“Kim?” Mitts leaned forward. He had his hand on her shoulder. “Kim? What are we supposed to do?”
She didn’t know, but there was something bothering her. Something about the way the spiders were moving. It reminded her of a sort of dance. Liquid spilling forward and back, waves of black washing forward over certain people and then tucking back under, like the ocean pulling sand into the deeps. And some people, inexplicably, left standing, the bugs splitting around them, desert islands. Three hundred yards out now, and with the binoculars, she could see the spiders as individual drops, but without the binoculars, they were a single flood of liquid, moving together.
And then the radio came to life: “Fall back! Fall back!”
She didn’t hesitate. She shoved the JLTV into drive and hit the gas. Because they were out on the wing, the last vehicle in the barricade, all she had to do was crank the wheel all the way to the left to spin a spitting semicircle of dirt, stone, and dust before she was turned in the other direction.
“What the fuck?” Elroy ducked down, holding tight to the edges of the turret. “We’ve got orders to—”
“They’re calling for us to fall back. It’s too late,” Kim yelled. “They fucked up. This isn’t the flu. We can kill as many civilians as you want, fire until you’re in the black, but it isn’t going to stop the spiders. We can’t shoot our way out of this one.” She kept the gas pedal tight to the floor, and the JLTV was picking up speed now that it was moving straight. On the highway, she could get the fourteen-thousand-pound beast up to seventy miles per hour, but on the sand and dirt, she’d be happy with thirty. In the rearview mirror she saw Sue’s Hummer tracking behind her, the rest of the line in a mix of chaos. Mitts scrambled across the seat to the other side so he could look out the window and back at the barricade.
There was another explosion, bigger this time. The entire JLTV bounced and bucked, but the tires bit back into the sand and it kept moving forward. The fast movers screamed over them again, from the other direction, payloads emptied, and Kim risked a look in the mirror again. All she could see was smoke and fire.
National Institutes of Health,
Bethesda, Maryland
Melanie figured she had another ten minutes or so before the helicopter got there. Manny had been insistent. Despite the president’s speech and all indications that the infestation was only in LA, people were starting to stream out of DC to go . . . To go where? Where did people think they were going to run to, Melanie wondered, a hotel in the Hamptons? It didn’t matter, though, because the end result was that the normally bad traffic around the DC area was even worse, and the half-hour drive to the White House was going to take a lot longer. So. Helicopter.
She leaned into the window of the isolation unit to try to get a better view of what the surgeon was doing. At first, she thought it was going to be a simple thing. They’d cut Bark open, the dead spider had flopped out, and the egg sac had presented itself. Snip some threads, pull the sac out and drop it in the insectarium, sew Bark back up, call it a day. But it wasn’t so easy. The strands of silk weren’t just tacked around the sac. They were literally sewn through Bark’s body. And worse. The threads were dotted with eggs, like mini egg sacs on a highway throughout his body. Nasty little surprises, and the surgeon had to track each thread and make sure he caught each of the eggs. The big egg sac was still in there; the surgeon wanted to work around it, to make sure he didn’t lose any of the precious threads. As an added bonus, the egg sac, all the spider silk, was incredibly sticky. It was nothing like the sac from Peru. That thing had been hard, designed to go the distance. But this egg sac was different, and the surgeon had to be careful to avoid getting tangled up.
Plus, as a final bonus, it was vibrating and getting warmer.