Creatures of the Storm (39 page)

It was Ken who thought of his neighbor.
“Maybe he made it home!” he shouted in his daughter's ear.

“Sure he did!” she shouted back. He thought
it was remarkable how the sarcasm translated even through the
bellowing wind.

But now...

“No way,” Rose said from the doorway to the
garage.

“So what if we couldn't find the key?” Ken
said, feeling more defensive than ever. “You could hotwire it or
something.”

“
I
could hotwire it?” Rose said,
looking deeply offended.

“Well...yeah. All that time on the streets.
All the things you learned, I figured...”

“Gee, Dad, I'm sorry. I must have missed the
seminar on car theft when Huggy Bear came by with Starsky and
Hutch.”

Ken started to say something more, then
thought better of it and closed his mouth.

“Besides,” she said, “even
if we
had
found
the keys, look, it's a Cadillac Seville.”

He shrugged.

“Dad, come on. It's a fucking wasteland out
there. This thing would get twenty feet, max, before it got stuck
in the mud and potholes. We need an off-road vehicle, at least
something with four-wheel drive. Obviously Mr. Tartaglione wasn't
that kinda guy.”

She was right. Ken sighed and turned around.
“One more thing, then,” he said, and disappeared deeper into the
house. Rose followed.

He paused by the back door, the one that led
to the swimming pool. Ken almost called out to Maggie to check if
the coast was clear until he remembered...all of it. He looked one
way and then other, and saw no movement on the patio or in the
pool, only the shining curtain of the vertical rain and the
churning surface of the Olympic-sized pool itself, dancing from the
impact of a thousand raindrops every second.

If the lights were
on,
he thought distantly,
it would actually be beautiful.

“We're going to be spending plenty of time in
or at the water,” he said aloud when Rose joined him at the door.
“Maybe he's got a raft or a float or something we can use.”

They shrugged into the new coats they’d
stolen and rolled out into the backyard, using the flashlights
they'd found in the utility closet to search for more salvage.
There weren't a lot of choices, but anything, Ken reasoned, was
better than nothing.

When the Mackies left the Tartaglione home
for the last time not ten minutes later, they left with the best
parting gifts they could find: warm clothes, flashlights, a
Styrofoam floatie, two life jackets, and a pool noodle.

They trudged wordlessly
down the flooded road, ducking under the sheer power of the storm.
Ken was thinking of
Half-Life,
one of his favorite video
games
.
When you
first started playing it, you were subjected to an apparently
endless cut-scene, minutes of entering a high-tech plant out in the
middle of nowhere, riding on the commuter monorail, checking in at
the gate, taking the elevator down past the administrative levels
and the cafeteria and the little offices and equipment lockers to
your own cool-as-shit laboratory in the sub-sub-sub-basement, where
some fancy end-of-the-world experiment goes totally wrong. There is
a reality-ripping explosion and massive destruction all over the
facility, and you have fight your way out of the devastation in
your handy-dandy exo-suit.

The thing was, you had to
take the same path
out
that you took coming
in.
All along the way, you had to fight through
nightmarish, dangerously wrecked versions of the same places you
saw on the boring trip down, but in reverse order: the equipment
lockers filled with bodies, the cafeteria crowded with
insect-headed aliens snacking on the off-duty workers, the admin
offices where they're building a monster bigger than your Volvo.
Everything's all boring and normal one minute and a deadly fucking
nightmare the next.

And here they were. Same thing. He'd taken
this trip south to VeriSil, the exact same route, again and again
over the last two years, most recently barely twenty-four hours
ago. Now nothing was the same. Now the familiar old world was
choking on rainwater and covered in mud, blasted and chewed to
pieces by creatures that he’d never even dreamed of. And yet he was
still on West Ridge Road, right outside the Tartagliones' place,
like yesterday and the day before.

At least it's mostly
downhill,
Ken thought wearily as he
slogged forward. And at least there were no creatures attacking
them at the moment. He had no idea where they’d gone, but for some
reason he and Rose were no longer the center of
attention.

Ken had to admit it: he understood next to
nothing about the creatures. They didn't behave like any known
species; they didn't seem to reason at all. All of his insights
about remote-control bone robots aside, after reading THE NEW
TAXONOMY, he had a strong suspicion that even the sensory systems
of the creatures of the storm were entirely different than any
other living thing, and maybe beyond their understanding. Where
were their eyes? How did their joints work? He wasn't even sure
they could hear. Neither Steinberg nor Armbruster had found
anything resembling a sound-sensing organ in their autopsies. Maybe
they sensed movement; maybe it was light. Perhaps they could track
the unique electromagnetic signature that every living creature
generated. Or maybe the monsters weren't attacking now because they
had simply moved deeper into the flooded crater because the
available food supply was more plentiful and easier to get to,
assuming they needed food at all.

Ken Mackie was a guy who
liked to
know
things, and it was maddening to be this clueless. All he knew
for sure was that he and Rose had seen nothing but pelting rain,
mud as thick as pudding, and the occasional blinding flash of
lightning in almost two hours.

He could feel consciousness, and perhaps
sanity, slipping away as they staggered into the gurgling
mud-puddle that had once been the Scenic Vista, the one Ken had
visited on the way back from VeriSil a few hours earlier. Now it
was time to pause again. When they reached the edge of the
turnabout, he raised an arm to Rose and stumbled to a halt. She did
the same right next to him.

Ken tried not to groan out loud. His
shoulders were aching from the weight of the backpack; his legs
were like Play-Dough. Rose, head down and hood dripping, said
nothing at first, she hunched next to him, breathing heavily.

“One stop!” he said.

“Where?”

He nodded downhill, to the lightless hulk of
the AM/PM Mini-Mart and the Arco station, a quarter mile away at
the bottom of the ridge. Its parking lot was a lake now, water
skittering across it in madly dancing wavelets, like the restless
water of a salt flat during a summer squall. Beyond the lake the
glass doors to the Mini-Mart were intact and tightly shut. It
looked dark and deserted and dry, almost cozy, inside.

“We gotta get outta the rain!” he shouted at
her. “Just for a minute!”

Rose stood glaring at the Mini-Mart for a
moment, then nodded reluctantly. “Yeah,” she said. “I could do with
a Slur—GAHH!”

A patch of thick, glassy cellophane, big as a
dinner plate, flew out of the driving wind and smacked Rose in the
side of the head. It hit with such force it threw her sideways and
drove her to the ground, into the water with a heavy splash.

For one long, stupid moment, Ken stared at
her lying in front of him. It seemed so...so random, to be knocked
down by flying—

A second flapping sheet soared out of the
storm and hit her a bit lower, on the shoulders and neck. It
plastered itself against her so tightly it molded to the curve of
her jaw and circled her throat. Then another piece slapped against
her torso, big as a piece of plastic sheeting.

But...but
it moved.
Not because of
the wind or Rose struggling beneath it, all by itself. It shifted
against her. Adjusted.
Squeezed
...and Ken could see Rose's
face, half-covered by
the
…the flumes,
he told himself.
God help me, that’s
what they’re called: flumes.
He saw Rose’s
one free hand come up and claw weakly at the glassy, muscular thing
that was wrapping around her head as she tried to clear her mouth
so she could scream.

Shit. It's alive!

He lunged forward and dug
his gloved hands into the flume. He could feel it twitch under his
fingers as he pulled at it, hard as he could. “Come on,” he said,
“Shit, come
on,
you
shit...”

He worked three fingers
under the edge of the first sheet, the one covering most of Rose’s
face. He braced his legs, setting himself to heave on it. Rose's
hand came up, clutched at his wrist, and pulled with him,
hard,
fueled by terror
and desperation.

“One...” he gritted,
“Two...
THREE!”
They pulled together, her body flexing and kicking against
the mud, scrambling for traction. Their combined strength managed
to lift one edge, so they pulled again, lifted it more, then
pulled
again,
one
final time, and ripped it off her face with an audible
zipping
sound he would never forget. An
instant later he threw it away and saw it catch the wind and fly
off, disappearing into the gale.

Rose gasped like a landed fish, gulping in
the air. She clawed at the second flume, the one tightening around
her neck, and this time Ken was ready with the steak knife he'd
lifted from the Tartagliones' kitchen, wedging it under the
muscle-tough tissue of the flume that was tight against her
collarbone and dragging, up and out, hard and fast, cutting it in
two.

They worked together now, Rose on her knees,
her father above her, ripping the glistening sheet and finally
freeing her and flinging it into the wind. They started on the
third one, but it sensed a losing battle. It lifted one edge on its
own, a questing wing feeling for the wind, then caught the current
and lifted away, twisting into the mist like a set of bodiless
wings.

Rose stayed on her knees for the longest
time, gulping for air, shuddering at memory of their touch. Her
skin, pale on her best day, was an angry pink wherever the flume
had touched her, as if she'd been slapped by a huge hand.

Ken let her stay there for as long as he
dared. Then he bent and put his hand under her elbow and pulled her
to her feet, even though she wasn't nearly ready.

“Come on,” he said. “Mini-Mart. Now.”

They sprinted to the shallow lake of the
parking lot and splashed across it, moving as fast as they could.
As if the devil himself was chasing them.

The doors to the Mini-Mart were unlocked, but
there was no one inside. That was easy to confirm in the first five
minutes, using their newly acquired security flashlights to
penetrate the twilight that filled the store. It wasn't quiet. The
rain drummed constantly against the tin roof like a freight train
that would never stop passing.

There was no sign of the shopkeeper or the
manager, though the shelves were neatly stocked and the displays
sorted and tidy. Obviously the workers there had up and left when
the power failed, or had been lured outside to meet their fates. By
then the weather had grown so bad it even discouraged looters.

Rose, still short of breath, almost tore the
top off a bottle of water and drank until she couldn't drink
anymore. Ken got a bottle of his own and took a judicious sip, his
mind racing.

“We can't stay long,” he said, hating the
unsteadiness in his own voice. “They know we're here.”

Rose broke from her gulping long enough to
say, “Jesus, that was weird.” She wiped her mouth with the back of
one hand and looked at him. “Who knows we’re where?”

“Those things!” he said,
his voice rising. “All of them! Don't you get it, Rose? They can
communicate with each other without speaking. It's a kind of
telepathy, but...inorganic. A kind of
cyber-telepathy”
His eyes were
blazing with the implications.

Rose gave him a long look. “Yeah, Dad,” she
said. “We call it 'wi-fi.'”

He blinked. “What?”

“You already told us they were, what? Robots
made from bone? Papier-mâché killer computers. Got it. Moving
on.”

He stared at her some more, then he finally
let himself take a breath and sit down. “God Almighty,” he said.
“You're right.” His heart still racing, he let his butt rest
against the standing freezer next to a display of barbecue supplies
– briquettes, spatulas, oven mitts, aprons that said KISS THE COOK
and SOMETHIN'S BURNIN'!! His heart was still racing.

Rose, halfway across the store, Rose plucked
up a bag of no-name potato chips and ripped them open. “Weird to be
hungry at a time like this,” she muttered, “but I'm starving.” She
shoved a dozen chips into her mouth and crunched, closing her eyes
in a moment of ecstasy: all that salt; all that grease.
“Ahh...”

“At least you should go for the good stuff,”
Ken said, taking another pull at the water. “May be your last
chance.”

She shook her head. “No way,” she said.
“First they came for the Doritos, but I had eaten all the Cool
Ranch, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Sun Chips, but I
hated Sun Chips, they tasted like Styrofoam, so I said nothing.
Then they—”