Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  Belatedly, it occurred to Jimmy that he should call this in. He didn’t know how he was going to explain it to anyone, how he could possibly make them understand all he was seeing, but he had to try. This was important. Somebody, everybody, needed to know about this.

  His hand had barely touched the TRANS button on the radio mic at his shoulder when the twisting arc of the unnamed creature came up again, rising before him with an eerie kind of majesty. He looked up in astonishment as it teetered above him for a moment…and then saw it fall, straight towards him.

  The creature plucked Jimmy Fultz out of the Dragonfly like a doll on a string.

  It was the last thing he ever saw.

  * * *

  Mindy Bergstrom closed down the Dos Hermanos Sheriff Department Headquarters all by herself. She hadn’t heard from Bo or Jimmy or even Sheriff Peck in hours. It was so long ago she’d stopped trying to raise them on the radio or the phone. It had been longer than that since her sister Cindy had been in touch, and she knew in a secret part of her brain that Cindy was already gone. Thinking back, she imagined she knew the exact moment when Cindy-girl had blinked away. It was that quick and that final.

  Mindy Bergstrom loved Dos Hermanos. She had spent most of her first twenty-five years in St. Paul, Minnesota and she had always detested the cold and wet that hunched there like an angry old man. Now, barely past fifty years old, ‘cold and wet’ was almost all she remembered of her life before DH. Here she was warm all the time, living with the only family she’d ever loved, in a place filled with light and devoid of the mud, the mildew, the sniffles, the clamminess of…well, of everywhere else on Earth.

  She stared through the storefront window, through the half-raised Venetian blinds that looked out on the shimmering, deserted vista of North Poplar street. It was so sad. Everything that had happened in the last thirty-six hours reminded her of that awful other place she thought of as the outside world. All the calls she’d taken, all the things she’d seen traveling to the Conference Center and back, to her home and back…

  It was never going to be the same again. That was obvious to any old fool. And small and simple as Mindy Bergstrom was, she was no fool.

  She sighed as she took off her headset and shut down the phones. She made sure the coffee machine was turned off and the mini-fridge was shut tightly, as she did every night. She almost smiled as she shrugged into her only coat, the one she wore when it got a little chilly at night in December and January, and she was careful to close and lock the door as she left.

  Mindy Bergstrom had come into this world, into this town, and into this life very quietly. She had lived very quietly, and she knew it would end very quietly as well.

  So when she left the office, exactly on time, she decided to walk home all by herself. Just this once.

  * * *

  Donald Peck didn’t know shit about poetry. Never had. He sat in his tricked-out police cruiser on the East Ridge, not all that far from where Jimmy Fultz had stolen the Dragonfly hours earlier. He didn’t think of Coleridge or Ozymandias as he looked down on the dimly visible remains of his drowning city. Hell, “Ozymandias” was the name of a space shuttle or a WWA wrestler.

  It was hard to believe that yesterday he’d been all worked up about a handful of missing girls. Like they mattered. Like they were any real threat to him. He should have remembered that, after thirty years of hard work, nothing was a real threat to him in this town. As far as he was concerned, he pretty much owned Dos Hermanos, California.

  Which was what made it so frustrating, so maddening. That something as simple as the fucking weather could bring him down so quickly and so completely.

  “It’s rain,” he said into the padded dashboard of the cruiser. “Just rain.”

  The sight of the devastation below him would have overwhelmed a normal man. Filled him with grief or despair. Not Donald Peck. Peck felt only one emotion, just as overwhelming but entirely different.

  Rage, seasoned with desperate, unbreakable determination.

  He wasn’t going to let it happen. He simply wasn’t. The plan was simple: he’d gather together the last few assholes who were still in town, the ones too poor or too stupid to get out on their own, and he would lead them to the Promised Land, up the highway and through the Notch, like some fucking Aryan Brotherhood Moses. He would become the brave local hero who saved the last few survivors of the Great Dos Hermanos Flood, and soon he would return to rebuild their home as their chosen leader.

  He’d be in a better position than ever. No one, not some brain-dead grandson of one of the founders, not some slime-fingered corporate stooge, could challenge him then. And something like this would never happen again. The place would be his, forever, as he’d always planned. After all, the good thing about a five hundred year storm like this was that he’d have at least five hundred years before the next one came.

  “Sheriff, this is Eight Eleven.” It was Bo Cameron, sounding strangely unnerved. Usually not enough information made it all the way into Bo's head to give him any trouble. “Are you…Sheriff, are you all right?”

  “Eight Eleven, this is Peck. Of course I am,” Peck said. “Are you?”

  There was a long pause. All he heard was Bo Cameron breathing in and out, in and out, hard and fast. He was about to click off when the cop spoke. “I guess,” he said, not certain of that at all.

  “Any contact with the others?” Bo asked. “Mindy? Fultz?”

  “No, sir. I think Mindy went home for the night. Fultz? Who knows?”

  Okay,” Peck said, wondering what had happened to them, but not really caring. “You’re done, are you?”

  “I’ve made a full circuit,” Bo said over the police band. “Rousted the civilians, sent ‘em packing or to the Conference Center. I’m ready to—”

  There was a crash of breaking glass and the scrape of metal on metal, clearly audible over the police channel.

  “Bo? What is it? Bo!”

  Bo went “Wha—” and then there was…

  Peck heard it as a chomp. The sound of something huge biting into something meaty. Then there was screaming. And swallowing. And more screaming, and this time it wouldn’t end. Sherriff Peck listened until there wasn’t anything more to listen to. Then he turned off the radio, knowing there was no one left to answer, and no one left to call.

  He thought about that for a moment.

  Okay. So…things got a little simpler. That’s all.

  There was still the plan. Still the vision. Still his unstoppable determination.

  This just makes it easier. Now it’s all up to me.

  Twenty-five

  Ken led his daughter back to the atrium with the high-domed ceiling of glass, but she couldn’t stand it there. Things were tapping at the glass two stories above them, and that was too much to bear.

  Without asking permission, Rose fled upstairs to the sitting room, a wide, low-ceilinged room with dark beams and white adobe walls. Four sets of casement windows looked out over the huge broken tooth of stone in the driveway to the dim glow of the town beyond and below, little more than a faint smudge through the rain. Her father was close behind her, his long face tight with tension.

  “Maggie,” he said to the open air. “Are you all right?”

  It seemed like an odd question to Rose, but the disembodied voice of the house seemed to understand what he was asking. “I lost two processors and the far south surveillance cameras,” Maggie said very calmly. “One of the memory back-ups has failed, too, but we’re thrice redundant there. All Uninterruptable Power Systems and the back-up generator are still solid, too.”

  God, Dad, she thought. Overbuild much?

  He nodded. “Satellite link?”

  “Still intact, but the one-way mirror is still in place.”

  “So all in all…what’s your self-assessment?”

  Maggie didn’t answer right away, and even that was odd. Rose couldn’t recall her pausing before.

  “I’m a little slower now,” Maggie said,
almost as if she was admitting a secret weakness. “But I’m still here.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Rose asked.

  “Maggie isn’t a single computer,” Ken said. “She’s actually a whole series of distributed processors, sensors, memory drives, a bunch of stuff, that are installed all over the house. Her higher functions – her fuzzy logic drivers, some of her conversational protocols, and what we’ve come to call her ‘implication engines’ – are handled through her uplink to a commercial geostationary satellite up there,” he pointed over their heads, “which, in turn, links her to microseconds of commercially available share-time on a series of networked supercomputers.”

  “So there isn’t like one glowing mechanical brain in a closet somewhere,” Rose said. “She’s got bits of her scattered all over the house…and all the hard decisions are done, in fractions of a second, by talking with other, smarter computers, far away.”

  Ken smiled. He looked proud of her. “You got it,” he said.

  “…and the other side of that,” Maggie said, “is that when the house is damaged, and some of the sensor or processors go offline, I lose some of my reasoning and communications capacity.”

  “You get stupider,” Rose said helpfully.

  “Right,” Maggie agreed. Rose caught it that time. It took a measurable beat for her to respond this time.

  “What are you going to tell Mom?” Rose asked abruptly, knowing she was interrupting and not really caring. Her Dad, preoccupied with the screen and his own thoughts, turned to her abruptly, surprised at the question.

  “What?”

  “You told her we would be out of here, over the ridge, by dark. But somebody ate our ride.”

  He blinked and looked out the windows. Lightning flickered, thunder cracked like wet wood, and for a moment—just a moment – something whistled past the second floor balcony, a huge, filigreed wheel of bone, edged in teeth and talons, twirling on the wind. It flashed for only an instant, then disappeared in a black-on-black afterimage.

  He opened his mouth say something and Maggie interrupted.

  “Ken,” she said with unexpected volume and urgency. “Somebody’s coming in the gate.”

  The TV flickered to a green, grainy night-vision view of the front gate and the first half-mile of private road. A blocky, dented Jeep was bouncing towards them, trailing sparks as it barreled through the water at the bottom of the first hill and spun off sheets of water as it surged up the second incline.

  “Anybody we know?” Ken asked, peering at it.

  “Not that I can tell,” Maggie said. “Do you recognize the vehicle?”

  “Nope.”

  “Dad,” Rose said, “if he hits the driveway he’ll sink like you did.”

  “Crap,” Ken said.

  “Deep crap,” she agreed.

  They pounded down the stairs. “Maggie!” he called. “What’s going on with our…wildlife out there?”

  “All cameras show it’s clear at the moment,” Maggie said as they skidded on the overpolished floor of the entryway. “They seem to have followed the big ones, the leg-things—”

  “Bone spiders,” Rose and Ken said together, and then looked at each other in surprise.

  “Bone spiders, then,” Maggie said. “They all seem to have left with them.”

  Ken nodded. “Good. Then–”

  “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” Rose said. She couldn’t resist.

  “Whatever you say, Dave,” Maggie said. The door-lock went thunk, and Rose thought, You may be down, Maggie, but you’re not out – not nearly.

  They ran onto the porch, right to the edge of the roofline. The Jeep’s lights were visible at the top of the second hill, still climbing.

  Ken waved his long arms frantically. “STOP! STOP THERE!”

  Rose hopped up and down next to him and did the same. “WAIT! WAIT!” She noticed a single headlight, much dimmer, far behind the battered Jeep. She couldn’t see what kind of car it was.

  Maggie swiveled the exterior lights to illuminate the path. The Jeep was outlined in stark black-and-white, the rain etched in thick vertical slashes, slicing the scene into a thousand narrow, flickering strips.

  The Jeep kept coming. They shouted louder, knowing they wouldn’t possibly be heard, and waved even more frantically as the car topped the third hill and accelerated down the paved drive, straight towards them, and straight towards the lake of mud.

  “STOP!” Rose screamed as the Jeep hit the edge of the road, the point where it would start to sink, and ridiculously, impossibly, the car actually sped up. For an instant it flew into the air, jumping like a jalopy in some absurd reenactment of a Dukes of Hazard stunt. She could see the muck-encrusted undercarriage all too clearly in the searchlights as it soared through the air and came down right in the middle of the liquefied landfill with the most extraordinary sound.

  The Jeep went splurch and k’tang!! simultaneously, the sound of a car splashing into mud as thick as clay and the sound of a car hitting another car at full speed, both at the same time. Muck and dirty rainwater flew up in a perfect circle with the Jeep at its center, a full three-hundred-sixty degrees of filth in a six-foot splash. Rose and Ken staggered back, arms up, as the mud-wave splattered over the porch.

  When Rose looked back, she fully expected to see the Jeep sinking swiftly into the ground, as the Land Rover had earlier.

  But it didn’t. It sat there, buried halfway up its wheels, as if it was floating on the muck instead of sinking into it.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ken said, so softly Rose barely heard it. “I think it’s on top of the Rover.”

  Rose noticed it was in exactly the same place that the Rover had sunk. She had a momentary vision of the buried four-wheel-drive, submerged in the mud, with the Jeep sitting on top of it like a seven-ton Easter bonnet.

  Maggie’s swiveling searchlights turned and adjusted like the eye-stalks of some vast mechanical snail. There was a stout woman with very short hair sitting inside the Jeep, eyes as big as saucers, mouth gaping. She looked as stunned by the experience as Rose was. After a long moment her eyes shifted from a thousand-yard stare to Ken and Rose.

  “Get out!” Rose shouted, gesturing to her. “Quick, before you sink, get out!” She moved out into the rain, put her boot into the bubbling muck beyond the red-brick porch and immediately started to sink. It was as bad as ever. Maybe worse.

  The woman in the car didn’t notice. She scooted across to the passenger door, kicked it open, hauled herself out…and sank into the watery mud, almost to her waist. She was fast, though, Rose saw. She yelped, recovered, clutched, and pulled herself back up into her seat, dripping and filthy, before the mud could take her completely.

  She looked up across the ten-foot gulf between them with an expression that clearly asked, What the fuck?

  “Quicksand!” Ken bellowed, making huge, sweeping gestures that were impossible to decipher. “All around you!”

  Rose didn’t know if the woman could hear them or not.

  The Jeep woman got the idea. Without missing a beat, she squirmed around, stood up in the doorway of the Jeep, and scrambled out onto its broad, mud-spattered hood. Now she was only eight feet from the red brick porch.

  As she struggled to stand on the shuddering, denting sheet metal, the whole car lurched two feet forward and nosed downward twenty degrees. The woman danced to keep her balance, and Rose knew exactly what was happening.

  “You’re sliding off!” she screamed, knowing that would mean absolutely nothing to the woman. “You’re sinking in! Quick! JUMP!”

  The car slid another foot down. The woman got the idea, took three pounding steps that covered the length of the hood, and leaped, as far and as high as she could, straight towards the porch, feet first.

  She missed.

  She fell short by exactly three feet, knifing feet-first into the muck. A brown wall of mud flew up and slapped Rose square in the face. She gagged and used the back of her wrist to scrape the crap out of her
eyes, cursing at it, and found the short-haired woman right in front of her, beyond her feet, sinking fast. She was already up to her chest in the liquefied landfill.

  Without even thinking about it, Rose threw herself onto her stomach and put out a hand. The Jeep woman tugged her own hand from the mud, the motion driving her six inches deeper down, and clutched at Rose’s straining fingers. They intertwined, held tight.

  Rose started to slide forward, belly-first, into the mud.

  Ken saw what was happening and threw himself forward, covering Rose’s legs, pinning her to the bricks. He used his weight to stop her, wrapped his long fingers around her ankles, then shuffled back and pulled, as hard as he could.

  Rose felt her vertebrae go pop-pop-pop as she stretched, but she moved back. Ken pulled with all his might again, and she inched back a little farther. Look at me, Rose thought as the pain clamped on her spine. I’m a human tow rope.

  The Jeep woman came with her, an inch at a time. First her arms were over the porch, then her ample chest. The instant her elbows were on solid ground, they separated and she churned her legs like an Olympic cycler until she was completely on the farthest corners of the covered porch, gasping for breath.

  That was entirely too close for Rose. For any of them.

  The Jeep woman pulled herself up onto all fours, then up on her knees.

  “Fuck,” she said, and tried to wipe her face clean. “Thanks, but ... fuck.”

  “Yeah,” Ken said. “Let’s get you in—”

  “Guys,” Rose said. She pointed across the shivering mud-lake, at what amounted to the far shore. The ridge-line that broke into a severe downhill grade.

  It was lined with monsters. Drifts of candle-eyes and needleseeds huddled on the ground. A lattice of thornwheels whickered in the wind behind them, flumes and blade-ribbons hung from the dancing, drenched eucalyptus trees like bony Christmas decorations, flapping in the chaotic wind. They were all illuminated by the stark white glare of Maggie’s searchlights, so bright even the lightning fracturing the sky behind them seemed pale and gray.