Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  There was a man standing in the midst of them. Or most of a man. He had too many legs, and one of them seemed longer than all the others. One arm was hanging by a series of threads, wriggling in the wind. Under the remains of his filthy, mud-encrusted clothes he was almost the same ash-gray and china-white as the creatures around him, from his ridged, plated hair to his opaque, marbled eyes.

  But he was alive. He was watching them. And the Jeep woman clearly recognized him.

  “Steinberg!” she bellowed. “You ASSHOLE! Why don’t you just fucking DIE?!”

  The man with the monster looked at her and smiled. The corners of his mouth cracked. He pretended to laugh, ha-ha-ha like a jolly old elf made of muddy paper, elbowing the creatures to his left and right. Look at that, he seemed to be saying, look how the meat-things whimper and scream!

  The woman was on her feet now, right at the edge of the porch. The rain was pounding into her eyes, driving her back, but she refused to acknowledge it. “I know all about you!” she shouted. “You and your buddies! You think you’re so great, you think you’re the man, but you’re a FUCKING PUNK!”

  The man with the monsters glanced to the side as a bone spider, ten feet tall, climbed the ridge to join them.

  “Let’s get inside,” Ken said, three minutes later than any sane man would have, as far as Rose was concerned.

  The bone spider cocked one of its larger legs and slammed it down on the hood of the disappearing Jeep, driving it four feet deeper into the muck.

  Rose tugged at the woman’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Come on.”

  “Fuck you, big man! Big, big man!”

  The bone spider was raising another leg, high in the air. It was aiming for the porch.

  “NOW!” Rose screamed, and jerked the crazy woman back, through the open door, into the entryway of the house. They tumbled inside as the bone spider’s leg, thick as a golf cart, rammed into the red brick porch where they had been standing and broke it off like a bit of bad plaster, crunch, driving it into the muck.

  Maggie slammed and locked the door behind them. The wind and rain cut off with a snip.

  The three of them were sprawled across the polished hardwood floor of the entryway. No one spoke for five heartbeats or more.

  “Asshole,” the woman muttered. “Thinks he can get me, does he?” She glared at Ken and Rose as if they were challenging her. “Does he?”

  For once in her life, Rose had no idea what to say.

  Twenty-six

  Steinberg snarled at the slammed door of the Mackie hacienda. It seemed to leer at him across the mud lake.

  Go after her, he ordered the bone spider. Finish her up. First her, then Jennie.

  His creatures had been waiting for him in the first hollow beyond the gate, rolling and slicing through the water, sucking greedily at the rainfall and growing, growing.

  Come help me, he told them. I have a job to do.

  They had climbed the slopes together, come to the mud lake, watched the little meat-baby clamber out of her car like a bug caught in a matchbox.

  Crush her, he told his bone spider. Now.

  She had gotten away. Scurried into her adobe rat hole. And he wanted to see her when it ended. He wanted to see her pop.

  Take me over there, he told the creature. Lift me up…

  No, the voice of the storm told him. There is something else to do...

  He started to protest, but he knew there was no point to it. The second mind twisting inside his own was hard as marble. You didn’t simply do what you were told, you surrendered to the irresistible pressure of it. You had to.

  Do as I tell you…

  He turned away from the hacienda with huge reluctance and trudged back to his ATV. He needed to go south. Not all the way, not this time. Just a little way.

  To the Conference Center.

  And then, he thought, I will be free. Free to go to the woman I love.

  Twenty-seven

  Lucy was giddy with adrenaline and victory. She had beaten the son of a bitch. She had escaped.

  “I know all about them,” she said to the programmer and the girl. “Everything, everything is right here.” She dug inside her khaki jacket and pulled out the flash drive. Its clean, cool surface was startling compared to the mud that caked every inch of her.

  Ken frowned at her and kept his distance. He thought he recognized her through the mud and water. “Look, Doctor…Doctor…?”

  “Armbruster,” she said, wiping mud out of her mouth. “Lucy.”

  “Doctor Armbruster, you have got to calm down. You barely–”

  “I know what I barely did, man.”

  “Ken,” he said, still sounding idiotically calm. “And this is Rose, my daughter.”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said, looking them both up and down as she struggled to her feet. Her heart was still pounding. “I remember you from the restaurant yesterday.”

  Rose wasn’t even looking at her. She was peering out the small windows beside the front door. “They’re gone,” she said. “All of them. The, the creatures and that man who was with them.” She looked back. “Did you see him, Dad? Did you see that guy standing with them?”

  “I sure did,” Lucy said, and tried to scrape some of the filth off her with no success. “The son of a bitch. Look, have you got a computer? You must have a computer, you’re a programmer, right?”

  “Sure, but–”

  “Where is it?” she demanded.

  Ken looked at her, as annoyed as he was terrified. “The study,” he said. “This way.”

  They trotted down the hall. “You gotta see this,” Lucy said, panting with excitement, adrenaline, fear. “It’s fucking amazing. You gotta see it.”

  The overhead lights flared and the monitors flickered to life all by themselves when they entered the quiet, triangular room with the massive multimedia bay. Lucy was still too buzzed to notice. She fit the drive into a USB port set into the desktop and started tapping on the keys. “Look at it,” she said, talking more to herself than anyone else. “Everything, all laid out. I don’t know where these fucking monsters came from, or how they became so multivariate without a wider ecological niche, or how they grew and spread so fast, but…”

  Rose was standing on the other side of the room, in front of the floor-to-ceiling drapes that covered the glass doors to the garden. “There’s something moving outside,” she said in a small voice.

  “Maggie?” Ken said. “What’s up?”

  “It’s Lucy,” Lucy said. “Not—”

  “Night vision and infrared show negative, boss, but then these creatures haven’t been showing on infrared anyway.”

  Lucy looked up sharply, in search of the new voice. Nobody to the left. Nobody to the right. She thought for a moment longer, then turned and looked at the computer monitor and said, “Ah. So. A voice-enabled PC?”

  “Something like that,” Ken said, smiling.

  “Cool. You are a programmer.”

  Ken scowled. How exactly did she make that sound like an insult?

  “Maggie, I’m still hearing it,” Rose said. “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  “Look,” Lucy said as she flipped from screen to screen, “I know this is hard to understand, but–”

  “Well, gosh,” Ken said, fluttering his eyes. “I’ll try to keep up. But y’know, I’m only a programmer.”

  Lucy put her head down and took a breath. “Okay. Point taken. I’m a jerk. Sorry.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “But this is important. Really.”

  “You’d be surprised at how much we already know,” Ken said, “but show me what you’ve got.”

  They spent a feverish ten minutes paging through Steinberg’s data. They even tried to upload it to somewhere, anywhere, but Maggie explained again about the one-way mirror data link, and Lucy appreciated the metaphor: she had been suffering the same problem. She looked through the satellite data and camera links that Maggie had assembled and –
much to her surprise – found herself impressed.

  “You did this?” she said to Ken, then corrected herself. “No, wait. Didn’t mean it that way. I mean, you figured out how to hack all the security and traffic cams in town that fast? Or is this something you do on a regular basis?”

  “I did it,” Maggie said. “And yes, I did it that fast.”

  Lucy looked up into the open air again. “You? You mean on your own?”

  “All by myself.”

  “Uh-huh.” She glanced at Ken. “Self. You know, I’d heard you were a hotshot AI guy, Kenneth, but still…”

  He shrugged. “I’m as surprised by it as you are, Lucy.”

  A wave of lightless gray mist surged into Lucy’s mind from every direction. She felt her knees start to buckle, and she had to paw mindlessly at the desk chair and sit down fast to keep from falling.

  “Shit,” she said, and scrubbed at her short, crusty hair. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “You blood pressure just hit the floor,” Maggie said, as Lucy struggled to catch her breath.

  “I’m not surprised,” Ken said. “You’re crashing from the adrenaline rush, Lucy. Take a break.”

  “Fuck that,” she said, forcing herself to breathe deeply. “We’re in trouble here.” Her head snapped up as something occurred to her. The sudden movement made her vision swim a second time, and she did her best to ignore it.

  “Hey,” she said, inhaling raggedly. “Hey, you said you were able to drive those fuckers off with electricity?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, “a high-voltage shock of at least–”

  “Fine, whatever. You’re telling me that they must have an electromagnetic signature of their own, right? They use it, they need it to think, like we do. Otherwise electricity wouldn’t bother them any more than bullets do. Have you tried tracking ‘em that way?”

  “We’ve tried everything,” Rose said. “Twice.” She was pacing nervously, still glancing at the drapes every few seconds. “Daddy…”

  “That satellite data you showed me,” Lucy said, plowing ahead. “Those sats can scan for E-M sources, too.” Ken looked momentarily confused and she snapped at him. “Electromagnetic sources, goddamn it! If we could get large and small scale readings of the Valle, maybe we could actually see the fucking things and get a sense of where they’re coming from, if they have a nest or a hive or —”

  There was a tremendous crash and slumping sound beyond the drapes. Rose, still close to the drapes, jumped halfway across the room. “Okay, everybody heard that, right?” Lightning flickered beyond the windows, and thunder, as loud as exploding oil tanks, pounded across them. “Can we please get out of here now?”

  “I’ve written the Steinberg data onto two of my hard drives, Ken,” Maggie said, “and burned DVDs in one of the laptops upstairs. If you …”

  She paused. It was like she drifted off.

  “If we what?” Lucy said impatiently.

  “Sorry,” Maggie said. “There’s a lot going on at once. Something on the porch.”

  “Oh, shit,” Rose said.

  “And the wind is spiking. Barometer falling fast. Really fast. It’s a …” another pause, as the glass in every window began to rattle. “…cyclonic effect.”

  “Maggie,” Rose said. “Please, Maggie, what’s outside?”

  Without warning, without asking permission, Maggie opened the drapes that covered the floor-to-ceiling patio doors.

  “Maggie, wait—”

  The security lights on the patio popped on, and everyone froze in place.

  Candle-eyes, the small, broad-footed lumps with eye-stalks like fingers, completely covered the level ground in a churning, sludgy sea. Rising above them, taller than the windows themselves, was a single creature with no torso at all, but a latticework of talons and needle-sharp claws, twisting and twining, glinting in the light as it opened its wings like an enormous, skeletal dragonfly.

  It turned to face them, half transparent, bone white. The wings twitched back at the sight of them. It tensed, a scorpion about to strike.

  “RUN!” Rose screamed, entirely unnecessarily. The three of them fled through the door to the hallway as the huge wing-creature struck the doors and shattered them with a single blow. Maggie slammed the interior door behind them, barely in time. They heard fragments of glass thunk against the other side.

  The study was lost.

  “Why the hell did you open those curtains, Maggie?” Ken shouted.

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said, and Lucy could have sworn she actually sounded puzzled. “I didn’t…think…”

  “You didn’t think?” he echoed acidly. “You’re supposed to anticipate this shit, Maggie! That’s the whole point—”

  “Dad,” Rose said severely. “Never mind. Just tell us where to go now.”

  He pulled himself up short. Lucy was impressed at his self-control “Upstairs,” Ken said after a moment. “We can barricade—”

  “No,” Maggie said. “Not upstairs.”

  “What, are you kidding?” Lucy said, astonished. “They can tear that door off like tissue paper! We can’t–”

  “The wind,” Maggie said. “It will kill you.” The doors to the far end of the hall, the ones to the large rooms at the center of the house, slammed shut. An instant later, the doors to all the rooms that faced the driveway slammed as well. They all heard the rhythmic click-click-click of doors locking down the hall.

  “Stay away from the windows,” Maggie said. “It’s coming. Now.”

  The loudest scream Lucy had ever heard, a scream that came from the Valle itself, not from any human throat, began to build around them, growing higher…and higher...

  And the wind hit them like the fist of God Himself.

  Twenty-eight

  When Donald Peck parked his police cruiser directly in front of the Conference Center, he left every light on it pulsing and flickering in the storm – a beacon for the last stragglers. It was already twenty minutes to six, and he had hoped some of the VIPs he had met with the night before would arrive early. Instead, he found a few hundred waterlogged and desperate citizens and Karen Kramer, the manager of the Center, still wearing the same furiously pink pants suit she’d been wearing the night before. She greeted him hoarsely as he entered.

  Peck didn’t like the way she looked. She was rumpled, slightly stained, and her anxiety showed through her makeup like a painted skull as she offered him some mangled donuts and lukewarm coffee. He passed.

  Stu Axminster of the DHW&P arrived a few moments later. “Goddamnit, Donald,” he said, “Richie Riegel just called me and said he ain’t bringin’ the Orange Monster back.”

  Peck sighed. “Not surprising,” he said shortly.

  “He’s stealing, goddamn it! Stealing goddamn public property! Your people need to pick him up! He—”

  “Stu,” he said, “my people are gone. So are yours. Besides, The Monster’s a two-seater, right?”

  “Yeah?” Stu said, sticking his chin out. “So?”

  “So it’s not going to help us with getting people out of town, is it?”

  Stu blinked a couple of times. “Well…no, but–”

  “And you still have all the other city vehicles? The ones with lots of seats?”

  “Well, yeah. They’re all parked right next door in the holding lot. Under the tower.” His stony expression was obvious. Stu didn’t like the way this conversation was going.

  “Do you have drivers for all those vehicles, Stu? The ones we’re actually going to use?”

  Stu’s eyes shifted away. “Well... probably. I mean, I called. I left a lot of messages, I …I need to check on that.”

  “You do that,” Peck said. He could barely stand to look at the man as he skittered away. I can’t take much more of this. I really can’t.

  He moved towards the stage, weaving past clumps of dripping, miserable citizens, to check on the microphones and the podium. As he bent to read the levels on the amplifier, he heard a voice behind him, a thick, wet,
phlegmy, familiar voice.

  “You’re a liar, is what you are.”

  He straightened and turned, though he already knew what he was going to see.

  Karen Kramer, her tightly bound body swaying inside the violent pink pantsuit was standing a little too close to him. Her bird-arms were wrapped tight around her. She was shivering, less from the cold than from…something else. Tension. Fear. He could smell it on her. She clearly hadn't showered or changed clothes in at least a couple of days.

  “You’re not looking for those little girls,” she said. “You never were.”

  Peck noticed that a few of the arrivals were watching them, wondering what the ever-cheerful, ever-helpful Miss Karen’s problem might be.

  I can’t have this happen here, he thought. “Come with me,” he said – telling, not asking – and took her by the elbow. He led her out of sight, into the wings, to a place right inside a security door that read DO NOT OPEN ALARM WILL SOUND, though he knew damn well that wasn’t the case and never had been.

  “Karen,” he said testily, “we’re doing the best we can.” As if there’s any ‘we’ left.

  She sneered at him. “Like hell you are, Donald. Even before this mess outside, you didn’t look for them. I know you.”

  “I–”

  “You’re bullshit. You’ve always been bullshit, and everybody knows it. We put up with it because nobody else wants your stinking job!” she said, her voice rising.

  “Karen, come on, we—”

  “You just want me to shut up!” she was hysterical now. What little color was left in her face, under the hideous makeup, was high in her cheeks and bright as bruises. “You always want everybody to shut up! You lied about the kids and you’re lying about the storm because you want all those difficult people with all their difficult problems to just go away!”

  He clenched his teeth and tried not to make his fingers into fists. “If you will calm the fuck down, maybe we—”

  “You wish I would go away, too! Don’t you? You wish –”