Creatures of the Storm (21 page)

Spin
control
, she knew immediately.
They’re working the room.

She saw a couple of the
teachers she’d met earlier in the day, the cute little one with the
curly hair, Elli something, and the hulking P.E. teacher who looked
like the tall guy from
Everybody Loves
Raymond,
gently separate children from
their parents and take turns escorting them to the school two
blocks away. They seemed remarkably calm and competent despite the
missing children and the massive storm.

Lucy quietly moved to the
back of the room, watching Herb McCandless, the dickless wonder of
the DH Emporium, whispering intensely to a dark-haired,
beetle-browed man. She dodged Tony O’Meara, the restaurateur she
had tangled with earlier that day, as he laughed too heartily and
pounded the shoulders of that cute young doctor from the Borrego
Clinic, who looked entirely uncomfortable with the whole ordeal.
Lucy noticed that Miriam Lazenby was keeping a raptor’s eye on the
poor young physician as well. She wondered what he had done to
piss
her
off?

Peck tapped the mike for attention. “Good
evening, everybody,” he boomed. “Thanks for coming. Let me make a
few comments, and then we can take a couple of questions.” The
crowd’s conversation, sharp and edgy, almost staccato to Lucy’s
ear, stumbled and then stopped as he spoke. It was already starting
to get too warm and damp in the room.

Within five minutes, he’d
laid it all out: the random aspect of the disappearances, the lack
of any evidence of foul play, the hope that these three
separate cases
– there
was no connection here, none at all – would resolve themselves as
soon as the weather cleared, the damn-near-heroic efforts of his
small but tough band of officers.

Lucy couldn’t help but be
impressed. He was
good
. He had taken a jittery crowd of tired strangers and turned
them into an optimistic battalion of allies. Hell, half of them
would go home and make cookies for the search party, if only he’d
ask.

And not a word about the
storm
, she thought, forcing herself to
pull away from Peck’s hypnotic delivery.
Not a
word
about anything she’d told him
.

“So I’m sorry we dragged you out here on the
worst night of the year,” he said with a sheepish smile, “but I
know Principal Pratt and his teachers were concerned, and wanted
you to hear some straight talk. I’ve pretty much covered everything
we know. I guess we can take a couple of minutes for questions
…”

A pretty blonde woman with a nervous smile
raised her hand. They didn’t have mike stands set up, so the cop
who looked like Don Knotts patrolled the central aisle with a
wireless mike and turned it over only to the people who passed
muster. He got the high sign from Peck and turned it over to the
young mom.

The blonde clutched the microphone like a
lifeline. “My son is in kindergarten at DHPS,” she said. “Is it
safe to send him to school tomorrow?”

Lucy snorted.
Of course not
.
Unless your son can breathe
underwater.

“Of course,” Peck said
without hesitation. “Heck, Diane, it’s probably the safest place in
town right now.
Everybody’s
on the lookout.”

There was polite laughter all around.

Lucy whistled softly between her teeth.
“Hey,” she stage-whispered to the Barney Fife clone. “Officer! Over
here!”

The cop ignored her, and handed the mike to a
serious-looking man in a CAT cap. “I sure would like to help with
the search, if I might,” he said. “I know plenty more who’d say the
same. What can we do?”

“Thanks, Jerry,” Peck said,
and Lucy hated his easy charm all over again. Did he know
everyone
in this
one-horse town by their first name? “I’ll have an announcement
about that in a minute.”

The skinny cop passed by again. “HEY,” she
said, not whispering this time. “HERE!” People in nearby seats
turned and glared at her. She barely resisted the temptation to
stick out her tongue at them.

Herb McCandless got the
mike next. He introduced himself, as if that was necessary, and
announced that X-S-R-Ease
and
The Sport Fort at the Emporium were selling
personal security devices, such things as pepper spray and sirens
and flashlights, at cost, with the Emporium’s sponsorship. “And
umbrellas, too,” he blurted out. “Rain gear and–” He caught Peck’s
dangerous look and clammed up.

Lucy put her hand in the
air and waved it insistently. Peck made a point of looking right
through her. “Well,” he said with an increasingly hollow
heartiness, “I don’t know about you all, but I’d like to get into a
nice, dry place that isn’t an auditorium.” More polite chuckles.
“So please, any volunteers willing to support the search
teams,
if
we need
them, sign up with Bo here. And let’s all thank Karen for the
hospitality table.”

There was a smattering of applause. Lucy
eased to the right towards the skinny cop, who was standing and
staring wordlessly, wireless mike dangling. She took one step
forward, snatched it out of his hand, and brought it up to her
mouth in one smooth motion.

“WHAT ABOUT THE RAIN?” she asked loudly. She
had the mike too close to her mouth, and it boomed out over the
auditorium like the voice of God, almost as loud as the thunder
itself.

Everybody stopped. They all started looking
for the voice.

Lucy stepped on a chair and started to speak.
Heads swiveled toward her, finding her in the crowd.

Peck was one step ahead of her.

“Dr. Armbruster, I don’t think this is the
time for–”

“You should be telling them
to evacuate,” she said, riding over him. “Or at least get ready to
evacuate by tomorrow night, if they need to.”
And they’ll need to,
she added
silently.
Guaranteed.

“There’s no reason for that,” he said. “We
don’t need– ”

“My name is
Doctor
Lucy Armbruster,”
she said, and people actually started to listen. “I’m an
environmental scientist, a
scientist
, and I’ve been studying
the weather in Dos Hermanos for more than two years.” She glanced
at Peck, almost expecting him to interrupt, but he wasn’t looking
at her. He was glaring offstage and making some sort of gesture
with one hand. “I’m telling you, this storm is the worst you’re
going to see in a hun—”

The mike died in her hand
with an angry
squelch
.

“Thank you for coming, everyone,” Peck said
smoothly, loud enough to ride over the murmur of the crowd. “Be
sure to take a couple of donuts home with you; we have plenty.”

“WAIT!” Lucy shouted, as loud as she could.
The crowd was breaking up, turning away. The wave of conversation
rose again.

Lucy felt the heat flaring
in her cheeks. She thumped
off the chair
and threw the wireless microphone back at the skinny cop and
started to bull her way through the crowd. She’d catch them at the
door, make
them listen.

Peck was coming for her, weaving his way
through the crowd, politely but completely ignoring everyone around
him.

When Lucy veered left, so did he. She started
to turn away, to get to the door, but his hand flashed out, took
her upper arm in a vise-grip, turning her half around so they were
shoulder to shoulder. He held her there, leaning his head down
close to hers, with a fixed and perfectly formed smile on his face.
From ten feet away, it would almost look like they were two
friendly rivals in a private confab.

“Why did you–”

“Don’t embarrass yourself,
doctor,” he said into her ear. His smile didn’t flinch. “And don’t
make
me
embarrass
you.”

“WHAT THE–”

“If you raise your
voice
one more time
, I will
cuff
you and
duck
-walk you out to the cruiser like a
drunk
. 'Cause that's what you're
acting like right now, a mean
drunk
. Do you want that?”

On
cuff, duck,
and
drunk
he
pinched
her forearm even harder for
emphasis, to show her what he would be happy
to do.

Lucy looked to the crowd for help, but they
were all looking elsewhere. Civic leaders were ushering folks to
the door or the pastry table.

Realization hit her like a physical blow. The
faces, the noise, the averted looks…

They didn’t
want
to hear her out.
They couldn’t.

Lucy realized she was
thinking two days ahead of these people. To them, the rain had
started. It was nothing more than an annoying curiosity, like a
snow flurry in Palm Springs.
She
was already seeing the end result;
they
weren’t even scared
yet. And by the time they realized how bad it really was, it would
be too far too late.

Most of them probably
wouldn’t die
.
They’d get out in their cars or trucks or SUVs. But they’d
lose everything they owned, and the insurance companies would screw
them royally. It’d be like the tsunami, like Katrina or
Sandy.
But they don’t get that…
yet…

“Okay,” she said, through
teeth clenched so tightly they ached. “Okay, let
go
.” She jerked her arm
free of his grip and turned to face him.

Her heart was racing, her mouth was dry, and
there wasn’t a goddamn thing she could do about this. She knew that
now.

Peck’s pale blue eyes drilled into her. “Do
you need an escort to your car?” he asked quietly.

“No. I can find my way.”

“All right, then. Good night, Doctor.”

She didn’t move right away,
not fast enough to suit him. So he simply stood there, flat in
front of her, and stared. And
stared
. And kept staring until she
turned on her heel, stalked out of the Conference Center, and
disappeared into the storm.

The end,
she told herself as she fought her way through
the storm to her car.

The end.

The first
night of the storm was a relatively quiet one for Dos Hermanos,
especially in view of what would happen next.

The rain that began at 11:14 that morning
continued. It didn't grow much worse after the first lightning
storms, but it didn't get any better either. It was relentless,
unending, the same thundering waterfall at two a.m. that it had
been at two p.m.

Sometime during the night the construction
site on the east side of the VeriSil campus began to teem with a
new kind of life. The tiny attic of the Dos Hermanos Public School
became a refuge for a far more familiar but no less dangerous
species. Herb McCandless' DH Emporium, the one and only shopping
mall in town, shifted on sand that should never have been its
foundation when the soil first began to liquefy and then began to
move with a mind of its own.

A few very smart or easily frightened
citizens suddenly decided to visit a distant friend or family
member. One hundred and thirty-two made it out that first night,
and found a hell of a surprise on the other side of the Notch.
Three hundred and eighteen more died during that same eleven hours,
early victims, like Rex Tartaglione. They were the unlucky ones;
they met the first few creatures of the storm.

That, of course, was only the beginning.

The electrical storms were the most
terrifying. The waves of lightning that spanned the Valle always
began in the same place. The first strikes, the ones Lucy saw from
her office, hit Rocky Point, the highest reach of the Northern Rim,
far above the Notch. Then the front moved south very slowly,
lightning striking left and right, back and forth, like the
ponderous march of a spider as big as God. The strikes returned
every forty-five minutes to an hour all night long, on past dawn.
And they ended in the same place every time, fading into a flurry
of sizzling bolts at the foot of the sloping black expanse of Two
Brothers’ double peaks.

Just before midnight that night, Lucy
Armbruster returned to the Tomas Rivera Agricultural Station far to
the north, below the Notch and Rocky Point. She found that Station
deserted and the doors wide open, lights still burning in the
reception area, doors unlocked on all sides. She cursed that idiot
Cindy Bergstrom and wondered briefly why she hadn’t seen her with
her sister Mindy at the Town Meeting. Not that it mattered now. She
had work to do.

She went to her office and called up the
latest satellite data on her laptop. None of it was good. When she
tried to e-mail her colleagues back at the University, then tried
to contact other schools, nothing happened. No e-mail was getting
through, not even to law enforcement or FEMA. Nothing.

She tried to call her former office mate in
Riverside, and the phone didn’t even ring. She tried calling her
cold and heartless sister in Seattle. Nothing. It didn't make any
sense, she had four bars, but when she entered the number…not even
static. It was like it was blocked.