Creatures of the Storm (27 page)

“Jesus,” Ken said. “What is this, Hurricane
Sandy?”

“Worse,” Maggie said flatly. She showed them
a new weather satellite image of the storm swirling over the
Valle.

“It looks like a skin disease,” Rose said,
stepping closer to the screen. “Like a cancer.” She looked even
paler than usual, her hair obsidian black against her
scrubbed-white skin. “Any idea how long it will last?”

“No possible break until tomorrow evening,
and even then…no guarantees. Until then, it will keep getting worse
and worse.”

The view shifted to a grainy black-and-white
view of a lake in the rain. It took Ken more than a moment to
realize it wasn’t a lake at all, it was the VeriSil campus that he
had only recently left. “I broke a few rules,” Maggie said, “and
patched into every traffic and security camera I could find,
including VeriSil, Dos Hermanos Water and Power, and a few Sheriff
Peck put into place that nobody seems to know about. As you can
see, VeriSil is underwater.” The construction site was all that
showed above the waterline, a moldy black skeleton of some ancient,
ruined temple.

The picture shifted to show an intersection
north of VeriSil, almost as submerged as the computer plant.
“Indiana and Maynard,” she said. “Five feet.” It switched to
another view, this one showing a row of tidy cottages with
floodwater flowing merrily in and out of wide-open front doors.
“Two blocks farther north,” Maggie said. “Indiana and Brighton.
Three feet. Roughly half the Valle is under four feet or more, and
it’s rising by inches every hour. It’s the worst-case scenario,
Ken. DH is filling up like a punch bowl.”

Ken glanced at Rose, who was staring at the
screen with growing alarm.

“And no chance of calling
somebody?” he said. “The Guard, FEMA, firefighters,
anybody
?”

“I keep trying,” she said,
“and I can get all the information I want flowing
in
… but nothing’s
flowing
out
. It’s
like being on the wrong side of a one-way mirror.”

Nice analogy,
he thought distantly.
I
wonder if she made that up herself?
The
implications jolted him.
How much like a
human
is
she?

“The Clinic!” Rose said. “Can you see the
Clinic?”

“Yes,” Maggie said. The screen flickered to a
down-angle shot of the Clinic’s waiting room as seen from a high
corner. The time code in the upper right said 00:12:21, just a few
minutes ago.

The image was painted with garish,
uncorrected colors, and the strange angle made it look like
everyone’s heads were swollen and their bodies shrunken, but it was
still clear what was going on. Sick, scared, and injured people
were filling the room to bursting, and everyone was dirty and wet.
A few bodies in white coats, not particularly clean or dry
themselves, moved from body to body, offering help, comfort,
advice.

“Look! There she is, there’s Mom!”

Sure enough, Ken could see the part in her
hair more clearly than her face, but it was obviously Lisa Corman
Mackie herself, shoulder to shoulder with the young doctor,
Chamberlain. They watched a silent, intense conversation with one
little boy, clearly terrified by all that had happened, then saw
them move farther, deeper into the room, to huddle over an old man
whose leg was bent in a wrong and dangerous way.

“She looks okay,” Rose
said. The relief in her voice was obvious. “In fact, she
looks
good
.”

Ken found himself smiling. “She does,” he
nodded. “She really does.”

The screen cut to static. “Hey!” Rose
cried.

“There’s more,” Maggie said. ”Some images I
can’t correlate.” The static resolved itself into rain. Heavy,
white, straight-vertical rain falling as thick as a waterfall.

A
thing
came out of the torrent,
impossibly tall, built entirely of legs. Its sharp edges and
corners made it look manufactured, cleaner, more precise
than any organism. It moved with a strange fluid
awareness that said
alive
,
dangerous, hungry
. And strangest of
all, the rain didn’t seem to touch it. Despite the six inches of
water that foamed around its lower points as they plunged into the
ground, the…
thing
…didn’t get wet. The rain seemed to fall
into
it before it could even glisten
with moisture.

Rose said, “Holy
shit
,” and before Ken
could speak, Maggie shifted the image: a vacant lot elsewhere in
town, with four of the…
things
…

“Bone spiders,” he whispered.

… stalking madly across a flooded vacant lot,
chasing something dark and furry. A dog, a filthy, wet, panicked
dog.

“Oh my god,” Rose said, her voice
trembling.

The image changed again: a pile of rocks that
seemed to roll round and round itself under its own power,
trundling down Bishop Avenue and leaving cracked asphalt and chewed
flesh in its wake.

“Brickteeth,” Ken said.

A long, jointed writhing log with a white,
flexing razor-flower gaping at one end.

“Dragontongue.”

A ragged-edged sheet of cellophane, oily
rainbows shimmering through it, twisting through the air, driven by
the wind, wrapping around a running woman.

“Flumes. Jesus, what
is
this?”

What indeed. Where were
these names coming from? How did he know these things, why did
he
recognize
them?

“We gotta get outta here,” Rose said.

Ken turned towards her. She
was trembling, staring at the images.
“
We gotta get outta here
now,
Dad.”

She started fast-walking down the corridor
towards the front door as quickly as her lean legs could carry
her.

“What the
hell
?” Ken said, and
chased after her. “Honey,
wait!
”

“No,” she said as she ran
from him. “
No.
T
his is crazy. I don’t care if you
have a car or not, we can
walk
the hell out of here,
run
out if we have to.”

She skidded to a stop at the front door and
groped blindly for the latch.

“Honey,
wait
. I have a better—”

“No!” Rose said, in full panic mode. “No,
let’s just GO!” She threw the door open and turned to throw herself
into the storm.

A bone spider, two stories
tall, rose up out of the bubbling mud directly in front of the
porch. Ten of its ten thousand legs rose up, already clean, dry as
granite and sharp as steel, and reached for her,
grew
towards
her.

Ken seized her by the
collar of her thin black tee and jerked
her back inside with one hand as he slammed
the door shut with the other. There was a
deafening
crack!
of ripping wood when the talons of the creature scraped
across the entrance. It went on and on and on as they both fell
back and scrambled out of the entryway, into the living room, away
from the horrible sound.

“
Jesus,”
Rose said. “Oh, my god,
oh,
Jesus
…”

The scraping stopped. A moment later
lightning cut through the house and thunder pushed at the
windows.

They lay sprawled on the
terra cotta tiles of the living room, panting and terrified. Rose
swallowed hard and cleared her throat. “Okay, Dad,” she said
roughly. Her face was so white it was nearly translucent. “When
you’re right, you’re right. This
is
the safest place in town.”

Thirty seconds after Lucy found Cindy Bergstrom’s body, she
was running.
Okay,
she thought, grasping for thought,
okay, okay. Cindy’s dead and somebody killed her. Maybe
Fender, I don’t know. But the others…?

She pounded down the
corridor towards the office wing. “Rebecca?” she shouted.
“
Rebecca!!
” Her
assistant could have come in while Lucy was sleeping at her desk;
anything could have happened.

She burst into Rebecca’s office, there was no
one there. It didn’t look as if it had been disturbed since the day
before. Lucy realized she was panting like a race horse.

“Okay,” she said again, aloud this time.
“Okay, then…”

Steinberg.
He was a solid gold twenty-four-karat asshole,
but he was her responsibility.

She turned on her heel, her thoughts spinning
as she ran.

I gotta get the hell out of
here. But if I leave now
,
I’ll never come back
.

She was certain of that. The town itself was
doomed. Even her facility, high on the north rim of the crater as
it might have been, was in jeopardy from the continuing wind and
liquefaction.

She passed the lunch room and tried not to
think of Cindy’s twisted body lying on the wet linoleum, staring at
the ceiling.

There are files
here,
she thought
wildly
. Experiments, projects, sample
cases. All irreplaceable. Years of work. What am I going to do, how
am I –

She pushed her way through the broken
entrance to Steinberg’s lab and stopped short.

Every specimen in the room was gone or
crushed. Every instrument, every cage, every case and container and
tray was destroyed. She stood in the middle of the devastation,
flinching at the cold, wet wind blowing through the shattered
window, and turned full circle, awed at how thorough the vandalism
was.

Except…
there
. Sitting in one corner, in an
almost perfect ring of cleared floor was Steinberg’s computer, his
chair still upright in front of it, its screen still clean and
glowing, power still on. All the files were neatly arranged right
on the desktop. And there was a digital image, a crisp and clear
close-up of one of his ‘new creatures’, as his
wallpaper.

Why was that spared?
Why would looters leave that – about the only
thing worth stealing in the first place?

Fascinated, she forgot her terror for a
moment and sat gingerly in front of the keyboard. She
double-clicked on the first icon she saw, a folder marked NEW
TAXONOMY.

Her jaw dropped at what she saw.

It took a precious five
minutes to see it all, but by then she knew what she had
here.
He was telling the truth,
she realized.
All that
horseshit about a new species, those bogus specimens like the soda
straw and the bird claw and all. They were real.
They were the remnants –maybe the
seeds
– of a whole host
of creatures.

Michael Steinberg had been going mad, maybe
for a long time, but he stayed a scientist to the bitter end. He
had kept all his notes in meticulous order. He had examined the
creatures, dissected and tested them, taken digital pictures and
even digital video as they grew, always measuring, always
observing, always recording. Hell, he’d even left the webcam
attached to this computer running after he went totally off the
rails, destroying all the cages, setting all his pets free.

It would take hours,
days,
weeks,
to
work through all he had here, but it was painfully clear: he really
had defined new a whole new set of creatures, a New Taxonomy. Their
structures, their biology and biochemistry. Their strengths and
weaknesses. All from a man who was slowly but surely
becoming
one of
them
.

That was the worst
part.
Lucy stared mutely at the screen.
‘
Transformational speciation,’ he called
it. Turning people into creatures like
him.

She stared at the digital
images of what Michael Steinberg had become,
was becoming.

“Look at that,” she said
under her breath. “Just
look…”

Lightning struck the ridge outside. Thunder
exploded beyond the shattered window, snapping Lucy out of her
horrified paralysis.

What the hell am I
doing?
I have to get out
of here!

She understood in a
blinding instant that she had to get this data out of here and tell
somebody. The university, the army, NASA,
somebody…

Steinberg, anal-compulsive as ever, had
stored all the data in the one folder. It was easy to handle. She
tried to use the broadband connection to upload the entire folder
to the University server back in Riverside, but as before, there
was no indication it went through at all.

Screw it
, she decided. She pawed through the two drawers that hadn’t
been pulled out and overturned and found half a dozen black and red
flash drives with the Station's logo on it. She knew it well, 100G
storage, all she would need. She wrote the entire folder to one of
them in less than a minute and slipped it into an inner pocket of
her khaki coat. Then she slogged out of the Steinberg’s devastated
lab without a pause, promising herself she’d come back for the
rest.