The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(76)
“Because I’m looking at a new egg sac. I’m absolutely sure this thing isn’t more than a few hours old, but it doesn’t look like it. It looks like one that’s going to hatch pretty soon.”
“What? Where are you?”
“The National Institutes of Health. Bethesda.”
Manny stepped into the hall, following the bustle of suits and uniforms. He saw Steph holding on to Ben Broussard’s arm and talking at him as they walked.
“Why are you at the NIH?”
“You gave me carte blanche. And we needed a surgeon and a hospital with a biocontainment unit. There are only four places in the whole country with biocontainment units. The other three are at Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula, Montana. So Bethesda, Maryland, seemed like an obvious choice.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” Manny asked. “No, never mind. That doesn’t matter. But why did you need a surgeon? Wait, what? Biocontainment? Please tell me these things don’t also carry disease.”
“No, they aren’t infectious-disease carriers.” She stopped. “Well, at least I’m pretty sure they aren’t. Wouldn’t that be something, though? If they carried the plague? No. I don’t think that’s the worry, but we didn’t want to go to a normal hospital and then have the egg sac hatch and then have a spider, I don’t know, slip out an air vent or something. We needed a place that had procedures and the facilities to keep everything inside. So, NIH.”
“Do I want to know why you needed a surgeon? No,” he said, answering his own question, “I probably don’t want to know, but okay, I have to ask: why do you need a surgeon?”
“Because the egg sac is inside one of my students.”
National Institutes of Health,
Bethesda, Maryland
Melanie looked down at Bark lying unconscious and cut open on the operating table. At first, they’d been relieved: the surgeon had opened Bark’s abdominal cavity and the spider flopped out. The thing was dead. Spent, really, as far as Melanie could tell. Like the ones that had died for no apparent reason in the lab. Like the spiders being swept up on the streets of Delhi. And soon, soon, she hoped, Los Angeles. The relief was short-lived, however, because the spider seemed to have spent itself on putting together an egg sac inside Bark. It was like the one that was shipped to her lab, except it wasn’t calcified. The silk was sticky as hell, and the whole thing was warm and buzzing. The surgeon looked terrified, and one of the nurses had tried to run from the room before remembering they were in a biocontainment unit—it was built for guarding against the spread of the kinds of diseases that made Ebola look like a kids’ game, and both entrance and exit required going through air locks and all kinds of decontamination—but Melanie couldn’t stop herself from laying her gloved hand on the sac. She knew she should have been freaking out. She and Bark had been sleeping together regularly until this week, and here he was now, the spider playing a game of hide-and-seek in his body that left him put under and cut open. And there was a part of her that was freaking out. She could feel it. There was a little piece of Melanie that wanted to scream and try to run from the room like that nurse, but that little piece was being outvoted by the part of her that was trying to understand the puzzle.
Under the gloved hand, she felt the pulse of the egg sac, and in her other hand, the phone was warm against her ear. “Manny?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t . . . Okay. Why is there an egg sac in your student?”
She gave him the quick brief. Dropping the container, the glass breaking, the spider slipping through Bark’s skin as if it were barely there, the panic and then the resignation that the only thing to do was to get it out. The rushed trip to the NIH, the Secret Service agents flashing badges and yelling and cutting through the red tape as if they’d never heard of it. “Aren’t you glad you left me with a bunch of suits and Steph’s presidential orders?” she said, but the joke fell flat. Which made sense. It wasn’t a time for jokes, but she wasn’t sure what else to do.
“Feeders and breeders,” Manny said.
“And there’s a pattern,” she said. She took her hand off the egg sac. Julie Yoo was suited up in scrubs, and Melanie watched Julie and the surgeon start to work through the cords of silk that connected the sac to the inside of Bark’s body. They’d brought an insectarium from the lab, and the egg sac was going into it the second it was out of Bark. “We figured it out from the spiders in the insectarium and the rats. And then Patrick—one of my students—noticed it on the video out of Los Angeles. The feeders stay away from the hosts. They’re marked somehow. This serves a dual purpose: the hosts are both places for the eggs and a way to spread the colony. The person, or, I guess, animal, can travel with the eggs inside them until they hatch. Whoever their host is will likely be able to travel farther than the spiders could on their own. Shutting down air travel was a really smart call.”
Manny didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and Melanie could hear noise in the background on his end. She realized that while they were working away in her lab dealing with a few of these spiders, Manny’s job was to help Steph deal with all the spiders. She was an academic, but as much as Manny was a politician, sometimes that meant he dealt with the real world in ways she didn’t.