by Brad Munson
Do you HAVE to act like a fucking cartoon? he asked silently.
“Well,” Jimmy Fultz said, frowning deeply, “if we aren't gonna look for them, why'd we invite everybody down here?”
He had to say it through gritted teeth. “Because we sent out the invitations before it started raining, you moron.”
The double doors at the far end of the hall flew open and the first of the VIPs arrived. Herb McCandless from the already dissolving mall, the Emporium, was first in, shaking his folding umbrella and shedding water like a wet dog.
As always, Peck thought bitterly. If there's free food, Herb's at the head of the line.
Behind him came his usual Chamber of Commerce entourage: the owner of the town's used car lot (there were no new car lots in DH), both dentists, and the usually dour owner of Dos Hermanos Window and Doors, who clearly thought he was about to be busier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He was a pretend Texan; he loved phrases like that.
Maybe so, Peck thought grudgingly. Maybe not. He vaguely remembered the joke that Marty Fein made about the sycophants and their pudgy leader: “They put the sucker in the COC.”
He turned his attention back to his deputies and shook his head sadly. He'd spent months searching the town and advertising in every newspaper within five hundred miles for better candidates, but nobody was the least bit interested in coming to the ass end of nowhere for this kind of job. What was it that prick politician said? Sometimes you fight the war with the army you've got, not the army you might want…
“So what're we supposed to say?” Bo asked him, casting a nervous glance at the approaching civic leaders.
“Nothing,” Peck said. “Don't make any promises, don't make any predictions. We're doing the best we can, we're putting 110% effort into finding those poor girls, it's a tough job but we're ready for it, you know, the usual bullshit.”
“Will do,” Mindy chimed in, and squared her rounded shoulders.
Jimmy Fultz bobbed his head, attempting decisiveness and competence. It didn't play. “Got it,” he said.
You don't got it at all, Peck thought. But what choice do I have?
Normal Lazenby, mayor of Dos Hermanos, swept through the spread wings of the double doors, protected from the storm by the arc of a massive umbrella hovering over his leonine head. It was held steadfastly in place by his formidable wife Miriam. Normal, as always, was the picture of command: hawk-like features, a magnificent sweep of silver hair, eyes keen and clear. He was almost frighteningly white. But for his irises, he looked as if he had been carved from marble, or even chalk, while his wife was a comparative riot of color, a bold blue beret on her steely hair, a spray of color at her raddled throat, a slash of crimson where her lips used to be.
Normal took three steps into the room and stopped so abruptly that Miriam nearly crashed into him. She pulled up short at the last instant and recovered without a stumble.
As she always does, Peck noted with no small amount of bitterness. Always there, protecting the old shitheel.
You didn't have to be psychic to see the look in Mayor Lazenby's piercing blue eyes. He was...confused. Stunned. A little terrified. At that moment, Peck was convinced he had absolutely no idea where he was. Miriam knew exactly what was up. She took him firmly in hand, bird claws clasping his thin upper arm of his exceedingly well-tailored suit, and guided him forward, ever forward, towards the cluster of local dignitaries who were approaching Peck and his deputies.
I'll see you all in hell, Peck promised them silently. Every single damn one of you.
“Remember,” he said under his breath, barely loud enough for the two other cops to hear. “Encouraging words. Total confidence. No promises.”
He didn't even wait to see if they understood. It wasn't as if he had a choice.
He put out his hand. “Thanks for coming,” he said and gave Herb the good-old-boy pat on the shoulder that the old twat liked so much. That turned into a firm shake with Marty Fein from VeriSil, along with a confidential little wink, like they were in on some kind of joke between leaders, even though there was no joke at all. Doug Pratt, the weasel-faced principal of DH Public School, caught the look and scowled.
“Right this way, folks,” Peck said, and ushered them into Conference Room B. “Let's get this show on the road.” Literally, he added only to himself. As in “dog and pony.”
The pre-meeting to the meeting went reasonably well. Help us help you, We need to hang together no more than ever, Don't dwell on the details, Stick to the big picture.
He managed to get all the way to the end before it went to shit.
“So that about covers it,” he said. “People should be arriving any minute now. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and a bear claw, and let's get ready to greet them.”
“Well, we're with you,” Herb McCandless of the DH Emporium said. “Of course we’re with you. Nobody wants a panic.”
“Deseret Fifty-Six Fifty,” Mayor Lazenby said.
Peck gave the mayor a sidelong glance. That was the first thing the crazy old man had said all night. What the hell did it mean?
“Surely not,” Marty Fein said, agreeing with Herb. “We have enough on our plate.”
Perfect, Peck thought. They were falling right into place. Just what I needed.
They were all half on their feet, eying the free eats, when a single voice cut through the rumble like a sharpened sword.
“What about this wretched weather?” It was Miriam Lazenby, the mayor's wife, sitting in the exact center of the room next to her husband. Her spine was ramrod straight, her eyes eagle-bright.
Everyone stopped and looked at Peck again. Shit. Of course it would be her.
“Aren’t you even going to mention it?”
“It’s a storm,” he said shortly. “They happen. Granted, they’re rare here in Dos Hermanos, but–”
“They’re unheard of in Dos Hermanos,” Miriam corrected him. “We have a granddaughter at that school. We have reason to worry if there’s a genuine threat from strangers or from the rain.”
I know all about your granddaughter. If she were one of the missing, we’d all be better off. Aloud, Peck forced himself to say, quite gently, “Really Ms. Lazenby, I can assure you, this storm is going to break soon. Tomorrow morning at the very latest.” He gave her his best, most impervious Trust Me smile.
“How do you know?” Miriam Lazenby demanded.
Peck stopped cold. It was so rare that anyone questioned him, he really didn’t know quite how to respond. “I’ve been staying in touch,” he said vaguely.
“With whom, exactly?” Now Marty Fein was chiming in.
Peck hated him; he was one of the few people in the Valle that Peck couldn’t afford to ignore.
He opened his mouth and the words came out before he even knew what he was saying, exactly as he had heard them a few hours earlier: “I checked in with the NWS and Earthwatch right before our meeting,” he lied smoothly. “The college Agricultural Station up on the ridge gave me the readings from their own sampling stations, confirmed by satellite data. Another eighteen hours. Twenty-four, tops.”
Everyone looked impressed. Even Miriam Lazenby pulled back a bit, though the snarl remained firmly in place.
Thank you, Dr. Armbruster, he said silently. You have no idea what a help you’ve been.
“Oh,” Fein said. “Well. Then … good. Good, because another day like today and the whole plant would be underwater, you know? That would be very bad news.”
Peck smiled, firmly back in control. “I’m not in the bad news business, Mr. Fein,” he said. “I know I can count on all of you, all of you, to help me calm those frazzled nerves tonight.”
There were general sounds of assent, grunts and yesses and even a you bet. Then everyone was shifting chairs and moving, everyone but Peck’s own people. Within moments, the last of the ‘leadership’ was out of the Conference Room and the door was shut firmly behind them.
Peck turned and put his back to the
pressed wood.
“So the storm is breaking?” Mindy Bergstrom said. “That is good news.”
Oh, for Christ's sake, Peck said, careful to keep his expression cool and calm. Will you just shut UP?
“I mean, things have been kind of—”
“Mindy,” Peck said, “I don’t know if the storm is going to break. Nobody knows. But you had better go out there and tell everybody who asks that the storm will be ending tomorrow. Tomorrow, guaranteed. And you tell everybody who whines about those kids that we have a ton of leads, that they’re as good as home already, and you stick to the story that the disappearances are unconnected. Unconnected, am I clear?”
There were tight nods all around. He could tell how scared they were, and that was exactly how he wanted it.
He stepped aside and opened the door. “Get out,” he said.
They got.
Lightning flared outside the dark window and thunder boomed a heartbeat later, deep enough for him to feel it in his chest. It suited his mood perfectly.
This was bad. Far worse than Peck liked. He could make it work, though. He was sure of it.
After all, he had to.
Fourteen
Michael Steinberg stood in the middle of his laboratory, his lips flaking away like old parchment, listening to his menagerie calling to him: the clatter of bone against metal, the skirl of shell scraping over shell, the click and chitter of hard, sharp edges striking at cracking glass.
It wasn’t music. It was better than music.
He knew what it meant. The wordless voice inside his head was telling him what had to happen next.
There was an eight-foot pole with a hook at the end hanging inside the door to the hall, a tool for opening the high casement windows of the laboratory. Michael crossed the room to fetch it, and he could hear, he could feel, the hiss and crackle of his new leg-joints grinding to dust and rebuilding, the sharp snap and dry whisper of bony, brittle tissue dissolving and regrowing with every movement.
Lovely sounds, he thought. Really lovely.
The pole was hollow and very light. It felt good in his hand as he swung it back and forth. It whistled joyfully in the misty air.
The right tool for the right job.
Without another thought he spun and smashed a one-hundred-gallon terrarium to pieces.
A torrent of needleseeds tumbled from the broken box, bouncing and crackling across the linoleum like spiked Christmas ornaments. Michael spun a full 180 degrees, pole sizzling in front of him, and swept an array of trays and beakers off a specimen table. Glass and metal flew everywhere; stains and candle-eyes surged across the filthy floor, dashing for freedom like blind baby turtles.
He swept the pole again and gloried in its screaming.
In less than five mad minutes, he had broken every glass or plastic container in the room, overturned every table and desk, shattered every scrap of technology and bit of equipment. Soon he was wading calf-deep through a swamp of oily water, debris and twitching rain-creatures who, to his mild surprise, ignored him entirely. As a last grand act, he lifted the cracked and splintered pole like a javelin and rammed it point-first through the plate glass window over the sink. The glass shattered with an almost musical sound, and a wave of moist inhalation rushed inside, washing over him through the new hole in the wall.
Thunder rumbled far away.
The creatures moved towards the opening in a single, tidal surge. Every molecule of Michael’s new body wanted to join them, to leave now, go lose himself in the storm, in the wet, forever.
Something stopped him. That wordless voice again. A squeeze at the back of his head, a cold intrusive finger of thought from outside.
He couldn’t leave yet. There was more work to be done.
He pulled himself away from the window and slogged through the wreckage towards the closed hallway door, tossing aside the damaged pole. Creatures streamed and crawled and stumbled past him in the opposite direction. He smiled fondly at them as he bent with a pop and seized a table-leg that was dangling by a single nail from a sheet of cracked pressboard. It was slightly longer than his forearm, a stout piece of wood wrapped in cheap sheet metal and shaped vaguely like a torch, thin at the bottom, wide at the top. Lots of sharp corners and gleaming edges.
The right tool for the job, he told himself again, and jerked it free. He swept open the door and stepped through it. The creatures didn’t follow. They had the open storm waiting for them. He knew it would be hours before their thirst, and the direction from that outside mind, that guiding Intelligence, would drive them indoors again.
The corridor was deserted. No one had noticed his destruction so far. The thick walls of Lucy Armbruster’s pet project were wonderfully soundproof. For a moment, Michael thought he was all alone in the building…
… until he heard the distant, wet squelch of Cindy Bergstrom’s blinking eyes.
He nodded, and his neck made a dry ripping sound.
Get to work.
The lights hummed over his head. The hallways felt narrow and confining and so dry it was like staggering down a tunnel cut in desert rock. His walk wasn’t really a walk anymore. He had found other, more efficient ways to move, and he used them now without thinking.
First he visited the lunch room and looked on the hook next to the security panel. No, not there.
He slipped down the hall to the coat closet. Sometimes Lucy the Lez left them hanging with the Station's jackets, caps, and windbreakers. And again: nothing.
He moved down the hallway to the central lobby, forcing himself to stand up straight. He pawed at his clothing, only dimly aware of the bits of debris and ash-gray sand clinging to his double-knit pants from mid-thigh down, and hid the club behind his back as he rounded the corner.
Cindy was sitting at her desk, dead center in a pool of light, studying something on the computer screen with puzzled intensity. She barely glanced up when he came towards her.
“Dr. Steinberg,” she said, then something registered and she looked back again, focusing on him for the first time as he stood there in the shadows. “Dr. Steinberg?” she said, with new concern in her voice. “Are you all right?”
Michael’s tongue was gone, absorbed into his changed skull long ago. He had to grow new plates and panels and fluted channels in his mouth to make a sound that resembled human speech. It had only taken a few seconds, but it felt strange to him. So unnatural.
“Where are the keys?” he asked. His new voice sounded thick and fuzzy even to his own altered ears.
“Wow,” she said, shaking her curly head. “You sound like you’re getting a terrible cold. And what happened to your pants? Did something spill?”
Michael took a step closer to the desk. The club was very heavy, held tight behind his back. “I need the keys to the ATV.”
Her eyes slid away and she gave him a smug little smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. Really. But Doctor Armbruster said–”
“KEYS!” he bellowed. Bits of skin and grit sprayed out of his mouth and pattered onto the desktop. Cindy stopped short, gaping at him, her gray curls bobbing.
She was seeing him clearly for the first time.
Her hand crept to her chest. For a moment Michael thought it was a typically melodramatic gesture – “oh my, suh, I do believe you have given me the vapors!” Then his new senses – not sight, exactly, he couldn’t really see all that well anymore, but something – showed him the obvious outline of the Center’s key chain and the key itself, hiding under a small panel of cotton, right beside her fingertips.
It was in the left breast pocket of her ugly orange blouse.
“Please, Doctor,” she said. “You don’t have to take that tone. I’m —”
Michael brought the club around and hit her in the head as fast and as hard as he could. The metal-covered edge of the table-leg connected with her skull above the eyebrows, and it was going so fast, it hit her so hard, that Michael Steinberg sheared off the top of Cindy Bergstrom’s head with a single, sweeping blow.
A saucer-sized dish of hair and bone flew away with a remarkably small spray of blood. He heard it thunk against a far wall.
A skull cap, Michael thought distantly. I just made a real live skull cap.
Cindy still sat in the chair looking at him. Her jaw opened as if to finish her sentence and hung there; her tongue spilled out, motionless, and a strange sound emerged, something long and liquid and low that started as a human voice, almost a word, and wound down and down and down, into a moan…then a gurgle…then a grunt…and then stopped.
A string of drool leaked from the corner of her mouth. Michael watched curiously as the light in Cindy Bergstrom’s gray-green eyes – the only sign of intelligence he’d ever seen in her – faded away forever.
He was thinking hard now. Planning. He knew he’d have to do something with the body; that bitch-doctor Armbruster or the other one, the mulatto assistant, could come back at any time and he wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
He moved around the desk, hooked an arm under Cindy’s motionless shoulders, across her ample breasts, and hauled her up and out of the chair. He caught a flicker of green out of the corner of his failing eyes, and saw that she had been playing solitaire on the computer. That was what she’d been studying so intently.
Cindy was barely leaking at all, he realized. She would be easy to move, easy to hide, especially with his newfound strength.
And then he could finally go out into the storm, where he belonged.
Five minutes later Cindy was safely concealed and Michael was out the front door of the Station. He paused for a moment on the porch when the rain first struck him, face pointed to the sky, palms upturned, chest out, taking in as much of the water as he could.