Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  God bless the Eagle Scouts.

  He pulled the right line and the knot opened for him. Now he had a stout length of rope at least ten feet long, securely lashed to the raft itself.

  He thrashed around in the muck, turning back to face Rose, still standing on the distant shore, hugging herself tightly. And now it did seem distant, much farther than he remembered it.

  He wrapped the tether around his wrist, grasped the floatie in both hands, and kicked as hard as he could. Again. And again, and with the third kick he began to move forward, towing the pallet-raft behind him. It still wallowed low in the water with its heavy load of rebar.

  A few feet more, that’s all. He’d be feeling solid land under his feet any—

  Something huge, solid and slate-gray rose out of the water to his right. No eyes, no edges, no teeth, just mass, so huge it blocked out the ashen light of the storm.

  “DAD!”

  He lunged away from it and kicked harder than ever, still clinging to the raft's line, digging into the floatie. The jagged, pock-marked mass rose up in the water, higher and higher, shedding water as it rose, and for one giddy, vomitous moment Ken thought it was going to turn and fall on him. He yelped and lunged and kicked away from it again, and yes, there, there was the gluey mud under his feet, clinging to him, giving him traction, pushing him farther on.

  The water to his left was nothing but the creature. The water to his right was a scattered collection of whirlpools and waterspouts, as if something with a thousand mouth-side holes was just under the surface, sucking in water and spitting it out simultaneously. He didn’t want to look at it. He couldn't. He dragged himself forward, out of the shadow of the ashen, lead-heavy mass to his right. He flinched away again as it sank back into the water, apparently unaware of him. Then Rose's hands were under his shoulders, dragging him forward, and his knees were pumping like a hurdler’s...and he was out of the water, sprawled on the mud. Soaked to the skin but done, done.

  “Wow,” he panted. “That could've been easier.”

  * * *

  The twisting track that split off from the “Y” intersection of East Ridge Road and VeriSil Drive had been a concession to off-road enthusiasts when VeriSil built their facility tight against the southern curve of the crater. The bobbing, horizontal path about halfway up the rocky slope wound along the rough terrain from the south end of East Ridge Road to, inevitably, the south end of West Ridge Road, with the Two Brothers exactly halfway along. That was before the water had risen. Now it was a lakeside drive, a few feet, if that, from the trembling water of the new lake. And it was the only route available to Ken and Rose.

  They edged along the slippery trail, chests flat against the muddy slope, their backs to the water, moving slowly eastward. Ken had tied the tether of the pallet-raft around his waist and then knotted it to his belt loop for good measure. It forced a sort of uneasy grace in his movement and slowed him considerably, but he had to do it this way. He needed both hands free as they crawled towards the construction site and beyond that, to the Brothers.

  The remains of the path dipped under them unpredictably, then rose again, only a few feet away from the jittering water's edge. As the channel narrowed, the water trapped between the buildings and the ridge itself grew deeper and more turbulent than ever, even as the trail grew rougher and more treacherous. Boulders and cracks flowing with mud made the ridge wall a treacherous, convoluted surface. Every handhold was a risk. The rain continued endlessly, pounding down on the hoods and shoulders of their parkas so violently loud it was impossible to speak, barely possible to see.

  Five minutes after they edged into the shadow of the admin building, Ken encountered a rock that was three feet taller than he was, jutting out of the nearly vertical wall of mud. It nearly completely blocked their way. He had to twist 180 degrees to make his way around it, and as he turned to the north, he looked up at the building and had a head-spinning moment of disorientation.

  He found himself looking into the spacious, well-appointed expanse of Conference Room One, the same room where he and Maggie had impressed Carl Josephson and his pudgy assistant, the late Mr. Cling, just hours before. He was looking at it from the outside now, though the mud-spattered glass, across a torrent of madly churning water.

  That was only a day ago. How was that possible? What the hell happened? He knew for a fact, though he didn't know how, that there wasn't a living soul in that building now. They were all gone, escaped or dead.

  “YOU OKAY?” Rose shouted in his ear. He hadn't even noticed her coming up so close to him, but there she was, her back still to the building, her mouth pressed to his ear.

  He shook himself mightily. “YEAH!” he said. “FINE!” He turned away, back to the mud wall, and took a full side-step around the huge outcropping. His left foot plunged into a pothole of liquefied mud nearly two feet deep.

  He was lucky Rose was so close. He had to reach out and grab her parka to steady himself as he staggered for balance. He realized later that if the tether attached to the raft had chosen that moment to foul or even give him another good jerk, he would have fallen into the raging channel and been lost for good. Instead, he found his feet and looked down. It took a moment to sort out what he was seeing, and to realize that the pit wasn't simply a small version of the sinkhole they'd encountered back at the hacienda. This mud was actually grit, made up of rough pebbles the size of chick-peas, and they were in constant, almost Brownian motion, churning like boiling oatmeal. He could see them digging into the rubber and cloth of his boot.

  Eating my foot, he thought numbly.

  He clutched at Rose and the rock itself and heaved his leg out of the muck. It came loose with a comical pop!, and he stretched to put it down on solid ground a foot farther down the trail. Strands of grainy muck wriggled on his hiking boot and he bent precariously to brush it away with his gloved hand. He wanted to scream Get off! Get off!, as if he'd put his foot into a bucket of maggots, but he stopped himself. Barely.

  “CAREFUL!” he bellowed to Rose when he got both feet onto the path on the far side of the trap. Rose saw it clearly. She stretched even farther to avoid the hole as she stepped over it.

  Another three minutes and they were out of the edgeless shadow of the admin building. The light changed, though only a little; the path grew wider and a bit more stable. Now they could afford to turn and look in the direction they were going. For the first time, they could clearly see the construction site a short distance to the north, if only from the back.

  Until the rain began, it had been nothing more than a cubical skeleton of girders and catwalks, visible from halfway across town as an angular black-edged sketch against the ridge wall and the too-blue sky. It had been essentially hollow. You could see right through its harsh geometry to the landscape beyond, even glimpse the tiny shapes of ant-sized men and their toy machines clambering up and down the structure.

  Now, Rose and Ken saw, things had changed. The huge construct of girders and cabling was full. Engorged. Stuffed with...something.

  It wasn't organic. It didn't pulse like a tumor or flex like a muscle. Still, it moved like a living thing. Points grew out of it, pits opened up in it. Bits of horn and bone and jagged rock rose to its surface then fell again; needles and cutting edges grew then dissolved; blades blossomed like flowers made of shattered glass, then dipped to cut into themselves, into each other, and break apart, only to be reabsorbed.

  All of it was nourished by gushing torrents of rain, flowing down from higher levels and out of the sky itself, covering the entire massive thing with a swathe of waterfalls and rivulets. Feeding it as it became thicker, higher, more complex. Feeding it as it grew.

  Thank God it doesn't have eyes, Ken thought as they crept behind the building, moving as quickly as they dared, afraid to speak. It was the only time either of them heard the creatures make a sound, and it was a horrible one, something Ken had never heard before: a hissing of sand against sand, a clashing of stone blades, a clink of sharp ed
ges colliding, tumbling over each other, grunting and grumbling like the gnashing of teeth.

  If it could see us, he thought. If it knew we were here...

  It seemed to take forever to slip away, past the far corner of the structure, away from that sound. A few yards further on, they felt the muddy pathway dip downwards, steadily downwards now, towards the water's edge.

  They had arrived at the foothills of the Brothers. They could see its steep, denuded slope in front of them like a wall made of pounded earth and rock, rising from the churning water, butting up against the path and blocking the way.

  This was their destination, but it didn't matter. They would have been forced to stop here anyway.

  Rose's beautiful violet eyes widened when she saw the Brothers taking shape ahead of them, emerging from the twisting sheets of mist and rain. “Oh, shit,” she said. “This was a terrible idea.”

  Ken was again reminded of that video game, Half-Life. You spent hours, days, climbing over wreckage, crawling though air ducts, finding weapons and fighting monsters at every level – always monsters, more monsters, each level more dangerous and revolting than the last. And then finally, at the end, you conquered the Big Bad and struggled to the surface, to the sunlight, to the long-awaited end of the adventure.

  And what did you find?

  He came to the answer too late. Far too late.

  More monsters.

  Thirty-five

  The eighty-degree slope was utterly bare, unmarred by any tree or plant or bit of vegetation. The rain had cut a million rivulets into its muddy, pebbled surface and made it fundamentally unstable. The ground was shifting and sliding under the runoff like the breathing hide of some huge, water-soaked rhino.

  The creatures of the storm were everywhere, scattered thickly across the steeply sloping terrain. Flat, shapeless stains writhed in the mud; flumes twisted through the air; clusters of candle-eyes shoved and thrust through the muck while dragontongues whipped their bony, fleshless bodies, wriggling between glistening boulders. All of them, and a thousand new creatures with no names, covered the Two Brothers from base to crown, from a few yards ahead of them to the curved horizon. And they were busy.

  Some, like the candle-eyes, tumbled together in packs, as if muttering something secret but terribly important that only they could hear. Other creatures moved rapidly and with urgency, disappearing over the line of the hillside, stopping to confer silently with other shapes, pausing to dissolve into gritty piles, only to be swept up by a passing stain or tumbling hookweed. They were all in constant motion, but it was motion, Ken could see, with purpose. Not a purpose he could understand. Maybe that no human could understand.

  Back in the hacienda, with all the paperwork and simulations and Lucy Armbruster’s boundless, jaded enthusiasm, their plan had made perfect sense to Ken. Hell, it had seemed almost cute. Use the materials at hand, turn the power of the storm against itself, that sort of thing. But now, here, with the wind slapping him in the face, with rainwater forcing itself into his mouth and up his nose, with muddy runoff as thick as porridge burying his boots, and the entire lethal menagerie of the storm dancing and churning in front of him, all Ken could ask himself was, What the hell was I thinking?

  Rose stood a few feet away. She looked grim and eager and terrified all at once, like a storm-tossed soldier about to enter her first real battle.

  “Well?” she shouted at him through the gale. A wave of water slapped her in the face, and she shook her head angrily to clear her eyes. “Are we doing this or not?”

  “You do see those things, don't you?” he asked her, nodding at the monsters ahead of them.

  “Yeah, but they don't seem to see us. Haven't you noticed, Dad? These things don't care about us at all anymore, unless we go up and kick 'em in the nuts.”

  He shook his foot again. It was still tingling. “Or stick a boot up their ass. Yeah, I noticed.”

  Ken kept looking up the steep, glittering slope.

  This is impossible. This is fucking –

  “Dad! Stop it!”

  He flinched and looked away from the hill. Rose was glaring at him, fuming. “Don't get all think-y on me now!” she shouted. “That's what you always do, you overthink. Sometimes you have to just fucking do things!”

  There was a roll of thunder far to the south, deep and deliberate. Ken felt it in his chest as much as he heard it. It reminded him of The Plan all over again. He glanced downhill, back to the water line.

  “Okay,” he said. “You're right. We have to get – what the fuck?”

  Rose tried to follow his eyes. She had to wipe away muddy water to do it. “What?”

  “What’s that?”

  Rose rolled her eyes. “God, Dad, will you–”

  “No, really, Rose. Look!”

  She squinted through the chaos, downhill to the water's edge, and caught sight of a shiny black two-man rubber raft, thrown to the sodden shore by the storm. It was still inflated, still sporting the showroom gleam of a new purchase.

  It looked as if it was waiting for them.

  They picked their way carefully across the muddy, newborn shore line, Ken towing the pallet the last few feet and bringing it to ground as they reached the inflatable. Then, together, they stood over the raft and simply gawked.

  It was filled with guns

  “Thank you, Jesus,” Rose gasped. Rain was pouring off her in a cataract.

  Ken could see M-16s, Magnums, grenades. Even a rocket launcher. And boxes, clips, and bags of ammo, enough for a small war.

  “Where the hell did this come from?”

  “I have no idea,” Rose said. “And I couldn't care less.” She actually smiled as she bent to pick up an over-and-under pump shotgun.

  “Careful with that,” he said automatically.

  She gave him The Look. “Seriously?” she said, and hefted the weapon like a pro. She expertly cracked it open and checked the breach for shells. “Locked and loaded,” she said, and smiled brilliantly. “To coin a phrase.”

  Ken only frowned. One more thing I don't want to know about.

  He was thirty-seven years old and had never in his life touched a real gun. His entire knowledge of firearms was developed by watching endless repeats of Miami Vice and playing Grand Theft Auto. He'd never even been a big fan of Call of Duty. Now he was sorry.

  Rose patted the arm of his soaked parka, trying to be comforting. “Don’t worry, Daddy,” she said. “They make these things idiot-proof these days.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “You know what I mean.” She slipped the shotgun’s carrying strap up her arm and hefted another weapon – a strangely made handgun, something like a small shoebox with a handgrip on the bottom and a stubby barrel at one end. “Like this. This is a MAC 10. Even you can work it.” Her hands flickered across it – popping the ammo clip, clearing the chamber, sighting and reloading – as if she’d done it a thousand times before.

  “Rose,” he said seriously, “you scare the shit out of me sometimes.”

  “It's a daughter's greatest dream,” she said, and gave him the MAC, butt-first. “Safety's on,” she told him, and showed him how it worked. “Be careful anyway.”

  Ken nodded, put it into the biggest side pocket of his parka, and zipped it shut.

  The rumbling thunder was closer. Distant flashes of lightning pulsed in the lowering clouds, still far to the north. The light was beginning to fade; this would be the last progressive, north-to-south electrical storm before dark, like the hundreds that had come before it.

  Time was running out.

  They spent five minutes loading up on ordnance, then turned together and faced the slope.

  “So how are we going to do this?” Rose asked, suddenly unsure.

  “I have an idea.” He’d thought of it as they’d loaded up, when he noticed that the smooth-bottomed rubber raft had a tow rope of its own, a loop, really, anchored in two places along its curved leading edge. Without a word of explanation he reached down, gather
ed up an armload of rebar from the pallet, and dumped it in the bottom of the raft. As he straightened, he saw Rose staring at him as if he was mad.

  “We'll tow it,” he said, his throat raw. “Like a—what do you call it? A travois.”

  She blinked for a second, and then understood. “Ah,” she said, then bent and helped. They transferred all of the rebar from one platform to the other in a matter of moments, and as they did, he saw that he had remembered correctly: the rods came in three lengths, from six to roughly eleven feet, and all the same thickness, about the diameter of an index finger.

  While they worked they kept an eye on the busy creatures a few yards away. They still hadn’t noticed the humans at all.

  When Rose and Ken finished their work, Rose hefted one of the longer rods and tested it in her hand, hefting like a javelin. “Just shove it in the ground?” she asked. “That’s it?”

  Another wave of rain, thick enough to choke on, passed overhead. They might as well have been on the deck of a ship in a hurricane. Ken ducked his head against the squall, then nodded through it as it crested. “That’s it,” he said. “Poke it down as deep as you can.”

  “Okay,” Rose said. She took five steps straight uphill, the bar gripped in one hand.

  “Rose, wait…”

  She set her feet, hunched her shoulders, raised the rebar over his head and rammed it, hard she could, into the sodden earth. It penetrated a full foot. She turned back to him, grinning. “Like that?”

  “Jesus, Rose. You are totally insane.”

  She nodded. “I know,” she said. “I got that. I—”

  She abruptly stopped, cocked her head curiously, and laid her naked palm flat against the mud. After a moment she turned her impossibly violet eyes on her father. She had a strange, wondering expression.