for corn. Not surprisingly, since he hadn’t actually unlocked the home screen, nothing happened. “How in the devil’s name do you operate this thing?” Padruig said. “This infernal contraption is cursed.”

  “It’s just a phone, Padruig, not an instrument of Satan.”

  Padruig harrumphed. “It might as well be. You can trace the decline of modern civilization to these things.”

  “You said the same thing about television, microwaves, and people no longer dressing up to fly on airplanes. Here, give it to me.” Aonghas took the phone and dialed the number on the scrap of paper that Padruig handed to him. It was a London number. There was just silence at first, and Aonghas held his breath, afraid that maybe the cell phone lines were overwhelmed again, that Thuy’s call had been a lucky fluke, but then there were a series of sharp, chippy beeps, two long tones, and then the click of a telephone receiver being lifted.

  “Who is this and how in the hell did you get my private number?”

  Without a word, Aonghas handed the phone to his grandfather.

  “This is Padruig Càidh . . . Yes. That Padruig Càidh.” He listened for a moment and then cut off the voice on the other end of the line. “I know you’re a fan and I know this isn’t exactly a good time for you, but I need you to send me something . . . Yes, now . . . No. I don’t care if you’re in the middle of something.”

  It went like that for a minute or two, and then finally the voice on the other end acceded to Padruig’s demand—as, in Aonghas’s experience, everyone acceded to Padruig’s demands—and his grandfather handed the phone back to Aonghas.

  “He said we’ll have the maps within the hour. Every known contact point.”

  “How is it, exactly, that you have the personal phone number for the director of MI6?”

  “How do you think?” Padruig asked. “Harry Thorton. The man’s a fan. He’s been sending me letters since he was a young man. A few times a year. Ideas on what the next Harry Thorton mystery should be. He keeps asking me to ring him the next time I’m in London so he can take me for a pint and talk about Harry. I killed him once, remember? In Thirty Strikes a Minute, he was the character who got thrown off the clock tower.”

  “You really think you’re right about this?”

  Padruig looked out over the water. The waves rolled against the island in the same rhythm they had always seemed to come. The ocean, as always, unconcerned with the plight of humankind. “Did I ever tell you what your grandmother said to me on the day we found out your mother was going to have a baby?”

  Aonghas was surprised. His grandfather almost never talked about his dead wife. She’d been, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. She’d put up with Padruig for one thing, but she had also been smart and funny, a good cook, and a modern woman. She had gotten a job to help support her and Padruig when he’d first started writing, and he always said she was the person who’d come up with the idea for the first Harry Thorton mystery. She’d denied it publicly, in interviews, and even privately, to her own daughter, but Padruig insisted it was true. But he didn’t usually bring her up out of the blue. More than thirty years dead and gone, and the thought of his late wife still made his grandfather sad.

  “I wish she had lived long enough to hold you, or, better yet, for you to have had the chance to get to know her,” Padruig said, “but do you know what she said to me? The very night that your parents told us they were having a baby? This was before we found out that your grandmother was already sick.” He paused. There was a hitch in his voice, and Aonghas realized his grandfather was crying. “No. That can’t have been right. Not we. Not before we found out your grandmother was sick, but rather, before I found out your grandmother was sick. I’ve never put it together before. She must have already sensed it. Must have, somewhere inside her, known what was coming, known she had only a few months to live, even if the doctors hadn’t told us that yet.”

  He snuck a handkerchief from his jacket pocket. The handkerchief was pale yellow linen. Delicate. He turned his back for a moment so that Aonghas wouldn’t see him wipe his eyes. He turned toward Aonghas again and cleared his throat. “She said to me, ‘You watch over the baby.’ That’s what she said. Like she knew that the crash was coming for your parents. Like she already knew she wouldn’t be there for you either.”

  “How come this is the first time I’m hearing this?”

  Padruig gave a sort of choking laugh and then folded the handkerchief up and put it back in his pocket. “The lass hasn’t told you, has she?”

  Aonghas felt disoriented. Light. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he had suddenly grown wings and lifted from the rock of the island, gliding out over the water. His grandfather wasn’t making sense.

  “The lass? You mean Thuy?”

  Padruig smiled, and it was a real smile. Something happy and genuine and real, and for a moment, even though he didn’t understand what his grandfather was talking about, it made Aonghas feel even lighter. Hopeful.

  Padruig looked up at the castle, and Aonghas followed his grandfather’s gaze. Thuy stood inside, near the window, holding a cup of tea and looking back at them. She was smiling, too, and lifted her hand in a gentle wave.

  Both men waved back.

  “Told me what?”

  Padruig clapped his hand on Aonghas
’s shoulder. “Why, that she’s pregnant, of course. Why do you think she agreed to marry you? It certainly wasn’t for your looks, you great galloping fool.”

  The White House

  Manny could see it coming a mile away. Steph had her tells. First she’d start tapping her thumb against the edge of the table. Next, she’d fidget with one of her earrings. At some point, she’d pick up her drink and hold on to it with both hands as if she was acutely aware that her fidgeting fingers were a sign that she was losing her temper. She was good at keeping her feelings in check. She had to be. Women who became too obviously angry got dismissed as too emotional to be good leaders. With the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his assorted brass not so subtly indicating that they thought her unwillingness to start dropping nukes was because she couldn’t overcome her emotions—in other words, because she was a woman—for Steph to get obviously angry was not the right play.

  Losing her temper may not be the right play, but it would have been cathartic for her. It would have made Steph feel better, and Manny would have gotten a kick out of watching her lean on Ben Broussard and his crew of military advisors. President Pilgrim had learned how to come down like an avalanche when she needed to. You don’t get elected president of the United States, particularly when you’re a woman, without developing sharp elbows and the willingness to throw them. Manny remembered, years ago, when Steph was still Governor Pilgrim, how she had to deal with the state’s director of highways. He was a holdover from the old regime and a different era, a good ol’ boy who liked to hunt and got a kick out of calling his dogs “bitches” in front of Stephanie as often as he thought he could get away with it.

  He didn’t.

  Steph was a politician, which meant she kept score.

  The man had, at one point, gone behind Steph’s back on a funding issue, and when she caught him, he had the gall to tell her he did it because he didn’t think she understood the numbers. Women and their difficulty with logic, and all. It had been a work of art the way she’d destroyed him. Manny had always thought of anger as a thing with heat, but maybe thinking of her like an avalanche really was the best metaphor, because she was ice cold. The man had left her office sputtering and red-faced and he’d resigned his office in disgrace.