Creatures of the Storm (10 page)

He was the first to break
the silence. “I’ll be in my lab if anyone needs to check up on me,”
he said. Then he turned on his heel and sauntered out of the room.
The swinging door shut behind him with a flatulent
whuff
.

It was as if his exit caused an audible pop,
and suddenly everybody was moving, looking busy, coming towards
her, talking at once.

“What will we–”

“That cop was such a–”

“—got this rain gear from–”

“Stop it,” she said, putting up her hands.
Everyone kept talking and bustling around the room. “STOP IT!” she
shouted... and they froze, all of them, and stared at her
again.

She took a deep breath. “Give me one of the
parkas,” she said to Cindy. “I’m going to walk Fender back
home.”

Cindy held one out to her. It was yellow and
shiny as a schoolgirl’s slicker. “I’d be glad to do it, it’s
no–”

“No. Thank you. I could use
the walk.” Lucy nodded at Rebecca without looking her in the face.
She couldn’t bear to see the moist-eyed pity she knew was waiting
there.
Big Boss gets ignored by the
cop
, she thought.
Big Boss ain’t so big after all
.

She motioned to the confused long-hair. “Come
on, Fender,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“’Kay,” he said, and put his head through a
cowhide poncho that made him look like a badly dressed Guernsey.
“Comin’ atcha.” They pushed through the door together, and ducked
against the wet wind that tried to push them back again.

The trip from the Station parking lot up the
cement staircase to the highway was usually a quick and easy climb.
Even Lucy could take two steps at a time on a regular day. Now, in
the gathering darkness, with the wind and rain lashing at them from
all sides, it was a slow and careful slog, one riser at a time with
both hands gripping the cold, wet banisters fashioned from one-inch
pipe.

They paused when they reached the yellowed
gravel of the highway’s shoulder, already weary.

“Totally insane!” Fender shouted into her
ear. All Lucy could do was nod in agreement, and momentarily
appreciate the smell of good dope and bad oral hygiene that came
from him in a warm burst.

There was a sudden flash of blue-white light
high and to the right. They both looked up as the first blast of
thunder struck them like a fist. They staggered back, half in
surprise, half from the actual force of it. They watched together,
dumbfounded, as lightning struck the ridge to the north again. When
the second thunder-roll hit, it struck again, a little farther to
the south...and again…and again.

They stood in the pouring rain for five full
minutes watching the lightning travel down the Valle in an almost
straight north-to-south line, striking at rock outcroppings, trees,
buildings, each strike a little farther from them than the last.
The entire town was lit by a burst of sterile blue illumination
with each arc. From where they stood, it looked like a slide show
of stark black-and-white photographs, a serial portrait of a small
American town in the midst of drowning. Lucy was distantly
surprised that the Water Tower, Dos Bros’ tallest structure – sheet
steel filled with water, no less – was somehow spared a strike. She
assumed it was well-insulated and equally well-grounded, but
still.

They couldn’t make themselves move. In spite
of the wind and rain, they waited until the electrical storm
finally collapsed in a web of lightning-strikes on the VeriSil
campus, far to the south, half a mile from the bald, shadowy twin
peaks of The Brothers. When the light flickered away and the
thunder fell to an ominous grumble, Lucy forced herself forward.
“Come on,” she said. There were no car headlights in either
direction when they crossed; they were alone on the northbound
lanes of Highway 181.

“It was like… God walking, or something.”
Fender managed to sound reverent even while shouting over the
storm. “It was… it was …”

She stopped when they reached the center
median. “If you say 'far ouuut,' Fender, I swear to God I will
leave you here to get hit by the next oncoming car.”

He blinked at her from behind his speckled
granny glasses. “Well,” he said, “I was going to say ‘awesome,’
but… never mind.”

“Good thinking,” she said. They cross the
southbound lanes without incident and walked down the off ramp to
the wide, whitewashed gate with the overhead sign that read SUNMILL
WINDFARMS. TOURS DAILY. Lucy knew, the last tour that Fender had
given was in January, and even then the visitors had been lost and
drunk.

They trudged shoulder-to-shoulder up the
gravel driveway. Ankle-high grass stretched out on both sides of
the road, dancing in the twisting breezes of the storm, hissing
sharp and loud as the rain slashed down. The only illumination was
from a set of forty-watt bulbs set at irregular intervals along a
single power line that was strung between crooked poles running
from the gate to Fender’s trailer. The line was swinging back and
forth, dancing up and down. Lucy half-expected it to loop-the-loop
entirely, like a jump-rope twirling in the hands of giant invisible
children.

The windmills that gave the farm its name and
Fender enough cash to buy good dope were scarcely visible beyond
the hillocks of grass. Lucy could see their naked steel legs
shuddering in the wind, the rotor blades locked in place to avoid
being damaged by the unpredictable winds. She knew he couldn’t
possibly afford any serious breakage here. Fender barely eked out a
living as it was, selling his excess wattage to the local grid.

For all the eeriness of the scene, the storm
seemed less harsh on this side of the highway. Lucy found she could
actually hear something other than the splatter of the raindrops on
her hood and the blackboard scratch of the wind whistling past her
ears.

“Glad that crazy lightning didn’t hit my
mills,” Fender said as they approached his trailer. “It'd blow ‘em
right out of the ground, I bet.”

“I bet,” she said. She wanted to keep the
conversation to a minimum. Her plan was to get this poor creature
into his home and get the hell out, so she could take her own sweet
time getting back to the Station for another go-round. She longed
to be alone for a while. It was no fault of Fender’s; he was a
braincase and a burnout, but not a bad neighbor. It was just too
much to deal with his constant questions and comments right now,
not to mention his entirely obvious crush on the totally clueless
Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson. That was why he had come by as soon as the
storm got serious, Lucy knew. He wanted to make sure his girl was
okay. He was probably hoping to rescue her from some horrible
storm-related crisis, so she would finally see him for the prince
he was.

Poor
Fender
, she thought.
A knight in shining armor, smelling of pot and patchouli, in
love with a gay-girl Guinevere.

His trailer was a classic Airstream, a huge
aluminum-colored slug as big as a train car, up on blocks at the
dead center of his wide, gently rolling parcel of land. The
well-worn patch of gravel directly in front of his wooden porch – a
little platform slapped together from bits of cast-off lumber – was
a puddle now, brown as chocolate milk and as churned-up as a
ten-year-old’s bathwater. It was a little too wide to step over.
They paused at its edge to figure out their next move.

“Hope you got this thing anchored pretty
well,” Lucy said, squinting up at the Airstream. “You could end up
floating away before morning.”

Fender grinned at the thought. “That’d be
kinda cool, wouldn’t it? Wake up halfway to Hawaii.”

There was a small movement at the edge of the
puddle. They both looked down on what Lucy mistook for a cluster of
seed pods or thistles. Some optical illusion of the churning foam
made it look as if they had rolled out of the water under their own
power. Of course they were just lying there, bumping against the
tiny lake’s tiny wavelets.

Fender crouched down next to the cluster.
They were spherical and spiky, a little bigger than golf balls, a
little smaller than tennis balls. “Now, what the heck are these
here?” he asked. He reached forward and then stopped suddenly.
“Hey!” he said. “Did you see…?” He scowled at the things, then
shrugged and reached forward again, more carefully this time. He
got a thumb and a forefinger on one spike and stood up, holding it
out like a Christmas ornament on a string. “Weh-hell,” he said
wonderingly, “will you look at that, now?”

Lucy stepped forward and looked hard…and felt
another cold blue current shudder down her back.

It was all spikes. Some were as thin and
straight as needles from top to bottom; others were thick at the
base, then sloped up like cactus-thorns or sea-urchin spines to a
glistening point. There wasn’t a curve anywhere on the thing,
either. Each spike was made up of flat planes, three- or four-sided
pyramids, even a few with eight or ten, each face like a facet of
unpolished quartz, all meeting at a single tiny center-point you
couldn’t quite see. The thing seemed to have no real center at all.
It was all thorns.

And they were moving.
Growing, actually, or shrinking. Lucy resisted the urge to put her
nose right up to the thing. She could see plainly from a foot away
that some of the spikes were getting longer while others appeared
to be falling back, becoming thinner and breaking away. The whole
ball of thorns was in constant, almost organic motion, moving,
reaching, retreating, like a living thing – a
breathing
thing, though it had no
mouth, no lungs, no life. Even the spine that Fender held seemed to
be growing longer, almost stretching, as if the weight of the
sphere was causing that one spine to grow thicker and
longer.

“That’s not possible,” she said.

“Wow,” Fender said. “I mean… wow.” He brought
it close to his face.

A spike as thick as a darning needle shot out
from the ball, straight for Fender’s left eye. He flinched away at
the last instant and the point of it dug into the side of his face
instead, into the flesh below his cheekbone. Lucy gasped when she
saw it pierce him deeply, at least a quarter inch, then rake
through the skin and tissue as Fender’s head turned. Blood sprayed
as it sliced up and over, still going for the eye, still
growing.

Fender yelped like a wounded beast and flung
the thing away as fast as he could into the shadowed grass. “Shit,”
he said and cupped his cheek. His legs started to buckle. “Shit,
shit, what was that?”

Lucy got an arm under him
and held him up. She was surprised how light he was, and how
muscular, like a man made out of twisted wire. “Wait a minute,” she
said. “Come on, now, wait a minute, let’s get you inside.” She
turned and slogged through the puddle and got him up the porch. It
wasn’t until they were fumbling with the latch on the unlocked door
that she realized there could have been a whole swarm of those
things, those
needleseeds,
in the water she’d walked through.
Stupid
, she thought as
the door screeched open,
but at least we
made it inside
.

“Shit,” Fender said, still doubled over and
clutching his face. “Shit shit shit.”

The inside of the trailer was cramped and
precisely as messy as Lucy had expected, but there was one old
steel-and-stuffed-vinyl kitchen chair that wasn’t covered with
stacks of paper or dirty clothes. She levered Fender into it and
put a hand on his shoulder, comforting but firm. “Come on, Fender,”
she said. “Come on, look up here.”

He didn’t respond. She was
still staring at the back of his trembling head. Lucy saw for the
very first time that there were streaks of gray in his long blond
hair, and a noticeably thin spot was starting to show right at the
crown.
Even ageless hippies get
old
, she thought with an unexpected
tenderness.
Doesn’t seem
fair
…

“Come on, Fender,” she said again. She put
her other hand under his chin and slowly, steadily, forced him to
look up.

He was crying freely. His glasses were
crooked, almost falling off. She removed them and put them on the
counter, then pried his hands away, still muttering meaningless,
comforting things: “It’ll be fine, let’s just get a look. Come on,
Fender, help me out here, man, let me look, you’ll be fine.”

“Shit,” he keened. “Shit shit shit…”

It was worse than she thought. A gash over
two inches long and a half an inch deep ran from the middle of his
right cheek to within a quarter-inch of the corner of his eye. It
was gushing blood, red and plentiful and, if anything, thinner and
messier than she had expected. She had heard that head wounds were
bad, that much she remembered that from her first aid classes. But
this?

She looked around his tiny
kitchenette and caught sight of a roll of paper towels. “Hang on a
second, Fender, give me a second.” She grabbed at it, tore off
three sheets, and folded them rapidly into a thick pad. “Here. Hold
this against your cheek, man. Tight, now, tight as you can. And no
taking it off to look.” She put the pad in his palm and pressed it
hard again his face.
Apply pressure to the
wound
, she told herself,
if only to keep the idiot from freaking out at
all the blood.

“Do you have a first aid kit?”

“Shiiiit,” Fender said, groaning thinly as he
held the pad to his cheek. He was starting to rock back and forth
like an autistic child.

“Fender!” she said, and jerked him by the
shoulder. “Join me, here, man! Do you have a first aid kit?”