Creatures of the Storm (29 page)

“Mom?” she said. “God, you won’t believe
what…what? I…” She stopped and listened for a long time. “No,” she
said at length, in a strange, measured tone. “No, actually I
believe you completely.”

Something scratched at the
door, a long, deep, guttural
skaaaaaaaa
that wouldn’t stop. Rose
cast a haunted, sidelong glance at her father and whispered into
the phone. “We can’t, Mom.
We can’t get
out
.”

Things were clattering against the panes of
the atrium a story above their heads. It sounded like bundles of
sticks being flung at the glass, skittering down…and scrabbling
back up.

Rose looked up and recognized them. “I saw
one of those last night,” she said with horrified understanding.
“Maggie, remember? In the bedroom?”

“I remember,” Maggie said.
“And I remember how we got rid of them.” The room’s indirect lights
dimmed a bit and there was a deep, bone-buzzing
hummmm
. The stick-bundles –
scumble
, Ken
thought,
That’s what they’re called,
‘scumble’
– were doused with sparks and
flew away from the windows. He could see one of them lying on the
rain-soaked porch outside, twitching like an animal in the middle
of a seizure.

“No, Mom,” Rose was saying into the phone.
“No, we’re okay for now. They’re outside. They can’t get in.”

Ken gave her a baleful look. She
shrugged.

“What about
you
?” She listened some
more as Ken came to a decision. He dug into his pocket for
keys.

“Okay,” Rose said, nodding. “Okay. I love
you. Here’s Dad.” She held out the phone, and Ken was surprised and
a little stunned to see tears in her violet eyes. “She wants to
talk to you,” she said.

He took the phone. “Having fun?” he said,
trying to sound tough and brave.

“If anything happens to
her,” Lisa said without hesitation, “I will kill you. You get that?
I will actually
kill
you.” She sounded stretched tight, but very calm, very much
in control.

“I get that. And if
anything happens to
you
, Lisa…”

“What?”

He looked straight at his
daughter as he said it, almost challenging her. “I’ve been a
complete asshole for more than two years,” he said. “I know that.
But I still love you. I never stopped. I want us
all
to get the hell out
of…wherever we are…alive.”

Rose’s head came down a few inches, as if she
was absorbing a blow. Her eyes never left his.

It would be so much
easier
,
if she
wasn’t so fucking
smart
. And beautiful. And
right,
most of the time
.

“I’m going to be fine,” Lisa said. “There’s a
big meeting at the Conference Center tonight, and then everybody’s
caravanning out of town. We’ll be with them.”

“‘We’?” he asked.

“Everybody still left at the clinic at eight
o’clock tonight,” she said, “when they come to get us. What about
you?”

“We’ll be over the ridge and out of here by
sunset.” That was no more than an hour away.

“Call me if you can.”

“I will. We’ll meet you at the rest stop,
right outside the Notch. You know the place I mean?”

“Yeah. Right along the highway.”

“That’s it. We’ll wait for you there, or you
wait for us.”

“I promise.”

He nodded, his throat thick with emotion.
“Me, too,” he said. “I promise.” It was a big word for them, one
that hadn’t passed between them for a long, long time.

Lisa hung up then. He handed the phone back
to Rose, who was staring at him as if she’d never seen him before.
He decided very suddenly that he didn’t want to talk to her, not at
this moment.

He didn’t look at his daughter as he sorted
through his keys. “I don’t suppose you know how to drive a
motorcycle?”

“As a matter of fact,” Rose said, “I do.”

Ken looked up, surprised.
“You
do
?”

Her smile was crooked and a
little bitter. “Daddy, I learned to do a
lot
of things those months I wasn’t
at home. You should probably be happy that at least
some
of them were
constructive. Even legal.”

He laughed. He didn’t mean to, but he did.
“Come on,” he said, shaking his head, and they moved down the South
Wing’s central corridor, towards the far-off covered walkway and
the garages beyond.

“Maggie, can you see
anything…
unusual
out there?”

“Not at the moment. The…activity…seems to be
centered around the front door.”

They were almost there. “Good. I gather
you’ve locked all the doors?”

“Gosh, no, boss, I didn’t think of that.”

He scowled. “I don’t recall programming
sarcasm into your conversational protocols.”

“It’s a natural evolution in response to
silly questions,” Maggie said almost tartly.

They had reached the southern entrance.
Beyond it, dimly visible through the four-paned window in the door,
was the covered walkway and the garage beyond it shimmering in the
wind-driven mist. “Unlock it, please,” he said.

The door went
thunk
.

Ken put a hand on the knob,
peered left and right through the door’s window and said
“
Now!
” He threw
open the door and they sprinted the fifteen feet from building to
building. It felt like a mile.

The door to the garage opened before they got
there and slammed tight behind them as soon as they piled inside.
The lights were already on. There was a large empty spot in the
middle of the concrete pad where the Land Rover was supposed to be
waiting. Beyond that was a waist-high mass, five feet wide and
three feet thick, covered by a nearly immaculate tarpaulin.

“Why didn’t I notice that before?” Rose asked
almost rhetorically. The rain was like a snare drum on the
uninsulated roof, loud enough to give an instant headache.

“You were too busy being pissed off at me,”
he said. “Besides, it’s on the driver’s side.” He walked across the
room, undid a set of bungee cords, and whipped the tarp away.

A sweetly evil black Kawasaki 4500 RoadMaster
was waiting underneath, polished to such a high shine that it
seemed to glow with a dark light of its own.

“My
God
, Daddy,” Rose said, almost
breathless. “What
were
you thinking?”

He stared at the bike.
“Well,” he said, “I was forty years old, my brother had killed
himself, my wife had given me the worst news a wife and can give
her husband, and…I had
all this
money
.” He smiled, and it was only
half-cynical. “The ultimate mid-life crisis.”

Rose approached the bike
and ran an envious, almost lustful hand over the cowling. “No,
no,
no,
”
she said admiringly. “The ultimate in
totally
cool
bikes.”

He had to agree. “I’ll be back in twenty
minutes,” he said. “Then we can—”

Rose stared at him with
frank astonishment. “You think you’re going to
leave
me here?” she said.
“Alone?”

He smirked. “There is
exactly
one
bike.
And riding two-up in his storm would be dangerous.”

“What, like staying
here
isn’t
dangerous?”

“Ken…” Maggie said, trying to interrupt
politely.

“Rose, there are
things
out
there—”

“
Ken
,” Maggie said more
urgently.

“—who can get in
here
any fucking time
they want to, Daddy. What, you’re going to leave me with your pet
robot while you go slammin’ off to—”

The rolling garage door exploded inward and a
creature made of broken bones as big as tree trunks surged inside.
Ken bellowed, Rose screamed, and they both jumped away from the
horror as fast as they could, scurrying back to the door they’d
come in.

The thing fell with a crash
into the spot where the Rover should have been. A wave of water and
wind rushed in with it. Thick arms burst from its trunk and grew in
seconds to tower over them. Then the rocky black-and-gray creature
with no mouth and no face extended three massive limbs, each
thicker than an oak, and scooped up the Kawasaki like a toy. Ken
watched as it
pinched
the bike, collapsing it at the midpoint into a block less
than six inches thick. Two hundred pounds of beautifully
engineered, virtually solid steel clunked
to the concrete in two distorted hunks as swiftly and easily
as a boy squeezes clay between his fingers. The sound alone was
incredibly painful.

He didn’t wait for the
creature to drop it. He simply turned and shoved his daughter out
the side door, back onto the walkway, without even thinking of what
might be waiting in the rain. “Out!” he shouted over the shattering
motorcycle and the rattle of the rain. “Out,
out!
”

The walkway was clear. They ran back through
the opening door to the house and threw themselves inside as the
bone spiders attacked the detached garage from all sides and tore
it to pieces.

Just. Like. That.

They fled down the hall,
escaping the sound of the destruction and the grinding roar of the
creatures themselves. There was a thundering
boom
on the front door as they
passed, and Rose skidded to a stop without thinking.

She looked through the side windows that
faced the driveway. “Oh my God,” she said, and backed away. Ken
peered through the window himself. Two more bone spiders were close
behind the one on the porch, pawing and sinking in the liquefied
landfill as lightning stuttered in the lowering clouds behind them.
The dull glare of the security lights gave them a sick yellow
luminosity all their own.

The
boom
came again. And again.
Boom. Boom
.

“Oh, fuck,” Rose said.
“
It’s knocking at the
door.
”

Jimmy
Fultz was up and off to work before dawn. He was wearing three
layers of clothing under his canvas overcoat, plastic wrap over his
uniform’s cap, and he was still soaked to the skin ten minutes
after he stepped outside.

He met Bo Cameron and the Sheriff at the HQ
before six a.m. Mindy looked bad, like she hadn’t slept at all or
had been crying all night. Or both. Sheriff Peck clearly didn’t
care. He was focused on the two of them.

“Make the evacuation
announcement and look for people in trouble,” he said grimly. “If
they have working vehicles, send them out of town.
Make
them leave. If they
don’t have vehicles, tell them to hunker down until six o’clock
tonight, then come to the Conference Center. We’ll gather whatever
transportation we can find and caravan out of town from
there.”

“We’re not going to stay and fight?” Mindy
said, her voice quavering. “We’re going to run?”

“Fight what?” Peck snapped. “Water? It’s
already won. Whenever the storm breaks, we’ll come back and clean
up, if we can. For now…it’s done.”

Jimmy could see that he hated saying it, but
he thought the Sherriff was right. In the last twenty-four hours
he’d seen things he couldn’t believe, and they were only getting
worse. That, and he was pretty sure he was having
hallucinations.

“Must be the stress,” he said to himself,
completely unaware he was talking out loud.

“What?” Peck snapped. “You have a
problem?”

“No, sir,” he said, and swallowed.

Peck shoved a finger at him. “You take the
south side.” The finger swiveled to Bo, who stiffened as if it had
pierced him like a dart. “You take the north. Come if I call,
otherwise …”

Peck stopped for a second, and a sudden,
dreamy, distant look came into his eyes. As if for one moment he
comprehended where he was, what he was doing, how everything had
changed.

“Just go,” he said softly, and turned
away.

It didn’t take Jimmy long to realize that
most of the South Side, the part of town Sheriff Peck had assigned
him, was already underwater. He didn’t care. He gave some thought
to the best way he could complete the assignment, and after much
consideration he drove his patrol car, the oldest still in service,
the one with a crack in the passenger side window, to the splendid,
well-maintained Lazenby Estate high on East Ridge.

He knocked on the door very
politely, but nobody answered. Then he knocked loud-politely and
still nobody answered. Well, it was a courtesy anyway. He was the
law, after all.
And with that Jimmy
trudged around the side of the house to the long, sloping concrete
driveway and commandeered the tidy little twelve-foot ketch with
the outboard motor that the Lazenbys called
Dragonfly.
It was half afloat
already. Rainwater was sluicing down the slope from the top of the
ridge so strongly and steadily it was creating a miniature river
that crested around the boat’s trailer.