“Oh.” He said it aloud, though it was just him in the plane. He leaned over her body to get a closer look at the flesh that was pitted and chunked out. Some of it was just burns, but there, where he’d thought she’d been torn by shards of metal, he was no longer sure. The flesh bulged and looked raw, and suddenly he felt his skin go clammy. Had spiders been eating at her too? He looked out of the rent in the plane and saw Moreland coming back across the field toward him, some sort of jar in his hand.
Mike turned to glance at the crystal glass, suddenly worried that the spider wouldn’t be there, but he was relieved to see the creepy thing was still under the dome. “Fuck,” he said, and pulled out his phone. He wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to explain this to the director, but he was pretty sure flesh-eating spiders didn’t fall into the category of “anything other than an accident” that the director had been hoping for. Before he dialed, he looked around. Was there anything else? Was he missing something? This was Bill Henderson, not some anonymous housewife or corporate drone caught up in a drug deal gone poorly. Five minutes from the time the plane went down until the director was calling him as the nearest available agent. This was not something Mike could afford to fuck up, and if it turned out later that, oh, by the way, there had been something really obvious, some clue or thing that he should have seen that was what really caused Henderson’s plane to crash, Mike was going to be eating buckets of shit for the rest of his career. So he took another look at the plane, at the burnt and ravaged bodies, at the scattered ash that was starting to blow and lift in the hot breeze. The metal tube was like an oven in the unseasonable spring sun, the sharp edges of the walls and exposed wires a diagram of disaster. At his feet, there was the pinging of the spider again, beating at the glass with its legs or body or whatever the hell those things were called. Mike decided that, no, there was this single crippled spider and nothing else. He wasn’t missing anything.
But he was wrong. Near the back of the plane, in the gloom and ash, there was a small stirring.
The Indian Ocean
He slid the two rifles onto the deck of the boat and climbed up the ladder. The .40 cal Smith & Wesson was tucked into his waistband.
“Okay,” he said, picking up the rifles and carrying them over to his wife. “They still coming?”
She shook her head. “Something’s wrong.”
He handed her the .22 caliber rifle. She couldn’t handle the Winchester. Maybe a .22 wasn’t ideal for stopping power, but he’d made her practice with it until she could put three bullets in an inch circle from fifty feet out. He was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but he didn’t have a good feeling. He put the binoculars up to his eyes. Two years of sailing and they’d had only one close call with pirates, off the coast of Africa. They’d been lucky.
Until today.
No question that’s what this boat was. You don’t see a Zodiac where they were, out in the middle of the ocean, unless it was working from a mother ship. And this was a big one, stripped down for speed, with a bunch of men hunkered down in it. As soon as his wife had glassed the boat with the binoculars and then shown it to him, he’d put out a Mayday and run belowdecks for the rifles and his pistol. He knew how it worked. They both did. It was part of the risk of sailing in certain parts of the world. Help would come. Eventually. Maybe. They were on their own for now, and what people read about every now and then in the news was only part of it. Best-case scenario, they’d end up being held for a ransom that they couldn’t afford to pay. Worst-case scenario, he’d end up dead, and his wife . . . Well, that was a thought he would hold on to when his finger was on the trigger and he was trying to figure out if he should fire. But his wife was right: something was off.
When he first saw the Zodiac, the eight or nine men in it had been leaning forward, as if their bodies could make them get to the sailboat more quickly. But now, as the boat cut across the calm water, the men were rising from their seats.