Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

The destruction of the hacienda had become a nearly continuous roar under their feet.

  “Okay,” Lucy said, her voice rough with fear. “Enough dicking around. We gotta get the fuck out of here.” For no apparent reason, she bent over at the waist and snatched at an extension cord that was plugged into the wall at her feet. “You have a pen knife?” As she straightened up she gave Rose the eye. “You. You must have a switchblade, right?”

  Rose started to say something filthy but her father got between them. He held up a red and silver device as big as a small banana. “Will this do?” he said. Rose recognized it, a super-deluxe Swiss Army knife, exactly the kind of nerdy multi-tool her Dad always carried. She remembered how much her mother hated it; it was always ruining the line of his pants.

  Lucy nodded with grim satisfaction and took it from him. “I'm going—”

  The noise from below and outside was so loud that Rose barely heard the chorus to Kanye West’s Golddigger.

  Her cell phone was ringing.

  She didn’t even look to see who was calling. It had to be her mother. There was no one else she could imagine.

  She turned away from the two adults and welded the phone to her ear, almost hissing into the phone. “Mom!”

  “Rose?” said a soft, cultured female voice. She had to strain to hear it over the rip-tear-crackle coming up through the floor, out of the walls. “Rose, it’s Maggie.”

  She was stunned. She glanced at her dad and Lucy, but they were muttering to each other, completely ignoring her. One of the tablets had video of a security cam running; it showed a raft covered with construction material, bobbing in the current. Another showed the Two Brothers, even farther to the south, their steep side bare of any vegetation at all, glittering with rivulets that cut through the shallow topsoil like bursting veins. Dad kept glancing at the videos as he drew some kind of crude diagram on the back of printout. Lucy was scraping plastic insulation off the long, unplugged extension cord as she listened to him. What is that all about? Rose wondered in spite of herself.

  “I wanted to talk to you in private for a minute,” Maggie said in her ear.

  Rose frowned. “Okay...”

  “You’re going to be leaving soon. I wanted to tell you how good it was to meet you.”

  Rose blinked at that. “All right,” she said. She really didn’t know how to answer.

  “I have two things I’d like you to take with you, if you don’t mind,” Maggie said.

  Rose frowned. “What—”

  She had been standing next to her father’s desk with its jumbled collection of paper and tech. A white box barely larger than a pack of cigarettes twittered. A small inset green light on the short side of the box flickered at her. “I've written my core coding to this exterior hard drive, Rose. It's all that Ken wrote and the changes that have been added since by the parallel processors. I have no idea if this can all be stored, if that’s me on there, or a twin of me, or nothing more than busted code, but…I’d like you to take it with you. Just in case.”

  The chill got deeper, and Rose glanced over her shoulder to make sure Lucy and her Dad weren't watching. They weren't; Lucy had acquired a second extension cord somewhere and was stripping the insulation off that as well, wrapping the gleaming bare wire around her arm like an electrical contractor. She wasn't even glancing in Rose's direction.

  Rose quietly unplugged the drive. “I’ve got it,” she said, and tucked it into one of the pockets of her khaki jacket. She buttoned it firmly shut.

  As she did, the laser printer on the other side of the desk began to hum.

  “One more thing? Please?” Maggie said.

  “Look, I—”

  “One sheet. Already done. You don’t even have to read it. Just put it away in another pocket. It’s for Ken.”

  “For…?”

  “Later,” Maggie said. “Please.”

  There was something in that voice, something entirely unmechanical, unsynthesized. Without another word, Rose took the sheet of paper, folded it in quarters, and buttoned it into her left breast pocket.

  “Thank you,” Maggie said when she was finished. “Good luck. I truly hope to speak with you again.”

  Rose hunched forward. “Look,” she said, “this is totally weird, but…but I want to thank you,” she said, astounded at the words coming out of her own mouth.

  There was a long pause. For a moment Rose thought she had offended Maggie somehow, then she realized what a truly bizarre idea that was…and then remembered how long the pauses were getting. Processing speed, she reminded herself. She’s getting stupider by the minute.

  “Thank me for what?” Maggie finally said.

  “My dad was a basket case when he came here,” she said softly, head down. “He had no friends, no direction, nothing. Just money. And now…now he’s different. I think the car accident had something to do with it, but that’s not all. There’s something more that helped him come back. I’m thinking maybe it was your, um, friendship. He needed somebody and you were there, and even if you started out as nothing more than lines of Linux or something, I can tell, something happened. You’re special, and you helped him.”

  The response was a little too prompt. “That’s very kind, thank you.”

  Rose frowned. “You didn’t quite understand what I said, did you?”

  Another pause. Even longer. “No,” Maggie admitted. “The material I gave you took a long time for me to put together, and I did most of it…before. When I hadn’t lost so much. Now…I will think about what you said, Rose. For as long as I can.”

  Rose smiled sadly. “And remember the ‘thank you’ part, okay? You can forget the rest.”

  “I will think about it.”

  “I know.”

  The light in front of her shifted. She turned to see her father standing over her, frowning in puzzlement.

  “That’s not working, is it?” he said. “The wind knocked down all the towers.”

  Rose snapped her phone shut and tried not to look guilty. For some reason she figured that Maggie didn’t want her Dad to know they’d been talking. “No,” she said, “I was just trying it...”

  He nodded and looked down. “Nearly done,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you a little first.”

  You, too? she thought, thoroughly uncomfortable.

  “We might not have time for this later,” he said, “so I want to say it now. Especially with…since we don’t know where your Mom is, I…I may be the only one who can tell you.”

  “Dad, you don’t have to do this.”

  He smiled at the floor. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  He looked up at her, and she was shocked by the glittering in his hazel eyes. He was holding back tears, obviously terrified. She had never seen him cry before. She had never seen him afraid.

  “I idolized your Uncle Pat,” he said. “He was a hero to me from the time we were kids. Hell, he taught me to read, Rose. He worked on my homework with me when Mom and Dad were too busy or distracted. And then he became a real hero, a firefighter, while I went off to play with computers.”

  She started to say something and then stopped herself. There was no reason to butt in. Thunder echoed through the house. Something tap-tap-tapped under their feet, hard as a ball peen hammer.

  Ken ignored it. “When he started hanging around the house in Palos Verdes more and more, I was glad,” he said. “I thought we would be closer now, more of a real family. But that wasn’t why. Right after your twelfth birthday, when things were really starting to take off for the business, I learned three things. And then he died.”

  “Shit, Dad…”

  “First, I don’t know what happened, really. Something on the job, maybe, or professional burn-out or mid-life crisis, But your Uncle Pat started drinking. Heavily. He was drunk at least part of every day in those last few months, and most of every day.

  “Second, maybe it was the drinking, maybe it was something I did or didn’t do. I’ll never know. But the fact is your Mom a
nd Uncle Pat slept together for over a year before he died.” He swallowed hard. “They… they had an ‘affair.' Fuck, I hate that term.”

  Rose could see how much it hurt him to say that out loud.

  She was starting to cry. She couldn’t help it.

  “And three, his death in the pool wasn’t an accident. At least I don’t think it was. I confronted him about the, the… about him and Lisa. We had a fight. He punched me in the stomach and I left, and when I came back an hour later, he had drunk a full bottle of Cutty Sark and thrown himself into the pool, knowing what would happen.” Ken ran his hand through his hair, working hard to keep it together. “He passed out. He drowned. And I was the one who found him.”

  Rose stood up and put a hand on his arm. “Daddy, stop it. I don’t have to—”

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “It broke me, Rosie. I couldn’t talk to Lisa about it, though I tried. Obviously. I couldn’t talk to you, you were only twelve. You were just a kid.”

  She started to protest, and then was struck with an image of herself two-and-a-half years ago: the pony tail, the wide-open spirit. No experience with anything anywhere, and a head full of obsessions about GuildWars and her best girlfriend Rita and what was happening on Degrassi that week. She had to nod. “Yeah,” she said. “I was just a kid.”

  “All I had was money. VeriSil had given me this huge deal, enough to open an office and hire a staff and buy equipment. So I took it all and...left. I came here. I didn't build an office, I didn't hire a staff. I did all the work myself and begged for more and more time. I ran, Rosie. And everything that happened after that—to you, to your Mom, everything – was because I ran.”

  He was half right, she knew, but only half. There was a lot more to her running away and her drug problems and her mother’s shutdown and even… ‘the affair’…than something as simple as The Curse of the Absent-Minded Professor and the arrival of his sexy alcoholic firefightin’ brother. She wanted to tell him that. She wanted to open her mouth and tell him everything she knew—

  There was a tremendous crash directly below them. The walls wobbled and the floor shuddered and shifted under them.

  They were coming. Rose figured that was the last piece of the staircase falling apart, and they were coming.

  “Dad,” she said, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible, “we need to talk about this a lot more, and we will. And I really, really appreciate you telling this to me now. It matters. But…can we postpone the rest until we’re sure we’re actually going to live until dinnertime?”

  He blinked at her for a moment, then smiled. She smiled back. “Okay,” he said. “That makes sense.”

  He turned away, and she saw – she actually saw – his formidable powers of concentration leap up, as he turned to the task at hand.

  “I’ll get the board,” he said, raising his voice and speaking to Lucy. “You explain the plan to Rose.”

  Lucy nodded and came to her while her dad picked up the thickest book he could find – it looked like one of the later Harry Potters – and started whacking at the empty top layer of the bookcase as hard as he could. It was a long, heavy piece of furniture, with a top plank two inches thick that ran nearly the full length of the room, but he was making progress.

  He was knocking it free.

  “Okay,” Lucy said, keeping an eye on his work. “Here’s the plan. We’re going to use that bookcase board to build a bridge from this window to the top of that rock out there. When all three of us are out, we’ll grab the board, bring it over, and use it as a bridge on the other side, to reach solid ground beyond the driveway, at the foot of that eucalyptus tree.” Rose could see the top of the tree she was talking about through the bedroom window, whipping back and forth in the wind, ash-white in the light of the security spots. “From there,” Lucy said, “we can go on foot along a ridge trail until we get away from the liquefaction, and then…”

  She trailed off, almost glaring at Ken as he worked the long, thick plank loose.

  “Then what?”

  “Then we can work our way north to the Notch and get the hell out of here…or we can go south and try to kill this … thing inside the Two Brothers. The thing that’s directing the creatures.”

  Now they were both looking at Ken, who was either concentrating on the task at hand or pretending to ignore them. Or both.

  “What does Dad say?” Rose asked quietly.

  “He hasn’t decided ye—” There was a long, loud, double-toned screeeeee as a claw or a spike dragged down the hallways, tearing up drywall and floorboards as it came. It stopped outside the locked and barricaded door…

  ... and then the chewing started.

  “Okay,” Lucy said. “Enough of this shit.” She crouched down and started to plug her two stripped extensions cords into the wall socket nearest the window, then stopped

  “Maggie?” she said sharply. “Is this socket off?”

  “Yes.”

  Lucy sighed. “Good.” She plugged in both cords, pushing twice to make sure they were secure, then took the far end of the naked wires and tied them loosely to two belt-loops on her jeans. They were long cords, at least twenty feet each. “Is that board ready yet?” she snapped to Ken, sounding completely annoyed.

  “Oh, shut up,” he said. He pulled it free of the last nail and struggled to lift it. Both Lucy and Rose rushed to help. “There we go,” he said.

  As they were hefting the lumber, choosing their spots, Lucy looked over at Rose with a combative frown. “I hate kids, you know,” she said.

  Rose raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah. I think they should be sent away to military academies and boarding schools until they’re old enough to enter society. Like twenty-five.”

  Rose blinked at her. “Okay…”

  “But you ...” she said, “you’re all right.”

  Rose had a strong sense of how much that admission cost Lucy Armbruster. She was almost touched.

  Lucy sneered, like she’d bitten down on something distasteful. “Whatever,” she said, and shouldered the plank. “Okay! Maggie, open the window and cut the security grid on three, you got it?”

  “Got it,” Maggie said, sounding eager.

  A piece of the bedroom door behind them flew away, pulled back by the creature ripping at it from the other side.

  “One!” They lifted the board.

  “Two!” Rose checked: yeah, her pockets were buttoned and buckled. She was ready to go.

  “THREE!” They ran forward as if they were going to ram the board end-first into the window like a battering ram. At the last instant, the casement window flew wide and the constant THRUMM of electricity cut off. Ken got to the window frame first, let go of the plank, and guided it out the window like a long wooden tongue. Momentum overcame bad balance; as fast as one-two-three, the far end of the twelve-by-two had plonked against the flat top of the rock tower ten feet beyond the sill.

  They’d made themselves a bridge.

  Another chunk of the door flew away with a skreeeeek. Rose saw flashes of something ash-gray and multi-ribbed outside in the hall through the crack, as Lucy and Ken came up, one on each side of her, and pushed her forward. “You first” Ken said. “You’re lightest!”

  She was up on the window box before she could stop them, and she took only an instant to decide. What the hell, she thought. She braced herself, and looked back one last time, and saw her father standing there grinning, red-cheeked and bright-eyed – alive – even as the door disintegrated ten feet behind him. He was exactly as she remembered him from years before.

  She would never love him more than she did at that moment.

  Rose turned away, hunched her shoulders, and ran full-tilt through the window, into the storm.

  Thirty-two

  It hit her like a force field all along her left side. Her feet danced on the wet wood. She staggered once, halfway along, and then she was across, onto the rock. The uneven, rain-soaked surface was slick as ice. The instant her sh
oes touched it they flew out from under her, and she landed on her ass with a thump.

  For one inglorious moment she thought she was going to keep sliding and fly right off the stone tower. But she stopped, and turned to shriek through the wind and rain, “Be careful! SLIPPERY!”

  Lucy vaulted out the window, hit the board in two places. It bowed alarmingly right near the middle, and she smacked into the stone right next to her. Rose could hear the scientist panting like a steam engine, more out of excitement than exertion.

  “Son of a bitch” she gasped. “What a rush!”

  They both turned to see Ken climb up into the window frame as the last of the door at his back flew away and a thing, all curves of claw and flickering talons, tried to force its way into the room. He jumped, and jumped again, and the two women back-stopped him as he hit the stone tower and fell into a heap, all arms and legs.

  “Graceful as ever,” Rose said into his ear.

  “What can I say?” he said, struggling to his feet. “I was born to dance.”

  He and Lucy bent to pick up the end of the board and slide it across; it would barely reach the rocks at the base of the huge eucalyptus, but it would work. They would have to slide down the board at better than a 45-degree angle, which was far better than the alternative.

  They barely had their fingers under the plank, barely had it three inches off the stone, when a cantilevered, faceless knot of talons and needles jumped through the bedroom window and landed with a thwack! in the middle of the bridge. They simultaneously let go of the board to avoid losing fingers.

  The growing, crackling spike-wad wobbled for a moment on the makeshift bridge, then found its balance. It swiveled on thirty separate legs and started crawling directly towards them…slowly at first, then with growing speed.

  “Shit,” Lucy said. She reached back and unknotted the stripped extension cords that were still tied to her pants. “MAGGIE!” she bellowed. She spread her arms wide as she shouted, a gleaming wire in each fist.

  The spotlights on the side of the house swiveled and turned to her. “YES?” said an amplified voice. It was ragged and tinny in the roar of the storm, but it was still Maggie.