The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(73)

And one untouched rat.

The surviving rat was pressed against the glass, huddled in the corner of the insectarium, radiating sheer terror. Melanie didn’t usually ascribe much in the way of emotional lives to her rats. She couldn’t afford to. They were things for testing, or, right now, for feeding, and she didn’t want to have a moral crisis every time she wanted to get some work done. There was no other way to describe it, however. The rat looked scared. It was squeaking and shivering and pushing itself as far away as possible from the spiders. The spiders, for their part, were ignoring the rat, which was bizarre to Melanie. They’d positively inhaled the other rats. It had looked like an unruly arachnoid wrestling match as they fed. But this rat seemed as if it were almost invisible to them.

“Julie,” Melanie said. “How many rats have we dropped in?”

“Today?”

“No. Total. What number is this?”

Julie scrolled through some notes on her tablet. “Nine. No. Ten. Counting the first one, and then the ones we just dropped in, we’ve fed them ten rats.”

Patrick gently touched the glass on the other side of the rat’s body. “You think these spiders are counting or something?”

“Or something,” Melanie said. “Why are they leaving this one alone?”

“They didn’t,” Bark said. “Not exactly.”

Melanie looked at him. He’d mostly pulled himself together since she told him she was ending things, but he hadn’t been particularly vocal. “What do you mean?”

“He’s got a cut on him. On his belly.” Bark pointed through the glass.

“Wait,” Patrick said. “We’re short another spider.”

“What the f*ck?” Melanie tugged at her ponytail and then pulled out the elastic. Her hair felt greasy. She couldn’t remember if she had even brushed it after her last shower. “Julie, pull the video back to when we dropped the new rats in.”

They watched it on Julie’s screen and then watched it again, slower. What had seemed almost instantaneous earlier was terrifying with the frame rate dropped to a tenth the speed: the spiders were already leaping before the trap door had fully opened. They met the rats’ bodies mid-drop. The spiders were feeding before the rats hit the ground of the insectarium. Except for the one rat and one spider. It was so quick and there was so much chaos going on with the other spiders feeding that Melanie understood why they’d missed it. The spiders had swarmed over the other rats, but only a single spider had gone to the surviving rat. But that spider hadn’t fed. It had . . . disappeared? No. The rat’s body blocked the angle from the camera, but they could mostly make it out. The spider lunged forward, gave a sort of shiver, and then was gone. It had disappeared inside the rat’s body.

“Scroll back again. Get me a clear frame of that spider before it burrows into the rat.” Julie found the frame, froze it, and then Melanie pinched at the screen, zooming in. “Look at that marking on the abdomen,” Melanie said. “Does that mean something?”

They spent several minutes watching the other spiders move around the tank before Bark spotted another with the same marking.

They were careful. They segregated the marked spider. They followed all the protocols. But something as simple as putting a container too close to the edge of the table?

There was always human error.

Sooner or later, but always.

And now the spider was gone. Smashing glass. Yelling. Blood. Gone.

Somewhere inside Bark’s body.

Julie marked the time: 1:58 A.M.





Highway 10, California


Sometimes, Kim thought, being in the Marines meant just being along for the ride. First they’d been sent to Desperation, the shittiest town this side of, well, anywhere, to build what looked like an internment camp, and then suddenly, minutes before the president’s address, the company was peeled off from the brigade at full scramble. The whole company, nearly 150 Marines leaving behind close to five thousand, loaded up in a mix of brand-new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and old, sand-scarred Hummers. They’d heard the quarantine order over the radio as they busted down the road ten miles back to the highway. And when they got to the highway, there were already two M1 Abrams tanks—tanks!—blocking traffic. Nobody in or out.

The captain ordered them out wide, the two tanks on the road and the mix of JLTVs and Hummers bouncing off the shoulders of the highway out into the scrub, until they were nearly one hundred yards wide on either side, far enough out to discourage any drivers from getting cute and trying to glide past the blockade, because there was no question that somebody would have tried. The civilians were getting antsy. It was past two in the morning. By now, Kim figured, with the traffic piling up and piling up for hours and hours, it might reach as far back as Los Angeles, quarantine order or no quarantine order. Even out in Desperation, putting together fences and working their asses off, they’d started hearing about what was going on in LA. At first, it sounded as though things were confined to one neighborhood, and it seemed like crazy panic with nothing to it. Just people freaking out over the idea of freaking out. There hadn’t been much in the way of video: shaky images with lots of screaming. But then, suddenly, all the news—Internet, television, radio—was spiders, spiders, spiders. Spiders swarming over the city, spiders eating some people and leaving others alone, spiders drifting from the sky onto rooftops, spiders coming out of drains and scuttling under doorways. Private Goons said he’d heard from a cousin that all Los Angeles was on fire. Nobody else knew if that was true. And then they were bounced from Desperation to the highway, and Kim was facing down American citizens with a fifty-caliber machine gun. Kim’s fire team had landed one of the new JLTVs. They were all the way out on the farthest edge of the left side, in the brush and scrub and dust. At first she thought it was silly. There were tanks on the road. Who was going to try to get past those? Did they really need to be so far off the road? But as night came, Kim started to think that maybe a pair of tanks and a few Hummers and JLTVs might not be enough if all these people decided they weren’t interested in obeying the president’s quarantine. The towers of portable floodlights sent a white glaze a couple of hundred yards back, but past that, from her perch on top of the JLTV out at the wing of the blockade, Kim could see headlights for what seemed like forever. There’d been announcements on the radio and the captain had sent a couple of men out to a distance of two miles to make sure motorists knew the road was blocked off and to encourage them to turn around and go home, but it had turned into a clusterf*ck—with the backup from the roadblocks, people started trying to drive the wrong way down the highway, so now it was backed up on both sides. Nobody could go forward. Nobody could go back. The only way out was past the tanks, past the Hummers and JLTVs, past Kim and her .50 cal, and they were under orders not to let anybody by. Not good.