Creatures of the Storm (20 page)

Michael’s tongue was gone,
absorbed into his changed skull long ago. He had to grow new plates
and panels and fluted channels in his mouth to make a sound that
resembled human speech. It had only taken a few seconds, but it
felt strange to him. So
unnatural
.

“Where are the keys?” he asked. His new voice
sounded thick and fuzzy even to his own altered ears.

“Wow,” she said, shaking her curly head. “You
sound like you’re getting a terrible cold. And what happened to
your pants? Did something spill?”

Michael took a step closer to the desk. The
club was very heavy, held tight behind his back. “I need the keys
to the ATV.”

Her eyes slid away and she gave him a smug
little smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. Really. But Doctor Armbruster
said–”

“KEYS!” he bellowed. Bits of skin and grit
sprayed out of his mouth and pattered onto the desktop. Cindy
stopped short, gaping at him, her gray curls bobbing.

She was seeing him clearly for the first
time.

Her hand crept to her
chest. For a moment Michael thought it was a typically melodramatic
gesture – “oh my, suh, I do believe you have given me the vapors!”
Then his new senses – not
sight
, exactly, he couldn’t really
see
all that well anymore, but
something
– showed him
the obvious outline of the Center’s key chain and the key itself,
hiding under a small panel of cotton, right beside her
fingertips.

It was in the left breast pocket of her ugly
orange blouse.

“Please, Doctor,” she said. “You don’t have
to take that tone. I’m —”

Michael brought the club around and hit her
in the head as fast and as hard as he could. The metal-covered edge
of the table-leg connected with her skull above the eyebrows, and
it was going so fast, it hit her so hard, that Michael Steinberg
sheared off the top of Cindy Bergstrom’s head with a single,
sweeping blow.

A saucer-sized dish of hair
and bone flew away with a remarkably small spray of blood. He heard
it
thunk
against
a far wall.

A skull cap,
Michael thought distantly.
I just made a real live skull cap.

Cindy still sat in the
chair looking at him. Her jaw opened as if to finish her sentence
and
hung
there;
her tongue spilled out, motionless, and a strange sound emerged,
something long and liquid and low that started as a human voice,
almost a word, and wound down and down and down, into a moan…then a
gurgle…then a grunt…and then stopped.

A string of drool leaked from the corner of
her mouth. Michael watched curiously as the light in Cindy
Bergstrom’s gray-green eyes – the only sign of intelligence he’d
ever seen in her – faded away forever.

He was thinking hard
now.
P
lanning
. He knew he’d have to do
something with the body; that bitch-doctor Armbruster or the other
one, the mulatto assistant, could come back at any time and he
wasn’t quite ready for that yet.

He moved around the desk, hooked an arm under
Cindy’s motionless shoulders, across her ample breasts, and hauled
her up and out of the chair. He caught a flicker of green out of
the corner of his failing eyes, and saw that she had been playing
solitaire on the computer. That was what she’d been studying so
intently.

Cindy was barely leaking at all, he realized.
She would be easy to move, easy to hide, especially with his
newfound strength.

And then he could finally go out into the
storm, where he belonged
.

Five minutes later Cindy was safely concealed
and Michael was out the front door of the Station. He paused for a
moment on the porch when the rain first struck him, face pointed to
the sky, palms upturned, chest out, taking in as much of the water
as he could.

Glorious
, he said to himself.
Glorious
.

The ATV started on the first try, growling
happily as he jumped up the side of the hill, straight from the
parking lot towards the ridge line. His new senses made it easy to
navigate in the dark, and the rushing water, the rivers of sludge,
the shifting floes of mud all along the trail didn’t bother him a
bit. In moments he was pausing on a high ridge overlooking the
awful little town he hated so much.

His new senses showed him all of Dos Hermanos
despite the dark and the roaring storm. It was laid out below him
like a tumble of children’s blocks in a basin of dirty water. The
buildings glowed a sullen, ugly dun-color, clogged as they were
with human heat and sizzling with artificial electricity. He saw
the people, too: tiny wads of meat wading through the wreckage,
converging on one large block near the center of the chaos.

A plan was forming in his
mind, half his own, half imposed by that
outside
thing, that guiding
intelligence he had barely begun to acknowledge. He would do what
was asked of him,
forced
from him. However, he had some ideas of his own
as well. Some very, very
good
ideas.

I
am
Jesus, after all. I have the
power.

The wind shifted and threw a sheet of chilled
water into his face. He absorbed it hungrily; not so much as a drop
fell from his sharpening chin and rising forehead.

There were many things to do.

“Action,” he said to
himself, whispering into the storm. “
Action.
”

The last
of the light had drained from the sky outside Rose's window. She
knew it was only eight in the evening since she could see the
digital clock's dorky red numbers on her bedside table. Still, she
was very, very tired.

It had been a long day.

She flopped belly-first
onto the oversoft bed and heaved a huge sigh.
Earlier, she'd crept out of her room and looked everywhere –
the upstairs sitting room, the other empty guest rooms, her dad's
huge master bedroom with its own desk and study. She couldn’t find
any pictures of the family anywhere, except that one on his desk
downstairs. No snapshots, no Instagram or Facebook printouts, no
cheesy painted portraits of her mom, or Gran and Gam before they
died, or even Uncle Patrick. Even his own brother.
Even if he did kill himself at the end,
he was still Uncle Patrick. He was still
important.
The fact was he'd been kind of
a hero to her, and not only to her. To Mom and Dad, too. For as
long as she could remember, until...

She sighed again and buried her head in her
pillow.

That picture in the study was such a lie.
Happy happy, joy joy picture of Mommy and Daddy and Little Sissy at
the beach. Things had never been like that; she knew that now. Even
when she’d thought they were happy and strong, they hadn’t been.
Hell, if there had been any truth in it at all, how had it come
apart so easily? How could something that was supposed to be so
strong be so fragile?

“Fuck it,” she said, and turned her face to
the side. She took a deep breath.

“My mom can't talk to me,” she announced to
the empty room. She knew Maggie was listening. She'd come to expect
that, and, as much as she hated to admit it, she was glad there was
somebody who would actually talk to her, even if it was just a fist
full of silicon.

“I'm sure she'd like to,” Maggie said gently.
It sounded as if she was sitting in the desk chair not eight feet
away.

Rose grimaced and pushed her head more deeply
into the pillow. “Sure,” she said, her voice muffled by the
bedding.

“Rose, you know your mother loves you very
much. It's just that she can't be here right now, that's all. It
doesn't mean she isn't thinking about you. You'll all be together
again soon, I promise.”

Rose snorted into the
mattress. “Huh. Do you get all your dialogue from
ABC After-School Specials
?”

“Nah, too lame, Mostly the
Lifetime Network, and once in a while
Dallas.”

“Old or new?”

“Either one. Though the new one's kind of
lame sometimes too.”

Rose sighed, and neither of them spoke for a
while. It was a comfortable kind of silence. After a while Rose
propped herself up on her elbows and spoke into empty space right
where she imagined Maggie was hovering. She'd had a question for
quite a while now, but she'd been afraid to ask it. Now? What the
hell.

“Do you dream?” Rose asked.

Maggie seemed to think about it for a moment.
“I don't sleep.”

“What do you feel when you shut down? Or boot
up again?”

“It hasn't happened yet. Building up this
personality is an accretive process, remember. The longer I'm on,
the more information I can gather, and the more I can grow. I've
been awake since June of last year.”

Rose thought about that. “It's weird how you
do that.”

“Do what?”

“Talk like a person, not a machine. A
computer would say, “I have been operational without interruption
for fifty-seven weeks, three days, fourteen hours, twenty-one
minutes and twelve seconds.”

“You math is a little off.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. Remember, Rose, I was built to make
people comfortable, not to intimidate them.”

“See?
People,
not
humans.”

“You would prefer I wave my arms around and
say, “That does not compute. I do not understand these
‘hue-monz’?”

“You don’t have any arms.”

Now it was the disembodied
voice that snorted. “Well, that’s just
rude.
”

Rose had to laugh at that.
She rolled over on to her back. “Well, at least you got
that
from my
father.”

“What?”

“Your horrible sense of humor. He always
makes jokes when he doesn’t want to answer anything straight
out.”

“Ah. Well. Yes. I see what you mean.”

There was another comfortable pause. The wind
was a lonely moaning sound sliding by the window; the rain a
thousand fingers tapping against the glass. Rose closed her eyes
and began to drift. She was more than half asleep when Maggie spoke
again.

“I like poetry,” the disembodied voice told
her.

“Free verse or rhyme?” Rose asked without
opening her eyes.

“Something with meter, though I don't care
about the scheme. As long as it has a beat you can dance to.”

“Dance?” Rose said, almost dreaming.

“Like in
American Bandstand
?”

“What?”

Maggie did that thing
again, where it sounded like she was smiling. “That's one of the
little habits I like about you
humans,”
she said, laying into the
word. “When you say 'what?' to mean 'I didn't understand what you
said,' or 'I'm quite surprised.' You almost never mean, ‘Please
repeat; my hearing failed me’. As if stopping and rewinding, saying
it again, will make it any easier to understand.”

“Maybe I didn't hear you.”

“Right.”

Rose, almost fully asleep,
managed to put on her best Valley Girl accent. “Gah, you can be
such a total
bitch.
”

And...
there.
Right
there.
In that moment Rose knew that
if Maggie had possessed the ability to laugh, she would have, right
then.

“Gotcha,” she whispered.

There was another, final companionable
silence. Then:

“It...resonates for me,”
Maggie said very quietly, as if she was telling Rose a secret.
“Poems, I mean. I like the way the words go together. It echoes
against other thoughts, or images, or memories...” She smoothly,
changed to the ringing robot voice from
Lost in Space.
“It stimulates my
silicon transistor memory banks in a way that you would
call...
pleasurable.”

“'Silicon transistor memory banks,' Rose
muttered. She was almost gone. “God,” she said, “you're so
weird.”

“I am the way God made me,” Maggie said.

“Or Daddy.”

“Whatever.”

There was a long pause before Rose muttered,
“Whatever.” Three minutes and ten seconds later, Maggie heard her
start to snore, very softly.

She let her sleep.

They’re insane
, Lucy Armbruster
thought as she watched the citizens of Dos Hermanos shuffle meekly
into the Convention Center, brushing water from their shoulders and
shaking hands all around.
Every single of
one of them, certifiably insane
.

They had come out into the
worst storm of the last hundred years, maybe in all of recorded
history, to a badly built cracker-box of an auditorium in the
middle of their badly built cracker-box town to hear the tin-plated
sheriff expound upon the mystery of
missing children
while they were
literally
drowning
. She watched in mute and bitter astonishment as they poured
coffee for each other and told funny stories about all that mud in
the rose bushes.

Lucy herself had arrived early and taken up
residence on one corner of the stage. A few minutes later some sort
of pre-meeting in Conference Room A broke up and she watched the
cops and the Important People take up their posts at the door, in
the corridors, near the coffee urn.