The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(26)
He knew there’d be some questions when he landed, though. No matter how many billions he had, there was the little matter of the missing guide, the bodyguard, and the three models who’d flown to Peru with him. Well, the guide probably didn’t matter much, and the bodyguard’s death had been an occupational hazard, but even he couldn’t just make three semi-famous models disappear. Fortunately, he wasn’t prone to drugs or violence and didn’t exactly have a history of leaving bodies in his wake. When the questions came, he’d direct them to his lawyers and simply tell the truth: some sort of animals had attacked them, and sick, injured, and disoriented, he’d panicked and fled. For right now, what he was most concerned about was whether the spiders he saw swarming over the interior of his jet were real or part of a nightmare.
He could hear a steady drone and see the spiders growing like black moss on the walls and ceiling of the jet. He could feel them crawling on him. His skin itched and he jerked and swatted. He sat up with a start and blinked hard. He’d been dreaming. A nightmare. A dark speck floated across his vision and he rubbed his eyes to clear them. Nothing. He saw one of the flight attendants, a brunette named Wilma or Wanda or something like that, staring at him, and he tried to straighten up in his seat. He knew he looked like a mess. The movement made him wince. His head, his stomach, his ankle, the fever. He felt like hell. Screw it, Henderson thought, and he stayed slumped in his chair, not even bothering to try to give her a smile.
She walked down the aisle and over to him to touch his arm. “We’ll be touching down in about ten minutes, Mr. Henderson. Can I get you anything before we land?”
He thought he saw something moving in the corner of his vision, another black spot, but when he flinched and turned, there was nothing there. Just his reflection in the window. He rubbed his eyes again, and that seemed to chase away the floating specks that teased him. “A tonic water would be good,” he managed. “And see about turning down the temperature. It’s hot in here.” She started to turn, but he called her back. “And get my assistant on the line. I feel like shit. Tell her we’re going straight to my doctor.”
She nodded and retreated to the galley. Henderson closed his eyes for a moment and then snapped them back open. The tonic water was on the table in front of him in a heavy cut-glass crystal tumbler. He must have nodded off for a few seconds. He shook his head. He didn’t want to fall asleep again. As lousy as he felt, sleeping meant dreaming, and right now dreaming meant those goddamned spiders. He had been scared of spiders even before his trip to Peru, even before he watched his bodyguard’s face dissolve. At least here, on his jet, he knew that the only spiders were the ones inside his head. Which was killing him. The headache was a pressure that seemed as though it was centered in the middle of his forehead. He’d ask for some aspirin when Wilma or Wanda or whatever her name was came back.
He could feel the jet descending, and out the window were the first real outskirts of Minneapolis. He usually liked coming back to town, looking out over the city where he’d been born and raised and where he’d started one of the largest technology companies in the world. Today, however, when he tried looking out the window the light made him wince. It was like something pushing on his eyeballs. He could feel each beat of his heart like a hammer blow to his temple. Worse, he could feel something tickling inside his skull, a sneeze building up, and with this headache he knew that a sneeze was going to feel like the worst thing in the world. The pain in his head was suddenly enough to make black dots swim in his vision.
He sneezed. He saw a fine spray of blood coat the wall. Snot dripped from his nose. It felt like something was skittering around in there, and when he wiped at it, he realized something was skittering out of his nose. He felt the hairy, hard leg and pulled it. Holy f*cking shit. It was a spider.
He just pulled a f*cking spider out of his nose.
He had one of the spider’s legs pinched between his fingers. The bug swung and clicked at him. It was making an actual clicking sound with its mouth or its mandibles or whatever the hell they were, and then the spider turned itself so that it was against his hand, biting into the flesh. It was a sharp pain, worse than a pinch, but oddly icy. He swore, and flung the creature away from him.
And then whatever pain was left in his head, the bite from the spider, the fact that he’d even had a f*cking spider come out of his nose, was written over by the burning in his leg. It was worse near the cut he’d gotten in the jungle, as if somebody were holding a lit candle to his skin, and it radiated up and around his calf. He stared down at it, and for a moment he thought he might be having another nightmare, because he could actually see his skin bulging and rippling. He heard himself grunting and then screaming, and though he knew it was from the pain in his leg, it was both similar to and completely different from a dream: he was outside himself, watching. There was part of him that was writhing in his leather seat, straining against the seat belt, clutching at his calf and both shrieking and crying, and there was a part of him that seemed to be watching calmly as the flight attendant ran down the aisle toward him, followed by the copilot rushing from the cockpit. He wasn’t sure what part of him watched the skin around his ankle split open, a zipper of blood and blackness, as spiders spilled out onto the floor, swarming over Wilma or Wanda, over the copilot, leaving all three of them screaming and thrashing at the pain and the biting, and he didn’t even try to figure out what part of him watched as a thin line of blackness rolled toward the open cockpit door. And then he couldn’t see anything at all, but he could feel it when the plane pitched steeply forward.