The Hatching: A Novel (35 page)

She took a few sips, neither of them saying anything, neither of them wanting to talk about how many empty bunks there were inside. After a few minutes, she leaned into him and he silently put his arm around her.

N
ot even twenty-four hours since the spiders started dying in Los Angeles and it was over. How many millions of people dead across the world? But it was over. Manny reached for his Diet Coke and realized his hand was shaking. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he last slept. Three days? Four? But what he knew for sure was that the reports everywhere—India, China, Scotland, Egypt—were that the spiders were all dead. All that was left was the cleanup. How come it couldn’t be as simple as only having to deal with the fucking Staples Center?

“Sorry,” Melanie said. “You know as well as I do the Staples Center is just what’s obvious. You think because you kill one spider in your bathroom that there aren’t others hiding somewhere else in your house?”

Steph was lying on the couch. Not exactly dignified behavior in the Oval Office, but it was just the three of them. She had her eyes closed, but she clearly wasn’t sleeping. “Please tell me you didn’t say that.”

“But can’t we just, I don’t know, soak all of them in gasoline and then light the whole thing on fire?” Manny said. “Okay, so the whole idea of spraying insecticide over Los Angeles was a fiasco—”

“Honestly,” Melanie said, “it wasn’t the worst idea.”

“Sure, if we had enough insecticide and planes to spray more than a few square blocks, and then if the insecticide we used had actually worked. But fire? Right?” Manny said. “Set the Staples Center on fire? That should take care of any we don’t see.”

“I’m not talking about the Staples Center.”

“Then what are—”

“The spiders aren’t all the same,” Melanie said. “They just look the same because we’re seeing them as a group. You get a mass of these spiders, a swarm of them, and it looks like a unified group. We’ve been thinking about it wrong, trying to figure out what kind of spider it is, and then thinking, oh, they’re dying and all that’s left is the egg sacs. But it’s not just one kind of spider. There are spider
s
. Plural.”

Steph sat up and put her feet on the floor. “I don’t understand.”

“The spiders display patterns of eusociality similar to
Hymenoptera
and
Isoptera
, and I think, in a similar fashion, these spiders have different castes too.”

“Melanie,” Steph said, “I know you think what you’re saying makes sense, but please understand I’ve barely slept since this started, and nothing you just said makes
any
sense to me. We aren’t scientists, okay?”

“Spiders are normally loners. There are about thirty-five thousand known species, and mostly they live by themselves, but there are about two dozen species that display eusociality. Which just means they work together. They all help care for the brood and share resources, all that sort of stuff. So when I say
Hymenoptera
and
Isoptera
, you should think ants and bees and termites. Colonies. They work together, and they take on defined roles. You know, worker bees and queens and that type of thing.”

Manny leaned forward. “You’re saying they have queens? That all we have to do is kill the queens?”

“No, I’m . . .” She paused. “Well, maybe. Fuck. Okay. I have to think about
that
. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Just stay with me for a minute. We’ve got a kind of spider that isn’t like any other we’ve ever seen, but it’s not just one kind of spider. In the lab, we’ve already figured out how to differentiate between feeders and breeders, but it also looks as though there’s more than one kind of breeder. There are the spiders that use hosts to carry their eggs, the ones that lay eggs inside people, and there are breeders who lay eggs in sacs in places they’ve cleared out. Some egg sacs hatch quickly, some seem to be slower. Maybe it’s the same breeders and they just choose what kind of sac to make depending on the conditions, but I don’t think that’s it. It’s like they are on parallel but different tracks. There are the ones that behave like normal spiders and seem to develop at a normal pace, and there are the lightning ones.”

“Blitzkrieg,” Steph said.

“What?”

“Not everything is comparable to the Nazis,” Manny said.

“Lightning war,” Steph said to Melanie. “Blitzkrieg. Fast, overwhelming attacks as a military doctrine.”

“Yeah. I guess. They hatch and grow in this crazy accelerated fashion, and they die more quickly too.”

She looked at Manny and Steph, but they didn’t seem to get it. “I’m explaining it wrong. I’m talking about some of the spiders being feeders and some of them as breeders, but that’s the wrong way to think of it. It’s about timing. These ones, the ones we’re seeing out in the wild, they’re the colonizers.” She leaned over, putting her hands flat on the table. “They’re like pioneers, clearing the land.”

Steph squinted at her. “Clearing the land? For what?”

Melanie felt sick. She didn’t want to say it. “For the rest of them. Think of it as an advance team. These spiders, the ones we’re seeing, they’re just the first wave.”

Steph put her elbows on her knees and let her head sink. “You’re saying this is just the beginning?”

“It’s part of their evolutionary advantage. They come out with a first wave and clear out any potential predators. They’re designed to breed quickly and feed on anything that gets in their way, but the price of that fast growth is that they burn out. That’s what we’re seeing now. The first wave has hatched and cleared out space to set the table for the next stage.”

“So, what’s next?” Steph asked.

“More,” Melanie said. “Worse. The next ones are the real ones. Those will be the ones that are in it for the long haul.”

“How long?” Manny said. “How long until they come back?”

“Again—I can’t stress this enough—I’m working by feel here. I’ve never seen spiders like this, and I don’t have a lot of data. But looking at the egg sacs, looking at the variations in the spiders?” She stopped. “I’m not completely confident—”

“Melanie,” Steph said. “Just give me a number. How long?”

“Two weeks,” Melanie said. “Three if we’re lucky.”

E
very fifteen minutes or so, Annie would stick her foot into the lake. With the sun out, it was hot enough that she wanted to swim, but in April, in northern Minnesota, no matter how warm the air was, the water was barely different from ice. She sighed and went back to coloring. It was better to be out here, on the dock, than inside her stepdad’s cabin. All her mom and Rich wanted to do was sit around the radio and read the news on their stupid tablets.

She waved her hand around her head. The black flies weren’t bad yet, but there were already mosquitoes. Their whine was a constant part of cottage life. She whisked her hand back and forth a couple of times before she realized the buzzing wasn’t the sound of mosquitoes. It was a motor. She jumped to her feet. She could see her daddy at the helm of a boat. He was coming to get her. Coming to tell them it was safe to go home.

W
riting a book is a solitary endeavor, but getting a book out into the world requires a great deal of help.

Emily Bestler at Emily Bestler Books / Atria Books is a terrific editor, smart as hell, and a joy to work with. And while most writers are lucky if they have even one editor like Emily in their whole career, I’m about as lucky as it gets, because I also got to work with the magnificent Anne Collins at Penguin Random House Canada and, in the UK, with the excellent Marcus Gipps at Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group.

Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency is my literary agent extraordinaire. I can’t thank you enough. I’ll keep trying, though.

Erin Conroy at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment. Crushing it, as always.

At Emily Bestler Books / Atria Books, thanks to: David Brown, Judith Curr, Suzanne Donahue, Lara Jones, Amy Li, Albert Tang, and Jin Yu. At Penguin Random House Canada, thanks to: Randy Chan, Josh Glover, Jessica Scott, and Matthew Sibiga. At Gollancz, thanks to: Sophie Calder, Craig Leyenaar, Jennifer McMenemy, Gillian Redfearn, and Mark Stay.

At the Clegg Agency, thanks to: Jillian Buckley, Chris Clemans,
Henry Rabinowitz, Simon Toop, and Drew Zagami. Also thank you to Anna Jarota and Dominika Bojanowska at the Anna Jarota Agency, Mònica Martín, Inés Planells, and Txell Torrent at MB Agencia Literaria, and Anna Webber at United Agents.

You guys didn’t actually do anything, but thanks to Mike Haaf, Alex Hagen, Ken Rassnick, and Ken Subin. Shawn Goodman, you actually did help, so thanks to you as well.

And, of course, thank you to my brother and his family, my wife’s family, the friends who are family by choice, and to my wife and daughters. But no thanks to my dogs. You two are not super helpful.

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