At first he thought it was dust or dirt or even coal, but quickly he and the crew realized what filled the tunnel nearly to waist height: dead spiders.
The black bodies were so thick that it was like a single mass. They’d pushed up against the door, but farther back the volume dropped, and as far as he could see down the tunnel, before the bend, they seemed to fall to knee height. On the walls, high up, and hanging from the ceiling, he could see chalky, white bundles. Spider silk. Most of them were the size of footballs, but a few were larger. There was one close to the door, and while the crew stayed behind him, he shuffled forward a few steps, sliding through the spilled spiders as though they were dried leaves. He reached up to touch one of the bundles. It was sticky. And though he’d expected it to be cool, it was warm.
His phone pinged again: I’ll meet you at the hospital.
He put the phone back in his pocket and turned around. The sound of the spiders crunching and popping under his feet made him feel sick. They were scary, but no more so than looking at a specimen pinned under glass. He toed one with his shoe. It was light, as if it were hollow. Dead. Dried out. Used up. Whatever these spiders were—thousands and thousands of them, tens of thousands—and however they’d gotten down into the tunnel, they were dead.
He knew what he should do: he should figure out where the hell his supervisor was and get the man down here. And if he couldn’t reach his supervisor, call his supervisor’s supervisor. Not only was this the stuff of nightmares, it was also clearly something that was beyond what he was supposed to handle on his own.
His phone again: Hurry.
But if he did what he was supposed to, it would be hours and hours. The prospect of making overtime was much more appealing when his wife was waiting to go into labor than it was with her actively in labor. If he didn’t get moving right away, his wife would hold it against him for the rest of his life.
“Okay,” he said. “For now, we leave it. You two stay here and keep everybody out of the tunnel.” The men he pointed to muttered and didn’t look at him, but he knew they’d do their job. “We’ll see to this tomorrow.”
He gave one last look at the mass of spiders and then turned to hurry to get to his wife.
Perhaps if he’d looked more closely, he might have seen the bones buried under the pile of spiders, three bodies stripped clean. He might have then realized there was a reason he hadn’t seen his supervisor since those two scientists had come. And, perhaps, if he’d been alone, if it had been quieter, he would have heard the sound behind him, back in the tunnel. A skittering. A tearing.
If he’d heard it, he would have realized that all the spiders weren’t dead. Perhaps then he would have yelled at the men to shove the door back into place, to hold it tight.
Perhaps.
But he didn’t.
Delhi. Second most populous city on earth. Including surrounding towns and villages, home to twenty-five million people.
Mathias Maersk Triple-E Class Container Ship, Pacific Ocean, 400 miles from Los Angeles
With a crew of only twenty-two men, the four-hundred-meter-long Mathias Maersk Triple-E could carry eighteen thousand containers, and, at a slow steam, use about a third less fuel than older and smaller ships. Modern efficiency at its best, already outdated: the Mathias was going to be outclassed soon enough. Scale. It was all about scale. As long as a ship was full, the bigger it was the more money it made. And the Mathias Maersk Triple-E was full. They’d loaded up in China, shipping container after shipping container. The manifest included everything from textiles to rubber ducks, all packed tight in their individual metal coffins, ready to hit the streets of America.
Calm seas and fourteen days of routine logs. If he’d been a religious man, he’d have given prayers of thanks. A good part of their cargo came from northwest China, where the nuke had gone off. He felt bad for the captains waiting in port in China right now. Their schedules were going to be thrown off. Routine logs were not in the offing for those captains. They were not going to cross the ocean anytime soon. Not like him. With the autopilot locked in on the Port of Los Angeles, at a steady seventeen knots, he had about twenty hours to go. Or he’d had twenty hours to go. Unfortunately, it sounded like there was going to be a problem.