Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  Well, THAT wouldn’t do, she decided, and looked around for a weapon to end the madness even as she retreated. There, in the corner behind Cindy’s desk was… what was that? It looked like the leg from a desk or a chair or something. It was certainly the right size and shape to use as a club…

  Wonder where that came from, she thought as she rolled over, grabbed it, and came up swinging. She ignored the sticky-slippery feel of it in her hand.

  The first sweep of the club barely missed Fender as he spun away, but she took advantage of the retreat and turned to run down the hall. There would be no help from Rebecca or Cindy, they were gone. And as much as she hated the idea of running to Michael Steinberg for help, anything was better than facing this... thing… alone.

  She ran down the long hallway towards his lab. She could hear Fender slithering and thumping behind her, scudding across the floor, caroming off the walls. Lucy slipped when she stopped at Steinberg’s office, turned and pounded through his door – to find herself hit in the face by the full force of the storm.

  She tripped and fell head-first into foot-deep, rain-soaked debris. She bellowed like a beast as she pulled herself up.

  The room was a wreck. Completely destroyed. Sheets of cold rain and mist were billowing in through the shattered window above the lab sink, and Michael Steinberg himself was nowhere to be found.

  It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. A moment later the door behind her burst open and the monster that had been Fender flew in, fell hard, and thrashed madly in the muck right next to her.

  Lucy scrambled to her feet. “There!” she said, backing away towards the door. “Wet enough for you?”

  The creature rolled over onto its back and faced her. The resemblance to her old friend from across the road was gone. The thing spread its arms, swelled its chest and drew in gallon after gallon of the water around it, absorbing it faster than any sponge, fast as a pump or a vacuum.

  Lucy backed to the hallway door, horrified. The creature paused long enough to sit up, still bone-dry, she noticed, still papery and arid, and cracked its face to form a smile. “Not nearly enough, Doctor,” it said. “Not nearly.”

  Lucy turned and bolted out of the room, back into the hall, back the way she came.

  The Jeep. I’ll get to the Jeep and get the hell OUT of here. The keys were on a hook in the break room, right where she’d left them the night before. She was positive.

  The Fender-thing blew the door off Steinberg’s lab and followed her. A small tidal wave of water and debris gushed into the hall. He kicked through it and started down the corridor towards her, skidding and bouncing off the walls as he came.

  She made it to the break room, moving so fast she slammed into the lunch table to stop herself.

  There were the keys. On the hook. She lunged for them, got her hand around them, pulled back, and Fender filled the doorway, jumped inside.

  She pushed the lunch table between them and raised her makeshift club in the air, vaguely surprised she still had it in her hand. He swept the table aside with a single movement, and it skidded across the linoleum to slam into the freestanding broom closet on the far side of the room.

  The closet door popped open. A body slumped out.

  Lucy had found Cindy Bergstrom.

  “GIMME!” the Fender-creature bellowed, and lunged for her.

  “FUCK YOU!” Lucy screamed back, and brought the club down in a vicious slash at the monster.

  The blow connected with the side of the creature, below its upraised arms…and continued through, across his chest, through the center, and out the other side above its hip, meeting almost no resistance at all.

  The creature stopped in mid-stride. It looked down at the huge canyon plowed through its chest in mute astonishment. Then it looked up, and found her eyes…and in one impossible moment, Lucy saw the last of its consciousness blink away, like a light switch turning off. The creature collapsed right in front of her, making a set of distinct noises as it landed: Thump. Thump. Ka-THUMP.

  She had cut it in two with a single blow.

  It didn’t move. It didn’t twitch. It didn’t even bleed. Lucy went to her knees next to the thing and poked at it with her club.

  It was hollow. Completely hollow. Like a papier-mâché model of a half-human thing.

  How could it have moved? How could it have been so strong? Where was its brain? And where was Fender?

  She stood up slowly and put a foot on top of the dead creature’s hand. She pushed down firmly…and it popped under her instep and collapsed to powder, like old Styrofoam. She did the same with the upper leg. Then the hip. Finally, she punched through the plated, scarred mass of its head.

  There was sand inside, a roiling, gluey kind of sand that pulled itself into a ball and skittered away as she watched. No threat now, just… gone.

  Lucy looked at the shattered remains of the creature. Then she looked at the pile of human flesh that had been Cindy Bergstrom.

  “I gotta get the hell outta here,” she said raggedly. “Now.”

  Twenty-one

  Ken was using the last of the hot water to scour off the mud when his daughter barged into the bathroom.

  “Hey!” he said. She was visible only as a fractured silhouette through the frosted glass. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You’re taking too long. We need to talk.” She plopped down on the closed toilet seat and ran a hand through her hair.

  “Rose,” he said, trying for patience, “can we do this later?”

  Rose ignored him. “I tried calling Mom. She said we would talk every two hours. I’ve called and called, and nobody answered.”

  He turned off the water, cracked open the door, and put out a hand. “Can you at least hand me a towel? I’d like to avoid any Oedipal problems at this late date.”

  Rose put a fluffy ivory-colored towel in his. “Actually, the Oedipal complex would be you lusting after Grandma. Which is especially weird with her being dead and all. Me lusting after you would be an Electra complex and, trust me, no worries there.”

  Ken dried himself briskly and wrapped the towel securely around his waist before he stepped out.

  “So what are we going to do? We should go get her,” she said, looking him directly in the eye.

  “There’s no way we can leave here,” he told her. “Not until the storm –”

  Maggie’s voice spoke over his shoulder. “You missed a spot,” she said.

  They both jumped. Rose snapped a glance into each of the corners until she found the tiny lens peeking down. “Oh, now, that’s sick,” she said. “You have cameras in the toilet?”

  Ken set his jaw stubbornly. “Sixty-five percent of serious household accidents happen in the bath—”

  “Spare me,” Rose said, holding up a hand and looking away. “It’s just weird. I assume both of you have seen Her?”

  “Seen who?” Ken said, puzzled.

  “Haven't had the pleasure,” Maggie said.

  He sighed bitterly and walked out of the bathroom, into the bedroom. Rose followed. “Maggie, have you tried calling Lisa?” he asked.

  “Repeatedly,” she assured him. “I’ve called the Clinic’s general number and emergency number as well. No answer. The lines are still in working order, but they’re not picking up.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Ken said, trying to sound reassuring. “If there was any problem, they’d let us know.”

  Rose snorted. “Oh, sure.”

  “I’ll keep trying every ten minutes,” Maggie volunteered. “Until somebody answers.”

  Rose sniffed. “Thank you, Maggie,” she said, giving her father the evil eye. “At least somebody cares.”

  He smiled sweetly. “Nice to see you and Maggie getting along. My diabolical plan is working.”

  “Actually, Boss,” Maggie said, “we have other problems to deal with.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s going to flood here, too,” Rose said, sounding genuinely concerned for the first
time.

  “Not a chance,” Ken said. “We’re on the highest of high ground up here on the ridge. Until the rain stops, this is probably the safest place in town. We’ve got plenty of food and water and electricity. We even have back-up generators if the power grid fails.”

  “Ah. Imminent power failure,” she said. “This is supposed to cheer me up?”

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” he said. “All you want to do is make smart-ass comments.”

  “And you can talk to me other times? When is that, exactly?”

  “Ken,” Maggie said. “Can we convene in the study? There are things you need to see.”

  “Sure. Fine.” He opened the bedroom door for Rose, who swept out without a glance. He took three minutes to dress in new jeans and a fresh shirt, then he followed her down to the first floor.

  He saw the lights in the study brighten as he moved down the long, high-ceiling corridor to the study. A mad array of screens and monitors, including the wide-format wall screen had already swelled to life.

  “’Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” Rose said. She was standing in one corner with her arms folded, looking as sour as ever.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” Maggie said.

  Rose started to say something…then pressed her lips together.

  Ken chose to ignore the entire exchange. “So what’s up?” he said.

  “Okay,” Maggie answered, sounding very businesslike now. “The property first. I’ve used our external cams to check the roof and walls, and the thermostatic sensors inside to check wiring and humidity.”

  I didn’t know she could do that, Ken thought as she showed view after view of the hacienda’s exterior.

  “We seem in good shape,” Maggie reported. “No major leaks or breaches, despite nearby lightning strikes and winds gusting from thirty to forty miles per hour.”

  “Jesus,” Ken said. “What is this, Hurricane Sandy?”

  “Worse,” Maggie said flatly. She showed them a new weather satellite image of the storm swirling over the Valle.

  “It looks like a skin disease,” Rose said, stepping closer to the screen. “Like a cancer.” She looked even paler than usual, her hair obsidian black against her scrubbed-white skin. “Any idea how long it will last?”

  “No possible break until tomorrow evening, and even then…no guarantees. Until then, it will keep getting worse and worse.”

  The view shifted to a grainy black-and-white view of a lake in the rain. It took Ken more than a moment to realize it wasn’t a lake at all, it was the VeriSil campus that he had only recently left. “I broke a few rules,” Maggie said, “and patched into every traffic and security camera I could find, including VeriSil, Dos Hermanos Water and Power, and a few Sheriff Peck put into place that nobody seems to know about. As you can see, VeriSil is underwater.” The construction site was all that showed above the waterline, a moldy black skeleton of some ancient, ruined temple.

  The picture shifted to show an intersection north of VeriSil, almost as submerged as the computer plant. “Indiana and Maynard,” she said. “Five feet.” It switched to another view, this one showing a row of tidy cottages with floodwater flowing merrily in and out of wide-open front doors. “Two blocks farther north,” Maggie said. “Indiana and Brighton. Three feet. Roughly half the Valle is under four feet or more, and it’s rising by inches every hour. It’s the worst-case scenario, Ken. DH is filling up like a punch bowl.”

  Ken glanced at Rose, who was staring at the screen with growing alarm.

  “And no chance of calling somebody?” he said. “The Guard, FEMA, firefighters, anybody?”

  “I keep trying,” she said, “and I can get all the information I want flowing in… but nothing’s flowing out. It’s like being on the wrong side of a one-way mirror.”

  Nice analogy, he thought distantly. I wonder if she made that up herself? The implications jolted him. How much like a human is she?

  “The Clinic!” Rose said. “Can you see the Clinic?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. The screen flickered to a down-angle shot of the Clinic’s waiting room as seen from a high corner. The time code in the upper right said 00:12:21, just a few minutes ago.

  The image was painted with garish, uncorrected colors, and the strange angle made it look like everyone’s heads were swollen and their bodies shrunken, but it was still clear what was going on. Sick, scared, and injured people were filling the room to bursting, and everyone was dirty and wet. A few bodies in white coats, not particularly clean or dry themselves, moved from body to body, offering help, comfort, advice.

  “Look! There she is, there’s Mom!”

  Sure enough, Ken could see the part in her hair more clearly than her face, but it was obviously Lisa Corman Mackie herself, shoulder to shoulder with the young doctor, Chamberlain. They watched a silent, intense conversation with one little boy, clearly terrified by all that had happened, then saw them move farther, deeper into the room, to huddle over an old man whose leg was bent in a wrong and dangerous way.

  “She looks okay,” Rose said. The relief in her voice was obvious. “In fact, she looks good.”

  Ken found himself smiling. “She does,” he nodded. “She really does.”

  The screen cut to static. “Hey!” Rose cried.

  “There’s more,” Maggie said. ”Some images I can’t correlate.” The static resolved itself into rain. Heavy, white, straight-vertical rain falling as thick as a waterfall.

  A thing came out of the torrent, impossibly tall, built entirely of legs. Its sharp edges and corners made it look manufactured, cleaner, more precise than any organism. It moved with a strange fluid awareness that said alive, dangerous, hungry. And strangest of all, the rain didn’t seem to touch it. Despite the six inches of water that foamed around its lower points as they plunged into the ground, the…thing…didn’t get wet. The rain seemed to fall into it before it could even glisten with moisture.

  Rose said, “Holy shit,” and before Ken could speak, Maggie shifted the image: a vacant lot elsewhere in town, with four of the…things…

  “Bone spiders,” he whispered.

  … stalking madly across a flooded vacant lot, chasing something dark and furry. A dog, a filthy, wet, panicked dog.

  “Oh my god,” Rose said, her voice trembling.

  The image changed again: a pile of rocks that seemed to roll round and round itself under its own power, trundling down Bishop Avenue and leaving cracked asphalt and chewed flesh in its wake.

  “Brickteeth,” Ken said.

  A long, jointed writhing log with a white, flexing razor-flower gaping at one end.

  “Dragontongue.”

  A ragged-edged sheet of cellophane, oily rainbows shimmering through it, twisting through the air, driven by the wind, wrapping around a running woman.

  “Flumes. Jesus, what is this?”

  What indeed. Where were these names coming from? How did he know these things, why did he recognize them?

  “We gotta get outta here,” Rose said.

  Ken turned towards her. She was trembling, staring at the images. “We gotta get outta here now, Dad.”

  She started fast-walking down the corridor towards the front door as quickly as her lean legs could carry her.

  “What the hell?” Ken said, and chased after her. “Honey, wait!”

  “No,” she said as she ran from him. “No. This is crazy. I don’t care if you have a car or not, we can walk the hell out of here, run out if we have to.”

  She skidded to a stop at the front door and groped blindly for the latch.

  “Honey, wait. I have a better—”

  “No!” Rose said, in full panic mode. “No, let’s just GO!” She threw the door open and turned to throw herself into the storm.

  A bone spider, two stories tall, rose up out of the bubbling mud directly in front of the porch. Ten of its ten thousand legs rose up, already clean, dry as granite and sharp as steel, and reached for her, grew towards her
.

  Ken seized her by the collar of her thin black tee and jerked her back inside with one hand as he slammed the door shut with the other. There was a deafening crack! of ripping wood when the talons of the creature scraped across the entrance. It went on and on and on as they both fell back and scrambled out of the entryway, into the living room, away from the horrible sound.

  “Jesus,” Rose said. “Oh, my god, oh, Jesus…”

  The scraping stopped. A moment later lightning cut through the house and thunder pushed at the windows.

  They lay sprawled on the terra cotta tiles of the living room, panting and terrified. Rose swallowed hard and cleared her throat. “Okay, Dad,” she said roughly. Her face was so white it was nearly translucent. “When you’re right, you’re right. This is the safest place in town.”

  Twenty-two

  Thirty seconds after Lucy found Cindy Bergstrom’s body, she was running. Okay, she thought, grasping for thought, okay, okay. Cindy’s dead and somebody killed her. Maybe Fender, I don’t know. But the others…?

  She pounded down the corridor towards the office wing. “Rebecca?” she shouted. “Rebecca!!” Her assistant could have come in while Lucy was sleeping at her desk; anything could have happened.

  She burst into Rebecca’s office, there was no one there. It didn’t look as if it had been disturbed since the day before. Lucy realized she was panting like a race horse.

  “Okay,” she said again, aloud this time. “Okay, then…”

  Steinberg. He was a solid gold twenty-four-karat asshole, but he was her responsibility.

  She turned on her heel, her thoughts spinning as she ran.

  I gotta get the hell out of here. But if I leave now, I’ll never come back.

  She was certain of that. The town itself was doomed. Even her facility, high on the north rim of the crater as it might have been, was in jeopardy from the continuing wind and liquefaction.