“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 fucked?”
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?”
Melanie fished her phone out of her pocket to read the texts, suddenly realizing they had to be from Mike in Minneapolis. If those egg sacs were getting warm, getting ready to hatch, then . . . But no. The texts were from Julie.
She’d left Julie a sobbing mess outside the biocontainment unit back at the National Institutes of Health. Not that she could blame Julie. To see the nurses and the surgeon go down under the swarm of spiders, let alone Bark, still opened up on the table, and Patrick. At some point, Melanie knew, the scientist part of her was going to get overwhelmed, and she’d be crying heaps too.
Spiders at NIH dying. The first text.
Call me! The second text from Julie.
And the third, longer: The spiders behind the glass are all dying. Just falling over. Almost all of them. All at once. Called lab. Some dead. Some alive. But Melanie: egg sac at lab! Got to see it.
“No,” Melanie said. “We’re not fucked. Or, maybe we are. Like I said, it depends. Manny, you’re wrong. The problem isn’t what to do about a stadium full of eggs. Though you’re going to need to start searching to see if there are other infestation sites in Los Angeles. The question that really matters, however, isn’t what you need to do, but when you need to do it. For now, you’ve got to get somebody into the Staples Center to take the temperature of the egg sacs. Before they hatch, there’s a spike in temperature. Maybe this will give me a sense how much time we have,” she said. “Oh, and I want somebody in Minneapolis.”
“Minneapolis?” Alex Harris looked alarmed. “Why Minneapolis?”
EPILOGUE