The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(69)

The camera crew finally gave up on the traffic and set up on McCarthy Quad at the University of Southern California. It was the perfect shot for a reporter who couldn’t get an angle on the real action. The dichotomy of reporting on fear and chaos from the middle of an ivory-tower oasis. Students walked past in the background as if nothing was going on twenty-five miles across town. The reporter blathered excitedly, filling time in the way that only a seasoned pro can fill time when the facts are almost entirely speculation.

And then, the spiders came gliding down from the sky.

At first, there weren’t many. The camera caught a few black dots against the cerulean sky, cotton-candy trails of silk streamers looking like vapor trails. But then some of them started drifting down. For a few minutes, it was almost comical. The camera recorded one landing near the reporter who promptly squashed it with his shoe. There. What was so scary about that? If you’ve got a shoe, you’re safe. Around the reporter, however, students were pointing and beginning to scream. And then the camera caught one student flailing her arms, five or six of the large black dots scurrying over her, and then a burst of blood oozed from her face, her shirt staining crimson. And more screaming. And more screaming. And more and more and more and more. And the camera suddenly dropping. All Teddie could see on her screen was pavement and shoes and socks and the alien movement of spiders, and then just the lower body of the reporter, his legs kicking and then kicking more weakly, and then not moving at all. And all of it, Teddie realized, running live because she hadn’t ordered it cut away. That’s when she threw up the second time.

Since then, they’d gotten a helicopter in the air, and they’d gotten an incredible money shot, at, of all places, Mann’s Chinese Theatre. It was too good to be true, the sort of shot that would have made Teddie stand up and seek someone out specifically for the purpose of giving and receiving high fives if the situation had been just a little bit less grim. Some sort of early-afternoon opening: the kind of movie that didn’t deserve klieg lights and a nighttime slot, which meant the A-list stars on the project were really B-list and C-list famous, and the brigade of fans standing in a corridor ten deep were filled partly with paid extras, and the photographers calling names were themselves also B-list and C-list. But the shot from the helicopter? That was A-list all the way. The cameraman had been panning the area, one of the anchors talking about how not all of LA seemed to be caught up in this catastrophe, when a car barreling down Hollywood Boulevard punched through a red light at North Orange, clipped a delivery van, and then swerved left across three lanes to plow into the crowd waiting outside the theater. That would have been enough on a normal day to cause chaos and have Teddie make the call to break into the live news, but this was already live, already in the middle of chaos, and it got immediately worse: almost as soon as the car stopped moving, before the anchors could do more than yell, a blob of black rolled out of the smashed front window of the car. The cameraman figured it out before Teddie did, because he was already zooming in, and the blob of black turned itself into a thousand individual parts.

There was a pattern to the way the spiders moved. Teddie knew there was a pattern to it, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. At first, people ran away from where the car had crashed, but then they turned to help, and almost as quickly, the tide turned again, but it didn’t matter: whether it was the crush of people or the bugs themselves, the spiders were faster. Teddie watched as people went down. A woman screaming, disappearing under a mass of writhing spiders. A young black man whose back was a weaving carpet of spiders made it thirty or forty feet before he too fell to the ground, a sick slick of blood around him. But here and there, Teddie saw the thread of spiders weave itself around people, passing them by as if they were magnetically repelled; she couldn’t figure out the pattern, why some people were swallowed by the swarm of spiders and others were left alone. And also, where most of the spiders seemed to move together in a synchronized dance, like a single, connected organism, here and there a few individual spiders peeled off.

That had been a couple of hours ago.

The first reports had been of swarms, veritable rivers of spiders drowning the city, coming from the sky like little specks of death, but now they were scattered. The cell phone towers were overwhelmed, and close to two-thirds of the city was without power—trucks and cars crashing into utility poles, sketchy reports of the spiders chewing through electric wires—but where people had Internet and energy, they were uploading videos of single spiders coming up drainpipes or shimmying through open windows, racing across floors and countertops and leaping on people and animals. Teddie knew there must have been other videos taken, ones that ended with screaming and the phone dropping to the ground, a cracked screen left to show only an empty ceiling, but the videos that made it online all ended with the same conclusion: a squished spider. One spider, the videos all seemed to say, wasn’t going to be eating anybody on its own.

What was it, Teddie wondered, that made these people pull out their cell phones in the middle of whatever it was that was going on? Anybody who was watching television or listening to the radio or, hell, had a cell phone, had to know what was going on. Sure, maybe at first there had still been people posting photos of pop stars and cute cats and self-aggrandizing Me tweets, but that had disappeared as soon as it was clear something horrific was going on. By now, you had to be living in some sort of bubble to not know about the spiders. And even if you were skeptical—Teddie could imagine herself as one of those people, she could imagine herself to be the kind of woman who would hear about rampaging spiders eating people and call bullshit until she’d seen it with her own eyes—you couldn’t possibly be in Los Angeles and not understand there was something seriously messed up going on. And yet, there were new videos every few minutes, people who couldn’t help but interpret this as an opportunity to be just a little bit famous, when, as far as Teddie was concerned, they should be interpreting this as an opportunity to get the f*ck out of Dodge. Seriously. It was amazing to her that great swaths of Los Angeles seemed to think that the proper response to a full-scale catastrophe was to document it.