The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(83)

Dead spiders in the insectarium. Dried out. Used up. And the other spiders. Feeding machines. The egg sac in Bark, sticky and ready to hatch, and then the egg sacs in Minneapolis? Mike said they were cool. A little rough. She tried running the numbers in her head, thinking over the data. It was . . . something. There was something she was missing. She was so close. She needed her lab. She needed a nap.

She closed her eyes and then heard the door to the bathroom. She opened her eyes and stared at her knees, sitting on the toilet for a few more seconds, savoring the time to herself, before she finished up and stepped out of the stall. Stepped out of the stall to find Manny leaning against the sink and waiting for her.

“Jesus, Manny. Come on.”

“We were married for eleven years,” he said, and then shrugged. His version of an apology. “I needed to talk to you before you go in.”

She brushed past him to wash her hands. “What am I doing here, Manny? This is way past me at this point. I’m a lab kind of girl. What do you expect me to do?”

“I expect you to do your job,” he said. “You know spiders. That’s all we need. Tell us, as best you can, what we’re dealing with.”

“Minnesota,” she said.

“What?”

“They’re in Minnesota now. You knew that, right?” Manny turned pale, and Melanie had the answer to her question. “Mike—Agent Rich, the one who brought the spider from Minneapolis—called me when I was on the way here. They found a dead spider in a warehouse near the crash site and some egg sacs.”

Manny took a deep breath. “How many? How many egg sacs?”

“I think he said three. Three? But the good news is that they’re cool, and we might have some time before they hatch.”

“There’s something you need to see,” Manny said.

He walked her out of the bathroom and down the hall. As they passed the Situation Room, a young woman in army dress bounced through the doors, a cacophony of voices following her. Manny didn’t glance in. He turned, four doors down, and took her into a smaller, quieter room. It was nearly empty. Just Billy Cannon, Alex Harris, and a couple of aides.

“Show her the footage,” Manny said.

Melanie sat down in one of the chairs around the table. They all faced the same large screen on the far side of the room. One of the aides turned down the lights, and the screen lit up.

“We shot this forty minutes ago. Marines in Los Angeles.”

“Don’t worry,” Billy said dryly, “we’re not going to show you the Hollywood sign covered in spiders.”

The video was shaky and poorly lit. There were dark shadows and whoever was holding the camera kept moving it back and forth. She realized it must have been mounted on his helmet. Melanie caught a glimpse of someone in a military uniform—one of the other Marines, she assumed—and a shape on the ground that she realized was a body. The camera stopped moving, the light showing a dark carpet. No. It wasn’t a carpet. It was a layer of dead spiders. A foot reached out and poked at the spiders, pushing them aside.

“They’re dying?”

“Some of them. Most of them. But that’s not the point of the video,” Manny said. “This. Watch this.”

The video moved forward again, out of the mouth of a hallway, opening out into a cavernous space. There were sections of seats. The camera panned over and she saw a Los Angeles Lakers logo.

“Is that the Staples Center?”

“She’s a basketball player. I told you she’d recognize it,” Manny said to Alex, but Melanie barely heard him. She was leaning toward the screen, reaching out with her finger.

“Oh my god.”

The egg sacs closest to the light on the camera were white and dusty looking, casting shadows on the ones behind. What should have been the hardwood court was covered in white lumps, and there were more of them up in the stands on the other side, until the light gave way to darkness. Thousands of egg sacs. Maybe tens of thousands.

“Near as we can tell,” Manny said, “the spiders are all dying out. There was a respite last night, late, and then a fresh wave with a break in the middle of the night, and then another wave, but they’re dying. We’ve got boots on the ground, and we’re getting the same report over and over. The spiders are just keeling over. Spider bodies everywhere.”

Melanie’s phone started ringing, but she ignored it. “All of them?”

“All of them,” Manny said. “We’ve got a couple of coolers full of spiders on ice being rushed back to you now to take a look at. But right now, it’s suddenly weirdly calm. Which means the question is: What do we do about this basketball stadium full of spider eggs?”

“For starters,” Billy said, “we should probably cancel tonight’s game. Though the Lakers probably would have lost anyway.” No one laughed.

Alex touched her arm. “Are we f*cked?”

Coming from the national security advisor, who looked as if she could be cast as the grandmother in some sort of feel-good Christmas commercial, the question was almost funny. Almost.

“It depends,” Melanie said. Her phone stopped ringing, kicking to voice mail, but then it dinged with a text. And then another. And another.

“I’d say it probably doesn’t depend,” Billy Cannon said. “I can make all the jokes about the Lakers I want, but when those things hatch, we’re talking how many? Millions more? And what does it mean that one day we have this swarm in Los Angeles, and the next they’re all dying or dead?” He pushed his chair back and launched his coffee cup at the trash can, missing by a good two feet. “Fuck,” he said. “What happened to regular war?”