Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

“You can feel it,” she said. “Not just electricity. Not just the rain. You can feel it, that thing that’s inside the hill.” She pushed her fingers even deeper into the mud, overcome for a moment. “No. It’s not inside the hill. It is the hill.”

  Ken didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t need to feel it thrumming in the earth. He already knew the truth, and it terrified him.

  He started to speak, but Rose turned away from him, snatching her hand out of the mud and straightening up quickly. She lifted her head and looked uphill. The nearest creature, a multi-legged clot of stone covered in blunt horns, pointed its mouth like a jagged mineshaft and crunched at them.

  Rose shook herself free. “Fuck that,” she said. “Let's go.”

  * * *

  Ken picked up a rod from the raft and plunged into the mud, half expecting the Earth to shudder at the impact or spew some blackish ichor from its new wound. But nothing happened. The iron bar simply stuck there, vibrating from the impact and shivering drops of rain.

  Just your basic stick in the mud, he thought.

  The ground shifted under his feet, but it wasn’t a sign of some waking giant, it was simply the rushing water liquefying everything.

  He had always assumed the hill they called Two Brothers was solid rock, covered with a few inches of windblown topsoil. That was why nothing would grow there; it was granite or gypsum underneath. Now he knew he was wrong. It wasn’t bedrock that formed its mass. It wasn’t Earthly at all. Regular plants couldn’t grow on Two Brothers because nothing could live there.

  He pushed the thought away, glanced at his daughter, and trudged uphill ten steps, bending against the gale and the stinging rain. He pulled up another length of rebar and slammed it into the earth. Then he moved to the side, building a second row on the slope, and did it again.

  “You go that way,” he said, gesturing uphill in one direction. “I go this way!” He set another bar, shoved it deep, and still the creatures ignored them, hurrying about their duties, finishing their chores.

  They paused at the end of a third row. Rose straightened up, unbent her back and ran her hand through her dripping hair. “Looks like Pinhead! she shouted. Ken frowned at her and cocked his head. She scowled. “Hellraiser?” she shouted. He shook his head again, he had no idea what she was talking about.

  Rose grinned in spite of herself. “Idiot,” she said under her breath. She knew he understood her; he could read her lips.

  Look at her, Ken thought. Just look at her. How did she get to be so amazing?

  He shook his head and went back to work himself. The next wave of the storm was approaching, rumbling over the water towards the center of the Valle. He turned just long enough to see lighting striking mid-town. It was coming this way.

  He created two more rows, then three, climbing higher and higher. So did Rose. The wind started to scream. It was getting to be a routine. Painful and filthy, but mind-numbingly repetitive. Pick up the bar. Shove it in the ground. Check for creatures. Move on. And always he kept Rose in view, out of the corner of his eye.

  They were more than halfway up the slope, panting like animals, when the attack began. Ken had lost count of the number of rows. He simply set his feet, lifted another bar from their makeshift travois, and rammed it down. This time the ground at his feet flinched and lifted up.

  Ken jumped back, startled. The edges of a huge plate of tissue, an earthbound flume, or something like it, wriggled all around him. It had been lying on the waterlogged soil of the Two Brothers, covered in mud and splattered earth. Now it snapped a corner up and tried to snag Ken’s leg as he leaped away.

  The edge of it got under the cuff of his jeans, twitched past his sock, and touched his ankle with chemical fire, right where the biting sand had stung him before.

  “SHIT!” he said, and jerked away. Suddenly Rose was by his side, the over-and-under out of its shoulder holster, already in her hands. She hunched down and fired without hesitation, pumping shots into the whickering, shuddering thing lying in front of them.

  The sound of the rifle was harsh against the gurgling roar of the rain, but it worked. The flume crumpled under the impact, then tried to lurch away. Rose wouldn’t accept that. She took two heavy steps forward and fired again and again, until the thing stopped moving. Then stopped trembling. Then dissolved into the mud. Whatever remained was buried under the next flow of mud in mere seconds.

  Ken barely noticed. It felt like his foot was burning off.

  As soon as she was sure the thing was dead, Rose staggered to his side and stood over him as he sat in the mud and frantically stripped off his boot and sock. The water rushed against his bare flesh, and that felt good, wonderfully good. He could see the skin was an angry scarlet and already beginning to show lemon-yellow welts.

  “Can you get up?” Rose asked, looking in every direction for more attackers.

  “Have to,” he said between gritted teeth. “Give me a minute.”

  “Haven’t got it,” she said.

  He glared up at her. “For chrissakes, Rosie—”

  “Dad!” she said and gestured past him. “They’re coming.”

  He looked past her, towards the edge of the slope. The creatures had stopped working now. They were turning towards them. Others were gathering downhill at the shoreline, so close together they were fighting for space.

  Rose and Ken had finally been noticed. Now all the creatures, every shape and size, were climbing and crawling and lurching to meet them.

  Ken forced himself to his feet. He grabbed the next rebar and slammed it in the ground. Rose pulled out a semi-automatic rifle, one he hadn’t even noticed, and picked a spot in front of him, midway between the creatures and the travois. She poured gunfire into the monsters, her whole body vibrating from the weapon’s kick.

  They were coming in waves, from small to large. Maybe the little ones could move faster; maybe the Intelligence behind it all saw them as more expendable because they could be regrown more quickly. Ken didn’t know. Didn’t care. He just wanted to set the last of the bars higher and higher. He wanted to reach the top of the hill and kill this fucking thing.

  First the pumpkin-sized needleseeds in front exploded into a million sharp pieces from Rose's assault. The flinders made from their death struck the rolling set of turnbuckles close behind them, and caused them to falter and swerve. That gave Rose all the time she needed to blow the turnbuckles to pieces as well, then the set of brickteeth that hobbled behind them.

  Ken limped forward to complete another row, and another. He tried to ignore the constant chatter of Rose’s gunfire, and the burning agony in his ankle, foot, leg.

  The lightning was striking the South Side now. They could see the ghost of it behind the rain, jagged bolts arcing from clouds to broken buildings, to crippled towers, to open water. Thunder followed the flashes, coming sooner behind each strike.

  Rose’s semi-automatic seized up with a raucous clacking. She threw it aside, unlimbered the over-and-under, and expertly cut the bottom out from under a star-shaped rock-pig-thing that was trundling towards them. It dived into the mud and tripped up a thornwheel that was too close behind.

  She fired until there were no more shotgun shells. Then she dropped the weapon in the mud and pulled out a Magnum .357 she had thrust inside her shirt.

  Ken finished another row. His back was screaming, his hands were bleeding from the roughened metal, but he bit down on the pain and he pulled the travois higher. More than two-thirds of the bars were gone, but the top seemed farther away than ever.

  He felt, more than heard, the first lightning strikes hit the edge of the VeriSil campus, a half mile to the north. The Plan, he told himself as his daughter backed up the hill, close behind. The fucking Plan.

  His leg was burning worse than ever. When he started on the next row it collapsed under him like a broken branch, failing completely. He cursed as he fell to one knee and used a length of rebar to pull himself upright. He balanced precariously on the makeshift crutch and set
the newest rod and lurched to set another one, five yards uphill.

  Lightning was playing along the far end of the VeriSil campus now. Thunder, like bomb blasts, pushed at them over and over and the rain was a continuous, choking silver wall.

  Rose blew the tail off a dragontongue, then put another round into its whickering rose-head. It fell heavily at her feet and she shoved a boot into it, breaking it in three more places.

  They wouldn’t stop coming. Ken could see that. They would never stop coming.

  Five bars left, and he wasn’t near the summit. He had horribly underestimated what he’d needed, or he’d set them too close together, or the whole fucking idea was absurd, he just didn’t know. Ken was only half-conscious now, hearing only the thunder and the gunshots, feeling only the rain.

  It’ll work, it’ll work, it HAS to work.

  He shoved in the last two. The last one. He turned, balancing on one leg, as three lightning strikes hit the middle of the VeriSil headquarters beyond the base of the Brothers. The bolts lit up the land with a ghostly, actinic light. The concussion pounded through him in waves.

  “ROSE!” he bellowed. “I’M DONE! WE CAN—”

  An arm as thick as a girder flew out of the mist and caught Rose directly in the stomach. It threw her back, towards her father, and Ken had to lurch to the side to avoid her as she flew past him and landed flat on her back, twenty feet farther uphill, with an ugly, meaty thwack.

  He rushed to her side, staggering through knee-deep muck. Her arms were thrown out at her sides, her face was pointing into the rain, still as white as ivory despite the filth around her.

  White and red. Red on her lips, pouring from her nose.

  She’s bleeding. My little girl. My little girl.

  Suddenly the whole ridiculous nightmare – the monsters, the storm, the talking house, everything – was real to him, maybe for the first time. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a joke. His baby girl was hurt, and any second, any instant, she could die.

  She could die.

  He threw himself up to his feet and stood over her, chalk-white against the black earth, illuminated by the overlapping lightning strikes. Lightning had reached the first of the rebar at the bottom of the hill, farther south than it had ever come before, drawn by the raw iron reaching up into the air in a forest of lightning rods. Not close enough yet, but it was happening. He had been right.

  That was The Plan, he told himself as he knelt beside Rose. All along.

  He looked up, towards the crest of the Brothers, at the monster that had hurt his little girl.

  A bone spider, one million legs twitching and clawing at the open air, stood there. It was fifteen feet taller than he was, lifting its arms to cut them both to bits.

  Ken pawed at the right pocket of his parka, ripped open the zipper and pulled out the MAC-10 that Rose had forced on him. As it brought it up, his daughter's face turned to him and she opened her eyes.

  Those eyes, he thought wildly. Those beautiful eyes.

  She smiled at him.

  He looked away as he straightened up and aimed the gun. He had never fired a weapon before in his life. He didn’t believe for a second that it would stop this huge creature or save the day, but he had to do it.

  He took a step forward, his burning leg forgotten. “FUCK YOU!” he bellowed. “FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU!” He pulled the trigger as the talons came down, firing over and over again, not even sure he was hitting the creature —

  – and the bone spider lifted into the air.

  Ken kept firing at it until he ran out of ammo. Then he just stood there, gun still up in front of him, as the massive creature rose even higher, legs flailing and dangling, and for one crazy moment he thought it was doing it on its own, that it had somehow acquired the power of flight. Until he saw the churning black mass underneath it, almost invisible against the storm, that was rising out of the earth at the crest of the hill.

  It looked a little like the writhing, faceless mass inside the construction site, but it was much more than that. Striations of stone twitched inside it as it rose even higher, glistening in the downpour. Tumors of stone rolled and bubbled in its gritty tissue. Edges emerged and cut furrows in its surface, bleeding a thick black mud of its own, then closed to make new wounds.

  The bone spider that had been forced into the air tried to cling to the surface as it rose. Then it collapsed in on itself and was reabsorbed into the column as it thickened and continued to rise, an obscene crown of… something…emerging from the hill itself.

  No, he thought, as Rose sat up beside him, awake but dazed. No, not emerging. Being built. Being exposed. It was like seeing a naked limb of a living creature with its skin peeled away. The musculature, the veins, still pulsing and moving, but laid bare.

  It was wrong. It was not supposed to be like this. It was wounded.

  The tower twisted, almost bent as another triple-thump of lightning struck halfway up the hill now. Bolts of electricity were traveling between the lightning rods now, pulling the energy farther up the hill, coaxing the lightning to strike again. Rose and Ken were barely a dozen feet from the last few rods, even closer than the rumbling, turning mass of the thing at the top of the hill.

  Rose hunched her shoulders and grunted like an old woman as she pulled herself to her feet, swaying in the wind and rain. A wave of relief ran through Ken for an instant. She was whole. The blood on her mouth washed away in another wave of raindrops, and he saw it was a nosebleed caused by the force of her landing.

  Lighting SLAMMED and SLAMMED in the flood-lake below them, a last explosive volley, coming closer and closer. It hit the construction site. Hit the base of the hills. Hit the first few rods, and with each strike thunder bellowed, faster and louder with each explosion.

  Ken whipped around, The Plan huge in his mind. “We gotta go!” he shouted. “NOW!” He turned and threw himself uphill, straight towards the towering monster, towards the top of the Two Brothers, dragging Rose by one arm and forcing her to follow. He was over the top in an instant, ignoring the agony in his burning leg.

  They crested the hill less than ten feet from the exposed and twisting column of the Intelligence. It had risen fifty feet in the air already and was still growing. It would reach a hundred feet in moments as the sodden earth around it churned and cracked like breaking skin.

  In ten steps Rose and Ken were over the top of the hill and running down the far side, towards the southern ridge of the crater beyond.

  “RUN!” he said. “DOWN, DOWN, GET OFF THE MOUNTAIN, RUN!”

  He hurtled downhill in long dangerous strides that risked his legs flying out from under him at any moment. He could feel the lightning striking behind him, climbing up the hill, roaring as if it was angry at being lured so far. He imagined he could see it: lightning drawn to the iron bars, then leaping from spike to spike, iron sucking electricity right out of the sky, flowing into the ground beneath him and torturing the inhuman Intelligence that lived there. Killing it. He heard another strike, and another and another.

  The ground bucked under them, flexing like a living thing.

  They heard a sound that had never been made on Earth before, a groaning, roaring, bottomless, voiceless BOOM that filled the audible spectrum and blew beyond it.

  There was a deep arroyo directly in front of them, a crack in the earth between the Brothers and the crater ridge behind it. It was so deep they couldn’t see the bottom even as they sprinted towards it. The far side was a dim blur through the rain. The gap between the hillside and the ridge was no more than ten feet wide at the top, Ken could see that much. One leap and they would be on the far side, on the crater ridge, away from The Brothers. It was no wider than that leap from the rock to the tree in front of his house. But, God, they were tired, and they were wet, and his leg was burning so badly, and the ground was unsteady and sticky.

  We have to jump. I can’t jump. We’ll miss it. We’ll fall. We have to jump. We can’t…

  They didn’t pause. They didn’
t falter. They ran side-by-side as the lightning reached the top of the hill, right behind them. They threw themselves into the air together.

  The lightning hit the twisting tower of the Intelligence itself, and the world exploded.

  Thirty-six

  Sunrise came six hours later. As it approached, the rain fell back for the first time in days. Ken could see gaps in the clouds by three a.m. By five, the last of the rain whispered away, and the world grew quiet, almost silent. It was so beautiful to hear – to not hear – it took Ken's breath away.

  They peeled off their soggy, ruined parkas, laid them out on the rocks to dry, and sat close together on the top of the South Ridge to watch the sun come up off to their left. A fresh breeze plucked at their ragged, dirty clothes as the morning light revealed a sky that was desert-hard, flat blue, and uninterrupted by clouds. The desert below them, to the south of Dos Hermanos, was as dry, unpopulated and immense as it had ever been. As it had always been. Lucy’s theories about the mountain shadow effect and the microclimate had been correct. As far the Anza-Borrego Desert, and the rest of the world, was concerned, the last three days in DH had never happened.

  When it was bright enough, Ken stood up and turned to Rose. “Want to see?” he asked. They were the first words he had spoken in hours, and they sounded oddly distant and small even in his own ears. He knew why. The explosion had made them both half-deaf, and they were only beginning to recover.

  Still close together, they mounted the ridgeline, picking carefully through the shattered stone. Rose’s clothes were stiff with mud. Her jeans looked as if they had been put through a shredder. Ken looked slightly ridiculous with one shoe on, one foot bare, and the leg of his jeans torn open to the knee. He was thankful that at least the swelling had gone down. The wound from the monster was more like a chemical burn than an infection, and though it itched furiously it had not progressed beyond mid-calf. He knew he wouldn’t die from it, not at the moment, anyway. But he did think about the rock-like infection that had transformed Daniel Steinberg, and the notes and video he’d seen from the mad scientist’s NEW TAXONOMY.