Creatures of the Storm (17 page)

Michael loved this creature
the most. He had watched it grow from a twitching little thing no
bigger than an apricot to a meter-high monster in a matter of
hours, and it was still growing. From all he could tell, it
couldn’t
stop
growing. Given the impossibly light, hard, and resilient
material that served as flesh, skin, and bone for the creature,
even the inverse square law didn’t seem to apply. Bone spiders
could be as big as elephants, as big as
mountains,
and still they could
grow.

How does it see? How does
it hear? Does it
need
to, when all it wants to do is kill and drink and kill and
drink?

The creatures shared one other characteristic
as well, the ability to infect any living thing with their dry and
sandy simulacrum of tissue. His tests had shown him that any cut,
bite, or scratch could change you, make you their own, with a
single, swift incision. It didn’t happen that often, Michael told
himself, because so few survived the first encounter. They didn’t
want recruits; they wanted to eat.

It was happening to him.
Right
now
. He
could feel it happening to half a dozen other people all across the
Valle.

It began happening the
instant he had cut himself. The seeds had taken
him the instant the claw had pierced his skin, and now he
could feel his skin getting thicker, his teeth growing together
into a single jagged ridge of…something beyond bone, something
closer to marble. He could feel the crackle and snap of new growth
breaking in his joints every time he flexed an arm or a leg, then
he could feel brittle
new
tendons growing back in the new position so fast
they almost leaped together.

And he could
hear
something, too.
That other voice, that guiding Intelligence
at the back of his brain. It was the tiniest
whisper of Something Else that kept telling him
how
good
this
was, how
smart
he
was, how
perfect
he was becoming.

Michael loved every minute of it. It was all
he had ever wanted.

He stood in front of his utility sink and
looked out his single window at a slice of the Valle de Los
Hermanos, hundreds of feet below. It wasn’t the best view; that
dyke bitch Lucy had kept that for herself. Besides, the rain was
worse than ever, and the town was barely visible. It didn’t matter
anymore. Michael didn’t really need a window at all. He could see
the entire crater laid out before and below him with a new kind of
sight. And he could see all his creatures there, pinpoints of
light, patches of shimmering silver against a bottomless, lightless
black, scattered all across the valley and twinkling, burning,
guttering, glowing.

The tiny part of him that
was still a scientist wondered what he was seeing. Electromagnetic
energy, maybe, at a special frequency or level of activity. Not
that it mattered; they were simply
there,
and he could sense every one
of the creatures. Deep under water, huddled in bedrooms, hiding in
bushes, sprawled on rooftops exposed to the wind and rain –
everywhere. Growing.
His.

His new mouth cracked itself into a
smile.

Michael Steinberg had been
raised by two perfectly decent people who considered themselves
“recreational Jews”. That’s what his father had called them. They
celebrated Hanukkah, complete with their very own Hanukkah bush,
went to temple twice a year whether they needed it or not, and
regularly gave money to World Jewish Relief. But deep in his heart,
like so many other young Jewish boys, Michael had this
thought
,
this
persistent thought
that maybe,
maybe
, he was The One.
The one they had all been waiting for.

Who was to say the Messiah
would know he was the Messiah at all until God told him? Even the
near miss, that preacher from Nazareth, seemed to have had a normal
childhood before he stepped out at age 30 and began his slow walk
to Golgotha. So…it could happen. One day the sky could open up and
the celestial finger could point to him,
him,
Michael Steinberg, and his
destiny would be revealed.

It was a common dream. Lots of little Jewish
boys had it. But he hadn’t forgotten like most of them had.

He stood in the middle of
his laboratory, surrounded by the clacking, ticking, popping of his
creatures as they grew. He spread his arms wide to take in all that
he saw, and it was good.
So
good.

I was wrong,
he told himself. He wasn’t God, though he could
hear God’s Voice in his head. He wasn’t Adam, though he had been
charged to name all the beasts of this new world. He was something
in between: part God, part Man, more than both.

It’s obvious,
he realized.

I’m Jesus.

Rebecca
stepped out of the Agricultural Station, staggered to the left,
tripped forward, and stood hanging on a light post in the parking
lot to keep from being pushed flat onto her face.

Hey Mom and
Dad
, she thought giddily.
You ought to see me now.

Rebecca had grown up in
Santa Cruz, California, home of one of the most hospitable climates
in the known world. Her parents, one black, one white, were both
products of the Bay Area as well, and they had fully expected her
to be like them and never stray too far from Paradise. She
remembered clearly how they had responded to the news that she was
going to do her graduate work not at UCSC, or even at nearby UC
Davis, but in dirty, conservative,
hot
little Riverside, of all places.
When she’d announced her appointment to the Anza-Borrego Desert for
an inexplicable one-year internship…

Little did they
know,
she thought as she braced herself
against the battering wind and staggered across the parking lot,
rooster-tails of water spraying in front of her boots.
The wind was like a physical force; the raindrops
felt like grapeshot against her unprotected flesh.

Why did I agree to do this
again?
She knew the answer without even
thinking about it.
Easy,
b
ecause LUCY
asked.

Rebecca had been happily
and openly bisexual since early puberty, and her parents, both far
left of center, had seen no problem with her succession of
boyfriends and girlfriends…so far. She was sure, however, they
would
freak
if
they guessed at her true feelings for the knobby,
foul-tempered,
teacher
she was crushing on so completely at the moment. Even Rebecca
herself didn’t quite understand it. Yes, she was well aware that
Lucy was almost twice her age. Which mattered exactly
why
?

Rebecca thought about what the relationship
meant, if it meant anything at all, as she climbed the outdoor
stairs to the shoulder of Highway 181. It was well past five
o’clock, and the last of the natural light was slipping away. She
could barely see the tarmac in front of her rubber boots, much less
anything resembling an oncoming car. One bit of bad timing, and a
truck could come rushing out of the darkness and squash her
flat.

Fortune favors the bold and
all that shit
, she thought, half-quoting
her mother. Without another moment’s hesitation, she stomped into
the road, head up and eyes forward. Her boots sent out broad
crescents of spray with every footfall, and soon enough, sooner
than she’d expected, she was across the highway and standing at the
wide wooden gate to the wind farm.

She tried to remember the last time she had
made the walk over to see Fender in his native habitat, and
couldn’t come up with a date. It must have been longer than she’d
realized. She distinctly remembered that the carefully maintained
white-gravel path from the highway to his trailer was wide enough
to accommodate three people walking side-by-side, and that the
grass that surrounded his massive windmills was always meticulously
trimmed. Now the path was barely wide enough for one person to
walk, and the grass was so long and invasive it looked shaggy. Not
at all the image that Fender worked so hard to maintain.

The sheets of rain suddenly, momentarily,
cleared and she got an unobstructed view of the windmills. She
stopped dead in her tracks.

The windmills were
singing.
No,
she
corrected herself. As her father would say,
Check that.
The windmills were
singing
and dancing
.

They sprang up out of the
deep green sod, flawless white towers of heavy pipe and plastic
more than three stories tall. At the top were the wide propellers
–
vanes
, she
remembered, hearing Fender’s uncharacteristically serious voice in
her head.
They’re called
vanes
,
man
. And now, in the ripping gale of the
storm, those vanes were spinning so fast, so irregularly they were
a milky blur at the apex of the towers.

The music came from the roaring, whining,
swooping sound of the vanes as the wind screamed through them,
hollow, howling tones that wandered up and down the scale,
sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Each tower sang a different song in
a different key; all of them blended together into a wild, wailing
roar that was more animal than mechanical.

It was the wind that made
them dance, too. They shimmied and trembled, flexed and bobbled,
waggled and twisted, coming
that
close
to lifting their concrete-bound feet
right out of the earth. In fact, Rebecca thought that if she
watched a moment longer, one of the towers would actually
lift a leg and come walking towards her in a
wind-driven march towards the open road, its whirling vanes
roaring.

The massive, multi-story strangeness of it
made her take a step back, and she felt the shaggy grass rustle and
pluck at the heels of her boots. She jerked forward again,
terrified.

No,
she told herself very sternly,
REALLY now, FUCK that noise
. She
wrapped the pea coat tightly around her shoulders and ran the last
fifty feet of gravel path, past the stout wooden sign that
read
SUNMILL WIND FARMS – FREE TOURS AT
1:00 and 3:00 COME WIN THE ENERGY WAR…WITH WIND!
She had always loved that hand-painted sign – so
weird and friendly, so
Fender
ish. She ignored it now as she
sprinted to the silver slug-shape of the Airstream trailer, jumped
up onto the wooden porch, and pounded on the screen door with the
flat of her hand.

“Fender? Fender, it’s
Rebecca, from the Station! Let me in!” Not
How are you
or
I came by to check up on you.
Just a
desperate
Let me in!

The screen collapsed under
her hand and the pressed-wood door flew inward with a
bang
.
Rebecca fell into the humid warmth of the trailer
and nearly lost her balance in the debris that covered the
floor.

The trailer was in shambles. It looked as if
every container, every jar or bottle or jug in the place had been
opened, emptied, and thrown on the sodden carpet.

The sound of the rain on the trailer’s
stainless steel roof was deafening. “Fender!” she shouted. She
could barely hear her own voice. “FENDER!”

Beneath the rattle-bang of
the rainfall she heard another equally wet sound: rushing
water.
G
ushing
water, actually, like an open
fire hose. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen nook.

“
Fender!
” she bellowed.
“
It’s Rebecca! Are you OKAY?”
She kicked her way through the wreckage to the
narrow little door and peered in.

Fender was sitting huddled over the sink, his
neck twisted, his head turned, so his mouth was suspended directly
under the water faucet in his small one-basin sink. The water was
on full-blast, pouring directly into his yawning mouth.

Rebecca simply stared for the longest time.
He was conscious, that much was clear. She could see his Adam’s
apple, half-obscured by his drenched beard, working up and down and
up and down.

“Fender?” she said again. She put out a hand
and touched his knee. “Fen—”

He jumped like a startled
animal, leaping up, water spraying everywhere. “Wha – Oh!” He
turned and saw her, and for a moment Rebecca was positive he didn’t
recognize her. Then: “Oh!
Oh!
” He twisted again, facing her,
unmindful of the water gushing from the tap. “Rebecca,” he said,
his voice raspy and dry. “Hi. Hey. Nice to…um…”

He looked awful. His skin had turned dull,
almost ashen. His eyes, usually bright and a little unfocused, were
tiny dark beads buried in nests of new wrinkles, and there was a
network of cracks in dried skin around his mouth, on his neck, even
between his fingers. It looked like he’d lost twenty pounds since
she’d last seen him, and she’d seen him only hours before.