Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  Everywhere the spiders went, they left a trail of soft, whispering silk, sticking to trees and bushes, wrapped around men and women and children who found themselves unable to move, unable to even scream.

  Soot Lake, Minnesota

  They came before dawn.

  Mike and Leshaun were ready for them.

  Mike had passed the afternoon reading in one of the red Adirondack chairs in the picnic area. He’d had to get out of the cottage. Fanny and Dawson kept the TV news on in the living room, the radio on in the kitchen, and there wasn’t anywhere inside he could get away from the chattering buzz of doom and gloom. He could see it in the dark, hollowed circles under the anchor’s eyes, the way that there wasn’t enough makeup to stop him from looking pale and haunted under the studio lights. He could hear it in the voices of the broadcasters on National Public Radio. Panic.

  He didn’t blame them. He was scared himself. The military was turning the country into a patchwork quilt of islands, with bridges and roads already blown as far east as Chicago and St. Louis, heading rapidly toward Cleveland and Louisville. Over breakfast, Fanny had made a half-hearted joke about America as an archipelago. Nobody laughed, partly because the news was so unsettling, and partly because Fanny had to explain to Mike what an archipelago was. The video footage on the television was worse. He’d always liked disaster movies, liked watching Hollywood blow itself up, remembered how cool it had been the first time he’d seen the White House explode on-screen. Asteroids and aliens, tidal waves and earthquakes, even machines rising up to wipe the planet free of the human scourge. In a darkened cinema—Annie was perfectly content to watch movies on a tablet, but give him a big screen, comfy chairs, and a bucket of greasy popcorn any day of the week—it was a diversion. But watching it on the actual news? The videos were often shaky, hurried cell phone images or taken by cameramen running to catch the shot and played on an endless loop on CNN, FOX, MSNBC.

  But it was almost peaceful out there, on the lawn. Leshaun was napping, and Fanny and Dawson were inside, prepping dinner or talking or just being married, and Mike was happy to stay out of their way. The living room had a bookcase stuffed with thick thrillers and horror novels, tomes about WWII and Vietnam and the invention of steel or gunpowder or the microprocessor, cooking magazines and home decorating magazines, and even a smattering of novels featuring the Oprah seal or stickers indicating they’d won something. Mike had already worked his way through the spy thrillers and now he was on the cop thrillers. They were more his speed. He liked reading about the good guys stopping the bad guys. The heroes were like him. Men with badges and guns. Except they were all taller, better looking, and more likely to get the woman. And they didn’t have little girls lying on the grass beside them, giggling at a movie they were watching on a tablet.

  He glanced down at Annie and smiled. She had covered herself with a towel and was hunched over the screen, headphones on her ears. He could see her feet sticking out and hear her laughing every few minutes. She’d burned through all the animated movies and kid-appropriate movies Fanny had brought, and the adults had more or less thrown up their hands and started letting her watch movies that were, perhaps, a bit much for a nine-year-old girl. At dinner the day before, she’d accidently dropped her chicken on the floor, yelled “Balls!” and then collapsed in a fit of laughter. The grown-ups, Mike included, were too startled—and amused—to offer anything approaching discipline.

  So he’d been reading, listening to his daughter snickering every now and then, and glancing up occasionally over the lake when he’d heard the first buzz of the motor. He instinctively put his hand on his pistol, but he’d waited until the boat came closer before walking down to the dock. It was the grizzled-looking black dude with the white beard. He came in very slowly, holding his hands up to show Mike they were empty. He cut the motor but didn’t make a move to get out of the boat, instead just reaching out and holding on to one of the pillars. Mike didn’t draw his Glock, but he kept his hand on the butt of the gun.

  “Just being neighborly,” the old man said. “Not planning on getting out, and I don’t need anything. Wife and I are fixed up fine. I know this isn’t the time to be making new friends, though I’ve had a conversation or two in the past with that other fellow and his wife up there in the cottage, the ones who own the place.”

  “I appreciate that,” Mike said. “But we aren’t really set up for visitors at this time.”

  “I understand, I understand. I understand that well enough. Thought I’d make sure you and yours are all set. When I came by here the other day, you had a black fellow with you as well, and you didn’t seem too shy about letting me know you weren’t open for conversation.”

  “Interesting times we’re living in,” Mike said.

  “Oh, yes. And I don’t mean to say otherwise. I come in showing you my hands were empty because I didn’t want you thinking anything else, but that’s not to say I haven’t been keeping my rifle close by. I wouldn’t leave my wife alone in our little cottage if she wasn’t a better shot than me.”

  “And are you a good shot?”

  The man gave a slight grin. “Fair enough.”

  “Was that you I heard yesterday, taking target practice?”

  The grin was gone. “Nope. And that’s why I thought I’d stop by, have a word. I figured you and that other fellow for lawmen the way you held your pistols. You a cop?”

  “Federal.”

  “So you know what it means to hear gunshots and then to see something burning up in the night. I was a sheriff until I retired a few years ago. Small town, but still. With the way drugs are, small town don’t mean as much as it used to. I suppose you’ve seen some things, like I’ve seen some things. And last night I heard shots and then saw a good glow across the lake from us.” He glanced past Mike and nodded. “Got myself a good pair of binoculars, and seen you had a kid with you, so I wanted to do right, wanted to make sure that I told you to keep that gun you got your hand on close to you, wanted to make sure you or that black fellow was keeping an eye on things. Not just during the day, but at night too.”

  Mike had said that, yes, he and Leshaun would be careful and thanked the man. The old guy had pushed off from the dock, started his motor, and went back down the lake, presumably to rejoin his sharpshooting wife.

  Mike wasn’t worried about the old man and his wife. He seemed plenty capable of taking care of himself. And he wasn’t worried about intruders either. He and Leshaun would keep Annie safe.

  The three shirtless, tattooed guys were utterly predictable and unsuited for the job. They came to the cottage close to four in the morning, which was smart. Dead of night, too early for anybody to be up making coffee, too late for night owls. And they approached through the woods, smart enough to know that the sound of a motor would have cut through the night like an alarm clock. But those were the only smart moves they made.

  They all had camouflage pants and jackets and hunting rifles, making their intentions clear, which was dumb. And they came up the trail through the forest toward the cottage in a tight line, and that was dumb too. They had flashlights, each of them, and that was the dumbest thing they did. In the darkness before the dawn, they might as well have been holding flashing beacons instead. Mike supposed they had planned to turn off their flashlights when they got closer, would have quieted down and tried to spread out around the cottage as they got ready to commit whatever acts of malfeasance they had planned. But the three men never got close enough to enact whatever plan they had. They were dumb and he and Leshaun were smart. And the men may have been mean in their intentions, but he and Leshaun were meaner in their actions.

  Mike had been clear with Dawson and Fanny about what he expected to happen. He’d told them to expect to hear some noises and to stay buttoned down, that he and Leshaun would be a while cleaning things up. Their job, he told Dawson and Fanny, was to tell Annie to go back to sleep in the event she woke up—the kid was an incredibly heavy sleeper and the cottage was well insulat
ed, but still—and to hold on to the 12-gauge and the Glock 27 as a last resort, in case he and Leshaun had figured wrong.

  But he and Leshaun hadn’t figured wrong. The three white boys came traipsing down the path in the woods carrying their hunting rifles, one by one, showing no field discipline, so close together that if he’d had a high enough caliber rifle, Mike could have used a single bullet to string them together.

  It wasn’t sporting, but he and Leshaun had agreed ahead of time that, particularly given the friendly warning from the old man and the events of the days before, this was no time for sportsmanship. If those three men wanted to come in the light of day with their hands open and empty, why then Mike would be happy to talk with them, but if they came in the middle of the night with guns and bad intentions, Mike felt no need to play fair.

  Dawson and Fanny had been quiet, hesitant, as Mike and Leshaun told them the plan, but Leshaun had put it plainly for them.

  “Bad people do bad things,” he’d said. “In normal times, Mike’s job, my job, is to catch those kind of people, and we’ve both seen some things I’m not ever going to talk about. But these aren’t normal times, and we’re not going to wait for them to do whatever it is they want to do.”

  They waited for the three men to walk past them, and then Mike and Leshaun put them down. It was noisy, the flash of their service guns leaving them star-blinded, but it was quick and easy. Two of the men were just sacks of meat afterward, but the third was breathing in sloppy, ragged bubbles, so Mike used another bullet. They’d already dug the graves in the loamy dirt of the woods. All that was left to do was drag the bodies to the holes and cover them up.

  It was pushing five in the morning by the time he and Leshaun flashed their lights at the cabin in the agreed-upon sequence, letting Fanny and Dawson know it was just them and that all was clear. They crept inside as quietly as they could, and by the time Annie woke up, he and Leshaun were both showered and cleaned up. If Annie noticed the extra rifles in the house, she didn’t say anything.

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

  It was a motley group. Dichtel and Nieder, the kid from CNN, Julie Yoo and Melanie, Shotgun and Gordo. A single glass cage with a wire lid, holding two spiders, was centered on the conference table. Through the large window overlooking the parking lot, the early morning looked gorgeous again. No clouds, the sun slanting over the city, the glass and metal of low-slung office towers catching the light. It was Melanie’s favorite kind of morning, the kind when she normally got out of bed and slipped on a pair of shorts and a jogging bra, laced up her shoes, grabbed her cell and some headphones, and pounded out three or four miles before showering and heading to her lab on campus. But she wasn’t going to get to go for a run today. She wasn’t going to get to do anything until Dr. Mike Haaf got back.

  Finally, outside the glass door, Melanie saw Sergeant Faril step aside so that Haaf could come into the room. Before he even opened the door, however, they all knew what he was going to say.

  “No dice. Still can’t get a response.”

  Laura Nieder threw her pen on the table. “Crap. Why don’t the goddamn Japanese understand—”

  Melanie held up her hand. “Laura. Come on. They’re dealing with their own problems right now. We’ll keep trying, but in the meantime, let’s work with what we’ve got. I know it’s not much, but the truth is, we’re running out of time.”

  They started at the beginning. Listing it out. The egg sac from Peru, calcified and old, pulled out of the ground in a box that pointed to it being at least ten thousand years old. China. India. How aggressive the spiders were. The way they used people as hosts, how their life cycles accelerated at a ridiculous rate, feeding and breeding and spawning even more quickly. They noted Teddie’s point, that the die-out was too orderly, too consistent for a naturally condensed life cycle, that there should have been overlapping waves of spiders both being born and dying at the same time.

  All the while, the two spiders in the cage crawled against the glass, pressing themselves first to one side and then the other, trying to get out. Not to escape, but to feed. In the moments when everyone was quiet, they could hear the tap of the spiders’ legs against the glass. Midway through, Fred and Amy, trailed by the chocolate lab, came in bringing donuts and bagels, a carafe of coffee, a bowl of apples.

  Claymore barked at the spiders until Gordo whistled him over and started scratching the dog’s chest. The dog settled into an occasional low growl. Fred and Amy sat down and Melanie didn’t bother to kick them out. It didn’t seem worth the effort.

  “And now we’ve got the Japanese video with what we think of as the ‘normal’ spiders and the new, red-striped spiders apparently feeding the giant egg sacs. But I think we need to start at the beginning. With the question of why these things are just coming out of the ground now,” Melanie said.

  Haaf spoke up. “We keep coming back to the same concept. Cicadas. Nobody really understands how they do it, either.”

  Melanie had to stop herself from shuddering. People always thought it was funny that she could work with spiders but be creeped out by cicadas, but there was something about them that just made her feel cold. Their blood-red eyes. The way their tymbals clicked and their discarded exoskeletons crunched underfoot. She loved living in Washington, DC, and working at American University most of the time, but the downside was the cicada swarms.

  “So why would these spiders hide between cycles?” Dichtel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Haaf said. “We think that it makes sense with cicadas, that by having the main swarms hatch on thirteen-year and seventeen-year cycles, it means that no predator can keep pace with them. They come out, breed, swarm, whatever, and there’s no real natural predator. Sure, they’re only out for a few weeks, but in that time, there’s nothing that can stop them. There are plenty of things happy to feed on cicadas, but the numbers work in the cicadas’ favor. There isn’t a predator that has specifically evolved to feed on them, which means that things that eat cicadas are doing it just because they’re there. They end up satiated.”

  Predator satiation, Melanie thought. One of those insane ways that evolution sidestepped problems. All the cicadas had to do was breed in large enough numbers so that no matter how many of them got eaten, whatever it was that was feeding on them eventually got full and gave up.

  “Maybe these spiders originally had some sort of natural predator, then?” Nieder said. “So as a defense mechanism, the spiders evolved along the same lines as cicadas, developing hatching cycles with long enough gaps that whatever it was that had threatened them had died off?”

  Teddie looked skeptical. “Like what? Giant spider-eating birds? If you’re telling me that the next plague that’s going to happen is flocks of killer birds like in that Hitchcock film, I give up. I’ll just go ahead and jump out the window right now.”

  “First of all,” Haaf said, “that’s safety glass so you’d probably just bounce off. Second of all, no, the point is that the hatching cycle means they can avoid specific predators.”

  Gordo opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and leaned back in his chair. But it was too late. Everybody was already looking at him. Screw it. “If they’re like cicadas, can’t we expect them to just sort of, you know, go back underground at some point?”

  They all swung their attention back to Haaf.

  “Maybe?” he said. “But the thing that worries me is, if we compare these to cicadas, well, cicadas use predator satiation as a defensive mechanism, but things are turned around here. The spiders are the ones feeding. Nothing is eating them. Unless the argument is that sooner or later the spiders are going to get sick of eating us, we’ve got a problem. And, well, I think we can all agree we probably don’t want to wait until the spiders have had their fill of human flesh. Plus, it seems pretty clear we’re on the verge of a new wave here. We’ve got the super-sized egg sacs—”

  “That glow,” Shotgun said mildly.

  “—that
glow,” Haaf continued, gesturing to the cage, “and now we have spiders with red stripes mixed in with our good old black spiders, some of which have markings on their abdomens that seem to indicate they’re breeders. And some sketchy reports that the spiders with red stripes may be either significantly less aggressive or significantly more aggressive, depending on the circumstances, plus we’ve got a mix of egg sacs that seem to be designed for the long haul and sacs that are, because we lack a better term, fresher.”

  Melanie stood up. All of a sudden she felt cooped up in the conference room. She glanced at the two spiders. Caged. She felt caged. “Thanks to Teddie’s video editing, we know that the first wave of spiders seems to let about one in five people live, and we think about one in ten of those survivors are infected. Roughly ten percent infection rates. Again, we aren’t completely certain, and I know those numbers have been moving around, but I think we’re comfortable with using those as our baseline. And we’ve all seen the video of the way the spiders seem to move in patterns that don’t make a lot of sense. Or, rather, too much sense.” Melanie looked around the room at all the people nodding. “And we’ve got the box from Shotgun that seems to turn our spiders into pacifists. Again, I can only say these things with real confidence about the first-wave spiders. Who knows what the red-backs are like or what that giant thing is in Japan? But at least these ones seem to calm down when Shotgun does his thing.”

  More nodding. They’d blasted the spiders in the biohazard unit with the ST11 and dropped a goat in. The poor goat stood there in the middle of the room bleating and shitting, its eyes rolling in the back of its head, but as long as the low thrum of the ST11 washed over the room, the spiders left it alone. But, god, the moment Shotgun powered the machine down? It was scary how quickly they stripped it to the bone.