The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(64)

She was tired, and grateful for the coffee. The food could be pretty bad sometimes, and the coffee occasionally tasted like it had been filtered through socks, but it was always full of caffeine. She looked up and watched the tiny plane doing a lazy circle around the small city they were building. A black helicopter was buzzing around maybe a mile away. There were a couple of AH-64 Apaches loaded with missiles and ready to be all badass, but they were on the ground, rotors stilled. The airborne helicopter wasn’t marked, but as near as Kim could tell, it was the sort of bird that muckety-mucks in suits liked to play in. After a few minutes of the plane circling overhead, the helicopter, which had been lingering out near where flatbeds were still pulling in, peeled off hard and up toward the direction of the plane. Whoever was in the plane, whatever civilian it was at the yoke, wasn’t curious enough to stay; the plane straightened course and headed out. The helicopter tracked it for a few more seconds then turned back to where it had been hovering, came in low, and settled.

The lieutenant gave a yell for the platoon to finish up. Kim drained her coffee, pulled her work gloves on, and looked at her squad, Honky Joe, Sue, and the few other soldiers around her. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever the f*ck we’re doing, just look alive. Something’s coming down the pike.”





Point Fermin Park,

Los Angeles, California


Sparky was going nuts. To be fair, Sparky was a twelve-year-old coonhound, so he was kind of nuts to begin with, but he was braying as if there were a monster around the corner. He yanked on his leash again, but this time Andy was ready for it and didn’t stumble. Andy Anderson was rounding eighty years old, a retired entertainment lawyer and widower. With no grandkids and his friends dropping dead right and left, he had two things left that he cared about: baseball, and the damned dog. The two things intersected. He’d named the dog Sparky in honor of his favorite manager: Sparky Anderson, the man himself. Andy would have named the dog after one of his heroes anyway, but he liked the idea that Sparky Anderson was a Detroit legend who had grown up in Los Angeles. Not that many people knew Sparky Anderson had moved to Los Angeles as a kid. If they knew Sparky Anderson, they knew him only as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds or the Detroit Tigers. They sure didn’t know him for his utterly forgettable career as a major league player. But Andy didn’t hold that against him. Andy had never been much of a ball player either, blowing out his arm after only two years of mediocre pitching on a mediocre team at a mediocre college. But he was born and bred Detroit, and it was for Sparky Anderson’s time in Detroit that Andy had decided to pay homage to the man. The year the Tigers won, 1984, had been the best year of Andy’s life. And that was saying a lot, because Andy’s life had been good. But the year the Tigers won the World Series had been the best of all those years; everything had swung his way, including the Detroit hitters. Never mind that Andy had lived in Los Angeles since 1971, he still thought of himself as a scrappy Detroit kid. He never tired of the joke of having a dog named Sparky Anderson.

But Sparky—the dog, not the deceased MLB manager—was giving him fits today. The dog had started by taking a shit right in the middle of the kitchen sometime during the night, a thing he was wont to do once or twice a month. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered Andy. The dog was old, and there wasn’t much you could do about it other than make sure you had paper towels and spray cleaner at home. He was tired this morning, however. He’d stayed up late to watch the president’s speech and then the endless bloviating on cable news backed by crappy, boring footage of empty airports, parked planes, and that stupid, shaky video from India. The president said nothing of any substance—the threat was dire enough that she was willing to take “unprecedented action in defense of the country and our citizens, shutting down air travel and closing the borders as a temporary matter” even if she wasn’t willing to specify what the threat was beyond referencing “the recent events in China and India”—and the news people were left with nothing real. Just damned-fool speculation. Some of the talking heads were saying that China was setting itself up to try to invade Japan, and at least a few of the opinion pukers said it was some sort of virus, like the plague. But the consensus, if there was one, was that there were hordes of spiders on the loose. Or swarms of spiders. Whatever you call a bunch of spiders. What you should really call a bunch of spiders, Andy thought, was horseshit.

So he’d been up late, and then Sparky woke him up before 5:00 A.M. by starting with his coonhound’s warbling bark, calling out with some real distress before taking a dump on the kitchen floor. Andy had cleaned it up and then parked himself in his chair to watch the same cycle of drivel on the news until, just before it was time for their noon walk, Sparky took another dump on the kitchen floor. Even if it hadn’t been time for their walk, the smell, even after it was cleaned up, would have been enough to force Andy out of the house. He drove the two of them to Point Fermin Park. The dog howled the whole way. Sparky seemed intent on being a little prick all day long. He was an old dog, and normally content to sniff at things, lift his leg occasionally, and amble down the path, but today Sparky was yanking on his leash. It was giving Andy fits. Andy didn’t have many worries left—he had had plenty of money, and he was healthy enough that he figured he’d be fine for a while and then just go ahead and die of old age—but breaking his hip was one of his few real terrors. It was one thing to grow old and lonely, but it was another to finish out his days bedridden and in pain.