The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(60)

Even though she had been intending to end things with him for a while, the reason she finally went ahead with it was at least partly Agent Rich. He wasn’t a dreamboat physically like Bark, but he wasn’t as unimpressive-looking as Manny was either. Not to dump on Manny, who was a good guy, but he wasn’t what Agent Rich was. Which was a man. Agent Rich was a true-blue man. With handcuffs. There was a real part of Melanie, even with all that was going on in the lab, that hoped he’d stick around DC and give her a chance to see what he looked like wearing nothing but his handcuffs.

There was only a part of her that had wanted Agent Rich to stay, however, because the bigger part of her wasn’t sure she’d ever want to leave her lab. These things were f*cking incredible. And she’d started calling them “things” because she wasn’t sure they were really even spiders. At least not the way she’d come to think of spiders. There are thirty-five thousand species of spiders, and they’ve been on earth for at least three hundred million years. From the very origin of humanity, spiders have been out there, scuttling along the edges of firelight, spinning webs in the woods, and scaring the hell out of people, even though, with a few rare exceptions, they are no real threat. But these were something different.

Melanie had never understood the panic people felt about spiders. What was it that made people so afraid? Was it the eight legs, each limb both separate and a part of the spider? Or, with larger spiders, was it the hair? Was there something about seeing something as familiar as hair on something as alien as a spider that made people take leave of their senses? Even if you knew that the Mygalomorphae infraorder of spiders, which includes tarantulas, had utricating hairs, it’s not as if utricating hairs were much of a threat to humans. At worst, they caused mild irritation. And the few species of spiders that could harm or even kill a human weren’t always the ones that looked the scariest to people. None of it made sense to Melanie. Dog bites sent close to a million people a year to the emergency room for stitches, but spiders—unless a brown recluse bit you, and that was still pretty damn rare—didn’t do much other than keep the mosquito population down. And yet, a spider in the tub was enough to make a grown man scream. Even as a kid, Melanie hadn’t been scared. She distinctly remembered being five and trapping a spider for her mother. She’d popped a glass over the spider, brushed the spider in, and then brought it outside. Maybe that wasn’t unusual; kids were taught to be afraid by their parents. But who had taught the parents to be afraid in the first place? No, Melanie had never understood being afraid of spiders.

Until now.

Finally, there was a reason for her to be afraid of spiders.

She’d explained all that to Manny when he called her yesterday, before Steph grounded civilian air traffic across the country, but she was going to her office right now and shutting the door behind her to call Manny, because after another night of studying them, she’d figured out that while one of these spiders was impressive, and the brood of them in the insectarium was kind of frightening, the way they acted together was scaring the shit out of her. She was beginning to worry that grounding the planes might not be enough.

Manny’s phone rang through to voice mail, but before she even started leaving a message there was the beep of Manny calling her back.

“If it’s about our relationship, Melanie, we need to do it another time.”

“Fuck you, Manny. You called me on this,” Melanie said. She wasn’t really angry, though. She knew Manny. Knew he was making the joke because he was already worried about why she was calling. “It’s about the spiders.”

“Please tell me you’ve decided we’re overreacting. We’re getting killed on grounding the planes, Alex is freaking out, and we’ve actually deployed soldiers on US soil to get ready to enforce quarantine zones. The ACLU is pitching a fit, we’re breaking a half-dozen laws, and we still aren’t sure this is a real thing.”

“What about India?” Melanie asked. Manny didn’t say anything, so Melanie pushed it. “There’s been more news out of India, hasn’t there?”

“Not publicly,” Manny said.

“But you aren’t lifting the flight ban, and you aren’t calling back the troops.”

“No.”

“So it’s bad?”

“Melanie, why are you calling?”

“I think it’s bad, Manny. Some of this is speculation, and I’m going to need to study them a lot longer, get more information, really spend some time—”

“Melanie,” he said, cutting her off. “I get it. This isn’t for publication. This isn’t going into your tenure file or getting peer-reviewed, okay? Wait. Hold on.”

She could hear the muffled sounds of talking in the background. Manny’s voice distinct but the words unrecognizable, lost to ringing phones and a crowd.

Manny came back. “We’ve got other scientists and advisors and everybody and their mother telling us what they think is going on. None of it makes any sense, Melanie. This might as well be an alien invasion for all of what we understand.”

“It is.”

“What?”

“An alien invasion. I mean, not exactly,” she said, “but sort of.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Okay,” Manny said. “We came to you because Steph and I knew you’d be discreet and knew you were an expert, but right now what I need is someone I can trust. Which means you. So I don’t care if you haven’t done all the research you need to. I don’t care if it hasn’t been peer-reviewed or any of that other stuff. All I need to know is this: Is it solid?”