by Brad Munson
It would be so much easier, if she wasn’t so fucking smart. And beautiful. And right, most of the time.
“I’m going to be fine,” Lisa said. “There’s a big meeting at the Conference Center tonight, and then everybody’s caravanning out of town. We’ll be with them.”
“‘We’?” he asked.
“Everybody still left at the clinic at eight o’clock tonight,” she said, “when they come to get us. What about you?”
“We’ll be over the ridge and out of here by sunset.” That was no more than an hour away.
“Call me if you can.”
“I will. We’ll meet you at the rest stop, right outside the Notch. You know the place I mean?”
“Yeah. Right along the highway.”
“That’s it. We’ll wait for you there, or you wait for us.”
“I promise.”
He nodded, his throat thick with emotion. “Me, too,” he said. “I promise.” It was a big word for them, one that hadn’t passed between them for a long, long time.
Lisa hung up then. He handed the phone back to Rose, who was staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. He decided very suddenly that he didn’t want to talk to her, not at this moment.
He didn’t look at his daughter as he sorted through his keys. “I don’t suppose you know how to drive a motorcycle?”
“As a matter of fact,” Rose said, “I do.”
Ken looked up, surprised. “You do?”
Her smile was crooked and a little bitter. “Daddy, I learned to do a lot of things those months I wasn’t at home. You should probably be happy that at least some of them were constructive. Even legal.”
He laughed. He didn’t mean to, but he did. “Come on,” he said, shaking his head, and they moved down the South Wing’s central corridor, towards the far-off covered walkway and the garages beyond.
“Maggie, can you see anything…unusual out there?”
“Not at the moment. The…activity…seems to be centered around the front door.”
They were almost there. “Good. I gather you’ve locked all the doors?”
“Gosh, no, boss, I didn’t think of that.”
He scowled. “I don’t recall programming sarcasm into your conversational protocols.”
“It’s a natural evolution in response to silly questions,” Maggie said almost tartly.
They had reached the southern entrance. Beyond it, dimly visible through the four-paned window in the door, was the covered walkway and the garage beyond it shimmering in the wind-driven mist. “Unlock it, please,” he said.
The door went thunk.
Ken put a hand on the knob, peered left and right through the door’s window and said “Now!” He threw open the door and they sprinted the fifteen feet from building to building. It felt like a mile.
The door to the garage opened before they got there and slammed tight behind them as soon as they piled inside. The lights were already on. There was a large empty spot in the middle of the concrete pad where the Land Rover was supposed to be waiting. Beyond that was a waist-high mass, five feet wide and three feet thick, covered by a nearly immaculate tarpaulin.
“Why didn’t I notice that before?” Rose asked almost rhetorically. The rain was like a snare drum on the uninsulated roof, loud enough to give an instant headache.
“You were too busy being pissed off at me,” he said. “Besides, it’s on the driver’s side.” He walked across the room, undid a set of bungee cords, and whipped the tarp away.
A sweetly evil black Kawasaki 4500 RoadMaster was waiting underneath, polished to such a high shine that it seemed to glow with a dark light of its own.
“My God, Daddy,” Rose said, almost breathless. “What were you thinking?”
He stared at the bike. “Well,” he said, “I was forty years old, my brother had killed himself, my wife had given me the worst news a wife and can give her husband, and…I had all this money.” He smiled, and it was only half-cynical. “The ultimate mid-life crisis.”
Rose approached the bike and ran an envious, almost lustful hand over the cowling. “No, no, no,” she said admiringly. “The ultimate in totally cool bikes.”
He had to agree. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” he said. “Then we can—”
Rose stared at him with frank astonishment. “You think you’re going to leave me here?” she said. “Alone?”
He smirked. “There is exactly one bike. And riding two-up in his storm would be dangerous.”
“What, like staying here isn’t dangerous?”
“Ken…” Maggie said, trying to interrupt politely.
“Rose, there are things out there—”
“Ken,” Maggie said more urgently.
“—who can get in here any fucking time they want to, Daddy. What, you’re going to leave me with your pet robot while you go slammin’ off to—”
The rolling garage door exploded inward and a creature made of broken bones as big as tree trunks surged inside. Ken bellowed, Rose screamed, and they both jumped away from the horror as fast as they could, scurrying back to the door they’d come in.
The thing fell with a crash into the spot where the Rover should have been. A wave of water and wind rushed in with it. Thick arms burst from its trunk and grew in seconds to tower over them. Then the rocky black-and-gray creature with no mouth and no face extended three massive limbs, each thicker than an oak, and scooped up the Kawasaki like a toy. Ken watched as it pinched the bike, collapsing it at the midpoint into a block less than six inches thick. Two hundred pounds of beautifully engineered, virtually solid steel clunked to the concrete in two distorted hunks as swiftly and easily as a boy squeezes clay between his fingers. The sound alone was incredibly painful.
He didn’t wait for the creature to drop it. He simply turned and shoved his daughter out the side door, back onto the walkway, without even thinking of what might be waiting in the rain. “Out!” he shouted over the shattering motorcycle and the rattle of the rain. “Out, out!”
The walkway was clear. They ran back through the opening door to the house and threw themselves inside as the bone spiders attacked the detached garage from all sides and tore it to pieces.
Just. Like. That.
They fled down the hall, escaping the sound of the destruction and the grinding roar of the creatures themselves. There was a thundering boom on the front door as they passed, and Rose skidded to a stop without thinking.
She looked through the side windows that faced the driveway. “Oh my God,” she said, and backed away. Ken peered through the window himself. Two more bone spiders were close behind the one on the porch, pawing and sinking in the liquefied landfill as lightning stuttered in the lowering clouds behind them. The dull glare of the security lights gave them a sick yellow luminosity all their own.
The boom came again. And again. Boom. Boom.
“Oh, fuck,” Rose said. “It’s knocking at the door.”
Twenty-four
Jimmy Fultz was up and off to work before dawn. He was wearing three layers of clothing under his canvas overcoat, plastic wrap over his uniform’s cap, and he was still soaked to the skin ten minutes after he stepped outside.
He met Bo Cameron and the Sheriff at the HQ before six a.m. Mindy looked bad, like she hadn’t slept at all or had been crying all night. Or both. Sheriff Peck clearly didn’t care. He was focused on the two of them.
“Make the evacuation announcement and look for people in trouble,” he said grimly. “If they have working vehicles, send them out of town. Make them leave. If they don’t have vehicles, tell them to hunker down until six o’clock tonight, then come to the Conference Center. We’ll gather whatever transportation we can find and caravan out of town from there.”
“We’re not going to stay and fight?” Mindy said, her voice quavering. “We’re going to run?”
“Fight what?” Peck snapped. “Water? It’s already won. Whenever the storm breaks, we’ll come back and clean up, if we can. For now�
��it’s done.”
Jimmy could see that he hated saying it, but he thought the Sherriff was right. In the last twenty-four hours he’d seen things he couldn’t believe, and they were only getting worse. That, and he was pretty sure he was having hallucinations.
“Must be the stress,” he said to himself, completely unaware he was talking out loud.
“What?” Peck snapped. “You have a problem?”
“No, sir,” he said, and swallowed.
Peck shoved a finger at him. “You take the south side.” The finger swiveled to Bo, who stiffened as if it had pierced him like a dart. “You take the north. Come if I call, otherwise …”
Peck stopped for a second, and a sudden, dreamy, distant look came into his eyes. As if for one moment he comprehended where he was, what he was doing, how everything had changed.
“Just go,” he said softly, and turned away.
* * *
It didn’t take Jimmy long to realize that most of the South Side, the part of town Sheriff Peck had assigned him, was already underwater. He didn’t care. He gave some thought to the best way he could complete the assignment, and after much consideration he drove his patrol car, the oldest still in service, the one with a crack in the passenger side window, to the splendid, well-maintained Lazenby Estate high on East Ridge.
He knocked on the door very politely, but nobody answered. Then he knocked loud-politely and still nobody answered. Well, it was a courtesy anyway. He was the law, after all. And with that Jimmy trudged around the side of the house to the long, sloping concrete driveway and commandeered the tidy little twelve-foot ketch with the outboard motor that the Lazenbys called Dragonfly. It was half afloat already. Rainwater was sluicing down the slope from the top of the ridge so strongly and steadily it was creating a miniature river that crested around the boat’s trailer.
Jimmy sincerely doubted if the elderly and entirely sedentary Lazenbys had ever put the silly thing in the water, but they had proudly displayed it in the turnabout of their estate, right out in the open, and assigned their servants to clean it and polish it all year round, simply to remind people how rich and important they were. They had a boat, in the middle of the desert. A boat they didn’t even need. Take that, peasants.
Now, at least, it would finally be put to use. Jimmy tried to scrape the pounding rain out of his eyes with the back of his wrist, but that didn’t work very well. Still, even half-blind and buffeted every which way, it didn’t take long to undo the latches and untie the lines. One good tug on the stern and Dragonfly was free of the trailer and floating in the two feet of water coursing down the driveway.
Jimmy nearly tripped over his own feet climbing into the boat, and it bobbed and teetered under him until he got settled, but eventually he got it all under control. The outboard started with the first touch, and he was happy to see it even had a full tank of gas.
Despite the rain driving into his face like cold, sharp fragments of glass, Jimmy Fultz couldn’t have been happier. For the first time in a long time, maybe in his entire life, he was on his own.
Captain of my own fate. In a manner of speaking.
The outboard was a pleasant rumbling under his hand. It was easy to steer southward with one hand while he held the bullhorn in his other and chanted the alert:
“THIS IS THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. I REPEAT: EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU HAVE TRANSPORT, LEAVE THE VALLEY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE TRANSPORT, MEET AT THE CONFERENCE CENTER AT SIX PM. REPEAT, THOSE WITHOUT TRANSPORT MEET AT THE CONFERENCE CENTER AT 6 PM.”
He’d made up the little speech himself, and he was rather proud of it. He particularly liked the way it bounced off the churning water and the glistening walls of the houses in a soggy kind of echo.
“THIS IS THE SHERRIFF’S DEPARTMENT…” he began again.
He had been underway for no more than half an hour when he floated past the Squire, a bar that was housed in a rusting Quonset hut owned by the grandson of one of the city’s founders. Lights were still burning in its windows, though how it was still getting power this far south into the floodplain was beyond him.
He cut the motor and used the bullhorn to hail any survivors.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Anybody in there? In the Squire?”
He saw a shadow plaster itself against one of the windows, struggle for a minute, then lower the pane. It was Steve Chapin from the hardware store, his hair matted with rainwater or sweat, his gray eyes too large and a little wild.
“Hey!” he said back. “Pretty bad out there, huh?”
Jimmy nodded. “Gettin’ worse, too. You guys okay?”
“Fine,” Chapin said, and then grinned crookedly. “Well, not fine, exactly. You know what I mean. We’re waiting for Richie Riegel to get here with his big ol’ utility truck. He’s taking us all out. But…I don’t suppose you’ve seen Jennie Sommerfield? The blonde with the…you know, the blonde?”
Jimmy knew Jennie very well. He’d been at the homecoming game where she’d been crowned queen. He’d also busted up a couple of the bachelor’s parties where she’d been dancing, and answered a couple of her stalker complaints about that guy that was always after her, what’s his name, the scientist.
“Nope,” he said. “She goin’ with you?”
“Yeah,” Chapin said, though Jimmy could tell there was a whole story behind that one word. “Soon as she gets here.”
He let it go. He had other things to do.
“Good luck gettin’ out!” he shouted, and turned the tiller to the west and south.
“Good luck to you, too!”
Jimmy lost them in the storm just a few seconds later. He had to stop soon after to bail out the rainwater, and thought he might have seen a bright orange streak to the north—Richie Riegel’s famous W&P truck, though he couldn’t be sure. Soon he crossed Farantino, now so deeply submerged that the street sign was lower than the gunwale of the Dragonfly.
After that he stopped bothering with the bullhorn at all. There was no longer anyone left to hear—not this far south, not anymore.
Down here, Dos Hermanos already belonged to the monsters.
They twisted though the water around him. They tiptoed and scurried on the few remaining outcrops of roofs, gas station signs, street lamps. They wheeled and spun on the misting winds, flights of them, cells of them, sometimes single huge eyeless creatures made of wings and talons and nothing else.
The water was so deep it had a wind-driven chop. It was almost like being on an open lake. It was easy for Jimmy to forget he was cruising a few feet above people’s homes, businesses, backyards. Even as the day grew later, the storm grew more violent, and the wind rose higher, Jimmy urged the Dragonfly farther south towards VeriSil. Towards the Two Brothers.
Something in him, something deep and resonant, wanted to see it all.
As the skeletons rose out of the mist of dusk, he sensed that he was fighting a current in the water that he hadn’t expected. It wasn’t a strong one. It should have been far stronger. Water should have been flowing freely through Arroyo Verde, draining the Valle as it filled. Instead, there was nothing more than a slight pull, barely more than a drift.
He was thinking of turning towards it when he saw the first structure, and he forgot everything else.
It was built on the remains of a microwave tower, one of VeriSil’s outlying structures. Now it was covered, twined, raddled with…something else. With the same gray, craggy material as the creatures themselves, growing in twisted parasitic networks over the metal beams, gathering in knobs and knuckles, splaying outward, upward in cantilevered branches, dressed in rocky scales and plates that fluttered and cracked against the wind. It was something like a tree, something like a minaret. Something like an insect disguised as a tree or a minaret.
And it was alive. In the way it trembled, in the way it moved in the wind—not pushed by the gale, but turning of its own volition. Beyond it, the superstructure that was supposed to have been VeriSil’s n
ew headquarters was overwhelmed by new growth. It was farther away, still dim in the gathering gloom, but Jimmy could see bone spiders, brickteeth, dragontongues, stains, clambering and crawling over it, moving industriously here and there, swarming and separating, joining and breaking and joining again.
Building, he realized. Under some unified direction, according to some plan. Building.
The water boiled right in front of him, in a band thirty yards wide, and a rough archway, five times wider than the Dragonfly, studded and filigreed with living stone, lifted itself from the trembling water. Without knowing how, Jimmy knew that it was another creature entirely, one without a name yet, rising up to take him.
He didn’t want to go. Not yet.
He pulled hard at the tiller, gunned the little motor and peeled off to the left – to port, he corrected himself, port – and fled. He aimed the pointed bow of the little skiff at the central cleft of the Two Brothers where they still rose above the water, their foothills a new shoreline.
There was something there, it was calling him. But a mad population of creatures to the east of that, where Arroyo Verde should be draining the Valley, was roiling and twitching, distracting him horribly.
He had a chance to see it only for a moment, in a fleeting gap between sheets of rain. First he glimpsed a rickety staircase rising up out of the water, winding up to a ramshackle house halfway up the Brothers. Then he was looking past the staircase, directly at Arroyo Verde.
There was a wall there, a barrier that had never been there before. The creatures of the storm were swarming over it, building it, creating it from their own rocky flesh. Sealing off the only natural outlet to the water, making the flooded Valle their own.
Forever.
Some water was still escaping, in a roaring torrent so narrow and violent it would crush anything that was caught between its walls. That’s where he would be heading soon if he didn’t turn back now, he knew, to be chewed between the teeth of the hungry current.