Creatures of the Storm (11 page)

He stopped groaning and shaking. After a
moment he gulped in a mouth full of fresh air and said, “Kinda.
Band-Aids and Bactine. Above the sink.” He pressed down harder on
his cheek and started to double over again. “Shit!”

She found it in the half-broken cupboard and
brought it out. Just as directed: Bactine, Neosporin, a used
athletic bandage, and three half-empty boxes of Band-Aids in
different sizes, surrounding an unopened bottle of Tylenol.

“The best that modern medicine has to offer,”
she said. She pulled out the boxes, quickly locating the type of
Band-Aid that was the large square pad usually used for scraped
knees.

She turned back and pulled
Fender’s face up to her again. He didn’t fight as hard this time.
“What
was
that?”
he asked, his eyes squeezed shut in pain.

At least that’s better than
‘shit shit shit’
, she thought. “I haven’t
got a clue,” she said, “but the wind must have caught it and blown
it into you.”

“No way,” he said. “It bit
me, Lucy. That thing jumped on me, man! It
bit
me!”

“Okay,” she said. The truth was, it had
looked like that to her, too, but that wasn’t possible. Seed pods
generally didn’t attack at will. At the moment, it didn’t really
matter. This guy had a serious facial wound, and they had to deal
with that first.

“Never mind,” she said, “We’ll get this
cleaned up and get you over to the Clinic.”

“No way,” he mumbled. “I hate those guys.
Always thinking I’m OD’ing or something, even when I just got the
flu.”

She nodded in understanding. The Borrego
Clinic wasn’t exactly Cedars-Sinai, but it was all they had. This
looked like it was going to need stitches and antibiotics at the
very least. “We’ll see,” she said, then she reached out to gently
pull the hand with the blood-soaked paper towel away from wound.
She was braced to see the worst.

She saw a thick, scabby, almost dry line of
blood no more than two inches long. That was it. No bubbling gash,
no bright red gush, just a dark and crusty blot on his cheek. As if
he’d barely bled at all.

“I’ll be goddamned,” she said to herself.

“What?” Fender asked in alarm. “What? Come
on, it’s already tingling like a son of a bitch, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Fender. Christ, get hold of
yourself.” She wiped the blood away from it. He flinched, but
didn’t scream. Then she did it again.

The wound had closed up,
though not in the way she’d expected. Not at all. A crust had
formed over it, flakes of gray and white, like tiny chips of bone
or rock that hadn’t drawn the lips of the wound together but had
filled the gash, like plaster troweled into a crack in a wall. It
wasn't a scab, it couldn't have formed that quickly, and it wasn't
the right color or texture. It was more like...like a
patch,
something you'd
make in a concrete wall.

She took the water-soaked towel and wiped it
over the wound again. It left behind a swath of moisture that
glistened in the trailer’s dim light…and then the crust along the
cheek seemed to swell, to actually grow new chips along its edge as
the water soaked in.

No, she decided. It didn’t
soak in. It was pulled in,
sucked
in, like a sponge.

For a brief moment, Lucy
thought it was some bizarre infection caused by the needleseed
itself. But it couldn’t be infected – not this fast. This didn’t
look like the effects of any plant toxin she’d ever seen before,
either, and she had seen plenty. There was no leakage, no pus,
nothing. Only dry flakes, dry particles.
Dry
.

How can an infection be
dry?
she asked herself.

Fender was pulling himself together. His
breath was slowing down and his wiry muscles were loosening, if
only a little. “Shit,” he said one last time. “Okay. Not so bad
now. Whatever you did is helping.”

Lucy hadn’t done a thing. And as she watched,
the last of the moisture from her towel, and the last of Fender’s
tears, were pulled across his drying skin and drawn swiftly into
the wound.

“It’s cool now,” he said now, barely panting.
“It’s cool. Whew.” He looked up at her and tried to smile. “Hey,
can I have a glass of water?”

She stared at him. “What?”

He passed a hand over his cheek very
tenderly. He didn’t seem to notice the wound shifting under his
fingertips.

“Water, please,” he said. “Please. A nice,
big glass, too.”

She's a moron,
Michael Steinberg
thought.
She's a joke. She doesn't deserve
what she got, and when the time comes I'll take it from her. ALL of
it.

This time he locked the door to the lab. No
one would disturb him again, especially not that fat fuck with the
Napoleon complex.

He was through being a
target for her and her twisted kind. No more playing the role of
the little white cake in the urinal that everybody pissed on. These
specimens, this
evidence,
was going to change the whole fucking world, and
put him on top. The very top.

He didn't bother with the latex gloves. He
wanted to get the specimens back into their carefully made
sponge-rubber pockets so he could work on the documentation a
little bit more. Finishing touches. The last polish.

The New Taxonomy,
he said to himself.
It
had a hell of a ring to it.

It didn't matter
what
she
thought.
It didn't matter what any of those smelly, squishy pus-pockets
thought, if they thought anything at all. His paper was nearly done
now, and in a matter of days, months at the outside, he'd be on the
cover of everything from
Scientific
American
to
USA
Today,
and
she
would be begging for
scraps.

He was still trembling with
anger, still red-faced and muttering to himself about Lucy
Armbruster and Jennie Sommerfield and that fucking
cop
,
when he
seized the microscope that held the claw-specimen. “Rank
bitch,
he snarled.
“
Fire
me?
Fire
ME
? What the
fu—OUCH!”

The pain was like a spike in his palm. He
jerked around, cursing, and his elbow hit the edge of the specimen
tray. It skittered across the metal counter and slid into the sink
with a splash.

He hadn't been paying attention. When he had
tugged the claw-specimen from under the scope's clips, it had
snagged on one side and turned in his hand and the wickedly sharp
tip had dug deeply into his palm.

Michael hissed in a breath and raised his
hand to his eyes, the claw still dangling from his palm. Runnels of
blood were flowing through its channels and running down his wrist,
turning his ragged shirt cuff a bright, almost theatrical red. The
curved point of the specimen had doubled back; it was coming out of
his palm a full inch from where it entered. Blood bubbled up from
both cuts like water from an Artesian well.

While he watched, the
bleeding just...
stopped.
Tiny white particles, oversized grains of sand,
appeared from nowhere, and were welling up out of the cut or
condensing right out of the air. He watched in fascination as they
clustered around the base of the claw, building up in a heartbeat,
layer on layer, sealing the specimen to the flesh. And as they
accreted, the sharp, thin pain of the cut itself simply drained
away.

Michael felt a mild tingle,
almost a
buzz
,
rising from his hand and filling
his head. It was warm and soft-edged and
right,
like the pulsing in the storm
had been
right
in
his head a few hours earlier.

Still, it looked out of
place, an alien claw, sharp as a bird's beak, sprouting from his
palm?
No,
he told
himself. “I don't want that
there,
” he said in a dumbfounded
voice. “Not
there
.” Without even thinking about it, he wrapped two fingers
around the vicious curvature of the claw and yanked it free, hard
as he could. It ripped out of his hand with a thick and
meaty
squishing
sound, but offered almost no resistance, spraying a fan of
grayish blood and ash-colored particles as it pulled free. He
barely heard the droplets and granules spatter against the window
glass above the sink.

The sink.
The sink.
Oh,
god,
he thought as he
plunged both hands into the water despite his cuts.
The specimens! The evidence! Holy Christ, they’ll
be ruined by the water!

He hauled the tray out, careful to keep it
straight, and peered through the water as it sheeted off, checking
for each precious specimen, each carefully measured and
photographed and recorded piece.

It was all there. All
intact. Everything was fine,
fine.

A
nd everything was…

…
growing.

“Look at that,” he said,
his voice a wondering whisper. “Look at
that...
”

The specimens were sprouting new limbs,
building new layers. Needles were extending, legs were unfolding
and struggling to bend. As yet, no eyes, no mouths that he could
recognize as such, but...life. A strange, brittle, sharp-edge kind
of life, far from human, but still, life in each of the pieces he
had found.

In
his
specimens.

He could still feel
tingling in the cuts on his hands. The same particles, the same
growth that was changing the specimens was taking hold inside his
body as well, he realized, drawing on the water,
building
with the water.
The buzz in his head was still there, too, more than ever like the
huge deep pulse he first felt in the rain today. Something that had
never quite left him, that kept beating and
beating
and BEATING.

ACTION,
it told him, exactly as before.
Take
ACTION.

There was a mind even greater than his own at
work here. There were thoughts even deeper than his own thoughts.
They echoed over him like thunder, surged around him like the
roaring wind.

He wanted them inside
him.
Inside
him.
He wanted to be part of it completely.

Michael Steinberg looked down at the tray of
specimens, wriggling and shuddering in an inch of standing water.
As he watched, the water level sank by half as the creatures took
it in and changed.

He reached into the tray
and picked up one particular specimen, a squashed sphere with a
bite taken out of it, no bigger than an apricot. Its surface had
originally been covered with small pimples and warts. Now each of
those bumps had growing into a short spike, a blunt needle of its
own. Soon the specimen would be nothing
but
needles, nothing but
sharp.
He could see its
final form in his mind's eye already.

He picked up the sphere and looked at it
closely. He watched it grow and change as he held it between his
fingers.

Then he opened his mouth
very wide and laid the wriggling, bumpy sphere on his tongue. He
could feel one of the needles
jump
at the sudden moisture in his mouth and grow
thicker and sharper to take it all. He could feel an extrusion
eagerly pierce his tongue, while another bit into his palate. He
felt the curve of the sphere dissolve and flow down his throat like
dry sand.

He closed his mouth and bit down. The
brittle, papery taste of the thing surged briefly behind his teeth,
then mixed with his blood and spittle.

It was the right thing to
do. Michael Steinberg stood alone in his lab, staring at nothing,
feeling the tingling buzz build and build and
build,
and he knew it:

It was the right thing to do.

It
looked as if the entire town was melting. The buildings, the trees,
even the unnaturally straight lines of curbs and power poles looked
soft and pulpy in the dying light. Rose watched it pass, shivering,
wet and cold, in the passenger seat of the Range Rover.

Rain isn’t only about
getting
wet
,
she told herself.
It’s about getting
weak
. There’s nothing sweet or
gentle about it, and there probably never was. We just weren’t
paying attention.

After a while, the Rover’s
headlights revealed the hunched shoulders of the
hacienda
on the crest of
the West Ridge at the end of the long dirt drive that led to it,
really nothing more than a wide, lazy circle of decomposed granite
on a base of pounded earth. The driveway sidled along the entire
length of the two-story adobe, past an endless display of deeply
set, small-paned windows. Lights burned in some of the rooms –
fire-yellow, ember red, electric silver-blue. As they trundled by,
Rose caught glimpses of an exercise room, an old-fashioned study, a
parlor of some kind and a kitchen.
Empty
,
she
knew
.
All
empty
.