She leaned into him. “There are worse places to be.”
She was quiet then, and he knew that she was thinking about her parents, about her brother. Padruig had told her that if they could get to the island, they’d be welcome, but all three of them knew it was an empty offer. News was scarce from Stornoway and the Isle of Lewis, but Aonghas and Thuy had seen that man split open at the airport, spiders swarming from his body. Edinburgh seemed untouched, but with flights grounded, there was no way for Thuy’s parents and brother to get to them. Even if they could, it might be safer for them to stay where they were. And to pray. Nothing else was left to them.
At least the three of them were safe, Aonghas thought. At least he and Thuy and his grandfather were safe. He knew it was a selfish thought, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d lost his parents at such a young age, and he’d finally found a woman who made him understand what it could mean to love somebody for the rest of your life. It wouldn’t have helped anybody for them to be in his flat in Stornoway, or for him to be visiting Thuy in Edinburgh. What could he have done? Written the spiders away?
No, much better for them to be here, on this ridiculous rock in his family’s ridiculous castle. Padruig had made him and Thuy tour the building with him, room by room, cupboard by cupboard, in case, he said, “the old ticker goes.” How to keep the generator in working order and how to service the spare. What to check on the deep freezer, how to make sure the seals in the dry storage area were intact. When to bleed the boiler once the winter came, and when to open and close windows to make sure the damp didn’t invade the stone building. They did an inventory together, counting bins of flour and beans, canned fruit, chocolate in vacuum-sealed plastic. Padruig admitted he was less well stocked with sherry than he would have liked, “But with the little tadpole in your tummy,” he had said, “we’ve only got me and Aonghas to worry about for the next while, and we can to stick to port if need be. We’ll suffer through it together.”
It was, in some ways, almost freeing. He and Aonghas had been talking about maybe starting a new series to go along with the Harry Thorton mysteries, and both men were excited about the idea of trying to write together again. Thuy seemed content to study her medical textbooks, to read, to cook, to spend her time playing cards and chess and talking with Padruig and Aonghas. There was no point worrying about what they couldn’t control. They were safe as houses on Càidh Island, and there was nowhere they had to go. There was nowhere he wanted to go, he thought, except close to Thuy. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth.
As long as the spiders didn’t come to them, they’d be fine.
Boothton, South Dakota
Even if Jigger Spitz and his parents had still been alive, the house was too far from the highway for them to hear any explosions. They were too far from anything interesting to even see air force jets passing overhead. They were so far out in the middle of nowhere that it was a wonder Jigger Spitz had waited as long as he had to run away from the farm and head west, all the way to California, where he’d gone to university and then to law school and then settled in Los Angeles. He’d made a nice life for himself. Nothing too fancy, but certainly better than his parents could reasonably have hoped for him. Nope, he had no intention of moving back to South Dakota. Sure, he came home to visit twice a year, for Christmas and for a few days in the brutal heat of August, dutiful son that he was, and he called his mother every Sunday, usually exchanging a few words with his father about the weather and the crops and the new tractor. Once a year, in February, when things were at their gloomiest in South Dakota, and there wasn’t a lot for his parents to do on the farm, they came out to visit him in Los Angeles. They were lovely people, his parents. Polite and thoughtful and, for farmers from South Dakota, good sports about trying new dishes when he took them out to sample the high end restaurants in Los Angeles. They were always a little disappointed that he couldn’t introduce them to any movie stars. No matter how many times he tried to explain to them that just because he lived in Los Angeles didn’t mean he was friends with anybody famous, they still had slightly pursed lips by the end of their vacations. Once, they’d seen Gwyneth Paltrow coming out of a restaurant as they were entering, and that seemed to make his mother happy for a while.
But when the spiders emerged, Jigger had made it out of Los Angeles—just barely—and he couldn’t figure out where else to go but home. He’d been so scared, terrified. As soon as he’d heard what was happening he thought of the news out of Delhi. He made an immediate decision to jump in his Toyota hybrid and get the heck out of Dodge. Traffic was always a nightmare in Los Angeles, and of course it had been worse than normal, but he’d done it, he’d gotten out of the city. He thought he was going to make it without any problems until he hit the blockade. It was completely unfair. Five minutes earlier, even three minutes earlier, and he would have been through. There were only fifteen or twenty cars in front of him, but a whole line of Hummers with machine guns had shut down Highway 10, and he was stuck. He sure wasn’t about to turn around and go back to Los Angeles, so he’d sat there in his car for hours and hours, wondering if they’d ever let him through, listening to the static-laced news on the radio and keeping his phone charged, even though the cell circuits were mostly overloaded. He’d been thankful that he had a hybrid; even with running the motor occasionally to make sure the radio and cell phone charger didn’t drain the battery, he still had plenty of gas. At one point, some idiots had tried making a run for it, and one of the Hummers had opened fire. It was loud and scary and, Jigger thought, a miracle that the driver and his passenger had been able to get out of the vehicle with their hands up. But then, later, there were explosions and rockets and gunfire, cars smashing into other cars, a black flood of spiders sweeping up the road.
He’d been sleeping with the windows open to the slightly cool night air when everything went to hell. He hadn’t known what else to do, with the bright flare of fire and the incredible noise behind him, so he’d laid on the horn, like everybody else had. He’d alternated between looking in front of him, desperate to see the cars moving but also scared of the machine guns, which were firing all over the place, and looking back at the flames and explosions and people running past his car screaming. A missile landed close enough that flames actually blew past his open window, which was the scariest thing that had ever happened to him, some of the hair on his arm getting singed off and a puff of black smoke coming through the open window, until the next second, when, even scarier, he looked in the rearview mirror and thought he saw some sort of black mass rising up and rolling toward him. A woman ran out of the mass, past him. She was shrieking, with five or six black balls rolling over her face and arms. That was the first moment Jigger realized the spiders were right there, on the highway with him.
And, hallelujah, just when he thought he didn’t have a choice but to get out of his car and run for it, the military Hummers started driving off and the cars in front of him started moving, and he slammed on the gas.
He’d swatted at imaginary spiders for the next two hundred fifty miles, finally stopping for gas only when he was afraid he was going to piss himself. He went to the bathroom and washed up in the sink. He smelled like smoke and fire. Where the hair had been singed off his arm, the skin was an angry pink, and there was a smear of blood and a tender spot on the side of his neck that he wiped at with a paper towel. Once he finished cleaning himself, he heated up two convenience store frozen burritos in the microwave, grabbed a couple of sodas, a Snickers bar, a large bag of Peanut M&M’s, and then kept driving as fast as he could, to South Dakota, stopping only for gas and to vomit once on the side of the road. By the time he hit the Colorado state line, his stomach was knotted up in pain.
The last six or seven hours of the drive were a blur of fever and sweating. When he got to the house, his dad had to help him from the car and up to his childhood bedroom. His mom treated his arm with some aloe and wrapped it with a bandage, and then wiped at the blood he’d missed o
n his neck, putting another bandage over the scab there that he hadn’t even noticed. He was muttering and curled up in the fetal position by then, but his parents weren’t the type to panic. They’d lived on that farm since 1971, and there’d been plenty of stiches and cuts and fevers, and Mrs. Spitz had told her son when he’d called her from the road that only a maniac would eat burritos you could buy at a gas station. They tucked him in and went down to eat their dinner of chicken and boiled potatoes, checking in on Jigger every now and then.
Mr. and Mrs. Spitz died the way they lived: early to bed. If they’d been accountants or teachers or people who had jobs that were nine to five instead of farmers, maybe they still would have been awake when Jigger spilled open, his insides almost mummified by spider silk. The spiders he’d carried from Los Angeles to South Dakota didn’t have any trouble getting out of Jigger’s bedroom, because his parents had left the door open as they had when he’d been sick as a child. Even if they had closed the door, the spiders could have squeezed through the inch-thick gap between the door and the wood floor, an artifact of the shag carpets that the Spitzes had installed in the third year of their marriage and then ripped out in the early 1990s, when Mrs. Spitz said she wanted the hardwood floors back. If they weren’t farmers, maybe one of them would have been awake to see the spiders, black with a red stripe, spilling down the stairs and heading for their bedroom, where they’d slept since the day they were married in 1971, never a night apart. Maybe they would have been awake to see the spiders pouring through the open door, crawling over the floor, skittering across the ceiling, seeking out the hot, deep breath of the sleeping couple like there was some sort of flashing neon sign saying, GOOD EATS! GOOD EATS!
But they weren’t awake. Mr. and Mrs. Spitz were sleeping when the first threads of silk began blooming in the air around them. They were sleeping when the spiders descended and bit them. The bites felt like the time Mr. Spitz crushed his fingers in the gears of the harvester, barely escaping the loss of his hand, like the time Mrs. Spitz spilled an entire cup of boiling water on her leg. But worse. Because whatever kind of venom the spiders were secreting kept the pain so vibrant that it made the paralysis an added torture: it would have been some relief, at least, to be able to scream.
But they couldn’t scream, and they couldn’t open their eyes. Mr. Spitz was the first of the two the spiders began to feed on, the first that the red-striped spiders started dipping into and carrying, mouthful by mouthful, to the glowing, pulsing cocoon growing in Jigger’s room.
At least there was some small mercy: paralyzed, stuck with her eyes closed, Mrs. Spitz didn’t have to watch.
She had to listen, though.
And she could hear the spiders moving over the surfaces of the bedroom, the soft brush and chitter of their eight legs, the sound they made feeding on her husband, the way, near the end, his breathing got ragged and wet sounding. And then she realized she was alone in the room. Her husband was no longer breathing. She didn’t know that it had been a week since Jigger made it home. Time had stopped having meaning days ago. All she knew was the burning, pulsing pain of the spider bites, the original bites fading into something like warmth, but always, always, always, a new bite, a new source of agony, a new cup of boiling water poured on her.
She didn’t know that at that moment Melanie and Shotgun were talking again inside the NIH, that President Pilgrim was back in the Situation Room, that Aonghas and Thuy were watching Padruig pace the rocks of Càidh Island. She didn’t know that all over the globe, there were poor, unfortunate men and women suffering as she was. What she knew, without a doubt, was that she’d be next.
She prayed for it. She’d never been a religious woman. She’d gone to church most Sunday mornings, because that’s what one did, but no, she couldn’t have ever rightly said she was a believer. But she prayed. At first she prayed it would turn out to be just a bad nightmare, and then she prayed that the pain would stop. Then she prayed that she’d be able to open her eyes, so she could at least see what was happening. And then, she started praying that she’d just die from the pain, that her heart would stop, or that whatever it was that made it so she couldn’t move would spread from her arms and shoulders and legs and feet, from the muscles of her face, to the muscles in her chest and into her heart, that she’d just stop breathing. And then she prayed that she wouldn’t be able to hear anymore. And then, finally, she prayed for the spiders to just go ahead and finish what they’d started. She prayed for days and nights and days again.
And then she prayed most fervently that she would die before the thing upstairs came for her. She could hear it. The pain of the bites, the fear, the sound of her husband being eaten alive beside her, the soft, skittering movement of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of spiders around her while she was wrapped tightly in silk, so tightly that she couldn’t have moved even if she hadn’t been paralyzed, and the sound of her husband’s last breath, none of it compared to the sound coming from her son’s bedroom above her.
A thump. Tearing. Moist, shuffling, clacking. Oh god, she could hear the door open, could hear the movement on the wide plank floor, the first creak on the stairs . . . She prayed for it to be quick.
The White House
Manny didn’t have to see a mirror to know that his face was giving away the news. He could tell how panicked he must look from the way Sharon took one glance at him and then suddenly looked panicked herself.
Three in the morning? Four in the morning? He’d been sleeping on the couch in his office when the phone rang. He’d been having a good dream, for once. Him and Melanie on a beach, in Florida, in those early years of their marriage. Nothing sexy or profound, just the warmth of the sun and the sand soft beneath him. Not wistful, not a dream about missing that marriage or wanting Melanie back, but just . . . peaceful.
The ringing phone jarred him awake, and by the time he figured out that he was talking to his counterpart in the prime minister of India’s office, Sharon, who had been sleeping on the couch in the anteroom, had already come in and turned on his desk lamp.
It was a quick call. Manny put the phone down and just shook his head at Sharon. He couldn’t even figure out what to say.
“For Christ’s sake, Manny, just tell me, okay?” Sharon’s voice was shaky. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard his aide sound scared, but he figured now was as good a time as any.
“News out of India,” he said. “They’re back.”
What he didn’t say, what he was afraid to say, was that from what he could tell by the panic in his Indian counterpart’s voice on the other end of the line, it sounded like things were about to get much worse.
Los Angeles, California
The city was dead.
In Europe and South America, there are cities that only seem to come alive after midnight. In America, across the Midwest and in the small towns of the South and in New England, the lights go off and the roads roll up by nine. In larger cities that lack a cosmopolitan element, Wichita or Cleveland, Toledo, Tacoma, most things are buttoned up by eleven. On either side of the country, however, in New York City and Los Angeles, if you know where to look, things only begin to take off after the clock strikes twelve. In Los Angeles, even a month ago, that meant the Cobra Club, MacMac’s Lobster Shack, back room poker at Disco City, the red taillights of traffic backed up in certain neighborhoods and outside certain bars and clubs and restaurants well past one in the morning, two in the morning, three.
But that was a month ago.
Now, it was midnight, and the city was a ghost town. The lonely sound of sirens still drifted through the night, but the cop cars weren’t moving, and it was only a matter of time before the batteries ran down and the sirens slowed down like a record player growling and dying. Fires dotted the city, a different kind of flashing light from police cars and fire trucks. But there were no hopping dance clubs, no restaurants showing third-seating patrons to their tables. There were still close to a million people alive in the greater Los Angeles area,
but they were hiding behind closed blinds, cowering in their bedrooms. They weren’t lining up behind velvet ropes or cutting white lines on bathroom counters.
Anybody who had the means to leave had already fled Los Angeles. It wasn’t a city of refuge, if it ever had been. Even with the air force destroying overpasses and cloverleafs, making the highways impassable, those who could get out had, taking pickup trucks through the sand around ruined stretches of highway, trading what cash and jewelry they had for a spot on an overloaded boat. In at least one case of delicious irony, a fervent anti-immigration activist had blown two tires while trying to drive over bombed-out blacktop and then decided to make a go of it on foot, ultimately dying of heat and thirst almost in sight of the border with Mexico nearly thirty hours later.
Those were the lucky ones. The ones who made it out.
The ones who couldn’t flee? The old, the infirm, the poor? The ones who wouldn’t flee? The stubborn, the hopeful, people who lived in a city built on monster movies and imagined heroes, but who couldn’t believe in a terror as real as these spiders? Those were the unlucky ones. Of the list of more than five hundred confirmed infestation sites that Quincy and the military had been working from, more than three hundred had been destroyed by the army. But that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even close to enough.
Not tonight.
Tonight was the night the spiders emerged again.
Midnight, and Los Angeles, the playground of the rich and famous, showed its true colors. No longer a playground. Los Angeles became a feeding ground. Black spiders with red stripes on their backs spilled out of basements and garages, out of parking garages and food trucks, from the pits of a fifteen-minute oil change shop. They marched across sidewalks and streets, across manicured lawns and alleyways choked with dirt and weeds. They crawled up the walls of office buildings and skittered through air vents and elevator shafts, squeezed through mail slots and windows that had been cracked open to let in the breeze.
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