Creatures of the Storm (22 page)

Though she didn't know it then, internet,
cell phone, and even land line service to all of Dos Hermanos had
been cut off at precisely 8:17 p.m., while most of the town was in
the Conference Center. It would never be restored.

On a whim, she tried calling the Sheriff’s
Department. That worked with no trouble at all. Mindy Bergstrom
answered, sounding obscenely perky. “The Sheriff’s already gone
home for the night,” she said. “He’ll be back bright and early
tomorrow. Would you like to leave a messa—”

Lucy hung up. She tried calling outside town,
to the Highway Patrol office in Barstow. Then Bakersfield. Then
Palm Springs. And every time: nothing.

Inside the Valle, she could call anywhere she
liked. Beyond the rim, however…

“That’s ridiculous,” she said aloud, startled
at how loud her voice was in the empty building. “It’s like we’re
quarantined…or…”

Or trapped.

She scrubbed at her short
russet hair and tried to calm down.
You’re
getting paranoid
, she told herself.
Don’t jump to conclusions
.

It was time for a cup of coffee. She’d go the
break room, make a pot, and then call Cindy Bergstrom at home and
ask her what the hell she was thinking, leaving the place wide open
like this.

It'll be fine,
she told herself as she settled down to a long
night.

A short distance to the
southwest, at the Mackie
hacienda,
the spider-god would have found Rose Mackie lying
alone on the bed in her beautiful, silent second-story room,
staring at the glowing screen of her iPhone and listening to the
sound of her own beating heart.

It was late, and her mother
was certainly sleeping. However, there was something wrong here,
something terribly
wrong
, and she needed to talk to
her.

Fuck it
, she thought.
It’s not the first
time I’ve woken her out of a sound sleep
.
She hit the speed dial for her mother’s cell.

Her call went to voice-mail immediately.

She tried to google the
clinic’s address, but the internet failed her. She searched the
room a bit, and found a phone book politely stored in the drawer of
her bedside table.
Thank you,
Maggie
, she thought.
Or Dad. Or whatever
. She located the
phone number for the Borrego Clinic’s 24-hour desk with no
trouble.

It rang seven times before anyone answered,
and even then the female voice on the other end sounded
unaccountably angry, as if Rose had already done something to piss
her off.

“Can you tell me the status of Mrs. – Ms. –
Lisa Corman?”

“She’s fine,” the woman
said shortly. There was a yelp and the clang of a metal
behind.
There goes somebody’s
bedpan
, Rose thought, and couldn’t help
but smile. “She’s asleep. Why are you calling
now
?”

“I just wanted to check,” Rose said, annoyed
at being challenged.

“She was up earlier,” the woman said. “We
gave her something, a sedative. She’s sleeping.”

Rose frowned. “You gave a sedative to a
concussion patient? Are you sure?”

“
No
, I’m not sure. I wasn’t there. I
don’t kno—
Carrie, damn
you!
”

“Let me talk to somebody else. Let me talk to
a doctor.”

“We’re busy! Everyone’s
busy! Call tomorrow. In fact, come
get
her tomorrow. We need the
bed!”

She hung up. Rose pulled
the phone away from her ear at the harsh
clack
of the disconnection and
stared at it in disbelief.

“What the hell…?”

She called again and the phone rang and rang.
Even without another conversation with the angry woman, she knew
she’d been right about one thing.

Something was wrong.
Something was
very
wrong.

Down in the
hacienda’s
study,
directly below Rose, Ken was hearing things. He'd long since become
used to the thumps and crackles of the mini-mansion. Every house
had them. And of course the wind, rain, and thunder of the storm
had added a whole new orchestra to the night.

This was something more, a
rhythmic crunching, grinding, cracking sound, sometimes loud,
sometimes barely above a whisper. It was bothering the hell out of
him, too. He was trying to concentrate, trying to get the script
for the presentation down perfectly, but that goddamn
noise...

“
Maggie?”

“Lisa is fine. She’s asleep. I called and
asked again, and they hung up on me.”

“I wasn’t going to ask,” he
lied. “Do… do you hear that? What the hell
is
it?” He heard it again, that
grumbling, grinding rats-in-the-walls sound.

“What the hell is what?”

Ken suddenly realized the
AI couldn't differentiate those particular sounds from the chaos of
other audio artifacts hitting her microphones. It was a
pattern-recognition function still reserved only for humans. It was
odd, but strangely comforting.
At least
there were
some
things they couldn't do. Yet
.
It didn't really matter. It was annoying, that
was all. It couldn't be an actual threat, even if... even if it did
sound like something huge was chewing
on
the house.

Something huge and
hungry
.

Mindy Bergstrom, holding down the fort from
the Sheriff’s Department Headquarters, dead center in the Valle,
tried to call her sister for the twenty-seventh time. She knew it
was the twenty-seventh: she was keeping a tidy little row of
hash-marks on the blotter in front of her.

She couldn’t keep the
tremble out of her voice, hard as she tried. “Cindy? You call me,
now. I’ve been trying and trying, and you wouldn’t
believe
all the crazy
calls we’ve been getting from all over town, so…seriously now, I’m
not joshin’, you
call
me.”

She hung up the hand set very carefully, like
it would jump out of her hand at any moment. She hoped it would
ring. She really did. She was so worried.

She jumped, startled, at the bray of the
police band radio at her shoulder. A grating, blurred version of Bo
Cameron’s voice, choked with static, came out of the three-inch
speaker. “I'm outside the Emporium,” he said. “Looks quiet.”

“Bo,” she said, “you go home for the night.
You can’t do nothing single-handed, and the Sheriff and Jimmy are
already signed out.”

“But what if—”

“I’ll call if there’s an emergency,” Mindy
said. “You keep roamin’ around out there in the dark and wet and
you’re likely to catch your death.”

There was a pause, and then he grated, “Roger
that.” She could hear the pouting even through the static.

He signed off and she turned away from the
twenty-year-old police band radio.

After a moment’s thought, she reached over
and pulled the cord out of the back of the official Sherriff’s
Department land line. The crazy calls had started to taper off
after midnight, but really, she couldn’t take another one. Cindy
could still get hold of her through her cell phone, and the boys
always knew that was the number to call if they really had to talk,
so that was fine. She didn’t want to think about the rest of it for
a while. When she did, she could feel the town dying all around
her, and that was just too much right now.

Really, it was just too much.

The rest of Dos Hermanos scarcely knew what
was happening. They electricity was still on, and even if satellite
TV and the internet was screwed up because of the storm, they still
had their DVDs and reading lamps, their tablets and e-readers. Most
of the townspeople spent the night tucked away, watching movies,
reading, or simply turning in early.

Remarkably few people
enjoyed sex, drugs, or drinking that night, including those who
usually made a habit of it. There was something about the storm
itself that discouraged it, that made you want to stare into the
dark and do nothing, or sleep, or simply
stay still
. When sleep did come, it
wasn't especially restful. Most of the surviving men and women of
Dos Hermanos awoke on Friday morning feeling just as weary as they
had felt when they'd gone to bed Thursday night, maybe even a
little worse.

Still, they were glad to see the new day,
even if the light was the color of lead and just as heavy. There
was work to be done, clocks to punch, meetings to attend. So they
got up. They showered. They went to work. They did what they
thought they had to do, and not a speck more. And they waited for
the rain to stop.

After all, they told themselves, three
thousand voices, minus the recently escaped and the already dead,
it couldn't get much worse. This wasn't the end of the world, was
it? Seriously, this was only a goddamn rain storm. This was the
twenty-first century, this was America, they were almost all
employed (even if they hated their jobs) and well-fed (if not
well-nourished), and living in a nice little town where no one
could hurt them, a safe and simple place to hide from a frightening
and complicated world.

The rain would stop soon. It always did.

Really, it couldn't get much worse.

THE
SECOND DAY

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough
brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough
fire,

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon's
sphere.

- William
Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night's
Dream

The presentation was not going well. Not at all.

Simply getting there had been a nightmare.
The floodwaters rose with every hundred feet Ken traveled south in
the crater valley, and he could have sworn the Rover had floated
the last forty feet to the underground parking structure. It had
started off badly, from 9:45 a.m. on Friday morning, the moment
he’d walked into too-large, too-empty, too-cold Conference Room One
on the seventh floor of VeriSil's corporate headquarters.

He hated this room. It was cruelly spacious.
The human voice sounded small and unimportant in its hollow,
lacquered depths, and the room-wide, floor-to-ceiling picture
window that spanned one wall was blinding in its brightness and
beauty. It showed the steep face of the South Ridge, a few feet
away, dotted with vegetation and earth tones. It made the room even
larger, even more impressive, and made the unprepared feel that
much less significant in the Grand Scheme of Things.

That was exactly how Ken
was feeling at the moment. Despite his best efforts, he looked damp
and nervous and, worse yet,
unready
a
s he faced the two most
powerful men in the company.

Carl Josephson, the
severely trim CEO of VeriSil, was forty-eight years old, sleek and
bald and lipless. His smile reminded Ken of the expressions drawn
on Disney cartoon snakes like the ones in
Jungle Book
or
Robin Hood
: far too wide, slightly
goofy, and very, very dangerous. Josephson quite intentionally
displayed it on a regular basis, as if to counter the natural
horror his normal expression generated, and Josephson had given him
one of those smiles when they shook hands twenty minutes
ago.

“Here’s your chance, Ken,” he had said in a
surprisingly mild and resonant baritone. “Wow me.”

Wow,
Ken thought.
Wow.

Josephson wasn’t smiling
now. In fact, he looked as if he’d swallowed a bug. He had not said
a single word during the first twenty minutes of the stumbling
presentation. His ubiquitous and over-lotioned executive assistant
Stefan Cling, round-faced and doughy, had spoken for him, pursing
his lips and looking sour at even being
out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere
to meet this loser
.

And then there was Ken’s old buddy Marty
Fein, sweating like a pig and looking even more squashed than
usual. He had been radiating uncontrolled anxiety like a space
heater with a busted switch ever since Ken had arrived. Now he was
obviously ready to melt directly into the shag carpet.

Ken had been trying to
explain the concept of Everybody’s Assistant, and he had been doing
a remarkably bad job of it. There was a tattooed drift of
bullet-pointed pages, schematics, and full-color screen shots
scattered across the polished walnut table in front of him, but
none of them made much sense. He even had a giant flatscreen
monitor on the wall behind him, cued and ready to
wow,
but he hadn’t put
anything up yet.

He was lost.

“Look,” he said, clenching his fist and then
forcing it open again. “I know this sounds like a whole lot of
nothing right now,” he said. “Just another jumped-up version of
Outlook with really good voice recognition or something. Big
deal.”

Josephson’s lips got even thinner. He was
obviously agreeing with him.