The Hatching Page 11

  It wasn’t.

  Mike could see it clearly. It was a spider, three-quarters of its hairy, golf-ball-sized body digging itself out from the flesh on the upper part of Henderson’s right cheek. Mike’s hand was throbbing and it was dripping blood freely now. The only noise in the plane came from Mike’s breathing and the spider making its way out of Henderson’s face. It sounded like . . . Oh shit. It sounded like chewing. Mike gagged again, and then couldn’t stop himself. He rushed back to where he’d entered in the opening of the jet, held on with his good hand, leaned out, and let loose what was left of his lunch. Most of it splashed on the ground, which was good, but some got on his pants, which was still better than puking right in the heart of an investigation. When he straightened up his nose was running and his eyes had teared up. He had to wipe at his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Ugh. He was going to submit his dry-cleaning receipt to the agency as a legitimate business expense. Fuck the director and fuck this, he thought.

  “Gross, huh?” Moreland looked pleased with himself.

  Mike didn’t reply. He walked back down the funnel of the plane and splayed the beam on Henderson’s face again, and that’s when he wished he hadn’t puked already, because right now was when he really needed to puke: the spider was gone.

  Frantic, he ran the light on the wall and then the ceiling, then across Henderson’s face and torso and down the burnt flesh and exposed bones of Henderson’s leg. And there. Relief. The spider. On the ground.

  It was moving slowly. Mike knew it wasn’t the right word for an eight-legged thing, but it looked as if the spider was limping. He squinted and leaned over. There was clearly something wrong with the bug—two of its legs weren’t moving and it was dragging its body along the ground. Maybe it had been injured in the crash or gotten burned too? Mike shook his head. Who cared what happened to the spider? The only question that mattered was, how the fuck had it gotten into Henderson’s head?

  Except, Mike realized, as he watched the spider dragging its body across the floor, the question that was bothering him the most was, why in all of the angels of mercy was the spider coming toward him? Because it was absolutely headed toward him. It wasn’t trying to get away or hide or even oblivious of Mike. It wasn’t doing any of the things that to Mike, in his limited experience with creepy crawlies, seemed natural. No, it was clearly moving in his direction. Mike tried stepping to the side, and the spider changed its line, angling toward him again. Mike took another step to the side and banged into the table that was next to Henderson’s chair, and again, the spider changed its bearing. Mike started to reach for his gun, but he quickly realized that shooting a spider might be overkill. He started to psych himself up to just squash the thing with his foot—it might be big and hairy and incredibly creepy what with the eating its way out of Henderson’s face and then making a beeline for Mike, but it was still something he could stomp on—when the spider stopped moving on a dark spot on the floor.

  It took Mike a second to understand what the spider was doing. The dark spot on the floor was blood. He looked at the suit jacket wrapped around his hand and saw a drop of blood fall to the floor. He had been bleeding on the floor.

  The dark spot on the floor was his blood.

  And as near as he could tell, the spider appeared to be feeding.

  Mike wanted to shriek. It took everything in him not to run screaming, but then he felt the table against the back of his thigh again and he remembered the crystal glass he had picked up off the floor. He put the flashlight between his teeth again, then, trying to be careful but quick, he flipped the glass over and slammed it down on top of the spider. He grabbed the flashlight again and pointed it at the glass. The bug didn’t seem to notice at first, but then, after a few seconds, the thing went absolutely fucking berserk. It flung itself at the sides of the glass, hitting it hard enough that Mike could hear the ping of its body. He was glad billionaires had serious, heavy cut-glass crystal on their planes instead of the flimsy plastic cups he got when he flew coach.

  A light hit him in the eyes and he realized it was Moreland training his flashlight on him. The cop had come into the plane. “Is that a spider?” he said.

  Mike nodded and looked down at the glass. The bug had stopped thrashing and seemed as though it had gone back to working on the blood. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any big jars lying around? Something with a metal lid that we can poke holes in?”

  Moreland squatted next to the glass and tapped on the top. The spider started flinging itself against the glass again. Its legs made a disturbing skittering sound, like leaves blown across pavement, and when its body hit the glass it made a clear ringing sound that would have almost been pleasing—like wind chimes—if it weren’t coming from some sort of flesh-and-blood-eating creature that was a quarter of the size of Mike’s fist.

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “How about you don’t do that?”

  Moreland stood up and turned to walk out of the plane. “I’ll see what I can find. I bet the EMTs or the firefighters have some sort of container that would work.”

  Mike kept his flashlight trained on the glass as the sound of Moreland’s footsteps disappeared. There was something niggling at him. Something more than just having a spider eat its way out of Henderson’s face, something about the plane. Reluctantly, he moved the beam of the flashlight off the spider so he could look around. He splayed the light across the wall and the ceiling, but it was just scorched metal, melted plastic, marks from the fire. On the floor, bits of ash stirred whenever the wind cut through the hole in the plane, but the larger lumps of charred materials stayed settled, held down by weight or simply melted to the floor. He extended his leg and poked at one of the lumps with the toe of his shoe and watched it collapse into a pile of loose ash. Were there more of these spiders around? Maybe they’d burned up in the fire? He took a few steps toward the front of the plane and caught what was left of the flight attendant’s body in the beam of the flashlight.

  “Oh.” He said it aloud, though it was just him in the plane. He leaned over her body to get a closer look at the flesh that was pitted and chunked out. Some of it was just burns, but there, where he’d thought she’d been torn by shards of metal, he was no longer sure. The flesh bulged and looked raw, and suddenly he felt his skin go clammy. Had spiders been eating at her too? He looked out of the rent in the plane and saw Moreland coming back across the field toward him, some sort of jar in his hand.

  Mike turned to glance at the crystal glass, suddenly worried that the spider wouldn’t be there, but he was relieved to see the creepy thing was still under the dome. “Fuck,” he said, and pulled out his phone. He wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to explain this to the director, but he was pretty sure flesh-eating spiders didn’t fall into the category of “anything other than an accident” that the director had been hoping for. Before he dialed, he looked around. Was there anything else? Was he missing something? This was Bill Henderson, not some anonymous housewife or corporate drone caught up in a drug deal gone poorly. Five minutes from the time the plane went down until the director was calling him as the nearest available agent. This was not something Mike could afford to fuck up, and if it turned out later that, oh, by the way, there had been something really obvious, some clue or thing that he should have seen that was what really caused Henderson’s plane to crash, Mike was going to be eating buckets of shit for the rest of his career. So he took another look at the plane, at the burnt and ravaged bodies, at the scattered ash that was starting to blow and lift in the hot breeze. The metal tube was like an oven in the unseasonable spring sun, the sharp edges of the walls and exposed wires a diagram of disaster. At his feet, there was the pinging of the spider again, beating at the glass with its legs or body or whatever the hell those things were called. Mike decided that, no, there was this single crippled spider and nothing else. He wasn’t missing anything.

  But he was wrong. Near the back of the plane, in the gloom and ash, there was a small stirring.

 
; The Indian Ocean

  He slid the two rifles onto the deck of the boat and climbed up the ladder. The .40 cal Smith & Wesson was tucked into his waistband.

  “Okay,” he said, picking up the rifles and carrying them over to his wife. “They still coming?”

  She shook her head. “Something’s wrong.”

  He handed her the .22 caliber rifle. She couldn’t handle the Winchester. Maybe a .22 wasn’t ideal for stopping power, but he’d made her practice with it until she could put three bullets in an inch circle from fifty feet out. He was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but he didn’t have a good feeling. He put the binoculars up to his eyes. Two years of sailing and they’d had only one close call with pirates, off the coast of Africa. They’d been lucky.

  Until today.

  No question that’s what this boat was. You don’t see a Zodiac where they were, out in the middle of the ocean, unless it was working from a mother ship. And this was a big one, stripped down for speed, with a bunch of men hunkered down in it. As soon as his wife had glassed the boat with the binoculars and then shown it to him, he’d put out a Mayday and run belowdecks for the rifles and his pistol. He knew how it worked. They both did. It was part of the risk of sailing in certain parts of the world. Help would come. Eventually. Maybe. They were on their own for now, and what people read about every now and then in the news was only part of it. Best-case scenario, they’d end up being held for a ransom that they couldn’t afford to pay. Worst-case scenario, he’d end up dead, and his wife . . . Well, that was a thought he would hold on to when his finger was on the trigger and he was trying to figure out if he should fire. But his wife was right: something was off.

  When he first saw the Zodiac, the eight or nine men in it had been leaning forward, as if their bodies could make them get to the sailboat more quickly. But now, as the boat cut across the calm water, the men were rising from their seats.

  He hadn’t even bothered trying to outrun the Zodiac. In the small community of sailors who had cashed in to retire early and spend their time at sea, their boat was neither the most ostentatious nor the most threadbare. In Madagascar they’d made friends with a couple who had been in technology whose boat was almost entirely custom-made, and off the coast of Sri Lanka they’d had dinner aboard a vessel that was so threadbare his foot had gone through a rotten plank on the deck and he’d needed to get ten stitches. Their sailboat was in good shape, but they’d bought it used and hadn’t been able to afford to spend much on cosmetics. It was fast, though. Sure, it wasn’t a racing boat, but for a cruising sailboat, it could move. Not that it mattered now. With the high buzz of the Zodiac coming at them, he’d known right away he and his wife couldn’t outrun the pirates.

  It was weird though. The men weren’t even looking at them anymore. They were scrambling away from the bow, and one of the men was flailing around. It looked as though he was having a fit and the other men were scared. Wouldn’t that be something? If they were saved from pirates because one of them was an epileptic and the rest were superstitious? That would be a funny story, he thought, certainly funnier than he and his wife being kidnapped or killed. Or worse.

  He lowered the binoculars and turned to his wife. “Remember what we talked about,” he said. “If you’ve got to shoot, shoot. We’re not in Charleston.” What he didn’t say was that, if it came down to it, the reason he had the pistol was to make sure he had a bullet left for each of them, just in case.

  He looked back at the water, and even without the binoculars, he could tell that something really was different about the boat. It had veered off course, no longer headed toward them. Instead of knifing across the water, it was arcing gracefully away from them, a large and gentle circle. And the men inside were . . . Fighting? It almost looked as though they were pulling some sort of a dark cloth from the body of the man who’d been having a fit.

  He turned to his wife. She held her rifle tightly. He knew she was scared, and he reached out and cupped his hand around the back of her neck, kissed her, and then put the binoculars back to his eyes.

  What the fuck? The boat was headed straight again, toward their sailboat, but there were no men left in the Zodiac. Instead, it was full of some sort of dark liquid. It looked like oil. He watched it for a few more seconds until he was able to understand that it was not a liquid at all, but something that seemed to move of its own accord. He dropped the binoculars and raised his rifle.

  He took two shots, aiming for the air tubes, before he realized it was a bad decision. Even the smallest Zodiacs had three air tubes—one on each side and the bottom—and though he didn’t know how many a big one like this would have, it was probably more than three. But even if there were only three to hit, the bigger problem was that he’d brought his Winchester Model 70. He loved his Winchester. It was accurate as hell, but it held only five rounds. Hunting deer? Sure. Hunting pirates or trying to sink a Zodiac? Not ideal. An AR-15 with a couple of thirty-round magazines would have been ideal. He could have sprayed the boat, changed the clip, and kept firing until the fucker sank. Instead, he had three shots left.

  But he didn’t have to sink it. With nobody left to steer, he just had to get it to veer off course, to turn away from them. If he popped an air tube on one side of the Zodiac, that would make it drag and turn. They wouldn’t have to outrun the Zodiac, just outmaneuver it. He raised the rifle to his shoulder, looked through the scope then hesitated. The Zodiac was close. Maybe a hundred yards away now. It was headed straight at them, so the speed of the boat shouldn’t be a problem with his aim—he’d always been a good shot—but he had doubts about popping the air tube. Maybe it wouldn’t just deflate. Maybe it wouldn’t drag into the water and turn the Zodiac away from them. Maybe he’d fire his last three bullets and then have to stand and watch the Zodiac crash into them.

  The engine. Three shots to stop the engine, and then they could outrun the Zodiac all day. He moved the rifle fractionally, putting the engine housing in the middle of his sights. The boat was moving so goddamned fast, he had only a few seconds. The first shot was wide. He saw the plastic on the housing splinter. The second hit home, however. The buzz of the Zodiac’s engine went quiet and he lowered the rifle, one bullet to spare.

  His wife came up to his elbow.

  “Where are . . . What is that? I don’t understand.”

  The boat continued to glide toward them, the motor dead but its momentum still moving the Zodiac slowly through the water. The black mound in the boat rising and falling in waves, as if it were an ocean unto itself, but in a different rhythm. Even from where the boat stopped gliding, nearly thirty feet from them, he could hear the sound of whatever it was scraping and clicking on the rubber and wood of the boat.

  He turned to his wife. “I need to use the radio.”

  He turned and went belowdecks. His wife ran after him, peppering him with questions.

  Neither of them saw the bloom of silk that started to rise from the mass of spiders, the white threads whispering and twisting in the gentle wind, spiders drifting into the air.

  The White House

  “Two more to Germany. Wheels down in a couple of hours.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stabbed his thick finger against the map on the touchscreen monitor.

  Manny was listening, but he was also looking at the press release one of his aides had prepared for him on the plane crash that had apparently killed Bill Henderson. The director of the agency had a man in place and a team on the way to make sure it wasn’t anything other than an accident. Just another headache for Manny. Of course the nuclear explosion was the big news of the day, but the president was going to have to say something about Henderson, and she’d have to go to the funeral. Christ. Minneapolis. This was not what Manny needed. Bill Henderson had been a pushy asshole—which was one of the reasons he’d become a billionaire—but he’d also been an unabashed ally of their party in general and Steph in particular. Even if he hadn’t rounded up his richest friends to donate, his own contribution
s to their campaign coffers had been what put them over the top. It wasn’t that easy to replace a billionaire with deep pockets, and while the other guys each had a clown car full of buffoons driving them to the convention, sooner or later one of them would emerge. It was a miracle they hadn’t figured it out yet as it was. With the loss of Henderson’s money and the fucking Chinese dropping nukes, Manny was suddenly thinking there might be a real race. He knew that’s not what he was supposed to be preoccupied with right now. That was the lie of politics: that they were there to serve the common good. But it was a lie Manny believed—or maybe used to believe?—and that Steph believed. This wasn’t the time for politics. There was a crisis and a real worry here. Nukes weren’t something to be discounted. No. He had to think about the Chinese.

  He sighed and watched Ben Broussard finish his presentation.

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs looked at the president and then at the rest of the people in the room. “We’ll have them on the ground and operational by eighteen hundred tomorrow, and from there we can have a rapid response here and here as needed,” he said, tapping the map again. “Any questions?”

  There were none, so Ben took his seat. The president stared at the map for an uncomfortable second and then she turned and said, “Any comments?”

  Manny saw that Alexandra Harris, the national security advisor, had slipped into the room sometime in the last couple of minutes, and at the president’s question, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s the wrong reaction.”

  “You think we’re overreacting? To a nuclear bomb?” Ben slammed his hand on the table. He didn’t look pissed. He looked furious. For the first time, Manny considered that maybe the problem with Ben was simply that he was one of those old-guard military men who, no matter what he said, couldn’t quite stomach the idea of having a woman as the commander in chief. Or, in this case, the national security advisor. Billy Cannon, the secretary of defense, didn’t react like that when Alex challenged him, but that’s probably because Billy looked at Alexandra Harris and saw the national security advisor, while Ben looked at Alex and saw a woman. The thought made Manny want to chuckle a little, because really, Alex looked like nothing other than a grandmother. She was sharp as hell, but there was always a part of him that expected her to pull some hard candies out of her purse.