Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  The little ones, thousands of them, covered the walls and ceilings and skittered around her as she lumbered forward. There were several silk-wrapped shrouds on the floor, empty husks of prey that had once been close to her size. She moved slowly past them on her long, thick legs. But slow was fine. She had no need to hurry. She knew there were more of the little ones outside. Tens and tens of thousands of them close enough to serve as feeders for her, and farther away, there were more. So many more.

  And, she knew, there were others like her, making their own way into the light.

  EPILOGUE

  Positano, Italy

  Music played on speakers on restaurant patios over the sound of the surf breaking against the rocks. But if you listened closely, you could also hear the brush and skitter of spiders moving across stone and tile, crawling over cotton and linen.

  There was nobody outside left to listen.

  The screaming had been over for hours.

  Which was not to say that there was nobody left alive in Positano. There were still many people, perhaps thousands, crouched behind shutters, huddled in locked bathrooms, and even an oblivious few who’d slept through the chaos and who sat on their balconies and wondered why their vacation paradise was so quiet.

  Those were the lucky ones, because the others who were still alive had it much, much worse. Those would have cried out if they could have, would have shrieked at the pain and the terror of being wrapped alive in silk, of being completely paralyzed.

  And waiting.

  There were other living things besides tourists in Positano. So many things alive in Positano. Spiders crawling, breeding, constantly feeding. Tens of thousands of spiders, hundreds of thousands.

  Cozad, Nebraska

  The people of Cozad, Nebraska, were god-fearing folk. Which suited Bobby Higgs just fine. That’s how far they’d made it before the bombs started falling and the highway became impassible. By the time they got to Cozad, the minivan that picked him up had been joined by twelve other vehicles that had been part of the original procession from LA. They’d started calling themselves the twelve disciples, and Bobby had let it ride.

  With those twelve vehicles—nearly thirty adults and almost as many children stuffed into cars and pickups and minivans—as his base, Bobby had been an immediate sensation in Cozad. Within forty-eight hours, nearly a quarter of the population of Cozad, a thousand people, were ready to march with the Prophet Bobby Higgs.

  They stayed off the rubble of the highways, taking side roads and marching across farmers’ fields, only making ten, eleven miles a day, but by their third day of marching, their ranks had begun to swell.

  Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Delaware

  Somehow, as the helicopter sped toward the aircraft carrier, the dog ended up on Melanie’s lap. She could feel Claymore’s hot breath in her face, and there was a part of her that wondered how the dog had managed to make his way from California to Washington, DC, and now to what was perhaps one of the only safe places left on earth. She held the dog tight and scratched his belly. She could see Amy leaning into Fred’s embrace. They’d both been crying intermittently.

  She couldn’t blame them.

  Nazca, Peru

  If they hadn’t been working in broad daylight, Pierre might have pissed himself. Dr. Botsford seemed fascinated, but Pierre found it terrifying. They’d gone back to the site where they’d found the original egg sac, looking to see if there was anything under where they’d stopped digging. They’d been careful, but they had barely dug another six inches when Beatrice came across a bone.

  A femur, to be exact. A femur, which, according to Dr. Botsford, had been the subject of intense heat. When he pointed that out, it was easy to see where it had cracked open, the marrow bubbling and leaking from the middle of the bone.

  And then they uncovered another egg sac.

  An egg sac would have been bad enough, but he remembered how the one he sent Julie had been chalky and cold. How it had felt foreign but dead to him as he packed it up for FedEx. But this egg sac. Oh, this egg sac. He wanted to cry. He really wanted to piss his pants. This egg sac was warm. Perhaps it could simply have been the afternoon sun, but it was also sticky, and if you held your hand against it you could feel the slightest vibration. It was all Pierre could do not to scream at Dr. Botsford and the other graduate students as they debated what to do for more than twenty minutes, in the way that only academics can debate something that has a clear answer. The relief he felt when they finally agreed on a course of action was tempered by the fact that he was going to be the one to carry the sac back to their base camp. And then he had to sit and wait while Cynthia built a good, roaring fire, not sure the entire time if he was imagining it, or if the sac was really getting warmer, if the pulses were getting stronger. By the time they judged the fire hot enough, Pierre could barely get himself to pick up the egg sac.

  He wanted to place it gently in the middle of the fire, but the flames were too hot. He couldn’t stop himself from dropping it and springing back, his hands and arms stinging, his eyebrows singed.

  For the first couple of seconds, nothing seemed to happen, but then, even among the glowing coals and the bright flames, they could see the sac catch fire. One side started to turn gold and then black, and Pierre was reminded of nothing so much as roasting marshmallows. He heard Beatrice gasp, and he realized it wasn’t a shimmering mirage of heat and fire: the egg sac was shaking, vibrating. And then, with a loud cracking sound, a line splintered up the side of the shell.

  He flinched. They all flinched. Even Dr. Botsford, who had never quite seemed to understand that there were real-world implications to these spiders, stepped back.

  For perhaps the blink of an eye, Pierre thought the spiders in the egg sac would come bursting out, but the opening was too small. He saw a single, terrifying black leg probe out of the crack, but then the fire turned it into something worse, the leg twisting and shrinking in the heat. The sac cracked again, wider, and then split wide open, but the spiders inside—there were so many it made Pierre breathless—were still. As the angry fire licked over them, they burned and popped like sap in a log. They watched the fire until the egg sac and all the spiders were only ashes and embers.

  None of them talked much as they ate dinner, and none of them suggested going back to the site with flashlights after they were done eating. The idea of being out there at night, the shadows that came from artificial lights, uncovering mysteries thousands of years old, perhaps stumbling across another egg sac—or something worse, some ancient warning—was too much to contemplate.

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

  The group of them stood in front of the biocontainment air lock.

  Teddie was running a video camera, though Kim was honestly not sure where it had come from. She was filming Shotgun tapping on the glass.

  “Can you not do that?” Gordo said.

  “What?” Shotgun looked so innocent.

  Kim stared through the glass at the spiders. There were hundreds of them. But it was nothing, she knew, to what was coming.

  “You’re making them agitated,” Honky Joe said.

  Shotgun smiled. “I think they’re naturally agitated.”

  “Fine,” Gordo said, “but I don’t see any reason to rile them even more.”

  Kim stepped forward and put her palm against the glass. Immediately, the closest spiders to where she was standing started pinging off the glass, trying to get to her. “Are you sure about this?”

  “No,” Shotgun said. “But it makes sense. We’re all hoping that pilot is back here in a few hours, but if she’s not, we might be on our own for a while. If we need a place to shelter, better in there than out here. If the spiders can’t get out of the biocontainment area, I figure they won’t be able to get in, either. All we have to do is kill all these spiders, bring in supplies, and we’ve got our own little panic room. Well, not little. I figure we can probably put, what, fifty people in there if we don’t mi
nd getting friendly?”

  “Okay,” Gordo said, “that makes sense. So, are you going to use the Spinal Tap on them?”

  Honky Joe raised his eyebrows. “The Spinal Tap?”

  Shotgun waved his hand. “Inside joke. But no. I don’t think that would work. It seems to confuse them, but the effect isn’t strong enough, and I don’t want to risk it.”

  “So . . . How are we getting the spiders out so that we can get in there to hide?”

  Shotgun bit his lip. “Good question.”

  Marine One, over Washington, DC

  They rose hard and flew in a tight convoy over the city. Below them, Manny could see the streets choked with traffic. They were a thousand feet up and with the chop of the rotors and the headphones, there was no chance of him hearing the noise below. But he could imagine it. Cars honking at each other, people yelling, children crying. The spiders weren’t here yet, but it might only be a matter of time.

  He looked over at Steph. She stared out the windows and knotted her hands. He’d put it to her as plainly as he could: they’d lost at least half the country. There was no more room for restraint. They needed to hit every major metropolitan area they could, and they needed to carve away four-fifths of the country.

  Finally, she looked over at him and nodded.

  It was time to unleash the hounds of hell. There was nothing left to save.

  Scorched earth.

  Soot Lake, Minnesota

  Annie’s fingers kept slipping off the monofilament, but she wouldn’t let Mike help her.

  “I can do it, Daddy.” The tip of her tongue was between her lips, and Mike loved every second of it. He loved that she watched him so closely as he tied the knot on his own hook, and that she wanted to learn how to do it herself. He loved that she could laugh at the Frankenstein bale of line she ended up with instead of a proper knot, and how she took one of the worms that she’d dug out of the loamy soil directly behind the house and bent the worm onto the hook herself. They were sitting on the edge of the dock, their feet skimming the cold water, and Annie threw a good cast, the bobber landing with a reassuring plunk, the worm and hook right behind.

  Mike wasn’t exactly relaxed. But he felt good. They had enough food, if they were careful, to last them a month. Longer if he and Annie could catch some fish. He had time to figure stuff out, he thought. They’d survive.

  It was like a flashbulb from across the room. Bright even in the bright light of day. Bright even from as far away as Minneapolis. He knew immediately what it was.

  “Inside now, beautiful,” he said.

  “But Daddy, I want to catch a fish.”

  “Right now. No arguing. Tell Rich and your mom I need them to get all the garbage bags and any duct tape we’ve got.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll explain later, okay? But right now, just go.”

  He took her fishing pole and then reeled in her line. There was another flash of light. Would the sound carry from that far away? No. He didn’t think so. But there’d be fallout coming. He figured they were far enough away to be spared the worst of it, and there weren’t any cities close enough to Soot Lake to be worth the bother of a nuclear weapon. It didn’t make sense to target the wilderness.

  They’d close the windows and tape up garbage bags and seal as many cracks as they could, stay inside for a few days, and then he’d see where they were.

  They’d be okay.

  He looked at Annie slipping through the front door.

  He’d make sure of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dear reader, thank you for braving these books. I apologize for any feeling of itchiness that may have accompanied your reading experience. I’ve included these acknowledgments because, while I spend a lot of time alone writing, getting a book from an author’s desk into your hands takes a big group. So I hope you take a few seconds to read all these names. Thank you to:

  At Emily Bestler Books/Atria: Emily Bestler, David Brown, Judith Curr, Suzanne Donahue, Lara Jones, Hillary Tisman, and Albert Tang. At Penguin Random House Canada: Anne Collins, Josh Glover, Jessica Scott, and Matthew Sibiga. At Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group: Marcus Gipps, Stevie Finegan, Craig Leyenaar, Jennifer McMenemy, Gillian Redfearn, and Mark Stay.

  At the Clegg Agency: literary agent extraordinaire Bill Clegg, Chris Clemans, Marion Duvert, Henry Rabinowitz, and Simon Toop. At the Anna Jarota Agency: Anna Jarota and Dominika Bojanowska. At MB Agencia Literaria: Mònica Martín, Inés Planells, and Txell Torrent. At United Agents: Anna Webber.

  At William Morris Endeavor Entertainment: stone cold killers Erin Conroy and Anna DeRoy.

  The MacDowell Colony for the gift of time and space. And lunch.

  Alex, Ken, Ken, Mike, Shawn, Will.

  My family. Yeah. All of you.

  TIME IS RUNNING OUT IN THIS APOCALYPTIC BATTLE.

  IT’S ZERO DAY.

  COMING IN 2018

  THEHATCHINGBOOK.COM

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  EZEKIEL BOONE lives in upstate New York with his wife and children.

  Follow @ezekiel_boone on Twitter or visit ezekielboone.com.

  EMILYBESTLERBOOKS.COM

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  ALSO BY EZEKIEL BOONE

  The Hatching

  Don't miss the first in The Hatching series by Ezekiel Boone

  “An apocalyptic extravaganza of doom and heroism . . .addictive.”—Publishers Weekly

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Ezekiel Boone, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition May 2017

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  Jacket art by David Wu

  Author photograph by Laurie Willick

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Boone, Ezekiel, author.

  Title: Skitter : a novel / Ezekiel Boone.

  Description: First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York, NY : Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2017. | Series: The hatching series ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016029715 (print) | LCCN 2016036360 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501125072 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501125089 (trade paperback) | ISBN 97815011250
96 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Spiders—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Horror. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.O6577 S55 2017 (print) | LCC PS3602.O6577 (ebook) | DOC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029715

  ISBN 978-1-5011-2507-2

  ISBN 978-1-5011-2509-6 (ebook)