Teddie had thrown up only twice today, which, she thought, was pretty good. At first, that deep feeling in her stomach had been excitement: now this was a news story. They’d gotten reports of the crash and she ordered a camera crew from the Los Angeles studio over to the port. It was the kind of story that could get her a promotion: great visuals, easy to summarize, and plenty of ways in which they could spin it off. She was already thinking of the “hidden menace of shipping” special. But those excited butterflies quickly turned into something else.
The crew couldn’t get anywhere near the port. Traffic was snarled everywhere, which wasn’t that unusual for Los Angeles, but she gave up on the ship story pretty quickly. The news was spiders. The cell phone videos and phone calls were terrifying. India was one thing—it was so far away you could convince yourself it might be a hoax or that it wasn’t as horrifying as it looked—but this was Los Fucking Angeles. Some kid near Long Beach uploaded a six-second clip of spiders overwhelming a jogger and coating him like an oil slick, and they got a call-in from near the port from a woman who was yelling that she was watching spiders eat a mom and a baby before the caller herself started screaming and then the only sound was this weird crackling. That was the first time Teddie threw up, when she figured out the crackling sound was actually the spiders chewing human flesh.
The camera crew finally gave up on the traffic and set up on McCarthy Quad at the University of Southern California. It was the perfect shot for a reporter who couldn’t get an angle on the real action. The dichotomy of reporting on fear and chaos from the middle of an ivory-tower oasis. Students walked past in the background as if nothing was going on twenty-five miles across town. The reporter blathered excitedly, filling time in the way that only a seasoned pro can fill time when the facts are almost entirely speculation.
And then, the spiders came gliding down from the sky.
At first, there weren’t many. The camera caught a few black dots against the cerulean sky, cotton-candy trails of silk streamers looking like vapor trails. But then some of them started drifting down. For a few minutes, it was almost comical. The camera recorded one landing near the reporter who promptly squashed it with his shoe. There. What was so scary about that? If you’ve got a shoe, you’re safe. Around the reporter, however, students were pointing and beginning to scream. And then the camera caught one student flailing her arms, five or six of the large black dots scurrying over her, and then a burst of blood oozed from her face, her shirt staining crimson. And more screaming. And more screaming. And more and more and more and more. And the camera suddenly dropping. All Teddie could see on her screen was pavement and shoes and socks and the alien movement of spiders, and then just the lower body of the reporter, his legs kicking and then kicking more weakly, and then not moving at all. And all of it, Teddie realized, running live because she hadn’t ordered it cut away. That’s when she threw up the second time.