Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  More sighing. “I know, I know.”

  “So what do you say we get to work and come up with a killer presentation? Convince them of what we can do?”

  “We,” he repeated.

  “Hey,” she said, and he could almost have sworn she was laughing. “Who knows the project better than me?”

  * * *

  Rose’s room, the third on the right, just as she’d been told, was large and high-ceilinged. There was soft, warm lighting and exposed beams and a set of windows that looked over the circular driveway with its huge broken-tooth stone centerpiece. There was clean linen on the bed with a thick comforter folded at its foot, and even a clear glass vase of California poppies on the end table.

  Rose hated every cleaned, vacuumed, polished, dusted, carefully prepared square inch of it.

  It keeps pulling at me, she thought as she lowered herself onto the perfect bedspread. It’s like gravity. You can’t escape it. It’s always there.

  It would be so easy. There was sure to be liquor in that huge dining hall they passed. Good shit, too. There were probably pills in the medicine cabinet, and Rose would know the name of every one of ‘em. She was a fucking encyclopedia of prescription medications and their off-label uses. Really really off-label.

  “It’s too much,” she said out loud to the empty room, and then again, in her head. It’s too much. I hate this place, I hate that man, I hate my life. All I want to do is sleep. Float away. Get away.

  She fell on her side, into the pleasantly floral fragrance of the comforter, and did her very best not to cry.

  She was remembering a corner in East L.A. She’d forgotten the names of the streets, if she’d ever known them, but she remembered that corner in painful, cutting detail. Every crack on the sidewalk where she’d laid her cheek, ever particle of grit ground into her knees and the heels of her hands.

  That had been the very bottom of it. That morning, when she’d dragged herself up into the greasy morning light with a hangover so bad she couldn’t speak. When that man, that thing that hobbled like a man, put his fist up her torn skirt and whispered something so wheezy and wet she couldn’t even understand it, but she could smell it. In fact, she realized, God damn it all, she could still smell it. She would always smell it.

  At that moment, she had raked him with her nails – the ones that hadn’t broken off – and kicked him with her one remaining high heel. She had staggered away, and he had been too hurt to follow her. Some chick at the Beverly Center, a thousand miles away from that corner she couldn’t forget, had let her borrow her phone. She’d never even thanked her. Her mom came and got her and she slept in a bed that night for the first time in month. She still remembered thinking, no matter how bad it gets, or how shitty I feel from no drinking or smoking or shooting, it will never be as bad as waking up a broken wrist and a knife-cut on my taint and somebody else’s vomit in my mouth on that corner in East L.A. Never as bad as that.

  She could feel the tears rising. She hadn’t cried, actually cried, since that day. But now…

  “I was wrong,” she said to the empty, perfect, fucking beautiful room. “I was so wrong.”

  Because the gravity never let up. The pull never went away. It didn’t get any better, she didn’t get any happier, and all the really good reasons she’d had to run in the first place were still there, still cutting her, still working, especially her fucking father and his fucking toys and her fucking mother and her paper smile and… everything.

  The world she was living in now, the one without all that wonderful stupid shit she had put into her body, was simply too hard. It was all sharp edges and hard landings, nothing but dead eyes that made her sick and angry. It was all …

  Too much.

  She turned her face and buried it in the double-thick pillows and screamed. She let it go on and on, and when she ran out of air, she turned her head, gasped in another breath, and did it again. When the second scream ran dry, she lifted her head up…and found that she actually felt a little better. A little.

  There was a clink against the window above the bed. She looked up to see a twig – no, a whole tangle of twigs – pasted against the window screen. Some of the sticks were thin as a pencil; others thicker than a finger. They looked eerie, bony, illuminated by the spilled light of the bedroom and, for a pulsing instant, the flash of lightning far across the Valle.

  As she stared, the pile of twigs seemed to shift in place – twitch, as if plucked at by the wind or…

  There was a knock at the door and she jumped again…then forced herself to stop. Too fucking much JUMPING going on here, she thought. She was acting like a third-rate actress in Halloween 14.

  The knock came again, short, soft, polite.

  “Nobody home,” she called out.

  “Rose? It’s Maggie.”

  Rose felt a sudden chill. She spun around and sat up on the bed, cross-legged. “How the hell are you knocking on the door?”

  “Special effects,” Maggie told her. Her voice seemed to be coming, quite convincingly, from the other side of the door. It was distant, muffled, slightly hollow. “You like?”

  “Frankly,” Rose said, “it creeps me out. You creep me out.”

  Maggie paused, almost as if she were taking a breath, choosing her words. “I only wanted to tell you that you have all the privacy you need in there.”

  There was a strange, metallic zipping sound behind her head. Rose looked over her shoulder and saw that the bundle of sticks – was it bigger now? – had actually cut its way through the window screen, driven hard against the window by the force of the wind.

  “…not listening to what you’re saying, and your Dad can’t hear you either. Just so you know.”

  Rose had missed the first part, but she got the gist. “Okay,” she said shortly. “Thanks.”

  There was a long, deep pause. “Okay,” Maggie said. “If you need something, all you have to do is open the door and call out.”

  Rose didn’t bother answering.

  Another pause. “I’m gone, then,” Maggie said.

  “What, are you going to make tiny little footstep-sounds that get softer and softer?” she asked.

  Maggie chuckled. Rose was sure she heard it, a chuckle. “No,” she said, “I’ll go. ‘Bye.”

  Rose was alone. She could feel it. She glanced at the sticks jittering against the window as she fumbled for her purse and pulled out her cell phone. The twigs had worked their way even more deeply into the cut in the screen. And they were definitely bigger now. How was that possible?

  She speed-dialed her mother’s cell phone. It rang twice before a voice answered – a male voice.

  “Um … Lisa Mackie’s cell phone,” the voice said. It was vaguely familiar to Rose, but she couldn’t quite place it.

  “Lisa Corman, actually,” she said. “She changed it back. And who is this?”

  “Rose? That you? It’s Bryan Chamberlain. At the clinic.”

  Oh, right, the cute doctor-guy. “You normally answer your patient’s phones?” she asked.

  He laughed easily. “Hardly. I was checking on your mom and the phone went off. It was sitting on the end table, and I didn’t want it to wake her so …”

  “Oh,” Rose said, disappointed. “She’s asleep?” She didn’t realize until that moment how much she’d wanted to talk to her mother, just to hear her voice. How embarrassing was that?

  “Finally drifted off a few minutes ago. She was having a tough time of it. She got up and walked around with me a bit.”

  Skreek. The sharp shriek of metal on glass. Rose turned with the cell phone still in her hand and saw the sticks scrabbling against the window glass. They were bigger than her fist now, and it didn’t look like the wind was pushing them; it looked like they were moving, all by themselves. Like fingers on a hand, but a hand with no palm, no wrist, no–

  “Rose?” the doctor said. “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” she said distantly. “So… Mom’s okay?” She stared at the stic
ks in fascination. What were they? She got up on her knees in front of the window and lifted one hand. There was another flicker of lightning outside, far across the Valle. It made her hand a black-etched shadow against the window for an instant. The sticks were a scrabbling, twitching blur.

  They were reaching for her. She could feel it. Reaching for her.

  “Rose? You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, fascinated. “Yeah, I’ll…we’ll talk tomorrow …” She dropped the phone and brought her hand up to touch the window right where the sticks–

  They jumped at her, grabbed for her right through the glass. The cutting noise became a mad shrieking as they scrabbled frantically to get at her.

  Skree-skree-skree–

  “Jee-sus!” Rose snapped her hand back and jumped away, clear off the bed. The finger-sticks scrabbled and scratched and jerked to get at her now, the cutting-noise getting higher and sharper than ever.

  Skree! Skreet-SKREE!

  “Daddy?” she called out. “Daddy, can you–”

  There was a voice at her shoulder, a deep, rich female voice, like Julie Andrews without the English accent.

  “I’ll take care of it, Rose,” Maggie said.

  SKREET! SKREET! SKREE—

  There was a deep, grating VUMMMMM that came from nowhere. Blue and white sparks jumped from the window-screen to the sticks, an angry, blinding spit of light. The sticks jumped again, but this time it was more like a convulsion. The humming stopped for a moment, then came again, louder: VUMMMM. More sparks, and the sticks hopped off of the window, away from the screen, and were snatched away by the wind and rain.

  Gone in an instant. All that was left was a ragged three-inch incision in the window screen, and a triangle of mesh that whipped around in the storm-driven gale like a waggling flap of skin.

  “That’s better,” Maggie said. She sounded grimly satisfied.

  Rose stared at the window. She swallowed hard. “What’d you do?”

  “Electrical charge,” Maggie said. “All the windows and doors are wired for it. Discourages break-ins when I activate it.”

  “You activate it much?”

  “Actually,” she said, “this was the first time.”

  The door flew open and Ken barreled in, tripping over his own feet. “Rose? You okay? Maggie said something was happen—”

  Rose put up a hand and smiled. “I’m fine, Dad. It’s cool. Something just … hit the window. From the storm. Made me jump.” For some reason, she didn’t want to tell her father about this, not yet. He had other things to think about, and they’d had enough weirdness for one day.

  Ken looked suspicious. He frowned at her. “You sure? Maggie said–”

  “Positive,” she said. It occurred to her that Maggie was the ultimate multi-tasker: she had been talking to her Dad downstairs even as they’d had their conversation about privacy up here. “Just a jittery teenager, that’s me. Probably withdrawal symptoms, y’know.” She grinned wickedly.

  Ken went pale, and she realized it wasn’t yet a joke to him.

  “Kidding,” she said. “Jesus, Dad, really, come on. I was kidding.”

  “Sure,” he said uncertainly. “I knew that.”

  “Anyway, Rosie the Robot here zapped the thing away, so–”

  Something occurred to her. She turned from her father and addressed the empty air. “Hey,” she said. “I thought you said you couldn’t hear me unless I called out into the hall. I didn’t even get near the door.”

  “Oh, that,” Maggie said. “I lied.”

  Rose sighed.

  Eight

  Sheriff Donald Peck was having a particularly vicious fantasy about beating the living shit out of Doctor Daniel Fucking Steinberg, geekfart cocksucking pain in the ass that he was, when his smart phone bleep-bleeped.

  He froze behind the wheel of his parked cruiser and clamped his teeth together.

  The phone went bleep bleep again.

  Only four people were supposed to have that number, and none of them were people he could afford to ignore.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  He pulled the phone free and looked at the Caller ID.

  “What the fuck?” Without another thought he took the call. “Armbruster? Who the hell gave you this number?”

  The dyke scientist’s brassy voice was as clear and painful as a fucking French horn. “I work with computers all day, Sheriff,” she said. “It was no big challenge.”

  “Never use this number,” he ordered her. “This is for official business only.”

  “Sure,” she said, dismissing him.

  He closed his eyes and ground his teeth again. Bitch. If you ever, EVER get on my side of the line, I will fuck you up SO bad.

  “I’ve got more information from the NWS and Earthwatch, not to mention our own sampling stations around the ridge line,” she said. “Satellite data confirmed–”

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, already bored. “Let me guess. It’s raining.”

  Now she was the one giving a bitter sigh. “Brilliant, Sheriff. Really. The point is, it’s not going to stop raining for at least forty-eight hours. Maybe longer. It’s not even going to slack off.”

  “Or so you think.” Peck massaged his temples with thumb and forefinger. Was this bitch never going to let him go? If she didn’t already have the ear of everybody at the goddamn public school, and through them all the parents who were already hating his guts, he would cut her off right fucking now.

  “This isn’t opinion, Sheriff. It’s fact. This little crater valley of yours is like a, a teacup that’s already starting to fill up, and it’s going to fill up completely in the next two days.”

  “You can’t know that,” he said.

  “I can. I do. You have to start evacuation procedures immediately.”

  “Evacuation? Are you out of your fuc– are you –” He stopped himself, took a breath. “Doctor, do you have any idea how much money the city would–”

  “There isn’t a city, you ass! Not anymore! That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

  “I’m supposed to take your word for it, and tell three thousand people to leave their homes? After less than, what, six hours of rain? What makes you think I could do that, even if I wanted to?”

  “You’ve got that town meeting tonight. Do it then. Convince them. Get them to pack up and move out, if only for a little while.”

  He was already shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No way.” The storm closed in around the cruiser, as if on cue. He lost sight of the hood ornament not five feet away in a chattering wash of rain and debris.

  “If I’m wrong, I’ll take full responsibility,” Lucy said.

  “Oh, that would make all the difference,” Peck laughed. “No one even knows who you are, Doctor. You’re just another crackpot scientist to these people, like your crazy friend Steinberg.”

  “Goddamn it, Sheriff, if you don’t mention it at tonight’s town meeting, I will.”

  Even the thought of that made him go cold. “I’d advise against that, Doctor. I’d advise against you attending at all. You don’t have any connection with the children, after all, do you? I mean, it’s not like you’re a parent…” you pathetic old gone-to-seed bull dyke you. “…and your interest in the children might be seen as…I don’t know, unhealthy? Suspicious?” Peck could hear the shock in her voice.

  “My…what? What did you say? ”

  “Why don’t you sleep on it, Doctor?” he said smoothly. “We’ll talk tomorrow…if there’s anything to talk about.” He tapped off the phone and stopped short of throwing it as hard as he could against the windshield.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. “Son of a fucking bit—”

  Something big and wet and glassy splopped against his windshield, and Peck jumped back in surprise.

  “What the—”

  It looked like a rain-soaked piece of plastic, wrinkled and soggy. It nearly covered the entire window. The wind made it ripple and twitch like it was moving
on its own.

  Peck grunted under his breath. Can’t drive with that fucking thing in my way. He took a deep breath and popped open the door. The rain slapped him hard, a face full of wet towel. He levered himself out into the storm, cursing under his breath, and pawed at the thing that was blocking the–

  “SHIT!” He snatched his hand back in surprise.

  That fucking thing STUNG me, he thought, astonished. No, it—it BIT me. He squinted through the downpour at his finger and saw it was intact but swelling, as if he’d jammed it in a door. At least it hadn’t broken the skin.

  “What the fuck is–”

  The thing flew off the windshield and came right at him. Peck dodged to the right, halfway back into the car, and the sheet of silvery translucent … stuff … flew past him, almost as if it was flapping its wings. It disappeared into the storm in an instant.

  Peck stared at his throbbing finger for a second longer, then pulled himself back into the cruiser and slammed the door. He was embarrassed at the racing of his own heart. Don’t be a pussy, he ordered himself. It was simply a piece of cellophane with…acid or something on it. That’s all.

  The two-way radio at his shoulder HONKED and a blurred, ugly, barely female voice brayed out of it. “HQ TO PECK. HQ TO PECK. CHECK IN, PLEASE.”

  He suppressed a burst of rage and thumbed the call button. “Peck here. Get Jimmy and Bo and anybody else you can find over to the Conference Center, ASAP. We’re going to have a sit-down before the meeting tonight, about the kids and the rain and … everything.”

  “Roger that, Sheriff.” There was another blast of static and she cut off.

  Things used to be so much simpler, he thought as he activated the Christmas tree of lights on the roof of the cruiser. Lightning struck to his right, then to his left, then right in front of him as he mounted Highway 181 headed south. One of the bolts struck a billboard for Coca-Cola not twenty feet away and blew it to smoking bits.