Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  She nearly jumped out of her skin at the loud boom that rattled the windows.

  The other scientists scrambled to their feet and came over just in time to see two more jets streak overhead so fast they were gone in the blink of an eye, followed closely by two more window-rattling twin booms that left no doubt what the first sound had been.

  Melanie looked behind her. All the scientists but Haaf had run to the window to look for the jets breaking the sound barrier overhead. Haaf, however, was still sitting at the table, staring at the blank wall across from him. She recognized that look. She’d had it on her own face plenty of times.

  “Dr. Haaf?”

  He kept staring at the wall, but his lips were moving.

  “Dr. Haaf? Mike?” Melanie tried again.

  “In the background of the conversation,” Haaf said, turning to Melanie. “It was some chatter separate from the main conversation. I couldn’t catch all of it.” He looked embarrassed again. “Remember that I learned most of my Japanese so I could watch untranslated anime, so take this with a grain of salt. But I’m pretty sure that’s what one of the researchers was saying. ‘Off switch.’ ”

  All the other scientists had turned from the window as well, the jets forgotten. Everything forgotten except for Haaf. He stood up, halfway embarrassed and halfway lost in concentration. “Maybe I’ve got the translation wrong. It’s not an exact translation, I don’t think, but the one guy in the background, the fellow who they said had been in the suit. The guy who was actually in there with them, wearing the hazmat suit and filming, right? That’s what he was trying to say. He was muttering and angry and talking to the woman next to him.”

  “What?” Melanie said.

  “I could swear he was saying something about an off switch.”

  Shinjin Prefecture, Japan

  “Because it’s just a theory,” Koji said to his assistant. “And nobody other than you thinks there’s anything to it. What was I supposed to do? Shout over the others?” He shook his head. “They wouldn’t have listened to me even if I had.”

  Soot Lake, Minnesota

  The roads had been murder. Even using the sirens on their agency car and Leshaun driving like he thought he was the second coming of Steve McQueen, it still took them until almost noon to get to the parking area by the boat ramp at Soot Lake. The good news, Mike thought, was that the traffic was all people leaving the city. No. Leaving wasn’t the right word. Fleeing. How much worse was it going to get when word got out that the government was pulling back resources? Pulling back resources. Yeesh. That was a euphemism if there ever was one. The government wasn’t pulling back resources, it was orchestrating a full-on retreat in advance of the coming doom.

  He looked at his watch again. The clock was ticking, but it didn’t matter how bad the roads got outside Minneapolis, he thought, as long as he was safely on that government plane with his daughter—and ex-wife and her new husband—by six o’clock, as long as they were flying east, away from this ridiculous nightmare.

  Leshaun called him over. His partner had found a small, dinged-up fishing boat with a pull-cord twenty horsepower engine. It wasn’t fancy, but the lightweight aluminum shell would barrel across the water fast enough, and, equally important, it didn’t require a key. He stepped into the front of the boat. He could never remember if the front was the stern or aft or the gunwale or some such other nautical bullshit. Why did boat people have to make stuff so complicated? What was wrong with front and back, left and right? He untied the rope from the stainless steel ring on the dock and Leshaun cranked the throttle.

  It was loud going and the lake was choppy. There was enough of a wind to put up two- and three-foot waves, and the aluminum boat could have been an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster for all the comfort it offered. The engine buzzed and all Mike could think about was the sound of insects. Yes, he knew that spiders were technically arachnids, but really? Were there really people that pedantic that they were going to split hairs on that right now? He’d call them bugs if he felt like it. He held on to the seat with one hand and the side of the boat with the other. Even though the air was warm, the spray off the water was freezing, which made sense for a Minnesota lake in May. At least the boat was making time. Pacing the shore like a race car.

  “There,” he yelled back to Leshaun, pointing out the cove where Dawson’s cottage lay nestled against the shore. Leshaun turned the tiller and the boat skipped even more, taking the waves broadside.

  The dock was empty. No Annie standing out there and waiting for him this time, as she had been when he’d come to pick her up just a few days ago.

  At another time, he would have appreciated the cottage. It wasn’t opulent, but it wasn’t one of those shoebox cabins that were held together with spit and rags. Dawson might not have been a showy guy, but he made good money and he liked nice things. Cedar shakes and wide, mullioned glass, a multilevel deck designed so that you couldn’t quite figure out where the deck itself ended and the dock began, and a broad swath of low-growth native plantings that left a little picnic area on the south side of the house. Because Dawson was the kind of humongous asshole who married your ex-wife but was actually a pretty great guy who made you feel terrible about all your own bad decisions and whatever ill you’d wished on him, he’d offered to let Mike borrow the cottage on more than one occasion.

  Leshaun tucked the boat gently against the dock on the other side from Dawson’s boat. Mike hopped out, leaving Leshaun to tie off their stolen fishing skiff. He ran up the steps fast enough that he could feel his jacket flapping.

  The shotgun blast almost took his head off.

  Holy fuckity fuck. His ears. He patted himself down. There were a few buckshot holes in the edge of his jacket, but he didn’t think he’d been hit. You know, he thought, remembering the shoot-out with the meth-dealing Aryan who’d put a bullet in Leshaun, he’d been having people fire guns at him way too regularly in the past couple of weeks. Fortunately, as Leshaun came bounding up the steps, his service revolver in his hand, Dawson had already dropped the shotgun to the deck.

  “Oh my god. Are you okay?”

  Mike turned to Leshaun and motioned for him to holster his gun, but Leshaun had already lowered his weapon and was pulling back his coat to tuck it away. Mike looked back at Dawson, digging into his ringing ear with his pinky. “What the hell, Rich, why on earth did you try to shoot me?”

  “I didn’t. I mean, I did, but only because you told me to. And I wasn’t trying to shoot you, not really. But you told me that if anybody showed up I had to put a hole in them, that I needed to keep everybody away from Fanny and Annie, even if that meant killing them.”

  Mike glanced over Dawson’s shoulder and saw his ex-wife staring at him from inside the cottage door. She looked frightened.

  “I assumed you’d look to see who it was first,” Mike said. “Thank goodness you aren’t a great shot.” He and Leshaun finished walking to the door. “Where’s Annie?”

  “She’s got headphones on,” Fanny said. She reached out and took Dawson’s arm. Mike realized Dawson was shaking. “She’s watching a movie on her tablet and she borrowed Rich’s good headphones. They’re noise canceling.”

  “They must work pretty well if a shotgun wasn’t enough to get her attention,” Leshaun said. He leaned in to kiss Fanny on the cheek and then shook Dawson’s hand.

  “We were watching the bombings,” Dawson said. “On television.” He pointed to a small satellite dish bolted to the side of the cottage. “I didn’t hear the boat until the last minute, and then you were running up the stairs and I just . . .” He gulped. “Sorry.”

  Mike took a deep breath. He could relax. He was okay. His jacket had a little extra ventilation, but he was okay. All they had to do was get back to Minneapolis in time. “We’ve got to go. Right now. We need to be—” He stopped talking. He’d been about to tell Rich and Fanny that they needed to leave right now, that very second, to get in the boat and then into the agency car, to ride buckled
up in the back of their sedan while the cherries ran and Leshaun mashed the peddle to the ground, so that they could blaze into the airport and load up on a military transport plane before things went to hell in the Midwest, but now he paused. “Bombings? What bombings?”

  Dawson looked at him queerly. “You don’t know? Why are you here? I figured that’s why you came.”

  “No. We’ve been ordered to pull out. The whole agency. And not just us. Every federal government asset that can get out. Not just from Minneapolis. Everywhere west of the Mississippi. We’ve got to be at the airport by six to get on a plane, but we can bring family with us.” He realized Fanny was staring at him like he was crazy. “What?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  He didn’t. So they took him inside and sat him down in front of the television, where he watched scattered video captured by shaky cell phones: highways exploding, jets streaking through the sky, bridges collapsing. The news anchor trying to keep her voice steady as she described the destruction of roads and tunnels, the military and police trying to turn the country into an impassable patchwork quilt. The station replayed the president’s brief speech which included her order for all citizens, wherever they were, to hold in place, and a clear and frank statement that the military would be destroying transportation hot points, regardless of whether citizens were still using those hot points or not, and that the military would use lethal force to prevent people from traveling. In other words, the president had said, “In plain English, stay the hell off the roads. Stay home.”

  Mike sat there, watching the television and understanding that whatever the plans had been to get federal agents like him east with their families, those plans had been canceled.

  As he was watching, his cell phone buzzed. A text from the bureau chief to every single agent under his command: Due to rapidly deteriorating conditions, our timeline has been accelerated. Wheels up in one hour.

  Mike felt sick. There was no way he’d get back to the airport in time. He was too late to get them out.

  Oslo, Norway

  They’d found the yellow-tinged barn stuffed full of egg sacs like a sausage ready to burst. The farm was out on the fringe of the city. A lonely outpost left over from the days when Oslo was more of a notion than a reality, from when the only thing around was farms, fields, and trees. Had the spiders hatched back then, they would have moved more slowly: horses and chickens and cows and other livestock would have outnumbered humans ten to one. Back then, traveling twenty miles in a single day seemed ambitious. The spiders would have had to march along at their own pace. No jets or cars or trains or boats, fewer ways to spread their relentless hunger. But by the time the spiders came, almost all the farms had given way to houses, office buildings, and shopping centers. This barn, the one crammed with egg sacs, was a mere relic from an earlier time. The farm itself was only a third of the acreage it had been in 1950. It had been a working farm until the mid-2000s, but the farmer was too old now. The fields had been fallow for years, and the barn was no longer a working concern. The farmer was in his early nineties, and his only son, a man himself in his midsixties, kept expecting his phone calls to go unanswered. The son had an agreement already in place with a developer: the moment the farmer died the bulldozers would roll. A comfortable retirement for the son and modern town houses on an urban green for the developer. That was the plan.

  There had only been one outbreak in Norway, originating twenty miles away. An engineer who’d come home from a trip to China, feverish and scared, talking nonsense one day and then bringing destruction the next, his body opening up like Pandora’s box. The Norwegians reacted quickly. They had benefited from unaccountable good fortune. Some countries, like India and China and Brazil, were the unfortunate inheritors of sleeping broods of spiders who had been waiting thousands of years to hatch. Norway was only a secondary site, lucky enough to have seen the reports out of China, to see the footage from India, from Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles. The moment the traveler’s body erupted, Norway ordered burn zones and pullbacks. There were quick decisions by the military. Lives were lost—thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand; they were still counting the dead and missing—but it could have been much worse. That’s what everybody was saying. They’d been lucky in Norway. And luckier still: they’d found the infestation site in the barn so easily.

  The barn hadn’t been painted in perhaps forty years. The wood was worn down by the winters and the wind and the sun. It listed strangely to one side and had done so since a bad storm in the 1980s. Back when it was a working farm, the farmer had spent many nights listening to the wind and worrying that the building would fall in on itself, killing the two dozen cows that were housed inside. It had been a large barn at one time. Not by the industrial-farming standards of today, but large enough that if there had still been two dozen cows and the attendant bales of hay, there would still have been plenty of space for the rusted-out farm equipment that the farmer kept thinking he might try to sell as antiques.

  It was all too late for that, of course.

  The Norwegians congratulated themselves on how quickly they’d found the infestation and stomped it out. They decided, based on the American reports of the Staples Center in Los Angeles, that there’d be a singular breeding ground, and if they could find it and contain it before the spiders spread fully, they would be protected. They had found the barn almost as soon as the spiders started dropping dead. Not that it had been particularly difficult. You could see the white egg sacs straining through the cracks in the boards from the road. They were squeezing out of every opening; the barn itself packed so tightly that there was no way inside. The Norwegians did not even bother doing an accounting.

  How many egg sacs were inside?

  Who cared?

  Burn them all!

  A demolitions expert rigged it so that everything burned inward, a controlled and rolling flame from which there was no hope of egress, and the barn and everything inside was sacrificed in the name of prudence. No scientific study necessary. It was a great conflagration. Those who had not already evacuated or who had already returned could see the glow of the fire from a distance of twenty kilometers. Those who were closer, the demolitions expert and the firemen who had volunteered, the soldiers who had been assigned to cordon off the area, and the television reporters who had insisted they be allowed inside to witness it, all said that the sound of the egg sacs burning was terrifying in its own right. The egg sacs in the barn, too many to count, had been chalky, white, cold and calcified, inorganic looking so that it was hard to imagine that they contained anything alive. And as the fire burned around them, the egg sacs shattered and popped, the heat twisting them open with violent cracks, each explosion sounding like a gunshot.

  When the fire burned itself out, the soldiers combed the embers to make sure there was nothing left. And nothing was left of the barn.

  But it wasn’t only the barn.

  The Norwegians had failed, unaccountably, unforgivably, to search the high school auditorium, only three kilometers away from the barn. It was in an area that had been particularly overrun with spiders, and perhaps this oversight had to do with the simple fact that the Norwegians had thought they’d found the main infestation. After all, the Americans, the Japanese, and the Indians were all reporting that they found egg sacs concentrated in large, dark buildings. In the panic and the confusion and sheer overwhelming terror, they found the barn and thought they’d found the solution: here are the spiders you need to destroy. Could they be faulted for not continuing to look? Could they be faulted for not understanding that the barn contained one type of egg sac—the hard, almost petrified versions designed to last through floods and wind, snow and rain, to sleep for thousands of years until the next time the rhythm of the years called the spiders out to feed—and the high school auditorium contained another? If only they’d found those other egg sacs, they’d have seen immediately that there was a difference. The softness of the webbing,
the heat of the egg sacs, speaking to a very different timeline. And in the back, the pulsing glow of the largest of the sacs, large enough that perhaps six or eight of the old farmer’s cows could have nestled inside, would have made it clear to every person that something new and horrible was coming.

  But the Norwegians hadn’t found these other egg sacs. And in the dark, quiet loneliness of the high school auditorium, underneath stage lights that remained unlit, nestled among the rigid, worn-down seats in the audience, and woven against the walls and throughout the theater rigging, the sacs grew warmer, the pulsing glow at the back of the auditorium grew brighter.

  The Interstate 80 High Times Truck Stop and Family Fun Zone Restaurant and Gas Station Taco Bell Pizza Hut Starbucks KFC Burrito Barn 42 Flavors Ice Cream Extravaganza Coast-to-Coast Emporium, Nebraska

  Well, shit. Babcock Jones lit another cigarette. A little warning would have been nice before the government blew the holy hell out of the highway. Technically, President Pilgrim did say the government was going to be dropping bombs, but he didn’t think she really meant it. He just about crapped his pants from surprise at the first explosion.

  He came up the hill—it wasn’t much of a hill—here because it was the closest thing to peaceful he could find so close to the interstate. His business was on one of the most traveled stretches of Interstate 80, so a little bit of quiet was an important thing. Also, as long as he walked up the grassy rise, five or six hundred yards away from the Interstate 80 High Times Truck Stop and Family Fun Zone Restaurant and Gas Station Taco Bell Pizza Hut Starbucks KFC Burrito Barn 42 Flavors Ice Cream Extravaganza Coast-to-Coast Emporium, Mags let him have a smoke, figuring that the exercise might counterbalance the ill effects of the cigarette. She’d quit back in 1992 just like it was nothing. She woke up one day and said, “Think I’m not going to smoke anymore,” and bam! Two packs a day down to none. He’d tried to quit, too, but he couldn’t, and Mags had declared that the only way he could have a cigarette was if he hauled his sorry ass up the rise. So he obeyed.