Creatures of the Storm (28 page)

Someday. After the weather clears. After the
monsters are…somewhere else.

She trotted down the corridor to the lobby,
belted her coat more tightly, and pushed through the front door one
final time.

Bye-bye, my
baby
, she thought as the storm rushed over
her.
It was nice knowing
you
.

The water in the parking lot was deep enough
to cover her shoes. Her feet were soaking wet by the time she made
it to the Jeep and tried to open the door.

The latch flapped uselessly in her hand.

Right,
broken
.
She
should have remembered.
It seemed like
years ago that she’d learned about that.

She popped open the back
door instead, ducked inside, and reached forward to snag the latch
from the inside.
Stupid
thing
, she told herself. She twisted
around to get free of the back seat.

I won’t even bother to get it fixed; I’ll
trade in the piece of—

“Boo.”

The voice was right
there
, right at her ear,
and she hadn’t even gotten out of the car. Lucy yelped in spite of
herself and straightened up with a jolt, catching the back of her
head on the doorframe, grabbing at the half-open driver door,
gasping as she stood and saw –

Michael Steinberg.

Or…what had
been
Michael
Steinberg.

His skin was dull gray. His
hair was plated with water and mud, his eyes dead and distant, like
balls of clay in a face made of mud. It was a counterfeit
Michael Steinberg, made out of rotting
granite…but all the more dangerous for that.

“Made ya look,” he said. The voice seemed to
come from somewhere other than his mouth. As she stood there, back
against the car, clutching the door, she saw other things about him
had changed, too. The neck. The chest. The legs…

Oh my god. What happened to his legs?

“Michael,” she said aloud, barely recognizing
her own voice. “What are you doing here?”

“Running an errand for a friend,” he said,
sounding almost jovial. His long, knobby arms came up without
hesitation and reached for her face. In that instant Lucy knew what
his ‘errand’ was.

I’m dead
.
Just like Cindy.

“Wait!” she shouted. Her hand flashed into
the breast pocket of her jacket and she pulled out the red-and-gold
flash drive.

Steinberg stopped, but he didn’t lower his
arms. She noticed distantly that water wasn’t dripping from his
crooked fingers. It was soaking in as fast as it fell.

“What’s
that
supposed to be?” he said, still
sounding vaguely amused.

“It’s THE NEW TAXONOMY,” she said, holding it
up in front of her, like a priest holding back a vampire with a
crucifix.

He lowered his head in
anger, a bull made of boulders. She could see it even in his
immobile features. He was changing, yes, but the ego was still
there, that mad compulsion to
be
somebody.
Transformational speciation my ass,
she thought.

“I trashed the computer,”
she lied. “I fried the hard drive. This is
it
, Michael. The only copy. Right
here.”

He brought his arms down and hunched his
shoulders even more.

“Give it to me,” he grated.

“Let me go, and I will.”

He made a grating, coughing sound with his
hidden mouth. Lucy assumed it was supposed to be a laugh. “Ach.
Sure,” he said. “Deal. Give it.” He stepped forward, sloshing in
eight inches of water, and extended one set of gnarled gray
fingers

Who the hell does he think
he’s kidding?
Lucy thought rhetorically,
and as he stepped forward she pulled open the car door, got behind
it and
slammed
it
into him as hard as she could.

Steinberg, for all his new
height and bulk, was still prone to the laws of physics, and so
far, the Jeep still outweighed him. He flew backwards at the sudden
impact of the swinging door and landed heavily on his back with a
tremendous
splash
, even as Lucy threw herself into the soggy driver's seat,
slammed the door, shoved the key into the ignition and punched the
accelerator.

He got himself upright on
his complex of new legs faster than she thought possible and
threw
himself at the driver’s side. He
pawed at the door-handle. It flapped uselessly in his claw as it
had in her hand.

God bless crappy American
manufacturing,
she thought madly, and
jammed on the accelerator again. The Jeep leaped forward, jerked
out of Steinberg’s grip, and Lucy dragged it into a wide, looping
arc that covered the entire parking lot.

Steinberg was right in
front of the driveway, the only way out. That didn’t slow her down
one bit. She gritted her teeth as she took careful aim and
drove
the Jeep, full force, into his
ashen, stony body.

He didn’t fall. He didn’t
even crack
.
The
huge rocky form flew over the hood and its face smashed against the
windshield directly in front of her, splitting like porcelain into
a thousand tiny fissures. She flinched and steered reflexively to
the right, away from the exit as he thrust his hands through the
shattered windshield to take her by the face. Particles of glass,
small and sharp as fingernails, flickered across her as his
impossibly dry fingers wrapped around her head and
dug in
.

Without thinking,
without
caring
,
Lucy opened her mouth and bit him
–
hard.
Her teeth
cracked off a mouth full of dead-dry tissue as she punched on the
brakes and skidded on the asphalt.

Momentum snatched Steinberg away. The fingers
flew from her face, the body rocketed off the hood. Steinberg’s
suddenly massive form rolled twice in the rain-choked air before it
hit the pavement and tumbled through the foaming water.

She popped the car into reverse and jammed on
the accelerator again. The car roared straight backwards. While the
creature struggled to stand, she tapped on the brakes, threw the
Jeep into drive, and surged forward, aiming the car like a
rocket-propelled grenade.

The rear bumper hit
Steinberg square in his shoulders while he was still hunched over.
The impact drove him under the car. Lucy
felt
the
crunch-a-thump, crunch-a-thump
as
the wheels rolled over his body, but she kept driving, throwing the
Jeep into another wide, looping turn that would take her back
towards the exit. She strained forward, peering over the steering
wheel through the broken windshield. Was it dead now? Was it
finally
dead?

Son of a
bitch
.

The Steinberg-thing was getting up again,
even though one of its arms was missing. She saw the limb bobbing
in a rain-puddle near his ankles. The exposed joint was dry and
bloodless. It looked like flaking plaster of Paris.

She slammed on the
accelerator one more time and drove straight into him again. This
time she liked the solid crunch
the
collision made. Steinberg's stony new body flew into the air, so
high and far she almost lost him in the storm. Then he landed,
skidding, with rooster-tails of rain flying in two directions at
once. She didn’t care. She kept driving for the exit even as he
rolled to a stop and heaved himself into a sitting
position.

She saw him in the rear view mirror when he
stood up on his wobbly, recovering legs. One of the larger severed
limbs was cradled in his one remaining arm. In the time it took her
to drive to the entrance, she saw stubby gray fingers of clay-like
tissue erupt from his hip, wriggling and reaching blindly to meet
other stubby little fingers, to find each other, twist together,
intertwine …

He was standing on two legs by the time she
hit the driveway. An instant later he was steady enough to stagger
towards the red ATV that was waiting at the edge of the lot and
mount up.

Fuck me,
she thought as she drove blindly down the
twisting road.
Monster on a
mini-bike.

She tried to make it to the freeway but it
was too late. The storm had blocked the on-ramp completely. It was
covered with rain-soaked rocks and tree branches washed down from
the ridge, and she didn’t have time to pick a path through it.

“Fuck it,” she growled, and forced the Jeep
in another direction, up and over, onto the frontage road that
wandered along the ridge line to the south. It was a familiar route
to her. Most of their sampling stations were planted along this
rutted path. She knew it would take her deeper into the Valle and
the storm, yes, but more importantly, it would get away from
Steinberg.

She swayed and braked and
surged along the winding mud road, and the storm rose up to enfold
her, more violent and blacker than ever. It shoved at the sides of
the Jeep with huge gusts of wind. Walls of rain leaped up from
flooded intersections and rushed over the hood like tidal
waves.
Behind her, a few hundred yards
away, a single glaring headlight followed. She only saw it on the
straightaways, only when she slowed for an instant. Steinberg was
back there. He was coming.

There was a flash of
lightning and something on the seat next to her flared brightly
enough to distract her for an instant. It was the thumb drive, its
silver-and-red finish momentarily catching the lightning. All of
Steinberg’s data was trapped in that little metal tab. She didn’t
even remember throwing it into the seat when she’d jumped
inside.
But she had it.

I can still get it out of town…

When she looked up at the
road in front of her again, she saw the Mackie
hacienda
for the first time. It was
waiting for her at the top of the ridge at the end of a private
drive beyond a wide-open wrought iron gate, crouching on the crest
in front of towering blue-black rain clouds that flickered with
lightning. There were even welcoming lights in the
hacienda
’s windows,
yellow-red, warm,
human
colors. The first she had seen in a long
time.

She threw the car into a
skidding right hand turn and shot thorough the riverstone gateway.
Now she could see a person – no,
two
people – standing on a covered
porch in front of a wide chocolate-brown door. The path to them was
clear. They were at the end of a wide driveway that was flooded but
looked smooth as glass. They were waving at her, arms over their
heads, waving her in, it seemed. C
ome on,
it’s safe here. Come on!

She gunned the engine and headed towards the
drive, grinning for the first time in hours.

Almost
there
.
Safe and
sound.

Women,
Steinberg thought, veering and bouncing after the glowing
taillights of Lucy Arumbruster’s Jeep.
Can’t live with ‘em; can’t kick ‘em out of a moving
car.
He’d heard that from some stand-up
comedian, and it was funny. So, so funny.

Two women had been ruling
his life since he came to this fucking desert hell-hole: Lucy
Armbruster, the smart-ass dyke with the money, and Jennie
Sommerfield, the most beautiful woman in the world who would
not,
would not,
give him what he wanted. What he deserved.

The rain splattered against his crusty
cheeks, but Michael couldn’t feel it anymore. It didn’t even get in
his eyes; he’d grown some kind of transparent covering under his
overhanging brow, over his squelching eye-holes, to catch the
moisture and absorb it before it got to him. He was in a cocoon of
rock and bone that cut him off, held him tight, and as he drew
closer and closer to that disgusting sack of meat and bullshit, he
still found himself longing for the other one, that Jennie, that
dream he’d had for so long.

He’d already messed around with her a little
bit – when Armbruster wasn’t nagging at him, when The Voice wasn’t
pulling him here or there for some bullshit errand or other. And he
would get back to her before this was all done. He had to.

She glowed like the sun the first time he met
her at that VeriSil company picnic. A part of her had burned inside
him ever since, and not even this glorious transformation, not even
Armbruster’s repulsive betrayal, not even the echoing voice of the
storm could drive out that memory.

He loved Jennie. He always
would. And best of all, now it didn’t matter if she loved him back
– not anymore. He could
make
her love him. He could make anybody do
anything.

So first: kill the bitch
that was trying to run away from him right now. Then second: find
the other one, the pretty one, and make her his own. He would have
smiled at that last thought, if his face could smile
anymore:
Make her. His
own.

Ken and Rose
were still huddled in the living room with the two-story atrium
when Rose’s phone rang. She pounced on it.