Creatures of the Storm (43 page)

Lightning was playing along the far end of
the VeriSil campus now. Thunder, like bomb blasts, pushed at them
over and over and the rain was a continuous, choking silver
wall.

Rose blew the tail off a dragontongue, then
put another round into its whickering rose-head. It fell heavily at
her feet and she shoved a boot into it, breaking it in three more
places.

They wouldn’t stop coming.
Ken could see that. They would never
stop
coming
.

Five bars left, and he wasn’t near the
summit. He had horribly underestimated what he’d needed, or he’d
set them too close together, or the whole fucking idea was absurd,
he just didn’t know. Ken was only half-conscious now, hearing only
the thunder and the gunshots, feeling only the rain.

It’ll work, it’ll work, it
HAS to work
.

He shoved in the last two.
The last
one
. He
turned, balancing on one leg, as three lightning strikes hit the
middle of the VeriSil headquarters beyond the base of the Brothers.
The bolts lit up the land with a ghostly, actinic light. The
concussion pounded through him in waves.

“ROSE!” he bellowed. “I’M DONE! WE CAN—”

An arm as thick as a girder
flew out of the mist and caught Rose directly in the stomach. It
threw her back, towards her father, and Ken had to lurch to the
side to avoid her as she flew past him and landed flat on her back,
twenty feet farther uphill, with an ugly, meaty
thwack.

He rushed to her side, staggering through
knee-deep muck. Her arms were thrown out at her sides, her face was
pointing into the rain, still as white as ivory despite the filth
around her.

White and red. Red on her lips, pouring from
her nose.

She’s bleeding. My little girl. My little
girl.

Suddenly the whole
ridiculous nightmare – the monsters, the storm, the talking
house,
everything
– was real to him, maybe for the first time. It wasn’t a
dream. It wasn’t a joke.
His baby girl was
hurt,
and any second, any
instant
,
she could die.

She could die.

He threw himself up to his feet and stood
over her, chalk-white against the black earth, illuminated by the
overlapping lightning strikes. Lightning had reached the first of
the rebar at the bottom of the hill, farther south than it had ever
come before, drawn by the raw iron reaching up into the air in a
forest of lightning rods. Not close enough yet, but it was
happening. He had been right.

That was The Plan,
he told himself as he knelt beside Rose.
All along.

He looked up, towards the crest of the
Brothers, at the monster that had hurt his little girl.

A bone spider, one million legs twitching and
clawing at the open air, stood there. It was fifteen feet taller
than he was, lifting its arms to cut them both to bits.

Ken pawed at the right pocket of his parka,
ripped open the zipper and pulled out the MAC-10 that Rose had
forced on him. As it brought it up, his daughter's face turned to
him and she opened her eyes.

Those eyes,
he thought wildly.
Those
beautiful eyes.

She smiled at him.

He looked away as he
straightened up and aimed the gun. He had never fired a weapon
before in his life. He didn’t believe for a second that it would
stop this huge creature or save the day, but he had to do
it
.

He took a step forward, his
burning leg forgotten. “FUCK YOU!” he bellowed.
“
FUCK
YOU,
FUCK YOU!”
He pulled the
trigger as the talons came down, firing over and over again, not
even sure he was hitting the creature —

– and the bone spider lifted into the
air.

Ken kept firing at it until he ran out of
ammo. Then he just stood there, gun still up in front of him, as
the massive creature rose even higher, legs flailing and dangling,
and for one crazy moment he thought it was doing it on its own,
that it had somehow acquired the power of flight. Until he saw the
churning black mass underneath it, almost invisible against the
storm, that was rising out of the earth at the crest of the
hill.

It looked a little like the writhing,
faceless mass inside the construction site, but it was much more
than that. Striations of stone twitched inside it as it rose even
higher, glistening in the downpour. Tumors of stone rolled and
bubbled in its gritty tissue. Edges emerged and cut furrows in its
surface, bleeding a thick black mud of its own, then closed to make
new wounds.

The bone spider that had
been forced into the air tried to cling to the surface as it rose.
Then it collapsed in on itself and was reabsorbed into the column
as it thickened and continued to rise, an obscene crown of…
something
…emerging from
the hill itself.

No,
he thought, as Rose sat up beside him, awake but
dazed.
No, not emerging. Being built.
Being
exposed
. It
was like seeing a naked limb of a living creature with its skin
peeled away. The musculature, the veins, still pulsing and moving,
but laid bare.

It was
wrong
. It was not supposed to be
like this. It was
wounded.

The tower twisted, almost bent as another
triple-thump of lightning struck halfway up the hill now. Bolts of
electricity were traveling between the lightning rods now, pulling
the energy farther up the hill, coaxing the lightning to strike
again. Rose and Ken were barely a dozen feet from the last few
rods, even closer than the rumbling, turning mass of the thing at
the top of the hill.

Rose hunched her shoulders and grunted like
an old woman as she pulled herself to her feet, swaying in the wind
and rain. A wave of relief ran through Ken for an instant. She was
whole. The blood on her mouth washed away in another wave of
raindrops, and he saw it was a nosebleed caused by the force of her
landing.

Lighting SLAMMED and SLAMMED in the
flood-lake below them, a last explosive volley, coming closer and
closer. It hit the construction site. Hit the base of the hills.
Hit the first few rods, and with each strike thunder bellowed,
faster and louder with each explosion.

Ken whipped around,
The Plan
huge in his
mind. “We gotta go!” he shouted. “NOW!” He turned and threw himself
uphill, straight towards the towering monster, towards the top of
the Two Brothers, dragging Rose by one arm and forcing her to
follow. He was over the top in an instant, ignoring the agony in
his burning leg.

They crested the hill less than ten feet from
the exposed and twisting column of the Intelligence. It had risen
fifty feet in the air already and was still growing. It would reach
a hundred feet in moments as the sodden earth around it churned and
cracked like breaking skin.

In ten steps Rose and Ken were over the top
of the hill and running down the far side, towards the southern
ridge of the crater beyond.

“RUN!” he said. “DOWN,
DOWN, GET OFF THE MOUNTAIN,
RUN!”

He hurtled downhill in long
dangerous strides that risked his legs flying out from under him at
any moment. He could feel the lightning striking behind him,
climbing up the hill, roaring as if it was angry at being lured so
far. He imagined he could see it
:
lightning drawn to the iron bars, then leaping from spike to spike,
iron sucking electricity right out of the sky, flowing into the
ground beneath him and torturing the inhuman Intelligence that
lived there.
Killing
it. He heard another strike, and another and
another
.

The ground
bucked
under them,
flexing like a living thing.

They heard a sound that had never been made
on Earth before, a groaning, roaring, bottomless, voiceless BOOM
that filled the audible spectrum and blew beyond it.

There was a deep arroyo directly in front of
them, a crack in the earth between the Brothers and the crater
ridge behind it. It was so deep they couldn’t see the bottom even
as they sprinted towards it. The far side was a dim blur through
the rain. The gap between the hillside and the ridge was no more
than ten feet wide at the top, Ken could see that much. One leap
and they would be on the far side, on the crater ridge, away from
The Brothers. It was no wider than that leap from the rock to the
tree in front of his house. But, God, they were tired, and they
were wet, and his leg was burning so badly, and the ground was
unsteady and sticky.

We have to
jump
.
I can’t
jump. We’ll miss it. We’ll fall. We have to jump. We
can’t…

They didn’t pause. They didn’t falter. They
ran side-by-side as the lightning reached the top of the hill,
right behind them. They threw themselves into the air together.

The lightning hit the twisting tower of the
Intelligence itself, and the world exploded.

Sunrise came six hours later. As it approached, the rain fell
back for the first time in days. Ken could see gaps in the clouds
by three a.m. By five, the last of the rain whispered away, and the
world grew quiet, almost silent. It was so beautiful to hear –
to
not
hear – it
took Ken's breath away.

They peeled off their soggy, ruined parkas,
laid them out on the rocks to dry, and sat close together on the
top of the South Ridge to watch the sun come up off to their left.
A fresh breeze plucked at their ragged, dirty clothes as the
morning light revealed a sky that was desert-hard, flat blue, and
uninterrupted by clouds. The desert below them, to the south of Dos
Hermanos, was as dry, unpopulated and immense as it had ever been.
As it had always been. Lucy’s theories about the mountain shadow
effect and the microclimate had been correct. As far the
Anza-Borrego Desert, and the rest of the world, was concerned, the
last three days in DH had never happened.

When it was bright enough, Ken stood up and
turned to Rose. “Want to see?” he asked. They were the first words
he had spoken in hours, and they sounded oddly distant and small
even in his own ears. He knew why. The explosion had made them both
half-deaf, and they were only beginning to recover.

Still close together, they
mounted the ridgeline, picking carefully through the shattered
stone. Rose’s clothes were stiff with mud. Her jeans looked as if
they had been put through a shredder. Ken looked slightly
ridiculous with one shoe on, one foot bare, and the leg of his
jeans torn open to the knee. He was thankful that at
least the swelling had gone down.
The wound from the monster was more like a
chemical burn than an infection, and though it itched furiously it
had not progressed beyond mid-calf. He knew he wouldn’t die from
it, not at the moment, anyway. But he did think about the rock-like
infection that had transformed Daniel Steinberg, and the notes and
video he’d seen from the mad scientist’s NEW TAXONOMY.

Is this how it
begins,
he wondered, resisting the urge to
touch his wound.
Could this happen to
me?

At least Rose would be okay. She had escaped
with nothing more than a light scratch along one cheek, and that
wasn’t from a creature of the storm, it was from her last fall in
the mud. She had joked earlier that she didn’t want it treated. It
would make a really cool scar, she said. She could dine out on
horror stories about it for months.

Ken hadn’t seen the humor.

They reached the ridgetop and looked down
into the Valle de los Hermanos. Even inside the crater, the last of
the thunderheads were tearing themselves to shreds and
disappearing. By noon, they would be gone. Whatever combination of
forces had brought the storm to Dos Hermanos had faltered now. It
might not rain again in the crater for another five hundred
years.

The hill they called The Two Brothers was
changed. A new pit, obsidian-black and too deep to fathom, took up
most of the summit, a smoking crater within a crater, as if twenty
sticks of dynamite had been used to blow it away. Below that,
beyond that, the rest of the Valle was a restless, muddy lake that
filled the vast bowl of Dos Hermanos all the way to the jagged line
of the North Ridge. Its fractal surface, dove-gray in the new
morning light, was pock-marked with debris and half-submerged
wreckage.

There were no people. Anywhere.

The water level of the lake had not dropped
an inch since last night. It was effectively sealed inside the
crater, and it was staying there. Ken tried to remember how many
generations the Salton Sea had survived since its creation, not all
that far from here, despite the desert winds and heat. He wondered
how long this new formation might last.

Not that it
mattered,
he realized with a sudden
chill.
Nobody was coming back
anyway
.

Because the monsters were still there.

Even from the top of the
ridge, they were visible everywhere, swarming along the water’s
edge and humping under the muddy surface of the lake. Ken could see
them all: a set of brickteeth fighting with a caisson of
thornwheels; a dragontongue flailing out of the water as a drift of
hookweeds rolled by and settled down for a long,
long
drink. Two bone
spiders, directly below them, were fighting over nothing at all,
claw and talons flashing in the watery morning sunlight.