The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(59)
“How long do you think we’re going to be on these buses?” Sue asked. “Long enough for the brass to figure out that some of their Marines can’t piss in bottles?”
Duran, who had a bit of a thing for Sue, leaned back, holding his cards to his chest. “I’ll hold the bottle for you if you want to try.”
“You into golden showers, Duran?” Sue said.
That got Sue a laugh, and it made Kim smile. She’d been trying to persuade Sue to give Duran a chance. He was a good guy, and from what Sue had told her about her dating history, a good guy was something she wasn’t used to. Besides, with the Chinese dropping nukes and spiders eating India and this f*cked-up deployment, why not?
Kim shoved her pack to the floor, turned all the way around, kneeled on the seat, and folded her arms on the seat back to make herself more comfortable. “Can’t be that long, right? No way we’d be on school buses if we were going to be traveling more than an hour or two. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”
Sue unclipped the gas mask that was bouncing off the outside of her pack. She held it up to her face. “You see this thing? It’s like three sizes too big for me, like they decided to make a gas mask that could fit a grizzly bear. If there’s gas or bio, or whatever it is they think they’re trying to get us ready for in such a hurry, it won’t matter if my mask is on or not. The f*cking thing doesn’t fit.” She clipped the mask back to her pack. “We fought a war with Humvees that couldn’t withstand a basic blast from an IED, and we’ve spent the last couple of days getting on and off planes, jumping up and sitting down. And you’re banking on something making sense in the military? You’re telling me that putting us on school buses means we aren’t going very far?” She shrugged. “Want to put some money on it?”
“Yeah, but a school bus means—”
“A school bus means things are really f*cked,” Sue said. “You know how people get about that sort of stuff. Armed troops of any kind on US soil make citizens freak the f*ck out, so what do you think it’s going to do to people when they see us loaded up in little yellow school buses?” She reached down to touch her M16. “We ain’t exactly toting Scooby Doo lunch boxes here. If this is a big enough deal that they’re requisitioning school buses, something is clearly f*cked. So yeah, I’m a little concerned that my gas mask doesn’t fit.”
“Come on. You know you’re not going to need a gas mask.”
Honky Joe held up three aces. Mitts swore, and Goons just calmly handed his cards to Duran. Honky Joe gave his cards to Duran as well, and then turned to Sue and Kim. “Gas mask? Maybe. Maybe not. But I agree that this is f*cked up. With the nuke, deploying somewhere closer to China maybe makes sense, but we’re deploying stateside. That, my friend, is a big deal.” He leaned over Sue and tapped on the window. “You see that?”
They were driving past flatbeds loaded with chain-link fencing and posts. Each truck was loaded to the gills, the trucks themselves five abreast in a line that must have stretched close to a mile. It took the school buses more than two minutes to pass the trucks.
“You already know how big a deal it is to deploy troops on domestic soil,” Honky Joe said. “But that’s a bigger deal. What do you think that fencing is for? We’ve got to be setting up internment camps or something. Who for this time? Who we trying to keep locked up?”
Kim looked down at Sue’s gas mask as it jiggled atop her pack. The glass eyes and filter canister made it look menacing, bug-like. “No,” Kim said. “You don’t deploy troops in the United States unless you’re expecting an invasion. Or something. My bet is it’s a something. Gas masks? It’s not who. It’s what. And the fences aren’t for an internment camp. Think of it as a quarantine. The question isn’t who are we trying to keep out, but what are we trying to keep out?”
Sue held the oversize gas mask up to her face again. “Fuck,” she said, drawling the word out. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
American University,
Washington, DC
Bark was crying again. It was eight o’clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. Melanie had slept for maybe four hours, and Bark was crying again.
Unbelievable. Okay, Melanie was willing to admit that maybe she could have handled it with more tact, that given how little sleep they’d been getting and how hard they’d been working since the egg sac arrived, this wasn’t the ideal time, but the minute she’d told him it was over she felt nothing but relief. Relief and annoyance. Seriously. Unbelievable. He started crying like she’d been his high school girlfriend. She was pretty sure Julie and Patrick weren’t aware of her and Bark’s affair before, but whatever hope she had of continued discretion had gone out the window because Bark just could not keep his shit together. The good thing, she supposed, was that neither Julie nor Patrick seemed judgmental about it. There was a time when they would have tsk-tsked her and called her a slut behind her back, but now they mostly seemed like they were annoyed by Bark’s constant crying. If anything, Julie seemed as if she might be impressed that Melanie had gotten a little bit of what she wanted. Score one for feminism, Melanie supposed. The downside of feminism was probably right in front of her, though: instead of putting a brave face on it, Bark was just standing there, in the middle of the lab, dripping tears. Like a leaky faucet, not even bothering to wipe his face. Julie was drawing the venom from the dead spider, Patrick was prepping the solution, Melanie was headed to her office to give Manny a call, and Bark was standing around crying.