Creatures of the Storm (16 page)

It was days like this he was sorry he’d ever
sold the car dealership in Fresno and moved to DH in the first
place. Or brought his fucking trophy wife with him.

Usually walking the rat
wasn’t that big a deal. Sometimes it got a little chilly for a late
night stroll, and at least it got him out of the house when Denise
was blaring
Real Housewives of
Wherever-the-hell-they-were-this-week.
But
tonight? When the sky was literally falling down around them? If
he’d thought it through, he would have settled for a load on the
sheepskin.

Still, the third time Denise yawped at him,
Rex slapped the leash on the little turd and literally braved the
storm.

It was even worse than it
looked from inside. Not so much cold as
everywhere.
Rex had to hunch inside
his jacket and keep his head down to keep from choking on the
downpour.

The plan was one quick turn
around the backyard and that was it. Step-step-
poop,
step-step-
porch,
done and done. But the
fucking dog had other ideas. When they reached the far end of the
manicured back lawn, the one they never stepped on for fear of
mussing up the landscaping, the little shit made the weirdest
sound, a kind of yelp/bark/growl all at once, – and surged
into the hedges. It happened so fast Rex lost his
grip on the leash, and it went flying into the dripping, rustling
underbrush with a wet smack
.

“Goddamn it!” Rex bellowed into the rain.
“Come back here, you little fuck!”

Without truly thinking about it, Rex barreled
into the brush himself, sure he’d find the fucking dog three feet
ahead of him, soaked and shivering when it realized what it had
done.

But no. Ten steps into the unlandscaped,
real-life scrub of the ridge crest, Rex not only lost track of the
dog, he lost track of the house.

“Come back! NOW, goddamn it, NOW!”

Nothing.

He staggered deeper into the storm,
completely unwilling to go back to the house without the fucking
dog in hand. Denise would pop a vein. At one point, between
bellows, he thought he heard the little monster, another one of
those weird bark/growl/yelp things that seemed to cut off right in
the middle. It was almost five minutes later that he nearly tripped
over the thin strip of red canvas with a stitched loop at one end,
the damn dog’s leash drooping pathetically on a thorn bush, with no
dog in sight.

He kept looking. The storm
slapped at him, cut at him, screamed at him, but he was
damned
if he was going to lose that yippy
little shit-bucket because of some bullshit rain.

He was out for nearly half an hour in the
dark and wet when he finally had to admit he was completely lost.
He didn’t even know which way was ‘home’ in the vaguest sense, and
then he saw the glowing light.

It was the house, or
a
house.
Some
house, for fuck’s
sake, and he was going to reach it. He slammed through the scrub
grass and bushes, fell down twice and pulled himself up, not caring
about the mud or the scratches, and slammed through some more until
he lurched onto the shimmering flagstones of a patio that wasn’t
his.

He stood there for a moment, still clutching
the leash, and stared at the man on the other side of the sliding
glass door. The one who was talking to himself.

Rex Tartaglione stumbled
over to the glass, weary beyond words. The man didn’t notice him.
He tried knocking on the glass with a knuckle so soaked he wondered
if it had actually softened. No, it was the glass: it was thick and
insulated. He couldn’t get more than a weak, tiny
thud-thud
from
it.

The weariness was getting
worse. He was having trouble standing. He reversed the leash in his
hands, held up the curved metal hasp that should have been
connected to a dog collar and tapped on the glass:
tic-tic-tic.

The guy still
didn’t notice him. Now that he thought about it,
Rex recognized him a little. It was that computer guy from VeriSil,
the one who lived in the old DelGado place. He’d seen him at a
picnic once, and down at the market, maybe.

Tic tic TIC!

This time the man looked up, startled. His
eyes went big but he just stood there, still talking to
himself.

“HEY!” Rex shouted. “IT’S ME, REX! I LIVE
NEXT DOOR!”

The asshole still didn’t move. He looked down
at his iPad or whatever and said something else.

“IT’S REX! THINK YOU CAN LET ME IN?
ASSHOLE?”

And then the man turned away.

Rex couldn’t believe it.
The bastard had simply
turned away,
like he couldn’t be bothered. It looked like he
was actually going to leave the fucking room
,
ignore Rex entirely, and Rex
lifted hand to
really
knock on that fucking glass –

-- and something snatched
him away. In an instant, in a
blink,
it pulled him away from the
glass and off to the side so fast he didn’t even have time to make
his own growl/yelp/barking sound.

Sharp, thorny branches
wrapped around his chest, so hard and tight he couldn’t move. More
were wrapping around his ankles, his thighs. He could feel one at
the back of his head, reaching around for his face. And they
were
sharp.
Each
thorn bit into him, everywhere, all at once, like barbed wire but
worse. Like wire covered in fish hooks that moved like fingers.
And
squeezed
.

He couldn’t even the glass
door anymore. Couldn’t even see the house. All he could do was gasp
as the wires tightened, closed in,
squeezed
him.

He tried to gasp again, but the breath gushed
out instead. When he tried to move, the thorns bit deep. He felt a
finger pop off and fall away. He felt his belly open up in a long,
meandering slice. He felt the tiny razor-branches creep over his
temples, coming around from behind to cover his eyes, cover his
mouth.

Seal him up.

Stop,
he pleaded.
Stop stop st—

It happened in an instant,
between one heartbeat and the next. The hookweed
clutched
him, so fast
and hard and tight that Rex Tartaglione actually heard his body
pop
,
like a
balloon filled with blood.

It was the last thing he heard.

My, my, my,
Michael Steinberg
thought, shaking his head in happy amazement.
I’m really very good at this God stuff
.

He scarcely noticed the stiffening of his
joints or the strange ashen undercolor his flesh had acquired. It
had become harder to ignore over the last few hours, but he'd
managed. There had been work to do, after all.

Now he stood in the middle
of his half-destroyed lab space and gazed upon the dozens of bins,
bowls, containers, cups, saucers, tubs and tubes that covered every
horizontal surface in his lab, and the
things
that were growing in each of
them. He found that it was good.

Nothing should be growing there, of course.
The Valle de Los Hermanos was a hyper-arid climate; virtually no
evapotranspiration, a climatic aridity index of less than .03.

Look at all this,
he told himself, grinning like a little
boy.
Look at it!

He smiled lovingly into the tray right in
front of him, where a thin, wide plate of…tissue?...was twitching
lazily in less than an inch of water. ‘Tissue’ wasn’t exactly the
right word, though. It was translucent, he could see the hairline
crack in the old specimen tray beneath it, right through the
creature. And it was milky, like a sheet of moist wax paper, but he
already knew it was far stronger than human or even reptilian skin.
It was very thin as well, a few cells at most, though absurdly
durable. He also knew what it would do to mammalian flesh if it
came in contact with it, how it would literally suck the fluid
right out of it in a matter of moments, and not stop until there
was nothing left.

All of his little friends
would do that, it was the one thing they had in common. No matter
how big, how small, how sharp, how flat, they were all infinitely,
relentlessly
thirsty
.

He was beginning to feel the same way
himself.

Michael had happily whiled
away the last few hours moving from specimen to specimen, awarding
them with names of his own choosing, building a New Taxonomy, being
– what had the bitch called it?
The Darwin
of the twenty-first century?

Yeah,
he thought.
That’s
me
.

They weren’t really
his
names, he knew. They
were coming from…somewhere else. From that greater mind, the one
that spoke to him. He claimed them as his own; translated them into
the common tongue so all his new subjects would know.

“Stain,” Michael said to
the wide, flat, creature on the tray. “I will call you a ‘stain.’”
Small ones moved by growing in a specific direction and dissolving
portions that remained in an unwanted direction, a bit like algae
or lichen, but at a ridiculously fast rate. He’d already seen one
move ten inches in twenty minutes simply by foaming a new leading
edge and letting it harden while the old trailing edge powdered
away. Once they grew above a certain size, stains would let go of
the Earth completely. First a corner, then a whole edge would come
loose and actually start to
wave
, as if it were hailing a cab.
Then they could literally fly away on a gust of wind, driven like a
thistle, randomly encountering water-bearing organisms to encase
and suck dry.

Michael thought they were
strangely beautiful when they flew. He cleared his throat. “When
you take to the air, I will call you ‘
flumes’,
” he announced. He liked the
sound of it. “Flumes,” he said again, tasting the word on his spiny
tongue.

Behold my New
World
.

The
needleseed
, a sphere no larger than
a golf ball made entirely of sharp
points
, constantly and subtly
changing shape as its tiny spines grew and broke, dissolved and
regrew.

Or ‘
biting sand’
,
churning in a blue plastic bucket, ready to envelop any
water-bearing organism and grind it up like sandpaper on a slab of
steak so it could desiccate it easily, almost instantly. Michael
had watched in mute fascination as the sand had done exactly that
to a stray cat he had snagged from town. Now he had to resist
watching more. The slow, unending Brownian movement of the tiny
grains rolling and turning was so hypnotic, so
magnetic
, it was all he could do to
keep from and falling face-first into the bucket.

He turned instead to the
‘
turnbuckle’
.
Such a wonderful design! Two nearly perfectly circular hoops, some
as small as wedding rings, some as large as bicycle wheels, joined
along one edge. They could open themselves at any part, wrap around
a tree trunk or a barrel or a human torso and then turn counter to
each other as they
squeezed
, drawing tighter and
tighter until the hoops pierced the soft flesh and chewed it to
paste. So patient. So
sleek
.

He took a long probe and
poked at the ‘
hookweed’
. In the laboratory, it grew in its platter of water into an
almost perfect sphere, each silver-white tendon studded with wicked
hooks that speared the air in every direction. In the wild, that
flawless globe would be warped by wind and debris into a thousand
twisted shapes that would become tumbling sculptures made of living
barbed-wire. Barbed wire that could
move
if it had to.

The ‘
scumble’
was a smaller, even
deadlier version of the same design. He had a whole family of them
in a bowl under the broken window. It was only a pile of ribbed
sticks, but any animal unfortunate enough to step into that pile
would never escape. Its broken ends would snap at moist flesh with
the ferocity of an old-fashioned bear-trap, then rub and rub until
there was nothing left but grit.

And then there was his very
favorite: the ‘
bone
spider’
.
He
glided over to the largest cage he had in the lab, a huge
four-by-four-foot terrarium made from half-inch Plexiglas, with a
hose attached to a flange he had installed in one side so he could
feed regular and large amounts of water into the box.

The creature inside had a
constantly changing number of cantilevered legs that grew from a
central point so tiny it couldn’t be called a body at all. In
effect, the thing was nothing
but
legs – no eyes, no mouth, no visible sensory
organs or central trunk at all, just incredibly sharp
legs
, in constant
movement, graceful as underwater ballet, that resembled a praying
mantis as much as spider while somehow resembling neither one at
all. Each leg was a ribbed talon with ragged teeth, part of a
swaying, ticking predator, iron gray and bone white, that looked
like an insect made of razors and wire. The legs skirled and
shrieked against each other when they moved. They made the same
sound as sharpening knives.