The Hatching Ebook Box Set: The Hatching, Skitter, and Zero Day by Ezekiel Boone

Author:Ezekiel Boone [Ezekiel Boone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501192098
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2018-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

Oslo, Norway

They’d found the yellow-tinged barn stuffed full of egg sacs like a sausage ready to burst. The farm was out on the fringe of the city. A lonely outpost left over from the days when Oslo was more of a notion than a reality, from when the only thing around was farms, fields, and trees. Had the spiders hatched back then, they would have moved more slowly: horses and chickens and cows and other livestock would have outnumbered humans ten to one. Back then, traveling twenty miles in a single day seemed ambitious. The spiders would have had to march along at their own pace. No jets or cars or trains or boats, fewer ways to spread their relentless hunger. But by the time the spiders came, almost all the farms had given way to houses, office buildings, and shopping centers. This barn, the one crammed with egg sacs, was a mere relic from an earlier time. The farm itself was only a third of the acreage it had been in 1950. It had been a working farm until the mid-2000s, but the farmer was too old now. The fields had been fallow for years, and the barn was no longer a working concern. The farmer was in his early nineties, and his only son, a man himself in his midsixties, kept expecting his phone calls to go unanswered. The son had an agreement already in place with a developer: the moment the farmer died the bulldozers would roll. A comfortable retirement for the son and modern town houses on an urban green for the developer. That was the plan.

There had only been one outbreak in Norway, originating twenty miles away. An engineer who’d come home from a trip to China, feverish and scared, talking nonsense one day and then bringing destruction the next, his body opening up like Pandora’s box. The Norwegians reacted quickly. They had benefited from unaccountable good fortune. Some countries, like India and China and Brazil, were the unfortunate inheritors of sleeping broods of spiders who had been waiting thousands of years to hatch. Norway was only a secondary site, lucky enough to have seen the reports out of China, to see the footage from India, from Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles. The moment the traveler’s body erupted, Norway ordered burn zones and pullbacks. There were quick decisions by the military. Lives were lost—thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand; they were still counting the dead and missing—but it could have been much worse. That’s what everybody was saying. They’d been lucky in Norway. And luckier still: they’d found the infestation site in the barn so easily.

The barn hadn’t been painted in perhaps forty years. The wood was worn down by the winters and the wind and the sun. It listed strangely to one side and had done so since a bad storm in the 1980s. Back when it was a working farm, the farmer had spent many nights listening

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