Creatures of the Storm (15 page)

She was joshing, of course,
at least in her own mind. As far as Cindy was concerned,
everybody
loved her and
her antic sensibility. Who
wouldn’t
want to be stranded in a research facility for a
long weekend with the life of the party?

Lucy started to get queasy all over again.
She was almost welcoming the long, wet, dangerous trip down to the
Conference Center. With any luck, Cindy would be pooped out and
fast asleep by the time she returned.

“Okay then,” she said, hating the sound of
her own forced cheer. “Glad you’re thinking ahead. I have to go
pull together some information for the town meeting, so carry on. I
guess.” She backed out, thinking about how to mention this all to
that idiot Michael Steinberg when a thought suddenly struck
her.

Don’t bother.

She stopped abruptly in the
hallway outside the break room and thought that through. What did
she owe Steinberg, anyway? He’d ignored and insulted her; he had
made it clear he didn’t need any help or support from the rest of
them. So if his studio apartment with its well-worn collection
of
Jugs
and a
refrigerator full of Hungry Man Dinners was underwater, what did
she care?

She made a quick turn away from his office
corridor and started off in the opposite direction, towards her own
office, then stopped herself again.

She caught Cindy coming out
of the break room with an over-hot microwaved plate and a can of
Diet Dr. Pepper in one hand and a week-old copy of
US Weekly
in the
other.

“One more thing,” she said.

“Surely,” Cindy said.

Lucy dug into the pocket of
her lab coat and handed the receptionist the one-and-only set of
keys to the candy-apple-red ATV. “Our friend Dr. Steinberg no
longer has permission to drive the Station’s all-terrain vehicle,”
she said with mock solemnity. “This, however, may not stop him from
trying. So I am putting
you
in charge of the keys. Understand?”

Cindy took the key ring, tucked it into the
breast pocket of her blouse, and patted it with the flat of her
hand. “I’ll guard them with my life,” she said, playing along.

Lucy nodded. “See that you do. Hup hup.” She
nodded like a Modern Major General and turned on her heel, throwing
a breezy little “Thanks” over her shoulder, and not waiting for a
reply.

It was another final meeting that would haunt
her for the rest of her life.

Lucy’s own office was dark and oppressive.
Gray metal desk, gray floors, and gray sky beyond the smoked glass.
She had never seen it so dark and uninviting, and the bluish buzz
of the fluorescent overheads didn’t do a thing to raise the
mood.

It didn’t matter. She’d be spending most of
the next hour or two concentrating on her computer screen and her
printer, and then she’d be gone for a while.

She started to sit behind her desk when the
sky beyond her window ripped in two along a wide, white, jagged
crack between clouds. The flash made her look up. A heartbeat later
the thunder was like a velvet fist thumping her in the chest.

She stopped herself from sitting down and
went to the window instead. This was one of the few indulgences she
had allowed herself when designing and building the Tomas Rivera
Agricultural Research Station. She had given her office the best
view of the entire Valle de Los Hermanos, spread out before her
like tangled skeins of earth-colored yarn, unraveling as it
traveled south to the double peaks of The Brothers.

At this time of day, she should be seeing the
first chalky colors of sunset appearing in the western sky. The
first few street lamps should be flickering on, and the light
itself should be turning thick and gray, with a weight that would
linger, patient as stone, until night crept up from the cracks in
the earth and filled the Valle to its ridge crest.

Tonight, there was no
scattering of lighted windows, no watercolor gouache of salmon and
pale blue above the mountains. There was only ink-black
dark
, punctuated by
jolts of colorless brilliance and the instant visible/invisible
scribble of power cables and telephone lines.

She paused inside the
window, so close she could feel the minute vibrations of the rain
as each wind-driven drop made a tiny explosion against the glass.
Her eyes widened when the lightning struck again, on the far side
of the highway this time, and a little farther south, but from the
same bank of dense, slow-moving clouds scudding low over the town.
Five seconds passed…and another bolt struck on the near side of the
highway, farther south, and then
again
, on the far side and farther
away. Each strike was followed by another rumble of thunder; each
report took a heartbeat longer to arrive than the one before as the
front rolled away from her.

“It’s like God walking,” she said entirely to
herself. “If God was a spider made of lightning and thunder.”

The last roll was almost
subsonic. Lucy felt its vibration in her bones, in the soles of her
feet. She knew that the same phenomenon would come again, probably
within the hour. And again. And
again
, until the bizarre
meteorological conditions that had turned Dos Hermanos into the
bottom of a bucket made of mud dissipated. That was days away at
best.

She turned away from the window and looked at
the clock on the far wall. 5:45.

She set her jaw and took a deep breath. There
was work to be done.

I should call her,
he
thought, staring blindly at the flatscreen embedded in the
wall.
See how she’s doing. Tell her we got
home okay.
He knew Rose had already texted
her mother with that last bit of information; he’d seen her do it
before she’d fled upstairs.

It was painful and odd.
He’d spent most of the last two years working very hard on
not
thinking about her,
what she was doing, how she was getting along, especially after she
had flatly refused his help, taken her name off all their joint
accounts, and moved without leaving him a forwarding address. He
had one e-mail address and one mobile number and that was it. She
had made it clear in her terse e-mails that he didn’t deserve even
that much, but there was Rose to think about.

Now she was just a couple of miles away. Ten
minutes on a regular day, an hour in this storm. And he couldn’t
stop thinking about her.

“How much longer is this going to last?” he
asked, pointing his chin at the curtain of rain falling beyond the
patio window.

“Three days,” Maggie said.

“That long?”

“At the very least,” Maggie told him. “None
of the meteorological data has changed; if anything the situation’s
solidified. It’s going to get very bad for the people down there,
lower in the valley.”

The news was almost cheering in one way.
“Think the meeting will be canceled?”

He could imagine her smiling. “Don’t get your
hopes up. Nobody seems to know how bad this is going to get, or how
fast. Tomorrow’s Friday, and it’s business as usual everywhere.
School is in session, stores are open, and meetings are still
scheduled. Even at VeriSil.”

He scowled and stared out the sliding glass
door at his flooding patio. “Damn,” he muttered. “For a second I
thought this dark cloud might have a silver lining.”

Maggie let him wallow for a moment, then
cleared her disembodied throat. “All right, now, back to business,”
she said, managing to sound brisk and affectionate at the same
time. “You have roughly sixty minutes tomorrow morning to convince
the Powers That Be that Everybody’s Assistant isn’t some massive
boondoggle.”

“More like five minutes,” he said, and put up
a hand before she could disagree. “I know, I know, I’m scheduled
for a full hour, but if I don’t hit them right between the eyes in
the first five, I’m fish food.”

“Indeed.”

“That’s the problem,
Maggie, the whole application is cumulative
.
That’s the miracle. It’s not made
to hit you over the head; it’s made to
fit
in
to your individual
life
.
”

“I think they call this ‘preaching to the
choir,’ Ken.”

He turned away from the
black, stormy rectangle of the glass doors and picked up a tablet
that was networked to the house system. “We’re way past the Turing
Test here, Maggie. Charts won’t do it, infographics won’t do it.
They have to
get
it right away, they have to
understand,
in the blink of an eye,
and that’s hard. They’ve never even seen anything like this
before.”

“Haven’t they?”

“No! Of course they haven’t! This isn’t some
little candy-ass voice recognition program! This isn’t a fucking
GPS with a plummy British accent. This…”

He trailed off, thinking. Thinking.

Getting
it.

There was a sudden
metallic
tic tic tic
behind him, a completely new and different sound than the
muted, rushing roar of the storm. He turned and saw a drowning man
standing outside his patio door.

“What the
hell
?”

The man was Ken’s size,
maybe a bit taller. He was standing inches from the glass, and he
looked as if he’d climbed out of a swimming pool fully clothed. He
was holding a dog leash without a dog at the other end, tapping the
leash's metal tab against the glass in a rapid tattoo:
tic tic tic.

“Rex Tartaglione,” Maggie
said. She pronounced it in the true Italian fashion, rolled r’s and
everything:
TarrrtaileeOWNay.
Ken didn’t have the heart to correct her. “He’s
our next door neighbor.”

“Next door” was generous, Ken thought
distantly. The hacienda he’d leased two years ago was at the center
of a sprawling, rugged bit of ridge crest terrain. The next
mini-mansion over was barely visible on a good day. But yes, that
was Rex What’s-His-Name, and this definitely wasn’t a good day.

Rex
tic-tic-tic’d
again and shouted
something Ken couldn’t make out over the thick insulation and the
raging storm. It sounded like an inarticulate bellow: “Rah RAH row
aooo…”

“Turn on the patio lights,” Ken said, still
not moving. There was something wrong here.

“They’re already on,” Maggie said, and Ken
raised his eyebrows in surprise. The storm had cut visibility to
mere inches. Rex was standing in front of nothing more than a
churning black background.

“Ra OOoo ra? Rowww?” he said.

Ken turned away for an
instant, looking for a place to put the tablet.
I don’t have time for this,
he
thought as he set the device on the polished credenza. He was only
slightly embarrassed by his lack of charity.
I’ll let him in, find out wh—

He turned back, and Rex was gone.

In the instant he’d turned away, the man had
disappeared completely, as if he’d never been there.

“What happened?” he said. “Where’d he
go?”

“I have no idea.”

Well,
that
was frustrating. “Turn on your
lights. I mean,
more
light. Look around.”

Now it was Maggie’s turn to sound frustrated.
“What, activate my sensors and engage the tractor beam?
Please.”

Ken stepped to the window and peered out, so
close his nose touched the glass. He strained to hear anything, see
anything.

The house lights behind him
and above him dimmed and guttered. He heard a deep throb run
through the house:
VUMMM
.

He turned around. “Okay,”
he said. “
Now
what?”

The lights did it a second
time, and the sound came again.
VUMMM

“Rose is having a little trouble upstairs,”
Maggie said. “Maybe you should check on her.”

It was as if he’d touched a live wire. He
bolted forward, then stopped suddenly. “What?” he said. “Is it
drugs? Is she hurt?”

“Just go
check
on her, Ken. And
calm down.”

He ran out the room, any thoughts of Rex
Tartaglione long disappeared.

Rex Tartaglione hated his
fucking dog. It wasn’t even his fucking dog, really, it was his
wife’s. She had insisted they get it, a tiny little rat-thing not
ten inches tall at the shoulder, if you could call that bony little
joint a shoulder at all. Rex thought it was too small to be a real
dog in the first place. Anything taller than your waist was a
fucking horse; anything below your knee was vermin. However, Denise
had whined and mewled and poked at him, so fine, sure,
yes,
she could have a
fucking ‘dog.’

Which meant, of
course,
he
was
the one who had to walk the little turd three damn times a day:
first thing in the morning, last thing in the afternoon, and once
at night so the little cretin wouldn’t lay a load on the sheepskin
rug. Denise couldn’t do it – oh,
no,
she couldn’t go out at
night,
what with
the
coyotes
and
the
homeless
and
her
nails
.