Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  She passed the lunch room and tried not to think of Cindy’s twisted body lying on the wet linoleum, staring at the ceiling.

  There are files here, she thought wildly. Experiments, projects, sample cases. All irreplaceable. Years of work. What am I going to do, how am I –

  She pushed her way through the broken entrance to Steinberg’s lab and stopped short.

  Every specimen in the room was gone or crushed. Every instrument, every cage, every case and container and tray was destroyed. She stood in the middle of the devastation, flinching at the cold, wet wind blowing through the shattered window, and turned full circle, awed at how thorough the vandalism was.

  Except…there. Sitting in one corner, in an almost perfect ring of cleared floor was Steinberg’s computer, his chair still upright in front of it, its screen still clean and glowing, power still on. All the files were neatly arranged right on the desktop. And there was a digital image, a crisp and clear close-up of one of his ‘new creatures’, as his wallpaper.

  Why was that spared? Why would looters leave that – about the only thing worth stealing in the first place?

  Fascinated, she forgot her terror for a moment and sat gingerly in front of the keyboard. She double-clicked on the first icon she saw, a folder marked NEW TAXONOMY.

  Her jaw dropped at what she saw.

  It took a precious five minutes to see it all, but by then she knew what she had here. He was telling the truth, she realized. All that horseshit about a new species, those bogus specimens like the soda straw and the bird claw and all. They were real. They were the remnants –maybe the seeds – of a whole host of creatures.

  Michael Steinberg had been going mad, maybe for a long time, but he stayed a scientist to the bitter end. He had kept all his notes in meticulous order. He had examined the creatures, dissected and tested them, taken digital pictures and even digital video as they grew, always measuring, always observing, always recording. Hell, he’d even left the webcam attached to this computer running after he went totally off the rails, destroying all the cages, setting all his pets free.

  It would take hours, days, weeks, to work through all he had here, but it was painfully clear: he really had defined new a whole new set of creatures, a New Taxonomy. Their structures, their biology and biochemistry. Their strengths and weaknesses. All from a man who was slowly but surely becoming one of them.

  That was the worst part. Lucy stared mutely at the screen. ‘Transformational speciation,’ he called it. Turning people into creatures like him.

  She stared at the digital images of what Michael Steinberg had become, was becoming.

  “Look at that,” she said under her breath. “Just look…”

  Lightning struck the ridge outside. Thunder exploded beyond the shattered window, snapping Lucy out of her horrified paralysis.

  What the hell am I doing? I have to get out of here!

  She understood in a blinding instant that she had to get this data out of here and tell somebody. The university, the army, NASA, somebody…

  Steinberg, anal-compulsive as ever, had stored all the data in the one folder. It was easy to handle. She tried to use the broadband connection to upload the entire folder to the University server back in Riverside, but as before, there was no indication it went through at all.

  Screw it, she decided. She pawed through the two drawers that hadn’t been pulled out and overturned and found half a dozen black and red flash drives with the Station's logo on it. She knew it well, 100G storage, all she would need. She wrote the entire folder to one of them in less than a minute and slipped it into an inner pocket of her khaki coat. Then she slogged out of the Steinberg’s devastated lab without a pause, promising herself she’d come back for the rest.

  Someday. After the weather clears. After the monsters are…somewhere else.

  She trotted down the corridor to the lobby, belted her coat more tightly, and pushed through the front door one final time.

  Bye-bye, my baby, she thought as the storm rushed over her. It was nice knowing you.

  The water in the parking lot was deep enough to cover her shoes. Her feet were soaking wet by the time she made it to the Jeep and tried to open the door.

  The latch flapped uselessly in her hand.

  Right, broken. She should have remembered. It seemed like years ago that she’d learned about that.

  She popped open the back door instead, ducked inside, and reached forward to snag the latch from the inside. Stupid thing, she told herself. She twisted around to get free of the back seat.

  I won’t even bother to get it fixed; I’ll trade in the piece of—

  “Boo.”

  The voice was right there, right at her ear, and she hadn’t even gotten out of the car. Lucy yelped in spite of herself and straightened up with a jolt, catching the back of her head on the doorframe, grabbing at the half-open driver door, gasping as she stood and saw –

  Michael Steinberg.

  Or…what had been Michael Steinberg.

  His skin was dull gray. His hair was plated with water and mud, his eyes dead and distant, like balls of clay in a face made of mud. It was a counterfeit Michael Steinberg, made out of rotting granite…but all the more dangerous for that.

  “Made ya look,” he said. The voice seemed to come from somewhere other than his mouth. As she stood there, back against the car, clutching the door, she saw other things about him had changed, too. The neck. The chest. The legs…

  Oh my god. What happened to his legs?

  “Michael,” she said aloud, barely recognizing her own voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “Running an errand for a friend,” he said, sounding almost jovial. His long, knobby arms came up without hesitation and reached for her face. In that instant Lucy knew what his ‘errand’ was.

  I’m dead. Just like Cindy.

  “Wait!” she shouted. Her hand flashed into the breast pocket of her jacket and she pulled out the red-and-gold flash drive.

  Steinberg stopped, but he didn’t lower his arms. She noticed distantly that water wasn’t dripping from his crooked fingers. It was soaking in as fast as it fell.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” he said, still sounding vaguely amused.

  “It’s THE NEW TAXONOMY,” she said, holding it up in front of her, like a priest holding back a vampire with a crucifix.

  He lowered his head in anger, a bull made of boulders. She could see it even in his immobile features. He was changing, yes, but the ego was still there, that mad compulsion to be somebody. Transformational speciation my ass, she thought.

  “I trashed the computer,” she lied. “I fried the hard drive. This is it, Michael. The only copy. Right here.”

  He brought his arms down and hunched his shoulders even more.

  “Give it to me,” he grated.

  “Let me go, and I will.”

  He made a grating, coughing sound with his hidden mouth. Lucy assumed it was supposed to be a laugh. “Ach. Sure,” he said. “Deal. Give it.” He stepped forward, sloshing in eight inches of water, and extended one set of gnarled gray fingers

  Who the hell does he think he’s kidding? Lucy thought rhetorically, and as he stepped forward she pulled open the car door, got behind it and slammed it into him as hard as she could.

  Steinberg, for all his new height and bulk, was still prone to the laws of physics, and so far, the Jeep still outweighed him. He flew backwards at the sudden impact of the swinging door and landed heavily on his back with a tremendous splash, even as Lucy threw herself into the soggy driver's seat, slammed the door, shoved the key into the ignition and punched the accelerator.

  He got himself upright on his complex of new legs faster than she thought possible and threw himself at the driver’s side. He pawed at the door-handle. It flapped uselessly in his claw as it had in her hand.

  God bless crappy American manufacturing, she thought madly, and jammed on the accelerator again. The Jeep leaped forward, jerked out of Steinberg’s grip, a
nd Lucy dragged it into a wide, looping arc that covered the entire parking lot.

  Steinberg was right in front of the driveway, the only way out. That didn’t slow her down one bit. She gritted her teeth as she took careful aim and drove the Jeep, full force, into his ashen, stony body.

  He didn’t fall. He didn’t even crack. The huge rocky form flew over the hood and its face smashed against the windshield directly in front of her, splitting like porcelain into a thousand tiny fissures. She flinched and steered reflexively to the right, away from the exit as he thrust his hands through the shattered windshield to take her by the face. Particles of glass, small and sharp as fingernails, flickered across her as his impossibly dry fingers wrapped around her head and dug in.

  Without thinking, without caring, Lucy opened her mouth and bit him – hard. Her teeth cracked off a mouth full of dead-dry tissue as she punched on the brakes and skidded on the asphalt.

  Momentum snatched Steinberg away. The fingers flew from her face, the body rocketed off the hood. Steinberg’s suddenly massive form rolled twice in the rain-choked air before it hit the pavement and tumbled through the foaming water.

  She popped the car into reverse and jammed on the accelerator again. The car roared straight backwards. While the creature struggled to stand, she tapped on the brakes, threw the Jeep into drive, and surged forward, aiming the car like a rocket-propelled grenade.

  The rear bumper hit Steinberg square in his shoulders while he was still hunched over. The impact drove him under the car. Lucy felt the crunch-a-thump, crunch-a-thump as the wheels rolled over his body, but she kept driving, throwing the Jeep into another wide, looping turn that would take her back towards the exit. She strained forward, peering over the steering wheel through the broken windshield. Was it dead now? Was it finally dead?

  Son of a bitch.

  The Steinberg-thing was getting up again, even though one of its arms was missing. She saw the limb bobbing in a rain-puddle near his ankles. The exposed joint was dry and bloodless. It looked like flaking plaster of Paris.

  She slammed on the accelerator one more time and drove straight into him again. This time she liked the solid crunch the collision made. Steinberg's stony new body flew into the air, so high and far she almost lost him in the storm. Then he landed, skidding, with rooster-tails of rain flying in two directions at once. She didn’t care. She kept driving for the exit even as he rolled to a stop and heaved himself into a sitting position.

  She saw him in the rear view mirror when he stood up on his wobbly, recovering legs. One of the larger severed limbs was cradled in his one remaining arm. In the time it took her to drive to the entrance, she saw stubby gray fingers of clay-like tissue erupt from his hip, wriggling and reaching blindly to meet other stubby little fingers, to find each other, twist together, intertwine …

  He was standing on two legs by the time she hit the driveway. An instant later he was steady enough to stagger towards the red ATV that was waiting at the edge of the lot and mount up.

  Fuck me, she thought as she drove blindly down the twisting road. Monster on a mini-bike.

  * * *

  She tried to make it to the freeway but it was too late. The storm had blocked the on-ramp completely. It was covered with rain-soaked rocks and tree branches washed down from the ridge, and she didn’t have time to pick a path through it.

  “Fuck it,” she growled, and forced the Jeep in another direction, up and over, onto the frontage road that wandered along the ridge line to the south. It was a familiar route to her. Most of their sampling stations were planted along this rutted path. She knew it would take her deeper into the Valle and the storm, yes, but more importantly, it would get away from Steinberg.

  She swayed and braked and surged along the winding mud road, and the storm rose up to enfold her, more violent and blacker than ever. It shoved at the sides of the Jeep with huge gusts of wind. Walls of rain leaped up from flooded intersections and rushed over the hood like tidal waves. Behind her, a few hundred yards away, a single glaring headlight followed. She only saw it on the straightaways, only when she slowed for an instant. Steinberg was back there. He was coming.

  There was a flash of lightning and something on the seat next to her flared brightly enough to distract her for an instant. It was the thumb drive, its silver-and-red finish momentarily catching the lightning. All of Steinberg’s data was trapped in that little metal tab. She didn’t even remember throwing it into the seat when she’d jumped inside. But she had it.

  I can still get it out of town…

  When she looked up at the road in front of her again, she saw the Mackie hacienda for the first time. It was waiting for her at the top of the ridge at the end of a private drive beyond a wide-open wrought iron gate, crouching on the crest in front of towering blue-black rain clouds that flickered with lightning. There were even welcoming lights in the hacienda’s windows, yellow-red, warm, human colors. The first she had seen in a long time.

  She threw the car into a skidding right hand turn and shot thorough the riverstone gateway. Now she could see a person – no, two people – standing on a covered porch in front of a wide chocolate-brown door. The path to them was clear. They were at the end of a wide driveway that was flooded but looked smooth as glass. They were waving at her, arms over their heads, waving her in, it seemed. Come on, it’s safe here. Come on!

  She gunned the engine and headed towards the drive, grinning for the first time in hours.

  Almost there. Safe and sound.

  * * *

  Women, Steinberg thought, veering and bouncing after the glowing taillights of Lucy Arumbruster’s Jeep. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t kick ‘em out of a moving car. He’d heard that from some stand-up comedian, and it was funny. So, so funny.

  Two women had been ruling his life since he came to this fucking desert hell-hole: Lucy Armbruster, the smart-ass dyke with the money, and Jennie Sommerfield, the most beautiful woman in the world who would not, would not, give him what he wanted. What he deserved.

  The rain splattered against his crusty cheeks, but Michael couldn’t feel it anymore. It didn’t even get in his eyes; he’d grown some kind of transparent covering under his overhanging brow, over his squelching eye-holes, to catch the moisture and absorb it before it got to him. He was in a cocoon of rock and bone that cut him off, held him tight, and as he drew closer and closer to that disgusting sack of meat and bullshit, he still found himself longing for the other one, that Jennie, that dream he’d had for so long.

  He’d already messed around with her a little bit – when Armbruster wasn’t nagging at him, when The Voice wasn’t pulling him here or there for some bullshit errand or other. And he would get back to her before this was all done. He had to.

  She glowed like the sun the first time he met her at that VeriSil company picnic. A part of her had burned inside him ever since, and not even this glorious transformation, not even Armbruster’s repulsive betrayal, not even the echoing voice of the storm could drive out that memory.

  He loved Jennie. He always would. And best of all, now it didn’t matter if she loved him back – not anymore. He could make her love him. He could make anybody do anything.

  So first: kill the bitch that was trying to run away from him right now. Then second: find the other one, the pretty one, and make her his own. He would have smiled at that last thought, if his face could smile anymore: Make her. His own.

  Twenty-three

  Ken and Rose were still huddled in the living room with the two-story atrium when Rose’s phone rang. She pounced on it.

  “Mom?” she said. “God, you won’t believe what…what? I…” She stopped and listened for a long time. “No,” she said at length, in a strange, measured tone. “No, actually I believe you completely.”

  Something scratched at the door, a long, deep, guttural skaaaaaaaa that wouldn’t stop. Rose cast a haunted, sidelong glance at her father and whispered into the phone. “We can’t, Mom. We can’t get out.”

>   Things were clattering against the panes of the atrium a story above their heads. It sounded like bundles of sticks being flung at the glass, skittering down…and scrabbling back up.

  Rose looked up and recognized them. “I saw one of those last night,” she said with horrified understanding. “Maggie, remember? In the bedroom?”

  “I remember,” Maggie said. “And I remember how we got rid of them.” The room’s indirect lights dimmed a bit and there was a deep, bone-buzzing hummmm. The stick-bundles – scumble, Ken thought, That’s what they’re called, ‘scumble’ – were doused with sparks and flew away from the windows. He could see one of them lying on the rain-soaked porch outside, twitching like an animal in the middle of a seizure.

  “No, Mom,” Rose was saying into the phone. “No, we’re okay for now. They’re outside. They can’t get in.”

  Ken gave her a baleful look. She shrugged.

  “What about you?” She listened some more as Ken came to a decision. He dug into his pocket for keys.

  “Okay,” Rose said, nodding. “Okay. I love you. Here’s Dad.” She held out the phone, and Ken was surprised and a little stunned to see tears in her violet eyes. “She wants to talk to you,” she said.

  He took the phone. “Having fun?” he said, trying to sound tough and brave.

  “If anything happens to her,” Lisa said without hesitation, “I will kill you. You get that? I will actually kill you.” She sounded stretched tight, but very calm, very much in control.

  “I get that. And if anything happens to you, Lisa…”

  “What?”

  He looked straight at his daughter as he said it, almost challenging her. “I’ve been a complete asshole for more than two years,” he said. “I know that. But I still love you. I never stopped. I want us all to get the hell out of…wherever we are…alive.”

  Rose’s head came down a few inches, as if she was absorbing a blow. Her eyes never left his.