The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(77)

“It’s bad out there, isn’t it?” she said. “We’re not getting the full story, are we?”

“Melanie,” he said. “Mel.” And that’s when she truly felt worried. He almost never called her Mel. The last time he’d called her Mel was when he told her he wanted a divorce. “I asked you earlier to come to the White House to answer some questions for us, but now I need you to come answer some questions.”

“Okay. Like what?”

“Like how to kill them.”





The CNN Center,

Atlanta, Georgia


Teddie scrolled the video back and watched it again and again and again. There was a pattern, she was sure of it.





Minneapolis, Minnesota


Leshaun looked like shit, but Mike was happy to see him. After he’d gotten back from dropping Annie off with Rich and Fanny at the dock, Mike went home, grabbed his work phone and agency vehicle, and headed in. He was the last one to the office.

The bureau chief gave an uninspired speech relaying the national orders and then telling them the arsenal was open for business. “Gear up,” he said. “Urban unrest, basically. That’s the model we’re using. We’ve got nothing to worry about on the ground here yet, so we’re just going to help local law enforcement keep the peace. Make sure nobody gets too panicked.”

“Right,” Leshaun said under his breath so only Mike could hear him, “because the way to keep everybody calm is to have us running around with machine guns.”

But he and Mike did the same thing as everybody else: they slipped agency Windbreakers over body armor and took M4 carbines, Remington Model 870 pump-action shotguns, and spare magazines, clips, shells, and ammunition and then got into Mike’s agency car and started driving around.

It was kind of boring.

“You sure you’re up for this?” Mike asked. Leshaun had leaned his seat back and had his eyes closed, but was not asleep. “Nothing’s really going on here. I mean, Los Angeles sounds like some incredibly dystopian nightmare, but good old Minneapolis? I guess rush hour is going to start soon, but let’s face it. We’re still in the Midwest.”

Leshaun laughed. He was from Boston originally, and was always willing to laugh about how boring the Midwest could be. “I’m good. My arm’s good. The ribs still hurt, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well be out and about.”

They didn’t talk much for the next half hour. A stop for coffee. And then Mike’s phone showed an incoming call from the bureau chief.

“If you saw that spider again, could you identify it?”

Mike shuddered. He didn’t think he’d ever forget it. “Yes sir.”

“We’ve got a report of a dead spider. There’s actually been a ton of calls about spiders, but this one’s maybe a little different. It’s two blocks from where Henderson’s plane went down.”

Mike put his phone back in the cup holder on the center console and flicked the siren on. It was a quick ride across town, traffic still light and the cherries clearing the way.

The building was a warehouse for a plumbing-supply company. There were two black-and-whites outside, a pair of cops leaning against their cars and smoking. They gave Mike and Leshaun a wave as they passed. Inside the warehouse, Mike and Leshaun followed the sound of voices until they came to another pair of cops standing with a woman in her mid-fifties wearing civilian clothes.

“I called it in as soon as Juan called me,” she said. “Juan’s the night manager. We fill most of our orders at night so that our customers can be ready to roll out first thing in the morning. There it is,” she said, pointing.

Mike reached out to grab onto the shelf so he could balance himself to get a closer look. The cut on his hand was still uncomfortable, but he had pretty good mobility. Actually, between the stitches in his hand and Leshaun’s broken ribs and shot-through arm, he and his partner weren’t in the best shape. But you worked with what you had.

There was no question this was the same kind of spider.

“But it’s a warehouse.” The woman was still talking. “We get spiders and mice and the occasional squirrel. If it wasn’t for all the stuff on the news, I don’t know if I would have called it in. And there’s those awful-looking cocoon things too.”

Mike looked up at her. “What?”

“Oh, around the corner. They look like cocoons.”

Mike and Leshaun and the two cops followed the woman. She had a flashlight and pointed the beam near the rafters. There was a lattice of cobwebs. And from the ground, Mike could see at least three softball-shaped orbs. It took him a second, but then he realized what they looked like: they looked like whole versions of the split-open egg sac from the lab in Washington.

This was not good.





Highway 10, California


The SUV was still smoking a little.

Kim was hugely relieved that the two passengers, both young men, had jumped out of the car with their hands up, scared shitless but apparently unharmed. The captain had both men detained and then sent down the line to the temporary internment camp outside Desperation. Maybe ten minutes after Kim had fired her .50 cal, somebody noticed the white SUV was on fire, but the captain delayed the rush to put out the flames. “Let it burn,” he ordered. “Maybe it will stop the next idiot from trying to get past the blockade, at least until we start moving everybody off the highway and to the camp.”