“Thanks. I’ve been on some sort of military transport plane or helicopter for . . . I don’t even know. The food left something to be desired.” Teddie picked up one of the paper plates and started scooping out rice and curry.
“Sorry about that as well.” Melanie sighed. “I said I wanted to talk with you, and somebody decided that meant bringing you to DC instead of, I don’t know, getting you on the phone.”
“Well, phones have been a little hit-and-miss since the army started bombing everything. We can’t reach half our reporters, and the ones who are still trying to do their jobs are almost impossible to reach. Anyway, I’m assuming you brought me here because of the segment I put together?”
“I want to know what you didn’t run,” Melanie said.
“Pardon me?”
“I know I seem brisk, but I just don’t have a lot of time. I’m Dr. Melanie Guyer, and this is one of—this is my colleague, Julie Yoo. We’re basically the front line here, trying to figure out what makes these things tick. I saw the segment on CNN, and I want to know what you didn’t put on the air. What got left out.”
Teddie hesitated, and then she walked over to the side table and pulled a bottle of water from the tub of ice. “I’m just an associate producer. No. Producer, actually. Newly promoted. Did you know that I was a Spanish major at Oberlin, for Christ’s sake? I only ended up at CNN as a fluke. Is that in your file?”
“I don’t have a file, Teddie,” Melanie said. “You’re assuming a level of organization that is impossible in the middle of this insanity. Given that I already said you got flown out here somewhat by accident, you—” She stopped. She could feel herself getting impatient. What was it with these kids thinking they were all special snowflakes? This wasn’t, not even a little bit, about Teddie. Melanie took a deep breath. No wonder she preferred working in a lab with her spiders over teaching undergraduates.
“Okay. So you were a Spanish major. But you figured something out, and the thing is, there’s always something more to the story. What was the thing that was just so crazy that you didn’t put it on the air?”
Teddie took a bite of her curry. She looked at Melanie and then out the window.
Melanie sighed. “Okay. Sorry. I just thought there might be something. I’ll try to have somebody figure out how to get you home, but it might take a while. Again, sorry about the whole flying you out here instead of just having a phone conversation thing.”
“They look fake,” Teddie said.
“What?”
Julie had looked up from her computer and was staring at Teddie. “Oh my god.”
“Right?” Teddie said to Julie.
Melanie shook her head. “I’m sorry, this might be obvious to the two of you, but it’s not to me. Spell it out.”
“You know what it’s like to watch those early movies that used computer animation? CGI? How it never looked quite right? You’d have actors doing their stuff, and it was all fine, and then there’d be one of the special effects shots and all of a sudden it was just wrong? And it always bothered me, because it was so fake looking even though it looked totally real at the same time? You know?” She looked at Melanie, and Melanie nodded. “So, it used to bother me, but now when you watch movies it’s really hard to tell. Like they’ve figured out how to make stuff not look all fake. Some of the footage—not the shaky stuff, not the cell phone videos or people running, but the good footage shot on tripods from mounted cameras—had that look. The wide-angle stuff caught the spiders from a distance, so you could really see how they moved. When you can see hundreds or thousands of them, the way they move together, it looks fake. You know?”
Melanie suddenly understood. She’d seen it, but it hadn’t really registered. By the time she was watching newscasts and video, fake looking or not, there was no question that it was all too real.
“So I slowed the video down and took the still shots, and we ran that, and, I guess, that’s what caught your interest and why I’m here. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how they just don’t look real. They look mechanical or something. And then I remembered this movie I loved as a kid. I can’t even remember what it was called, and I know it wasn’t much of a hit, but it was about these kids searching for some sort of treasure. At one point they disturb some rocks and these ants start streaming out of the rocks. I mean, I loved this movie. I used to have dreams that I was the girl, that I was finding the treasure. But I remember when they showed that scene, when the ants started streaming out of the rocks, the other people in the theater all sniggered. It was so cheesy looking. Whoever had done the CGI had gotten the details right. I mean, the ants looked like ants, with their shells and legs and antennas and stuff, but the way they moved? I was like maybe seven or eight, and even I could tell they weren’t real.” Teddie stopped and considered her plate and took another bite of curry-covered rice. “A couple of years ago, I read an article about using CGI for crowd scenes in movies, and in the article they said that one of the ways that special effects has gotten better is that they are able to program in the sort of random movements that happen when you’ve got thousands of individuals in the same space. That’s what was missing with the ants. They all moved exactly the same way. No randomness. And it’s like that with the spiders. The way they move. There’s no chaos to it.”
“Like a pattern?”
Sergeant Faril stuck her head into the conference room. “Sorry, Melanie. I know you said you didn’t want to be disturbed, but Manny’s calling. He said it’s urgent.”
“Tell him I’ll call him back. This is more important.”
Faril retreated.
“It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” Teddie shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a pattern in the way they move, but it’s sort of like some lazy CGI person just made them as a special effect. Instead of a million spiders, there’s just one big spider in a million parts. But think about it. Wasn’t the way they all just died off last week kind of crazy? I know that there’s some scientist claiming that they, in essence, grew and moved too quickly and burned themselves out, but doesn’t that seem like complete bull? . . . Oh. That was you, wasn’t it?”
Melanie waggled her hand. “Keep going.”
“Yeah. Well, sorry. But it just didn’t sit right with me. I mean, I suppose I could buy that they would exhaust themselves from growing so fast and everything, so your theory sort of makes sense. Somebody gets bitten and then, what, five hours later they’re opening up and spilling out spiders like a bag of frozen peas? If they are going to hatch that quickly, a super-condensed life cycle where they die that quickly is believable, too. And I can believe the faster they spread and grow, the faster that life cycle is. It makes a sort of intuitive sense.”
Melanie was trying not to be defensive, but she couldn’t stop herself from correcting Teddie. “At their fastest, it was closer to twelve hours from the spider entering a host to the point of hatching. But we think the gestation period was longer at the start, maybe twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Before Los Angeles, there was a plane crash in Minneapolis; a private jet flying back from Peru, where all signs seemed to indicate that one of the passengers was a host. Our best guess is that it had been at least twenty-four hours since he’d been attacked.”
“Wait, so it got shorter?”
“Exactly.”
“Like some sort of countdown clock.”
Melanie stared at Teddie and then nodded. “Maybe. Where did you go to school, again?”
“Oberlin. But, okay, the thing is with your theory, that they just burned themselves out, that their metabolisms couldn’t handle the rapid expansion, how is it that they all just sort of keeled over dead at the exact same time? The theory makes sense in a lot of ways, that they’d have some sort of internal countdown clock that ticked faster the faster they grew and spread, but how is it that this clock happened to go off at the same time? They didn’t all hatch at the same time, so why would those internal clocks line up like that? If they came out in waves, wo
uldn’t it make more sense for them to croak in waves too?”
Melanie looked at Julie Yoo. Her graduate student just shrugged. Melanie turned back to Teddie. “We’re doing the best we can with limited information. These things aren’t exactly easy to study. There’s been a lot going on, and it’s complicated.”
She suddenly felt a hot lump in her throat. God. She had been trying not to think about Bark. And she hadn’t been thinking about Patrick at all, which made her feel even worse. But they’d come unbidden to her mind.
It was easy to focus on the problems in front of her and to let what was going on out in the wider world stay in the background. It was too abstract. Who could understand what it meant to say two million were dead, or five million, or ten? Those numbers weren’t real to Melanie in the way it had been to watch that spider slip through Bark’s skin, the panic of realizing what had happened, of watching through the glass as he lay cut open on the operating table, his body threaded through with egg sacs and silk, her other graduate student, Patrick Mordy in there, assisting the doctor and nurses, Julie Yoo running down the corridor yelling, trying to tell them it was too late, and then . . .
Oh.
She was crying now.
The producer from CNN, Teddie, looked scared, but Julie got up, crouched down beside Melanie, and wrapped her arms around her.
It was just all too much. Too much to have those images running through her head. Too much pressure. She’d made her entire adult life about working in the field and then taking it back to the lab, about data collection and careful experimentation. It took more than seven years from when she’d had her first inkling of what might be going on inside the Heteropoda venatoria spider and what the venom might do in a medical setting, back when she was actually a junior in college, until the time she’d published the paper that was her first scientific breakthrough. And that had been working with a spider that wasn’t going to kill her. Seven years! And now, the president was coming to her and counting on her to figure out how to stop these spiders and giving her just days to do it?
And now, some blond bimbo—she knew it wasn’t fair to think of Teddie that way, but she was angry and sad and terrified and goddammit!—barely out of undergrad with a background in Spanish was telling her something so obvious that not thinking of it herself made her doubt almost everything else she’d come to believe about these spiders.
It took several minutes for Melanie to stop crying and to get control of herself. She stepped out to the washroom to splash water on her face, grateful that she wasn’t one of those women who found it necessary to load up on makeup every time they went out in public. Her makeup would have been a mess after that, and besides, who would she have been trying to look pretty for? The spiders? Sergeant Faril?
She came back into the conference room and sat down in front of Teddie and Julie. “Sorry,” she said.
Teddie made a face that was as much a grimace as it was a smile. “That’s okay. I’m sure you just need a good night’s sleep. And I guess my theories are sort of cockamamie. I don’t know anything about spiders. Until all this happened, I thought an entomologist and an etymologist were the same thing. But it was pretty clear in the video that the spiders weren’t killing everything, and if you looked closely and slowed it down, you could see that the spiders weren’t moving about randomly, and, more, that there was a pattern, too, in the people with gashes on them. The other stuff, I know, it sounds really crazy. But you asked me what else I didn’t include, and that’s what I was thinking. The way they move together just isn’t right. Individually, it’s all creepy and skittering, and at least to me, looks the way spiders should look, but man, as a group? It looks wrong, it really does. It looks like there’s something off. I don’t know.”
Melanie took a deep breath. “Any chance you’ve got that footage you’re talking about with you?”
Teddie unzipped her bag and pulled out her laptop.
Delhi, India
How much worse could it have been? If the spiders hadn’t started dropping, if they’d just kept feeding and feeding, laying new eggs at that accelerated pace? How bad could it have been, not just in Delhi, which had a population of around twenty-five million in the greater metropolitan area, but in all India itself? How bad?
For most Indians, that was a question that they were already asking. Even as there were fires still burning throughout the city and beyond, even as the rough counts of the dead and missing were being tallied—six million, eight million, twelve?—that was what people wondered. How much worse could it have been?
But that was the wrong question. What should have been asked, as the soft, sticky egg sacs in cellars and attics, stacked up in the dark corners of a broken city, began to open, and as the larger, truck-sized egg cocoons pulsed with light and started to unravel like the seams of an old shirt, was not how much worse could it have been. The question they should have been asking was how much worse could it get?
Greater Los Angeles Quarantine Zone, California
On a purely intellectual level, Quincy understood that energy drinks had not always been a thing. There was a time when soldiers were actually given amphetamines to keep them awake—he was pretty sure that was still actually a thing with fighter pilots and Special Forces types—or had to resort to coffee. Not him. Not any of the other men and women assigned to burn crews in Los Angeles either. Red Bull or Monster or anything cold and in a colorful can was the drink of choice. The cold part was a bit tricky, since power was only intermittent throughout the city. Quantity wasn’t a real problem, though. There were plenty of convenience stores and bodegas, most of them already semi-looted, but energy drinks weren’t a high-demand item. He’d had his partner, Janet Bibsby, pull the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on their way to the next address they’d been assigned for cleansing. The 7-Eleven was soot damaged and smoking lightly, but it wasn’t too bad inside, and he’d been psyched to find that the cooler case was still cold despite the power being out.
He took another sip of his Red Bull. His hands were shaking a bit from all the caffeine and whatever other chemicals were in there. He’d been bagging maybe two hours of sack time on average, and it was a drag. The Staples Center demolition had been sort of terrifying, partially because it was his first time seeing the egg sacs, and partially because there were so many of them. Mostly, since then, it had just become work. Yes sir, I’ll burn that building real good, sir.
He looked out the window of the JLTV. It was just him and Janet Bibsby on this run. They were down to dealing with smaller infestations, supposedly. Their list of targets consisted of single-family dwellings and small apartment buildings.
“Next left,” he said. She didn’t have to slow down since she was only doing five or ten miles an hour. The streets were in rough shape. LA looked like a war zone. It was a war zone. Smashed cars everywhere. Tons of fires that were plain old arson or accidents, not actually deliberate attempts to destroy spiders. And the bodies. He tried not to look at those.
Absent the destruction, this would have been a nice little street on which to raise a family. Well-maintained lawns and small ranch-style houses, though Quincy had the feeling that a starter home probably cost triple his best guess. You’ve got to pay for the sunshine, baby.
Janet pulled the JLTV alongside the curb. Even if the address hadn’t been marked on the list, it would have been obvious. Spotters had marked it with a big black X spray-painted on the house’s red garage door. Quincy slammed back the rest of his can of Red Bull, reached back for his gear bag, and got out.
Ahead of him, Janet had pulled out a cigarette and was already puffing away. He didn’t let her smoke in the JLTV, and it pissed her off to no end. It might have bothered him if she was hot and he wanted to nail her, but she looked almost uncannily like his younger brother, and he hated the smell of smoke. Cigarette smoke. He already smelled like the regular kind of smoke. They’d been burning shit down for days now. Everything smelled like regular smoke
.
He waited for Janet to finish her cigarette, sorting through his gear. Supposedly, troops trained in the use of flamethrowers were going to be coming in the morning. That would be handy for some of the smaller infestations. He’d seen a design for a homemade flamethrower that some dude had put up on the Internet, and they’d even tried to put one together, but they couldn’t get it to work. A flamethrower would be pretty great for this gig. Anybody could pull the trigger and bake some spiders. But until the new units showed up, the army was stuck with guys like Quincy. He’d be a lot more comfortable wiring bridges for demolition, or rigging the standard explosives, but he was okay with doing it this way. The trick was to make sure everything was contained. There was a lot of emphasis on the idea of making sure that no spiders or egg sacs were blown clear of the demolition areas. It wouldn’t do to have it start raining spiders.
Janet crushed her cigarette out on the driveway and they walked up to the front door. Might as well go in the easy way, Quincy figured.
It had gotten kind of boring. Routine wasn’t exactly the right word, because there was nothing routine about this, but it had been the same everywhere he’d gone since the Staples Center. Sure, twice it had been nothing at all. The first false alarm was two days ago, an apartment in a six-unit building, and the second time, yesterday, was a preschool. Empty. Both times, he and Janet had swept the buildings from top to bottom, but there was nothing. False alarms. The other places they’d gone to had all been infested, but the infestations were nothing like the Staples Center. There’d be a room or two littered with cold, chalky egg sacs. The most they’d seen, in the basement of an office building that had clearly seen better days, was maybe fifty or sixty football-sized sacs. But it was the same thing at all the sites. Wire it up, burn it down. This was their sixth, no, seventh stop of the day?
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