Creatures of the Storm (40 page)

“Oh, shut up.”

They lapsed into silence, gathering their
strength. Ken reached across the aisle and pulled down a two-pack
of Brawny paper towels, popping the cellophane – shuddering for a
moment at the memory of the flumes all over his daughter – then
wrapping a wad of paper as big as a grapefruit around his hand. He
used it to wipe his face and scrub at his hair.

A little dry before we do
it all again
.

“Okay,” he said. “From here we go to the
VeriSil campus, or as close we can get. We pick up what we need
there, then go around the back of the admin building, along the
ridge, behind the construction to the Two Brothers.”

“I remember,” she said dryly. “I was there
when we made the plan.”

He shrugged and finished
drying off as much as he could. “You still think this is a good
idea?” he asked into the dimness. It was getting stuffy in the
Mini-Mart. Without the air conditioning, with the doors firmly
closed, it was expressing its true architectural nature as a big,
windowless tin box with no ventilation.
They’d have to move on soon
.

“God, no,” she said, polishing off the last
of the chips. “Do you?”

“Oh, no, it stinks as a plan. Totally stinks.
But it's the only one we have.”

Rose nodded at that, not looking at him.
After a long moment, she gave him a quick sidelong glance, then
looked away again.

“It wasn't all your fault,” she said.

For a moment he didn’t know what she was
talking about. Then it dawned on him. “Oh. You mean...before.”

“I knew about Mom and Uncle Patrick.”

That stopped him. He really hadn't ever
considered that possibility. “You...what?”

“Everybody knew, Daddy. Everybody but you.
And I didn't run away and start doing drugs. It was more...the
other way around.”

This time she looked at him
and didn't look away. “You're a good guy, you know, but you only
think one way. You're a programmer. All linear.
This
then
this
then
this.
Life isn't like that. At
least
our
lives,
'before,' weren't like that. You just thought they were. It wasn’t
all your fault. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

He couldn't stop staring at her.

“I don't know what to say,” he told her.

“Good impulse,” she said. “Go with th—”

There was a strange, high
scraping, almost a
tinkle
like broken glass, from the back of the store.
They both turned towards it, suddenly wary.

“Anybody there?” Ken called, getting to his
feet.

The sound came again – louder – and this time
it didn't stop. It was behind Rose, around the corner and out of
sight. Without thinking, she turned and walked to the end cap and
peeked past it.

A tide of splintered metal
three feet deep was crawling—
flowing
– down the aisle towards
them, a churning mass of shards and needles, growing thicker and
taller with every movement.

“God,” she said, and backed
up, past the chips, past the energy bars. “Will this shit
never
end
?”

The mass of shard and edges
began to flow around the corner and the thin screeching grew
louder. Without hesitation Rose reached up and pulled down the
metal shelving unit filled with chips. It crashed to the linoleum
with an oddly musical
clang
even
as it crushed the
leading edge of the churning mass. Rose didn’t pause. She took two
giant steps backwards and pulled down the next shelving unit as
well, creating a barrier that the tide of living metal and glass
would have to flow around or over or cut through to get to
them.

Ken didn't take time to gawk either. “We
gotta get outta here,” he said. He hefted his backpack, Rose did
the same, and they turned together to the front doors, only to find
them blocked by a whistling, breathing mass of hookweeds, filling
the double-wide doorway entirely, ballooning into the store from
outside like an inflating blimp made of fishhooks and thorns.

“Oh,
god...
” he said under his
breath.

There weren't any other exits, they'd already
checked. The sheets of glass were thick and tough; nothing short of
a Chevy was going to bring those down without killing them in the
process. And with the rising tide of hungry metal behind them and
the bone-dry latticework of claws filling the–

Bone dry,
he thought. That was a characteristic of all the
creatures. They sucked up water at such a tremendous rate they
actually seemed to be dry in the middle of the storm. And dry
things were vulnerable.

He didn’t overthink it. He
simply turned around and picked up the half-used roll of Brawny
paper towels, ripping off a healthy chunk and thrust the remains at
Rose. “Roll it into balls,” he said. “
This
big.” He held up the wad he'd
already created, roughly the size of a softball. Without waiting
for a response, he turned back to the barbecue display, pulled down
one of the oven mitts, and fit it frantically over his left hand.
Then he lurched to the counter, not five feet away – five feet
closer to the flexing mass of hookweeds, growing larger and larger
as he moved – and grabbed a Bic lighter from a dump bin next to the
cash register.

Rose watched wordlessly as she made more
balls of paper toweling. Suddenly she got it. “Smart,” she said,
refusing to listen to the tinkling, crackling, clattering behind
her. She knew the tide of shards was halfway over the barrier
already.

“I hope so.” He put the wad
of paper in his mittened left hand and flicked the butane lighter
with his right. Of course it didn't catch. He had to do it again.
And again. And
again,
until it finally flared in a steady yellow flame.

The paper only took a second to catch. The
instant it was flaming, Ken turned and flung it into the center of
the swelling hemisphere of hookweed.

And it
burned.
For a moment it seemed to
stick there, pulsing like a flaming heart in the middle of the
latticework of thorns. Then it exploded with a soft
whoosh
, and he knew he
was right. The bony material, whatever it was, was dead dry and
caught fire just like its namesake, building a huge flame, eating a
hole deep into the center of it mass.

And then the hooks surged forward again,
regrew, and smothered the fire where it burned.

“Not hot enough,” Rose said calmly, as if she
dealt with this sort of thing every day. “Try this.” She snatched a
can of lighter fluid from the barbecue display, cracked off the top
with one wrenching twist, and squirted the oily liquid all over one
of her wads of paper. It was dripping when she shoved it into her
Dad’s oven mitt. “Careful now.”

The Bic caught on the first click this time.
Ken barely had to wave the flame over the little firebomb before it
burst. He threw it instantly, as much out of fear as anything.

It hit an inch below the first throw and fell
even deeper into the shuddering lattice. This time it was hotter,
burned deeper, and the hooks took longer to fight back and grew
more slowly.

“More,” they said together, and she shoved a
second sodden, stinking ball into the mitt. He lit it. He threw it.
As it burst against the creature, she shoved a third ball at him.
Then a fourth.

Then the whole thing was
burning and writhing, rebuilding and falling back, faltering and
surging as it shuddered to stay together. Rose took a step back
from the heat and chaos and felt a weird resistance against her
heels. She turned to see the tide of needles and spikes right
behind her –
right
behind her – and she lurched forward.

“Dad, run!”

“But—”

“RUN!”

She brought her shoulders down, put her arms
up in front of her face, and ran straight into the burning wall of
hookweed, through the door. Her father was barely a step
behind.

It was exactly as if some merry prankster was
waiting for them in the parking lot to throw a bucket of water into
her face the moment she emerged. The sudden transition from the
stifling calm of the Mini-Mart into the mindless violence of the
rainstorm was almost paralyzing, but Ken didn't stop running.
Burning bits of hookweed still clinging to his jacket were
extinguished and washed away in the storm. He could see cinders and
smoke streaming off Rose’s coat as well. They were safe— for the
moment.

Ken and Rose stomped across the shallow lake
without a pause, bounded onto the flooded asphalt of West Ridge
Road, and then kept running to the south, towards VeriSil.

Towards the Two Brothers.

They didn't
slow down enough to speak again until they reached the water's
edge, northwest of the VeriSil campus. Ken knew the “Y”
intersection he'd navigated the day before was straight ahead. It
was submerged now. The water had risen at least ten, maybe twenty
feet more, and that meant it was a good fifty yards ahead, even
though they were standing at the edge of the trembling new sea that
was once Dos Hermanos. He wiped his eyes for the ten thousandth
time so he could see his target, the accidental weapons of mass
destruction that had been left behind. They were barely visible
through the twists of rain and mist, dead ahead.

The raft, crafted from a
construction pallet, filled with black tangles of rebar, bobbed and
wobbled on the surface of the lake, twisting in one of its restless
shallows. That's what they needed, and they needed it
now
.

Ken unlimbered his back pack and went down on
one knee. It only took a moment to pull out the floatie he'd wedged
in there a couple of hours earlier, a flat-sided, round-nosed hunk
of Styrofoam, like the front half of a kiddy surfboard.

“You're going to go
in
that shit?” Rose said, astonished in
spite of knowing the plan in all its ridiculous detail.

“Yep,” he said, and glared
at the water, trying to plot out the least dangerous
approach.
Fuck it,
he decided.
They're all
dangerous.

“But there are
things
in there,
Dad.”

He shrugged. “Can't be helped.”

It's ten or twelve
yards,
he thought as he shuffled into the
shallows,
that’s all.
Thirty, forty feet tops.
It didn't
matter that the water was churning like a washing machine or thick
and brown as chocolate milk. It was a few feet. No
problem.

He went straight towards the raft. In five
steps he was up to his knees, his back fully to his daughter who
stood on the shore and tried very hard not to shout instructions.
He could feel the tortured currents tugging at his legs. Another
three steps and the muck was up to his waist. He brought the
floatie around, put it in front of him and leaned his chest on it
for stability.

This isn't so
bad
.
If it
doesn't –

As if on cue, the muddy ground under his feet
steeply dipped down and disappeared. Now he was floating, his full
weight on the oversized kid's toy. He was painfully aware it was
all that stood between him and drowning.

“Dad!” Rose shouted from behind him. “Are you
okay?”

He
kicked his legs as hard as he could, feeling like a
denim-clad Frankenstein's monster who was trying to swim for the
first time. Huge, thick, clumsy, wallowing in water as thick as
suet.

This has to be the
stupidest thing I've ever done.
H
e frog-kicked his way across the
last ten feet of filthy, choppy water and reached out, very
unsteadily, to snag the tether that held the raft to the light
pole. It was still attached by the nifty little highwayman’s hitch
that Carl Josephson had made less than a day and a half earlier,
though it seemed like a century ago.

God bless the Eagle Scouts.

H
e
pulled the right line and the knot opened for him. Now he had a
stout length of rope at least ten feet long, securely lashed to the
raft itself.

He thrashed around in the
muck, turning back to face Rose, still standing on the distant
shore, hugging herself tightly. And now it
did
seem distant, much farther than
he remembered it.

He wrapped the tether
around his wrist, grasped the floatie in both hands, and kicked as
hard as he could. Again. And
again,
and with the third kick he began to move forward,
towing the pallet-raft behind him. It still wallowed low in the
water with its heavy load of rebar.

A few feet more, that’s all. He’d be feeling
solid land under his feet any—

Something huge, solid and
slate-gray rose out of the water to his right. No eyes, no edges,
no teeth, just
mass,
so huge it blocked out the ashen light of the
storm.

“
DAD!”

He lunged away from it and
kicked harder than ever, still clinging to the raft's line, digging
into the floatie. The jagged, pock-marked mass rose up in the
water, higher and higher, shedding water as it rose, and for one
giddy, vomitous moment Ken thought it was going to turn and fall on
him. He yelped and lunged and kicked away from it again, and yes,
there,
there
was
the gluey mud under his feet, clinging to him, giving him traction,
pushing him farther on.