by Brad Munson
“Time to get upstairs,” Maggie said, and the door to the stairwell popped open. “Quickly, please.”
“This,” Lucy said, getting to her feet and brushing the biggest chunks of drying mud from her clothes, “is too fucking weird.”
Something beyond the western doors went crunch.
They ran up the stairs as fast as they could.
* * *
Five minutes later, crouching in a side-chair in the corner of her father's bedroom, Rose tried to call her mother. It was stupid and she knew it. The wind had blown the towers down, the power was off, and the satellites that might relay a signal were cut off from them for some reason. They had been for days. Still, she had to try. She had to hear her mother's voice one more time. It was pointless. There was nothing there, not even the equivalent of a dial tone or a “systems busy” message.
Rose sighed bitterly. She was about to throw the damn thing across the room when a blinking icon on the iPhone's screen caught her attention.
She had a voice-mail.
She hadn't heard the phone ring earlier, though that was no surprise. The gradual, relentless destruction of the house by storm-creatures and the shrieking of the storm itself drowned out everything—literally. She tapped the proper code and pressed the phone to her ear, straining for every syllable.
It was a terrible connection. She could barely hear. But she would have recognized her mother's voice anywhere.
“-etting worse, Rosie,” her Mom said, and for once she didn't mind the kid version of her name. “We don't –ink the caravan's … —et here. But we'll go anyway. Somehow. We …ake it to the highway and the… otch and we'll mee.. you there, I promise, we...”
There was a long pause then – nothing but hissing and spitting – until two final syllables rose out of the static: – love y—”
That was all.
Rose listened to it two more times, then she buttoned the phone back into one of the pockets of her canvas vest and let herself cry.
* * *
It killed over a thousand people. Those not in or near the Conference Center were drowned by the manmade tsunami that followed moments later.
Electrical power cut off with a knife-sharp pop seconds after the wind hit the city center. Dos Hermanos, California ceased to exist at that moment. The few who survived both the wind and the water found themselves trapped in an endless, rain-choked night, with no light, no help, no hope.
It wasn’t long before the creatures of the storm came for them.
THE THIRD DAY
“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was – and methought I had – but man is but a patch'd fool if he will offer to say what methought I had.”
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Thirty
All those people, Rose thought numbly. What happened? Where are they?
She stood at her father’s bedroom window and looked into the storm. The town of Dos Hermanos should have been visible below them, even in the middle of a dark and stormy night like this. Dark and stormy, she repeated to herself. What a laugh. Still, she knew she should have been looking down at a misty carpet of landbound stars, but those lights, already dim and guttering in the storm, had vanished when the wind hit.
Lightning flared for an instant, and she saw the rough, nearly flat top of the stone pillar thrusting out of the driveway. It looked like an island of rock floating over a lake of mud. Moments later, there was a subtle vibration under her bare feet. She thought it was thunder at first...then, on impulse, she laid down on the floor and put her ear against the Berber rug.
It wasn't thunder at all. It was the creatures of the storm, eating the house out from under them.
She could hear them downstairs, tearing through the walls, crunching across the carpets. There were no voices, no roaring, not even any breathing. Only…clattering beneath the gurgle of the rain. It was the sound of every artifact, every object, every human shape being shattered.
There was a sudden BOOM when an interior wall collapsed beneath her, and a thwack of bones knocking on the window to her right. Scumbles again, Rose thought. Maggie answered the attack with an electric THRUMM-buzz of her own. Out of the corner of her eye, Rose saw the creature explode off the screen in a shower of sparks, and the lights dimmed as current ran through the household security grid. It was the fifth time in an hour that Maggie had triggered the defense system, and it took longer for the lights to recover each time she used it.
Is that all that’s keeping them away? Rose wondered, ear still pressed to the floor. Just the electricity? She had a vivid image of the creatures waiting patiently, a few feet below her – inches away, really.
Suddenly Lucy was standing over her. “Get up,” she said gruffly.
Rose ignored her. “You can hear them,” she said. “Moving around.”
Lucy Armbruster’s round, righteous face was right next to hers, glaring at her, too close for comfort. “Look,” Lucy said in a fierce whisper, “the electrical grid that Maggie’s using to drive those fuckers away only goes around the outside of this house. Not between the floors. The second they figure that out, one of those bone spiders is gonna shove one of its big ol’ claws right up through this floor.”
Rose stared blindly at her for a beat...then jumped to her feet and backed away. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said in a very low voice. She kept glaring at Lucy as she moved as far from her listening spot as she could, on tiptoes.
Lucy shrugged her rounded shoulders. “Yeah,” she admitted. “But it got you up.”
The room was a huge “L”-shape – a full bedroom and bath, with a vast bed, a dresser, two end tables, and a generously proportioned nook around the corner where Ken had put bookshelves and a desk for his laptop. Her father was nowhere near the desk or the media center it housed, he was using the bed itself as a workspace, standing over it and gazing at the reams of print-outs and charts and scrolling data on three different tablets scattered across the mattress. The material was generated from the data that Lucy had brought to them hours before, and it had snagged his complete attention. He hadn’t heard a word of the two women's conversation.
“This is incredible,” he said, entirely to himself.
There was another BOOM! when another wall fell downstairs. A massive talon skreeeeked along the hardwood floor. Rose could feel it as well as hear it, tickling up through the carpet. She couldn’t help staring at the floor – through the floor.
“Where did they come from?” she asked. “How could they simply appear like this? Like ‘Instant Monster, Just add water’?”
“It can’t be as easy as it seems,” Lucy said from across the room. They didn’t look at each other as they talked. “Evolution doesn’t work like that. Whole species, whole ecologies, don’t pop up overnight.” She suddenly, unexpectedly, smiled. “You ever see that movie, Evolution? Really terrible picture; David Duchovny trying to get out from under X-Files, and I don’t remember who else.”
“I don’t think I saw it,” Rose said, staring at nothing.
“This meteor crashes to Earth, actually out in the desert, now that I think of it, with these little speckles of living stuff on it. Things start growing in the crater. Plants first, then insects, then monkey-type animals, all of them alien, of course, ready to kick ass and take over the planet.” She looked back out at the lightning again.
“Do you think that’s what’s happening now?” Rose asked.
“No,” Lucy said, annoyed. “It was total bullshit. It would never work that way.” She looked down at her shoes. “Besides, it was a comedy.”
“Do you think it’s happening all over?” Rose said quietly. “Like in War of the Worlds or something?”
“No,” Ken and Lucy said, immediately and together.
“The rainstorm is isolated to this crater valley,” Lucy went on. “It’s a hu
mongous mountain-shadow effect. We saw that on the last of the satellite images. Right over the ridge, not two miles that way,” she pointed out the back of the house, due west, “it’s sunny and hot as usual. If it’s the rainstorm that…activated…these things, as we think it did, then it’s still isolated to this crater.”
“Besides,” Ken said, “think about the video broadcasts and internet stuff we were getting right up until the wind hit. Everything was fine, CNN, The Weather Channel, all the data and government links. Right through the first two days. No, it’s only us.” He gave Rose a sharp look, as if he'd suddenly remembered something. “Have you got everything you need?” he asked her.
It took Rose a moment to understand what we was talking about. “Yeah. Yes. We got clothes from my room before we locked ourselves in here, including my, you know, underwear. And hiking boots and long johns. All that stuff.”
“Good,” he said, already on to something else in his mind. “You should get changed.”
Rose was lacing her second boot and pulling it tight when something exploded near the kitchen. It was violent enough to make the room shake.
“Another processor gone,” Maggie said. “Boss…” There was another THRUMM-buzz! and the lights lowered again. When they came back on, they were noticeably dimmer.
Something was drumming on the floor directly beneath them, like thigh-bones on a cardboard box. It almost sounded like it was knocking.
It made Rose angry. “I don’t get it,” she said. “They can’t just show up! You can’t have one lousy fucking rainstorm and see the whole world collapse like this. It’s ridiculous.”
Lucy almost laughed at her. She was grinning and shaking her head. “Kid,” she began.
“Don’t call me kid,” Rose snapped. “Jesus, that’s condescending!”
Lucy was taken aback. “Okay. Sorry. Rose. I was just saying, I don’t think you have any idea how precarious life is.”
Rose frowned. Thunder rumbled so low and powerful she could feel it in her chest, but she tried to ignore it.
“We’re on the razor’s edge here,” Lucy said. “If Earth was just a few planetary diameters closer to the sun, we’d fry like a falafel ball. A few diameters farther away … Tastee-Freez. Meanwhile, even in this magical temperate zone of ours, the best that evolution could come up with was the feeble human being. We’re pathetic. Weak and almost completely non-adaptive. We can only exist long enough to procreate in a tiny temperature range, far less than most living things. We can’t go more than a few hours without water, a few days without food. We're so delicate it’s kind of sickening.”
Something caught Lucy’s eye. She reached down and plucked a shiny Macintosh apple out of a bowl of fruit on Ken’s end table. “Seriously, if this was a scale model of the Earth – the whole planet, this big – how thick do you think the whole biosphere would be? From the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the entire layer of organized life on the planet. How thick?” She held up the apple as if challenging the teenager.
Rose shrugged. She didn’t have any idea.
Lucy took a vicious bite out of the apple. “Thinner than this skin,” she said with her mouth full. “Think about it. Thinner than the skin on this apple.” She swallowed with some difficulty. “We don’t want to think about it, Rose, but we’re tiny. Balanced so precariously between two canyons of extinction that it terrifies us to even consider it. Is it any surprise that one little shove, one little rainstorm, can do… this?” She gestured with the half-eaten apple, sweeping it all in: the window, the town beyond it, the creatures eating the house one bite at a time.
“That doesn’t even begin to explain the things downstairs,” Rose said. “They’re like animals—”
“They’re not animals,” Ken said abruptly, and turned to face them.
Lucy frowned. “What?”
“What’s the old Bio 101 definition of life?” he asked, his eyes shining. “It has to eat, it has to poop, it has to move, it has to reproduce. Right?”
“‘Poop’?” Lucy said. “Is that a technical term?”
“‘Falafel balls?’” he shot back.
She smirked. “Point taken.”
“Think about it,” Ken said. “These creatures don’t pass the test. They move, that’s true. The may eat, if they can somehow get nourishment from the water they absorb, but even Steinberg couldn’t find any evidence of it. And living things this big, no matter how efficient, need a huge amount of biomass to keep going, like the whales that live on krill who have to eat constantly or starve. These things are much more active than a whale, much more kinetic. Meanwhile, no pooping, and no babies. No sign of either.”
“So maybe we simply haven’t –”
“—and no mention of it in your scientist’s notes here, either,” Ken said. “Tons of information on growth and locomotion. Nothing on excretion or reproduction.”
Now it was Lucy’s turn to stop and stare. “Huh,” she said. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
Ken allowed himself a very small smile. “I know. I only noticed it because they’re more similar to the things I build than to the things you study.”
He looked at her directly for the first time, eyes still shining. “Really, Lucy. Think about it. These things are machines. Highly specialized machines.”
“Made out of iron-hard papier-mâché and bone-stuff,” Rose said. She was agreeing with him.
“Right,” he said. “I wouldn’t even call it organic, exactly. It’s more like crystallization or magnetic accretion than it is cellular growth. But…yeah. Robots made from bone.”
Lucy nodded and looked back out the window. “That would explain why the electricity works on them. It’s scrambling their signals, disrupting their thinking processes like an EMP on a silicon chip.”
“Or nearly so, yes,” Ken said. “It also explains the complete lack of a brain or nervous system in the creatures that Steinberg dissected. If they’re not animals, if they’re servomechanisms, they don’t need a brain. Somebody – something – else does the thinking for them, and tells them what to do.”
“Electromagnetism,” Lucy said. “They’d have electromagnetic signatures of their own, even if they don’t have a heat signature. And they’d be receiving signals from some other, much more powerful EM source.”
Ken looked up at the ceiling. “Maggie,” he said, “before we were interrupted, you were pulling down EM data from the satellites.”
“The satellite link is gone, Ken,” she said gently.
“I know that. Did you save the data before we were cut off?”
A long pause. The three humans looked at each other.
“Yes,” Maggie said finally. “And I still have access to…it.”
“Can you overlay that on a scaled map of Dos Hermanos?” he asked, speaking slowly and carefully. “Make it one map?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot, please,” Maggie said. “I’m having a bad day. Even in my current state, I’m smarter than you.”
He grinned. “Sorry. Can you pull that up, please?”
“It’ll take some processing time, but I’ll put it on the laptop screen.”
“Thank you.”
“While you wait, I will entertain you with a rendition of HAL 9000’s greatest hits. ‘Daayyyzzzeeee, Dayyyzeee…”
“Thanks, that won’t be necessary.”
Maggie stopped.
“Jesus,” he said. “How could I have built a personality as sarcastic as that?”
“I have no idea,” Rose said.
The picture built on the screen with painful slowness, far more slowly than it should have, Rose knew. She could see the look of nearly physical pain on her father’s face as it appeared one line at a time.
It was a good look in spite of his discomfort. This was her old Dad, come back from the dead. The one who was thinking, always thinking. Not the sorry son of a bitch who had possessed him for the last two years, the defeated one, the broken one, the one who spent e
very waking moment feeling sorry for himself and waiting for the next blow to fall.
This Dad was a pain in the ass. He did stupid things sometimes; he forgot birthdays and broke promises and occasionally was inexcusably selfish. But this was the Dad she had always loved, and she was so glad to see him it made her want to cry.
Ken glanced away from the screen and looked at her. He must have seen something in her eyes, in her expression. He didn’t look away. He held her for a long moment. He touched her hand.
Something huge and glass shattered downstairs.
“There goes the chandelier,” he said.
“I hated it anyway,” Rose said. “Didn’t go with the décor at all.”
“There you go,” Maggie said. The image on the laptop screen was complete. They turned back to it, standing close together now. Rose liked that.
Flares of electromagnetic discharge were scattered like diamond chips all over the north-south ellipse that was Dos Hermanos as seen from space. Some of the blocks and blobs were obviously buildings, thin spiderwebs showed power lines. But there were thick, tangled output up in the hills as well, and in clusters near the VeriSil plant.
The two wobbly circles of The Brothers, the two tall, narrow hills at the far southern end of the ellipse, were on fire. White-hot with EM discharge.
“There,” Ken said, pointing to the Brothers. “There’s your brain.”
Lucy was standing close behind them. She had been waiting at the window, watching the march of lightning from north to south as the storm grew ever more severe, dipped even lower.
“Well, good,” she said. “Because if that’s the real monster we’re after, I have a way to kill it.”
There was a shuddering BOOM! downstairs. The staircase had collapsed.
Thirty-one