Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  He did it without really thinking. He threw up one leg and kicked her as hard as he could, right in the middle of her narrow, lumpy chest. Karen went oog! and flew straight back, colliding with the security door’s pushbar and throwing it open. She fell into the roaring darkness and disappeared like that, all in an instant. In an instant more the door bounced off the outer wall and slammed shut.

  Just like that, she was gone.

  Peck stared at the door for a moment, pleased at how his heart rate had barely risen. He started to turn away, already forgetting her, when the door erupted with loud, metallic pounding and Karen called out. He could barely hear her through the metal, over the sound insulation and the gurgling thunder of the rain.

  “Let me in!” she bellowed. “Let me in, damn you!”

  He didn’t.

  “LET ME IN!” She sounded outraged – beyond outraged. “I’ll GET you, you son of a bitch! I’ll tell EVERYbody you–”

  There was a pause. Peck cocked his head like a curious dog, wondering what had stopped her.

  “Sheriff? Sheriff, there’s something out here.”

  Oh, my, he thought. Whatever could it be?

  “Sheriff, there’s – SHERIFF! GOD, OPEN THE DOOR! OPEN THE DOOR OPEN THE DOOR OHHHHH—”

  Her voice cut off with a wet slash unlike anything he’d ever heard outside of a butcher shop.

  The sound didn’t last for long. And when it stopped…

  “Well, then,” he said to himself. “Problem solved.” He smoothed his immaculate khaki uniform and turned back to enter the slowly filling auditorium.

  * * *

  Outside, in the heart of the storm, Michael Steinberg was saying good bye to his ATV.

  The red cowling was dented and cracked in a dozen places; the engine was laboring and coughing as he forced it into the storage lot behind the Conference Center. The Water Tower loomed over him under a stone-heavy bank of clouds, and the rain kept pouring down.

  It never stops. Thank God. Thank Jesus. Thank Me.

  “There, there,” he said, stroking the hood one final time. “That’s my baby.” He was fascinated by the hard, screeching sound of his hand on the metal, like horn scraping on bone. The engine coughed one final time, then the whole vehicle shuddered and died.

  He stood up on the ATV’s pins and surveyed the vehicles arrayed before him: tow trucks, flatbeds, mini-pick-ups, water tankers, a paddy wagon, street sweepers, a water cannon, steam rollers, a cement mixer – even, for no particular reason at all, an ice-cream truck. He needed something special for his next task, he knew. Something huge and heavy, but relatively agile. Something he could steer, and as heavy as…

  Then he saw it. Ah. Perfect.

  Steinberg hopped off the loading dock and splashed into the water towards his new vehicle. Takin’ out the trash. That’s me, Mr. Trash Man.

  He could feel the approval of the wordless Intelligence filling his mind.

  * * *

  Where the hell was Herb McCandless? Peck wondered. Or Marty Stein, or Tony O’Meara or Steve Chapin or Frank Baxter, or any damn member of the Town Council? Christ, even the Lazenbys.

  As if in answer to his thoughts, the back doors creaked open and Normal Lazenby strolled in, his wife at his side. He was perfectly groomed and bone dry, a silver-haired angel dressed in black who glided confidently down the center aisle and took the same seat on the stage as he had occupied the night before.

  The Mayor didn’t have to speak. He had presence. He looked every inch like the father of Dos Hermanos, and right now that was all that mattered.

  Dread coiled in Donald Peck’s belly. He had never felt that particular emotion before, and he hated it. He tapped the mic and said, “People? Let’s get started.” There was a whine of feedback that made everybody groan. He wouldn’t have put up with that even a few hours earlier. Now…he really couldn’t care less.

  “This is how it’s going to work,” he said without preamble. “We’re going to take the biggest public vehicles we can find – the flatbeds, the big trucks, the busses – and load everybody inside. They’re all parked right next door, in the utility lot. Then we’re going to stop by the school to pick up your kids and the teachers, then go over to the Clinic to pick up doctors and patients, and then we’re heading up 181 and out of here. So everybody–”

  “Wait a minute!” It was an exhausted, weary man streaked with mud, standing up from his seat and sounding very angry. “Why do we all have to go to the school and the clinic? I got no kids. My wife and I just want to go.”

  “Then go,” he said bluntly, hard into the mike. “Don’t let me stop you.”

  “We got no car, damn it! It got washed away last night!”

  “Then you go the way we say to go,” Donald snapped. “And you…” He wanted to say “and you shut the fuck up,” but he stopped himself at the last moment. “…and you try and make the best of it. Um…Chuck.” He remembered the man’s name now, Chuck Emerson, air conditioning contractor.

  The Greenaways were sitting right behind him. Now they stood up. “What about our daughter?”

  Oh, Christ, he thought. Sharon Greenaway was the last person he wanted to see right now, the mother of one of the missing girls. The last missing girl had disappeared barely two days ago. Mommy had been a meek little victim until now, but he could see the change in her. She had shed her soft, trembling Grieving-Mom-In-Trouble look. She was an instrument of vengeance now, eyes blazing and fists clenched white. “You said you were looking. Just yesterday, you said so. And now you want to run?”

  “Sharon,” he said in as measured a tone as he could manage. He couldn’t stand the look in her eyes, so he shifted to her sad sack husband. “Jim, I… I don’t know what to say. There are men out there right now, looking…”

  He couldn’t help it. He looked into her face again and saw the rage there, and the righteousness. He saw how immovable she was…and how right.

  Oh, fuck this, he told himself. He leaned on the podium.

  “Sharon…Jim…let me level with you. All of you. We’re not looking for your daughter right now. We don’t have the men or the time. I hope somebody found her and took her out of town. I really do hope that. Right now, though…we have to go.”

  “The hell we do!” Sharon said, standing up so fast she knocked her chair over. “We are not leaving Dos Hermanos without Katie!”

  “Then you’re probably going to die,” Peck said flatly.

  The Greenaways stared at him for one moment longer, then turned and left the room. Half a dozen others joined them, casting poisonous looks as they stalked through the double doors. Lightning blasted the walls to white, and there was a tremendous, metallic CLANGGG! of thunder that rattled the windows.

  “Good luck to you all,” he said as they left.

  * * *

  It was coming from the north. Steinberg could feel it himself now, exactly as the Intelligence muttering inside him had predicted. It was building, growing. It would be here any moment.

  Time to get ready.

  Steinberg found himself, yet again, thinking of his golden girl, his perfect Jennie. He had a moment of sheer panic, thinking she might be inside, that he might hurt her by accident. Then his tangled, wandering mind recalled: No. She was at the Clinic, still trapped inside, not here. It was okay. Really, it was okay.

  He settled himself in the seat of the massive garbage truck. He had found the keys clipped to the sun visor as if they’d been left for him, and they slipped into place without a snag. The engine started with the first try, and without a pause he popped the clutch and jammed on the accelerator.

  The truck roared straight forward, water flying everywhere.

  He didn’t stop. He didn’t even test the brakes. He just aimed it carefully, punched it hard, and rammed the garbage truck directly into the huge, cylindrical southwest leg of the Water Tower.

  Lightning flared as he connected, exactly on cue. The tremendous sound of the impact, metal on screaming metal, was all but lost
in the deafening crash of the thunder.

  The collision threw the steering column into Steinberg’s chest. He heard his sternum pop as it broke, heard the wet snap of at least three ribs. But he didn’t lose his breath. He didn’t really need to breathe anymore.

  As he lay hunched over the steering wheel, he heard the tiny chewing crunches of his bones rebuilding. He straightened up, put the truck in reverse, and pulled away for another hit.

  Maybe this time we’ll try backing into it…

  * * *

  “Why didn’t you tell us all this last night?” It was another outraged citizen with a soggy pile of suitcases next to him. Peck had seen him hustling his three hungry children off to the school for safekeeping a few minutes earlier, obviously glad to be rid of them. “You told us this was going to be over soon! You told us everything was going to be fine!”

  “I was wrong,” Peck said, too weary to fight.

  “We could have left then! We could’ve packed up everything and been safe!”

  “I was working from faulty information,” he said. “I was–”

  “That lady scientist!” another woman said. “She knew about it! She said this would happen and you cut her off!”

  “I was trying to restore order,” he said. “I was doing what I thought was right.”

  “How can that be?” Lu Anne Schreiber said. The keening voice made Peck want to drive a jackknife in her ear, but he didn’t flinch. He wouldn’t let himself do that. “How can putting us all in harm’s way be right?”

  A fat old man Peck barely recognized hauled his ass up. “Goddamn it, I lost my house! It just floated away, not two hours ago and you—”

  “You, too?” said another guy. “Shit, I thought I was the only one.”

  “And those things out there! Those things!”

  “My brother didn’t come home last night. I don’t know what–”

  “My dad—”

  “Jimmy and Dooley and Wyatt, they–”

  Lightning cut through the room again. Thunder exploded – that same strange double-thump of sound and shockwave. The audience kept talking, kept pushing at him.

  Peck closed his eyes. He tried to breathe steadily.

  This has got to stop. This has got to fucking STOP.

  * * *

  Steinberg’s new senses helped him time it just right. He pulled away, revved the engine, and waited until the tang of ozone rose…and rose…and peaked. Then he popped the clutch and lurched backwards.

  Lightning struck and thunder pounded out of the sky as the massive garbage truck slammed into the Tower’s leg one more time. The two impossibly loud sounds blended into one.

  The Water Tower’s leg was buckling. Steinberg could see cracks in the paint, the metal folding like cardboard right where the truck had hit it twice.

  This is going to work, he told himself, utterly amazed. This is actually going to …

  He sensed it. He looked up to the north, even as he forced the truck into forward gear and lurched away from the tower again.

  Only time for one more. One more…

  * * *

  They were shouting at each other now, terrified and angry. Peck tried to override it.

  “Let’s get to the trucks!” he said, booming it into the microphone on purpose. He waved at Stu Axminster to get his ass up to the podium. “Let’s line up at the doors—”

  “Why should we do what you say?” one man shouted. “This is your fault, YOUR fault!”

  “Let’s ride it out here! It’s still safe!”

  “My gran is still at the house! We gotta go get her–”

  “I don’t want to, I–”

  “–can’t, I –”

  “– don’t—”

  Donald Peck slammed his fist into the wooden podium right in front of the mic, hard and fast and loud as a gunshot.

  “JUST DO WHAT I FUCKING TELL YOU!” he bellowed.

  The people stopped shouting. Even the rain itself seemed to stop, and the wind held its breath.

  Everyone was staring at him.

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he said. “You want me to save you, to be your daddy, like always! God, you worthless, fucking, stupid bunch of…of…”

  Peck was suddenly aware that it was quiet – silent, in fact. Absolutely silent.

  Everything had stopped. Everything. The wind. The rain. Even…

  What was that distant roar? Growing louder and louder?

  He looked up and to the right, to the north. He felt a strange, invisible pulse that pushed his entire body, like the leading shockwave of a massive explosion.

  A wall of wind, as solid as stone, slammed broadside into the north wall of the Conference Center and blew it to pieces.

  It took thirty seconds for everyone to die.

  * * *

  Steinberg saw it coming with all his new senses, sweeping down from the Notch at more than seventy miles an hour. The Water Tower’s tank, a flattened sphere of blue-painted steel, hovered high above him, lit from below. The glittering, billowing curtain of force careening southwards was even taller than the Tower. And was more than just wind and water. It was like the fist of God Himself, and he could feel it in his bony hide, rushing headlong towards them.

  He popped the clutch and lurched forward, full-speed. He raised his arms and screamed into it, calling it down as he slammed the truck into the buckling leg of the Tower at the same instant the wind-wall arrived. In that last moment of awareness he saw the support crumple completely. The Tower groaned like a living thing as it twisted to the side.

  He saw it fall. It drifted down at first, descending at an angle, going right where he’d planned.

  First the walls of the Conference Center disappeared in a single poof. Then the tank hit the roof dead center and exploded. The truck around Steinberg blew to pieces, and he went with it. Vehicles scattered like thrown toys, walls disintegrated, buildings flew away. His own body cracked like china and the pieces scattered.

  It was the happiest moment of Michael Steinberg’s life.

  Donald Peck saw it all. The entire north wall of the building blew out in an instant, and all the people and chairs and soggy luggage flew into the air in a single pressurized wave and slammed through the south wall. That fast, in a heartbeat.

  The roof of the Center didn’t blow off, not right away. The massive, rust-colored beams in the four corners stood firm, and Peck, on the stage, was lifted straight up and plastered against the curved ceiling, pinned there like a bug by the air pressure, but still very much alive – and conscious.

  For one mad moment, he found himself looking down on the meeting room, viewing it from on high. He could see only a few bodies. Most had flown away, into the storm, but a handful were still there, clogged in the corners, like ants left after a blast from a garden hose.

  Some of them were moving. One or two were actually trying to stand, even though the gale-force winds, strong enough to suspend Donald Peck forty feet in the air, still howled through the wreckage.

  “Ants…” he wheezed.

  Then he heard the high screaming music of metal tearing itself apart. He turned his head a bit, to look at the curve of the Conference Center’s ceiling, and saw it flex down, pushed from above, as the cool blue curve of the Water Tower’s tank fell through the roof, collapsed it, burst like a second bomb.

  It was the last thing he ever saw.

  * * *

  The wind pushed him under. The water embraced him. The brittle limbs of what had once been Michael Steinberg broke off like toothpicks and swirled away, scattered by the pressure wave.

  For you, Jennie, he told himself as he spread. All for you.

  The last of his human consciousness still heard the stern voice of the Intelligence enfolding him, pulling him in. It was pleased with his work. Very pleased. And yet it did not take him completely. He was still distantly, wonderfully aware of the spark of Jennie Sommerfield, drowning in the storm-surge he had created.

  I’ll come for you
, he thought, not sure if he could do it. I’ll come for….

  And that was all that mattered.

  Twenty-nine

  The windows of Ken Mackie’s atrium exploded into a thousand pieces when the wind-wall hit the ridge. The doors of the locked hallway where Maggie had trapped them thumped as if ghosts were pounding on them, but they held, even through the horrible wooden rip-and-tear sound from farther down the hall. It wasn’t monsters this time. It was the wind that was ripping away parts of the kitchen.

  An instant later the power went off.

  “Dad?” Rose said. “Daddy?”

  “Right here,” he said. “I—”

  The power came back on. The emergency generator had kicked in, as it was supposed to.

  “Maggie!” he called. “Status?”

  “UPS did its job,” Maggie said calmly. “I didn’t even have to reboot.”

  Rose scowled. “What has UPS got to–”

  “Uninterruptable Power Source,” Lucy said. “To keep the computer running in spite of power failure. Don’t be an idiot.”

  Rose started to fire something back, but Maggie hadn’t finished.

  “There’s bad news, Ken.”

  “The antenna array,” he guessed. He had been expecting it. Dreading it, really.

  “Yes. They’re all gone. I’ve lost all contact with uplinks, reference satellites, the internet. We are on our own.”

  And now she’d be even slower, Rose realized. No more supercomputers to squirt questions to when things got complicated.

  There was a rumble in the room to the east – the crunching, thumping approach of the storm-creatures. It grew louder…and louder…and an electrical KZZZAK! cut through it, snapped it off. The lights dimmed at the same moment, then recovered.