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

Skitter by Ezekial Boone

Near the end of The Hatching (which was maybe 1-2 weeks ago in 'book time'), the conclusion of the scientists was that the rapid growth and metabolism of the spiders set on

devouring humanity was responsible for them dying out en masse. Looked like humans were saved simply because the spiders were living hard and dying young.

But it almost looks like those spiders were just the recon force ahead of the true invasion. Thousands of cocoons, some big enough to hold a semi, are humming and warm. Ready to hatch. Unlike so many other cocoons that are vibrating, but are cool. A new strain of spiders is showing up. This one has a red stripe on its back.

The President had essentially quarantined LA. No one in or out. But plenty have managed to escape going off road through the surrounding deserts. And plenty of them already have been bitten and are growing the next generation of spiders in their bodies, ready to erupt. Remember that in the last book, China dropped a nuke on the center where the spiders first appeared. Among the remaining options, the President is compelled to institute The Spanish Option (so named on how Spain tackled a plague a few hundred years ago).

Science is feverously trying to find out what makes this strain so lethal. Where they started, how they reproduce, how they communicate when they swarm and kill, why the first strain died out. Each clue seems to point back to Peru. Why is the big question? And more importantly, why now?

The military is tasked with cutting off all travel east with the initial line in the sand being the Mississippi River. Bomb all interstate bridges, every bridge across a body of water, and make as many roads as possible entirely impassible. Then set up a defensive line of with one order: kill anyone who tries to cross. If needed, more segments of the eastern US could be isolated in the hopes that either science or nature will provide a solution. Boone focuses the story on survivalists in the California desert, a blended family in rural northern Minnesota, a young couple on an private island off the coast of Scotland, the high plains of Peru, spider specialists in DC, and the President’s inner circle.

This is obviously #2 of a trilogy. As with most trilogies, the middle book is sort of how the bad guys strike back. This could be subtitled, ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’ An exceedingly fast read that can’t be put down, even knowing that the spiders are going to successfully strike back and back human beings into a corner.

Sleep well for the next year while we wait to see just how Boone brings this threat to the human race to a close.

Thanks to the good folks at Simon & Schuster's Emily Bestler Books for the advance copy for review. As I've said on a number of occasions, if it's published by Emily Bestler Books, it's going to be good. Every one I've read has been a winner.  Publication date is May 2017.

East Coast Don

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

A billionaire was trekking in the high plains of Peru. His flight home crashes without warning just outside of his Minneapolis home. A nuke explodes in remote China. A package is sent to an American entomologist at American University. 

Dr. Melanie Guyer and her grad students open the package sent by colleagues on a dig deep in Peru. It contains what appears to be a sac. The kind of sac that an insect would grow in. But it's calcified. They set up to begin to study the sac only to find its temperature rise.

In Dehli, India, some minor bureaucrat heads to an underground series of flood control chambers to obtain some routine measurements. On the Pacific trade routes, a super container ship filled to the brim from China is set on autopilot for the Port of Los Angeles. 

The Chinese say the nuke was an accident. An exercise that went south. Our bad. The series of doors in the Delhi tunnels are obstructed from the inside. Knee deep. Insects. All dead. Some the size of a fist. 

But not all are dead. And the ones alive are voracious. And they swarm. Eating any flesh in their path.

Which is not what spiders do.

Dr. Guyer's insect sac hatches and dozens of these spiders rush out, crashing against the glass walls of the insectarium. They are hungry, so Dr. Guyer drops in a lab rat . . . and it's devoured in seconds. By Spiders. Acting more like piranha. 

The doors of the Delhi tunnels are breached and spiders swarm like ants into the street. Flesh is stripped. Bodies stripped right down to the bone. The freighter's crew is dead and the ship is headed straight for the docks at open water speed. The crash spills thousands of containers, some of which have been breeding spiders. The containers came from the same corner of China as where the nukes were detonated.  And that Minneapolis plane crash yields a few spiders, one of which ate its way out of the billionaire's face.

The President essentially closes the borders. Grounds all flights. Imposes martial law in the hardest hit areas. Her Chief of Staff's ex is Dr. Guyer so before long, Dr. Guyer is an important and frequent guest of the Oval Office. 

Let's see. Peter Benchley (with an assist from Spielberg) scared everyone out of the water with Jaws. Hitchcock showed us how terrifying birds can be. Michael Crichton's Congo went overboard on gorillas. (and don't even get me started on Sharknado). Add Boone to the list. He has given everyone more reason to fear spiders. Normally a solitary creature, these spiders act like Army ants and feed like piranhas. And there are millions of 'em. China thought, in vain, a nuke would stop the spread. 

And no one knows how to stop them.

Sleep well tonight. 

East Coast Don

Available July 5, 2016.