Secrets of the Storm (The Rain Triptych)

by Brad Munson

  The crumbling shell of the Cafetorium shifted under a sudden blast of hurricane-force wind. Lisa could actually see the last remaining walls shuddering like sails.

  “No more time,” she said. “Everybody into their … things. Let’s go, let’s go.” She turned to Barrymore. “James, this raft is solid. We made it well. I think if you lie down—”

  “I can’t, Lisa.”

  She stopped and looked at him.

  “What?”

  “I want to. I do. I just can’t. I’m sorry.”

  She saw the smooth glowing stream of light surge up from his dripping collar and pass over his face like a mask. Truth, she knew. No matter how bizarre: truth.

  “Okay,” she said. “Oh my God. Okay. But the staircase is gone. How will you––”

  Trini was at his side, squeezing his arm. “He’ll find a way.” She give him a tearful, severe look. “You will, won’t you? You will. Or I’ll kill you.”

  He actually laughed. “It’s okay,” he said, as another piece of the roof ripped away. “I’ll make it. You worry about yourself.” He glanced at the last of the survivors as they clambered into their rafts and floats. He looked at Drucker, trying to winch open the loading dock doors at the far end of the room. The metal shrieked in its twisted frame.

  James looked at Trini one last time, then gave her a hug so long and hard it took her breath away. “I’ll be okay,” he said into her ear.

  Lisa didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to see if it was the truth or a lie.

  He turned from both of them without another word. “David!” he called, and hopped across the last rows of the drowning bleachers. “Let me do that!”

  She saw them in a heated, whispered conversation. Then Drucker, eyes as wide as Lisa’s own, nodded mutely and came back. He gave Lisa a look of utter astonishment.

  “Did he tell you?” he said.

  “What?”

  “He said … he said I’m supposed to take care of you.”

  Without another word he climbed into the green-dragon floater and dug the compass out of his shirt pocket. “He said we have to go north. North to the Notch.”

  Barrymore threw his full weight against the crank. The corrugated steel door complained loud enough to make the kids cover their ears, but it opened. Slowly.

  The convoy pushed and paddled and dragged its way into the open sea.

  Forty

  “Everybody stay together!” Lisa called out as the last of the inflatables pulled away from the school. “We can do this!”

  There were twenty-two makeshift vessels, all tethered together with clothesline and cord from window-blinds. They made a set of three concentric circles, wavering and rolling in the unsteady sea.

  Drucker kept pulling out the compass he’d salvaged from the science room the day before and referred to it with feverish intensity. He kept pointing through the downpour and shouting, “That way! Go North, Young Man!”

  They wallowed forward. They had gone only a few hundred feet when Lisa turned to look back at the lone figure standing on the loading dock of the collapsing Cafetorium. Water was already licking at his boots.

  James Barrymore saw her looking back. He raised his arm in farewell and held it there until she finally turned away.

  Idiot, she thought as she dug her makeshift oar into the water. She was in a kayak, of all things – another gift from the Outdoors Club. It had been given to her because she was the only one who had ever been in a kayak before.

  Rainwater spat in her face. She shook her head viciously to clear her eyes, and rowed again.

  North, she told herself. Like the man said.

  ***

  It was hard going. The current kept trying to pull them back towards the south, when they wanted to go in exactly the opposite direction. But it was no more than a mile and a half, the locals told her, and the land rose with every hundred yards to the north. It might even be shallow enough to walk just a little farther on. All they had to do was paddle for a bit – right up Highway 121, or rather over Highway 121, submerged unknowable feet below them. It should take them right to the Notch.

  Drucker was far to the front, looking like a cartoon tourista in a bright green plastic inner tube. His feet churned madly just below the surface, his arms working a wide bit of planking as an oar. My hero, Lisa thought. Never had bipolar disorder looked so beautiful.

  Trini was in one of the two rafts at the center of the lash-up, tending to the smallest children. The rest of the parents and teachers were ranged around the circle in a motley assortment of inflatables and floatation devices. Little Jennifer was a waterlogged lump in one of the two whitewater rafts. The Greenaways were close by her; Sharon hadn’t let Katie get three feet away since they’d boarded. Kerianne Briggs sat by herself at the edge of one of the six-man inflatables. Her mother hunched at the far end, staring at her, her hair still matted and untouched, her face passive and desperate at the same time. She no longer clutched the pistol; it was gone. Someone had given her a taser instead, but she held it with the same avid immobility as before.

  She wouldn’t stop staring at Kerianne.

  Lisa was at the back of the pack, in the kayak. When they were no more than two hundred yards north of the Cafetorium, they lost the outlines of the school in the pearly mist. The water around them was churning with debris – lumber, furniture, boxes, clothing, bodies – God, bodies, she thought, and tried not to look too closely. The rain pounded on their heads. The children were set to bailing, constantly bailing as the adults rowed north.

  They had been paddling for less than half an hour, saying very little, when Trini called from the eastern edge of the outer circle. She was sprawled on top of a turquoise air mattress. “Something here!” she yelped. “Big and white!” Lisa watched as she pulled out the taser she had been given, careful to keep her gloved hand only on plastic.

  An arc of bone-colored something, like the rolling back of a half-submerged sea serpent, broke the sizzling water right beside Trini. She thrust out the taser; Lisa heard the angry ZZZZATTT! all the way to the back of the convoy.

  The bone-thing jerked and twitched, almost spinning to the east to get away. Everyone saw the foaming trail it left along its escape route.

  There was a ragged cheer, soggy applause. Trini lifted her taser like a sword and shook it in triumph.

  “Keep a sharp eye!” Lisa called from the back. “Where there’s one, there’s more!”

  Nobody argued the point. Everyone looked around.

  Ten minutes later, Slumpy called out from the southwest portion of the outer circle.

  “Got something coming!” he said. “Looks like some kinda jellyfish, only it’s all hard and shit!”

  “Language, Steven!” Trini called.

  Lisa couldn’t help but smile. The boy pulled out his taser just as Lisa caught a flash of a platter-sized disk, jagged along its edges, rising almost gracefully out of the dung-colored water. Slumpy extended his arm to touch it as it passed –

  – and the thing leaped out of the water, flashed past the taser and sliced through the boy’s arm, just above the elbow. Lisa heard a wet buzzz as it bit through flesh and bone and emerged in a spray of blood on the other side; the arm detached and fell into the water with a sad little plish.

  Slumpy screamed – a high, dry, horrible sound. The people around him gasped and shouted. Trini covered the eyes of the little ones, made them look the other way as he screamed again, writhed in pain, and rolled off the mattress and into the water. He disappeared almost instantly into the brown and foaming murk.

  “Don’t think about it!” Lisa shouted, surprised at the determination in her own voice. “Just keep going, keep going!”

  The rain came down harder than ever. Lightning cracked the sky directly above them, moving relentlessly from north to south in bands of deadly brilliance.

  Another five minutes, another fifty yards, and a set of flumes – some as small as sandwich bags, some as large as bed sheets – flapped
by, glistening and translucent. They missed Katie Greenaway by no more than six inches as she huddled in the second raft.

  Jim Greenaway shocked another underwater thing when it came close. He drove it off, but no one cheered this time.

  A few yards farther on, the water seemed to smooth out. Everyone turned to the west as the rotting remains of the DH Emporium loomed out of the mist.

  They were much closer to the complex than Lisa expected to be. They could see through the gaping windows into the stores and corridors of both levels. It looked like the remnants of some huge cut-away model.

  Creatures were everywhere inside it: hurtling down the exposed hallways, crawling on the crumbling ceiling, crunching through shattered merchandise of every store. It was like overturning a rat’s nest and looking inside. They jumped, they bubbled, they boiled in every ugly combination imaginable. And they never, never stopped moving.

  A vast creature – a bone spider fully two stories tall – emerged from the wreckage of the central atrium. The rowers faltered for a moment as the creature eased through the water towards them, and they all saw the same thing as the same moment:

  A human figure was riding high on the monster’s cantilevered leg, cradled in a bony webwork of edges and claws.

  It was a woman – a girl, really, her wild half-blonde hair streaked with blood where patches had been pulled out. She was dressed in tatters of black leather and smeared with food and mud and … other things, Lisa realized. Sticky and dark. Her bright blue eyes were ringed with smears of make-up. Every inch of her smooth, tanned skin was scored with scratches and bites. Her nails, once painted and pampered were broken and cracked now. Two of them were missing entirely.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Trini said. “It’s Amber Lazenby.”

  The bone spider was less than twenty yards away from the caravan now. Amber’s head bobbed towards them. Her hands came up and griped the talons that held her so gently.

  “Look at me!” she shrieked. Her grin was wide and toothy and completely mad. “LOOK AT MEEE!”

  “ROW!” Lisa bellowed from the back, as loud and rough a sound as she could make. She had no idea who this girl was, but she wanted nothing to do with her. The sound of her voice seemed to jolt the others out of their horrified pause. They turned, they dug in. They surged north again.

  “I’M QUEEN OF THE MALL!” Amber yowled. “QUEEN OF THE MONSTERS, QUEEN OF THEM ALL!”

  Fifteen long, thin arms erupted from the near-middle of the bone spider and reached for the eastern edge of the convoy.

  Tasers came up. An electrical snap sounded – here, there, there – as they shocked one limb, then another, then a third.

  The limbs jerked back. One dissolved into powder and fell into the water.

  The bone spider stopped moving forward. It was clearly not used to resistance – or pain – and didn’t care for it at all.

  “ROW!” Lisa screamed again. The convoy pulled away from the creature as it shivered and swayed, suddenly cautious from the electrical shock.

  “WHAT DID I TELL YOU TO DO?” Amber screeched at it. “WHAT THE FUCK DID I TELL YOU TO DO?” She pounded her fists on its rocky hide. She dragged at the talons that held her. “LET ME GO, ASSHOLE! LET ME GO!”

  The claws did not respond. In fact, they drew together just a bit.

  Like a cage.

  “What …?” Amber said, barely understanding. “What are you doing? Listen to me! LISTEN! I’m the Queen, goddamn it! I’m the fucking Queen, you can’t do this!”

  The claws pulled in all around her, tighter and tighter. Now they were touching her shoulders on both sides, pressing down on her head.

  “The Queen!” she shrieked. “THE QUE—”

  She was crushed into a featureless ball of flesh and bone with a single wet snap. Blood ran briefly down the weathered columns of the bone spider, but the rivulets disappeared into the porous, papery flesh before they could travel more than a few inches.

  In half a dozen heartbeats, Amber was nothing more than a trunk-sized knob of desiccated tissue, and the bone spider had turned away from the annoying, retreating intruders to return to its nest.

  ***

  Lisa gave an explosive sigh of relief when the Emporium and its monsters disappeared into the driving sheets of rain behind them. But other creatures, more creatures, were coming for them now, from every direction. The outriders were using the tasers constantly now, poking them blindly into the water, risking electrocution to drive them back. But the creatures were grimly persistent, lunging and surging through the water, over and over.

  We must be getting close to shore, Lisa thought as she paddled. They’re getting desperate. She could tell that the water was shallower as they crawled farther north. They were passing the peaks of second-story houses and the sodden tops of the few trees that hadn’t been felled. She could detect the mysterious curves and edges of road signs and elevated billboards just below the surface. Even the occasional stoplight poked up out of the muck.

  We’re going to make it, she told herself. I swear to God, we’re going to make it,

  Then David Drucker’s little green dragon gave a shrill screeeeing whistle.

  It had sprung a leak. One of the seams on the cheaply made children’s toy had separated under the strain of the trip.

  “Don’t worry!” Drucker called out, struggling to close the rift. “Don’t worry, I got it!”

  Stephanie Lewis, an eighth grader from his class, paddled towards him. She had a small Styrofoam float and nothing more. “Come over on mine,” she said.

  “It can’t take two,” he said shortly. “It’ll swamp us both.”

  “Can you make it to the raft?” Trini called from the center of the convoy. The other rowers picked up the pace even more.

  “You’re overloaded already!” he called back, flailing almost comically inside the collapsing green dragon. “I’d capsize the lot of you.” As the last of the air leaked away, he cursed under his breath and tore out of the float entirely. It sank beneath the surface with a final hiss. “I’ll just swim,” he said breathlessly. “I’m a pro at treading water.”

  Lisa untied herself from the outer circle and rowed hard to get near him. He saw her coming. “It’s okay,” he said, his head and shoulders bobbing nervously just above the waterline. “We’ll be hitting shore before you know it.”

  “David, come on—”

  He ignored her. Instead he kept swimming forward, leading the way, and calling back, “Hey, let me check the depth while I’m here! Back in a sec!” He ducked down under the water.

  Everyone gasped. Lisa shouted “David!” but the water where he had been was silent and empty.

  She waited one beat ... and two … and he burst to the surface, rocketing almost halfway out of the water.

  “Fifteen feet at the most!” he crowed. “Come on, everybody, can’t you see me? Marco!”

  Nobody responded. He swam ahead a bit more, breathing hard now, but flushed with excitement. “Come on, people! Marco!”

  A few of the kids responded automatically: “Polo …”

  He actually laughed. Lisa, pacing the rowers to one side, couldn’t believe it. Insane, she thought, and not for the first time.

  “I can’t hear you!” he called out. “MARCO!”

  “POLO!” Even the adults joined, shaking their heads in disbelief as they rowed for all they were worth and the monsters filled the water around them.

  “Oh!” he said, pulling a face. “I just peed in the pool!”

  This time they all laughed.

  “Depth check again!” he said, and dived down.

  Lisa hated it. What if …

  He surged to the surface again in an explosion of water and foam. “MARCO!”

  It came immediately this time: “POLO!”

  “Okay,” he said, more breathless than ever. “Ten feet deep at the most. We’re getting there!” He snapped his head over one shoulder, searching out his greatest allies. “Trini! Lisa! You see anything straight
north?”

  Lisa strained to find something in the featureless gray mist, beyond the downpour. Nothing. But she didn’t want to say so.

  “I think I see something!” Trini said as they pushed and pushed. “A line, maybe. A white line?”

  Katie Greenaway leaned forward, pulling away from her mother for the first time. “Me, too! White and dark green! Right there!”

  “We’re gonna make it!” Drucker called as a choppy swell slapped him in the mouth. He spit and coughed. “Just a little bit more, okay? Come on!”

  They rowed as hard as they could.

  “Depth check!” he yelled, and Lisa said, “David, you don’t—”

  But he was gone, down again. She waited breathlessly through one beat … and two … and breathed a sigh of relief when he bobbed to the surface again, water boiling around him.

  Everyone was ready for the shout. One little boy actually said “PO—” before he realized Drucker wasn’t talking.

  Lisa rowed toward him. He was facing away from her, staring at the faint line to the north that even she could see now. “David?” she said. “You okay?”

  She was right next to him. She put out a hand, touched his shoulder …

  His head tipped forward, into the water. His entire body capsized. And Lisa saw that he was bitten through completely, just below the hips.

  He had no legs. No thighs. No waist. His organs were exposed in a viciously clean plane inches below his rib cage. It oozed something thick and sludgy, more like mud than blood.

  Lisa gasped. Trini Garcia screamed.

  Suddenly, as if on cue, the water all around them boiled with creatures – arms, claws, tentacles, cutting blades – rising out of the water, coming at them.

  The tasers went ZZATT in every direction as the convoy surged to the north. Children screamed and cried and one of the adults began praying under her breath. The creatures fell back, but only a few yards. Then they followed, far too closely.

  “Just a little more!” Lisa called, pulling on the forward tow lines, making them go even faster. “Just a little more!”