Creatures of the Storm (37 page)

Rose snapped her phone shut and tried not to
look guilty. For some reason she figured that Maggie didn’t want
her Dad to know they’d been talking. “No,” she said, “I was just
trying it...”

He nodded and looked down. “Nearly done,” he
said. “I wanted to talk to you a little first.”

You, too?
she thought, thoroughly uncomfortable.

“We might not have time for this later,” he
said, “so I want to say it now. Especially with…since we don’t know
where your Mom is, I…I may be the only one who can tell you.”

“Dad, you don’t have to do this.”

He smiled at the floor. “Oh, yeah,” he said.
“I do.”

He looked up at her, and she was shocked by
the glittering in his hazel eyes. He was holding back tears,
obviously terrified. She had never seen him cry before. She had
never seen him afraid.

“I idolized your Uncle
Pat,” he said. “He was a hero to me from the time we were kids.
Hell, he taught me to
read
, Rose. He worked on my homework
with me when Mom and Dad were too busy or distracted. And then he
became a
real
hero, a firefighter, while I went off to play with
computers.”

She started to say
something and then stopped herself. There was no reason to butt in.
Thunder echoed through the house. Something
tap-tap-tapped
under their feet,
hard as a ball peen hammer.

Ken ignored it. “When he
started hanging around the house in Palos Verdes more and more, I
was glad
,
” he
said. “I thought we would be closer now, more of a real family. But
that wasn’t why. Right after your twelfth birthday, when things
were really starting to take off for the business, I learned three
things. And then he died.”

“Shit, Dad…”

“First, I don’t know what happened, really.
Something on the job, maybe, or professional burn-out or mid-life
crisis, But your Uncle Pat started drinking. Heavily. He was drunk
at least part of every day in those last few months, and most of
every day.

“Second, maybe it was the
drinking, maybe it was something I did or didn’t do. I’ll never
know. But the fact is your Mom and Uncle Pat slept together for
over a year before he died.” He swallowed hard. “They… they
had an
‘affair.'
Fuck, I hate that term.”

Rose could see how much it hurt him to say
that out loud.

She was starting to cry. She couldn’t help
it.

“And three, his death in the pool wasn’t an
accident. At least I don’t think it was. I confronted him about
the, the… about him and Lisa. We had a fight. He punched me in the
stomach and I left, and when I came back an hour later, he had
drunk a full bottle of Cutty Sark and thrown himself into the pool,
knowing what would happen.” Ken ran his hand through his hair,
working hard to keep it together. “He passed out. He drowned. And I
was the one who found him.”

Rose stood up and put a hand on his arm.
“Daddy, stop it. I don’t have to—”

He couldn’t bring himself
to look at her. “It
broke
me, Rosie. I couldn’t talk to Lisa about it,
though I tried. Obviously. I couldn’t talk to you, you were only
twelve. You were just a kid.”

She started to protest, and
then was struck with an image of herself two-and-a-half years ago:
the pony tail, the wide-open spirit. No experience with anything
anywhere, and a head full of obsessions about GuildWars and her
best girlfriend Rita and what was happening on
Degrassi
that week. She had to nod.
“Yeah,” she said. “I was just a kid.”

“All I had was money.
VeriSil had given me this huge
deal,
enough to open an office and hire a staff and buy equipment. So I
took it all and...left. I came here. I didn't build an office, I
didn't hire a staff. I did all the work myself and begged for more
and more time. I
ran
, Rosie. And everything that happened after that—to you, to
your Mom, everything – was because I ran.”

He was half right, she knew, but only half.
There was a lot more to her running away and her drug problems and
her mother’s shutdown and even… ‘the affair’…than something as
simple as The Curse of the Absent-Minded Professor and the arrival
of his sexy alcoholic firefightin’ brother. She wanted to tell him
that. She wanted to open her mouth and tell him everything she
knew—

There was a tremendous crash directly below
them. The walls wobbled and the floor shuddered and shifted under
them.

They were coming. Rose
figured that was the last piece of the staircase falling apart,
and
they were coming
.

“Dad,” she said, trying to
sound as sympathetic as possible, “we need to talk about this a lot
more, and we will. And I really,
really
appreciate you telling this
to me now. It matters. But…can we postpone the rest until we’re
sure we’re actually going to live until dinnertime?”

He blinked at her for a moment, then smiled.
She smiled back. “Okay,” he said. “That makes sense.”

He turned away, and she saw
– she actually
saw
– his formidable powers of concentration leap up, as he
turned to the task at hand.

“I’ll get the board,” he said, raising his
voice and speaking to Lucy. “You explain the plan to Rose.”

Lucy nodded and came to her
while her dad picked up the thickest book he could find – it looked
like one of the later
Harry Potters
– and started whacking at the empty top layer of
the bookcase as hard as he could. It was a long, heavy piece of
furniture, with a top plank two inches thick that ran nearly the
full length of the room, but he was making progress.

He was knocking it free.

“Okay,” Lucy said, keeping an eye on his
work. “Here’s the plan. We’re going to use that bookcase board to
build a bridge from this window to the top of that rock out there.
When all three of us are out, we’ll grab the board, bring it over,
and use it as a bridge on the other side, to reach solid ground
beyond the driveway, at the foot of that eucalyptus tree.” Rose
could see the top of the tree she was talking about through the
bedroom window, whipping back and forth in the wind, ash-white in
the light of the security spots. “From there,” Lucy said, “we can
go on foot along a ridge trail until we get away from the
liquefaction, and then…”

She trailed off, almost glaring at Ken as he
worked the long, thick plank loose.

“Then what?”

“Then we can work our way
north to the Notch and get the hell out of here…or we can go south
and try to kill this …
thing
inside the Two Brothers. The thing that’s
directing the creatures.”

Now they were both looking at Ken, who was
either concentrating on the task at hand or pretending to ignore
them. Or both.

“What does Dad say?” Rose asked quietly.

“He hasn’t decided ye—”
There was a long, loud, double-toned
screeeeee
as a claw or a spike
dragged down the hallways, tearing up drywall and floorboards as it
came. It stopped outside the locked and barricaded door…

... and then the chewing started.

“Okay,” Lucy said. “Enough of this shit.” She
crouched down and started to plug her two stripped extensions cords
into the wall socket nearest the window, then stopped

“Maggie?” she said sharply. “Is this socket
off?”

“Yes.”

Lucy sighed. “Good.” She
plugged in both cords, pushing twice to make sure they were secure,
then took the far end of the naked wires and tied them loosely to
two belt-loops on her jeans. They were long cords, at least twenty
feet each. “Is that board ready
yet
?” she snapped to Ken, sounding
completely annoyed.

“Oh, shut
up
,” he said. He pulled
it free of the last nail and struggled to lift it. Both Lucy and
Rose rushed to help. “There we go,” he said.

As they were hefting the lumber, choosing
their spots, Lucy looked over at Rose with a combative frown. “I
hate kids, you know,” she said.

Rose raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah. I think they should be sent away to
military academies and boarding schools until they’re old enough to
enter society. Like twenty-five.”

Rose blinked at her. “Okay…”

“But you ...” she said, “you’re all
right.”

Rose had a strong sense of how much that
admission cost Lucy Armbruster. She was almost touched.

Lucy sneered, like she’d
bitten down on something distasteful. “Whatever,” she said, and
shouldered the plank. “Okay! Maggie, open the window and cut the
security grid on
three
, you got it?”

“Got it,” Maggie said, sounding eager.

A piece of the bedroom door behind them flew
away, pulled back by the creature ripping at it from the other
side.

“One!” They lifted the board.

“Two!” Rose checked: yeah, her pockets were
buttoned and buckled. She was ready to go.

“THREE!” They ran forward
as if they were going to ram the board end-first into the window
like a battering ram. At the last instant, the casement window flew
wide and the constant THRUMM of electricity cut off. Ken got to the
window frame first, let go of the plank, and guided it out the
window like a long wooden tongue. Momentum overcame bad balance; as
fast as
one-two-three
, the far end of the twelve-by-two had
plonked
against the flat top of the
rock tower ten feet beyond the sill.

They’d made themselves a bridge.

Another chunk of the door
flew away with a
skreeeeek
. Rose saw flashes of
something ash-gray and multi-ribbed outside in the hall through the
crack, as Lucy and Ken came up, one on each side of her, and pushed
her forward. “You first” Ken said. “You’re lightest!”

She was up on the window
box before she could stop them, and she took only an instant to
decide.
What the hell,
she thought. She braced herself, and looked back one last
time,
and saw her father standing there
grinning, red-cheeked and bright-eyed –
alive
– even as the door
disintegrated ten feet behind him. He was exactly as she remembered
him from years before.

She would never love him more than she did at
that moment.

Rose turned away, hunched
her shoulders, and ran
full-tilt through
the window, into the storm.

It hit her like a force field all along her left side. Her
feet danced on the wet wood. She staggered once, halfway along, and
then she was across, onto the rock. The uneven, rain-soaked surface
was slick as ice. The instant her shoes touched it they flew out
from under her, and she landed on her ass with a
thump
.

For one inglorious moment
she thought she was going to keep sliding and fly right off the
stone tower. But she stopped, and turned to shriek through the wind
and rain,
“Be careful!
SLIPPERY!”

Lucy vaulted out the
window, hit the board in two places. It bowed alarmingly right near
the middle, and she
smacked
into the stone
right
next to her. Rose could hear the scientist panting like a steam
engine, more out of excitement than exertion.

“Son of a
bitch
” she gasped. “What
a rush!”

They both turned to see Ken
climb up into the window frame as the last of the door at his back
flew away and a
thing
, all curves of claw and flickering talons, tried to force
its way into the room. He jumped, and jumped again, and the two
women back-stopped him as he hit the stone tower and fell into a
heap, all arms and legs.

“Graceful as ever,” Rose said into his
ear.

“What can I say?” he said, struggling to his
feet. “I was born to dance.”

He and Lucy bent to pick up the end of the
board and slide it across; it would barely reach the rocks at the
base of the huge eucalyptus, but it would work. They would have to
slide down the board at better than a 45-degree angle, which was
far better than the alternative.

They barely had their
fingers under the plank, barely had it three inches off the stone,
when a cantilevered, faceless knot of talons and needles
jumped
through the bedroom window and
landed with a
thwack!
in the middle of the bridge. They simultaneously let go of
the board to avoid losing fingers.

The growing, crackling spike-wad wobbled for
a moment on the makeshift bridge, then found its balance. It
swiveled on thirty separate legs and started crawling directly
towards them…slowly at first, then with growing speed.

“Shit,” Lucy said. She reached back and
unknotted the stripped extension cords that were still tied to her
pants. “MAGGIE!” she bellowed. She spread her arms wide as she
shouted, a gleaming wire in each fist.

The spotlights on the side of the house
swiveled and turned to her. “YES?” said an amplified voice. It was
ragged and tinny in the roar of the storm, but it was still
Maggie.

“ON THREE! ACTIVATE THE EXTENSION CORDS ON
THREE!” The light from the spots shimmered along the wires as they
stretched back past the monster, into the open window.