Creatures of the Storm (8 page)

Lucy didn’t even have to hold out her hand
before Rebecca slipped a new photo under her eyes – the tightest
shot yet, and a perspective she had seen a million times before. It
was ‘her’ half of the Anza Borrego Desert, as seen from only a few
hundred miles up. El Valle de Los Hermanos and the surrounding
desert for a hundred miles in every direction.

Sure enough, the swirling far edge of the
massive hurricane with the pretty name thousands of miles to the
south had set up a whole line of low-pressure systems and squall
lines that defied geography and seasonal trends. One of those
systems had snaked up from the southwest and wrapped itself around
their little crater valley, a fat tentacle of supersaturated air
pumping millions of gallons of water and God only knew how much
energy into the upper atmosphere.

“And thus come the rains,” she said more
clearly this time. Rebecca nodded and popped another picture on top
of the last. Lucy scowled. “You already showed me this one,” she
said. “I need to see some time lapses instead. Every hour, maybe?
Every two?”

“This is it. Look at the time code.”

Lucy opened her mouth to argue, then closed
it again. “Shit,” she said. “Do you have…?” Rebecca gave her the
third in the series. And a moment later the fourth. Lucy swallowed.
“Well,” she said with false calm. “That’s not moving at all, is
it?”

The storm had created a stationery front,
solid as stone, right over the Valle. They might as well have run a
hose as wide as five football fields from the Gulf of Mexico to the
Anza Borrego and opened the faucets all the way. Combine that with
the data she’d already seen on monsoonal flow, and the
mountain-shadow effects they saw around here all the time…

Damn. The cloud cover kept her from knowing
for sure, but it was possible that it was bone-dry – or at least
nothing more than humid – outside the crater, while inside it was
raining like never before. So far, there was no end in sight.

She tore herself away from the printouts and
looked directly into Rebecca’s beautiful hazel eyes. “You were
right,” she said. “I’m glad you showed me these.”

Rebecca’s smile was like the summer sun, so
bright and warm it made Lucy uncomfortable to look at it.

“So when are you leaving?” Lucy asked
her.

The beaming stopped. “What?”

“Come on, you can read this as well as I can.
This place is a disaster waiting to happen…except it’s not waiting
anymore. Your cute little house down by the VeriSil campus is going
to be underwater in a matter of hours. You have to pack up and get
out.”

“Get out of that house, maybe, sure,” Rebecca
said defiantly, “but I’m not leaving the Valle. No way. This is a
unique meteorological event, and I’m a meteorologist.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you’re Indiana Jones
now?”

“This is high ground, Dr. Armbruster. It’s
got the most sophisticated technology available and a complete
uplink to all the major weather satellite systems and databases.
It’s a ringside seat, and it’s a seat right next to the exit, too,
if things do get hairy.” Her grin was incandescent. “Heck no, I’m
staying.”

“No, you’re not,” Lucy said firmly.

“Yes, I am.”

“No. You’re. Not.” Lucy dumped the papers
back into Rebecca’s hands. “I still have to talk to that idiot
Steinberg, so we’ll continue this later. After I’ve killed
him.”

She left Rebecca standing in the hall and
fumbling with papers, her own mind whirling. There really wasn’t
much time. Lucy’s own little condo was nearby; it would be one of
the last to go underwater, worst-case. The rest of these people had
something to worry about, and soon. She should let them all go
right now. That might give them time to pack.

But first things first…

She reached the door marked LABORATORY #3 and
knocked. It drifted open at her touch. She stuck her head inside
and saw Michael Steinberg hunched over his computer terminal,
busily punching and clicking. His narrow shoulders were high up and
trembling.

He seemed to be laughing. Giggling,
actually.

Behold the mad scientist in
mid-cackle
, she thought. She stepped fully
inside. “Michael?”

It was as if she had set a firecracker off
between his feet. He went “ACK!” and jumped – actually jumped –
three feet to the right, clawing at a counter for balance as he
spun to her. His eyes were huge and bulging under his limp,
dirt-colored bangs. She was sure it took him a moment to recognize
her.

“Dr. Armbruster,” he said. “Ah. AH, Dr.
Armbruster!”

“Michael, where did you take the ATV?”

“You’ve got to see this,” he said, scrambling
to the stainless-steel sink, knocking aside furniture and carts as
he bulled through. It was as if he hadn’t heard her.

“Michael, what did you do with the ATV?”

He waved it away without even turning around.
“I had an errand. It doesn’t matter. Look at these. Look.”

He hauled up a steel tray
filled with specimens, a wide collection of strange shapes, all
twisted and stretched in different ways. They shared only one
thing: an ash-white color somewhere between bone and chalk. “Don’t
even
think
of
claiming this,” he said. “I’ve got it all documented, locked up
tight. This one is mine.”

She almost laughed in his face. “Don’t worry,
Doctor. I’ll leave it all to… what the hell is this supposed to
be?” She reached out to pick up a long cylindrical item, roughly
serrated along one side and hollowed completely through its long
axis. Steinberg jerked the tray back before she could touch it,
almost upsetting the entire affair. If he’d been able to, he would
have slapped her hand away. “Careful!” he brayed. “They’re very
delicate!”

He fumbled with a pair of tweezers and picked
up the cylinder, placing it on a nubby mat under a nearby
magnifier. He snapped on the light and she bent over it.

“Notice the pitted anchor-points on the
anterior. Have you ever seen anything like it? No, you haven’t.
Never. And this hollow center, obviously a conduit for nutrient or
bodily fluids, but unlike anything we’ve seen in any other species,
anywhere.”

She frowned as she stared, rotating the mat
this way and that, using a probe to gently prod and turn the
object. Finally she looked up, her expression carefully blank.

“Well, of course I recognize this,” she said
blandly.

He looked devastated. “You…you do?”

“Of course. Species Fastfoodia. Genus
Drinking Straw. But I can’t tell, is it Mcdonaldiana or
Jackintheboxia? Please,” she slapped the magnifier back towards
him. “Enlighten me, Doctor.”

He goggled at her, uncomprehending at first.
Then his expression curdled into rage. “Why, you … you bitch.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Michael. A new
species? We pick up crap like this off the desert floor every day.
If it’s not some bit of human detritus, then it’s some skeletal
fragment that’s been warped by the wind or heat. You know
that.”

He jerked away from her and put the
straw-thing back on his display tray. “It’s nothing of the kind.
Nothing like that. Look at this one.” He used the tweezers to pull
up a larger claw-like thing, straight as a ruler along the back,
angling into a curve with an almost geometrical abruptness as it
swooped into a circular arc, razor-sharp along the inside edge.

“Obviously avian,” she said, dismissing
it.

“Bullshit,” he said. “You know goddamn well
there’s nothing in bird taxonomy that accounts for a claw like
that. Not bird, not reptile, not mammal.” He looked up to glare at
her, and for the first time Lucy could clearly see the rage in his
eyes.

What an ugly, ugly
man
, she thought.
How the hell did he ever get this far?

“Have you checked?” she asked, carefully
controlling her voice.

He gaped at her. “What?”

“Have you checked? If it’s not a bird, at
least not a local desert species, what about an exotic? What about
some, I don’t know, parrot or macaw that somebody bought over the
internet from a pet store in the middle of Africa, then dumped in
the desert when it croaked?”

“That’s ridiculous,” he blustered, busily
putting the claw under the holding clamps on his microscope.

“What about simple birth defects of an
indigenous species? Or malnutrition? Have you ruled that out? Or
anomalous regrowth of an injury?”

“No,” he said, staring fixedly into the
eyepiece. “No, it’s not possible. Look at the ligature marks here.
It must be where the muscles, or something like muscles, linked to
the framework. And here, the fine cross-hatching, it’s as if a
secondary element overlaid the substructure and–”

“And what, a whole new species is more likely
than a stray bozo-bozo lizard from Macadamia or a bird with a
busted wing? Come on, Michael. Think.”

He slammed the countertop as hard as he
could. Glass and steel containers bounced and rang the length of
the laboratory. “You always do that to me!” he said, sounding like
a petulant child. “Always! I come up with a new idea and you piss
on it, without even trying to give it a chance!”

She stared at him. “Michael. Honey. That’s
because you’re always wrong.” For a moment she thought of putting a
comforting hand on his shoulder, actually trying to talk to this
asshole, to reason with him despite the wild gleam in his eye and
his absolutely absurd proposal. “Look,” she said, straining to be
gentle, “I don’t know why you keep doing this. You have this
schoolboy obsession with making The Big Discovery and becoming the
Stephen Hawking of modern biology. But somewhere in there, Michael,
you know the truth. Science isn’t like that. It’s hard work, and
slogging, and incremental discoveries, not overnight fame and
fortune.” She gestured helplessly at the claw-thing. “This isn’t
going to do it, Michael. All you’ve got–”

“Just look at it,” he said tightly.

“Michael. All you’ve got is some weathered
speci—”

“LOOK AT IT, GODDAMN YOU!”

She stared at him for the longest time. She
forced herself to count to ten. “Okay,” she said, so quietly she
could barely hear herself over the rush of water outside the
window. “I’ll make you a deal.”

“What?”

“I’ll examine the specimen…and you tell me
where you took the goddamn ATV.”

He glared at her. “I didn’t take it
anywhere.”

“Oh, please.”

“I didn’t take it anywhere important.
Just…out for a drive.”

“Without permission.”

He stared at her.

“After what happened last time.”

Still nothing.

“When you know that another complaint or
insurance claim will cause the liability coverage for the whole
fucking installation to be withdrawn.”

“It was nothing, Lucy. Really.”

“No trespassing? No property destruction? No
assault?”

“
No.
It was
nothing.
Now will you
look?”

She put her hands up. “Fine. Fine.” She bent
over the microscope and looked through the eyepiece, adjusting it
automatically. “You know I’m not going to see anything worth… wait
a minute. Wait a minute.”

She bent over more intensely and finely
adjusted the focus. “Did you see the striations on the side
here?”

“Where? Which ones?”

“These, these here. Complex. Delicate. Almost
like…like writing. My God, Michael, look at this. It says “MADE …
IN … JAPA–”

He shoved her away from the microscope and
got in front of it, as if protecting his precious discoveries.

“You’re a fucking moron,” he said. “A fucking
idiot. I give you the find of the fucking century, and you ridicule
it like everything else.”

Lucy wanted to rip his
greasy little head right off his shoulders. Where was that
celestial Frannie-voice now, she wondered. And would it say,
Walk away, walk away
or
do it do it DO IT!

She clenched her fists so tightly she could
feel her stubby nails digging into her palms. “I told you never to
take the ATV again. I told you it was a terminatable offense. And
not one week later, as soon as my back is turned–”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine,
fire me. You’ll be the laughingstock of the field, of the
world
when I release
this information, when everybody sees–”

Her cell phone rang. Michael stopped short
and stared at it, offended that anything, even an inanimate object,
would dare to interrupt him. He tried again.

“I mean it,” he said. “I dare you to–”

It rang again.

She gave him a perfectly bland smile. “Pardon
me,” she said. “Important call.” She plucked up the phone and
clicked it on. “Yes?”

“Fair warning,” Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson
whispered in her ear. “The cops are here.”

“Here?”

“Right outside. I saw the flashers.”

“Is Fender still here?”

“Afraid so. At least it looks like just one
guy, kind of big and handsome in an old sort of way.”

Sheriff Peck. She’d bet a buck on it.
“Thanks,” she said, and turned back to the moist and arrogant
scientist. “Well, congratulations, Michael. You’ve managed to bring
the cops down on us again.”

“What?” he said, still sounding offended.
“Where?”

“In the lobby. Come on.” She turned without
waiting for a response and was halfway through the door before she
turned back to look at him. She was secretly rather pleased with
how he looked: like a small, hairless animal caught in a trap. “Oh,
and before we go,” she held out her hand, “the keys.”

His hand went involuntarily to the pocket of
his lab jacket; his jaw started to tighten.

“Don’t argue about it, Michael. Just give me
the keys to the ATV.”