The Hatching: A Novel (24 page)

He passed a magazine shop that was shutting down. Middle of the day, and the woman running it was dragging the metal gate across the entrance. Just past that, a waiting area was quickly emptying out. Annoyed men in suits packing up laptops, families with crying children loading up strollers. As Mike came to the signs telling him that once he exited he could not reenter, he pulled out his phone and gave it a click with his thumb, forgetting it was dead. It didn’t matter: there they were, waiting for him. Annie was working on some sort of smoothie, and Fanny was typing something into her phone. They weren’t looking up, and that gave Mike a chance to watch them as he walked up. Fanny looked good. She always looked good. She’d never
been the fancy type, but she ran and had a nice eye for clothing. Even when she and Mike were together, before she remarried and suddenly had access to a whole different kind of shopping, she’d been good about picking outfits that worked to her advantage. And she’d done something different with her hair, something that gave a little more emphasis to her face. But even though he recognized that she was still beautiful, most men would have said sexy even, Mike realized that for the first time since he’d met her, he wasn’t attracted to her anymore. Whatever it was—that spark, that little jolt he felt when he kissed her—was gone. Even more interesting, the disappearance didn’t bother him. It was a relief, really. He didn’t know if it was because he was sure she was pregnant and that meant she was finally, irretrievably gone, or that enough time had finally passed, or meeting that scientist, Melanie, had reminded him there were other women he might be interested in, but he didn’t care. What it meant was that he could look at Fanny as somebody with whom he shared his daughter instead of somebody he was trying to win back.

As for Annie, it had only been, what, two, three days? Could she really look older to him? Older and younger at the same time. She had on a yellow sweatshirt with the hood up, her hair partly pulled from her ponytail, and from her profile, Mike could see what she was going to look like in a couple of years. And then she straightened up, pulled the straw out of her cup, and dribbled the smoothie into her mouth, looking very much like the kid she was.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said, leaning over and hugging Annie.

“Daddy!” She wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed as hard as she could. He kept wanting to tell her she had to take it a little easier, that she was getting big enough to hurt him when she hugged him that hard, but he didn’t have the heart to do it. It was as if she thought squeezing him harder meant she loved him more. “Whoops,” she said. “Sorry. I got smoothie on your suit.”

“No worries, sweetie,” he said, grateful she hadn’t said anything about his slipping and calling her “beautiful” again. He straightened up and gave Fanny a loose, one-armed hug. That seemed best. There was a lot of history, and with his sudden realization that he was no longer interested in trying to win her back, he wasn’t sure what else they had. More than just a mutual interest in Annie? Maybe a friendship? Could it be that simple? A friendship? “Thanks for picking me up,” he said. “I could have taken a cab, but this is nice.”

Fanny did that thing that wasn’t exactly a smile, and Mike understood why she’d offered to pick him up. She wanted to talk. And sure enough: “I wanted to talk anyway,” she said.

Annie jumped up and held on to Mike’s hand. “Mom’s having a baby.”

Mike actually laughed. Maybe because he was expecting it, and maybe because he realized he could just be happy for Fanny, happy that she’d figured out how to move past their marriage and try again, happy that Annie had gotten the bad first deal of divorced parents and somehow still ended up hitting twenty-one. For a minute, it was enough to make him forget about the buzz of people heading out of the terminal. The weird sense that the entire airport was shutting down in the middle of the day.

“Congratulations, Fanny,” he said. He hugged her, this time for real, with both arms, pulling her tight and holding on for an extra second. “I’m really happy for you. For you and Rich,” he said, and he understood that he really meant it.

L
ance Corporal Kim Bock didn’t know what was going on, but she knew things were fucked. The day after China dropped the nuke they were told it was boots up, and then they were told to stand down. Yesterday there had been a hastily organized training session to review procedures for putting on bio suits and gas masks, and it looked like it was going to be boots up again. But then they’d been ordered back to barracks and after spending a couple of hours packing and repacking gear, they’d been left to their own devices. There wasn’t any news, and even Honky Joe, who had been on and off the phone with his father, had no real information to add.

And then, all of a sudden, the radio and television and Internet were exploding with news and everything was all India and spiders and every goddamned airplane in the country was grounded and then everybody with any kind of ribbons or medals was yelling at them to clean their weapons and gear up and board a bus. Go, go, go!

So here they were. On a bus. A school bus. An honest-to-God yellow school bus. Mitts had looked at Kim and she’d shrugged. It didn’t make a lot of sense to her either. They were good Marines,
and so they had gotten onto the school buses, packs on their laps and M16s beside them. Elroy had his earbuds in and she could hear the music leaking out—the same old country shit he always listened to—and Mitts, Duran, and Honky Joe were playing cards with Goons. Kim squirmed around in her seat so she could talk to Sue.

To say that Private Sue Chirp came from a very different background from Kim was putting it mildly. Kim’s parents had met at Howard University. Her mom was a pediatric oncologist and her dad taught ninth- and tenth-grade history at the National Cathedral School. He liked to joke that he—and Kim, when she’d been a student there, which was one of his perks as a faculty member—was a nice splash of color for the school. As far as Kim could tell, she was the only person in her graduating class who hadn’t gone directly to college, and even though her parents had eventually come around to her desire to serve, they still expected her to go to college at some point. While Kim’s family wasn’t rich compared with most of her friends at the National Cathedral School, they were well-off, and that made them seem like billionaires compared with Sue.

Sue Chirp came to the Marines straight from the backwoods of West Virginia. Kim hadn’t really thought there was a backwoods anymore, but meeting Sue had convinced her otherwise. Sue was smart and she was going to be a good Marine, but that was only because she didn’t really have any other choice. She’d never met her dad, and her mom cycled through a series of boyfriends and was in and out of jail, usually for drugs. Once they’d gotten to know each other a bit, Sue told Kim that the scar on her arm was a burn from when she was six and her mom’s meth cooking had gone awry. But the Marines were a great equalizer, and despite their very different upbringings, with Sue white, poor, and mostly neglected, with the armed forces her only way out, and with Kim
black, relatively wealthy, and the focus of her parents’ lives, choosing the Marines over the easier path that had been laid before her, the two of them had become very good friends. Maybe it was just that they were both women trying to make their way through what had always been a man’s world, or maybe it was just that Sue was nice and smart. And funny.

“How long do you think we’re going to be on these buses?” Sue asked. “Long enough for the brass to figure out that some of their Marines can’t piss in bottles?”

Duran, who had a bit of a thing for Sue, leaned back, holding his cards to his chest. “I’ll hold the bottle for you if you want to try.”

“You into golden showers, Duran?” Sue said.

That got Sue a laugh, and it made Kim smile. She’d been trying to persuade Sue to give Duran a chance. He was a good guy, and from what Sue had told her about her dating history, a good guy was something she wasn’t used to. Besides, with the Chinese dropping nukes and spiders eating India and this fucked-up deployment, why not?

Kim shoved her pack to the floor, turned all the way around, kneeled on the seat, and folded her arms on the seat back to make herself more comfortable. “Can’t be that long, right? No way we’d be on school buses if we were going to be traveling more than an hour or two. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”

Sue unclipped the gas mask that was bouncing off the outside of her pack. She held it up to her face. “You see this thing? It’s like three sizes too big for me, like they decided to make a gas mask that could fit a grizzly bear. If there’s gas or bio, or whatever it is they think they’re trying to get us ready for in such a hurry, it won’t matter if my mask is on or not. The fucking thing doesn’t fit.” She clipped the mask back to her pack. “We fought a war with Humvees that couldn’t withstand a basic blast from an IED, and we’ve
spent the last couple of days getting on and off planes, jumping up and sitting down. And you’re banking on something making sense in the military? You’re telling me that putting us on school buses means we aren’t going very far?” She shrugged. “Want to put some money on it?”

“Yeah, but a school bus means—”

“A school bus means things are really fucked,” Sue said. “You know how people get about that sort of stuff. Armed troops of any kind on US soil make citizens freak the fuck out, so what do you think it’s going to do to people when they see us loaded up in little yellow school buses?” She reached down to touch her M16. “We ain’t exactly toting Scooby Doo lunch boxes here. If this is a big enough deal that they’re requisitioning school buses, something is clearly fucked. So yeah, I’m a little concerned that my gas mask doesn’t fit.”

“Come on. You know you’re not going to need a gas mask.”

Honky Joe held up three aces. Mitts swore, and Goons just calmly handed his cards to Duran. Honky Joe gave his cards to Duran as well, and then turned to Sue and Kim. “Gas mask? Maybe. Maybe not. But I agree that this is fucked up. With the nuke, deploying somewhere closer to China maybe makes sense, but we’re deploying stateside. That, my friend, is a big deal.” He leaned over Sue and tapped on the window. “You see that?”

They were driving past flatbeds loaded with chain-link fencing and posts. Each truck was loaded to the gills, the trucks themselves five abreast in a line that must have stretched close to a mile. It took the school buses more than two minutes to pass the trucks.

“You already know how big a deal it is to deploy troops on domestic soil,” Honky Joe said. “But that’s a bigger deal. What do you think that fencing is for? We’ve got to be setting up internment
camps or something. Who for this time? Who we trying to keep locked up?”

Kim looked down at Sue’s gas mask as it jiggled atop her pack. The glass eyes and filter canister made it look menacing, bug-like. “No,” Kim said. “You don’t deploy troops in the United States unless you’re expecting an invasion. Or something. My bet is it’s a something. Gas masks? It’s not who. It’s what. And the fences aren’t for an internment camp. Think of it as a quarantine. The question isn’t
who
are we trying to keep out, but
what
are we trying to keep out?”

Sue held the oversize gas mask up to her face again. “Fuck,” she said, drawling the word out. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

B
ark was crying again. It was eight o’clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. Melanie had slept for maybe four hours, and Bark was crying again.

Unbelievable. Okay, Melanie was willing to admit that maybe she could have handled it with more tact, that given how little sleep they’d been getting and how hard they’d been working since the egg sac arrived, this wasn’t the ideal time, but the minute she’d told him it was over she felt nothing but relief. Relief and annoyance. Seriously. Unbelievable. He started crying like she’d been his high school girlfriend. She was pretty sure Julie and Patrick weren’t aware of her and Bark’s affair before, but whatever hope she had of continued discretion had gone out the window because Bark just could not keep his shit together. The good thing, she supposed, was that neither Julie nor Patrick seemed judgmental about it. There was a time when they would have tsk-tsked her and called her a slut behind her back, but now they mostly seemed like they were annoyed by Bark’s constant crying. If anything, Julie seemed as if she might be impressed that Melanie had gotten a little bit of what she wanted. Score one for feminism, Melanie supposed. The
downside of feminism was probably right in front of her, though: instead of putting a brave face on it, Bark was just standing there, in the middle of the lab, dripping tears. Like a leaky faucet, not even bothering to wipe his face. Julie was drawing the venom from the dead spider, Patrick was prepping the solution, Melanie was headed to her office to give Manny a call, and Bark was standing around crying.

Even though she had been intending to end things with him for a while, the reason she finally went ahead with it was at least partly Agent Rich. He wasn’t a dreamboat physically like Bark, but he wasn’t as unimpressive-looking as Manny was either. Not to dump on Manny, who was a good guy, but he wasn’t what Agent Rich was. Which was a man. Agent Rich was a true-blue man. With handcuffs. There was a real part of Melanie, even with all that was going on in the lab, that hoped he’d stick around DC and give her a chance to see what he looked like wearing nothing but his handcuffs.

There was only a part of her that had wanted Agent Rich to stay, however, because the bigger part of her wasn’t sure she’d ever want to leave her lab. These things were fucking incredible. And she’d started calling them “things” because she wasn’t sure they were really even spiders. At least not the way she’d come to think of spiders. There are thirty-five thousand species of spiders, and they’ve been on earth for at least three hundred million years. From the very origin of humanity, spiders have been out there, scuttling along the edges of firelight, spinning webs in the woods, and scaring the hell out of people, even though, with a few rare exceptions, they are no real threat. But these were something different.