Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  But because of Julie, when he unearthed the egg sac, he’d recognized what it was. He couldn’t really say that he was a fan of spiders, but he was a fan of Julie, and he was smart enough to know taking an interest in her work would be good for him. Plus, you know, the egg sac had been buried under the spider line, and he’d already been keeping an eye out. Julie said her professor had some sort of crackpot interest in the Nazca spider line, and since Pierre had his own crackpot interest in Julie Yoo, he’d been hoping for something cool. It had actually been pretty extraordinary, because the egg sac had been found buried in a wooden box near some wooden stakes, all of them testing out at around ten thousand years old, which was way older than the rest of the lines. And then, the egg sac. Okay, he hadn’t really recognized it right away. It was weird. Hard and cold, like a fossil or something. Actually, it would have made sense if it was a fossil, but he’d put it in the FedEx box to Julie . . .

  And then. Well. Scary-time.

  So, yeah. He’d spent most of the past ten days or so expecting the red dirt of the Nazca plains to explode with spiders. Every night, in his thin nylon tent, after Bea rolled off him, neither one quite happy about the experience, he fell asleep waiting for skittering spiders to envelop them.

  But nope. Nothing. One of the local villagers who delivered fresh food on a regular basis told their cook there had been rumors of something in Manú National Park, but that was it. Peru was still more or less unscathed.

  If he and Bea had something that was closer to a real relationship, maybe he would have confided in her. But they didn’t really talk much, which was probably for the best, because she came from a pretty conservative family, which, come to think of it, might have explained why the sex was mediocre. Anyway, the more they talked the more awkward all of it was. So mostly they watched movies on one of the laptops or played Connect Four on the little travel set that Bea had brought with her. No, she wasn’t the person for him to confess Julie’s warning to, and finally, he’d gone to Dr. Botsford.

  Dr. Botsford had done that thing he did where he tilted his head back slightly so that he could peer at you through the half-glasses perched at the end of his nose. There was a whole theatricality to the way he conveyed disappointment. He wasn’t a yeller. But he’d look at you through his glasses, gently raise an eyebrow, and then exhale forcefully. He liked to wear an old bomber jacket and fedora, like he thought he was Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones. To be fair, most women considered him handsome, and Pierre thought that if you squinted just right, Dr. Botsford really did kind of sort of look a bit like Indiana Jones. But old Indiana Jones. From the fourth movie. He must have been in his midfifties, already on his fourth marriage, all to former graduate students, and given what happened every night with him and Natalie, Pierre figured that Dr. Botsford would be moving on to wife number five soon enough. Not that it stopped him from acting like he had all the moral authority in the world.

  “Oh, Pierre,” he said. “I am so, so disappointed in you. How could you not tell us about this warning from your girlfriend?” Sure enough, his head was tilted back and he was peering through his glasses at Pierre. Dr. Botsford shook his head, and in his most solemn, fatherly voice, continued, “This feels like a great betrayal.”

  They were sitting around the campfire while they talked about it, and while the other graduate students were, ostensibly, trying not to listen, they were, of course, completely listening. Pierre stole a glance at Bea. Uh oh. That didn’t look good. She’d definitely caught the word girlfriend.

  “I think you’re missing the point, Dr. Botsford,” Pierre said as gently as he could.

  “Oh, am I, Pierre? And what would the point be, if it’s not that you have betrayed the trust of me, our whole team, and, yes, to some extent, the Peruvian people?”

  Pierre had to resist rolling his eyes. “I think the point is that there might be more of those egg sacs full of spiders.”

  Dr. Botsford pushed his glasses up on his nose and considered Pierre. “Well. Yes. That seems like a reasonable concern. But if there were more of them, couldn’t we have expected them to hatch by now?”

  Pierre stared at Dr. Botsford. Like Pierre was supposed to know? “I’m just saying that, given the way the egg sac was placed in that box, like it was some sort of religious—”

  “The whole spider line is likely of religious significance.”

  “Fine, yes, but maybe they’re connected? Doesn’t that seem likely? It was really clear that somebody put the egg sac there. It wasn’t just, you know, randomly buried or whatever. It was arranged like a sacred object.”

  He hadn’t noticed Bea moving closer. All the other graduate students had moved closer actually, but Bea was sitting on the rock next to him now. “Okay,” she said, “let’s assume there are more of those egg sacs, and the one you sent off to your girlfriend”—Pierre winced—“hatched, doesn’t that mean the others would have hatched? And we would have been eaten. Ergo, no other egg sacs under the spider line. Probably. But that leaves the more important question. If the egg sac thing was buried there as some sort of ritualistic object, if it was put there because it had some sort of meaning, who buried it, and why?”

  Pierre didn’t have an answer. Dr. Botsford sucked air through his teeth and looked down his nose at all of them, playing the professor for all it was worth. “I think,” he said, “tomorrow we’ll try to find some answers.”

  Pierre was almost beside himself. Here he’d been panicked, worried that spiders were going to burst from the ground and eat them, and when he’d finally confided his fears, Dr. Botsford’s response was that they needed to find some answers? How about they run the heck away?

  If anything, Dr. Botsford looked thrilled, and Pierre realized that his advisor was already thinking about the papers he would write, the attention he could get, the new graduate students he would draw to him.

  Dr. Botsford, Pierre realized, had profoundly different priorities than he did.

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

  They’d taken the helicopters to Las Vegas, and to Kim’s surprise, that wasn’t the end of the road. All thirty-two of the Marines had been ordered to escort Shotgun and Fred and Amy and Gordo and their chocolate lab onto the waiting plane to accompany them to Maryland. “We’re on orders the whole way,” Staff Sergeant Rodriguez had told them. “Until further notice. Personal protection detail. Wherever these four go, uh, plus the dog, we go.”

  Usually, whatever the orders were, somebody in the platoon would bellyache, but there’d been no complaining about getting out of California. Standing guard over a few civilians sounded like an incredibly cushy job. Quickly, it became apparent that not only was this going to be a cushy detail, but it was also going to be sort of fun. Everybody loved Claymore, and Claymore thrived on the attention of an entire platoon. Shotgun and Gordo were nice enough guys, though only Honky Joe seemed nerdy enough to hold his own with them, but Amy and Fred liked the attention almost as much as the dog, and the truth was, Fred, in particular, was a hoot.

  The trip was convoluted. With all the air operations and military traffic, they couldn’t go direct. From Vegas, they’d been redirected to an air force base in one of the Carolinas—it was a bit of a blur—where they’d been billeted for two days. And then back in the air, to DC, all of them loaded up in five gunships. The helicopters had gone low and fast over Washington, cruising over readily identifiable landmarks and giving Kim a quick glance at her parents’ house before heading out to Bethesda. Landing in one of the parking lots of the National Institutes of Health was rather anticlimactic. Shotgun and Gordo and the mysterious black box that was evidently the cause of all this fuss were whisked into the government building, and her fire team was tasked with keeping Fred and Amy out of trouble.

  Easier said than done.

  Amy insisted on taking Claymore for a walk. It was clear that if he spent much more time being guarded by thirty-plus doting Marines, he was going to become a fat-ass dog soon enou
gh. So she and Elroy and Duran and Mitts walked with Fred and Amy while they walked Claymore. The dog was interested in sniffing and pissing on as many things as possible. Kim didn’t mind pulling guard duty. Every time she tried to sleep she fell into an endless loop of images of firing on civilians, of the fast sweep of spiders moving toward them, of the bumpy, gritty flight across the desert to temporary safety. No, this wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t even like there was anything to guard Fred and Amy from. There was such a mix of army and Marines and navy and air force in the parking lot and general vicinity that the biggest threat to their safety was probably an accidental weapons discharge. Basically, it was just glorified babysitting.

  After they’d done a lap around a few buildings and approached the outer edges of the security cordon—a pair of MPs had politely but firmly turned the party back toward the NIH building—Fred’s attention had been drawn to the three M1 Abrams tanks that occupied the outer edges of the west side of the parking lot. He was delighted to find out, after a little conversation, that one of the tank drivers, a nineteen-year-old kid from Alabama who barely looked like he was sixteen, with close-cropped hair and not even the barest hint of stubble on his face, was also gay. Fred seemed fascinated by the contrast between what he termed the “hypermasculinity” of the soldier and his own more flamboyant self.

  Kim thought Fred was making a little too much of the difference. Yeah, the kid had played football and liked to go hunting, and for all that, had been happily out as gay all through high school, but it wasn’t such a big deal anymore. There were plenty of Marines who were openly gay, at least three that Kim knew of in their platoon. Sure, maybe there was a time when that could get you discharged, but that time had passed. Which was more or less what the kid was saying.

  “Generational divide, sir. I was voted the prom king and my boyfriend at the time was voted prom queen.”

  “As a cruel joke? Like in Carrie? And then they dumped cow’s blood on you?” Fred asked.

  “I believe that was pig’s blood, sir, but no, not like Carrie. Completely unironic. The student body actually organized a protest against the administration to force the vote. We shut the school down for three days. There was a nice article about it in the New York Times, and our principal apologized for not allowing the students to vote for two prom kings instead of forcing us to be king and queen.”

  Fred shook his head. “I was definitely born at the wrong time.”

  “Could have been worse, sir. I had a great-uncle who was gay and lived in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic.”

  Fred stared at the kid. “What the hell are you doing driving a tank?”

  The soldier shrugged. He really did look young, Kim thought. “I like to blow shit up, sir. Tanks are good for that.”

  After a while, Fred and Amy wandered off, with Kim and her squad following, and then finally they ended up back at the gunships. By then, all of them were bored and a little cranky. Except for Claymore.

  Chocolate labs, Kim thought. Those suckers are always happy.

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

  The ST11 wasn’t working like it was supposed to.

  Shotgun had run through the basic concept with Melanie and the other scientists. Some of what he talked about was incomprehensible to Gordo, even though he’d worked on the project, but most of the scientists seemed to follow along. It wasn’t, when you came right down to it, a particularly complicated idea: use subsonic sound waves to make the bugs, more or less, shake themselves to death. Thankfully, none of them asked why it was called the ST11, because as amusing as calling it the Spinal Tap 11 was to Gordo and Shotgun, Gordo figured they might lose some credibility if the scientists thought the name was just a joke. And they had a lot of credibility, at least when they first walked into the conference room. After all, they’d been delivered by military gunship at the behest of CIA director Gibbons. It didn’t hurt either that Shotgun could hold his own with this group of PhDs. Gordo was no dullard himself, but Shotgun was smart enough to make Melanie stop fiddling around on her tablet and listen to him, and then for Melanie to get up and go get Julie, and then for Julie to go get the three other scientists.

  Finally, they’d captured a single spider from the brood in the biohazard unit, which was actually a lot more complicated than it sounded, and involved a lot of false starts and patience and hitting the button on the air lock at just the right moment so they captured one, and only one, spider, and making absolutely sure there was one spider in the cage and no extra spiders inside the air lock just lurking and waiting to feast on human flesh. Once that was done, they’d taken the spider into another part of the building, hooked up the ST11, and . . .

  Not much.

  The spider had been scrabbling against the glass of its cage, in a display of fury and hunger that was, Gordo had to admit, pretty creepy. They’d rigged up a camera to record the results of the test, and then Shotgun had aimed the ST11 at the cage and turned it on. The field version would run off batteries, but the beta version needed to be plugged in. Standard 120-volt outlet was fine, thank you. Shotgun fired it up, and it was pretty darn anticlimactic.

  Gordo knew the spider wasn’t going to explode in some Technicolor rainbow of gore, but the idea was that the thing would, at the very least, keel over and die. Even though the frequencies were directed, they could all feel the table shaking from the low, rumbling growl of the ST11. But the spider didn’t explode, and it didn’t die. In fact, it didn’t do much of anything other than scuttle over to the far side of the cage. After a few seconds it started scraping at the plastic liner on the bottom of the container, and then, after a few seconds of that, it settled down for what Gordo would have assumed was a nap if it weren’t for the creepy way its many eyes stayed open and occasionally flicked around.

  Nobody said anything. They didn’t have to. Gordo could see Dr. Nieder’s slumped shoulders, could see Dr. Guyer rocking back in her chair and looking at the ceiling, chewing on her lip, could see Dr. Haaf glowering at the table. He couldn’t bear to look at his friend, because he knew that Shotgun would look bereft. He’d promised the director of the CIA a weapon to win this war; he’d been whisked across the country in helicopters and transport planes with a platoon of Marines as his guard. He’d taken the time of these scientists and brought them into this room to show them what he’d cooked up, and it didn’t do anything other than make for a mellow-looking spider.

  They were already through the lobby and out of the building, Shotgun carrying the ST11, neither of them saying a word, when a large, muscle-bound woman in uniform who Gordo recognized as Dr. Guyer’s minder came running after them.

  “Hold up,” the woman said. She was out of breath. “Dr. Guyer has had a thought, and she’d like to talk to you again.”

  Gordo looked the woman up and down. SGT. FARIL was stitched on her nameplate, and she looked, frankly, kind of terrifying. He would have bet good money that she could have kicked his ass in any kind of fight.

  “About what?” Shotgun asked.

  The woman grinned and gestured at her uniform. “Do I look like I have a clue? I just do what the bug lady says.”

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

  Aonghas put his hand on Thuy’s shoulder. She was sitting in her favorite spot, in the Eames chair by the window in the library. He couldn’t tell if she was reading her book or watching Padruig walk the rocks in front of her.

  “How is he always so dapper looking?”

  Well, that answered it. Watching his grandfather. “Don’t know. He’s always been a clotheshorse. Long as I can remember. He’s like that about everything, really. That chair you’re sitting on probably cost two thousand pounds.”

  Thuy looked down and then gently picked up her cup of tea from her thigh and moved it to the side table. Aonghas laughed. “The table probably cost just as much. He likes nice things, I guess, and there’s no real reason he can’t afford them. There was a time when that wasn’t
true, but since he started with the mysteries, money hasn’t been an issue. He figures out exactly what he wants and then spends the money so he only has to buy it once. My theory is that he doesn’t like people very much, so instead he surrounds himself with things he does like. And those things happen to be expensive and include handmade woolen trousers.”

  “And he doesn’t care that you dress like—”

  “Watch it,” Aonghas said, giving her a kiss. He fell quiet, and they both watched Padruig pacing back and forth, a loop down the rocks to the water, risking the sea spray, then back up, and then down again. His grandfather had one hand tucked into the pocket of his overcoat and the other waving around as he talked to himself.

  “How come he never remarried after your grandmother died?”

  “I don’t think he had it in him. My mom told me once that when my grandmother died, there wasn’t much joy left in his life.”

  “Except for you.”

  “He was as good of a grandfather as he could have been,” Aonghas said, “and while there were times I maybe wished it had been a little bit more of a regular childhood, it worked out pretty well.” He kissed her again.

  She smiled at him. “Do you think we’ll hear back soon? About Peru?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you think we’re right?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But I learned a long time ago,” he said, “to give him the benefit of the doubt. Either way, there isn’t a lot we can do about it. We’ve done what we can, and I think we’re here for the long haul.”