The Hatching: A Novel (28 page)

The good news was that at an airport as small as Stornoway’s, it wasn’t much of a walk to the parking lot, and even with the passengers getting off the last plane to land on the island, it was easy in, easy out. “We can pick up some pasta and vegetables, maybe watch a movie. I’m sure you’ll be able to fly out tomorrow. I can’t imagine the prime minister is going to swallow this spider bollocks much longer. The upside is that you’ll never have a better excuse for missing a little school, and you won’t exactly have a glut of
free time once you start your residency. Plus, you know,” Aonghas said, loading her bag back into the Range Rover, “there are worse things than being stuck with your fiancé for another day. Fiancé,” he said again, rolling the word in his mouth. “I like the sound of that.”

He got into the driver’s seat, started the Range Rover, put it into drive, and then hesitated. There was a man throwing up in front of the doors to the airport. “Jesus,” Aonghas said. “Must have been a bumpy landing. That Indian bloke’s cleaning himself out.”

The man vomited again, and then slumped against a pillar. Even from where Aonghas and Thuy sat in the Range Rover, it was clear the Indian bloke was doing poorly. He was starting to claw at his tie, as though he was having trouble breathing, and the few other passengers who had been able to make it to Stornoway on the last flight before the grounding were either giving him a wide berth or standing well away from him. Now the Indian man let go of his tie and started pulling on his shirt, untucking it and then ripping it open. Jesus. Aonghas saw a button pop off, tracing a gentle arc before bouncing on the cement.

Thuy unbuckled. “I should go help.”

“You’re not a doctor yet.”

She rolled her eyes, but Aonghas grabbed her arm. “Just wait. Hold on.”

“Aonghas. I need to help.”

He kept his hand on her arm, but he was watching the man, watching the way people weren’t sure if they should move forward or back. The skin on the man’s chest and stomach looked shiny, as if it was stretched tight. “Just, I don’t know. Just wait one second.”

One second was all it took.

The man’s front opened up like a zipper.

“Aonghas!” Thuy screamed.

Aonghas slammed his foot on the gas.

“Aonghas! We’ve got to help him.”

Aonghas kept his foot all the way down, overriding the eco function that was supposed to improve the Range Rover’s miserable gas efficiency, overriding the computer in the engine that wanted to shift to a higher gear. He cranked the wheel and passed uncomfortably close to a middle-aged woman wearing a floral dress that looked like it belonged in the museum of “things from the 1970s that you wouldn’t ever want to wear in public.” Thuy was turned and looking out her window, and Aonghas, wrestling the steering wheel, stole a glance over his shoulder. He couldn’t see the Indian man anymore, but the people who were outside near the entranceway seemed to be screaming, flailing their arms. He could see the black balls—spiders, he knew even without being able to make out the details that they were spiders—moving and jumping and crawling on people. One woman’s face was streaming blood and she was clawing at her cheek.

“Oh my god.” Thuy turned back in her seat. “What the shit?”

“Buckle up,” he said. He lifted his foot off the gas and tapped the brakes, dropping from fifty kilometers an hour to thirty so he could take the corner at the end of the row of cars. With his foot off the gas for that brief instant, the Range Rover shifted gears. The tires gave the beginnings of a screech before he straightened it out.

By the time he came to the exit he was doing seventy. He didn’t even think of touching the brakes. He took the wooden arm off the exit gate.

As he turned right onto A866, Thuy spoke again. “Those were . . . those were spiders, right?”

“I think so,” Aonghas said. “Yes.”

“And they came out of his chest and stomach.”

“Yes.”

“The Indian man.”

“I suppose he could have been Pakistani.”

“He could have been Pakistani. Yes. I suppose.”

“But probably not,” Aonghas said.

“No. Probably not.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “That really happened?”

“I’m afraid so,” Aonghas said.

“And?”

“And I write mysteries for a living,” he said. “All I’m doing is connecting the dots.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Thuy scooted on the seat until she was turned to face him. He was driving the speed limit now, since he didn’t want to get pulled over, and those things didn’t seem like they could keep pace with a car. He risked looking at her. She reached out and touched his cheek.

“Okay,” she said. “That was impressive. You just reacted.”

“I’m not normally like that,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think a girlfriend has ever called me impressive.”

“Well, I’m not your girlfriend anymore. So what are we doing now? Where are we going?”

“Back to Càidh Island,” he said.

“What about my flight to Edinburgh?”

They passed a house with a small plastic toddler slide in the front. There was a part of Aonghas that wanted to stop and bang on the door and yell at the family to run, to get the hell out of there, but he didn’t stop. He kept driving. “Thuy,” he said, “even if your flight wasn’t canceled, we’re getting out of here for now. Think about what we’ve been listening to on the radio. That video they keep talking about. I mean, we haven’t seen it, but if the video is
anywhere near as bad as it sounds, and if the pictures they’re talking about are real—and now this, well, this . . . It seems like . . .”

“And China.”

“China?”

“You don’t think they’re connected?”

“Why would they be connected?”

“I don’t know,” Thuy said. “But don’t you think?”

Aonghas was quiet for a second, and then he turned on the radio and tuned in to the BBC. They were talking about Los Angeles.

It sounded terrifying.

T
eddie had thrown up only twice today, which, she thought, was pretty good. At first, that deep feeling in her stomach had been excitement: now
this
was a news story. They’d gotten reports of the crash and she ordered a camera crew from the Los Angeles studio over to the port. It was the kind of story that could get her a promotion: great visuals, easy to summarize, and plenty of ways in which they could spin it off. She was already thinking of the “hidden menace of shipping” special. But those excited butterflies quickly turned into something else.

The crew couldn’t get anywhere near the port. Traffic was snarled everywhere, which wasn’t that unusual for Los Angeles, but she gave up on the ship story pretty quickly. The news was spiders. The cell phone videos and phone calls were terrifying. India was one thing—it was so far away you could convince yourself it might be a hoax or that it wasn’t as horrifying as it looked—but this was Los Fucking Angeles. Some kid near Long Beach uploaded a six-second clip of spiders overwhelming a jogger and coating him like an oil slick, and they got a call-in from near the port from a woman who was yelling that she was watching spiders eat a mom
and a baby before the caller herself started screaming and then the only sound was this weird crackling. That was the first time Teddie threw up, when she figured out the crackling sound was actually the spiders chewing human flesh.

The camera crew finally gave up on the traffic and set up on McCarthy Quad at the University of Southern California. It was the perfect shot for a reporter who couldn’t get an angle on the real action. The dichotomy of reporting on fear and chaos from the middle of an ivory-tower oasis. Students walked past in the background as if nothing was going on twenty-five miles across town. The reporter blathered excitedly, filling time in the way that only a seasoned pro can fill time when the facts are almost entirely speculation.

And then, the spiders came gliding down from the sky.

At first, there weren’t many. The camera caught a few black dots against the cerulean sky, cotton-candy trails of silk streamers looking like vapor trails. But then some of them started drifting down. For a few minutes, it was almost comical. The camera recorded one landing near the reporter who promptly squashed it with his shoe. There. What was so scary about that? If you’ve got a shoe, you’re safe. Around the reporter, however, students were pointing and beginning to scream. And then the camera caught one student flailing her arms, five or six of the large black dots scurrying over her, and then a burst of blood oozed from her face, her shirt staining crimson. And more screaming. And more screaming. And more and more and more and more. And the camera suddenly dropping. All Teddie could see on her screen was pavement and shoes and socks and the alien movement of spiders, and then just the lower body of the reporter, his legs kicking and then kicking more weakly, and then not moving at all. And all of it, Teddie realized, running live because she hadn’t ordered it cut away. That’s when she threw up the second time.

Since then, they’d gotten a helicopter in the air, and they’d gotten an incredible money shot, at, of all places, Mann’s Chinese Theatre. It was too good to be true, the sort of shot that would have made Teddie stand up and seek someone out specifically for the purpose of giving and receiving high fives if the situation had been just a little bit less grim. Some sort of early-afternoon opening: the kind of movie that didn’t deserve klieg lights and a nighttime slot, which meant the A-list stars on the project were really B-list and C-list famous, and the brigade of fans standing in a corridor ten deep were filled partly with paid extras, and the photographers calling names were themselves also B-list and C-list. But the shot from the helicopter? That was A-list all the way. The cameraman had been panning the area, one of the anchors talking about how not all of LA seemed to be caught up in this catastrophe, when a car barreling down Hollywood Boulevard punched through a red light at North Orange, clipped a delivery van, and then swerved left across three lanes to plow into the crowd waiting outside the theater. That would have been enough on a normal day to cause chaos and have Teddie make the call to break into the live news, but this was already live, already in the middle of chaos, and it got immediately worse: almost as soon as the car stopped moving, before the anchors could do more than yell, a blob of black rolled out of the smashed front window of the car. The cameraman figured it out before Teddie did, because he was already zooming in, and the blob of black turned itself into a thousand individual parts.

There was a pattern to the way the spiders moved. Teddie knew there was a pattern to it, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. At first, people ran away from where the car had crashed, but then they turned to help, and almost as quickly, the tide turned again, but it didn’t matter: whether it was the crush of people or the bugs themselves, the spiders were faster. Teddie watched as
people went down. A woman screaming, disappearing under a mass of writhing spiders. A young black man whose back was a weaving carpet of spiders made it thirty or forty feet before he too fell to the ground, a sick slick of blood around him. But here and there, Teddie saw the thread of spiders weave itself around people, passing them by as if they were magnetically repelled; she couldn’t figure out the pattern, why some people were swallowed by the swarm of spiders and others were left alone. And also, where most of the spiders seemed to move together in a synchronized dance, like a single, connected organism, here and there a few individual spiders peeled off.

That had been a couple of hours ago.

The first reports had been of swarms, veritable rivers of spiders drowning the city, coming from the sky like little specks of death, but now they were scattered. The cell phone towers were overwhelmed, and close to two-thirds of the city was without power—trucks and cars crashing into utility poles, sketchy reports of the spiders chewing through electric wires—but where people had Internet and energy, they were uploading videos of single spiders coming up drainpipes or shimmying through open windows, racing across floors and countertops and leaping on people and animals. Teddie knew there must have been other videos taken, ones that ended with screaming and the phone dropping to the ground, a cracked screen left to show only an empty ceiling, but the videos that made it online all ended with the same conclusion: a squished spider. One spider, the videos all seemed to say, wasn’t going to be eating anybody on its own.

What was it, Teddie wondered, that made these people pull out their cell phones in the middle of whatever it was that was going on? Anybody who was watching television or listening to the radio or, hell, had a cell phone, had to know what was going on. Sure,
maybe at first there had still been people posting photos of pop stars and cute cats and self-aggrandizing Me tweets, but that had disappeared as soon as it was clear something horrific was going on. By now, you had to be living in some sort of bubble to not know about the spiders. And even if you were skeptical—Teddie could imagine herself as one of those people, she could imagine herself to be the kind of woman who would hear about rampaging spiders eating people and call bullshit until she’d seen it with her own eyes—you couldn’t possibly be in Los Angeles and not understand there was something seriously messed up going on. And yet, there were new videos every few minutes, people who couldn’t help but interpret this as an opportunity to be just a little bit famous, when, as far as Teddie was concerned, they should be interpreting this as an opportunity to get the fuck out of Dodge. Seriously. It was amazing to her that great swaths of Los Angeles seemed to think that the proper response to a full-scale catastrophe was to document it.

Now, though, it was 7:00
P.M
. Eastern Standard, or 4:00
P.M
. in Los Angeles. More than three hours since the ship ran aground and hell skittered into the city, and President Pilgrim was ready for another presidential address, her first since grounding the planes. The anchors were cutting over to the live view. Serious stuff. When she’d grounded the planes, the president had walked across the red carpet of the White House’s Cross Hall and spoken from the entrance to the East Room, but now she was sitting at her desk in the Oval Office.