Mike knew he was out of his depth. But sometimes, when you’re thrown in, the only thing you can do is swim. Or, phone a friend.
They cordoned off the whole block, cleared the warehouse of anybody who wasn’t wearing a badge, and called in four more agents plus the bureau chief. But then, honestly, they just sort of stood around. Nobody knew what to do. They all stared at the egg sacs and made serious faces and serious sounds, but there wasn’t really a protocol for it. One of the junior agents came back with a big glass jar and scooped the dead spider from the floor into it, but other than that?
And then Mike remembered the card from the scientist in DC. He pulled it from his wallet. Melanie Guyer. Dr. Melanie Guyer. She’d written her cell phone number on the back. It was 8:30 A.M. Minneapolis time, so 9:30 A.M. in Washington, DC, but Mike figured that with all that was going on and with a lab full of those suckers, she was probably out and about. What he didn’t expect was for her to be on a helicopter.
He had to speak loudly, and with the hush in the warehouse—it was easier to look serious if you were kind of quiet—everybody turned to look at him. He held up his hand in an awkward apology and headed outside.
“Agent Rich—”
“Mike.”
“Mike, listen, not really a good time right now.”
“I found a few, well, I guess egg sacs? I can text you a picture.” There was no response for a few seconds. He listened to the staticky chop of the helicopter blades. “Hello?”
“Sorry. I’m just . . . I just watched spiders hatch from a living human.”
Mike pulled the phone back from his ear and looked at it. He knew it was a strange thing to do, but it was also a strange thing to hear, and he needed to make sure it wasn’t something he’d imagined. He put the phone back to his ear. “In DC?”
“Maryland, actually, but it doesn’t matter.”
“They’re loose in DC now?”
“Maryland. But no. He was in a biocontainment unit. There was an egg sac inside him. They were trying to get it out. It shouldn’t have been . . . It shouldn’t have hatched so quickly. None of this makes sense.”
“Yeah, well, I’m hoping you can tell me what to do.”
“I don’t think anybody can tell you what to do,” she said. “You’re in Minnesota?”
“In a warehouse.”
“Is it as bad as Los Angeles?”
The phone was muffled for a second and he heard her shouting something. Then she was back. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing. It’s calm here. The only thing we’ve got is a dead spider and three pod things. As far as I know, there aren’t any other spiders on the ground here. We’re only a couple of blocks from where Henderson’s plane crashed, so I’m sort of figuring there must have been another spider that survived, that came over here and made these egg things.”
“Are the egg sacs warm?”
“I didn’t, uh,” Mike stammered, “I mean, nobody’s touched them. We set up a few barricades and taped the area off.”
“Like, with police tape?” She actually laughed. “That’s not going to do much.”
“That’s funny? I guess it’s a little funny. We’re a federal agency. It’s kind of what we do. But no, I don’t know if they’re warm or what.”
“Okay. Listen, Mike, I’ve only got a couple of minutes before I land, but I need you to go touch one, tell me what it feels like.”
“Give me a minute.” He walked back into the building, ducked under the police tape, and walked over to the shelves. He tucked the phone between his ear and his shoulder and pulled a wheeled platform ladder over. He went up a few steps, reached out his hand, and then hesitated. “Just touch it?”
“What does it feel like?”
From a distance, it looked smooth and white, almost like an egg, but up close he could see the individual strands, the way the silk threads were wrapped in layer after layer to create the sac. He shivered and then let his hand fall on the orb. He expected it to be sticky, but it wasn’t. It was a little rough, maybe a little bit tacky, but it was nothing like what he’d been afraid of. There’d been a part of him that was terrified his hand was going to stick to the thing. “It feels a little bit like one of those jawbreakers, after they’ve dried out again.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a kid. You know those big jawbreakers? My kid will eat one for a while and then stick the thing in a bowl and come back to it later. They’re basically pure sugar and chemicals and don’t go bad, but once they dry out, they’re sort of smooth and rough at the same time.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Lady, you work with spiders,” he said. Even with the sound of the helicopter and everything else, he imagined he could hear her smiling. Definitely, he thought. If they managed to survive all this, he was going to fly back to DC and take her out on a date. What the hell?
“It’s not sticky?”
“No. A little tacky, sort of, I don’t know—”
“Calcified?”
“Yeah. Good word. And it’s not warm at all. Cool, really.”
The White House