Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  Is this how it begins, he wondered, resisting the urge to touch his wound. Could this happen to me?

  At least Rose would be okay. She had escaped with nothing more than a light scratch along one cheek, and that wasn’t from a creature of the storm, it was from her last fall in the mud. She had joked earlier that she didn’t want it treated. It would make a really cool scar, she said. She could dine out on horror stories about it for months.

  Ken hadn’t seen the humor.

  They reached the ridgetop and looked down into the Valle de los Hermanos. Even inside the crater, the last of the thunderheads were tearing themselves to shreds and disappearing. By noon, they would be gone. Whatever combination of forces had brought the storm to Dos Hermanos had faltered now. It might not rain again in the crater for another five hundred years.

  The hill they called The Two Brothers was changed. A new pit, obsidian-black and too deep to fathom, took up most of the summit, a smoking crater within a crater, as if twenty sticks of dynamite had been used to blow it away. Below that, beyond that, the rest of the Valle was a restless, muddy lake that filled the vast bowl of Dos Hermanos all the way to the jagged line of the North Ridge. Its fractal surface, dove-gray in the new morning light, was pock-marked with debris and half-submerged wreckage.

  There were no people. Anywhere.

  The water level of the lake had not dropped an inch since last night. It was effectively sealed inside the crater, and it was staying there. Ken tried to remember how many generations the Salton Sea had survived since its creation, not all that far from here, despite the desert winds and heat. He wondered how long this new formation might last.

  Not that it mattered, he realized with a sudden chill. Nobody was coming back anyway.

  Because the monsters were still there.

  Even from the top of the ridge, they were visible everywhere, swarming along the water’s edge and humping under the muddy surface of the lake. Ken could see them all: a set of brickteeth fighting with a caisson of thornwheels; a dragontongue flailing out of the water as a drift of hookweeds rolled by and settled down for a long, long drink. Two bone spiders, directly below them, were fighting over nothing at all, claw and talons flashing in the watery morning sunlight.

  There was something different now. In the last few days, they had moved with relentless purpose, with an eerie and deadly efficiency. Now they …wandered. They fought whatever they happened to encounter, and then moved on. There was still frightening power, but no purpose. No intelligence.

  Ken had hoped – hell, he admitted to himself, he had prayed – that the destruction of the thing inside The Brothers would cause the creatures of the storm to simply collapse in place and die, as much as things like this could ‘die’ at all. Vampires hit by the sun. Puppets with cut strings.

  No such luck. He had been right all along. They were more like robots with damaged programs, but they were still energized by…whatever it was that energized them. Still moving, but aimless now. Lost.

  Lost but still horribly dangerous.

  Rose had been very quiet since the sun had started to rise. Now she blinked suddenly, as if in surprise, and put her hand to her breast. She unbuttoned her coat and reached inside, searching and searching ... then pulled out a white box, so clean in the midst of all the mud that it shimmered in the morning light.

  “What’s that?” Ken said.

  “A gift from a friend,” she said, and smiled. “Looks like it’s okay, too. I was afraid I’d broken it.” She held it up and showed it to her dad. “Maggie,” she said.

  His mouth dropped open. Then he turned it into a grin. “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Oh, I think you’ve been there, done that,” Rose said solemnly. “But here, she wanted you to have it.”

  As he took it, she popped open another buttoned pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper folded in quarters. “This, too,” she said, and handed it over.

  Ken frowned in puzzlement and scanned the single page. Then he sat down on a stone as big as a steamer trunk and read it again, this time much more slowly. Finally he nodded and handed the paper back to Rose. She smoothed it on her knee and read:

  Ken:

  Thank you.

  - Maggie

  …and below that:

  Don’t worry about saving these songs!

  And if one of our instruments breaks,

  It doesn’t matter.

  We have fallen into the place

  Where everything is music.

  The strumming and the flute notes

  Rise into the atmosphere,

  And even if the whole world’s harp

  Should burn up, there will still be

  Hidden instruments playing.

  So the candle flickers and goes out.

  We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

  Stop the words now.

  Open the window in the center of your chest,

  And let the spirit fly in and out.

  “That’s beautiful,” Rose said.

  “A poet named Rumi,” Ken said quietly. “I don’t know …” He looked up and out into the misty blues and magentas of the new sky and shook his head. “I just don’t know,” he said.

  There was a deep, rhythmic thud-thud-thud above and behind them. They turned together, their backs to the Valle, and mounted the ridgetop. Rose was the first to find the moving black dot as it circled towards them.

  It was a helicopter – a big one. They shouted until they were hoarse, jumped and waved, even Ken, on his wounded leg. The chopper altered course sharply as soon as it saw them and came closer.

  “What do you know,” Rose said into his ear. “We made it.” He turned his head to look at her, and so much welled up in him, so many emotions…

  He didn’t think he could talk at the moment, so he just nodded.

  “You think Mom is okay?” Rose asked. “I've been thinking about her all night.”

  “We'll have to see,” Ken said, trying to be comforting, terrified of the truth. “I hope so.”

  The chopper was closer now. They could see the USMC logo on its side. It didn't look real to Rose. How could it?

  “So what happens next?” she asked.

  He looked at the chopper, then looked back over his shoulder at the glittering new lake and the bone-colored creatures that danced and battled on its shore. He felt the sharp corners of the hard drive in his pocket, and the pressure of his daughter’s hand on his back. He shrugged.

  “That,” he said, “is a very good question.”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Brad Munson is a writer, editor, screenwriters and marketer living in Southern California until they politely ask him to leave, which could be any time now.