The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(57)
He’d tried to sleep on the plane. Economy all the way home. They’d flown him to DC on a government jet and sent him back to Minneapolis commercial. He’d sort of been hoping he’d get a first-class upgrade, but nope. That was the federal government for you. He’d tried closing his eyes anyway, leaning against the window and letting the drone of the motor vibrate him to sleep, but whenever he’d get close to actually drifting off he’d imagine the feel of something crawling on him. His leg. His arm. The back of his neck. After the third jump of adrenaline, the third time he started swatting at himself, he decided it was better to just call it a day and watch some television. Not a comfortable trip.
He waited until the plane was mostly cleared out before he made his way up the aisle from near the back. He didn’t have any luggage. The director had made it clear he was expected in Washington immediately, with “immediately” being code for “If you stop to pack luggage, you will find yourself reassigned somewhere unpleasant.” Mike did take the time to have his hand stitched and bandaged and to put on a new suit that didn’t have blood or puke on it, but all he was traveling with was his wallet, his cell phone, which was dead because he hadn’t brought a charger, his identification, and his Glock. The gun was a perk of working for the agency. They still wouldn’t let him bring a bottle of water through security, but the Glock wasn’t a problem. He wished he had taken the extra minute to grab his shoulder holster instead of his belt holster. A shoulder holster did a much better job of keeping his gun hidden, even if it was shitty for any real fieldwork. The holsters were slow to draw, and when you did draw, it was hard not to unintentionally put somebody in the path of the barrel as you moved it to where you were going. They looked undeniably cool, though. He kind of wished he’d been wearing one in that professor’s lab. His suit wasn’t much, a shiny Men’s BusinessDress special, but with his jacket off and a shoulder holster, he would have looked good. He did push-ups and chin-ups for a reason. But no. Instead, he was back in Minneapolis, getting off a plane after going nonstop for three days, the holster on his hip sitting against a patch of sweat. He’d showered at the hotel, but a change of clothes was in his near future.
He could hear the buzz of voices before he reached the end of the tunnel, but it wasn’t until he popped out into the terminal that he realized there was something wrong. The normal unpleasantness of an airport was turned up. Way up. Instead of the boarding-area stasis of families clustered together in boredom, middle-aged consultants who thought they were important enough to warrant three seats when there weren’t enough to go around, harried parents with car seats and juice boxes, instead of all that, there was a sense of mutiny. Crowds were clustered around the airline desks at the gates, a jabbering mix of yelling and pointing here, small groups of people crying there. More worrisome was that the people freaking out were only a small minority. The rest of the people were engaged in what looked like a mass exodus. A dispirited mass exodus, but a mass exodus all the same.
This, he thought, was what 9/11 must have been like.
Mike saw a uniformed TSA agent making like a traffic cop, and he stepped over to the young man, giving a flash of his ID. “Just got off a flight and my phone is deader than dead. What’s the ruckus?”
“No ruckus. Flights are canceled.”
“This is all just for a few canceled flights?”
The TSA agent stared at Mike with what looked suspiciously like a smirk. For a second, Mike indulged in the fantasy of popping the kid a quick one in the nose. It was a nice fantasy, but unwise.
“It’s not a few canceled flights. It’s all of them.”
“All of them?”
“Yep. Every flight.”
“Every flight from Minneapolis has been canceled?”
This time there was no suspicion. It was definitely a smirk. “Every flight in the country. Grounded all of them.”
Mike didn’t have a chance to admit that yes, he might have his head up his ass, because the man had already walked away. It didn’t bother Mike, however. He was preoccupied with the weirdness of the terminal. He hadn’t been traveling back in 2001, the last time flights were grounded, but he bet it had been like this. On 9/11, people would have been crowded around airport televisions watching the endless loop of the towers coming down. Now, Mike wasn’t exactly sure what they were looking at; the screens were captioned with Delhi, India, and what he saw didn’t make a ton of sense. And yet it did. The families and business travelers stranded in the Minneapolis airport might not understand what was happening, what to make of the brief snippet from India, but it took only a few seconds from Mike’s hearing that flights were grounded to his putting the dots together. Spiders. It had to be. Nothing else really made any sense. Not that spiders made sense. But with what had happened to Henderson, with his trip to DC, meeting the president, that’s what it had to be. And that meant that the president, the good-looking scientist, the people who got paid to tell agents like him what to do, were freaking out. Grounding the entire country? That was some serious shit.
He passed a magazine shop that was shutting down. Middle of the day, and the woman running it was dragging the metal gate across the entrance. Just past that, a waiting area was quickly emptying out. Annoyed men in suits packing up laptops, families with crying children loading up strollers. As Mike came to the signs telling him that once he exited he could not reenter, he pulled out his phone and gave it a click with his thumb, forgetting it was dead. It didn’t matter: there they were, waiting for him. Annie was working on some sort of smoothie, and Fanny was typing something into her phone. They weren’t looking up, and that gave Mike a chance to watch them as he walked up. Fanny looked good. She always looked good. She’d never been the fancy type, but she ran and had a nice eye for clothing. Even when she and Mike were together, before she remarried and suddenly had access to a whole different kind of shopping, she’d been good about picking outfits that worked to her advantage. And she’d done something different with her hair, something that gave a little more emphasis to her face. But even though he recognized that she was still beautiful, most men would have said sexy even, Mike realized that for the first time since he’d met her, he wasn’t attracted to her anymore. Whatever it was—that spark, that little jolt he felt when he kissed her—was gone. Even more interesting, the disappearance didn’t bother him. It was a relief, really. He didn’t know if it was because he was sure she was pregnant and that meant she was finally, irretrievably gone, or that enough time had finally passed, or meeting that scientist, Melanie, had reminded him there were other women he might be interested in, but he didn’t care. What it meant was that he could look at Fanny as somebody with whom he shared his daughter instead of somebody he was trying to win back.