Creatures of the Storm (32 page)

The Jeep woman came with her, an inch at a
time. First her arms were over the porch, then her ample chest. The
instant her elbows were on solid ground, they separated and she
churned her legs like an Olympic cycler until she was completely on
the farthest corners of the covered porch, gasping for breath.

That was entirely too close
for Rose. For
any
of them.

The Jeep woman pulled herself up onto all
fours, then up on her knees.

“Fuck,” she said, and tried
to wipe her face clean. “Thanks, but ...
fuck
.”

“Yeah,” Ken said. “Let’s get you in—”

“Guys,” Rose said. She pointed across the
shivering mud-lake, at what amounted to the far shore. The
ridge-line that broke into a severe downhill grade.

It was lined with monsters. Drifts of
candle-eyes and needleseeds huddled on the ground. A lattice of
thornwheels whickered in the wind behind them, flumes and
blade-ribbons hung from the dancing, drenched eucalyptus trees like
bony Christmas decorations, flapping in the chaotic wind. They were
all illuminated by the stark white glare of Maggie’s searchlights,
so bright even the lightning fracturing the sky behind them seemed
pale and gray.

There was a man standing in the midst of
them. Or most of a man. He had too many legs, and one of them
seemed longer than all the others. One arm was hanging by a series
of threads, wriggling in the wind. Under the remains of his filthy,
mud-encrusted clothes he was almost the same ash-gray and
china-white as the creatures around him, from his ridged, plated
hair to his opaque, marbled eyes.

But he was alive. He was watching them. And
the Jeep woman clearly recognized him.

“Steinberg!” she bellowed. “You ASSHOLE! Why
don’t you just fucking DIE?!”

The man with the monster
looked at her and smiled. The corners of his mouth cracked. He
pretended to laugh,
ha-ha-ha
like a jolly old elf made of muddy paper,
elbowing the creatures to his left and right.
Look at that
, he seemed to be
saying,
look how the meat-things whimper
and scream!

The woman was on her feet
now, right at the edge of the porch. The rain was pounding into her
eyes, driving her back, but she refused to acknowledge it. “I know
all about you!” she shouted. “You and your
buddies!
You think you’re so
great,
you think you’re
the
man
, but
you’re a FUCKING PUNK!”

The man with the monsters glanced to the side
as a bone spider, ten feet tall, climbed the ridge to join
them.

“Let’s get inside,” Ken said, three minutes
later than any sane man would have, as far as Rose was
concerned.

The bone spider cocked one of its larger legs
and slammed it down on the hood of the disappearing Jeep, driving
it four feet deeper into the muck.

Rose tugged at the woman’s
arm. “Come on,” she said. “Come
on
.”

“Fuck you, big man! Big, big man!”

The bone spider was raising another leg, high
in the air. It was aiming for the porch.

“NOW!” Rose screamed,
and
jerked
the
crazy woman back, through the open door, into the entryway of the
house. They tumbled inside as the bone spider’s leg, thick as a
golf cart, rammed into the red brick porch where they had been
standing and broke it off like a bit of bad plaster,
crunch
, driving it into
the muck.

Maggie slammed and locked
the door behind them. The wind and rain cut off with a
snip
.

The three of them were sprawled across the
polished hardwood floor of the entryway. No one spoke for five
heartbeats or more.

“Asshole,” the woman
muttered. “Thinks he can get
me
, does he?” She glared at Ken and
Rose as if they were challenging her. “
Does
he?”

For once in her life, Rose had no idea what
to say.

Steinberg snarled at the slammed door of the
Mackie
hacienda
.
It seemed to leer at him across the mud lake.

Go after her,
he ordered the bone spider.
Finish her up
.
First her, then Jennie.

His creatures had been waiting for him in the
first hollow beyond the gate, rolling and slicing through the
water, sucking greedily at the rainfall and growing, growing.

Come help
me
, he told them.
I have a job to do
.

They had climbed the slopes together, come to
the mud lake, watched the little meat-baby clamber out of her car
like a bug caught in a matchbox.

Crush
her
, he told his bone spider.
Now
.

She had gotten away.
Scurried into her adobe rat hole. And he wanted to see her when it
ended. He wanted to see her
pop
.

Take me over there,
he told the creature
.
Lift me up…

No,
the voice of the storm told him.
There is something else to do...

He started to protest, but
he knew there was no point to it. The second mind twisting inside
his own was hard as marble. You didn’t simply do what you were
told, you
surrendered
to the irresistible pressure of it. You had to.

Do as I tell you…

He turned away from
the
hacienda
with
huge reluctance and trudged back to his ATV. He needed to go south.
Not all the way, not this time. Just a little way.

To the Conference Center.

And then,
he thought,
I will be
free. Free to go to the woman I love.

Lucy was giddy with adrenaline and victory. She had
beaten
the son of a
bitch. She had
escaped
.

“I know all about them,”
she said to the programmer and the girl. “Everything,
everything
is
right here.” She dug inside her khaki jacket and
pulled out the flash drive. Its clean, cool surface was startling
compared to the mud that caked every inch of her.

Ken frowned at her and kept his distance. He
thought he recognized her through the mud and water. “Look,
Doctor…Doctor…?”

“Armbruster,” she said, wiping mud out of her
mouth. “Lucy.”

“Doctor Armbruster, you
have
got
to calm
down. You barely–”

“I know what I
barely
did,
man.”

“Ken,” he said, still sounding idiotically
calm. “And this is Rose, my daughter.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said, looking them both up and
down as she struggled to her feet. Her heart was still pounding. “I
remember you from the restaurant yesterday.”

Rose wasn’t even looking at
her. She was peering out the small windows beside the front door.
“They’re gone,” she said. “All of them. The, the creatures
and
that man who was
with them.” She looked back. “Did you see him, Dad? Did you see
that guy
standing
with them?”

“
I
sure did,” Lucy said, and tried to
scrape some of the filth off her with no success. “The son of a
bitch. Look, have you got a computer? You
must
have a computer, you’re a
programmer, right?”

“Sure, but–”

“Where is it?” she demanded.

Ken looked at her, as annoyed as he was
terrified. “The study,” he said. “This way.”

They trotted down the hall.
“You gotta see this,” Lucy said, panting with excitement,
adrenaline, fear. “It’s fucking
amazing.
You gotta see
it.”

The overhead lights flared
and the monitors flickered to life all by themselves when they
entered the quiet, triangular room with the massive multimedia bay.
Lucy was still too buzzed to notice. She fit the drive into a USB
port set into the desktop and started tapping on the keys. “Look at
it,” she said, talking more to herself than anyone else.
“Everything, all laid out. I don’t know where these fucking
monsters came from, or how they became so multivariate without a
wider ecological niche, or how they grew and spread
so fast,
but…”

Rose was standing on the other side of the
room, in front of the floor-to-ceiling drapes that covered the
glass doors to the garden. “There’s something moving outside,” she
said in a small voice.

“Maggie?” Ken said. “What’s up?”

“It’s
Lucy
,” Lucy said. “Not—”

“Night vision and infrared show negative,
boss, but then these creatures haven’t been showing on infrared
anyway.”

Lucy looked up sharply, in search of the new
voice. Nobody to the left. Nobody to the right. She thought for a
moment longer, then turned and looked at the computer monitor and
said, “Ah. So. A voice-enabled PC?”

“Something like that,” Ken said, smiling.

“Cool. You
are
a
programmer.”

Ken scowled. How exactly did she make that
sound like an insult?

“Maggie, I’m still hearing
it,” Rose said. “Are you
sure
?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“Look,” Lucy said as she flipped from screen
to screen, “I know this is hard to understand, but–”

“Well, gosh,” Ken said,
fluttering his eyes. “I’ll try to keep up. But y’know, I’m only
a
programmer
.”

Lucy put her head down and took a breath.
“Okay. Point taken. I’m a jerk. Sorry.”

“Okay, then.”

“But this
is
important.
Really.”

“You’d be surprised at how much we already
know,” Ken said, “but show me what you’ve got.”

They spent a feverish ten
minutes paging through Steinberg’s data. They even tried to upload
it to somewhere,
anywhere,
but Maggie explained again about the one-way
mirror data link, and Lucy appreciated the metaphor: she had been
suffering the same problem. She looked through the satellite data
and camera links that Maggie had assembled and – much to her
surprise – found herself impressed.

“
You
did this?” she said to Ken, then
corrected herself. “No, wait. Didn’t mean it that way. I mean, you
figured out how to hack all the security and traffic cams in
town
that fast?
Or is this something you do on a regular basis?”

“I did it,” Maggie said.
“And yes, I did it
that
fast
.”

Lucy looked up into the
open air again. “
You?
You mean on your own?”

“All by myself.”

“Uh-huh.” She glanced at
Ken. “
Self
. You
know, I’d heard you were a hotshot AI guy, Kenneth, but
still
…”

He shrugged. “I’m as surprised by it as you
are, Lucy.”

A wave of lightless gray mist surged into
Lucy’s mind from every direction. She felt her knees start to
buckle, and she had to paw mindlessly at the desk chair and sit
down fast to keep from falling.

“Shit,” she said, and scrubbed at her short,
crusty hair. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“You blood pressure just hit the floor,”
Maggie said, as Lucy struggled to catch her breath.

“I’m not surprised,” Ken said. “You’re
crashing from the adrenaline rush, Lucy. Take a break.”

“Fuck that,” she said, forcing herself to
breathe deeply. “We’re in trouble here.” Her head snapped up as
something occurred to her. The sudden movement made her vision swim
a second time, and she did her best to ignore it.

“Hey,” she said, inhaling raggedly. “Hey, you
said you were able to drive those fuckers off with
electricity?”

“Yes,” Maggie said, “a high-voltage shock of
at least–”

“Fine, whatever. You’re
telling me that they must have an electromagnetic signature of
their own, right? They use it, they need it to think, like we do.
Otherwise electricity wouldn’t bother them any more than bullets
do. Have you tried tracking ‘em
that
way?”

“We’ve tried everything,” Rose said. “Twice.”
She was pacing nervously, still glancing at the drapes every few
seconds. “Daddy…”

“That satellite data you
showed me,” Lucy said, plowing ahead. “Those sats can scan for E-M
sources, too.” Ken looked momentarily confused and she snapped at
him. “
Electromagnetic
sources
,
goddamn it! If we could get large and small scale readings of
the Valle, maybe we could actually see the fucking things
and get a sense of where they’re coming from, if
they have a nest or a hive or —”

There was a tremendous
crash and slumping
sound beyond the
drapes. Rose, still close to the drapes, jumped halfway across the
room. “Okay, everybody heard
that
, right?” Lightning flickered
beyond the windows, and thunder, as loud as exploding oil tanks,
pounded across them. “Can we
please
get out of here now?”