“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.”
It was morning now, and the rerouting of traffic had begun. Kim wasn’t sure why they weren’t just turning people around, but Honky Joe said that if Los Angeles was as bad as it sounded, they couldn’t send people back, but they also couldn’t let people just break the quarantine zone. Hence the wire fences and temporary holding pens. Or, as Honky Joe put it, not at all reassuringly, “Think of it as a short-term refugee camp.”
The sun made an angry promise about the coming heat of the day. A thin wisp of smoke twisted out of the burning hulk of metal that had been an SUV just a few hours earlier. The Marines had opened the road toward the camp outside Desperation, and from where she sat in the driver’s seat of the JLTV, Kim could see every driver and passenger take a look at the smoldering SUV as they turned off the highway. Kim’s squad and all the other squads—including the two tanks—were ordered to hold their line; squads in Hummers and JLTVs lined the road to the internment camp, spaced out every hundred yards or so, but they barely seemed necessary. Once the traffic started moving, people seemed so happy just to be off the highway that nobody questioned where they were going. The American people, Kim thought, preferred to be sheep. They’d been funneling traffic toward the holding pens outside Desperation for close to an hour, and there had been only one report of a car trying to break the line. If anything, the civilians had an almost celebratory air. Sure, they looked a little startled at the sight of the smoking SUV, but for the most part, people were waving and smiling at the Marines as they passed. They’d been taught to see the military as heroes, even if, Kim thought, they were mostly acting as traffic cops right now.
She had the windows open in the tactical vehicle, but it was still pretty gamey, full-on FAN: feet, ass, nuts. Duran was in the passenger seat and had found a phone charger somewhere. He was reading the news, a frustrating endeavor given how shitty the signal was out where they were. Elroy was manning the .50 cal, and Mitts was taking a nap in the back. There wasn’t much to do other than watch the traffic merging painfully onto the side road. What exactly did the military plan to do once all the cars were there? How long was this quarantine supposed to last? There had to be what, forty, fifty thousand people backed up on the highway? Maybe more? Kim glanced over at the wrecked hulk of the SUV again, looking at the pockmarks where the bullets had punched through the hood. She still couldn’t believe nobody had been killed. It made her feel sick. She’d been trained to open fire on hostiles, to take the shot before anybody could get close enough to detonate a car bomb. That was the world the military lived in now. But she’d never expected to have to operate on domestic soil. She was in the Marines to protect Americans.
“They’re saying Japan now too.”
Kim looked over at Duran. “Tokyo?”
He shook his head. “No. I’ve never heard of the place. Somewhere rural, in the mountains.”