Creatures of the Storm (2 page)

More drops fell. And more. Suddenly the rain
was thumping against the ground, a dull drumming that grew louder
and more insistent every second. A roll of thunder grumbled out of
the north, and Ken felt a chill when he looked downhill again. The
town had been replaced by a strange, colorless mist. Dos Bros was
nothing more than a smudged blur now.

“Come in for a meeting,” Marty said.
“Tomorrow, ten a.m.”

“Jesus, Marty, you want me to get this done,
or you want to waste time with–”

“
Tomorrow,
” Marty said flatly. It was
the first time he'd sounded certain about anything in the entire
conversation. “
Ten a.m.
The boss – the
big
boss, Mr. Josephson himself – is
gonna be here. You have to show him what you have. And it has to be
something
real
this time, Kenny. Something we can stand on.”

Ken put a hand over his
eyes and squeezed
. Oh,
Christ
, he thought.
I am in so much trouble.
When he
took the hand away, he could see that the ground was mottled now,
uneven and discolored like blistering skin. Droplets gusted onto
his cheeks, warm as blood.

“Look,” he said, desperate to end the call,
“I have to go. My daughter’s about to get here and–”

“Your
daughter
? Oh,
man
, that’s
great
!”

Ken closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “But it won’t get in the way. I promise. I
just have to go, that’s all.”

“All right, Ken. But–”

“I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Tomorrow,” Marty repeated.

“Ten a.m., Marty. I heard you.”

Ken tapped the phone off and looked back at
the half-dead plants in his garden. “Chow down, you poor bastards,”
he said, then edged his way along the side of the house until he
came to the sliding glass doors that opened into his study. Another
roll of thunder rose up out of the ground as he slipped inside.

The study was beautiful and serene, all
teakwood and leather-bound books bought by the pound. His desk was
ominously clean, only a computer monitor with the keyboard hidden
in a flat drawer.

“Maggie,” he said, “what
is
that
all
about?”

Maggie answered in a
mellow, slightly amused voice. “Which
that
is that?” she asked.

“The
rain
, damn it,” he said. He ran his
fingers through his hair. They came away wet and gritty, a mixture
of sweat and dirt and rain water.

The monitor on his desk flickered, and an
enhanced satellite map appeared: a perfect brown oval surrounded by
flat desert yellow. The oval was the meteor crater they called the
Valle de Los Hermanos; the irregular blue blotch inside it was the
town, neatly labeled DOS HERMANOS, CA, 14:15 PDT. A thin red line,
twisted as a capillary and marked as CA HWY 181, connected DH to
Barstow, almost 150 miles away. As Ken watched in silence, a swarm
of gray-blue blots scuttled along the top of the screen.

“An unusually wet cell, part of a distant
tropical storm series in the northern Gulf of California, is
backing up against the Piedras Blancas Range,” Maggie told him,
“causing the formation of thunderheads. There will be some heat
lightning, possibly resulting in brush fires in the foothills.
However, the cell is expected to pass at least thirty miles to the
north of us. It will dissipate entirely by midnight tonight. Chance
for local precipitation is negligible.”

Ken smiled and shook his
head. “You know,” he said, “Fifty years ago, I would have grunted,
‘Gonna rain?’, and my faithful Gal Friday – that would be
you
, Maggie – would have
stuck a pencil in her bun and said, ‘Don’t think so,
Boss.’”

“You asked.”

He sighed. “Yes, I did. It’s my own damn
fault.”

He looked down at the
single photograph on his nearly vacant desk: Ken, Lisa, and Rose,
taken more than two years ago. He loved that picture. It captured
perfectly what they had been,
who
they had been: Lisa’s reluctant smile, Rose’s
mouth open in happy astonishment, his own wide grin as he threw his
arms around them both.

What had happened to that
girl in the picture, he wondered.
That
Rose had been a sarcastic
fourteen-year-old fascinated by politics; an intense
twelve-year-old who was dedicating her life to veterinary medicine;
a serious nine-year-old obsessed with PlayStation. He couldn’t make
any connection between
that
Rose and the one who was about to arrive – the
hollow-cheeked teenager, white as typing paper, last seen lying on
the gurney in the St. Johns Hospital ER. The one in the smeared,
stolen makeup, with a witch’s brew of cocaine, meth, and something
they never identified swirling through her veins, who had awakened,
taken a single look at him, and said “
Fuck
you,
” in a sandpaper whisper he never
would have recognized…just before she passed out for a
week.

“Boss…” Maggie said, almost gently.

“
What?”

“They’re at the front gate. I’m letting them
in.”

It was like a bucket of cold water in the
face. “Shit,” he said. He looked around the study as if there was
somewhere else to go. Then he took a deep breath and started down
the long hallway to the front of the house.

A flash of blue-white light exploded over his
head as he opened the front door. Thunder rolled through him like
the roar of a passing train.

“Maggie,” he said, “I think we need to
redefine the concept of ‘negligible precipitation’.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” she told him. Her voice
was tinny and distanta few feet onto the porch.

There was the car, rising up over the first
ridge, half a mile away on the edge of the property. He could see
the gray silhouettes of two figures in the front seat, and the
jittering aura of raindrops jumping like popcorn off the hood and
roof.

Silently, suddenly, a
bright red ATV, a squat little bug-shape, nothing more than a
curved and shining cowling with huge cartoon-sized tires, shot over
the low ridge ahead of Lisa’s BMW and
slammed
into the road right in front
of the car.

The BMW swerved and plunged
into the muddy ditch at the side of the road, rear wheels spinning
madly. In a heartbeat it shot completely off the road and tipped
forward, then lurched downhill at high speed. Ken watched
helplessly as two things happened at once: the ATV threw out a
rooster-tail of muddy water, surged up the steep incline on the far
side of the road and disappeared…and the BMW slammed
grille-first into a granite boulder as big as a
steamer trunk.

He shouted into the storm as the car went up
on its nose, back wheels spraying mud and water. The BMW teetered
there, balanced on its headlights, and for one horrible, endless
moment he could see his ex-wife and his daughter through the
windows. Lisa had one hand braced on the wheel, the other thrown in
front of Rose; Rose herself was pushed back in the passenger seat,
as far away from the windshield as she could get. Then the sky
cracked open in a burning white flash –

– and the car fell onto its
roof with a thundering
SLAM
, wheels in the air. The
windshield shattered into white crystals, doors flying open, roof
collapsing.

“Maggie!
Maggie! Call 911!
”

He didn’t wait to find out if he’d been
heard. He jumped off the porch and ran down the quarter-mile of
road, sandy mud shifting under him.

“ROSE!
LISA!
”

He slipped and slid down the incline to the
side of the car. The rain roared and gurgled all around him.

“
ROSE!”

He knew they were dead.
He
knew
it. First
there was Pat, then the divorce, then hiding in the desert and
now
this.

Now he had lost everything.

Lucy
Armbruster looked deeply into the blank young faces staring up at
her and seriously considered mass murder.

You little
bastards
.
I come
all the way down here in your hour of need, and the best you can do
is gape at me like a bunch of sheep
.

It was obvious that the combined second
through eighth grade classes of the Dos Hermanos Public School were
just as bored as she was. They had sat and squirmed through her
forty-five minute presentation on “The Living Desert” only because
their teachers were lined up at the back of the Cafetorium like
vultures on a power line, waiting for somebody to make trouble.

This is what I get for
being nice
, she told herself, staring down
at them from the stage.
Another line drive
to the tits.
She scrubbed at her short
russet hair in a habitual gesture of annoyance and self-control.
This was all Frannie’s fault, she decided. She was simply trying to
do what Frannie would have wanted, trying to help this pathetic
little town through its current crisis.
A
nd what do I get? Cattle.
Worse:
pre-teen
cattle
.

“Okay,” she said. “Enough. I’m only going to
share one more thing with you, and then I’ll let you go.”

There were a few faint,
sarcastic cheers from the back of the house.
You and me both
, she thought. She
reached down under the podium, dug her hand into the box she had
brought with her, and held up a loose fist, leaking dirt and
rocks.

“What’s this?” she asked them.

A little boy in the first row – one of the
precocious ones she hated, the kind who always had the answer
hiding in his mouth – piped up with “Dirt!”

Ass-kissing
dolt
. “This guy here said ‘dirt,’” she
said aloud. “And he’s partly right. Soil, stones, bits of plant
matter. I picked this up right here from your playground, so it’s
nothing special…but there’s something hiding in it, right now. You
know what?”

Nothing again, though this time they actually
seemed to be paying attention. “Seeds,” she said, and she let the
dirt pour out right onto the podium. It made a sandy, hollow
thump-bump-hiss sound as it fell.

The kids oohed in spite of
themselves.
Nothing like messing up school
property to get their attention
.
I should have opened by kicking the podium to
pieces. Then they’d love me
.

“In this one handful of
local soil, there are thousands of seeds,” she said as the last of
the dirt fell to the floor. “In a cubic meter of Dos Hermanos soil
– think of a box about this big, by this wide, by this tall – there
are over one hundred thousand seeds. Flowers, plants, cacti, all of
them in seed form. They’re not dead; they’re not alive. They’re
what’s called
dormant
.”

“What’s that mean?” said
one dark-skinned little girl from the third row. Lucy recognized
her type. In fact, she recognized herself in that suspicious,
challenging glare.
Hang on,
darlin’
, she thought.
You’re in for a bumpy ride
. “What’s
your name?”

“Kerrianne,” the girl said.

“Okay,” Lucy said, wondering why she’d ask.
“It means sleeping…and waiting, um, Kerrianne. Kind of a
combination of the two. And there’s only one thing that will make
these seeds come to life.” To the whole group again: “Anybody know
what that one thing is?”

Now half a dozen of them from all over the
room said it at the same time: “Water!”

“Right!” She knocked on the podium of
emphasis. “Water. These seeds are all examples of xerophytic
adaptation – a big phrase, don’t bother writing it down. It means
they’ve all adapted themselves to really, really dry climates. They
can wait for months or years or even many years for the water to
show up. Desert Sand Verbena – you know, that wide-leafed plant
with the little purple flowers that’s out in front of the school?”
Lots of nodding heads now. “That’s one of them. Its seeds can go
dormant for years, until the right combination of rain and
temperature comes along. So can the desert paintbrush, and the
ocotillo. Some desert animals can do the same thing – snakes and
mammals and even fish, who live only in hot water pools in the
middle of the desert. If those pools dry up, though, the fish don’t
die; they go dormant. They wait.”

She looked down at them, silent again for a
moment. Then the memory of Frannie made her say, “You know…you guys
can be like that, too. You could be waiting for the right breaks at
the right time, and then you could turn into something
completely…unexpected.”

Christ
.
Who am I supposed to be, Deepak
fucking Chopra?

She straightened up and
slammed her palm against the podium – a sharp fast
whack!
– and everyone
jumped again. “Okay!” she barked. “Lecture’s over! Mr.
Pratt…?”

“Thank you, Dr. Armbruster.” The school
principal, a short, narrow-shouldered, flat-headed fellow with a
well-groomed mustache and a self-satisfied expression, ducked into
the mike as Lucy stepped aside. “Children, let’s thank the doctor
for taking the time to speak to us today …”