“Feeders and breeders,” Manny said.
“And there’s a pattern,” she said. She took her hand off the egg sac. Julie Yoo was suited up in scrubs, and Melanie watched Julie and the surgeon start to work through the cords of silk that connected the sac to the inside of Bark’s body. They’d brought an insectarium from the lab, and the egg sac was going into it the second it was out of Bark. “We figured it out from the spiders in the insectarium and the rats. And then Patrick—one of my students—noticed it on the video out of Los Angeles. The feeders stay away from the hosts. They’re marked somehow. This serves a dual purpose: the hosts are both places for the eggs and a way to spread the colony. The person, or, I guess, animal, can travel with the eggs inside them until they hatch. Whoever their host is will likely be able to travel farther than the spiders could on their own. Shutting down air travel was a really smart call.”
Manny didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and Melanie could hear noise in the background on his end. She realized that while they were working away in her lab dealing with a few of these spiders, Manny’s job was to help Steph deal with all the spiders. She was an academic, but as much as Manny was a politician, sometimes that meant he dealt with the real world in ways she didn’t.
“It’s bad out there, isn’t it?” she said. “We’re not getting the full story, are we?”
“Melanie,” he said. “Mel.” And that’s when she truly felt worried. He almost never called her Mel. The last time he’d called her Mel was when he told her he wanted a divorce. “I asked you earlier to come to the White House to answer some questions for us, but now I need you to come answer some questions.”
“Okay. Like what?”
“Like how to kill them.”
The CNN Center,
Atlanta, Georgia
Teddie scrolled the video back and watched it again and again and again. There was a pattern, she was sure of it.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Leshaun looked like shit, but Mike was happy to see him. After he’d gotten back from dropping Annie off with Rich and Fanny at the dock, Mike went home, grabbed his work phone and agency vehicle, and headed in. He was the last one to the office.
The bureau chief gave an uninspired speech relaying the national orders and then telling them the arsenal was open for business. “Gear up,” he said. “Urban unrest, basically. That’s the model we’re using. We’ve got nothing to worry about on the ground here yet, so we’re just going to help local law enforcement keep the peace. Make sure nobody gets too panicked.”
“Right,” Leshaun said under his breath so only Mike could hear him, “because the way to keep everybody calm is to have us running around with machine guns.”
But he and Mike did the same thing as everybody else: they slipped agency Windbreakers over body armor and took M4 carbines, Remington Model 870 pump-action shotguns, and spare magazines, clips, shells, and ammunition and then got into Mike’s agency car and started driving around.
It was kind of boring.
“You sure you’re up for this?” Mike asked. Leshaun had leaned his seat back and had his eyes closed, but was not asleep. “Nothing’s really going on here. I mean, Los Angeles sounds like some incredibly dystopian nightmare, but good old Minneapolis? I guess rush hour is going to start soon, but let’s face it. We’re still in the Midwest.”
Leshaun laughed. He was from Boston originally, and was always willing to laugh about how boring the Midwest could be. “I’m good. My arm’s good. The ribs still hurt, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well be out and about.”
They didn’t talk much for the next half hour. A stop for coffee. And then Mike’s phone showed an incoming call from the bureau chief.
“If you saw that spider again, could you identify it?”
Mike shuddered. He didn’t think he’d ever forget it. “Yes sir.”
“We’ve got a report of a dead spider. There’s actually been a ton of calls about spiders, but this one’s maybe a little different. It’s two blocks from where Henderson’s plane went down.”
Mike put his phone back in the cup holder on the center console and flicked the siren on. It was a quick ride across town, traffic still light and the cherries clearing the way.
The building was a warehouse for a plumbing-supply company. There were two black-and-whites outside, a pair of cops leaning against their cars and smoking. They gave Mike and Leshaun a wave as they passed. Inside the warehouse, Mike and Leshaun followed the sound of voices until they came to another pair of cops standing with a woman in her mid-fifties wearing civilian clothes.