The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(54)

He double-checked the autopilot, glanced at the zoomed-out map showing Los Angeles dead ahead, and went to call the first mate. Whatever it was, they’d get it fixed when they hit the port tomorrow. With a little luck they’d be tied up in time for him to grab a late lunch in Los Angeles while the ship was being unloaded. He was ready for a day on the town.





The CNN Center,

Atlanta, Georgia


“I don’t know if it’s worth bothering yet,” Teddie said to her boss. Teddie Popkins—Theodora Hughton Van Clief Popkins, but she’d been Teddie since her first week on earth, and using the Hughton Van Clief part of her name instead of sticking with Teddie Popkins was a good way to make sure the only men who hit on her were gold diggers—played the video back again. It was shaky, but the quality was first-rate. She’d be the first to admit that cell phones had made her life as a producer a lot better. A piece-of-shit phone could still shoot HD video. Sure, when she had reporters out in the field, there was nothing better than a cameraman with a $20,000 Panavision. But she didn’t exactly have a crew just standing around in India waiting for . . .

What the hell was it exactly?

Part of her job as a producer, particularly on a boring weekday morning shift like this, was to fill time when things were slow. Okay. Associate producer. Not bad for somebody three years out of college. But the point was that on slow news days, part of her job was to help make news, and today was as boring as you could get during a week when China had set off a nuke.

That was the problem. The nuke had eaten all the news. For the first twenty-four hours, the entire building had been buzzing. She’d called an ex-boyfriend at FOX, and he’d said it was the same there: reporters and producers were all hands on deck, the same ten China policy experts on heavy rotation, total speculation, what little video they had on a constant loop. And then, nothing. The nuke story just fizzled out. Nothing new happened and it didn’t seem like there was much beyond the story: China had accidentally exploded a nuke in a sparsely populated part of their country. Basically, whoops.

That was the other reason the story faded so quickly: it was in China. Teddie wasn’t jaded. She’d graduated from Oberlin College, the kind of liberal arts bastion where you learn to care about everything. She’d been out of school long enough to start eating meat again and to learn to walk downtown without having to stop and talk to every homeless person, but despite coming from money and painfully conservative parents—Theodora Hughton Van Clief Popkins’s father was William Hughton Van Clief Popkins III after all, the kind of lineage that meant she would probably have been a better fit at FOX if not for, as her father put it, “youthful naiveté about the way the world works”—four years at Oberlin had done their job. She hated that a story about some Hollywood starlet overdosing on Botox could push a nuclear explosion in China out of the headlines. She hated it, but she was also realistic. Americans just didn’t care about foreign news very much.

Which brought her back to the problem of what to do about this footage from India. India was a hard sell. Every once in a while there’d be some sort of groundswell story they would pick up on, but they weren’t going to be the lead on something out of India. Particularly during a week like this, when they’d already used up their quotient of foreign news with the China stuff. But still. The video.

“You might be right,” her boss said, “but just play it for me.” He leaned in over her shoulder so he had a better view of the monitor.

She had watched it slowed down and with the sound muted. At quarter speed, it was still barely a minute long, and it definitely lost the creep factor. A lot of sky and buildings and people running. In a few places, she could see what looked like black ribbons coming out of the train station, but nothing definitive. Near the end, there was a man stumbling out of a doorway and then falling down, the ribbons spreading over him, but even with a decent-quality cell phone camera, it was hard to tell what was going on. But at full speed, with the sound up? Even though the herky-jerky image telegraphed panic already, it was the screaming, the honking cars, something smashing, that really made it scary.

She played it at full speed and risked a glance at her boss. Don’s mouth had actually dropped open.

“Whoa. What the f*ck?”

“Yeah,” Teddie said. “That’s why I’ve been going back and forth. There really isn’t much to see, but it’s kind of terrifying, isn’t it?”

“Okay,” Don said, “but what is it?”

“It sort of looks like it might be bugs, right?”

Don crossed his arms. He was a good boss, Teddie thought, though it wasn’t as if she had a lot to go by. She’d started at CNN right out of college as his assistant, and he’d been the one who’d given her her first shot as a producer. Associate producer. Once or twice she tried to imagine what she would do if he hit on her; her dad might be right that she had a youthful naiveté about the way the world works, but she wasn’t completely stupid. She knew how certain things worked. He wasn’t married and he wasn’t gay and he was only in his early forties, young enough that it wouldn’t have been inconceivable. So she didn’t really understand why he never hit on her, never even hinted at it, except that maybe he was just one of those scrupulous people who didn’t mix business with pleasure. Or maybe he just didn’t do pleasure. Near as Teddie could tell, all Don ever did was work. So he was a good boss, in that he didn’t seem to think of her as some young thing he could take advantage of, but he was also a bit of a pain in the ass in that he didn’t seem to understand that she sometimes might want to do something other than work. He wasn’t much for amusements, and right now he was clearly not amused.