by Brad Munson
He could feel consciousness, and perhaps sanity, slipping away as they staggered into the gurgling mud-puddle that had once been the Scenic Vista, the one Ken had visited on the way back from VeriSil a few hours earlier. Now it was time to pause again. When they reached the edge of the turnabout, he raised an arm to Rose and stumbled to a halt. She did the same right next to him.
Ken tried not to groan out loud. His shoulders were aching from the weight of the backpack; his legs were like Play-Dough. Rose, head down and hood dripping, said nothing at first, she hunched next to him, breathing heavily.
“One stop!” he said.
“Where?”
He nodded downhill, to the lightless hulk of the AM/PM Mini-Mart and the Arco station, a quarter mile away at the bottom of the ridge. Its parking lot was a lake now, water skittering across it in madly dancing wavelets, like the restless water of a salt flat during a summer squall. Beyond the lake the glass doors to the Mini-Mart were intact and tightly shut. It looked dark and deserted and dry, almost cozy, inside.
“We gotta get outta the rain!” he shouted at her. “Just for a minute!”
Rose stood glaring at the Mini-Mart for a moment, then nodded reluctantly. “Yeah,” she said. “I could do with a Slur—GAHH!”
A patch of thick, glassy cellophane, big as a dinner plate, flew out of the driving wind and smacked Rose in the side of the head. It hit with such force it threw her sideways and drove her to the ground, into the water with a heavy splash.
For one long, stupid moment, Ken stared at her lying in front of him. It seemed so...so random, to be knocked down by flying—
A second flapping sheet soared out of the storm and hit her a bit lower, on the shoulders and neck. It plastered itself against her so tightly it molded to the curve of her jaw and circled her throat. Then another piece slapped against her torso, big as a piece of plastic sheeting.
But...but it moved. Not because of the wind or Rose struggling beneath it, all by itself. It shifted against her. Adjusted. Squeezed...and Ken could see Rose's face, half-covered by the…the flumes, he told himself. God help me, that’s what they’re called: flumes. He saw Rose’s one free hand come up and claw weakly at the glassy, muscular thing that was wrapping around her head as she tried to clear her mouth so she could scream.
Shit. It's alive!
He lunged forward and dug his gloved hands into the flume. He could feel it twitch under his fingers as he pulled at it, hard as he could. “Come on,” he said, “Shit, come on, you shit...”
He worked three fingers under the edge of the first sheet, the one covering most of Rose’s face. He braced his legs, setting himself to heave on it. Rose's hand came up, clutched at his wrist, and pulled with him, hard, fueled by terror and desperation.
“One...” he gritted, “Two...THREE!” They pulled together, her body flexing and kicking against the mud, scrambling for traction. Their combined strength managed to lift one edge, so they pulled again, lifted it more, then pulled again, one final time, and ripped it off her face with an audible zipping sound he would never forget. An instant later he threw it away and saw it catch the wind and fly off, disappearing into the gale.
Rose gasped like a landed fish, gulping in the air. She clawed at the second flume, the one tightening around her neck, and this time Ken was ready with the steak knife he'd lifted from the Tartagliones' kitchen, wedging it under the muscle-tough tissue of the flume that was tight against her collarbone and dragging, up and out, hard and fast, cutting it in two.
They worked together now, Rose on her knees, her father above her, ripping the glistening sheet and finally freeing her and flinging it into the wind. They started on the third one, but it sensed a losing battle. It lifted one edge on its own, a questing wing feeling for the wind, then caught the current and lifted away, twisting into the mist like a set of bodiless wings.
Rose stayed on her knees for the longest time, gulping for air, shuddering at memory of their touch. Her skin, pale on her best day, was an angry pink wherever the flume had touched her, as if she'd been slapped by a huge hand.
Ken let her stay there for as long as he dared. Then he bent and put his hand under her elbow and pulled her to her feet, even though she wasn't nearly ready.
“Come on,” he said. “Mini-Mart. Now.”
They sprinted to the shallow lake of the parking lot and splashed across it, moving as fast as they could. As if the devil himself was chasing them.
* * *
The doors to the Mini-Mart were unlocked, but there was no one inside. That was easy to confirm in the first five minutes, using their newly acquired security flashlights to penetrate the twilight that filled the store. It wasn't quiet. The rain drummed constantly against the tin roof like a freight train that would never stop passing.
There was no sign of the shopkeeper or the manager, though the shelves were neatly stocked and the displays sorted and tidy. Obviously the workers there had up and left when the power failed, or had been lured outside to meet their fates. By then the weather had grown so bad it even discouraged looters.
Rose, still short of breath, almost tore the top off a bottle of water and drank until she couldn't drink anymore. Ken got a bottle of his own and took a judicious sip, his mind racing.
“We can't stay long,” he said, hating the unsteadiness in his own voice. “They know we're here.”
Rose broke from her gulping long enough to say, “Jesus, that was weird.” She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand and looked at him. “Who knows we’re where?”
“Those things!” he said, his voice rising. “All of them! Don't you get it, Rose? They can communicate with each other without speaking. It's a kind of telepathy, but...inorganic. A kind of cyber-telepathy” His eyes were blazing with the implications.
Rose gave him a long look. “Yeah, Dad,” she said. “We call it 'wi-fi.'”
He blinked. “What?”
“You already told us they were, what? Robots made from bone? Papier-mâché killer computers. Got it. Moving on.”
He stared at her some more, then he finally let himself take a breath and sit down. “God Almighty,” he said. “You're right.” His heart still racing, he let his butt rest against the standing freezer next to a display of barbecue supplies – briquettes, spatulas, oven mitts, aprons that said KISS THE COOK and SOMETHIN'S BURNIN'!! His heart was still racing.
Rose, halfway across the store, Rose plucked up a bag of no-name potato chips and ripped them open. “Weird to be hungry at a time like this,” she muttered, “but I'm starving.” She shoved a dozen chips into her mouth and crunched, closing her eyes in a moment of ecstasy: all that salt; all that grease. “Ahh...”
“At least you should go for the good stuff,” Ken said, taking another pull at the water. “May be your last chance.”
She shook her head. “No way,” she said. “First they came for the Doritos, but I had eaten all the Cool Ranch, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Sun Chips, but I hated Sun Chips, they tasted like Styrofoam, so I said nothing. Then they—”
“Oh, shut up.”
They lapsed into silence, gathering their strength. Ken reached across the aisle and pulled down a two-pack of Brawny paper towels, popping the cellophane – shuddering for a moment at the memory of the flumes all over his daughter – then wrapping a wad of paper as big as a grapefruit around his hand. He used it to wipe his face and scrub at his hair.
A little dry before we do it all again.
“Okay,” he said. “From here we go to the VeriSil campus, or as close we can get. We pick up what we need there, then go around the back of the admin building, along the ridge, behind the construction to the Two Brothers.”
“I remember,” she said dryly. “I was there when we made the plan.”
He shrugged and finished drying off as much as he could. “You still think this is a good idea?” he asked into the dimness. It was getting stuffy in the Mini-Mart. Without the air conditioning, with the doors firmly closed,
it was expressing its true architectural nature as a big, windowless tin box with no ventilation. They’d have to move on soon.
“God, no,” she said, polishing off the last of the chips. “Do you?”
“Oh, no, it stinks as a plan. Totally stinks. But it's the only one we have.”
Rose nodded at that, not looking at him. After a long moment, she gave him a quick sidelong glance, then looked away again.
“It wasn't all your fault,” she said.
For a moment he didn’t know what she was talking about. Then it dawned on him. “Oh. You mean...before.”
“I knew about Mom and Uncle Patrick.”
That stopped him. He really hadn't ever considered that possibility. “You...what?”
“Everybody knew, Daddy. Everybody but you. And I didn't run away and start doing drugs. It was more...the other way around.”
This time she looked at him and didn't look away. “You're a good guy, you know, but you only think one way. You're a programmer. All linear. This then this then this. Life isn't like that. At least our lives, 'before,' weren't like that. You just thought they were. It wasn’t all your fault. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
He couldn't stop staring at her.
“I don't know what to say,” he told her.
“Good impulse,” she said. “Go with th—”
There was a strange, high scraping, almost a tinkle like broken glass, from the back of the store. They both turned towards it, suddenly wary.
“Anybody there?” Ken called, getting to his feet.
The sound came again – louder – and this time it didn't stop. It was behind Rose, around the corner and out of sight. Without thinking, she turned and walked to the end cap and peeked past it.
A tide of splintered metal three feet deep was crawling—flowing – down the aisle towards them, a churning mass of shards and needles, growing thicker and taller with every movement.
“God,” she said, and backed up, past the chips, past the energy bars. “Will this shit never end?”
The mass of shard and edges began to flow around the corner and the thin screeching grew louder. Without hesitation Rose reached up and pulled down the metal shelving unit filled with chips. It crashed to the linoleum with an oddly musical clang even as it crushed the leading edge of the churning mass. Rose didn’t pause. She took two giant steps backwards and pulled down the next shelving unit as well, creating a barrier that the tide of living metal and glass would have to flow around or over or cut through to get to them.
Ken didn't take time to gawk either. “We gotta get outta here,” he said. He hefted his backpack, Rose did the same, and they turned together to the front doors, only to find them blocked by a whistling, breathing mass of hookweeds, filling the double-wide doorway entirely, ballooning into the store from outside like an inflating blimp made of fishhooks and thorns.
“Oh, god...” he said under his breath.
There weren't any other exits, they'd already checked. The sheets of glass were thick and tough; nothing short of a Chevy was going to bring those down without killing them in the process. And with the rising tide of hungry metal behind them and the bone-dry latticework of claws filling the–
Bone dry, he thought. That was a characteristic of all the creatures. They sucked up water at such a tremendous rate they actually seemed to be dry in the middle of the storm. And dry things were vulnerable.
He didn’t overthink it. He simply turned around and picked up the half-used roll of Brawny paper towels, ripping off a healthy chunk and thrust the remains at Rose. “Roll it into balls,” he said. “This big.” He held up the wad he'd already created, roughly the size of a softball. Without waiting for a response, he turned back to the barbecue display, pulled down one of the oven mitts, and fit it frantically over his left hand. Then he lurched to the counter, not five feet away – five feet closer to the flexing mass of hookweeds, growing larger and larger as he moved – and grabbed a Bic lighter from a dump bin next to the cash register.
Rose watched wordlessly as she made more balls of paper toweling. Suddenly she got it. “Smart,” she said, refusing to listen to the tinkling, crackling, clattering behind her. She knew the tide of shards was halfway over the barrier already.
“I hope so.” He put the wad of paper in his mittened left hand and flicked the butane lighter with his right. Of course it didn't catch. He had to do it again. And again. And again, until it finally flared in a steady yellow flame.
The paper only took a second to catch. The instant it was flaming, Ken turned and flung it into the center of the swelling hemisphere of hookweed.
And it burned. For a moment it seemed to stick there, pulsing like a flaming heart in the middle of the latticework of thorns. Then it exploded with a soft whoosh, and he knew he was right. The bony material, whatever it was, was dead dry and caught fire just like its namesake, building a huge flame, eating a hole deep into the center of it mass.
And then the hooks surged forward again, regrew, and smothered the fire where it burned.
“Not hot enough,” Rose said calmly, as if she dealt with this sort of thing every day. “Try this.” She snatched a can of lighter fluid from the barbecue display, cracked off the top with one wrenching twist, and squirted the oily liquid all over one of her wads of paper. It was dripping when she shoved it into her Dad’s oven mitt. “Careful now.”
The Bic caught on the first click this time. Ken barely had to wave the flame over the little firebomb before it burst. He threw it instantly, as much out of fear as anything.
It hit an inch below the first throw and fell even deeper into the shuddering lattice. This time it was hotter, burned deeper, and the hooks took longer to fight back and grew more slowly.
“More,” they said together, and she shoved a second sodden, stinking ball into the mitt. He lit it. He threw it. As it burst against the creature, she shoved a third ball at him. Then a fourth.
Then the whole thing was burning and writhing, rebuilding and falling back, faltering and surging as it shuddered to stay together. Rose took a step back from the heat and chaos and felt a weird resistance against her heels. She turned to see the tide of needles and spikes right behind her – right behind her – and she lurched forward.
“Dad, run!”
“But—”
“RUN!”
She brought her shoulders down, put her arms up in front of her face, and ran straight into the burning wall of hookweed, through the door. Her father was barely a step behind.
It was exactly as if some merry prankster was waiting for them in the parking lot to throw a bucket of water into her face the moment she emerged. The sudden transition from the stifling calm of the Mini-Mart into the mindless violence of the rainstorm was almost paralyzing, but Ken didn't stop running. Burning bits of hookweed still clinging to his jacket were extinguished and washed away in the storm. He could see cinders and smoke streaming off Rose’s coat as well. They were safe— for the moment.
Ken and Rose stomped across the shallow lake without a pause, bounded onto the flooded asphalt of West Ridge Road, and then kept running to the south, towards VeriSil.
Towards the Two Brothers.
Thirty-four
They didn't slow down enough to speak again until they reached the water's edge, northwest of the VeriSil campus. Ken knew the “Y” intersection he'd navigated the day before was straight ahead. It was submerged now. The water had risen at least ten, maybe twenty feet more, and that meant it was a good fifty yards ahead, even though they were standing at the edge of the trembling new sea that was once Dos Hermanos. He wiped his eyes for the ten thousandth time so he could see his target, the accidental weapons of mass destruction that had been left behind. They were barely visible through the twists of rain and mist, dead ahead.
The raft, crafted from a construction pallet, filled with black tangles of rebar, bobbed and wobbled on the surface of the lake, twisting in one of its restless shallows. That's what they needed, and th
ey needed it now.
Ken unlimbered his back pack and went down on one knee. It only took a moment to pull out the floatie he'd wedged in there a couple of hours earlier, a flat-sided, round-nosed hunk of Styrofoam, like the front half of a kiddy surfboard.
“You're going to go in that shit?” Rose said, astonished in spite of knowing the plan in all its ridiculous detail.
“Yep,” he said, and glared at the water, trying to plot out the least dangerous approach. Fuck it, he decided. They're all dangerous.
“But there are things in there, Dad.”
He shrugged. “Can't be helped.”
It's ten or twelve yards, he thought as he shuffled into the shallows, that’s all. Thirty, forty feet tops. It didn't matter that the water was churning like a washing machine or thick and brown as chocolate milk. It was a few feet. No problem.
He went straight towards the raft. In five steps he was up to his knees, his back fully to his daughter who stood on the shore and tried very hard not to shout instructions. He could feel the tortured currents tugging at his legs. Another three steps and the muck was up to his waist. He brought the floatie around, put it in front of him and leaned his chest on it for stability.
This isn't so bad. If it doesn't –
As if on cue, the muddy ground under his feet steeply dipped down and disappeared. Now he was floating, his full weight on the oversized kid's toy. He was painfully aware it was all that stood between him and drowning.
“Dad!” Rose shouted from behind him. “Are you okay?”
He kicked his legs as hard as he could, feeling like a denim-clad Frankenstein's monster who was trying to swim for the first time. Huge, thick, clumsy, wallowing in water as thick as suet.
This has to be the stupidest thing I've ever done. He frog-kicked his way across the last ten feet of filthy, choppy water and reached out, very unsteadily, to snag the tether that held the raft to the light pole. It was still attached by the nifty little highwayman’s hitch that Carl Josephson had made less than a day and a half earlier, though it seemed like a century ago.