Creatures of the Storm (19 page)

Normal Lazenby, mayor of Dos Hermanos, swept
through the spread wings of the double doors, protected from the
storm by the arc of a massive umbrella hovering over his leonine
head. It was held steadfastly in place by his formidable wife
Miriam. Normal, as always, was the picture of command: hawk-like
features, a magnificent sweep of silver hair, eyes keen and clear.
He was almost frighteningly white. But for his irises, he looked as
if he had been carved from marble, or even chalk, while his wife
was a comparative riot of color, a bold blue beret on her steely
hair, a spray of color at her raddled throat, a slash of crimson
where her lips used to be.

Normal took three steps into the room and
stopped so abruptly that Miriam nearly crashed into him. She pulled
up short at the last instant and recovered without a stumble.

As she always does,
Peck noted with no small amount of
bitterness.
Always there, protecting the
old shitheel.

You didn't have to be psychic to see the look
in Mayor Lazenby's piercing blue eyes. He was...confused. Stunned.
A little terrified. At that moment, Peck was convinced he had
absolutely no idea where he was. Miriam knew exactly what was up.
She took him firmly in hand, bird claws clasping his thin upper arm
of his exceedingly well-tailored suit, and guided him forward, ever
forward, towards the cluster of local dignitaries who were
approaching Peck and his deputies.

I'll see you all in
hell,
Peck promised them silently.
Every single damn one of you.

“Remember,” he said under his breath, barely
loud enough for the two other cops to hear. “Encouraging words.
Total confidence. No promises.”

He didn't even wait to see if they
understood. It wasn't as if he had a choice.

He put out his hand. “Thanks for coming,” he
said and gave Herb the good-old-boy pat on the shoulder that the
old twat liked so much. That turned into a firm shake with Marty
Fein from VeriSil, along with a confidential little wink, like they
were in on some kind of joke between leaders, even though there was
no joke at all. Doug Pratt, the weasel-faced principal of DH Public
School, caught the look and scowled.

“Right this way, folks,”
Peck said, and ushered them into Conference Room B. “Let's get this
show on the road.”
Literally,
he added only to himself.
As in “dog and pony.”

The pre-meeting to the
meeting went reasonably well.
Help us help
you, We need to hang together no more than ever, Don't dwell on the
details, Stick to the big picture.

He managed to get all the way to the end
before it went to shit.

“So that about covers it,” he said. “People
should be arriving any minute now. Grab yourself a cup of coffee
and a bear claw, and let's get ready to greet them.”

“Well, we're with you,” Herb McCandless of
the DH Emporium said. “Of course we’re with you. Nobody wants a
panic.”

“Deseret Fifty-Six Fifty,” Mayor Lazenby
said.

Peck gave the mayor a
sidelong glance. That was the first thing the crazy old man had
said all night. What the hell did it
mean?

“Surely not,” Marty Fein said, agreeing with
Herb. “We have enough on our plate.”

Perfect
, Peck thought. They were falling right into place.
Just what I needed.

They were all half on their feet, eying the
free eats, when a single voice cut through the rumble like a
sharpened sword.

“What about this wretched weather?” It was
Miriam Lazenby, the mayor's wife, sitting in the exact center of
the room next to her husband. Her spine was ramrod straight, her
eyes eagle-bright.

Everyone stopped and looked
at Peck again.
Shit. Of course it would be
her.

“Aren’t you even going to
mention
it?”

“It’s a storm,” he said shortly. “They
happen. Granted, they’re rare here in Dos Hermanos, but–”

“They’re
unheard
of in Dos
Hermanos,” Miriam corrected him. “We have a granddaughter at that
school. We have reason to worry if there’s a genuine threat from
strangers
or
from
the rain.”

I know all about your
granddaughter. If she were one of the missing, we’d all be better
off.
Aloud, Peck forced himself to say,
quite gently, “Really Ms. Lazenby, I can assure you, this storm is
going to break soon. Tomorrow morning at the very latest.” He gave
her his best, most impervious
Trust
Me
smile.

“How do you know?” Miriam Lazenby
demanded.

Peck stopped cold. It was so rare that anyone
questioned him, he really didn’t know quite how to respond. “I’ve
been staying in touch,” he said vaguely.

“With
whom
, exactly?” Now Marty Fein was
chiming in.

Peck hated him; he was one of the few people
in the Valle that Peck couldn’t afford to ignore.

He opened his mouth and the words came out
before he even knew what he was saying, exactly as he had heard
them a few hours earlier: “I checked in with the NWS and Earthwatch
right before our meeting,” he lied smoothly. “The college
Agricultural Station up on the ridge gave me the readings from
their own sampling stations, confirmed by satellite data. Another
eighteen hours. Twenty-four, tops.”

Everyone looked impressed. Even Miriam
Lazenby pulled back a bit, though the snarl remained firmly in
place.

Thank you, Dr.
Armbruster,
he said silently.
You have no idea what a help you’ve
been.

“Oh,” Fein said. “Well. Then … good. Good,
because another day like today and the whole plant would be
underwater, you know? That would be very bad news.”

Peck smiled, firmly back in
control. “I’m not in the bad news business, Mr. Fein,” he said. “I
know I can count on all of you,
all
of you, to help me calm those frazzled nerves
tonight.”

There were general sounds
of assent, grunts and
yesses
and even a
you
bet
. Then everyone was shifting chairs and
moving, everyone but Peck’s own people. Within moments, the last of
the ‘leadership’ was out of the Conference Room and the door was
shut firmly behind them.

Peck turned and put his back to the pressed
wood.

“So the storm is breaking?”
Mindy Bergstrom said. “That
is
good news.”

Oh, for Christ's
sake,
Peck said, careful to keep his
expression cool and calm.
Will you just
shut UP?

“
I
mean, things have been kind of—”

“Mindy,” Peck said,
“I
don’t know if the storm is going to
break. Nobody knows. But you had better
go
out there and tell everybody who asks that the storm
will
be ending
tomorrow.
Tomorrow,
guaranteed
. And you tell everybody who
whines about those kids that we have a
ton
of leads, that they’re as good
as home already, and you stick to the story that the disappearances
are unconnected.
Unconnected,
am I clear?”

There were tight nods all around. He could
tell how scared they were, and that was exactly how he wanted
it.

He stepped aside and opened the door. “Get
out,” he said.

They got.

Lightning flared outside the dark window and
thunder boomed a heartbeat later, deep enough for him to feel it in
his chest. It suited his mood perfectly.

This was bad.
Far worse than Peck liked. He could make it work,
though. He was sure
of it.

After all, he had
to.

Michael
Steinberg stood in the middle of his laboratory, his lips flaking
away like old parchment, listening to his menagerie calling to him:
the clatter of bone against metal, the skirl of shell scraping over
shell, the click and chitter of hard, sharp edges striking at
cracking glass.

It wasn’t music. It
was
better
than
music.

He knew what it meant. The wordless voice
inside his head was telling him what had to happen next.

There was an eight-foot
pole with a hook at the end hanging inside the door to the hall, a
tool for opening the high casement windows of the laboratory.
Michael crossed the room to fetch it, and he could hear, he
could
feel,
the
hiss and crackle of his new leg-joints grinding to dust and
rebuilding, the sharp snap and dry whisper of bony, brittle tissue
dissolving and regrowing with every movement.

Lovely
sounds
, he thought.
Really
lovely
.

The pole was hollow and very light. It felt
good in his hand as he swung it back and forth. It whistled
joyfully in the misty air.

The right tool for the right job.

Without another thought he spun and smashed
a one-hundred-gallon terrarium to pieces.

A torrent of needleseeds tumbled from the
broken box, bouncing and crackling across the linoleum like spiked
Christmas ornaments. Michael spun a full 180 degrees, pole sizzling
in front of him, and swept an array of trays and beakers off a
specimen table. Glass and metal flew everywhere; stains and
candle-eyes surged across the filthy floor, dashing for freedom
like blind baby turtles.

He swept the pole again and gloried in its
screaming.

In less than five mad
minutes, he had broken every glass or plastic container in the
room, overturned every table and desk, shattered every scrap of
technology and bit of equipment. Soon he was wading calf-deep
through a swamp of oily water, debris and twitching rain-creatures
who, to his mild surprise, ignored him entirely. As a last grand
act, he lifted the cracked and splintered pole like a javelin
and
rammed
it
point-first through the plate glass window over the sink. The glass
shattered with an almost musical sound, and a wave of moist
inhalation rushed inside, washing over him through the new hole in
the wall.

Thunder rumbled far away.

The creatures moved towards
the opening in a single, tidal surge. Every molecule of Michael’s
new body wanted to join them, to leave now, go lose himself in the
storm, in the
wet
, forever.

Something stopped him. That
wordless voice again. A
squeeze
at the back of his head, a cold intrusive finger
of thought from
outside
.

He couldn’t leave yet. There was more work to
be done.

He pulled himself away from
the window and slogged through the wreckage towards the closed
hallway door, tossing aside the damaged pole. Creatures streamed
and crawled and stumbled past him in the opposite direction. He
smiled fondly at them as he bent with a
pop
and seized a table-leg that was
dangling by a single nail from a sheet of cracked pressboard. It
was slightly longer than his forearm, a stout piece of wood wrapped
in cheap sheet metal and shaped vaguely like a torch, thin at the
bottom, wide at the top. Lots of sharp corners and gleaming
edges.

The right tool for the
job
, he told himself again, and
jerked
it free. He swept open the door and
stepped through it. The creatures didn’t follow. They had the open
storm waiting for them. He knew it would be hours before their
thirst, and the direction from that outside
mind, that guiding Intelligence, would drive them indoors
again.

The corridor was deserted. No one had noticed
his destruction so far. The thick walls of Lucy Armbruster’s pet
project were wonderfully soundproof. For a moment, Michael thought
he was all alone in the building…

… until he heard the
distant, wet
squelch
of Cindy Bergstrom’s blinking eyes.

He nodded, and his neck
made a dry
ripping
sound.

Get to work.

The lights hummed over his head. The hallways
felt narrow and confining and so dry it was like staggering down a
tunnel cut in desert rock. His walk wasn’t really a walk anymore.
He had found other, more efficient ways to move, and he used them
now without thinking.

First he visited the lunch room and looked on
the hook next to the security panel. No, not there.

He slipped down the hall to the coat closet.
Sometimes Lucy the Lez left them hanging with the Station's
jackets, caps, and windbreakers. And again: nothing.

He moved down the hallway to the central
lobby, forcing himself to stand up straight. He pawed at his
clothing, only dimly aware of the bits of debris and ash-gray sand
clinging to his double-knit pants from mid-thigh down, and hid the
club behind his back as he rounded the corner.

Cindy was sitting at her desk, dead center in
a pool of light, studying something on the computer screen with
puzzled intensity. She barely glanced up when he came towards
her.

“Dr. Steinberg,” she said,
then something registered and she looked back again, focusing on
him for the first time as he stood there in the shadows.
“Dr.
Steinberg?
”
she said, with new concern in her voice. “Are you all
right?”