Secrets of the Storm (The Rain Triptych)

  What Comes Next

  Something moved in the brush behind Donnie. It slipped out into the open and Ty hissed in a breath. It was dead-gray, lumpy, scarred, and low to the ground, about the size and thickness of a bulldog.

  It was moving towards the kid.

  “You better get away from those trees, dude,” Ty said. The thing was all mouth – a gaping hole wide as a cantaloupe, with two concentric circles of jagged teeth, one in front of the other. As it turned, adjusting its direction to point straight at Donnie, Ty realized he could see right through it, from front to back. It was hollow. It was just a fucking tube with teeth, open almost as wide at the rear as at the front, its rows of teeth slowly rotating all the way through it.

  Nothing but a mouth. Nothing but a maw.

  Ty lowered his shoulder and slipped to the right as Donnie fired his pistol. The bullet zipped past him, a foot away as the rifle rolled down his arm. He caught it as it fell and brought it up, aiming and firing in one smooth motion.

  Two rounds.

  The maw exploded into a thousand shards. The shattered bits disappeared into the rain; the rest of it stopped moving.

  Donnie turned, saw it, and backed away from the wreckage of the creature, stumbling under the wind-torn canopy of the decorative oak. It was the wrong place to be. Another maw, almost as big as the first, dropped down from the dripping branches just above him and plopped onto Donnie’s shoulder with an audible thwack. He screamed as it writhed and bit into the side of his neck.

  Donnie ripped at the thing on his shoulder with his free hand, still bellowing. It moved under his fingers to bite him again. Ty could have sworn it didn’t actually bend at all: instead, the perfectly circular mouth that wasn’t already attached to the boy kind of closed up, disappeared, and a new one gaped open in its side, right under Donnie’s grasping hand, and bit him hard. Swallowed.

  Donnie bellowed – a deep, guttural cry of pure agony – and pulled his arm away from his opposite shoulder. The maw came with him, covering his hand and forearm like some hideous glove. It crawled up his arm, an inch at a time, even as he tried to shake it free. The front end was almost to his elbow in seconds. The back end should have shown the boy’s fingers and hand emerging from a rocky, twitching gauntlet, but there was nothing there – nothing but a pulpy black-red mass of chewed and desiccated tissue where his fingers ought to have been. Mummified ground beef.

  “Jesus Christ,” Slumpy said and lunged forward. “I got you, man!” he said. He put his hands on the creature without hesitation and started to drag it off, to rescue his friend. “I got you.”

  “Kid, don’t!” Ty said. “Let it be!” He jumped forward himself and shoulder-blocked the crazy kid, knocking him free of his friend.

  Donnie was already beyond help, still screaming as he reeled and fell on his back, sending up a low wall of water all around him at the impact. As he writhed in six inches of water, the maw moved up over his bicep, up to his shoulder, biting and chewing as it climbed. There was no arm left at the other side. Just bits of dry red-gray mud that fell into the water and washed away.

  “Fuck!” Slumpy said. “We gotta–”

  “Get out from under the tree!” Ty backed away, into the open. He’d seen more movement in the branches there. That’s where they were hiding, or growing, or landing or something –

  “No!” Slumpy said, nearly hysterical. “No, we gotta help–”

  Another maw fell out of the tree. This one landed square in the small of Slumpy’s back. He bellowed more in surprise than pain, and Ty didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward, pressed the muzzle of the M231 against the raddled, rocky side of the creature and fired a six-round burst directly into it. It rocketed away, already cracked and motionless.

  Ty didn’t wait for another one to fall. He grabbed Slumpy roughly by the arm and jerked him out into the open, away from the oak. Three more maws fell as they backed away.

  He shot all three. He emptied the clip into them, made sure they were dead. When the gunfire finally echoed away and there was only the sound of the storm, he realized that the other kid, Donnie, had stopped screaming.

  He turned to where the boy had fallen. There was no boy left there. Just a chewed-over pile of deep red and gray pulp and an empty carbine.

  RAIN:

  Secrets of the Storm

  Book Three of the Rain Triptych

  A TANDEM WAY BOOK

  SECRETS OF THE STORM

  The Rain Triptych Book 3

  © 2015 by Brad Munson

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Christian Bentulan

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Tandem Way Publishing

  Torrance, California

  www.TandemWayPublishing.com

 

  For John G. Jones

  Brother

  I have had a dream, past the wit of man to

  say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go

  about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there

  is no man can tell what. Methought I was,—and

  methought I had,—but man is but a patched fool, if

  he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye

  of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not

  seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue

  to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  CONTENTS

  THE FIRST DAY

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  THE FIRST NIGHT

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  THE SECOND DAY

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  THE THIRD DAY

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  About the Author

  THE FIRST DAY

  One

  Tyler Briggs had been in Dos Hermanos for less than ten seconds before he hit the wall.

  He’d run into shit like this many times before, up in the San Joaquin Valley and out in Pigeon Pass, back in his driving days: thick bricks of tule fog, each as big as a house, all flat planes and sharp edges so dense you couldn’t see your own damn hood ornament. All you could do was line up the wheels to the left of the center line, keep your speed steady, and hope nobody or nothin’ was gonna get in the way. Then two, three minutes later, pop! it was gone, and you were back surging through the cool desert night, the air as clear as vacuum all the way to
the horizon. If you were lucky, you would still be doing eighty and you wouldn’t be dead yet.

  But this was different. One instant he was topping the ridge crest of Highway 181, the only paved road in or out of Dos Hermanos, barely noticing the calm clear desert weather, and the next he plunged into the worst storm he’d ever seen.

  The wind punched into the side of his Corvette, a sidearm blow that made him shout out and grip the wheel so he could force his car back onto the road. A torrent of water sheeted over the windshield and made everything a single, gurgling blur. Then the wind hit again, even harder, and his two right wheels stuttered onto the soft shoulder – a band of dirt that had suddenly turned into a trail of sucking mud.

  Off to the left, Ty saw the dull brass glow of some large building or sodium-lit parking lot, suddenly active at two in the afternoon. Off to his right he saw the spindly towers of windmills, marching off into the mist and visible only for a moment before the iron cloud banks battered them away. He cursed under his breath and eased the ‘Vette back, back, back onto the road. He could hear the tires hissing like angry cats as they sped over the asphalt.

  Steady, he ordered himself. Steady, steady, ease it down. This has to –

  Something huge and black, all angles and corners, tumbled out of the twisting wind and smashed into the side of the car – right there, on the driver’s side, not five feet in front of him. Big as a Winnebago, darker than the storm itself, it rammed into the left bumper and sent him into a spin, fast enough to make him dizzy, spinning two, three, four times. Then he was off the road, slashing across the shoulder, over the edge, down the slope, rolling like a misshapen barrel down the freeway embankment. BANG, BANG, BA

  * * *

  Tyler woke up on the water-soaked ground, flat on his belly, five feet from the car and drowning in ice plant.

  It was foul stuff; a commonplace ground cover in California for too many years, mostly pulled out now, but here it was thick and sticky as seaweed, a sullen gray-green in the storm light, each stalk as thick as an old woman’s finger. Water was flowing through it, welling up around each stalk. Water was seeping into his mouth, his throat, his lungs.

  SHIT!

  He arched his back, pushed out his arms, threw his head as high as he could to get out of the water. It helped, but only a little. The rain was so heavy, falling so fast, he felt as if he had jumped out of a swimming pool and into the blast of a fire hose.

  It took him a long time to reconcile the view. The ‘Vette was off to one side, resting on its roof with its wheels spinning. Rain flowed off the wreck as if he had parked it under a waterfall. Tyler slowly realized that it – and Tyler himself – was at the bottom of the freeway embankment; the railing was a dim silver line fifty feet and a forty-five degree angle above him.

  He seemed to be okay. No broken bones, no deep cuts or head wounds. He wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten out of the car at all. The last thing he remembered was his car hitting the guard rail with a mad crash and then –

  – here. Drowning in the iceplant, his ears filled with a endless droning whine, but … but …

  He had to get up the road. He had to get help. He was here for a reason. He had to get it done.

  He tried to get to his feet but they flew out from under him. Too great an angle, and the fucking rain and ice plant made the whole slope a field of glittering slime. He tried a second time, just to get to his knees, just his fucking knees, and even then they slipped out from under him. He thumped down on his chest hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs.

  So he belly-crawled. Up the slope, digging his fingers into the ground cover, pushing up with the toes of his tennis shoes, inch after inch up the slope. Soaking wet, covered in mud and slime, but it was working It really was.

  Until the ground started biting him.

  At first Tyler thought it was just the ice plant, but no, this was different: these weren’t the blunt, pulpy fingers of the ground cover; this was sharp and hard, shards of bone or rock, that were pulling at him, plucking at him as he shoved his way toward the highway.

  “Quit it,” he said into the storm as he pushed himself uphill another foot. A nasty little claw caught at the pocket of his shirt and ripped it open; he felt something bite into his skin before he could jerk away, and he said it again: “Quit it!” He could feel something – something, goddamn it – nipping at the fold of his jeans, chewing at his cuff. He kicked it away without even looking back; then his right hand was on the dripping lip of asphalt at the edge of the road, and then his left hand joined it and he hauled himself up, bellowing, onto the roadway.

  Now, at least, he could fucking stand up, even though the wind kept shoving at him and bullets of rain kept trying to knock him down.

  He pivoted unsteadily to peer northward, up the road, then turned to look south. No cars. No headlights. No nothin’. Some bit of soggy debris flapped out of the gray and nearly brained him; he flinched to the side and it whickered away. He put a forearm over his face and tried to shield the worst of the downpour just so he could get his bearings, just so he could fucking see.

  He thought about those lights he’d seen a half-mile back on the east side of the road, and the jittering line of windmills on the west side. But no – he wasn’t going that way. He knew the storm was there. Maybe it broke up ahead, farther to the south, as quickly as it had come. Just like the tule fog. And he knew there had to be a legitimate off ramp somewhere along the way. Someplace to get help. It couldn’t be far. Besides, he had shit to do. He just couldn’t turn tail and run.

  He took a staggering step forward and the sting of a hundred cuts up and down his torso, up and down his legs, hit him all at once. He stopped as much in surprise as pain and looked down at his chest and legs for the first time.

  His clothes were in tatters. Not from the crash; he’d been thrown out of the car with barely a rip or a gash. But whatever was living in that ice plant along the side of the road really had been going at him when he’d belly-crawled back up to the road. He was cut all over.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, barely able to hear his own voice over the roar of the wind.

  It was a bitter truth, but he had no trouble accepting it: he’d been in Dos Bros barely an hour, and it had already tried to eat him alive.

  Literally.

  Two

  Four miles away, in Dos Hermanos’ only medical facility, Lisa Corman lay in her very fresh, very crisp new hospital bed. She was drifting in a pearl gray place without wind or walls, remembering the last conversation of her life.

  She had been arguing – again – with her daughter Rose. That was pretty much all she had been doing with Rose since her daughter had returned home a year ago. Lisa was thirty-six years old, very pretty and moderately successful in real estate, despite the recent economy. Rose was sixteen, dangerously pretty and not yet successful at much of anything, including getting to seventeen. At that moment, they both hated each other with a deep and grinding intensity.

  Lisa remembered that she had been driving – driving through the rain, looking for her ex-husband’s house. It had been … recently, she thought. She was sure of that. Not long ago at all. And she remembered that Rose, as usual, was chipping away at her. Nipping at her.

  “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” Rose said.

  “I don’t like being lost,” Lisa told her.

  “We weren’t lost, Mother,” Rose said. Then, under her breath, but loud enough to be heard: “I didn’t want to go to the mall anyway.”

  “I just thought if you could get something nice, something you liked –”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I know this isn’t easy, Rosie. But it’s not my fault that your father – ”

  She remembered how her daughter’s amazing blue-green eyes flared at that. “You always say that! Always! But it is your fault, Mother. I mean – partly, sometimes, it has to be.”

  “Rose,” she said, almost hissing, “you can’t understand.”

>   “Oh, that helps, Mom. Treat me like a five-year-old. Oh, no, even better: try to bribe me with a trip to the dress shop. That’s gonna help for sure.”

  Lisa remembered thinking we should never have come here. It had seemed like such a good idea just two weeks ago: Ken had a good job now, he was doing some amazing work with VeriSil out in the desert. No more drinking, no more dramatics. Maybe he and his daughter could build some kind of relationship. Not with Lisa herself, of course – never again, that was dead forever. But with her daughter ... maybe.

  She hadn’t counted on just how awful Dos Hermanos, California was going to be. What an awful little town, she had said to herself, even as they crossed the ridgeline and entered the crater valley. What a squat, dirty, depressing little Village of the Damned. She was a little surprised and very disappointed that Kenneth had chosen this place over any other to regroup. This wasn’t exactly Silicon Valley or the Tech Corridor. This wasn’t even some silly game developer in Santa Monica.

  This was just shit.

  The sky had started to cloud over five minutes after they’d passed the WELCOME TO DOS HERMANOS sign at the crest of Highway 121. She frowned at that, too: she’d read in the TripAdvisor that this was one of the sunniest, driest places on earth. She hadn’t even brought a jacket, much less a raincoat. And then somehow she’d gotten turned around or missed an exit or something, and ended up clear across the tiny town, completely lost. She’d actually had to leave the freeway and wander around, looking for someone to give them directions.

  She still wasn’t sure why she’d stopped where she’d stopped. Maybe the weird little hump of the World War II vintage Quonset hut had attracted her attention, or the sudden flare of perfect blonde hair on a perfect body, slouching so unexpectedly in the Quonset’s crumbling parking lot. But she’d stopped, and been dazzled by the beautiful girl’s equally beautiful smile. And she had been perfectly nice, too, even when Rose was bitchy to her. She’d pointed them in the right direction and wished them well.