Zero Day by Ezekiel Boone

It was bad enough when the prehistoric spider line suddenly hatched and started devouring human flesh (The Hatching). Worse still when modern travel sent them worldwide with China delivering the first nuclear shot and the US followed suit (Skitter). Now, it’s do or die time. Their spread must be stopped or humanity is all but lost.

As the spiders mutate to the point of even growing teeth, the scientists remain stumped on several levels. How they kill, how they digest flesh so quickly, why are some people ignored by the spiders, how do so many millions of spiders seem to follow some direction and not just scatter randomly.

Then there is a couple of bright inventors who fix up a device that tracks some sort of signal guiding the spider’s actions. When this contraption is turned on to effectively jam any communication, the spiders become, for lack of a better word, confused. President Pilgrim is being squeezed hard by the military to unleash the full nuclear arsenal of the US to fry the spiders wherever they are, but she is hesitant to do so. The head of the Joint Chiefs then initiates a coup and tries to get hack through all the nuclear safeguards to do what he thinks must be done.

Our inventor friends continue to modify their device so that they can now track the signal back to its origin. Make that origins. They identify upwards of a dozen locations for what can only be the spider queens. Their first target is in an Atlantic City casino. With a small band of soldiers, they track the signal's source and find the mutant queen. Some quick work with flamethrowers and .50 cal settles the score.

More queens are found, but in one confrontation, it’s learned that the queen is also receiving signals. From the uber Queen. And she’s in Peru, back where the first hatching occurred.

Book 3 in Boone’s spider trilogy. As before, Boone takes global hops as he develops the story. Once the concept of 1-way communication is learned, Boone presses the accelerator to the floor to rid the planet of the spiders.

A ripping good yarn, especially the last 100 or so pages, that is one part sci-fi and one part scientific mystery. Be warned that the descriptions of when the spiders attack humans can be quite disturbing. Also, some trilogies don’t necessarily need to be started at book 1 because each successive book relives important details from the earlier books. I’d advise against that. Start with The Hatching and read in order as Boone doesn’t waste much time reviewing old news – you’d be lost.

And you don’t want to get lost when these creatures are on the loose.

ECD