“Honestly, Manny, you know what I always tell people about spiders: there’s really no reason to be afraid of them.” Melanie walked to the back bench. “But that was before a couple of days ago, because these things scare the shit out of me.”
She put her Diet Coke down next to a stack of cages holding lab rats. The rats were mostly quiet, huddled against the sides of their cages, moved as far away from the insectarium—which was already nearly three meters away—as possible. She picked up one of the cages. As Melanie carried the cage closer to the insectarium, the spiders started launching themselves at the glass. The thud of their bodies was rhythmic and desperate.
“They just came out of the egg sac yesterday, and it was something to see. Like an explosion. I haven’t pulled one out for dissection yet, but I’ve never seen a spider like this. It’s something new.”
She held the rat cage above the insectarium.
“Are these—”
Melanie cut off her ex-husband. “Just watch.”
Julie had rigged it so there was a double-chambered entrance; they could keep the spiders enclosed, add a rat to one compartment, and then close up the whole thing before dropping the rat in with the spiders. For a second, as Melanie dumped the rat in, she felt bad for it: the little thing was squeaking and clawing at the glass, trying to climb away. Below it, even though they couldn’t see the rat in the top chamber, the spiders were frantic. They could smell it.
Melanie hit the lever, and the floor below the rat fell away, dropping it into the tank with the dozens of waiting spiders.
This was the fourth rat she’d sacrificed.
The sound of chewing hadn’t gotten any easier to tolerate.
Clearly, the sound bothered somebody behind her too, because she heard retching.
“Holy crap.” It was Manny, at her elbow.
Among other things—he was funny and smart as hell, maybe even smarter than she was—the fact that he had never been afraid of spiders was one of the things she loved about him.
“No shit. Spiders aren’t supposed to chew. Normally they liquefy their food and sort of suck it in. I have literally never seen anything like this.”
“Where did these spiders come from?” he said.
“FedEx,” Melanie said.
The president moved next to them as well, staring down and looking through the glass. The spiders had eaten half the rat, and one of them detached itself from the dead animal’s flesh and started trying to get through the glass to Steph. “What are these things?”
“I’m serious,” Manny said. “Where did you get these spiders?”
“I’m serious too,” Melanie said. “FedEx. From Peru. Remember the Nazca Lines? A friend of one of my graduate students was on a dig there. He found it and he shipped the egg sac to our lab. Probably ten thousand years old.”
“Sorry?” Steph said. “Did you say the egg sac was ten thousand years old?”
“Give or take. And you’d think there’d be no chance of anything alive in there, right? That it would be fossilized? But nope.”
“How on earth could they still hatch if they’re that old?”
She gave them the simplified version, the way that certain eggs could, essentially, enter a state of suspension, waiting for the right set of conditions. She told them about the evolutionary ecologist from Oklahoma who’d been getting seven-hundred-year-old water-flea eggs to hatch. “Or, maybe it’s easier to think of cicadas. Some cicada swarms are annual, but others are on thirteen-or seventeen-year cycles. Nobody really understands how it works, why they’re dormant that whole time, but our not understanding doesn’t stop the cicadas from coming out.”
Melanie shrugged. “I’ve got years and years of research ahead of me. There are only so many questions I can answer. All I can tell you right now is that once we realized they were hatching, it felt like it took forever. Twenty hours of staring at the fucking thing, but then, bam. And before you ask, no, I’ve never seen them or heard of anything like them before. As far as I can tell, it’s a new species. Or, probably more accurately, it’s a really old species. Totally extinct except for this egg sac. It’s kind of a miracle. That they were found, that they were shipped here, that they’ve been sitting around for ten thousand years or so just waiting for the right time to hatch. I’ve got to be honest, there’s a lot I’m not understanding here. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
She frowned and leaned into the glass. All the spiders, save one, had gone at the rat. But one of the spiders was moving listlessly near the corner. It looked undamaged, but there was something wrong with it. As if it didn’t have the energy to feed on the rat. She found herself about to tap on the glass but then stopped herself and turned to glance back at Billy Cannon. The secretary of defense had taken a paper towel from the rack by the sink and was wiping his mouth. She looked back at Manny, but he was staring at Steph. Steph was staring at Melanie and looked like she was about to say something when there was a knock at the door.