Creatures of the Storm (42 page)

“Where the hell did this come from?”

“I have no idea,” Rose said. “And I couldn't
care less.” She actually smiled as she bent to pick up an
over-and-under pump shotgun.

“Careful with that,” he said
automatically.

She gave him The Look. “Seriously?” she said,
and hefted the weapon like a pro. She expertly cracked it open and
checked the breach for shells. “Locked and loaded,” she said, and
smiled brilliantly. “To coin a phrase.”

Ken only frowned.
One more thing I don't want to know
about.

He was thirty-seven years
old and had never in his life touched a real gun. His entire
knowledge of firearms was developed by watching endless repeats
of
Miami Vice
and
playing
Grand Theft Auto.
He'd never even been a big fan of
Call of Duty
. Now he was
sorry.

Rose patted the arm of his soaked parka,
trying to be comforting. “Don’t worry, Daddy,” she said. “They make
these things idiot-proof these days.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“You know what I mean.” She
slipped the shotgun’s carrying strap up her arm and hefted another
weapon – a strangely made handgun, something like a small shoebox
with a handgrip on the bottom and a stubby barrel at one end. “Like
this. This is a MAC 10. Even
you
can work it.” Her hands flickered across it –
popping the ammo clip, clearing the chamber, sighting and reloading
– as if she’d done it a thousand times before.

“Rose,” he said seriously, “you scare the
shit out of me sometimes.”

“It's a daughter's greatest dream,” she said,
and gave him the MAC, butt-first. “Safety's on,” she told him, and
showed him how it worked. “Be careful anyway.”

Ken nodded, put it into the biggest side
pocket of his parka, and zipped it shut.

The rumbling thunder was closer. Distant
flashes of lightning pulsed in the lowering clouds, still far to
the north. The light was beginning to fade; this would be the last
progressive, north-to-south electrical storm before dark, like the
hundreds that had come before it.

Time was running out.

They spent five minutes loading up on
ordnance, then turned together and faced the slope.

“So how are we going to do this?” Rose asked,
suddenly unsure.

“I have an idea.” He’d thought of it as
they’d loaded up, when he noticed that the smooth-bottomed rubber
raft had a tow rope of its own, a loop, really, anchored in two
places along its curved leading edge. Without a word of explanation
he reached down, gathered up an armload of rebar from the pallet,
and dumped it in the bottom of the raft. As he straightened, he saw
Rose staring at him as if he was mad.

“We'll tow it,” he said, his throat raw.
“Like a—what do you call it? A travois.”

She blinked for a second, and then
understood. “Ah,” she said, then bent and helped. They transferred
all of the rebar from one platform to the other in a matter of
moments, and as they did, he saw that he had remembered correctly:
the rods came in three lengths, from six to roughly eleven feet,
and all the same thickness, about the diameter of an index
finger.

While they worked they kept an eye on the
busy creatures a few yards away. They still hadn’t noticed the
humans at all.

When Rose and Ken finished their work, Rose
hefted one of the longer rods and tested it in her hand, hefting
like a javelin. “Just shove it in the ground?” she asked. “That’s
it?”

Another wave of rain, thick enough to choke
on, passed overhead. They might as well have been on the deck of a
ship in a hurricane. Ken ducked his head against the squall, then
nodded through it as it crested. “That’s it,” he said. “Poke it
down as deep as you can.”

“Okay,” Rose said. She took five steps
straight uphill, the bar gripped in one hand.

“Rose, wait…”

She set her feet, hunched her shoulders,
raised the rebar over his head and rammed it, hard she could, into
the sodden earth. It penetrated a full foot. She turned back to
him, grinning. “Like that?”

“Jesus, Rose. You are totally insane.”

She nodded. “I know,” she said. “I got that.
I—”

She abruptly stopped, cocked her head
curiously, and laid her naked palm flat against the mud. After a
moment she turned her impossibly violet eyes on her father. She had
a strange, wondering expression.

“You can feel it,” she
said. “Not just electricity. Not just the rain. You can feel
it,
that thing that’s
inside the hill.” She pushed her fingers even deeper into the mud,
overcome for a moment. “No. It’s not inside the hill. It
is
the hill.”

Ken didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t need
to feel it thrumming in the earth. He already knew the truth, and
it terrified him.

He started to speak, but
Rose turned away from him, snatching her hand out of the mud and
straightening up quickly. She lifted her head and looked uphill.
The nearest creature, a multi-legged clot of stone covered in blunt
horns, pointed its mouth like a jagged mineshaft and
crunched
at
them.

Rose shook herself free. “Fuck that,” she
said. “Let's go.”

Ken picked up a rod from the raft and plunged
into the mud, half expecting the Earth to shudder at the impact or
spew some blackish ichor from its new wound. But nothing happened.
The iron bar simply stuck there, vibrating from the impact and
shivering drops of rain.

Just your basic stick in
the mud,
he thought
.

The ground shifted under his feet, but it
wasn’t a sign of some waking giant, it was simply the rushing water
liquefying everything.

He had always assumed the
hill they called Two Brothers was solid rock, covered with a few
inches of windblown topsoil. That was why nothing would grow there;
it was granite or gypsum underneath. Now he knew he was wrong.
It
wasn’t
bedrock
that formed its mass. It wasn’t
Earthly
at all. Regular plants
couldn’t grow on Two Brothers because
nothing
could live there.

He pushed the thought away, glanced at his
daughter, and trudged uphill ten steps, bending against the gale
and the stinging rain. He pulled up another length of rebar and
slammed it into the earth. Then he moved to the side, building a
second row on the slope, and did it again.

“You go that way,” he said, gesturing uphill
in one direction. “I go this way!” He set another bar, shoved it
deep, and still the creatures ignored them, hurrying about their
duties, finishing their chores.

They paused at the end of a
third row. Rose straightened up, unbent her back and ran her hand
through her dripping hair. “Looks like Pinhead! she shouted. Ken
frowned at her and cocked his head. She scowled.
“
Hellraiser?
” she
shouted. He shook his head again, he had no idea what she was
talking about.

Rose grinned in spite of herself. “Idiot,”
she said under her breath. She knew he understood her; he could
read her lips.

Look at her,
Ken thought.
Just
look
at her. How did she
get to be so amazing?

He shook his head and went back to work
himself. The next wave of the storm was approaching, rumbling over
the water towards the center of the Valle. He turned just long
enough to see lighting striking mid-town. It was coming this
way.

He created two more rows, then three,
climbing higher and higher. So did Rose. The wind started to
scream. It was getting to be a routine. Painful and filthy, but
mind-numbingly repetitive. Pick up the bar. Shove it in the ground.
Check for creatures. Move on. And always he kept Rose in view, out
of the corner of his eye.

They were more than halfway
up the slope, panting like animals, when the attack began. Ken had
lost count of the number of rows. He simply set his feet, lifted
another bar from their makeshift travois, and rammed it down. This
time the ground at his feet
flinched
and lifted up.

Ken jumped back, startled.
The edges of a huge plate of tissue, an earthbound flume, or
something like it,
wriggled
all around him. It had been lying on the
waterlogged soil of the Two Brothers, covered in mud and splattered
earth. Now it
snapped
a corner up and tried to snag Ken’s leg as he leaped
away.

The edge of it got under the cuff of his
jeans, twitched past his sock, and touched his ankle with chemical
fire, right where the biting sand had stung him before.

“SHIT!” he said, and jerked
away. Suddenly Rose was by his side, the over-and-under out of its
shoulder holster, already in her hands. She hunched down and fired
without hesitation, pumping shots into the whickering,
shuddering
thing
lying
in front of them.

The sound of the rifle was
harsh against the gurgling roar of the rain, but it worked. The
flume crumpled under the impact, then tried to lurch away. Rose
wouldn’t accept that. She took two heavy steps forward and
fired
again
and
again
,
until the thing stopped moving. Then stopped trembling. Then
dissolved into the mud. Whatever remained was buried under the next
flow of mud in mere seconds.

Ken barely noticed. It felt like his foot was
burning off.

As soon as she was sure the
thing was dead, Rose staggered to his side and stood over him as he
sat in the mud and frantically stripped off his boot and sock. The
water rushed against his bare flesh, and that felt good,
wonderfully
good. He
could see the skin was an angry scarlet and already beginning to
show lemon-yellow welts.

“Can you get up?” Rose asked, looking in
every direction for more attackers.

“Have to,” he said between gritted teeth.
“Give me a minute.”

“Haven’t got it,” she said.

He glared up at her. “For chrissakes,
Rosie—”

“
Dad!
” she said and gestured past
him. “They’re
coming
.”

He looked past her, towards the edge of the
slope. The creatures had stopped working now. They were turning
towards them. Others were gathering downhill at the shoreline, so
close together they were fighting for space.

Rose and Ken had finally been noticed. Now
all the creatures, every shape and size, were climbing and crawling
and lurching to meet them.

Ken forced himself to his feet. He grabbed
the next rebar and slammed it in the ground. Rose pulled out a
semi-automatic rifle, one he hadn’t even noticed, and picked a spot
in front of him, midway between the creatures and the travois. She
poured gunfire into the monsters, her whole body vibrating from the
weapon’s kick.

They were coming in waves,
from small to large. Maybe the little ones could move faster; maybe
the Intelligence behind it all saw them as more expendable because
they could be regrown more quickly. Ken didn’t know. Didn’t care.
He just wanted to set the last of the bars higher and higher. He
wanted to reach the top of the hill and
kill
this fucking thing.

First the pumpkin-sized needleseeds in front
exploded into a million sharp pieces from Rose's assault. The
flinders made from their death struck the rolling set of
turnbuckles close behind them, and caused them to falter and
swerve. That gave Rose all the time she needed to blow the
turnbuckles to pieces as well, then the set of brickteeth that
hobbled behind them.

Ken limped forward to complete another row,
and another. He tried to ignore the constant chatter of Rose’s
gunfire, and the burning agony in his ankle, foot, leg.

The lightning was striking the South Side
now. They could see the ghost of it behind the rain, jagged bolts
arcing from clouds to broken buildings, to crippled towers, to open
water. Thunder followed the flashes, coming sooner behind each
strike.

Rose’s semi-automatic
seized up with a raucous
clacking.
She threw it aside, unlimbered the
over-and-under, and expertly cut the bottom out from under a
star-shaped rock-pig-thing that was trundling towards them. It
dived into the mud and tripped up a thornwheel that was too close
behind.

She fired until there were no more shotgun
shells. Then she dropped the weapon in the mud and pulled out a
Magnum .357 she had thrust inside her shirt.

Ken finished another row. His back was
screaming, his hands were bleeding from the roughened metal, but he
bit down on the pain and he pulled the travois higher. More than
two-thirds of the bars were gone, but the top seemed farther away
than ever.

He felt, more than heard,
the first lightning strikes hit the edge of the VeriSil campus, a
half mile to the north.
The Plan,
he told himself as his daughter backed up the
hill, close behind.
The fucking
Plan.

His leg was burning worse
than ever. When he started on the next row it
collapsed
under him like a broken
branch, failing completely. He cursed as he fell to one knee and
used a length of rebar to pull himself upright. He balanced
precariously on the makeshift crutch and set the newest rod and
lurched to set another one, five yards uphill.