None of it made any sense to her. Normally it took two or three weeks for an egg sac to hatch, and the spiders that came out were hatchlings, growing slowly to their full sizes. But these things could lay eggs and have full-sized spiders popping out in twelve hours. Or twenty-four? She didn’t actually know. She would have said twenty-four based on what was happening everywhere else, but this egg sac seemed as though it was moving faster. It would hatch within twelve hours for sure. Maybe even quicker. It was like they were speeding up. One generation burning out quickly and the next even more so. Maybe the way she’d described it to Manny had been the best: like a rocket burning itself up.
But that didn’t make sense either. What evolutionary advantage was there in dying quickly? The parasitic part made sense. By laying eggs inside hosts, the spiders had guaranteed food sources once they hatched. But the fact that they could eat their hosts wasn’t normal either. Most spiders dissolved their prey and ground it up with their pedipalps since they didn’t have teeth. She’d described it once to Manny as having a broken jaw and needing to run everything through a blender before slurping it up through a straw. But these spiders? They had more in common with piranhas than anything else. Actually, Melanie thought, that might not be a bad comparison, though she didn’t know much about the fish other than what she’d seen in a couple of bad horror films. The spiders were uncommonly social and coordinated, swarming together and almost organized.
There had to be a reason for it. There had to be more to it. She was sure of it. The answer was a sort of itch she couldn’t reach. She knew she’d figure it out if she had enough time, but that was the problem. Did she have enough time?
Inside the containment unit, the surgeon was still bent over Bark’s body, assisted by three nurses and an anesthesiologist. Patrick was in there too. He had the lab’s expensive SLR camera plus a video camera, and he was alternating between taking pictures and shooting film. She tapped on the glass to try to get his attention. Video was fine for now. It was high-definition. She wished they’d brought a tripod from the lab. If they’d had a tripod, Patrick could have left the video camera running and bounced around with the SLR, but a tripod was another thing they’d forgotten. It was a miracle they weren’t shooting video on a cell phone. Like idiots, they’d rushed Bark from the lab without thinking it through other than to get him to the biocontainment unit. Nobody brought a laptop or a tablet, which didn’t seem like a big deal at first, until they realized that, with the egg sac starting to hum and heat up, it might be a good idea to look back at the data from the other egg sac. When Melanie stepped out of the isolation unit to get ready for her Manny-mandated helicopter pickup, she sent Julie scurrying to get on a computer to see if she could access their data remotely. The big question was: How hot was too hot? How soon was this sucker going to hatch? It was one thing to watch the egg sac in the lab hatch, another to actually have the numbers in front of you for comparison. Julie needed to get her ass back there as quickly as possible so that Melanie could crunch the numbers. She wanted to make sure that, if necessary, she could get Patrick and the medical team out of there with time to spare.
She leaned her head against the glass, suddenly exhausted. There was so much she didn’t know or understand about these things, but it wasn’t exciting anymore. It was just scary. She knew she could be detached sometimes, that she didn’t always get upset the way some other people did, but in there, through that glass, lying on the operating table, his chest and abdomen split open, was a young man she’d been sleeping with—okay, dating—until a few days ago. And she was being called to the White House to tell a bunch of generals and cabinet members and the president how to kill spiders. A rolled-up newspaper? Would that joke go over? Probably not. She didn’t know what she could say.
It would be different if there were just a few of them. If she had them in her lab and had the time to study them. There were so many questions. Just the egg sacs to begin with. Why were there two kinds? One for longer incubations and a softer, sticky one for immediate delivery. How could some of the spiders hatch so quickly? It was as if some of the spiders were on fast-forward.
“Doctor Guyer?” She turned, expecting to see a suit, but it was a man in full army combat gear. Or maybe navy or Marines. In their fatigues, she didn’t know how she was supposed to tell them apart. She nodded. “Your ride’s here, ma’am,” the young man said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t hear the helicopter come in. Let me just . . .” She trailed off. She was about to say that she needed to tell Patrick she was leaving, but she caught sight of Julie coming down the corridor, running. Running.
No. It was too soon. Not twenty-four hours or even twelve hours yet. They should have more time! But Julie was running and screaming and Melanie knew it meant she’d gotten access to the data from the lab. Melanie turned back to the glass and started to bang on it with her fists, to get the attention of the nurses and the surgeon and the anesthesiologist and Patrick, to get them the hell out of there.
Too late.
Minneapolis, Minnesota