Skitter Read online

  Ten thousand years. That’s how old the egg sac had been. It had been dug up near the Nazca Lines—great line drawings etched in the high desert of Peru—by a PhD student in archaeology who was friends with one of Melanie’s graduate students, Julie Yoo. The egg sac had been buried near the drawing of a spider. The rest of the Nazca line drawings, birds and animals and geometric designs, were maybe two thousand years old. But not the spider drawing. The spider was different. Older. Much older. According to Julie’s friend, the box and other items they dug up near the spider were ten thousand years old.

  Maybe the crackpots weren’t so far off in their theories about Nazca. How was it that an ancient civilization could have constructed such beautiful and precise images? On one level, the how was simple: rocks removed so that the white earth underneath became lines in the red dirt. The plateaus were protected from the weather so that the Nazca Lines could survive for thousands of years. Two thousand years. Or ten thousand years. Old enough that the question of how was also unsolvable, because they weren’t really drawings in a traditional sense. At ground level, they were simple lines and shapes. No meaning. But from above, they came so alive you could feel the beating pulse of these people praying to ancient gods. They didn’t have airplanes then, they couldn’t fly, so how had they designed them? Who knew? Melanie thought. Archaeologists had agreed that the simplest answer was that somebody had simply done a good job of planning. The Nazca had made the designs, staked out lines, and removed the stones. The egg sac had been found buried in a wooden box along with some of the stakes that the Nazca had used.

  Careful measurements and good engineering. Human ingenuity. Math. Science. That’s what she believed in. At least that’s what she used to believe in. Now? She was beginning to be open to the idea that the Nazca Lines could have been made some other way, and for some other purpose, too.

  She used to think that the ancient Nazca designs were a sort of prayer. She’d prayed to them herself, once, years ago. Back when she and Manny were still a couple, back when doctors had told her that having a baby would require an act of God. Not that seeing the Nazca Lines or breathing a fervent prayer as her plane circled above them had done any good. She and Manny had split up, and she was left with her lab and her spiders. But that was the thing. Maybe the older drawing, the drawing of the spider, was there as something different from the other lines. Not a prayer.

  Maybe the spider was a warning.

  Ten thousand years was a long time in human history. A blink of the eye in the history of the earth, but beyond the scope of human records. It was a span of time in which meaning was lost.

  Maybe if they’d been able to understand the warning, her world wouldn’t have gone to hell.

  Melanie rubbed her eyes. So tired, but she didn’t have time to sleep. She didn’t want to sleep. She was afraid of falling asleep. She knew what she’d see if she fell asleep: Bark, her graduate student and former lover, cut open on the operating table, his body shot through with silk and egg sacs. Patrick hovering over the surgeon and the nurses, taking photos with the lab’s camera. Melanie standing on the other side of the glass. Julie Yoo running down the hall toward her, too late with the information. And then, so quick: the spiders hatching from inside Bark’s body.

  Melanie rubbed her eyes harder. She didn’t want to picture it. The blood and the gore were bad, but worse were the spiders themselves. A black wave. A single thing made of a thousand individual organisms.

  She’d never been afraid of spiders or bugs of any kind. Not once in her whole life had she been grossed out. When other kids or adults shrank away from creepy crawlies, Melanie leaned in, fascinated. What made them work?

  But these were different.

  She reached out for her coffee and then stopped herself. Her hand was shaking. She was jittery. Too much caffeine. Not enough sleep. Too many nerves. What had it been? Ten days? Eleven? Twelve since she’d gotten the egg sac? Time was elastic.

  The goat screamed again. That was the only way to describe it. Not a bleat, but a scream. It kicked out and caught one of the soldiers in the thigh, but the man just swore and wrapped his arms tighter around the goat. The pair—Melanie had stopped bothering to try to learn their names a few days ago—finally forced the goat through the door of the air lock and then jumped out, closing the door behind them. The poor goat stood in the air lock, forlorn. Forsaken. It had stopped bleating and stood there, shivering.

  The soldiers stopped for a moment, catching their breaths. They looked out of place in the pristine lab, their combat uniforms a stark contrast to the lab coats and jeans and T-shirts worn by Melanie and the other scientists, who came in and out with such frequency that Melanie finally had to order armed guards to secure the entire floor.

  Armed guards. That was her new reality. Armed guards, a repurposed hospital room for a bedroom so that she could be closer to her research, and spiders that could strip a goat to its bones in less than a minute.

  The first soldier went through the airlock protocol, going down the list one by one. Once he was done, the second soldier double-checked each step himself. Then they turned to look at Melanie. Everybody was looking at Melanie. It felt like everything was on her.

  Two weeks ago, her biggest worry had been how to break off her ridiculous relationship with Bark. But now, suddenly, she had an entire floor of the National Institutes of Health to command. She could order armed guards to make sure that she and Julie Yoo and the three other authorized scientists were not disturbed. Between her ex-husband, Manny, and his boss, the president of the United States, whatever she wanted just seemed to happen.

  When she said she needed her equipment, overnight, presto chango, her entire setup at American University was duplicated at the NIH. Duplicated. There was even a Grinnell College mug on the desk, almost exactly like the one on her desk at American, but without the tiny chip on the rim. Actually, her equipment wasn’t duplicated: it was improved and added to. There was new lab equipment she didn’t know how to use even if she’d wanted to. And if she went anywhere outside the lab, she was trailed by five Secret Service agents. Not that she’d done more than go outside once or twice to stand in the sunlight and marvel at the hundreds of soldiers ringing the National Institutes of Health. She was, according to Manny and President Stephanie Pilgrim, the most important woman in the world right now. There were other scientists working on the question of how to deal with these spiders, of course, but Manny and Steph trusted her. They were counting on her. She was, in their eyes, the only hope for the human race.

  No pressure.

  What she needed right now was to figure out what in God’s name these spiders were, because they sure as hell weren’t like any others she’d ever seen. When the egg sac had come to her office from Peru, she’d been excited to see it begin hatching. For a few hours it seemed like she’d been on the verge of a big discovery, the nearly two dozen spiders in the insectarium arousing an intense curiosity. They didn’t act like spiders, at least not as she knew them, and they were hungry. Then she’d come to understand that the spiders weren’t only in her lab, and that there were certainly more than two dozen of them. Much more. Hundreds of thousands of them. Millions. Outbreaks in China, India, Europe, Africa, South America. And in the United States. How many people were dead already?

  She couldn’t think about it. Not now. Right now she needed to focus on these spiders, because she’d been tasked with figuring out how to stop them.

  “Okay,” she said. “Julie, we shooting?”

  Julie Yoo gave the thumbs-up. She stood over a bank of computer monitors, supervising the three techs who were running six Phantom Cameras, capable of shooting ten thousand frames per second. Whatever happened to the goat, it was going to be recorded in excruciating detail so Melanie could play it back at a speed that made a bullet look slow.

  A small crowd gathered by the glass. There’d been large crowds before Melanie had ordered the lab cleared of all nonessential personnel. Now there was only Dr. Will Di
chtel, Dr. Michael Haaf, Dr. Laura Nieder, and a dozen or so graduate students and lab assistants. Dichtel was a chemist who’d carved out a specialization in entomological toxicology. He’d made himself a small fortune synthesizing a modified version of the brown recluse spider’s venom that was now used in making microchips. Haaf was from MIT, an arachnid specialist, like her, and Nieder was there because she worked for the Pentagon trying to figure out how to adapt insect swarm behavior for the battlefield.

  Melanie went to the air lock and went through the same checklist as the two soldiers had. You couldn’t be too careful. She knew what was coming. She looked back at Julie, who gave her the thumbs-up again, and then at the scientists crowding the glass. Her hand hovered over the keypad.

  The goat was staring at her.

  The poor thing was shaking so badly.

  Melanie hit the button that opened the inner door of the air lock.

  And they came to feed.

  The Staples Center, Greater Los Angeles Quarantine Zone, California

  What was the old joke? Join the army so you can travel to foreign places, meet new people, and then blow them up? He’d joined the army because, well, what else was there? He was smart enough to go to college, but he hadn’t taken high school seriously, and even if he had, money was a problem. Maybe Detroit was an appealing place for artists and hipsters who could buy houses for pennies on the dollar, but Quincy’s dad had been insistent that he get out. Quincy’s dad was old enough to remember a time when Detroit had good jobs for union men, but not old enough to have had one of those jobs himself, so the week after Quincy graduated high school, his dad drove him down to the recruiting center.

  Quincy hadn’t been opposed to the idea of joining the army, and he didn’t have any better plans, so by the time his friends were starting classes at community college, he was through basic training. And now, standing inside the Staples Center, he was closing in on a decade in the army. He looked around at the egg sacs stacked up on the seats and in the aisles, and realized he wasn’t sure he’d get to celebrate a full ten years in uniform.

  The worst of it was knowing that before his squad had gotten the assignment, there’d been an argument about it. Somebody had used their political capital to make sure that the job of burning down the Staples Center and the roughly infinite number of spiders inside went to the army instead of to the navy or the Marines or the air force. There was always a political squabble before any mission, and if he screwed this up, there’d be a political squabble afterward to deflect blame. Not that he cared, because if he did indeed screw up, he suspected that he’d be sort of dead. He wasn’t really worried about making any mistakes of his own per se. It was more that something might go wrong while they wired the stadium. Like, you know, one of these egg sacs opening up and a torrent of spiders devouring him or laying eggs inside his body so that at some undetermined future date he’d suddenly split open so that spiders could go ahead and eat some other people.

  Absent the spiders, the job wasn’t particularly complicated. They didn’t want to blow the building so much as implode it. The idea was to get a real blaze going and then, once it was so hot that there was no chance of anything surviving, collapse the Staples Center in on itself in order to keep the blaze contained. The embers would continue to smolder and burn for days or even weeks beneath the twisted steel and concrete of what had once been a basketball stadium. Like the coals in a good charcoal grill. No spiders would be crawling out of that inferno.

  First, however, he had to finish laying the charges and get the hell out without being eaten.

  The egg sacs were clustered on the stadium seats, with the greatest infestations in the nosebleeds, where the lights did not seem to carry as clearly. The sacs were white and misshapen, running the gamut from rounded, volleyball-sized orbs to football-shaped ovals to lumpy packages that could have been anything. They were almost chalky. Quincy had accidently brushed against one while running a wire around a corner, and it had been cold and surprisingly substantial. It had left a dusty white mark on his sleeve that he’d been able to brush off. It was easier to avoid touching the egg sacs lower down, near the courtside seats where Quincy always saw celebrities pretending to actually care about basketball. There were still egg sacs down there, but there were fewer of them, more scattered. On the hardwood court itself, the sacs were littered in piles and small groups. You could still see the Los Angeles Lakers logo in the center of the court, and if somebody had given Quincy a basketball—and he was feeling suicidal—he could have dribbled, with some difficulty, from one end of the floor to the other.

  He finished wiring in the charge and wiped the sweat off his forehead. He looked up to do one more check that he’d wired the last one, and with profound relief, left the building.

  Outside, in the bright California sunshine, Quincy felt almost giddy. Somebody handed him a beer, and he carried it back to the tent that had been erected as a temporary command center. There were a bunch of cameras set up. He’d heard that the big boys in Washington were going to be watching live.

  Demolition work wasn’t like what you saw in the cartoons. There wasn’t a box with a handle and plunger, and no countdown over loudspeakers. Just a button to press. Best estimates were that the heat would peak at close to two thousand degrees. Glass and metal would melt, concrete would buckle and twist. The Staples Center was going to turn into a spider hibachi. No, Quincy thought, there was nothing to worry about.

  Nothing to worry about if you didn’t count the more than four hundred and ninety other sites around Los Angeles where there’d been confirmed reports of egg sac infestations. Lucky him. He was going to get to travel around Los Angeles burning them up, too.

  At least none of the infestations were as bad as the Staples Center, but Quincy had heard rumors that not all the egg sacs were the same. If the ones in the Staples Center were dusty and cold, that wasn’t true for all the infestations. He’d heard at least one other soldier claiming that the sacs were sticky and warm, that you could actually hear spiders moving inside, who knows how many, just waiting to come out. And another soldier told him that he’d seen an egg sac that was absolutely huge. Big enough for a person to fit inside.

  Forget the people who might have been infested—Quincy had seen all the videos—the egg sacs alone were terrifying. Thousands of those little time bombs all over the city. Each one of those thousands of bombs holding thousands of spiders, all ready to explode.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  University of Southern California, Greater Los Angeles Quarantine Zone, California

  It seemed as though half the city was on fire. The orange flames from the Staples Center flickered through the night. From the air it would have been beautiful. Lights among the darkness of power outages and disaster. But by the next day, clouds of smoke and soot clung to the sky. It was clear that no help was coming. It had been a solid week since Los Angeles had turned into somebody’s nightmare, and the sound of gunshots was not uncommon.

  Two men dragged an old woman across the concrete of the stadium tunnel like she was a piece of luggage.

  The Prophet Bobby Higgs was not pleased.

  “How many times do we have to tell you morons,” he said to the pair, “that we don’t care if somebody is talking shit about us. It doesn’t help our cause if you behave like jackbooted thugs.” He glanced at the men’s feet. Huh. They were wearing jackboots. Or something close enough. He wasn’t sure what jackboots were, but both men were wearing the kind of steel-toed construction footwear that he thought of when he thought of jackboots and neo-Nazis.

  The larger of the two men grunted and let go of the woman’s jacket. Her body shifted and her arm fell to the ground with a thunk. Though which of the men, exactly, was the larger was a difficult distinction for Bobby to make. They were standing in the tunnel underneath the University of Southern California’s football stadium, and both men looked like they could have played on the defensive line, either at USC or on an NFL team. Giants. Six foot si
x or seven and easily three hundred pounds each. But right now he thought Gill, the one who’d dropped the old lady, was the bigger of the two. Or maybe it was just that Gill looked a little meaner than Kevin. Not that Kevin was particularly gentle, but Gill had just enough intelligence to be creative in his cruelties. “She was talking about trying to get to the fence.”

  “Of course she was talking about trying to get to the fence. The army blew up the Staples Center yesterday, and they’ve been going around town burning down buildings and houses and doing everything but helping people,” Bobby said. He stepped over and grabbed the woman’s hair, pulling her head up so he could see her face. Her eyes were closed. She was late sixties, maybe seventies. Not in the plastic, Hollywood fashion of old ladies determined to buy their way out of aging, but in the midwestern, unashamed way of wrinkles and gray hair. She looked like a grandmother.

  “She’s terrified. There was a brief window when the quarantine broke and you could actually get out of here, but since the army got its shit together and started actually enforcing the quarantine, every single person who didn’t make it out is kicking themselves. Us included. Nobody wants to be here. We all want out. So yeah, she’s hungry and scared and believes the pathetic lies that the federal government is telling us.” Bobby stood up and wiped his hands on his suit pants. He shook his head and stepped back. “She thinks that if she gets to the fence she’ll find a friendly soldier who will believe that a kind old lady like her could never harbor eggs. She’s been a good little citizen her whole life. Why wouldn’t they help her? How can a lady like her possibly believe that her government is going to forsake her?”

  Kevin shifted a little on his size fourteen feet then looked at Gill. He seemed to notice, for the first time, that Gill had let go of the woman, so he let go too. The woman was completely unconscious, unable to break her fall. She hit the concrete with a solidness that was slightly disconcerting. Maybe she was dead? No. She was breathing. Just knocked out. Getting clubbed by one of those fellow’s fists could do that to a person, Bobby thought. He sighed. Either way, they needed to get rid of her.