That woman scared him. Forty-six years they’d been married, and she still scared the ever-loving pixie dust out of him. Which was probably a good thing. They’d gotten married right out of high school, and left to his own devices, Babcock Jones would have just kept pumping gas and been happy with a couple of beers on Friday night and a baseball game on the radio. But Mags had insisted he make something of himself, and the very first lesson he’d learned in his marriage was to do what Mags told him to. So they took out a loan that scared him almost as much as Mags scared him, and they bought the gas station. Then the gas station had become a gas station and a restaurant, and then it had become a gas station and a restaurant and a truck stop, and now, forty-six years into their marriage, Babcock Jones could walk up the sloping rise of grass, pull out a cigarette, and see something resembling an empire. 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 was like a city unto itself. He had billboards two hundred miles out in either direction, and there wasn’t an American worth his salt who didn’t stop for a fill-up and the chance to see a good old-fashioned midwestern spectacle of a truck stop.
And now, he figured, those drivers weren’t going to have much of a choice but to stop. Sure, he was going to lose out on traffic in one direction, but there’d be a hell of a backup in the other. Still, a warning from Uncle Sam would have been nice. Some sort of a howdy-do, we’re going to be blowing your highway up Mr. Babcock Jones, so be ready for some loud noises. He took another puff of his cigarette and realized his hand was shaking.
When Babcock Jones wasn’t listening to his beloved bumbling Chicago Cubs on the radio—it hadn’t been the same since Ron Santos died, but he’d been listening all his life—he relaxed by watching war movies and documentaries on his television. It was a state-of-the-art seventy-inch set he’d had special ordered and installed with surround sound, and he’d even paid for somebody to come out and adjust the contrast and all that shit. Until a few minutes ago, he would have argued for all he was worth that what he could see on his television set was better than what you’d see in real life. More colors, he liked to say. But that had been before the missile. Or maybe it was a bomb. He wasn’t really sure. What he was sure of was that it had happened fast and it had been loud.
Who’d have thought he’d ever see something like that, live in the flesh, right out here in Hicksville, Nebraska?
He was standing at the top of the rise when it happened, trying to get his breath back from the walk and enjoy his cigarette at the same time. It was a gradual slope of grass, but he was a little heavier than he wanted to be. If he was being honest with himself, a lot heavier. Back when it had just been the Interstate 80 High Times Truck Stop and Family Fun Zone Restaurant and Gas Station, Babcock had kept his weight under control. He’d always been a stocky fellow. Mags complained about his smoking, but not about his belly. More of him to love, she always said, though sometimes he worried he might have a heart attack and die on top of her, and she’d be trapped underneath him and end up dying herself in a manner so embarrassing that it was probably a good thing they’d both be dead or Mags would have ended up killing him. But she said she loved him no matter what shape his body was in, and there was a lot of him to love right now. It started when they’d added the Taco Bell, and it had gotten worse with each additional temple of fried gastronomy. He liked to start his day with a breakfast burrito from the Burrito Barn and one of those chocolate caramel Frappuccinos at Starbucks. Then, after he did his rounds in the truck garage, he’d stop for a small personal pizza at Pizza Hut, and then maybe grab a milk shake from 42 Flavors Ice Cream Extravaganza to tide him over until it was time for lunch, which was always a family meal complete with fries and a large Coke from the KFC. For dinner, Mags usually made him eat a salad. He’d just taken the first few heaving puffs of the cigarette and had turned from looking at his little empire to the west and to the way Interstate 80 stretched off eastward into the distance, connecting the country and running through his backyard, when the overpass half a mile down exploded.
A bomb, a missile, he didn’t know which, but it had blown the shit out of the overpass. The overpass and Interstate 80 running in either direction for a good hundred yards. He actually saw the jet coming back for the second pass before it unloaded. Whatever blacktopped highway had been in good working order after the first hit was taken care of by the second pass with the kind of hot vengeance that reminded him of how Mags could be when she thought he wasn’t listening to her. The third run extended the damage even closer to where Babcock stood on the grassy rise, and for a moment he wondered if his insurance would cover him if the government blew up 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. Probably not. That probably fell under the act of war provision, he thought, but that thought was quickly replaced by the idea that maybe it would be a good idea for him to move before the jet came back for a fourth run. There was no fourth run, however. Whoever had been flying the jet seemed to think that they’d done a good enough job. Babcock guessed that the pilot was right. A plume of smoke was resting against the horizon. Nobody was going anywhere without a pair of hiking boots. A few idiots might try cutting through the soft farm dirt that lined the roads, but that wasn’t going to work out so well. They’d get stuck axle deep and have to wait for one of Babcock’s tow trucks to come and haul them out. He turned and looked to the west. The traffic was already stacking up. Babcock smiled. 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 was going to see a downtick in business from truckers blowing across America, but they were about to see a serious uptick in truckers and families who were no longer going anywhere.
• • •
Thirty miles west of Babcock’s truck stop, Macer Dickson sat in the back of his Audi feeling a little guilty about dropping Bobby Higgs off on the side of the road. But only a little guilty. Jesus Christ. The Prophet Bobby Higgs. The guy really thought he was special. What a dickbag. But he’d served his purpose. There’d been a few panicked hours when Macer thought he was going to be trapped in the hell that had become Los Angeles, but recognizing what he could do with Bobby had been a stroke of genius. That idiot could work a crowd. The hilarious thing was that he’d actually started to believe all of it. Believed that Macer was helping him to build an army, believed that there was a higher purpose to what they were doing. The only thing Macer was interested in building was a human shield. He wanted out of Los Angeles, whatever it took.
Oh, but to hear Bobby at the end? He thought he really was some sort of savior. As if Macer had ever intended to use Bobby as anything other than a tool for the greatest jailbreak in modern history. Macer wasn’t a particularly bad guy. Sure, he sold drugs and girls and controlled a good chunk of the criminal traffic in Los Angeles, but he really wasn’t any worse than he needed to be. That didn’t mean he was a saint, though, and it hadn’t taken him very long to figure out that this was one of those situations that called for putting Macer Dickson first. So screw Bobby, and screw the people who crammed into USC’s stadium thinking that the Prophet Bobby Higgs could deliver them to safety. The truth was that he had delivered a number of them to safety, but they weren’t his problem. What mattered was that Macer Dickson was free and clear, headed away from Los Angeles. He was going to have a new, safe beginning, and he wasn’t going to feel guilty about leaving Bobby behind.
It had been smooth sailing since he’d kicked Bobby out of the car. Lita was a hell of a driver. She seemed to operate on coffee and gummy bears, and they hadn’t once been pulled over for speeding. Which was good, because there were more than a few guns in the car and the trunk was mostly full of cash. Once he got to Chicago, the ca
sh would go a long way toward helping him set up a new operation, and if not, well, that’s what the guns were for. One of the reasons he’d been so successful in Los Angeles was because the only thing heavier than Lita’s lead foot was her trigger finger. Macer was not a particularly bad guy, but Lita had a mean streak a mile wide. Things were good. And they were about to get so much better. He’d been seeing the billboards for the truck stop about once every ten miles for nearly two hundred miles, and while he normally wasn’t one for that sort of American circus of bullshit, he’d gotten seriously interested in the idea of getting some KFC.
The way Lita kept the gas pedal tight to the floor, they’d be there right quick, fifteen, twenty minutes to go thirty miles. Gas for the car, gummy bears and coffee for Lita, and a bucket of KFC and some Red Bull for him. A ten-minute stop, max, and on they’d go. The open roads of America were in front of him, clear highways ahead.
A quick stop and then nothing in their way, nothing to stop Macer’s flight from Los Angeles.
Chicago beckoned, he thought.
“Hey, Macer,” Lita said from the front, “do you see that smoke up ahead?”
Macer leaned forward to look out the windshield. “Fire of some sort? Probably nothing to worry about. We’ll make a quick stop for gas and food and keep going. There’s going to be a flood of people headed east, and we need to make sure we stay ahead of the circus.”
Càidh Island, Loch Ròg, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides
Padruig had gone down into the cellar and come back with a world map that Aonghas remembered from his childhood. It had hung in the library until he’d gone off to university and Padruig had decided to have the castle redecorated. The map was the same as those that used to hang in classrooms across the United Kingdom, and, in some of the smaller, poorer schools, probably still did. Every man and woman Aonghas’s age had learned geography in their early school years, and every man and woman Aonghas’s age had secretly yearned as children to be picked by the teacher as the student allowed to take the long stick with the metal question mark at the end and hook the handle of the map, unrolling it from its spool and then fidgeting with it until you felt it catch securely open. On the rare occasions that Aonghas had brought childhood friends with him to Càidh Island, they’d all been amazed at the presence of the map in his grandfather’s library. He hadn’t thought of the map in years, however, hadn’t even realized that his grandfather had held on to it, but there was a certain nostalgia to unrolling it across the table in the dining room.
Thuy glanced at the pages of notes the two men had made and held up the black marker. “Just draw right on it?”
She’d made the usual jokes about a doctor’s handwriting when she volunteered to be the one to mark the map. Aonghas had laughed, but had also pointed out that his fiancée was not actually a doctor, as she had not technically graduated from medical school yet, and Thuy had said “close enough,” and then Aonghas had pointed out that even had she graduated, she still had several years as a resident at the Stornoway hospital ahead of her before she’d be practicing as a doctor on her own, and in response, Thuy, quietly, so that Padruig couldn’t hear, had pointed out that Aonghas might want to think about what else he pointed out if he wanted to have sex with her that night when they went to bed, or maybe earlier, say after lunch, if things went particularly in Aonghas’s favor.
Aonghas had stopped pointing things out.
“Right on the map,” Padruig said. “Let’s mark it up. It’s been moldering in my cellar for years. I’d forgotten it was down there, but sometimes it’s a good thing to be forgetful. Forgetting you have something and then remembering it is a little bit like having a genie grant you a wish. We needed a map for our work, and poof, a map!”
Thuy beamed at the old man, and Aonghas couldn’t stop himself from feeling a mild bit of jealousy. The two of them had turned into thickened porridge. He still couldn’t believe that his grandfather had known his fiancée was pregnant before he did, but Thuy swore up and down she hadn’t meant to tell Padruig. She’d just bumped into him a few moments after taking the pregnancy test and couldn’t help herself. But why, Aonghas asked, did she have one of those pregnancy tests with her in the first place? Thuy gave him the crooked little grin he liked so much and admitted that she’d had her suspicions that a recent and somewhat comical mishap with a condom might be worth checking on. She’d ducked into the druggist’s in Stornoway the day she was supposed to fly out, when she’d said she was just running out to grab them a couple of coffees. She’d bought the pregnancy test but hadn’t had the nerve to take it. With all the time to think—too much time to think—on Càidh Island, she had finally decided it was better to just tear open the plastic wrapper and let out a wee little stream and have an answer one way or another.
“And you told my grandfather first,” Aonghas had harrumphed. Thuy had smiled again and kissed him. He tried to sulk for a few more minutes, but he couldn’t help himself: even with everything that was going on in the world, it made him wildly happy. She made him wildly happy. Beside which, they’d been alone in their bedroom at the time, and what with hugging each other in celebration, and hugging leading to kissing each other, and kissing leading to . . . Well, he got over his feelings of annoyance quite quickly.
His little tweak of jealous about Thuy and his grandfather’s relationship also passed quickly. He realized that instead of any jealousy, he should be feeling complete relief. Seeing the two of them get along, he couldn’t believe he’d ever been nervous about introducing Thuy to Padruig.
“What did we decide?” Thuy asked. “How are we weighting Olso?”
“Secondary,” both Aonghas and Padruig said at the same time. Some of the reported outbreaks had been easy to agree on. Locations that seemed to have spontaneous spider infestations were labeled primary, while secondary outbreaks were locations that had likely been swarmed after spiders were brought in by an infected traveler. There was also the question of timing. Primary locations seemed to happen earlier, almost concurrently, while secondary locations were a function of migration and the spread of newly hatched spiders. Xinjiang Province was a primary. Los Angeles was a secondary. Delhi was a primary. Stornoway, where Aonghas had seen the Indian fellow unzip himself into a storm of spiders, was a secondary. Some of the reported outbreaks had been more difficult to categorize. They’d argued over London and Frankfurt for hours, with Aonghas sure the cities were primary outbreak sites and Padruig convinced they were secondary.
“Even if we mislabel a few outbreaks as secondary swarms, I don’t think that will make a huge difference,” Padruig said. “We might not be able to pinpoint the exact start of this, but we can come close.”
Thuy nodded. Aonghas and Padruig double-checked the list as she used the marker to draw large circles around Xinjiang Province, around Delhi, around Rio de Janeiro. Part of Aonghas felt incredibly comforted by the exercise. In many ways, this process was similar to how he and Padruig had broken down new Harry Thorton mysteries when Aonghas had first taken over the franchise. They’d argue about an idea for hours and hours and when they came to some sort of consensus, they’d pull out the thick roll of butcher’s paper that Padruig kept for that very purpose and diagram the novel’s plot ahead of time. Who killed whom with what and where? The timeline for characters both major and minor, floor plans and murder weapons, and the location of escape routes. Every bit of the novel deconstructed before it had even been constructed. And then, at some point, Padruig would take the whole thing, roll it up, throw it into the fire, and tell Aonghas it was time to just write the damn story and forget about all the other nonsense.
The spiders really were just another mystery to solve, Aonghas thought, and having Thuy there with them felt so natural that he had to remind himself that she hadn’t always been. How could he have had a life before he met her? How could he have been so stupid as to wait to ask her to marry him? Or, he thought, chagrined, to wait so that his grandfather accidently told her Aonghas had a ring and
planned to propose so that she could accept the offer of marriage before he even had the chance to ask? Really, Aonghas thought, smiling at Thuy’s thin fingers as they carefully marked the map, his grandfather could be a bit of an ass at times.
When Thuy finished marking the map, they all stood back to look at what they’d wrought.
“Huh,” Thuy said. “Peru?”
“So it appears,” Padruig said. “May I borrow your mobile phone again, dear? I have a call to make.”
Desperation, California
“You’re calling it the Spinal Tap?” Amy said. “Are you guys literally the dorkiest people alive?”
Gordo tried not to purse his lips, but he couldn’t help himself. “It uses sound, and we even fabricated it so that it goes up to eleven, and . . . Oh, never mind.”
Amy and Fred had finished their movie and come down to the workshop to see if they could persuade Gordo and Shotgun to play Catan as a drinking game. Every time you rolled a seven you had to do a shot, she’d said. Which sounded both fun and like a good way to get alcohol poisoning. But when Gordo had explained what they were doing instead—trying to devise a way to kill spiders from a distance using something other than the conventional weaponry of explosives and projectiles that did a fine job of tearing apart human flesh but seemed to have failed miserably so far on spiders—Amy and Fred had come up with a new and different drinking game that, as far as Gordo could tell, mostly involved making fun of him and Shotgun for being nerds.
Amy was pretty well blasted, but in the fun sort of way that she got. He’d had a girlfriend once, in his senior year of high school, who turned into the nastiest version of herself when she was drinking. He’d been fortunate that they’d been in high school, where his girlfriend’s drinking had been limited to illicit house parties. Sometimes, when Gordo wanted to feel good about his life choices, he’d go online and read her blog: according to her infrequent updates, she’d turned into a drunk in college, entered rehab for alcohol right after graduation, moved to Florida, gotten married and immediately pregnant at twenty-three, had five kids in seven years, and then reinvented herself as something called a “psychic energy home consultant.” He remembered that one time, right before they’d broken up, she’d tried sneaking into his bedroom after she’d gone to a party with some friends. She’d been so drunk that she’d actually snuck into Gordo’s parents’ room, waking his parents, of course, and then proceeding to tell them, in great detail, that she didn’t like having sex with Gordo very much because even though his penis wasn’t all that small, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it other than pretend it was a jackhammer. Gordo sighed. Thankfully, his wife was nothing like that. As a drunk, Amy was plenty charming. She got giggly and sweet, and, most of the time, even friskier than she already was.
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