She unzipped her waist belt and pulled out her phone. She thought about photos, but decided instead that she’d just shoot some video. The phone had a good enough camera that she could just pull a still from the video if she wanted, and she had a partially formed thought that maybe she could sell the footage to a news station. Not that she and Bradley needed the money, but you know, it was a fun idea. Through the screen, however, it didn’t look quite as cool. The boat looked too much like some sort of toy. The image just didn’t give the right sense of scale.
She looked up from the screen and noticed the smoke had mostly stopped coming off the ship. There were just a few tendrils dripping down the sides. But the smoke that had already come off the ship was still drifting across the ground. It had spread out a little, so it was less a single carpet of smoke than larger patches and fingers spreading out over the road and the hills, pieces taking in some of the smaller office buildings outside the fence, near where the ship had hit. She remembered from 9/11 that a lot of the workers ended up having health problems from breathing in all the bad air, and she wondered if the workers on the docks were going to have issues.
She didn’t notice the finger of black crawling up the hill toward her.
In the parking lot of Cabrillo Beach, Harry Roberts was pissed. He didn’t like blacks—sorry, African Americans—and if that made him racist, he was fine with that, and he didn’t like cops either, even if he liked to think of himself as a law-and-order Republican, so being arrested by two black cops was the sort of thing that got him seething. Sure, his lunch had really been more of a liquid brunch consisting entirely of Bloody Marys, but who wouldn’t want a few extra drinks with what was on the news with that crazy stuff in India, China getting ready to invade Europe, and that cunt president grounding the flights? Admittedly, he didn’t really remember leaving the restaurant and driving his car over from Manhattan Beach, and admittedly, he sure didn’t remember crashing it into the light pole, and, okay, admittedly, he could understand their initial concern, since the air bag had evidently given him a bloody nose, and his face and shirt were covered in blood, but he couldn’t believe they cuffed him and put him in the back of their cruiser. Pricks. And then, worse, as they were writing something up, there was that incredible noise, some sort of an explosion across the water.
“Sit tight,” one of the cops had said to him. They left the windows partially open for him, but they walked across the parking lot and headed out of sight through the brush. And then, nothing for the last few minutes. Well, nothing other than the sounds of sirens, car alarms, a few screams. Harry had no clue what was going on except that he was pissed.
Then he heard two gunshots. Two. That was all. And then one of the cops burst through the bushes, running toward the squad car but looking back over his shoulder. He made it maybe ten feet into the parking lot before he started getting covered in . . . Harry couldn’t figure it out, but the cop kept running, closing the gap from thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen feet. By the time the cop fell, barely ten feet from the cruiser, Harry had figured out the cop was covered in insects of some kind. No. Spiders. But that was all he had time to realize before they broke off from the body and came for him.
Five minutes from the time the ship ran aground, Cody Dickinson, Philip Lanster Jr., Julie Qi, and Harry Roberts were dead. Close to a hundred other people as well. None of them able to see the threads of silk starting to twist into the air, catching and colliding, the soft breeze lifting spiders above the sand and surf and concrete that was the coast of Los Angeles, wafting over approaching ambulances and fire trucks and squad cars, sending them into the gentle noonday sun, south toward Compton and Lynwood and Chinatown, toward the 405 and the 10.
Stornoway, Isle of Lewis,
Outer Hebrides, Scotland
“Perhaps a phone call or an e-mail or—”