Creatures of the Storm (12 page)

The turnabout made a
three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circuit around a huge flat-topped
boulder as big as a guest cottage, more than ten feet high and
thirty feet across. It seemed to surge out of the ground like the
base of a ruined tower. The detached garage was beyond it, and when
they passed the rock, water hissing and glittering down its rough,
piebald surface, the garage door in front of her eased upwards.
Water sheeted off its sides in sprays so wide and thick it looked
like a mouth opening under a dirty brown mustache.

The interior of the garage was immaculate and
antiseptically illuminated by a bank of ceiling-mounted lights. Ken
killed the engine and Rose climbed out of the Rover, very watchful
and quiet as Ken opened the door to the covered walkway that
connected the garage to the house.

The storm blew across their
path in a tumble of mist and wind. “Everything’s set everything up
for you already,” he called over the gale as they crossed the ten
feet of covered walkway. Beyond him, Rose saw the lights in the
kitchen pop on, and the outer door
click
open all by itself.

Rose stopped moving while Ken kept going.

“I have no idea what you like,” Ken said, “so
I got a little of everything. If there’s some…”

He was halfway across the kitchen before he
realized he was talking to himself. He stopped and turned to see
Rose still standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and hesitant.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“You ever watch
The Prisoner
?”

He blinked at the non-sequitur. “What, the
old TV show?” he said. “Gad, Rose, that was way before you were
born.”

“They show it on BBC America all the time,”
she said, still not moving.

He frowned more deeply. “Okay…”

She looked at him like he was a complete
idiot. “The lights,” she said. “The door.”

He blinked again. “What about them?”

She sighed bitterly. “Never
mind.” She ducked her head down, gripped the sides of the door
and
pulled
herself into the house, only to stand inside the doorway,
frozen in place, as if waiting for lightning to strike.

Nothing happened.

“Are you finished?” Ken asked her, truly
annoyed now.

She scowled and walked carefully into the
kitchen.

It was a great room.
Expensive china and glassware gleamed on open shelves along two
walls. There was plenty of counter space and wonderfully deep
cabinets. Even the stove looked important, a brushed-steel
professional-grade monstrosity with six burners and an oven large
enough to cook two turkeys side-by-side. And everything was
clean. S
uperbly,
impeccably, deep-down-scrubbed-to-see-your-reflection
clean
.

“Damn,” she said, impressed in spite of
herself. “This is bigger than our whole apartment back home.”

Ken gave her a strange, quick smile. “I’d
like to see your place sometime,” he said, almost asking
permission.

She chose to ignore him. Ken shrugged and led
her into the dining room, with a table large enough to accommodate
twenty, and then through a high arch into the front entrance’s
anteroom and a huge, high-ceilinged living room. The entire house
was decorated in Desert Modern, from the nubby off-white area rugs
on burnished hardwood to the chocolate-brown exposed beams. The far
wall was dominated by a wide, low-stepped staircase that swept up
to the second floor, looking as if it had been sculpted right out
of the wall.

“Your room is upstairs,” he said, “with all
the other bedrooms, including mine. Third door on the left for you,
last door on the right for me. Down this hall there’s—”

“Is that where you keep it?” Rose demanded,
sounding angry.

“Keep
it
?”

Rose looked disgusted. “Oh, for …” she said
under her breath. She looked around wildly and swept open the door
to the hall closet. There was nothing inside but an old
windbreaker, a mop, and box of replacement light bulbs. “Not in
here, anyway,” she said and slammed it shut, then turned and
stalked down the hall as if she knew exactly where she was going.
Ken followed three paces behind. She found his study with no
trouble.

It was just as he had left
it, including the open drapes that looked out onto the small
backyard and his dying garden.
Probably
washed away now,
he thought as he crossed
the threshold. Lightning cracked open the clouds above the ridge,
and for an instant they could both see the rounded, hard-edged
silhouettes of cloud banks behind the slashes of rain, sharp white
against the carbon sky.

“Do you keep it in
here?
” she asked
impatiently, and swept open the double-doors to the media center.
There was nothing inside but a huge wall-mounted flat screen and a
complicated remote with lots of fashionably unreadable black
buttons and sliders.

She hopped to a dark wood
filing cabinet Ken had put against the far wall. “What about
in
here
?” She
rolled open a drawer and peered comically inside.

“Rose–”

“Oh, don’t
tell me it shows up as a cartoon-face on your
computer screen,” she said. “How
eighties
.” She started to punch keys
at random on his onyx keyboard. “Hello, Siri. Greetings, Max
Headroom. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Come out, come out, wherever
you–”

“
Hey!
” Ken snapped.
“
Stop
it!”

She snatched her hands away from the keyboard
and stood there, faced away from him, for a long moment. Ken saw
that she was staring at the photograph of the three of them, but he
couldn't see the expression on her face well enough to guess at
what she was thinking.

After a long moment she turned to him,
looking guilty and sullen at the same time.

He tried to pick his words
carefully. “We thought it was probably a good idea if Maggie
didn’t, um,
join in
at–”

“
We
thought?” she echoed.
“
She?
What, you
sat around and discussed this like, like
buddies?
”

“Rosie, that’s the
whole
point
to
Maggie. She’s supposed to be an assistant, a colleague, a trusted
friend.”

“God! Dad! Listen to
yourself! Didn’t you see
Her?”

“See what?”

“It’s a fucking
computer,
it’s not
your
friend.”

“She’s designed to be both,” he said very
calmly. He looked nowhere in particular as he said, “Maggie, talk
to her.”

Silence.

Ken scowled.
“
Maggie
, show her
what I mean. Come
on
.”

Silence. Only the rumble and spatter of the
rain.

Rose cleared her throat. “Um…Daddy?”

“What? You think I made
this whole thing
up
? Do you think I’m
totally
insane?”

Rose put up her hands and
answered too quickly. “No no no, of course
not. Maybe there’s something wrong with the, the
program.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the program,”
Maggie said.

Rose
squeaked
and jumped two feet into
the air.

“I like to mess with him sometimes.” As
always, the AI sounded like a beautifully modulated adult female
who seemed to be standing right beside you.

Rose clutched her chest
like a heart attack victim. “Jesus,” she said. “That scared
the
shit
out of
me.”

“Boy,” Maggie said, “one little disembodied
voice in a strange house in the middle of an enormous rainstorm,
and she gets all jumpy. What a wuss.”

“A
what
?”

“Take it easy, Rose,” Ken said, trying to
sound soothing. “She’s trying to put you at ease. Make you
comfortable.”

“
She
? Make
me
…? I’m gonna be sick.”

“Come on, give her a–”

“No. Really. Seriously. I am going to be
sick.” She looked around for an exit.

“There’s a half-bath through the door to your
right,” Maggie said, still sounding amused. “No tub, but a nice
place to pu—”

“
SHUT UP!”
Rose shouted, and ran out
of the room. Ken could hear the slap of her shoes on the hallway
tiles, then on the stairs, then a distant
slam
echoing down from the second
floor.

“Well, at least she found her room,” Maggie
said in a low voice.

Ken didn’t move for a long time, just stared
blankly at the empty doorway. Finally he said, “Well,” and rubbed
his eyes. “That didn’t go well at all, did it?”

“Let her be for a while. Besides, you have a
couple of other things to worry about.”

“I do? Like what?”

“For one, the storm has caused some damage to
the house. Nothing serious – yet – and I’ve taken care of most of
the repairs already, but you should know about them.”

He sighed deeply. “Okay,” he said.

“And Marty Fein has called
back four times since you left. I out-referenced that original cell
phone call for voice stress analysis, and Ken, he’s not kidding. If
you don’t show up with a
really
good
presentation tomorrow, they
really
will
cancel your contract and come rip the equipment, and the
programming, right out of your system.”

More sighing. “I know, I know.”

“So what do you say we get
to work and come up with a killer presentation? Convince them of
what
we
can
do?”

“
We
,” he repeated.

“Hey,” she said, and he
could almost have sworn she was laughing. “Who knows the project
better than
me
?”

Rose’s room, the third on the right, just as
she’d been told, was large and high-ceilinged. There was soft, warm
lighting and exposed beams and a set of windows that looked over
the circular driveway with its huge broken-tooth stone centerpiece.
There was clean linen on the bed with a thick comforter folded at
its foot, and even a clear glass vase of California poppies on the
end table.

Rose hated every cleaned, vacuumed, polished,
dusted, carefully prepared square inch of it.

It keeps pulling at
me,
she thought as she lowered herself
onto the perfect bedspread.
It’s like
gravity. You can’t escape it. It’s always
there
.

It would be so easy. There
was sure to be liquor in that huge dining hall they passed.
Good
shit, too. There were probably pills
in the medicine cabinet, and Rose would know the name of every one
of ‘em. She was a fucking encyclopedia of prescription medications
and their off-label uses. Really
really
off-label.

“It’s too much,” she said
out loud to the empty room, and then again,
in her head.
It’s too much. I hate
this place, I hate that man, I hate my
life.
All I want to do is sleep.
Float away.
Get
away.

She fell on her side, into the pleasantly
floral fragrance of the comforter, and did her very best not to
cry.

She was remembering a corner in East L.A.
She’d forgotten the names of the streets, if she’d ever known them,
but she remembered that corner in painful, cutting detail. Every
crack on the sidewalk where she’d laid her cheek, ever particle of
grit ground into her knees and the heels of her hands.

That had been the very
bottom of it. That morning, when she’d dragged herself up into the
greasy morning light with a hangover so bad she couldn’t speak.
When that man, that
thing
that hobbled like a man, put his fist up her torn
skirt and whispered something so wheezy and wet she couldn’t even
understand it, but she could smell it. In fact, she realized, God
damn it all, she could
still
smell it. She would always
smell it.

At that moment, she had
raked him with her nails – the ones that hadn’t broken off – and
kicked him with her one remaining high heel. She had staggered
away, and he had been too hurt to follow her. Some chick at the
Beverly Center, a thousand miles away from that corner she couldn’t
forget, had let her borrow her phone. She’d never even thanked her.
Her mom came and got her and she slept in a bed that night for the
first time in month. She still remembered thinking,
no matter how bad it gets, or how shitty I feel
from no drinking or smoking or shooting, it will never be as bad as
waking up a broken wrist and a knife-cut on my taint and somebody
else’s vomit in my mouth on that corner in East L.A. Never as bad
as that.

She could feel the tears
rising. She hadn’t cried, actually
cried,
since that day. But
now…

“I was wrong,” she said to the empty,
perfect, fucking beautiful room. “I was so wrong.”