The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(70)

Now, though, it was 7:00 P.M. Eastern Standard, or 4:00 P.M. in Los Angeles. More than three hours since the ship ran aground and hell skittered into the city, and President Pilgrim was ready for another presidential address, her first since grounding the planes. The anchors were cutting over to the live view. Serious stuff. When she’d grounded the planes, the president had walked across the red carpet of the White House’s Cross Hall and spoken from the entrance to the East Room, but now she was sitting at her desk in the Oval Office.

“America,” the president said, “is under attack.”

Teddie leaned in toward her monitor, but she realized she didn’t have to. She’d never heard such silence at CNN. The only sound in the entire building, as near as she could tell, was coming from banks of television monitors and computer screens, the president’s image and voice beaming in from six hundred miles away.





The White House


“America is under attack.”

Manny, standing behind the cameraman, experienced that slight disconnect between watching the president speaking on a screen and in real life at the same time. She let those words sit for a moment. “America is under attack.” They’d gone back and forth on the phrasing. So much was unclear. War and earthquakes, hurricanes and landslides, terrorist attacks and industrial accidents. Those were all things Manny knew how to handle. He already had words for them. They were all things the American public understood. But this was something different. That much was obvious. And that had led them, finally, to the decision to be as clear as possible. There had been some concern in the room about stoking panic, but after a few minutes of debate they all realized they were well past the moment of worrying about stoking panic; panic was already there.

“I don’t use these words lightly,” Stephanie said to the camera. “By now, most of you will have seen the horrifying images coming out of Los Angeles. While it may be hard to comprehend in an age of technology and terrorism, the threat we are facing appears to be a natural one. A little more than three hours ago, at approximately 3:45 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, a freighter ran aground at the Port of Los Angeles. The ship appears to have been carrying a very aggressive and dangerous species of spiders. We do not know for sure how the spiders got onto the ship, but we believe they must have been among the cargo, perhaps hatching inside a shipping container en route. At least some of the cargo containers came from the same province in China where the nuclear explosion occurred earlier in the week. The Chinese government continues to state that the nuclear incident was an accident, but based on our own intelligence reports, we believe it was a deliberate decision made by the government in an attempt to contain an outbreak of these same spiders. While we cannot confirm with one hundred percent accuracy that they are the same, I believe it is reasonable to conclude that the menace in Los Angeles is connected to the incident in China, and to the reports of the city of Delhi being overwhelmed. The Indian government has been much more helpful, despite their own crisis, and they have been sharing information with us, so we hope to have confirmation within the next twenty-four hours.

“As your president, I say this with a heavy heart: our country is under a real and immediate threat.” Stephanie paused. She looked, Manny thought, both presidential and exhausted. The weight of the world on her shoulders. And he knew why she was pausing: because what she was about to say had been a brutal decision. “If you are in or around the Los Angeles area, you must shelter in place. I have issued an emergency order of quarantine inside a two-hundred-fifty-mile radius of Los Angeles. That means that if you live within two hundred fifty miles of Los Angeles, you are required to remain in that area. The National Guard, local police, and state police, with the assistance of the army, navy, Marines, and air force, will be enforcing this quarantine zone. Again, if you live in Los Angeles or within a two-hundred-fifty-mile radius of it—which means south of the city all the way to the border of Mexico, east to the state border, and north past Fresno—you are under an order of quarantine. No vehicles or citizens will be allowed to pass beyond this area. I say this with a heavy heart but with hope for the future; to those of you who are within this zone, I want you to understand that you are not alone. The country is with you.”

Manny couldn’t stop himself from grimacing. He’d written the speech, but he hated those two sentences. He hated them because he knew they weren’t true. Maybe they’d get this figured out in the next few days and have soldiers and cops and first responders in there, but all they were doing right now was trying to keep it contained. They were scrambling to get crop dusters and firefighting planes over the city to spray insecticide, but that was going to take at least a few hours, and even then, they had no clue if it was going to work. The bitter truth was that the people in that zone were alone. The country was not with them in any sense other than as spectators. The National Guard and the police, the army and the navy, the Marines and the air force weren’t lined up with their guns pointed out, to protect them from some invading army, but rather with their guns pointed in. But as much as he hated those two sentences, he was even less happy about what was coming. Yes, it made sense, and he reluctantly agreed with the national security advisor and the secretary of defense and pretty much everybody else who said it had to be done, but it was still going to be tough to swallow in the polls.

“The news channels and the Internet have been awash in speculation the last few days, and the truth is that the facts of this situation are not entirely clear.” Stephanie leaned in toward the camera, and despite himself, despite knowing the words that were about to come out of her mouth, Manny found himself responding in kind, leaning toward her. “What I know for sure, however, is that Americans are dying, and my job is to protect this country.” She paused to take a breath. Here it comes, Manny thought. It made him feel sick. He knew it was the wrong thought to have at a moment like this, but he was a political animal and he couldn’t help himself. All he could think of was that she was going to lose the election with the next sentence. “I am declaring the states of California, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada under martial law.”