Melanie sat back down. She was out of steam. “Which leaves us where, exactly?”
Silence.
“Completely screwed, still.” It was Nieder. “And I say this based only on what Teddie was able to pull together on the patterns. I’ve done most of my research on how we can apply insect swarm behavior to the battlefield, and the truth of the matter is that we mostly can’t. There are applications for robotics in the battlefield, but swarm behavior is too complicated. It’s like modeling water flow in a dry riverbed filled with rocks. Once the water’s in there, you can see the way the water splits and goes around the rocks, filling in behind them, but to try to model something like that for practical purposes? Imagine a dry riverbed where the rocks are always moving around, and then try to figure out what the water will do. So mostly, what we do is just program troops—and by troops, we’re talking about mini-quad copters and autonomous vehicles—to maintain a specific distance from all other units and obstacles around them. It looks fancy, but it’s static.”
She pointed to the cage on the table. “But the way these spiders seem to interact and move is so scary because it’s both more dynamic and more controlled than we’d expect. On the simplest level, ants swarm a picnic because one ant finds some crumbs and leaves a trail of pheromones, and then another ant reinforces that trail, and all of a sudden the trail is like a highway for the ants, and your picnic is ruined. With the spiders, however, it’s different. They act and react in unison. Or, not in unison, exactly, but with a synchronicity that doesn’t make sense. At some point, when enough spiders have swarmed somebody, the other spiders divert around the victim—like water around a rock in a river, actually—and seek out somebody new. And when somebody’s been passed over, whether they are left for what we assume is a future meal, or whether they are infected with eggs, any spider that happens upon them seems to know it.”
Dichtel leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “And we’ve got at least anecdotal evidence from Japan that the red-back spiders ate at least the first three people who tried to go in and get data unprotected, but they weren’t aggressive toward the scientist in a hazmat suit. So, what? Scent? They couldn’t smell him?”
“That would make sense,” Nieder said. “Pheromones or something that would mark paths, more pheromones to indicate prey that should be left alone.”
Fred took a donut and grinned. “Maybe it’s brain waves. There’s a giant queen controlling all of them. Spiders from Mars.”
Shotgun sighed and patted his husband’s thigh. “That’s not funny, Fred. Sorry,” he said. “Fred can only go so long without being the center of attention.”
“No,” Gordo said. He said it so loudly and emphatically that he startled himself. It was still only a half-formed thought, and he was trying to work it out as he talked. “Think about it for a second. We’ve been trying to figure out how exactly it is that the spiders started dying out at the same time. Not just in Los Angeles, but everywhere.” He spun to point at Melanie. “You said it happened here in the hospital unit, too, after your grad student, uh . . . Anyway, it doesn’t make sense that they all got exhausted at the same time. And then there’s the way the spiders react to the ST11. I mean, just look at them. Shotgun, turn it on again.”
They stared at the spiders, skittering up and down the cage, trying single-mindedly to get through the glass. And then came the hum and low thrum of Shotgun firing up the machine, and the spiders suddenly lost interest.
“That’s not pheromones,” Gordo said.
Fred looked delighted. “I was right? It’s brain waves from an alien spider?”
“Oh my god.” Shotgun had his fist balled up to his mouth. “Chicago. They weren’t aggressive, right? We thought maybe it was bullshit reporting, but hadn’t they hatched out of some guy’s body, not a freestanding egg sac?”
“So?” Melanie asked, but she could feel it. They could all feel it: they were close to something. It was all just a puzzle. Research was simply gathering data and then figuring out where the pieces went. And for the first time, it felt like they might have the pieces.
“So, whoever that poor sap was, he wasn’t from Chicago. There hasn’t been an outbreak in Chicago. We’ve got to assume he came from Los Angeles or maybe somewhere else. He could have been infected in India and slipped through the cracks. Or Norway, or, heck, anywhere. And then if we’ve got spiders on a different cycle, if these red-backs come out slower, he’s like a ticking time bomb. And maybe he knows it. He knows something’s wrong, he’s been hearing on the news about people splitting open, so he’s scared, because what’s going to happen if he tells people? He’s afraid to tell people, but it’s got to hurt. So what does he do?”
“He hides,” Haaf said. They were all leaning in now.
“He hides,” Shotgun agreed. “He’s maybe a guest at the hotel or he sneaks in off the street, and he goes down to the subbasement maybe because he’s scared and maybe because he thinks that might be safer for other people, or maybe just because of whatever that instinct is in our caveman brains that drives us to shelter. And when the spiders come out of him . . . Nothing. If we believe this was a real occurrence, that this, what was he, the guy who found him? A porter?”
“Night manager. Assistant manager. Something like that,” Melanie said.
“If we believe he’s not just making this up, which we need to believe because he described the red-backs accurately, before we’d seen the Japan video . . . Well, if we believe what he said, he sees the spiders come out of the guy’s body and they don’t do anything. They just sort of mill around like I’m giving them a shot with the ST11.”
“So why wouldn’t they have attacked him?” Nieder asked. “We can argue that in Japan it was because the scientist was fully suited up and they couldn’t smell him or sense him for some reason. But why did they leave the guy in Chicago alone?”
Shotgun grinned and turned to Fred. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but you are a genius, honey.” He kissed Fred and then turned back to the room. “Because Teddie was right. We’re thinking of this the wrong way. This isn’t millions and millions of spiders. It’s millions and millions of pieces of the same spider. And for some reason, down in the subbasement of that hotel, their signal was blocked. Like trying to make a phone call from the fourth level of an underground parking garage. Whatever it was that makes all those individual spiders a single unit couldn’t get through, and the spiders were so disoriented that it was like the hotel manager was wearing a hazmat suit. Without the signal to guide them, to tell them to attack, he might as well not even have been there.”
The room was still, and slowly Shotgun’s smile faded from his face. He shook his head. “No. That doesn’t work.”
“Why not?” Haaf asked.
Shotgun looked frustrated. “It doesn’t hold together. In Delhi and at least a few other places, these spiders came up from underground. And all over the world, they’re coming out at the same time, dying off at the same time. They’re communicating somehow. They have to be. So why couldn’t they communicate in the subbasement of that Chicago hotel? What was it about that space that turned them quiet?” He reached out and tapped the ST11. “What is it about this device that seems to shut them off?”
He looked around the room and then sighed. “It’s all pretty thin, isn’t it?”
Melanie stood up and put her hand against the glass of the insectarium. “Thin? Well, I wouldn’t skate on it, but it’s a nice start. So if we don’t know why your machine seems to turn off the spiders, we better figure it out.”
Chicago, Illinois
It figured. Danny MacDowell had been a Cubs fan his whole life, despite being born and bred in St. Louis. It had caused him no end of grief, plus a few locker-stuffing incidents in high school, but he’d gone off to Columbia College Chicago and lived in Chicago his entire adult life. He only agreed to marry his wife when she said if they had kids he could name them Wrigley and Field, and he’d insisted on a December wedding because he
sure wasn’t going to take a honeymoon in the middle of baseball season.
There’d been some good years with the team, but there’d been more bad years. Such was the life of a Cubs fan. A few years back he’d gone to Vegas for a convention, and he’d met a salesman from Boston. They’d shared a couple of beers at a bar and talked baseball, and the fellow had complained how having the Red Sox turn into perennial winners had ruined things for the hard-core fan like him.
“You got these kids who are old enough to drive now who don’t understand how big a deal it was for the Sox to win in 2004. They just sort of assume that of course the Red Sox are going to win the World Series every few years. No sense of the pain. No sense of the misery.”
MacDowell told him he’d be happy to trade some of his misery if that would make things right. If having the Cubbies pile up World Series wins was a cross to bear, well, he’d gladly suffer.
He constantly asked himself how it was that he could have been born and raised in St. Louis and picked the Cubs over the Cardinals. A question his father often asked. How much happier would he have been with that scarlet bird on his hat, a fan of a team that was a perennial winner? But no, there was nothing but the ivy at Wrigley Field for him. Which meant, quite simply, that he had to put up with a certain amount of misery, and he’d put up with it for so long that he’d thought there wasn’t enough winning in the world to wash the taste out of his mouth.
And then, they’d done it! Oh, joyous day! And the best thing was it wasn’t a fluke. They were loaded! Arms like flamethrowers, curveballs on a string. Contact hitters plus the big lumber. Opening day should have been a national holiday, and the day that President Pilgrim grounded all flights, the Cubbies had lost only one game in the young season.
So of course, now that the Cubbies were just lovable—losers no more—here come the spiders. This is what it must have felt like to be an Expos fan the year the strike wiped out the playoffs. What was that old joke? Cubs up a run, top of the ninth at home, two outs, two strikes, the pitcher winds up, delivers, and the world ends.
His condo was eight stories up, and he stood staring out the window at the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Cars were up on the sidewalks, smashed into each other, smashed into buildings and fire hydrants. Complete gridlock. People were running and screaming. Oh. And there. Here they come, he thought.
He wasn’t going out there. There was nowhere to go. He finished his beer and went back in to check on his wife. They’d cried and held each other and made love one last time, and then she’d downed the whole bottle of sleeping pills. She was still breathing, but he didn’t really know what that meant. Hadn’t the pills been enough? They’d looked it up on the Internet, and it should have been more than enough. Maybe they just needed a little more time to work. He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. There was another bottle, on the nightstand, waiting for him. He sighed, took off his shoes, and lay down next to his wife. It took him a couple of tries to choke down all the pills. He thought about taking off his Cubs cap, but in the end, he decided to leave it on.
The White House
It wasn’t like the White House was normally a quiet, relaxing place. Even in the best of times, there was always some sort of crisis that needed to be dealt with. But despite being deep into his first term as Steph’s chief of staff, Manny had never seen it like this. Frantic didn’t even begin to describe the scene.
He thought the phone call from India was going to be the worst of it. He was wrong.
Los Angeles. Chicago. Minneapolis. Denver and Phoenix and Seattle and Portland. Kansas frickin’ City and Nashville. Towns he’d never heard of dotted across Nebraska and Idaho and New Mexico.
The Spanish Protocol had succeeded in breaking the country to pieces.
And now the country was falling apart in pieces.
Paris, France
Well, Brett McNeil thought, there were worse places to die. He’d waited his whole life for a romantic vacation in Paris. He’d waited through two marriages to women who wouldn’t have recognized a romantic gesture if it was shot at them from a cannon, and he’d waited through five different affairs to women his age or younger, and two affairs with women older than him, and finally, now that he was seventy and on his third—and what looked like it was going to be his final—marriage, to a woman he actually liked, he’d made it to Paris.
The first day, he broke his ankle. Thank goodness he’d married Felicity. The woman was a superhero. She got him back from the hospital and then spent the rest of the day on the hotel computer and talking to the concierge, figuring the whole thing out: where they could rent a wheelchair, where they could actually use a wheelchair, and how to get around Paris with a grumpy, semi-crippled and newly retired insurance adjuster from North Carolina. A few hours out and about was all he could handle, but it was worth it. Paris had been everything he’d expected.
Then came the spiders. Fortunately, Paris seemed safe enough, and as soon as they realized they were going to have to extend the vacation at least an extra week because people were all in a tizzy and there was no air travel, Felicity responded like the champ she was. She’d rented a car and taken them out of the city for four days, stopping in little villages and towns where Brett imagined everything was filmed in black and white.
He’d been anxious, but Felicity had been clear that they could afford it, so he’d tried to relax. His ankle throbbed, and it made many places a challenge, but it was worth it. Why had he waited so long to come to France? Maybe, he thought, it was because he knew, deep in his soul, that he needed to experience it with Felicity. It had to be because Paris was meant to be a city discovered by couples in love, and he’d never really, truly been in love until Felicity. So what if he was seventy? Love didn’t have an age limit. Though, to be honest, the broken ankle had put a damper on their sex life.
But today? Oh, today was the day. The Eiffel Tower.
They’d been saving it for a treat. He’d seen it, of course. How couldn’t you see it riding around Paris in taxis? As far as he was concerned, the Eiffel Tower was Paris. But to actually go up, to stand up on the observation deck at night, to take in the lights of the city from the tower itself? They’d waited for that. They’d originally scheduled it for the last night of their trip, but they’d kept pushing it back as the trip kept getting extended, but with no clear resumption of flights to the USA in sight, Felicity had decided that there was no point in waiting any longer. They’d had dinner at a small bistro up a side alley, around the corner from their hotel, just close enough that he could hobble there on his crutches, and then they’d taken a taxi to the base of what had to be one of the modern wonders of the world.
They rode the elevator and went out onto the platform. Felicity was smiling, looking at him and looking around at the city, and Brett realized he was crying. It was absolutely, unquestionably . . .
Screaming. Horns honking. The sound of automobiles crashing. They moved to the edge, to look down, and could see people running in panic.
He was scared. They were both scared. But they were scared together. Brett leaned on his crutches so he could hold Felicity and the two of them could look out over the glow of Paris. There were fires now, the occasional explosion, and to the west, a great swath of the city suddenly went dark, but Brett realized he was okay with it. He’d come to Paris with the woman he loved and he’d stood on the Eiffel Tower and seen the city at night. So if this was where he had to die, there was nowhere else he’d rather be and nobody else he’d rather die with.
Berlin, Germany
They’d had to sacrifice the outer suburbs. The ring could only be made so big. But it was holding. The fire burning in a great ragged circle. Those working the barricades, the women and men tasked with making sure the fires spread outward, not in, who had to tend the flames with gasoline and diesel fuel, who were the only bulwark against the spiders, saw spiders throwing themselves into the blaze in a frenzied drive to break through. There were many reports of spiders trailing streamers of
silk drifting through the sky and then being buffeted by the roiling waves of heat coming off the fires, their silk catching fire and leaving streaks in the night as the spiders fell into the flames.
But it was holding. It was holding.
The White House
Manny wasn’t sure how much longer they could put off evacuating. The Secret Service was getting frantic, and there’d come a point when it didn’t matter anymore what Steph wanted. They’d already flown the First Hubby off, and more than half the cabinet and senior members of the Senate and Congress had already been evacuated. Most of the politicians were going to the bunker in Tennessee, but the First Hubby and the cabinet had been taken to the USS Elsie Downs, fifty miles off the coast of Delaware, close enough to take a helicopter to instead of Air Force One.
As it was, he couldn’t figure out what Steph’s insistence that they stay in the White House as long as possible was really about. Penance? An act of contrition for the Spanish Protocol, a way of punishing herself for her decision to break the country into pieces, leaving so many Americans to fend for themselves? That wasn’t the Stephanie he knew, however, and it wasn’t until she asked him to come into the Oval Office to join her, Alex Harris, Billy Cannon, and Ben Broussard that he realized there was a strategy: she was clearing the room of the voices that didn’t matter.
He sat in one of the chairs and stared over at Broussard with a grudging respect. He had to hand it to the man, he’d stepped up. And to Steph, for getting over her dislike of Broussard and taking his advice.
“The truth of it is,” Steph said as Alex and Billy were still settling themselves, “the Spanish Protocol worked.”
Skitter Page 27
