Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  “Are you kidding me?” Alex said.

  “No,” Steph said to the national security advisor, “I’m not kidding. Look at how bad it is. How much worse would it have been if we’d allowed free movement, if we hadn’t balkanized the country? You can see it on a map. There’s a line dividing the country in half. If we hadn’t done it, there wouldn’t be a line. The whole map would be gone. Remember the analogy? Cut off the leg to save the patient?”

  “It’s like going into surgery to have your leg taken off and waking up with both of them gone and your arms to boot,” Alex said.

  Manny looked at Alex, Steph, and the two men. Broussard, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, somehow still looking like his uniform was starched, and the secretary of defense, Billy Cannon, wore a grim, tight line where his mouth should have been.

  Suddenly, Manny felt a laugh starting to bubble up. It was like he’d drunk a soda too quickly, and now the fizz was building and he had to let it out. It wasn’t a loud laugh, but it was so out of place that everybody turned to look at him.

  “Manny?” Steph did not seem amused.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking, you know, what I wouldn’t give for something simple, like Vietnam or the invasion of Iraq, or to be figuring out the fallout of a sex scandal or Watergate.” He shook his head. “There aren’t any good choices here, are there?”

  Billy put his boots up on the coffee table, never mind that it was a piece of furniture that dated to the Lincoln administration. “Not with conventional weapons. Berlin seems to be holding, and we’re going to try the same strategy in New York City, but our best estimate is that there’s only a twenty percent chance there isn’t already a brood of eggs ready to hatch somewhere in Manhattan. If we’re lucky, and there aren’t already spiders there, maybe it will work.” He looked at his watch. “The Brooklyn Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel are both already impassable, and all other ingress and egress points should be bombed in the next forty minutes. Once that’s done, the air force is going to flatten everything from 125th through 150th to create a buffer zone, and then the hope is that they can keep fires burning long enough to keep the spiders out.”

  “How long is long enough?” Steph asked.

  Nobody answered.

  “Well, dammit, find out,” she snapped at Manny. “Call your fucking wife again and get me an answer.”

  He didn’t correct her, didn’t remind her Melanie was his ex-wife, but he checked his phone again. He hadn’t talked to her in, what, two days? He’d called and she hadn’t called back, and he just hadn’t had the chance to follow up. Which meant he hadn’t had a chance to tell her about the conversation with the director of the CIA, the weird suggestion that they look to Peru.

  Billy Cannon continued. “Isolating New York works either way. If there are spiders already in Manhattan, it will keep them hemmed in and prevent a spread to other parts of the East, and if there aren’t already spiders in New York, maybe it will keep them out. We don’t have any confirmed outbreaks east of Chicago yet, but they’ll be coming. At this point, we are just hoping to carve out some safe havens. Ben?”

  Broussard leaned forward. “Army Corps of Engineers is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, blowing up shit as fast as they can, and the air force is burning fuel nonstop. Overpasses, cloverleafs, bridges, pretty much every highway or major road we can hit we are hitting. It’s going to be a hell of a cleanup job.” He coughed. “But I’m sorry, Madam President, I don’t think we have a choice. Chicago is gone. Everything west of Chicago is compromised, and it doesn’t matter how many highways or roads we destroy, some people will slip through. We need to reset the dividing line.”

  Steph stared at him. “Reset the line to where?”

  “Make a rough line from Buffalo to Pittsburgh and then Charlotte, all the way through Jacksonville, cutting off the country north to south. Honestly, you need to ignore the border and go farther north, too, past Toronto. It’s not like the spiders are going to respect international sovereignty. We know these spiders can move on their own, but not far and not that quick. They’re dependent on human carriers. So anywhere that people can get through we have to also assume that at least some of them will be carriers. I know it sounds like a drastic expansion, but if there are still parts of the country that we can save, we don’t have any time to waste, and this isn’t the time to be conservative. No matter how quickly we work with conventional weapons, there’s a limit to how much we can disrupt travel.”

  He didn’t say the obvious. He left that to Steph.

  “We have to turn everything west of Buffalo into a wasteland,” she said. “We’re back to the nukes.”

  Oxford, Mississippi

  There wasn’t much else Santiago could do. Even with wearing work gloves, his hands were blistered, and he knew both his wife and Oscar were exhausted. Oscar was a tough kid, but he was only eleven, and Santiago had worked him hard. Even their octogenarian neighbor, Mrs. Fine, had pitched in, painting the plywood signs he’d made with the words NO GAS.

  Which was a lie. He’d boarded up the windows of the convenience store—Mrs. Fine had painted those with NO GAS and CLOSED, too—but he’d had the underground tanks filled only a couple of weeks before this disaster began. He had plenty of gas, and he’d been using it.

  He’d dug a trench all the way around his properties, demolishing Mrs. Fine’s house and putting as much space between the Garcia house and their gas station and store and the trench as he could. He’d dug past his property line, figuring that the police in Oxford had other things to worry about. When people passed by and asked him what he was doing, he told them he was building a moat. They’d laugh and usually make some smart-ass comment about how that wasn’t going to stop the spiders.

  But there was a reason he’d hoarded the gas.

  He’d bought hundreds of bags of charcoal. All the charcoal he could find at grocery stores and hardware stores and the other gas stations in Oxford. And then when he couldn’t find any more charcoal, he’d filled his pickup truck with lumber, taking more and more trips to the hardware store. Then, he’d bought what had felt like a ridiculous amount of insulation, and finally, garden pressure sprayers. The sprayers weren’t ideal—he was able to find a dozen four-gallon backpack-style industrial sprayers, but the rest were only one- or two-gallon handhelds—but they’d have to do.

  He’d finally finished preparing just that morning. His wife had constantly been running people off who were trying to buy gas. People who were trying to flee. They came by in sedans packed with college students or in minivans loaded up with kids, suitcases strapped to the top. He felt bad turning them away, but he had to protect his family, and there was nowhere for these people to go. By the time most people realized they needed to run, the government was already dropping bombs. He’d heard the explosions of Highways 6 and 7 being torn asunder.

  It didn’t matter to him, though. They couldn’t run. Not with his daughter. His wife was inside with Juliet right now, handling her medications and getting ready to give her a bath. Normally, Santiago assisted with the baths, but he was on watch, and Oscar had volunteered to help get Juliet out of her wheelchair and into and out of the bathtub.

  He was sitting on a folding chair outside the convenience store by the gas pumps, the shotgun across his lap. He’d never actually fired the gun, but after the first time he’d had a gun pointed in his face, barely a month after he and his wife bought the gas station and convenience store, he’d acquired the shotgun. It felt good to have right now, even if he knew it was useless against spiders.

  The sun was warm on his face. He was tired, and there was a part of him that thought it would be okay to close his eyes for a few seconds. But then he heard screaming.

  He scrambled out of his seat, picked up his binoculars, and ran to the edge of the trench, which was pressed hard against the road. The road ran straight and true, and with the binoculars he could see nearly a mile out. It took him a second to get the binoculars in foc
us, and when he did he—

  He dropped the binoculars and ran. There was no time to waste.

  He screamed toward the house, first in Spanish, then in English, realizing that if his wife and Oscar were giving Juliet a bath, it might be up to Mrs. Fine to alert them. If he hurried, if they all hurried, they’d be okay. He’d spent every single dollar he could scrape together, maxed out their otherwise untouched emergency credit cards, and worked himself to exhaustion. He’d done absolutely everything he could think of.

  Except get a lighter.

  My god. He’d forgotten a lighter.

  He yanked his keys out of his pocket and fumbled with them trying to get into his store. It took him three tries to stab the key into the lock. Inside, he knocked over the entire display of lighters. He and his wife had fought over whether or not to sell cigarettes and lighters, but ultimately, it had been too much money to say no, and in this moment he was glad. He grabbed two lighters that had spilled onto the counter, spun around, and ran back outside.

  He could hear all kinds of screaming now, plus the honking of horns and even some gunshots. He rushed to the trench.

  He’d spread an even layer of charcoal all around the ditch, then topped that with the lumber that he’d bought from the hardware stores. More than thirty thousand dollars’ worth of charcoal and two-by-fours and every piece of wood he could buy and get home in his pickup. And then he’d hosed it all down with gasoline. He’d run his gas pumps nearly nonstop, soaking the charcoal and the wood and the dirt of the ditch. He’d been as surreptitious as possible, afraid that people would see him using the gasoline like this and insist that he allow them to fill their cars. But he needed it. He’d soaked the ditch and then filled half the tank sprayers. The yard reeked so badly of gasoline you could smell it a hundred feet away. Santiago’s biggest fear, aside from the spiders, was that the gasoline might accidently go up too soon.

  He looked up and saw a woman running down the street. She kept glancing back over her shoulder.

  He’d wasted too much time getting the lighters.

  He flicked the lighter and then crouched down and reached out to touch the flame to a piece of wood sticking up past the lip of the ditch.

  At first, the flame was surprisingly gentle. A blue lick of fire the size of a paperback novel. But then, quickly, with a sound like a tornado, the flame gusted down into the ditch and spread both left and right and then burst upward.

  Santiago was knocked onto his ass by the flare-up. He scrambled backward, swatting at his hair, thinking it was on fire, but it was just the heat from the trench, already uncomfortable. It wasn’t quite the explosive fireball you’d see in the movies, but it was an almost instant inferno ringing his properties.

  He saw a car go shooting past on the road, and then a young kid furiously pumping away at the pedals of a bike, but the fire in the trench was already surging heavenward, obscuring his vision of the street.

  He saw Oscar come out of the house and run around to the side, where the hose was connected, just as he’d instructed the boy. Santiago had covered the outside of the house with boards of mineral wool insulation, which was fire rated beyond anything else he’d been able to find in town. Oscar immediately started spraying the walls and the roof. Mrs. Fine came out too, and picked up one of the smaller tank sprayers full of water.

  Santiago turned back and looked at the fire. It was a magnificent beast. He had some of the tank sprayers filled with gasoline in reserve, but he was hesitant to use them. They had certainly not been designed for high heat, and he didn’t want to turn himself into a human torch.

  He squinted, looking more closely at the fire. He saw shapes on the other side. Bodies. People running and falling. Small things skittering and moving. But the fire kept them all at bay.

  The question was, for how long?

  Memphis, Tennessee

  A week ago, she’d locked her studio apartment and then sealed the edges around the door with duct tape. She had some caulk, and she’d spent an hour or so sealing everything she could think of with either the caulk or the duct tape. At first, she’d been afraid she might asphyxiate, but even when her apartment got brutally hot, she could breathe just fine. And then it had been a waiting game.

  Until today. Now.

  The water had stopped running yesterday, but until only an hour ago, she’d still had power. When that went out, she was thankful it was still light out. It was bad enough looking out the second-story window and seeing people running in panic, and then . . .

  The spiders.

  She wanted to move away from the window, but it was like she was glued there, just watching. Even as the first spider skittered across the glass, and then more and more, blocking the light, turning her apartment into a dark cave, she couldn’t make herself move away.

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

  Honky Joe, Shotgun, and Gordo figured it out at the same time. Lance Corporal Kim Bock was only a heartbeat behind them: there was only one helicopter left in the parking lot.

  “Well,” Gordo said dryly, “last time I order a helicopter from my phone.”

  “This is bullshit,” Melanie said. “We’re supposed to be evacuating. How many passengers can one helicopter take?”

  “On this one? Six,” the pilot said. “I didn’t get time to refuel before coming here. But if you ditch your bags and don’t mind cramming, I can get a number on our weight and trim. We might be able to stretch it to seven.” She looked at Claymore, who was lying on the parking lot tarmac, panting. “And the dog, too, maybe. We’ll be burning fumes by the time we get to the aircraft carrier, but we can do it. I’ll fuel up and come back for the rest of you right away. It’s going to be a zoo, but I should probably be back in five, six hours. In the meantime, however, some of you are going to have to wait.”

  Haaf cleared his throat. “Women first, I guess,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

  The pilot shook her head. “Sexism aside, I’m under strict orders. Dr. Guyer and all scientific personnel first, and then ancillary civilians.”

  Staff Sergeant Rodriguez stepped forward. “Captain Ripps is being polite, sir. The actual orders are to make sure that you and your colleagues are on the helicopter. No choice in the matter. At gunpoint, if necessary. That’s five seats for Doctors Guyer, Dichtel, Haaf, Nieder, and Yoo.”

  “Technically,” Julie said, “I’m a PhD candidate and I don’t—”

  “Not the time, Julie,” Melanie said.

  Rodriguez turned to Fred, Amy, Gordo, Shotgun, and Teddie. “Which means one of you—two if Captain Ripps says the math works—can join. And as much as I’d like it to be different, I’ve been authorized to use lethal force to ensure that Dr. Guyer and her colleagues are the first ones out. Though, obviously, we’d prefer not to have to shoot you, because, well, I know this isn’t very professional to say, but you all seem pretty cool.”

  Teddie shrugged. “I’ll stay. Screw it. I’ll shoot video and, assuming we don’t all die, I’ll win an Emmy for news reporting.”

  Shotgun turned to look at Fred, but Fred got there first. “I swear to God, if you so much as suggest that I go without you, I will skin you alive.”

  To Gordo’s surprise, it was Amy who spoke next. “No, Fred. We’re going. Me and you.” She was trying not to cry. “It’s got to be. You heard what the pilot said. She’ll be right back, but if anything happens in the meantime, you know as well as I do that we’d both be in the way. Gordo and Shotgun can take care of themselves, but they can’t take care of themselves if they’re taking care of us, too. We’ll be a distraction, and that’s not going to keep them safe.”

  There was some hemming and hawing, but Amy had her way.

  Kim watched Amy say good-bye to Gordo, watched Fred cling to Shotgun, the couples kissing, hugging, crying, and then Gordo and Shotgun backing away as their spouses joined the scientists in the helicopter. The pilot started the engine and then gave the thumbs-up to Kim. She walked over, holding Claymore’s leas
h. The dog was wagging his tail and panting. She’d been okay watching Amy get on the helicopter, watching Fred get on the helicopter, but there was something about this big, dumb galoot of a dog that turned her throat into a peach pit.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Kim said. She leaned down and scooped up the chocolate lab. Claymore turned his head and licked her face, and she stumbled a little bit. Despite the awkward way she was holding him, he was still wagging his tail. She helped him get his front paws over the threshold, pushed him the rest of the way into the helicopter, and closed the door. They were packed in there, but she didn’t want to look. She turned and walked over to where Sue and Duran and Elroy were leaning against a JLTV.

  They heard the whine of the motors pitching up, the rotors starting to spin, and then the air sweeping grit and dirt toward them.

  Kim watched it lift into the air, and not for the first time, she thought how buglike helicopters seemed. And then the chopper tilted forward and headed toward the sea. She glanced over at Shotgun, Gordo, and Teddie. All three of them stood watching the helicopter, and she figured they’d keep watching well after it was out of sight.

  Duran took off his helmet. “Well,” he said, “if that pilot doesn’t come back, I guess we take the bus?”

  “She’ll come back,” Kim said. “She said she’d come back, right?”

  Duran started to say something and then cleared his throat. “Hope so. Hope so. Either way, we’ve got ourselves a few civilians to look after,” he said, gesturing to Shotgun, Gordo, and Teddie.

  Kim nodded. “Yeah, but the real question is, are we looking after them, or are they going to look after us?”

  Shotgun, who had evidently been listening, turned to her. “No. That’s not the question. The question is, how are we going to stop these sons-of-bitches?”

  Denver, Colorado

  She came out of the shadows.