Creatures of the Storm (18 page)

“My God, Fender,” she said. “Are you all
right?”

“Great!” he said, and swept
a handful of sodden hair away from his face. “Fine, really. It was
only…some kind of fever or something, you know? Makes you thirsty
as hell. Totally thirsty
.
” Without a thought he cupped a
hand under the running water and threw
it
square in his face. He didn’t even close his eyes. An instant later
he seemed to be dry again, as if the moisture had evaporated…or
been absorbed. “Damn,” he said. “
Damn
, I’m dry.”

He looked at her with a
strange, thoughtful expression. A speculative look, as if he was
judging how easy it would be to pop her
open and drink up the paltry few quarts of blood and fluids
she carried in her body.

That’s
crazy
, she told herself.
Fender’s a gentle old soul, he’d
never…

His attention abruptly
shifted, away from her and to a new inspiration. “I
got it!” he said. “That’s
the ticket!” He threw open the doors to the cabinet below the
sink and began rummaging through the pile of cleaning fluids and
tools hidden there.

“Fender,” she said, worried. “That stuff is
poisonous, honey, you don’t want to–”

He pulled out a long green-painted crowbar,
sharpened and notched at one end and viciously curved at the other.
He stood up and hefted the bar in one hand, testing its weight…and
for the first time, Rebecca realized how big Fender really was.

“That's the ticket,” he
said again. He looked right at Rebecca and grinned
like a crazed animal, and for one horrible
instant she was sure that he
was
going to split her open her like melon, right up
the middle.

Instead, Fender heaved on
the bar, bellowing with all his might, swinging the tool straight
up and
whanging
it into the aluminum ceiling right over his head.

Rebecca jumped in surprise
at the sound of the collision. Before she could say a real word,
Fender pulled the crowbar loose of the three-inch dent he’d made
and swung it upwards again, even harder
.
The second clanging,
crunching
whanngg!
was like the ringing of a broken bell.

“Fender!” she screamed!
“
Stop it!
”

Too late. He had managed to punch a hole
through the ceiling, and rainwater was pouring in.

Fender grinned even wider
and jerked
on the crowbar twice, pulling
part of the torn metal inward. More water gushed right onto his
head. “
Yes!
” he
said, elated. He breathed a huge, guttural sigh of relief, tossed
the crowbar aside and sat back down in the kitchen chair where
she’d found him, head thrown back, arms spread wide. The gout of
water from the ceiling pounded directly onto his face, his neck,
his chest.

“Tha-a-a-at’s the ticket,” he said, sighing
with relief. “Yeah, thaaa-a-t’s it…”

Rebecca backed away. He had already forgotten
she was there, and that was perfectly fine with her.

Something was wrong with
him
. Some toxic substance, or bad drugs,
she
didn’t know, but she knew she couldn’t
help him directly. She’d get back to the Station and call 911. Send
them over to get him, make him better.

Rebecca left him there,
sprawled in his waterfall.
This is
nuts
, she told herself as she dragged open
the broken front door, horribly glad to be out of the sodden,
overheated trailer and back into the storm.
This is totally nuts
. Without a
second thought, she hopped down the wooden stairs, crossed the
gravel path and cut to her left, trotting across the overgrown,
soggy lawn, in a straight line towards the main gate and the
highway. There was
no time for
pathways
, she had to move
quickly.

She was five footsteps into the grass when it
started to grab at her feet.

At first she thought it was just the water
that was making it so difficult to walk, making the blades snag her
shoes like sea grass could tangle up a diver. She pulled free with
some difficulty the first time, then the grass pulled even harder.
She was barely able to free herself at all the second time.

She looked down and saw
that it wasn’t the water at all. The grass had grown into
silver-green tendrils –
tentacles
– that were snaking around her feet, her ankles,
and even the cuffs of her pants.

Rebecca stopped walking
when she was less than ten feet from the white gravel path. She
kicked,
hard
, and
managed to take one step back towards the road, directly towards
the stout wooden sign that read
TOURS
DAILY.
That was as far as she could
go.

She pulled one foot free
and took another step, then she almost fell over. She had to
stagger to keep her balance, and when she plunged her foot back
into the grass she saw the rubber was actually
cut
in a dozen places, deeply
slashed as if someone had gone at them with a butcher
knife.

They’re brand new
boots
, she thought.
Fresh out of the closet. How –?

The grass-blades were
tightening around her feet. This time she could see
them cutting right through the boots, like razor
wire cutting into flesh.

“Oh my god,” she said, a
tiny voice in the roaring of the wind, the hissing of the rain, the
singing of the wind towers so close behind her. “Oh my
god.
”

She managed to pull her foot up one more time
and take a long, lurching step towards the sign, towards safety
–

– and saw as she pulled her leg up, that the
boot was gone, cut to shreds, along with three of her toes and a
chunk of her heel.

In one cold flash of clarity, Rebecca
Falmouth-Hanson knew what was happening. It was like when she’d cut
off the tip of her finger with an X-acto blade, years earlier. The
blade had been so thin, so scalpel-sharp, that it had trimmed away
a piece of her and she hadn’t even felt it. She hadn’t even
realized it until she saw the blood. The razor-grass was like a
field full of scalpels, all painlessly slicing her into small
pieces.

The grass was eating her alive, from the
bottom up.

She couldn’t let that
happen, she decided. She
wouldn’t
. She would take one more
step,
two
more at
most, and then she could haul herself up on Fender’s stout wooden
sign. The grass couldn’t get her there. She would be
safe.

She ducked into the driving rain and kicked
as hard as she could. One foot came free and she lunged to take one
more step. As her knee came up and her leg pulled away from the
tangling grass, she saw that it wasn’t the foot she had freed at
all. There was no foot left. It was just a stump that ended in
mid-shin, coursing with water and mud and spurting dark blood.

At that moment, she knew it was too late.
Still, she didn’t stop.

She drove the remains of her leg down again,
jamming it against the ground. She held on a moment longer, somehow
stayed upright, and directed her fall towards the sign.

Rebecca wrapped both hands
around the heavy wooden uprights as they flew past. She tried to
pull
herself up,
haul
herself free. She could feel
consciousness slipping from her, draining away like the last of her
blood, but she wouldn’t let go. In a last act of defiance, she
laced her fingers together and gripped that sign,
clutched
it, so she
wouldn’t fall over. Even as she felt herself slipping into
grayness, felt herself dying, she held on
and thought of her Mom and Dad one last time, and her first
lover, and her last kiss, and that movie she always loved and that
dog she would never see again. She thought of Lucy and all the
things that would never happen now.

Still
standing
, she told herself as the grayness
took her away.
Still…

Her body never did fall
over. When the razorgrass did all the damage it could, when it
reached the maximum cross-section of this particular water-bearing
organism, it simply stopped cutting and drank
,
pulling every molecule of moisture
it could through the Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson’s flayed
trunk.

The whole process took less
than five minutes. At the end, the beautiful woman’s desiccated
body, dry as petrified wood, still clung to the four-by-four posts,
remarkably unchanged. She looked like a lovely, bone-dry mannequin
standing hip-deep in wet, waving grass, leaning on a wooden sign,
clinging
to it with a look of infinite
sadness.

It was her final anchor against the storm. An
anchor that had inexplicably failed her.

“You
three are idiots,” Sherriff Peck said to his deputies. “Each of you
is actually stupider than the other two. I don't know how you
manage it.”

Jimmy Fultz blinked at him.

Mindy Bergstrom stuck out her lower lip.

Bo Cameron stuck out his chin.

Peck closed his eyes and sighed. “Jesus
wept,” he said.

He had commandeered one of the smaller
conference rooms in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Conference Center,
a thin-walled, three-story Kleenex box, the bastard child of a
federal development grant and the tax windfall that accompanied the
arrival of VeriSil International.

“Let's get this straight,” he said. “This
storm is killing us. Half of the south side is already underwater.
We lost a line of houses at the bottom of the East Ridge to a
mudslide about an hour ago. There's no time and no resources to go
looking for those missing kids, so...they're a write off.”

Bo Cameron worked his prominent jaw a little
bit more. “So you mean, they're, like, dead. Or something.”

“Oh, dear,” Mindy Bergstrom said and shook
her round little head. “That's not good at all.”

Peck bit off another sigh.
“Alive, dead, it’s irrelevant,” he said. “We can't go looking for
them. We're going to have enough to do just trying to keep this
place from going under until the fucking rain lets up. We
cannot
let the people
coming here tonight know that. As far as they're concerned, we are
a hundred percent committed to the search.”

Cameron looked like a bigger, dumber version
of Buzz Lightyear without the cool suit; Mindy was the female
version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Jimmy Fultz looked like a
six-inch ruler: flat and fragile as a fence picket, the same width
at shoulder and hips, and six inches too short to be any good to
anybody. He actually took his deputy-hat off to scratch the top of
his head in consternation, and Peck sighed all over again.

Do you HAVE to act like a
fucking cartoon?
h
e asked silently.

“Well,” Jimmy Fultz said, frowning deeply,
“if we aren't gonna look for them, why'd we invite everybody down
here?”

He had to say it through
gritted teeth. “Because we sent out the invitations
before it started raining,
you moron.”

The double doors at the far end of the hall
flew open and the first of the VIPs arrived. Herb McCandless from
the already dissolving mall, the Emporium, was first in, shaking
his folding umbrella and shedding water like a wet dog.

As always,
Peck thought bitterly.
If there's free food, Herb's at the head of the
line.

Behind him came his usual
Chamber of Commerce entourage: the owner of the town's used car lot
(there were no
new
car lots in DH), both dentists, and the usually dour owner of
Dos Hermanos Window and Doors, who clearly thought he was about to
be busier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
He was a pretend Texan; he loved phrases like that.

Maybe so,
Peck thought grudgingly.
Maybe not.
He vaguely remembered the
joke that Marty Fein made about the sycophants and their pudgy
leader:
“They put the sucker in the
COC.”

He turned his attention
back to his deputies and shook his head sadly. He'd spent months
searching the town and advertising in every newspaper within five
hundred miles for better candidates, but nobody was the least bit
interested in coming to the ass end of nowhere for this kind of
job.
What was it that prick politician
said?
Sometimes you fight the war with the
army you've got, not the army you might want…

“So what're we supposed to say?” Bo asked
him, casting a nervous glance at the approaching civic leaders.

“Nothing,” Peck said. “Don't make any
promises, don't make any predictions. We're doing the best we can,
we're putting 110% effort into finding those poor girls, it's a
tough job but we're ready for it, you know, the usual
bullshit.”

“Will do,” Mindy chimed in, and squared her
rounded shoulders.

Jimmy Fultz bobbed his head, attempting
decisiveness and competence. It didn't play. “Got it,” he said.

You don't got it at
all,
Peck thought.
But what choice do I have?