Skitter: A Novel by Ezekiel Boone

Author:Ezekiel Boone [Boone, Ezekiel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501125072
Amazon: 1501125079
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2017-05-15T05:00:00+00:00

National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

Melanie started the Japanese video again. It was just her, Dichtel, Nieder, Haaf, and Julie Yoo in the conference room. She’d shooed out Sergeant Faril and all the other minders and guards and lab assistants and various other people who were in and out of the corridors of the National Institutes of Health. There were plenty of people who seemed pissed about the way she’d simply taken over an entire floor of the building. Two floors, maybe? Maybe more: the soldiers, guards, and ancillary staff had to go somewhere, and they had probably taken over additional space in the building, but that wasn’t her problem. There were only four biocontainment units of this level in the whole damned country. There was one at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, one at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, one in Missoula, Montana, and one here. Given that she was based out of American University in DC, the NIH building in Bethesda was a no-brainer. So tough cookies to the people who were feeling put out. She had things to do. Like figure out what the heck she was actually seeing.

The video was edited down to just a couple of minutes, with subtitles translating the limited commentary and data on the screen. None of the information meant a lot on its own: temperature and humidity didn’t do much for Melanie. The man in the hazmat suit and the scientists overseeing everything from back in the lab occasionally spoke—or swore—and their dialogue showed up as white characters spelling out the translation on the screen.

“Is that translation accurate?” Melanie asked, looking at Julie Yoo.

“You know I’m not Japanese, right?” Julie said.

If Melanie weren’t so tired, she would have kicked herself. Embarrassing.

“Don’t look at me,” Laura Nieder said. “I’m Cambodian, but via the state of Georgia and then New Jersey. I’m reasonably fluent in Spanish, and I can swear in Italian, but I don’t know a lick of Japanese.”

“Actually,” Dr. Mike Haaf said, “I can speak some Japanese. Huge fan of anime.” Melanie stared at him, and Haaf stammered a little. “Yeah, near as I can tell, it’s an accurate translation.”

They watched the camera mounted on the man’s helmet edge closer and closer, through the dim room littered with egg sacs, around the pillar of white nuggets blocking the view, until the giant, pulsing, glowing cocoon was all that filled the screen. The silk was translucent, the light radiating outward, like a flashlight through skin. Black dots skittered across the surface of the cocoon—because that’s what it looked like, more than an egg sac—offering a sense of scale for what they were looking at. They’d all seen the spiders, and they knew that if they looked like dimes on the surface of the silk pod, the cocoon had to be huge. The size of a king-size bed or a car, big enough to be terrifying. Big enough that they’d watched the video three times already, not believing what they saw.

The light inside the cocoon was pulsing.

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