The Hatching: A Novel (21 page)

Steph cocked her head at Manny, who offered a sheepish smile. “You know how it is,” Steph said. “You don’t mean to pick sides, but that’s always how it works.”

“I’m sorry,” Manny said. He stepped forward and took her hand. He hesitated and then leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. He had to get on his toes. Very quietly, so quietly that she almost missed it, he whispered in her ear, “You smell good.”

Melanie touched her wet hair. She could feel herself blushing a little, and she took a quick glance at Bark. The oaf had a small sulk starting on his face. Ugh. Tonight. Tonight, she promised herself, no matter what else was going on, it was over. She’d meant to drop his ass the day before, but they’d spent the entire day working with the spiders, and there had never been a good time to bring him into her office and tell him she was done with it.

“Sorry to barge in,” Manny said. “We need to talk.”

“About what?”

Manny looked around. “Can we clear the students out? It’s important, Melanie.”

There was a part of Melanie that wanted to say no. It was that same impulse that had torpedoed their marriage: there was just too much to do in the lab, too many things to study. It was hard to do to his face, always had been, and it was impossible to kick him out while the president of the United States, the secretary of defense, and a gaggle of Secret Service agents were wandering around the lab. It didn’t take somebody with a PhD to figure out this was something serious. So she found her purse, dug some cash out and handed it to Julie, telling her to take Bark and Patrick to Tara Thai on Massachusetts and get them some lunch.

As her students left the lab, Manny hustled the Secret Service guys out as well. He shut the door and attempted to smile at her. It was weak. “Sorry,” he said. “I tried calling but you didn’t answer your phone.”

She couldn’t stop herself. The words came out sharply: “I was busy.”

It just felt too close to every argument they’d had about their marriage. When he wanted to talk to her, she wasn’t available. Except this time, Manny did something different. He apologized.

“I’m sorry, and I know, but this isn’t personal. It’s official.” He motioned to Steph. “We needed to talk to you. I was going to send somebody to get you and bring you to the White House, but Steph thought you wouldn’t come unless they arrested you. Seemed counterproductive if we wanted your cooperation.”

Melanie leaned against one of the lab tables. She looked at Manny and then at Steph. She didn’t say anything. She liked watching Manny fidget.

“Look, the truth is that I, that we, me and Steph and Billy . . . I can’t
remember. Have you met Billy before? Billy Cannon. Secretary of defense.”

Billy’s handshake was firm, but before he let go of her hand, he nodded at the insectarium that was behind her. “Ma’am, if I can ask, what the hell is that spider behind you?”

“That one?” Melanie turned and gently touched the glass wall. She was so used to the spiders in the lab that she forgot how much they freaked people out. Particularly the bigger, hairy ones like the one Billy was looking at. “
Theraphosa blondi
. Or, more commonly, a Goliath birdeater, though they don’t really eat birds. Usually.”

“Jesus.” Billy leaned forward and tapped at the glass.

Melanie grabbed his wrist. “Don’t do that.”

Billy stood up straight again. “Why not? Is the thing going to kill me?”

“They don’t like it. That’s why. You wouldn’t like it if somebody sat outside your house banging on the window. They’re sensitive to vibrations. And no, it won’t kill you, though it hurts like a fucker if it bites you. Like getting stung by a wasp. And they have urticating hair. It gets on your skin and stings and itches, and if you inhale it, you’ll be coughing and unhappy. It’s obnoxious. But they’re like most spiders. You leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone.”

“Most spiders?”

“They hunt,” she said. “Bugs. That sort of stuff.” She turned to Manny. “Okay. What’s the deal?”

Manny ran his fingers through his hair. It was a familiar gesture, something he did when he hadn’t had a lot of sleep and when he was feeling overwhelmed, and the sight of it made Melanie smile a little. But only a little.

“This might sound crazy,” Manny said, “but are there spiders that eat people? I mean, giant swarms of spiders? Does even asking the question make me sound like I’m out of my fucking mind? If
there are, it seems like the sort of thing you would have brought up at a dinner party.” Melanie smiled for real this time. She’d been to so many boring political dinners, and her one solace had been scaring the shit out of whoever was sitting next to her with stories about all the dangerous creepy crawlies out there. “Are there?” Manny said. “Are there spiders like that?”

To Melanie’s right, Billy had drifted over to a shadow box on the wall that held a mounted spider. For a second he looked as though he was going to tap on that glass too, but then he saw Melanie watching. She glared at him and he lowered his hand. Melanie looked back at Manny. “You know how many phone calls and e-mails we get a month from people who think they’ve gotten bitten by a spider and are going to die?” she said. She stepped over to the smaller dorm fridge that was next to the larger lab fridges. She opened the door and pulled herself out a can of soda. She held one up to Steph and then Billy, both of whom shook their heads. Without asking, she handed one to Manny. She didn’t have to ask. He never turned down a Diet Coke. She cracked open the can and took a swig. The bitter sweetness felt like an extra hour of sleep under her belt.

She hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to share her new spiders with anybody outside the lab yet. She’d never seen anything like them, and she knew the discovery was going to be the next big step in her career. The ten-thousand-year-old egg sac hatching, the spiders themselves, and then the way they interacted? How many papers would she get out of this? And then she looked over at Steph and remembered again that she wasn’t just Steph. She was the president of the United States. “May I ask what this is about?”

Manny glanced at Steph. Steph gave a small shake of her head. Manny sighed and popped the top on his soda. “Take my word for it,” he said. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”

“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.

The Secret Service officer whom Melanie had banged into stuck his head in. “He’s here.”

Manny nodded, and the door opened wider. A white man in a suit came in. He was good-looking, Melanie thought. He had that first hint of softness around the stomach that comes with middle age, but he was only a couple of years older than she was. Even in the presence of the president and all the Secret Service agents, he looked sure of himself. He looked, Melanie thought, like what she wanted: a man. Certainly he was more appropriate than a graduate student. Even with his suit, he looked like a cop, though Melanie had been
in DC long enough to peg the guy for FBI or CIA or some agency other than plain old PD. He was carrying what looked like . . . yeah. It was a pickle jar. Except that wasn’t a pickle.

Melanie took the jar out of his hands, noticing that the guy’s left hand had a bandage wrapped around it. There were holes punched into the lid, and other than the spider inside, the jar was empty.

“Madam President,” the man said to Steph. “It’s an honor. Agent Mike Rich. From Minneapolis.”

Steph shook the man’s hand, and without letting go, she looked into Mike’s eyes. “And this is the same one? This is the spider that came out of Henderson?”

Melanie looked up from the jar. “Wait. What? Came out of . . .” She put the jar down next to the insectarium. “Where’d you get this?”

“It came crawling out of a man’s face, actually,” Mike said.

Melanie stared at him. “No.” She said the word slowly then said it again. “No. I mean, where in the world?”

Manny sighed. “You know how you asked me a few minutes ago if you could ask what this is about?” Melanie nodded. “The spiders you’ve got here,” Manny said, pointing to the insectarium, “aren’t the only ones. When you say you think they are totally extinct except for the ones you’ve got here, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. We think there are more of them.”

Melanie looked at the spider in the jar and then at the ones in the insectarium. “I can’t guarantee that these are the same spiders. At least on the surface, there is an apparent match, but I’d have to look a little more closely—”

“Melanie.” Manny’s voice was sharp. “When I say we think there are more of these spiders, I mean we think there are
more
of them. A lot more.”

H
e was not happy about having to work overtime. His supervisor had basically disappeared since those two scientists from Kanpur had come by. With the baby coming, he could use the money, but with the baby coming his wife expected him at home more often. At the thought, he hitched up his pants and then took his cell phone out of his pocket. She liked it when he remembered to text her regularly, to check in. She was due two days ago, and her temper had been rather short. He was a big advocate of trying to stop a fight before it happened, and dutifully, he tapped in a quick message saying he was thinking about her, asking how she was feeling. And then another one to apologize again for having to work but reminding her of the extra money it would bring in. The doctor said if she went another week, they’d induce.