Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  The science behind the protocol was designed for bioengineered weapons not flesh-eating spiders, but it was uncanny how much it made sense. Viruses need something to carry them. A host. And in the same way that viruses travel inside human bodies, so do these spiders. An infected person who is completely isolated from other people is no longer a danger. Even though this virus—the spiders—doesn’t pass through handshakes and coughing and kissing like a normal virus, it still requires a certain physical proximity. In other words, the idea of trying to quarantine Los Angeles had been the right impulse. They just hadn’t gone far enough.

  There were a lot of details. The presentation took almost an hour. Manny felt sick thinking about what it meant on the ground. California. Nevada. Colorado. Washington, Idaho, and Oregon completely written off. Everything west of Nebraska used as the primary containment areas. Once that was done, the second and ultimate dividing line, if it worked, would be the Mississippi. At the same time as they were shattering the western half of the country into thousands of pieces, making it as difficult to travel as possible, they’d start working on the second stage: breaking apart the rest of the country. Manny was terrified about how reasonable it seemed. Worse was how quickly Ben thought the military could achieve this objective.

  During the Civil War, brother had fought against brother, a line running between North and South, but the country had held. The country had, in the end, stayed whole. A more perfect union. But here was Ben proposing that the military could, over the space of forty-eight hours, with the help of millions of tons of ordnance—no nuclear weapons used, at least not yet—finally split the country in half. Not North and South, but East and West.

  And then, as soon as this deep fissure was carved down the middle of the country, the military would move on to secondary targets. Illinois and Ohio, the highways through Tennessee and Kentucky. From Maine all the way to Florida, a highway that Manny had driven on in high school. Highways and overpasses, on-ramps and off-ramps. Rail lines. County highways and big-city bypasses. All bombed into irretrievable ruins. Civilian air traffic shot down on sight, and anybody attempting to travel from one zone to another on foot or by bicycle or by any other means subject to lethal force.

  If they made it impossible for people to travel, by extension, the spiders couldn’t keep spreading.

  The plan itself also took into account a situation like the one they were facing now: a failed quarantine. The plan wasn’t designed simply to throw up some yellow police tape and pretend that a simple line would stop anything, but rather to interrupt the opportunities for movement, to break the country into as many pieces as possible so that if the spread of spiders—because with what Melanie was claiming, the spiders were coming back—could not be stopped, it could at least be slowed. It was a chance to buy time, the hope that a crumbled infrastructure would mean localized pockets of spiders eating themselves into extinction, rather than a constant spread. That was what the Spanish Protocol counted on: the virus burning itself out. For the spiders, it was the same idea: no new hosts.

  “What you’re talking about is like having the entire country commit suicide. We’re going to be bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age. Each highway interchange, each bridge, each tunnel. My god, the years it would take to rebuild! And the people who will die from this action? You’re asking me to kill tens of millions of Americans,” Steph said. “We’d be abandoning America. We’d be carving up the country into splinters. And what about the people already in infection zones? Should I just abandon them to their fates?”

  “No,” Ben said. “I’m not asking you to abandon them. I’m asking you to sacrifice them. There’s a difference.”

  The Spanish Protocol didn’t call for bombing Los Angeles or turning the Southwest into a sea of nuclear glass. It didn’t call for military strikes on defenseless civilians. What it called for was something both harder and cleaner, which was to cut off parts of the country in order to save the rest. Creating a sort of no-man’s-land buffer zone, cracking the map into a million pieces so that the spiders in the high rises of Chicago couldn’t spill into the hills and hollers of Arkansas or vice versa. Ben wasn’t proposing killing people for no reason. Ben was proposing cutting them off and letting them die, turning America into a feudal state, the map a jigsaw puzzle of citizens left to fend for themselves.

  Was there a difference? Manny wondered. If the military deliberately destroyed highways and bridges and tunnels, was it any different from killing the people in infected areas directly? No military strikes on people or cities. Instead, it would be military strikes on the infrastructure that allowed those people to move from city to city. Interstate 29, running through Fargo and Sioux City to Kansas City. Highway 55, running from Chicago through Memphis. Every place where Interstates 94 and 90 and 80 and 70 ran trucks and cars like blood through an artery. Highways were the heart of America, and what Ben was proposing was heart surgery. No. That wasn’t right. Not heart surgery. The Spanish Protocol called for cutting out the entire beating heart of America and throwing it on a fire.

  “What if we get the best-case scenario?” Steph asked. “What if Melanie is wrong, and we aren’t about to have another outbreak, and these spiders don’t come back? What if that’s what happens, and I’ve ordered this? What then?” She looked at Manny. “Even if Melanie is right, you’re asking me to give up on more than a hundred million Americans, to leave them on their own when they are counting on us most. And that’s if we can contain the outbreak to the western half of the country. If not, the next step is to break up the entire country. I’ll have as good as said to each and every American citizen, there’s nothing the federal government can do for you. We’re leaving you to die, so good luck.”

  Manny stood and reached out to hold Steph’s hand. He realized it was a surprisingly tender and private act to do in such a public place, but he didn’t care. He could see how much this was weighing on her, and he had a sudden stunning sense of clarity.

  “Ben’s right,” he said, a catch in his throat. He gave himself a second to gather himself, then said, “I’m sorry, Steph. But he’s right. I know it sounds cold, but we’ve got to do it, and the truth is, they haven’t gone far enough. We can’t stop at the Mississippi. We can’t just cut the country in half and hope it works. We’ve got to break the country into a million pieces. It’s the only way to save it. Think about the real reason the federal highway system was built. It wasn’t so you could order something from Seattle and get it cheaply to New York City in a week’s time. We built the interstates for war. The United States built these roads because we wanted a way to move tanks and missiles and troops to wherever they might be needed throughout the country, from coast to coast. Realistically, the whole point of the highway system is to move people across the country as quickly as possible. Right now, that’s the last thing we need. Can you imagine these spiders hatching in Chicago? New York City? Boston? Washington, DC? With the highway system intact, there’s no possible way to stop it. We’ve already seen that we can’t effectively block every road and intersection just using cops and soldiers. Can you imagine these things in every city in America?

  “Doing it this way is like radical surgery. We’ve got an infection, and we’ve got to amputate. You cut off the leg to save the body. We’re always playing the game of what if. We’re always rolling the dice on best case and worst case, but the worst case here? We’ve seen it already. We’ve seen it in Delhi and Rio de Janeiro. We’re lucky that so far we’ve only lost Los Angeles. Steph,” he said, his voice so much gentler than his words, “we can’t wait and take the chance of the worst-case scenario. The Spanish Protocol sounds drastic, but the reason we’re talking about it is because we’ve seen the worst case play out. The worst case is China.”

  He stopped and took a big breath. “We might end up having to use nuclear weapons, Steph. That’s the honest truth. But if you want to avoid lighting up the map and radiating the whole world, at least for now, you have to try the surgery first.” />
  Steph took her other hand and clasped it over his, so that his hand was between both of hers. She looked so sad it almost killed Manny, and in that moment, he realized that maybe he did love her in whatever weird way it was that he could love her, and he wished they were alone so that he could just take her in his arms. But they weren’t alone, and she didn’t need that from him—she was strong enough to stand there and make the hard decisions without anyone holding her up—and maybe that was what he loved most about her.

  “That’s a hell of a leg to be cutting off, Manny,” she said, but she was already talking to the room, already changing from Steph, his best friend and on-again off-again and mostly on-again lover, the sad, hurting woman who he wanted to shelter, back into what she’d been born to be: President Stephanie Pilgrim, commander in chief. “Do it,” she said to Ben. “Order the strikes. Order the strikes starting immediately. All of them. Highways and bridges. Anywhere you can stop the people who might be carrying these spiders into the rest of America. Maybe we’re too late, but we have to try. I’ll do everything I can to prevent using nuclear weapons, and if that means sacrificing America to save America . . . I don’t see any other options. Do it, Ben.”

  The room was silent.

  She looked down at the table, and when she looked up again, Manny could see that her eyes were wet. “I’m ordering the Spanish Protocol,” she said. “I’m throwing America on the mercy of God. And God help us all.”

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

  Melanie started the Japanese video again. It was just her, Dichtel, Nieder, Haaf, and Julie Yoo in the conference room. She’d shooed out Sergeant Faril and all the other minders and guards and lab assistants and various other people who were in and out of the corridors of the National Institutes of Health. There were plenty of people who seemed pissed about the way she’d simply taken over an entire floor of the building. Two floors, maybe? Maybe more: the soldiers, guards, and ancillary staff had to go somewhere, and they had probably taken over additional space in the building, but that wasn’t her problem. There were only four biocontainment units of this level in the whole damned country. There was one at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, one at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, one in Missoula, Montana, and one here. Given that she was based out of American University in DC, the NIH building in Bethesda was a no-brainer. So tough cookies to the people who were feeling put out. She had things to do. Like figure out what the heck she was actually seeing.

  The video was edited down to just a couple of minutes, with subtitles translating the limited commentary and data on the screen. None of the information meant a lot on its own: temperature and humidity didn’t do much for Melanie. The man in the hazmat suit and the scientists overseeing everything from back in the lab occasionally spoke—or swore—and their dialogue showed up as white characters spelling out the translation on the screen.

  “Is that translation accurate?” Melanie asked, looking at Julie Yoo.

  “You know I’m not Japanese, right?” Julie said.

  If Melanie weren’t so tired, she would have kicked herself. Embarrassing.

  “Don’t look at me,” Laura Nieder said. “I’m Cambodian, but via the state of Georgia and then New Jersey. I’m reasonably fluent in Spanish, and I can swear in Italian, but I don’t know a lick of Japanese.”

  “Actually,” Dr. Mike Haaf said, “I can speak some Japanese. Huge fan of anime.” Melanie stared at him, and Haaf stammered a little. “Yeah, near as I can tell, it’s an accurate translation.”

  They watched the camera mounted on the man’s helmet edge closer and closer, through the dim room littered with egg sacs, around the pillar of white nuggets blocking the view, until the giant, pulsing, glowing cocoon was all that filled the screen. The silk was translucent, the light radiating outward, like a flashlight through skin. Black dots skittered across the surface of the cocoon—because that’s what it looked like, more than an egg sac—offering a sense of scale for what they were looking at. They’d all seen the spiders, and they knew that if they looked like dimes on the surface of the silk pod, the cocoon had to be huge. The size of a king-size bed or a car, big enough to be terrifying. Big enough that they’d watched the video three times already, not believing what they saw.

  The light inside the cocoon was pulsing. It wasn’t obvious, not off and on like Morse code or a lighthouse on the rocks sending a message, but more subtle. The way the glow came just a little brighter, just a little dimmer, like listening to a lover’s soft breathing in the night, only not nearly as comforting, because this light was ominous, filled with the promise of something they didn’t understand.

  “Whoever the Japanese fellow operating the camera is, he’s a champ,” Dichtel said. “Walking through a collection of egg sacs would be bad enough, but it’s got to be terrifying when there are hatched spiders already swarming.”

  “Why aren’t they eating him, though?” Haaf said.

  “Smell?” Nieder leaned closer. “The suit blocks the smell?”

  “Holy shit!” Melanie jumped forward and hit the pause button. “Did you see that?”

  The other scientists in the room most definitely had not seen what she had seen. It took several minutes of Melanie scrolling backward and trying to freeze the image at the right moment, and then having to call in a tech to help figure out how to enhance the fragment, slow it down, and then zoom in closer, before they all sat back and watched the short clip taken from the video stream in an infinite loop in front of them. It reminded Melanie of the way, when she was still pursuing her doctorate and needed to take a break from the lab, she’d go online and look for things that could make her laugh, the way she’d watch a .gif of a dog failing to jump off a couch successfully, or one of some guy accidently punching himself in the balls, three or four or five seconds of hilarity in an endless repeat on her computer screen. But this wasn’t funny. All the other scientists could see what she’d seen, and none of them were laughing.

  “Jesus. They’re emptying themselves into it? They’re feeding it, aren’t they?” Nieder said.

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  They watched the loop run over and over again, the spider lining itself up and then reaching out to—reaching through—the shell of the silk cocoon, and then only seconds later, tumbling off with an odd lightness and grace, looking like a leaf drifting from a tree on a still autumn morning.

  Melanie glanced over at Julie and saw that her graduate student was looking at her tablet instead of the monitor. “Julie?”

  Julie looked up and shook her head. “Just zipping through the unedited feed, but there doesn’t look like there’s anything else in there that we missed.”

  “Okay,” Haaf said. “Can we agree that we really need to know exactly what is inside the giant egg sac that these spiders seem to be emptying themselves into? That if these other spiders have gorged themselves on everything in their way and are now disgorging themselves into an egg sac that appears to be about the size of a truck, we need to find out what is going to hatch? And why it’s glowing?”

  “There wasn’t one of these at the Staples Center site, was there? In Los Angeles?” Dichtel asked.

  Melanie stood up and crossed over to the window. They were at the front of the building, and she could see the glint of glass and metal in the parking lot, but instead of it coming from Fords and Chevys and Hondas and other cars, there were tanks and military vehicles and a helicopter that looked as menacing as any bug she’d ever studied. “Seems like something the army would have noticed, that we would have noticed,” Melanie said. “The Staples Center was just the standard egg sacs we’ve come to know and love.”

  “So what the heck is this?”

  It took nearly an hour to get through to the Japanese lab. Regardless of the help Melanie was afforded, they were routed to the wrong lab at first, and even when they did get through to the command center, it seemed like it took forever to get someone on the phone who had the a
uthority to talk to them, and from there, it took longer still to find scientists who had the authority to talk to them and who actually had some answers. And once they had the videoconference running with a small group of scientists who had the authority and the knowledge to talk with Melanie and her scientists—their Japanese counterparts—the conversation itself was an awkward first date of pauses and hesitations, delays caused by translators and conversation by committee. Like most first dates, it was profoundly unfulfilling.

  The Japanese, afraid of what was coming, had burned the entire temple to the ground. They seemed quite proud of the way they’d done it, a mix of explosives and something approximating napalm. They wanted to make sure that anything with eight legs had flames stuck to their legs like glue.

  The second the conversation ended and the image of the Japanese scientists turned into an empty blue screen—they’d been using some sort of encrypted military videoconferencing program on a beefy military laptop in an even beefier military protective case—Melanie picked up the laptop, screamed “Motherfuckers!” at the top of her lungs, and threw it against the wall. It was not a satisfying experience. The laptop bounced to the floor, apparently unharmed, leaving a small dent in the drywall.

  “Cowards,” she said, still seething, but no longer throwing computers. “How could they just burn it down without finding out what the hell it meant?”

  “I’m sure they thought the risk was—”

  “Screw them,” Melanie said. She spun away from the table and walked back over to the windows. She didn’t care that she had cut off Dichtel, and she didn’t care that the Japanese scientists and their government thought they had been protecting themselves. “We needed to know what was in there.” She leaned her head against the cool glass and looked out. It was kind of a lousy view, but it was what she had.