Creatures of the Storm (25 page)

I think it's going to get
worse than that,
he thought as he peered
through the wavering curtain of rain that flowed down the
windshield.
This may be problem too big
for even Doritos and Coke Zero.

He took a deep breath and
turned the Rover north, up the increasingly steep incline towards
the
hacienda
. It
was slow going. Whenever he did manage to move faster than ten
miles an hour, he felt as if he was drag-racing through the
Andes.

Less than a half-mile further on, the
creatures began to appear. First they were vague shadows barely out
of sight, moving in the mist and downpour. Then he saw a flash of
gray or black or bone-white, and they began to take shape as they
boiled out of the storm.

Ken stopped using the brake
at all. This was
not
a part of the world where he wanted to take a pause. He
wondered at how blind he had been on the trip down hours earlier.
Had these things been there when he’d driven down? Had he simply
been so preoccupied he hadn’t even noticed the crawling, teetering,
churning creatures rising up out of the rushing water all around
him?

Now they were horribly
clear, etched against the glittering sheaf of afternoon rainfall.
He saw a monster that looked like a huge snake made entirely of
bony nodules with a head like a carved jade plant. It slithered
across the road inches in front of his SUV, a wriggling fleshless
spine looking for...
something.
Something awful.

He passed a wide place in
the road, what he thought had been a scenic vista barely
twenty-fours ago, and he saw a set of flapping, translucent sheets
(
flumes, they’re called
flumes
) change course in mid-air to wrap
themselves around a red-tailed hawk that was struggling to fly
through the storm. The shimmering, silvery sheets brought the bird
to the ground like a captured stone. By the time it splashed down
five feet from the car, Ken could see it had become nothing but a
knot of dried feathers and a single, desiccated claw.

He'd never been more happy
to pass through the river stone pedestals at the end of his
driveway. But as he approached he saw a flexing, ashen wall of
tumbleweed (
no,
he corrected himself,
hookweeds.
They're called 'hookweeds'
) that looked as
if they were woven from bony fishhooks, stretching to block his
way.

No way.

Ken
hunched his shoulders, gripped the wheel, and stomped on the
gas, and the Rover surged forward. The hookweeds leaped at the
windshield and left scratches like metal teeth.

What were those things? He thankfully burst
through. How had this happened?

For one moment, as he raced along the last
arc of the ridge road to his home, he glimpsed the southern half of
the crater valley through the churning gray-on-gray scrim below
him. It was a view he’d seen virtually every day for the last two
years, and it was unrecognizable now. Half of the South End was
already underwater, with only roofs and the tops of high walls
still visible. The rest was disappearing, even as he watched.

The Valle was filling with
water like a great, huge bowl. Though the VeriSil campus and
construction site had been the first to go, it was clear: this was
only the beginning.
If the rain didn’t
stop now, right now, the whole of the Valle would be underwater
very shortly.

Just get me home,
he prayed to a God he’d never really believed
in.
Just get me home.

His heart was pounding
madly when he caught sight of his
hacienda’s
lights, pale yellow
behind the storm. Relief burst in his chest. He hadn't felt this
kind of happiness since he’d come to DH.

Thank you,
he said as he blazed towards the
roundabout.
Thank you.

“What do you
mean
you’re not coming?” Rose howled.

“Not
yet,
I said,” her mother buzzed
through the phone. It was the worst connection Rose had ever had on
her iPhone.

“Mom,” she whispered. “You
can’t leave me here. This place is so
weird.
This mechanical voice comes
right out of the
air
, and Dad is acting like a prick about half the time,
and…Mom, I keep seeing these
things
outside.”

Her mother didn’t say anything for moment.
Rose knew what that meant.

“
N
o
, I’m not
taking anything!” she snarled.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“No, but if you’d
thought
it any louder, I’d be
deaf
!
Jesus!”

“Okay,” Lisa said. “Let me talk to your
Dad.”

A short, stubborn pause. “You can’t,” she
said. “He’s not here.”

“What? Where
is
he?”

“He had to go to a meeting at VeriSil.”

“Great,” Lisa said bitterly. “Just like old
times.”

“It was really
important. They were going to, like, take away
the project or cancel it or something. Maggie told me—”

“’Maggie’?” Lisa repeated,
not quite believing what she was hearing. “The
computer
told you?”

Another stubborn pause.
“Yes. I mean, why not? Nobody else wants to talk
to me.”

“Honey, I promised Dr. Chamberlain I’d stay
for a while and help. Things are pretty crazy now, with the storm
and everything, and his other doctor didn’t show up and–”

“And what? Now you’re Clara Bow?”

“I think you mean
Clara
Barton
.
Clara Bow was a silent movie star.”

“Great. Fine.” Rose was mad enough to spit
bricks, and her mother was talking about dead celebrities.

“Honey, please
try to understand. I’ll be there as soon
as–”

“Oh, I understand,” she
said coolly. “You’d rather be in a hospital and Dad would rather be
at work than be with
me
. God help
us if both of you were
actually in the same place
for five
minutes.”

Now her mother sounded as cold as she did.
“That’s not fair.”

“Sure it—”

“Rose,” Maggie said right behind her.

She spun around and squeaked.

“Don’t
do
that!” she shrieked.

“Sorry. Your Dad is coming through the main
gate, and I think there’s going to be trouble.”

“Trouble?” Rose echoed.

“Out in front. It’s a mess.”

“What’s going on?” Lisa asked through the
phone.

“It’s Daddy,” Rose said. “Something’s going
on, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later, okay? I’m going to call
in two hours.”

“Two hours,” Lisa said.
“
Every
two
hours.”

“Right. Love you, Mom,” she said, and hung
up.

Rose bounced off the bed
even as some tiny, cool part of her mind repeated it:
Love you.
She thought
that was
the first time she’d said that
out loud in years.

At a distant
honk honk,
beyond the
bedroom window, Maggie told her unnecessarily, “Here he comes.”
Rose turned and the bedroom door began to open even before she put
her hand on the knob.
“Stop
that,” she said.

“Sorry,” Maggie said.

Rose took the wide, curving staircase two
steps at a time, pausing only for a heartbeat before she threw open
the broad front door and lurched onto the covered porch.

The storm swallowed her, shoving at her with
a wind so high it nearly threw her off her feet. It was almost as
wet under the roof as it was in the open yard; she was soaked
within seconds. She staggered to stay upright and peered into the
storm, straining to pick out the distant, dark shadow of the Range
Rover and its guttering headlights from the twisting gray-brown
chaos across the yard.

She crossed her arms and
hugged herself tightly as the Rover bounced up the last hill, made
the sharp right turn and swayed into the turnabout. The whole
driveway was a vast, jittering brown mud puddle, more like a lake
than a yard.
But a four-wheel-drive
shouldn’t have any trouble with that
, she
figured.

“So what’s the problem?” she said. “He
looks–”

The Rover hit the edge of
the gravel driveway, tipped up, and then tipped down,
straight
down, and
plunged grill-first into the water as if it was falling off a
cliff.

Rose watched in horror as
the Rover sank –
surged
– into the quicksand twenty feet in front of her,
and began to disappear into bottomless liquefied mud.

“Dad!”

The hood was already buried. The back end was
tipped up at better than a forty-five degree angle. And still it
sank. And sank. Her father, trapped inside, was slamming his
shoulder against the driver’s door, hard as he could, trying to
open it before the Rover vanished completely.

Too late. The quicksand had sealed the door
shut. It was like trying to push solid rock. And still it fell,
deeper and deeper.

Rose started to wade into
the muck. She had no plan at all, nothing in mind except to get to
him, to
help
him
somehow. The only thing that stopped her was the sound of Maggie’s
voice:

“Rose! Don’t! You can only
help him from
here!
Don’t go out there!”

She stopped herself right at the edge of the
patio. The Rover sank even lower. Only a slice of windshield was
visible now. Her father’s wide blue eyes were all she could see of
him, trapped behind the glass.

Surprisingly, unexpectedly,
she saw his booted feet come up. He was showing her his soles. He
kicked
against the windshield, both feet
at once, and she suddenly understood what he was doing.

“Yes!” she called over the howling wind.
“YES!”

Ken kicked again and the windshield starred
and pushed outwards. Again, and it shattered, his muddy boots
thrusting through two huge holes in the safety glass.

He came out butt-first, legs flailing. He
struggled to turn, stand up on the submerged hood even as it
continued to sink, dancing to keep his balance as the car shifted
under him. And sank again. Even farther.

He needed help, Rose realized stupidly. She
looked around wildly, lost for a moment, then got an idea. “WAIT!”
she bellowed into the gale, then turned and ran back inside.

Rose ripped open the broom closet in the
hallway and snatched the long-handled mop out of its clamp. Without
a breath, she turned and ran back out onto the porch, gasping at
the sudden slash of rain across her face.

He was already a foot lower, shin-deep in
watery mud and sinking.

Rose moved to the very edge
of the covered porch and looped on arm around the four-by-four
support. She dug her nails into the coarse gray hair at one end of
the mop and
flung
the other end as far as she could, towards her father. “Take
it!” she shouted. “TAKE IT!”

The handle splattered into the mud, a yard
from his closest foot. Ken ducked down and seized the end with one
hand, wobbling like a man standing in a rowboat, then grabbed it
with his other hand as well.

Rose took a step back, put
both hands in the mop, and pulled as hard as she could. “Come on,”
she said between clenched teeth. “Come
on…”

He fell down, flat on his
belly. But he fell
forward
, toward Rose, and never lost
his grip on the mop handle. She took another step back and
hauled
on the stick. And another.
And
hauled
, while
he climbed up the mop handle, hand over hand.

His knuckles brushed the red brick porch.
Then his elbows. Then his torso. And only then did he let go of the
mop handle and pull himself the rest of the way out of the rushing,
sucking mud, sprawling on the glittering brickwork, panting like an
animal.

Safe
, Rose thought wildly and flung the filthy mop-handled
aside.
Safe
.

She fell down next to him and threw her arms
around him, covering herself with mud. “Daddy,” she said. “Oh, God,
Daddy, Daddy…”

It was 11:07 a.m.
when Lucy awoke from a sleep she never intended to have, a
prolonged doze at her Station desk.

The last thing she
remembered was trying to send her notes to the UC Riverside server.
The next thing she knew it was, well,
now.

“Where the hell is everybody?” she asked,
entirely to herself. She pulled herself out of her chair and
lurched to the doorway. The desk clock said it was almost lunch
time. Where was Cindy? Where was Carole? Had they taken her advice
and gotten the hell out of Dodge?

She plopped down in Cindy’s
chair at the reception desk and looked around helplessly. “This
is
grea
—”