The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(75)

They were safe and sound underground. They could wait awhile before they had to poke their heads back up.





The White House


Manny was slumped in a chair. There was a point, and he didn’t want to admit he was at that point, where Diet Coke could do only so much. It had been a rough couple of days. He thought the fallout from shutting down all air travel was bad, but it had gone from bad to worse rather abruptly.

For a few minutes, just after Steph’s speech last night, he thought it was going to be okay. The Indians reported that the spiders seemed to be dying out. No reason. They were just dying. There were dead spiders all over Delhi. Heaps and piles of them. Hundreds of thousands, millions of dead spiders, like waves washed to shore and frozen in place. He’d seen film shot from a helicopter: the wind from the rotors stirred up the piles, spider corpses drifting in the breeze. Manny had, just for a moment, allowed himself to believe it was going to be that simple. The spiders would just die out in the same way cicadas did. Melanie had brought up the idea of periodical cicadas as a potential comparison, and Manny hoped she was right. Around Washington, DC, the Brood II and Brood X cicadas hatched on seventeen-year cycles. They’d last come to the surface in 2013 and 2004, respectively. Maybe the spiders would do their thing for a few weeks and then melt away like the cicadas, leaving only their husks behind.

But it wasn’t that easy. The spiders in Delhi might be dying, but now he had the spiders in Los Angeles to worry about, and then, in short order, reports from Helsinki, Rio de Janeiro, Lebanon, South Africa, and Russia. None of it made any sense anymore. Dawn was breaking in Washington, DC, and the entire world was falling apart. What was he supposed to do? They were treating it like a flu pandemic. A flu pandemic he would have at least understood. But spiders?

What he really needed was a nap. Five minutes. He just wanted five minutes to close his eyes, to let the din of the room drift away. Just five minutes to hit the reset button. Five minutes of sleep.

He got thirty seconds.

China.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

China.

They all stood quiet watching the balloons of light on the satellite imagery. A roomful of colonels and generals. Two stars, three stars, four. The secretary of defense, the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the director of Homeland Security. The f*cking president. Thirty or forty aides and attendants and all of them, including Manny, staring at the screen and watching what looked like a small field of beautiful flowers blooming in western China, a line of nuclear explosions stitching all the way down from Mongolia to Nepal. There were no human sounds in the room, just the constant chirp and chime and ring of e-mails and text messages and phone calls.

“What the hell?”

Manny didn’t know who broke the language barrier, but it opened a flood of yelling. First: denial. No way those were nukes. Second: confirmation. Nukes. The Chinese had just deliberately erased a third of their country. Third: silence again. The silence came slowly and then all at once, everyone in the room turning to look at Stephanie. To look at the president of the United States.

Nobody needed to ask the question. It was in the air. The question was everywhere. What the hell were they going to do?

It was not a good time for Manny’s cell phone to be buzzing, but as Steph started barking out orders—cabinet members to the conference room, military on full alert—and the room returned to noise and chaos, Manny snuck a look and saw Melanie’s name.

He pressed the phone hard against his ear and cupped his free hand over his mouth. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

“Manny,” she said. “You don’t understand. It’s worse than I thought.”

Manny rubbed his eyes. He wanted to believe he’d heard her wrong. Worse? How could it be worse? China was going to be glowing for the next thousand years, Los Angeles was a war zone, and his ex-wife was on the phone saying it’s worse than that? He motioned for an aide to grab his stuff so he could follow Steph. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Just tell me, okay, Melanie? I don’t think you understand just how bad a time this is for me to talk. You’ve already told me these spiders are designed to feed. What’s worse than that?” He caught a quick glimpse of one of the screens cutting to live satellite. The image was full of static, but it was panned all the way back so that most of China showed up, and even that far back, the dust or dirt or smoke or whatever the hell nukes left behind was terrifying.

“Okay. So stay with me. The timing doesn’t make any sense, right? They come out and they’re fully grown and eating like locusts. It’s accelerated.”

“What’s accelerated?”

“Everything. They’re like rockets. They feed until they burn themselves out. That’s what’s happening in Delhi. And it’s going to happen in Los Angeles soon.”

Manny perked up. He’d been right. “So you’re telling me they’ll just die out? How much longer?”

“No. You don’t understand. I was wrong before. When I said they were designed to feed, I was wrong. They’re colonizers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean some of them feed. But some of them lay eggs, and those things are accelerated too. They’ll hatch quickly.”

“How do you know?”