The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(66)
But Gordo and Shotgun were back in the shelter, talking to Amy and Fred about what the army was doing setting up fences in their backyard. Neither of them was there to run the math or to see the Mathias Maersk Triple-E run aground. The truth was that almost nobody was watching. So many things were automated at the port that during the lunch hour, there was barely anybody there. The first person to die from the actual impact was Cody Dickinson, who was also the only person who should have figured out there was something wrong with the Mathias Maersk Triple-E. But instead of doing his job, Cody Dickinson had smoked twenty dollars’ worth of pot and fallen asleep in his seven-hundred-dollar Herman Miller Aeron chair. He had the cushy office job because he had seniority, and he had seniority because he was sixty and had been a longshoreman for forty-two years, and because he had been working as a longshoreman for forty-two years, he’d worked as a longshoreman when working as a longshoreman actually meant working, which meant his back was wrecked, which was why he had the seven-hundred-dollar Herman Miller Aeron chair, but his back still killed him, and smoking a ton of pot was the only thing that really helped. So he was asleep when the ship ran aground and the impact caused the roof to collapse and kill him where he sat.
The shock wave was enough to easily carry the eight hundred yards from the point of impact to where the P. Lanster Insurance Agency sat just outside the fencing securing the Port of Los Angeles. The P. Lanster Insurance Agency was a low-slung office building, and at 12:47 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, Philip Lanster Jr., the son of P. Lanster himself, was the only occupant of the office. Philip Lanster Jr. had been trying to get his dad to move the agency to a better location for years. The office was inconvenient for everybody, dingy and too big for them, since they had only five employees. The benefit was that there were windows everywhere, and they all had views of the ocean. This afternoon, however, Philip Lanster Jr. was glad the office was inconveniently located. It meant that when his dad and the other employees went out for lunch, he’d have more time to finish cooking the books. He’d skimmed off only six grand, just enough to cover what he’d lost in Las Vegas the weekend before. A little creative paperwork, and problem solved. He was feeling pretty good about himself and had just stood up from the bookkeeper’s desk when the impact of the Mathias Maersk Triple-E’s crash made the window beside him explode into the room. If he’d still been sitting, he might have been fine, but he was just tall enough that one of the shattered pieces of glass hit him in the side of the neck. He bled to death in sixty seconds.
He was lucky to bleed to death in sixty seconds. The first spiders were crawling through the broken window in eighty.
Up on the hill, Julie Qi was catching her breath when the ship hit. She fell on her ass. She’d just finished a hard five miles. She f*cking hated running. What kept her going was the knowledge that the only thing she hated worse was the idea of her husband leaving her for somebody younger and fitter, and in LA, unless she busted her ass, that meant almost every woman out there. Well, the fitter part. She couldn’t do much about being younger. Bradley was forty-seven, however, and Julie was only thirty, so she figured she had a little bit of a cushion with age, if not with cellulite. So it was morning aerobics, running before a late, light lunch, and then yoga in the afternoon. Bradley worked and she didn’t, which meant her job was to look good.
It took her a moment to realize she hadn’t just fallen over for no reason—the shudder of the ground was enough to make her stumble and end up on her backside—and another moment to realize it wasn’t an earthquake. The ship was a mile away. It had run aground, but the weight and momentum were enough to drive it far enough out of the water that it almost looked comical. Julie got back to her feet and pulled her earbuds out, the music leaking into the air. “Jesus,” she said. There weren’t any flames or anything, but there didn’t need to be: the thing was like a quarter of a mile long. It looked spectacular just mangled and eating the coast. There was weird black smoke, however, Julie noticed. It sort of spilled off the ship, but instead of floating into the sky, it rolled over the edges and across the pavement.
She unzipped her waist belt and pulled out her phone. She thought about photos, but decided instead that she’d just shoot some video. The phone had a good enough camera that she could just pull a still from the video if she wanted, and she had a partially formed thought that maybe she could sell the footage to a news station. Not that she and Bradley needed the money, but you know, it was a fun idea. Through the screen, however, it didn’t look quite as cool. The boat looked too much like some sort of toy. The image just didn’t give the right sense of scale.
She looked up from the screen and noticed the smoke had mostly stopped coming off the ship. There were just a few tendrils dripping down the sides. But the smoke that had already come off the ship was still drifting across the ground. It had spread out a little, so it was less a single carpet of smoke than larger patches and fingers spreading out over the road and the hills, pieces taking in some of the smaller office buildings outside the fence, near where the ship had hit. She remembered from 9/11 that a lot of the workers ended up having health problems from breathing in all the bad air, and she wondered if the workers on the docks were going to have issues.
She didn’t notice the finger of black crawling up the hill toward her.
In the parking lot of Cabrillo Beach, Harry Roberts was pissed. He didn’t like blacks—sorry, African Americans—and if that made him racist, he was fine with that, and he didn’t like cops either, even if he liked to think of himself as a law-and-order Republican, so being arrested by two black cops was the sort of thing that got him seething. Sure, his lunch had really been more of a liquid brunch consisting entirely of Bloody Marys, but who wouldn’t want a few extra drinks with what was on the news with that crazy stuff in India, China getting ready to invade Europe, and that cunt president grounding the flights? Admittedly, he didn’t really remember leaving the restaurant and driving his car over from Manhattan Beach, and admittedly, he sure didn’t remember crashing it into the light pole, and, okay, admittedly, he could understand their initial concern, since the air bag had evidently given him a bloody nose, and his face and shirt were covered in blood, but he couldn’t believe they cuffed him and put him in the back of their cruiser. Pricks. And then, worse, as they were writing something up, there was that incredible noise, some sort of an explosion across the water.