Creatures of the Storm (41 page)

The water to his left was
nothing but the creature. The water to his right was a scattered
collection of whirlpools and waterspouts, as if something with a
thousand mouth-side holes was just under the surface, sucking in
water and spitting it out simultaneously. He didn’t want to look at
it. He
couldn't.
He dragged himself forward, out of the shadow of the ashen,
lead-heavy mass to his right. He flinched away again as it sank
back into the water, apparently unaware of him. Then Rose's hands
were under his shoulders, dragging him forward, and his knees were
pumping like a hurdler’s...and he was out of the water, sprawled on
the mud. Soaked to the skin but done,
done.

“Wow,” he panted. “That could've been
easier.”

The twisting track that split off from the
“Y” intersection of East Ridge Road and VeriSil Drive had been a
concession to off-road enthusiasts when VeriSil built their
facility tight against the southern curve of the crater. The
bobbing, horizontal path about halfway up the rocky slope wound
along the rough terrain from the south end of East Ridge Road to,
inevitably, the south end of West Ridge Road, with the Two Brothers
exactly halfway along. That was before the water had risen. Now it
was a lakeside drive, a few feet, if that, from the trembling water
of the new lake. And it was the only route available to Ken and
Rose.

They edged along the slippery trail, chests
flat against the muddy slope, their backs to the water, moving
slowly eastward. Ken had tied the tether of the pallet-raft around
his waist and then knotted it to his belt loop for good measure. It
forced a sort of uneasy grace in his movement and slowed him
considerably, but he had to do it this way. He needed both hands
free as they crawled towards the construction site and beyond that,
to the Brothers.

The remains of the path dipped under them
unpredictably, then rose again, only a few feet away from the
jittering water's edge. As the channel narrowed, the water trapped
between the buildings and the ridge itself grew deeper and more
turbulent than ever, even as the trail grew rougher and more
treacherous. Boulders and cracks flowing with mud made the ridge
wall a treacherous, convoluted surface. Every handhold was a risk.
The rain continued endlessly, pounding down on the hoods and
shoulders of their parkas so violently loud it was impossible to
speak, barely possible to see.

Five minutes after they edged into the shadow
of the admin building, Ken encountered a rock that was three feet
taller than he was, jutting out of the nearly vertical wall of mud.
It nearly completely blocked their way. He had to twist 180 degrees
to make his way around it, and as he turned to the north, he looked
up at the building and had a head-spinning moment of
disorientation.

He found himself looking into the spacious,
well-appointed expanse of Conference Room One, the same room where
he and Maggie had impressed Carl Josephson and his pudgy assistant,
the late Mr. Cling, just hours before. He was looking at it from
the outside now, though the mud-spattered glass, across a torrent
of madly churning water.

That was only a day ago.
How was that possible? What the hell happened?
He knew for a fact, though he didn't know how, that there
wasn't a living soul in that building now. They were all gone,
escaped or dead.

“YOU OKAY?” Rose shouted in his ear. He
hadn't even noticed her coming up so close to him, but there she
was, her back still to the building, her mouth pressed to his
ear.

He shook himself mightily. “YEAH!” he said.
“FINE!” He turned away, back to the mud wall, and took a full
side-step around the huge outcropping. His left foot plunged into a
pothole of liquefied mud nearly two feet deep.

He was lucky Rose was so
close. He had to reach out and grab her parka to steady himself as
he staggered for balance. He realized later that if the tether
attached to the raft had chosen that moment to foul or even give
him another good
jerk
,
he would have fallen into the
raging channel and been lost for good. Instead, he found his feet
and looked down. It took a moment to sort out what he was seeing,
and to realize that the pit wasn't simply a small version of the
sinkhole they'd encountered back at the
hacienda.
This mud was actually
grit, made up of rough pebbles the size of chick-peas, and they
were in constant, almost Brownian motion, churning like boiling
oatmeal. He could see them digging into the rubber and cloth of his
boot.

Eating my foot,
he thought numbly.

He clutched at Rose and the
rock itself and heaved his leg out of the muck. It came loose with
a comical
pop!,
and he stretched to put it down on solid ground a foot
farther down the trail. Strands of grainy muck wriggled on his
hiking boot and he bent precariously to brush it away with his
gloved hand. He wanted to scream
Get off!
Get off!,
as if he'd put his foot into a
bucket of maggots, but he stopped himself. Barely.

“CAREFUL!” he bellowed to Rose when he got
both feet onto the path on the far side of the trap. Rose saw it
clearly. She stretched even farther to avoid the hole as she
stepped over it.

Another three minutes and they were out of
the edgeless shadow of the admin building. The light changed,
though only a little; the path grew wider and a bit more stable.
Now they could afford to turn and look in the direction they were
going. For the first time, they could clearly see the construction
site a short distance to the north, if only from the back.

Until the rain began, it had been nothing
more than a cubical skeleton of girders and catwalks, visible from
halfway across town as an angular black-edged sketch against the
ridge wall and the too-blue sky. It had been essentially hollow.
You could see right through its harsh geometry to the landscape
beyond, even glimpse the tiny shapes of ant-sized men and their toy
machines clambering up and down the structure.

Now, Rose and Ken saw,
things had changed. The huge construct of girders and cabling was
full. Engorged. Stuffed with...
something.

It wasn't organic. It didn't pulse like a
tumor or flex like a muscle. Still, it moved like a living thing.
Points grew out of it, pits opened up in it. Bits of horn and bone
and jagged rock rose to its surface then fell again; needles and
cutting edges grew then dissolved; blades blossomed like flowers
made of shattered glass, then dipped to cut into themselves, into
each other, and break apart, only to be reabsorbed.

All of it was nourished by
gushing torrents of rain, flowing down from higher levels and out
of the sky itself, covering the entire massive
thing
with a swathe of waterfalls
and rivulets. Feeding it as it became thicker, higher, more
complex. Feeding it as it
grew.

Thank God it doesn't have
eyes,
Ken thought as they crept behind the
building, moving as quickly as they dared, afraid to speak. It was
the only time either of them heard the creatures make a sound, and
it was a horrible one, something Ken had never heard before: a
hissing of sand against sand, a clashing of stone blades, a clink
of sharp edges colliding, tumbling over each other, grunting and
grumbling like the gnashing of teeth.

If it could see us,
he thought.
If it knew
we were here...

It seemed to take forever to slip away, past
the far corner of the structure, away from that sound. A few yards
further on, they felt the muddy pathway dip downwards, steadily
downwards now, towards the water's edge.

They had arrived at the foothills of the
Brothers. They could see its steep, denuded slope in front of them
like a wall made of pounded earth and rock, rising from the
churning water, butting up against the path and blocking the
way.

This was their destination, but it didn't
matter. They would have been forced to stop here anyway.

Rose's beautiful violet eyes widened when she
saw the Brothers taking shape ahead of them, emerging from the
twisting sheets of mist and rain. “Oh, shit,” she said. “This was a
terrible idea.”

Ken was again reminded of
that video game,
Half-Life.
You spent hours,
days,
climbing over wreckage,
crawling though air ducts, finding weapons and fighting monsters at
every level – always monsters,
more
monsters, each level more dangerous and revolting
than the last. And then finally, at the end, you conquered the Big
Bad and struggled to the surface, to the sunlight, to the
long-awaited end of the adventure.

And what did you find?

He came to the answer too late. Far too
late.

More monsters.

The eighty-degree slope was utterly bare,
unmarred by any tree or plant or bit of vegetation. The rain had
cut a million rivulets into its muddy, pebbled surface and made it
fundamentally unstable. The ground was shifting and sliding under
the runoff like the breathing hide of some huge, water-soaked
rhino.

The creatures of the storm
were everywhere, scattered thickly across the steeply sloping
terrain. Flat, shapeless stains writhed in the mud; flumes twisted
through the air; clusters of candle-eyes shoved and thrust through
the muck while dragontongues whipped their bony, fleshless bodies,
wriggling between glistening boulders. All of them, and a thousand
new creatures with no names, covered the Two Brothers from base to
crown, from a few yards ahead of them to the curved horizon. And
they were
busy.

Some, like the candle-eyes, tumbled together
in packs, as if muttering something secret but terribly important
that only they could hear. Other creatures moved rapidly and with
urgency, disappearing over the line of the hillside, stopping to
confer silently with other shapes, pausing to dissolve into gritty
piles, only to be swept up by a passing stain or tumbling hookweed.
They were all in constant motion, but it was motion, Ken could see,
with purpose. Not a purpose he could understand. Maybe that no
human could understand.

Back in the
hacienda,
with all the
paperwork and simulations and Lucy Armbruster’s boundless, jaded
enthusiasm, their plan had made perfect sense to Ken. Hell, it had
seemed almost cute
.
Use the materials at hand, turn the power of the storm
against itself, that sort of thing. But now, here, with the wind
slapping him in the face, with rainwater forcing itself into his
mouth and up his nose, with muddy runoff as thick as porridge
burying his boots, and the entire lethal menagerie of the storm
dancing and churning in front of him, all Ken could ask himself
was,
What the hell was I
thinking?

Rose stood a few feet away. She looked grim
and eager and terrified all at once, like a storm-tossed soldier
about to enter her first real battle.

“Well?” she shouted at him
through the gale. A wave of water slapped
her in the face, and she shook her head angrily to clear her
eyes. “Are we doing this or not?”

“You do see those things, don't you?” he
asked her, nodding at the monsters ahead of them.

“Yeah, but they don't seem
to see
us.
Haven't you noticed, Dad? These things don't care about us at
all anymore, unless we go up and kick 'em in the nuts.”

He shook his foot again. It was still
tingling. “Or stick a boot up their ass. Yeah, I noticed.”

Ken kept looking up the steep, glittering
slope.

This is
impossible
.
This
is fucking –

“Dad! Stop it!”

He flinched and looked away
from the hill. Rose was glaring at him, fuming. “Don't get all
think-y on me now!” she shouted. “That's what you always do,
you
overthink.
Sometimes you have to just fucking
do
things!”

There was a roll of thunder far to the south,
deep and deliberate. Ken felt it in his chest as much as he heard
it. It reminded him of The Plan all over again. He glanced
downhill, back to the water line.

“Okay,” he said. “You're
right. We have to get – what the
fuck
?”

Rose tried to follow his eyes. She had to
wipe away muddy water to do it. “What?”

“What’s that?”

Rose rolled her eyes.
“
God
, Dad, will
you–”

“No,
really,
Rose. Look!”

She squinted through the chaos, downhill to
the water's edge, and caught sight of a shiny black two-man rubber
raft, thrown to the sodden shore by the storm. It was still
inflated, still sporting the showroom gleam of a new purchase.

It looked as if it was waiting for them.

They picked their way carefully across the
muddy, newborn shore line, Ken towing the pallet the last few feet
and bringing it to ground as they reached the inflatable. Then,
together, they stood over the raft and simply gawked.

It was filled with guns

“Thank you, Jesus,” Rose gasped. Rain was
pouring off her in a cataract.

Ken could see M-16s, Magnums, grenades. Even
a rocket launcher. And boxes, clips, and bags of ammo, enough for a
small war.