Creatures of the Storm (35 page)

An instant later the power went off.

“Dad?” Rose said. “Daddy?”

“Right here,” he said. “I—”

The power came back on. The emergency
generator had kicked in, as it was supposed to.

“Maggie!” he called. “Status?”

“UPS did its job,” Maggie said calmly. “I
didn’t even have to reboot.”

Rose scowled. “What has UPS got to–”

“Uninterruptable Power Source,” Lucy said.
“To keep the computer running in spite of power failure. Don’t be
an idiot.”

Rose started to fire something back, but
Maggie hadn’t finished.

“There’s bad news, Ken.”

“The antenna array,” he guessed. He had been
expecting it. Dreading it, really.

“Yes. They’re all gone. I’ve lost all contact
with uplinks, reference satellites, the internet. We are on our
own.”

And now she’d be even
slower,
Rose realized. No more
supercomputers to squirt questions to when things got
complicated.

There was a rumble in the room to the east –
the crunching, thumping approach of the storm-creatures. It grew
louder…and louder…and an electrical KZZZAK! cut through it, snapped
it off. The lights dimmed at the same moment, then recovered.

“Time to get upstairs,” Maggie said, and the
door to the stairwell popped open. “Quickly, please.”

“This,” Lucy said, getting
to her feet and brushing the biggest chunks of drying mud from her
clothes, “is too fucking
weird
.”

Something beyond the
western doors went
crunch
.

They ran up the stairs as fast as they
could.

Five minutes later, crouching in a side-chair
in the corner of her father's bedroom, Rose tried to call her
mother. It was stupid and she knew it. The wind had blown the
towers down, the power was off, and the satellites that might relay
a signal were cut off from them for some reason. They had been for
days. Still, she had to try. She had to hear her mother's voice one
more time. It was pointless. There was nothing there, not even the
equivalent of a dial tone or a “systems busy” message.

Rose sighed bitterly. She was about to throw
the damn thing across the room when a blinking icon on the iPhone's
screen caught her attention.

She had a voice-mail.

She hadn't heard the phone ring earlier,
though that was no surprise. The gradual, relentless destruction of
the house by storm-creatures and the shrieking of the storm itself
drowned out everything—literally. She tapped the proper code and
pressed the phone to her ear, straining for every syllable.

It was a terrible connection. She could
barely hear. But she would have recognized her mother's voice
anywhere.

“
-etting worse, Rosie,”
her Mom said,
and for once she didn't mind the kid version of her name.
“
We don't –ink the caravan's … —et here.
But we'll go anyway. Somehow. We …ake it to the highway and the…
otch and we'll mee.. you there, I
promise,
we...”

There was a long pause then
– nothing but hissing and spitting – until two final syllables rose
out of the static: –
love y—”

That was all.

Rose listened to it two more times, then she
buttoned the phone back into one of the pockets of her canvas vest
and let herself cry.

It killed over a thousand people. Those not
in or near the Conference Center were drowned by the manmade
tsunami that followed moments later.

Electrical power cut off
with a knife-sharp
pop
seconds after the wind hit the city center. Dos Hermanos,
California ceased to exist at that moment. The few who survived
both the wind and the water found themselves trapped in an endless,
rain-choked night, with no light, no help, no hope.

It wasn’t long before the creatures of the
storm came for them.

THE THIRD DAY

“
I
have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man
is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I
was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was – and
methought I had – but man is but a patch'd fool if he will offer to
say what methought I had.”

- William
Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night's
Dream

All those people
, Rose
thought numbly.
What happened? Where are
they
?

She stood at her father’s
bedroom window and looked into the storm. The town of Dos Hermanos
should have been visible below them, even in the middle of a dark
and stormy night like this.
Dark and
stormy,
she repeated to herself.
What a laugh.
Still, she
knew she should have been looking down at a misty carpet of
landbound stars, but those lights, already dim and guttering in the
storm, had vanished when the wind hit.

Lightning flared for an instant, and she saw
the rough, nearly flat top of the stone pillar thrusting out of the
driveway. It looked like an island of rock floating over a lake of
mud. Moments later, there was a subtle vibration under her bare
feet. She thought it was thunder at first...then, on impulse, she
laid down on the floor and put her ear against the Berber rug.

It wasn't thunder at all. It was the
creatures of the storm, eating the house out from under them.

She could hear them
downstairs, tearing through the walls, crunching across the
carpets. There were no voices, no roaring, not even any breathing.
Only…
clattering
beneath the gurgle of the rain. It was the sound of every
artifact, every object, every human shape being
shattered.

There was a sudden BOOM
when an interior wall collapsed beneath her, and a
thwack
of bones knocking
on the window to her right.
Scumbles
again
, Rose thought. Maggie answered the
attack with an electric THRUMM-
buzz
of her own. Out of the corner of her eye, Rose
saw the creature explode off the screen in a shower of sparks, and
the lights dimmed as current ran through the household security
grid. It was the fifth time in an hour that Maggie had triggered
the defense system, and it took longer for the lights to recover
each time she used it.

Is that all that’s keeping
them away?
Rose wondered, ear still
pressed to the floor.
Just the
electricity?
She had a vivid image of the
creatures waiting patiently, a few feet below her – inches
away, really.

Suddenly Lucy was standing over her. “Get
up,” she said gruffly.

Rose ignored her. “You can hear them,” she
said. “Moving around.”

Lucy Armbruster’s round,
righteous face was right next to hers, glaring at her, too close
for comfort. “Look,” Lucy said in a fierce whisper, “the electrical
grid that Maggie’s using to drive those fuckers away only goes
around the
outside
of this house. Not between the floors. The second they figure
that out, one of those bone spiders is gonna shove one of its big
ol’ claws right up through this floor.”

Rose stared blindly at her for a beat...then
jumped to her feet and backed away. “You didn’t have to do that,”
she said in a very low voice. She kept glaring at Lucy as she moved
as far from her listening spot as she could, on tiptoes.

Lucy shrugged her rounded shoulders. “Yeah,”
she admitted. “But it got you up.”

The room was a huge “L”-shape – a full
bedroom and bath, with a vast bed, a dresser, two end tables, and a
generously proportioned nook around the corner where Ken had put
bookshelves and a desk for his laptop. Her father was nowhere near
the desk or the media center it housed, he was using the bed itself
as a workspace, standing over it and gazing at the reams of
print-outs and charts and scrolling data on three different tablets
scattered across the mattress. The material was generated from the
data that Lucy had brought to them hours before, and it had snagged
his complete attention. He hadn’t heard a word of the two women's
conversation.

“This is incredible,” he said, entirely to
himself.

There was another BOOM!
when another wall fell downstairs. A massive talon
skreeeeked
along the
hardwood floor. Rose could feel it as well as hear it, tickling up
through the carpet. She couldn’t help staring at the floor –
through
the
floor.

“Where did they come from?”
she asked. “How could they simply
appear
like this? Like ‘Instant
Monster, Just add water’?”

“It can’t be as easy as it
seems,” Lucy said from across the room. They didn’t look at each
other as they talked. “Evolution doesn’t work like that. Whole
species, whole
ecologies
, don’t pop up overnight.”
She suddenly, unexpectedly, smiled. “You ever see that
movie,
Evolution
?
Really terrible picture; David Duchovny trying to get out from
under
X-Files
,
and I don’t remember who else.”

“I don’t think I saw it,” Rose said, staring
at nothing.

“This meteor crashes to
Earth, actually out in the desert, now that I think of it, with
these little speckles of living
stuff
on it. Things start growing in
the crater. Plants first, then insects, then monkey-type animals,
all of them alien, of course, ready to kick ass and take over the
planet.” She looked back out at the lightning again.

“Do you think that’s what’s happening now?”
Rose asked.

“
No
,” Lucy said, annoyed. “It was
total bullshit. It would never work that way.” She looked down at
her shoes. “Besides, it was a comedy.”

“Do you think it’s
happening all over?” Rose said quietly. “Like in
War of the World
s or
something?”

“No,” Ken and Lucy said, immediately and
together.

“The rainstorm is isolated
to this crater valley,” Lucy went on. “It’s a humongous
mountain-shadow effect. We saw that on the last of the satellite
images. Right over the ridge, not two miles
that
way,” she pointed out the back
of the house, due west, “it’s sunny and hot as usual. If it’s the
rainstorm that…
activated
…these things, as we think
it did, then it’s still isolated to this crater.”

“Besides,” Ken said, “think about the video
broadcasts and internet stuff we were getting right up until the
wind hit. Everything was fine, CNN, The Weather Channel, all the
data and government links. Right through the first two days. No,
it’s only us.” He gave Rose a sharp look, as if he'd suddenly
remembered something. “Have you got everything you need?” he asked
her.

It took Rose a moment to understand what we
was talking about. “Yeah. Yes. We got clothes from my room before
we locked ourselves in here, including my, you know, underwear. And
hiking boots and long johns. All that stuff.”

“Good,” he said, already on to something else
in his mind. “You should get changed.”

Rose was lacing her second boot and pulling
it tight when something exploded near the kitchen. It was violent
enough to make the room shake.

“Another processor gone,”
Maggie said. “Boss…” There was another THRUMM
-
buzz!
and
the lights lowered again. When they came back on, they were
noticeably dimmer.

Something was drumming on the floor directly
beneath them, like thigh-bones on a cardboard box. It almost
sounded like it was knocking.

It made Rose angry. “I
don’t
get
it,”
she said. “They can’t just
show up!
You can’t have one lousy fucking
rainstorm
and see the
whole world collapse like this. It’s
ridiculous.
”

Lucy almost laughed at her. She was grinning
and shaking her head. “Kid,” she began.

“Don’t call me
kid,”
Rose
snapped
. “Jesus, that’s
condescending!”

Lucy was taken aback.
“Okay. Sorry.
Rose
. I was just saying, I don’t think you have any idea how
precarious life is.”

Rose frowned. Thunder rumbled so low and
powerful she could feel it in her chest, but she tried to ignore
it.

“We’re on the razor’s edge
here,” Lucy said. “If Earth was just a few planetary diameters
closer to the sun, we’d fry like a falafel ball. A few diameters
farther away … Tastee-Freez. Meanwhile, even in this magical
temperate zone of ours, the best that evolution could come up with
was the feeble human being. We’re pathetic. Weak and almost
completely non-adaptive. We can only exist long enough to procreate
in a tiny
temperature range, far less than
most living things. We can’t go more than a few hours without
water, a few days without food. We're so delicate it’s kind of
sickening.”

Something caught Lucy’s
eye. She reached down and plucked a shiny Macintosh apple out of a
bowl of fruit on Ken’s end table. “Seriously, if this was a scale
model of the Earth – the whole planet,
this big
– how thick do you think
the whole biosphere would be? From the top of the atmosphere to the
bottom of the Marianas Trench, the entire layer of organized life
on the planet. How thick?” She held up the apple as if challenging
the teenager.