The Hatching Read online

  “All right,” Melanie said. “What’s new?” She reached over and snapped the lid of the laptop shut. She didn’t need her lab to be silent, but she wasn’t a big fan of background noise.

  All three students stood up and looked at the laptop, making an array of distressed sounds. “We’re kind of just keeping that going to listen to the news because of the nuclear explosion,” Patrick said.

  For a second, Melanie thought she had misheard him, but then she realized that no, Patrick had indeed said the phrase nuclear explosion. And yet, their reaction seemed more in tune with Melanie’s having shut the laptop during the halftime show at the Super Bowl; it was something they wanted on in the background, but not their primary concern. None of the three looked particularly frazzled. No more frazzled than graduate students normally did, particularly after spending a night in the lab. There was nothing to indicate nuclear Armageddon. Patrick had some sort of smear on the corner of his lip, maybe chocolate, and Julie’s hair was looking like it could use a good round of conditioning, but none of them seemed ready to set out for the hills, and as far as she could tell, none of them had been crying. Still, Patrick really had said that they were keeping the laptop open because of a nuclear explosion. She let her fingers fall back on the lid of the laptop and played them over the notch that opened it. “Uh, anybody care to fill me in? What the hell is going on? Exactly how long was I asleep?”

  “We’ve been keeping the temperature steady and had video on the egg sac at HD resolution, and really there wasn’t much of anything—”

  “No,” Melanie said, cutting Bark off. “Holy biscuits on a fucking stick. Are you serious? Not the spider. A nuclear explosion?”

  “Oh, it’s not really that big a deal,” Patrick said. “It happened last night, but we just found out about it a little while ago. I mean, I guess it was a big deal, because it was a nuke, but it was an accident. It was a large nuke, but it wasn’t a super-populated area. At least that’s what the news is saying. It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything.”

  “It happened in China,” Julie added helpfully.

  “Like a meltdown?” Melanie didn’t open the laptop. Their blasé response to this nuclear thing had already turned her away from it and toward thinking about the egg sac. The way the three students were standing made it difficult for her to fully see the insectarium, but a piece of the egg sac was in her vision, and she could see it was moving. No. Vibrating, really.

  She walked to the other side of the students and slid the cage containing the rat, Humpy, down the counter a bit so that she could have a clearer view of the egg sac.

  “Oh, no,” Patrick said. “Not a meltdown. An actual nuclear bomb. Or a missile. I’m not actually sure which. But either way, it was an accident. Maybe a training mission or a crash or something?” He looked at Bark. “Were you listening?”

  Bark shrugged. “I mostly tuned it out after the president made her comments.” He lightly touched the glass of the insectarium with the tip of his middle finger. “This thing has been really interesting. It’s humming,” Bark said.

  That was enough for Melanie to take her hand off the laptop and turn fully to look at the egg sac. It was big. That had been the first thing that struck her the day before. Just how big it was. There was no question it was an egg sac, but she’d never seen one that size before. Bigger than a softball. The size of a small melon. And it was hard. Calcified. Or something else. She wasn’t sure what had happened to it, and that was one of the things they were going to have to figure out once the spiders shucked their shell and they could analyze some of the pieces. It didn’t have any give to it, and the feel of it was almost chalky. She realized what it reminded her of: those hard, sour, knobby candy balls she used to get from the quarter machines at the mall when she was just a kid. It looked chalky too, and they noticed the egg sac left a gritty white powder behind, something that looked like baking soda but was textured and grainy, like sand, when she rubbed it between her thumb and fingers.

  It was, as Bark so unpoetically put it, really interesting.

  Melanie realized Bark was right about the humming. Or, not humming exactly, but something like that. Maybe buzzing? Whatever it was, it wasn’t steady. It seemed to be cycling, low and strong and then moving into a higher pitch but fading, and the vibrating of the sac seemed to alternate with it. She reached through the open lid and put her hand over the sac, and at her first touch she almost snatched it back. “It’s hot.” She looked up at Julie.

  “Yeah, the temperature has been going up consistently. I didn’t even notice at first. We tracked it,” Julie said, nodding at the screen on the other laptop on the bench behind her, “but it wasn’t super obvious initially. It was so gradual that at first I didn’t really register that I was adding a degree, adding a degree. If you look at the data, there’s clearly a pattern.”

  Melanie let her fingers wrap over the top of it, palming the egg sac just as she used to wish she could palm the ball back when she was in college and still thought there was a chance in hell she could dunk a basketball someday. Maybe if the hoops had been at nine feet instead of ten. And if she’d been able to go off a trampoline. Six feet was tall for a woman, but she’d never had great hops.

  She realized that was what the egg sac felt like to her. Even with the small protrusions, the little knobs, it felt like a basketball. It was smaller, of course, small enough that it nestled in her hand. She wouldn’t have used the words sticky or tacky, as she might with the kind of basketballs she preferred, but there was something to it that kept it from feeling slick. She could imagine that before it became calcified it had been woven against a wall or inside a crevice somewhere, the silk spun into a cradle to hold the bundle of spiders waiting to be born. And it was hot. Not so hot that she had to take her hand off it, but warm, like a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.

  It was amazing to think the egg sac was ten thousand years old, that it had been buried for so long. And that it was part of a Nazca Line. That giant spider was like a message just for her, a sign for Melanie to pay attention. Yes, she’d write articles about it—this egg sac’s resurrection and what might be inside was the sort of thing she could run with—but more than anything, it reminded her of the fun her job as a scientist was, and of how truly amazing the world could be.

  The egg sac gave a jerk under her hand. They were waiting to come out. How long had those eggs been in there? How long had they been waiting to hatch? And what was that sound? Something rising above the hum of the egg sac, a sharp tone. The tone was mechanical, it sounded like . . .

  Oh. Melanie took her hand out of the insectarium and stood up straight. It was her cell phone.

  She fished it out of the pocket of her lab coat. Manny. She thought about answering it, about talking to her ex-husband, and then she dug her thumbnail into the mute button and put the vibrating phone back in her pocket.

  Bark was leaning down now, bent over almost comically, his chin pressed against the table so that he had an eye-level view of the sac. His mouth was open a little. “Yeah,” he said. “Here we go.”

  “Where?”

  “Here,” Bark said, and he motioned for Melanie to bend over. As she did, Julie and Patrick crowded in. “There, on the bottom. See the seam?”

  Melanie didn’t at first, but then the egg sac gave another shake and she saw that what she had taken to be a difference in color was actually a crack, the beginning of an opening. She swung into action.

  They double-checked that the video was recording, that the temperature streams were flowing through the computers. She sent Patrick running for the still camera and even took a few pictures herself to make sure they had enough light. In the few minutes that took them, the seam in the egg sac had already started to widen. Melanie was ready for it. Patrick was standing, but she and Bark and Julie were perched on stools, and Melanie had her hand resting on the top edge of the insectarium. It was still open, and she slid the lid closed, latching it shut from force of habit.r />
  The egg sac went still, and Melanie realized she was holding her breath. All of them were so quiet Melanie could hear the ticking of the second hand on her watch. She wrapped her fingers around her wrist; the watch had been a birthday gift from Manny, the second or third year of their marriage, when things were still good. They waited. And waited. She unwrapped her fingers and looked at her watch. Thirty seconds. Forty-five. The egg sac was still. The humming sound had died down. One minute. One thirty.

  Melanie felt the phone in her pocket buzzing again. She ignored it.

  One forty-five.

  Nothing.

  Two minutes.

  Julie cleared her throat.

  Two fifteen.

  “Maybe,” Patrick said quietly, but he didn’t say anything else.

  Two minutes thirty seconds.

  Three minutes.

  Melanie shifted, and was about to look at her watch again when there was movement.

  The egg sac pulsed. It pushed outward. The small, open seam puckered. There was something behind it. And there, on the top, to Melanie’s right, a pinprick in the shell. The pinprick turned into a crack, zippering down the side and meeting the open seam. The egg sac pulsed again, the hum suddenly returning, a car engine idling in a closed garage. The egg sac jerked to the left, tilting, and then again.

  “Jesus,” Bark said. “They aren’t coming out easily.”

  “Since the egg sac has calcified, it might be tougher than it usually is for them?” Julie had the camera to her eye, and the sound of the shutter opening and closing came to Melanie above the hum of the egg sac. She had to restrain herself from telling Julie to wait to take pictures until there was something worth taking pictures of. They could always delete any photos they didn’t need, but better to have too many than too few. “I mean, I know it’s scientifically possible, but I can’t really believe it’s hatching at all,” Julie added.

  The egg sac went still again for a few seconds, but the humming, if anything, got louder. And then, suddenly, it was both still and quiet.

  Melanie’s phone vibrated again. She ignored it. Goddamned Manny.

  They were all quiet for a few seconds more, and then Melanie said, more to herself than to the room, “What the fuck?”

  As if those were the magic words, the egg sac seemed to explode. Later, with the video slowed down, Melanie saw the way in which the spiders broke the sac open at its weak points, using the open seams for leverage, but in the moment, an explosion was the only word to describe their birth. One moment the egg sac was mostly intact, quiet and still in front of her, and the next moment spiders banged against the glass walls of the insectarium, scuttled across its floor and the underside of the lid, legs tapping against the glass and plastic, the sound like grains of rice spilling on the floor.

  Patrick shrieked, high-pitched, like a child. Julie scrambled backward. Even Bark jumped.

  But Melanie found herself drawn forward. She didn’t know how many of them there were, but they were frantic. Dozens of them at least. They’d been packed in the egg sac, and they came out in a swarm, their bodies unfolding, alien and beautiful. Big and fast, black apricots thundering against the glass. Skittering. She put her palm against the glass of the insectarium, and the spiders flew to it. It was like the plasma ball she’d had as a kid, one of those globes with an electrical charge in the middle. She remembered the way she’d put her hand on the glass and the filaments of plasma would be drawn to her flesh. She could never feel the current, but she knew it was there. In the same way, the spiders flocked to where her hand pressed against the insectarium. Even though she couldn’t possibly be feeling them through the glass, the vibrations went through her flesh anyway.

  She pulled her hand back.

  “Holy shit.” Bark leaned forward and pointed to the corner. “They’re eating that one.”

  Julie trained the lens toward the small group of spiders—three or four, though it was hard to tell given the way they crawled over one another—that were tearing into one of their brethren.

  “Whoa! Do you see this?” Patrick pointed to the other side of the insectarium. A large group of the spiders—maybe half the number in the container—had gone to the other side. Some of them just seemed to be pushing against the glass, but several were actively throwing their exoskeletons against the glass. They wanted out.

  “What the fuck?” Melanie stood straight up. “Are they trying . . . ?”

  All four of them looked at the cage on that side of the insectarium. Inside, Humpy, Patrick’s favorite lab rat, was oblivious to the arachnid swarm banging against the glass of the insectarium, desperately trying to get at his small body.

  Metro Bhawan, Delhi, India

  Dr. Basu was not pleased. She did not like Delhi. And Faiz was exhausting her. Normally she found him mostly amusing, but he’d spent the entire drive from Kanpur to Delhi—which should have taken six hours, but instead had taken thirteen—in a state of despair. She’d already been dreading the drive with him because she knew he would be texting or e-mailing Ines constantly, and when he wasn’t talking to Ines, Dr. Basu assumed he’d be talking about Ines. But literally five minutes into the trip, his Italian girlfriend had texted and informed him that she was now his Italian ex-girlfriend. Their relationship had moved too quickly, Ines wrote, and she was calling things off. Dr. Basu had a fleeting moment of relief—which made her feel immensely guilty—at the idea that she and Faiz could now talk about seismology instead of Ines, but of course, Faiz was distraught. Which was the lesser of those two evils, she thought, having to endure Faiz’s misery or his ecstasy? The longer the drive took, however, the angrier she became at Ines. She hadn’t even met this woman, but there was a part of her that wanted to fly to Italy just to give Ines a piece of her mind. How dare she break up with him by text? And worse, after an hour or so of Ines and Faiz texting back and forth, Ines dropped the bombshell: the real reason for the breakup was that she’d finally had a chance to read some of his work and she couldn’t be with a man if she didn’t “respect” his research. Saying she didn’t respect Faiz’s research was as good as saying she didn’t respect Dr. Basu’s research either.

  Thirteen hours in that car, and most of that time spent reassuring Faiz that he was smart, which was true, and an excellent worker, which was mostly true, even if he occasionally—okay, often, well, always—made inappropriate comments, and that he deserved to be treated better. By the time they arrived, she had a throbbing headache. No surprise, then, that she was beyond annoyed that she could still not figure out what the hell was causing the odd seismic readings.

  Faiz waved her over to where he was. He still looked miserable, but he was doing his best, holding his tablet and phone and talking with a man wearing a suit and tie. When she got closer, she saw that the man had a Delhi Metro Rail Corporation ID badge clipped to his jacket. He held up one hand.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not authorized to let you go any farther.”

  Dr. Basu pointed to the man’s ID badge. “Are you not the supervisor?”

  “I am, but—”

  “There are no ‘buts’ to this. One of our sensors is below. We need to see it.”

  The man shook his head. “Yes, your assistant already told me that.” Dr. Basu did not bother to correct the man about Faiz’s status. “And you had a man go down yesterday. It’s disruptive.”

  Dr. Basu stared at him and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She’d found that this tactic made men, in particular, uncomfortable. Sure enough, he started to fidget, and Dr. Basu decided to speak. “Is not the whole point of your having an earthquake warning system so that you can be warned if there are earthquakes? And is it not correct that you would like this system to be working properly?”

  “That’s correct, but—”

  She cut him off again. She took great pleasure in doing that to men like this who didn’t want to take her seriously. “Then we need to get down to the sensor to see if we can understand why we are getting these readings
.” Dr. Basu brushed past him. The man started to speak but then decided to just keep pace with her. She smiled to herself.

  She was sweating too much to be comfortable, and they might not get an answer, but at least this area seemed to be where the activity was the highest. She pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped her forehead. She stopped in front of a large iron door.

  “Open it,” she said.

  The man hesitated. “I can open this one, but I don’t have the codes for the next two.”

  “But you brought our associate down there yesterday.”

  “Yes. Well, no, not exactly. Not me personally. I am the supervisor, after all. I sent one of the maintenance men down with your man.”

  Faiz leaned against the wall. “What’s with all the doors?”

  The man punched a series of numbers into the electronic keypad. “Water protection. For flooding. The doors are watertight, and they are set up in a series like on a boat or submarine. If one is breached, the next is designed to hold everything out. And if we know the water is coming, we can shut everything down, close the doors, and wait. Once the worst is over, we pump it out and are back up and running in just a few days. You only open one at a time, pass through, close it behind you, and then open the next. Like an air lock.”

  He opened the door and ushered them through. He had to push hard to get the door to open. It was maintained well, but the tolerances had to be tight, Dr. Basu thought, if they were meant to hold out water. The man closed the door behind them. The bolts shot home with a loud clank. The light in the hallway was fluorescent and shaky. Dr. Basu pulled a bottle of water from her purse. She unscrewed the cap and was about to take a sip when the ground shook and she stumbled a little. She spilled water on her blouse.

  “Did you . . . ?” Faiz let his voice trail off.

  “Yes,” Dr. Basu said. “That was a big one.” Ahead of them was another door that looked exactly like the one behind them.

  She looked at the Delhi Metro man. “Get the codes. We’re going to need to open all the doors.”