Creatures of the Storm

  RAIN:

  Creatures of the Storm

  Book One of the Rain Triptych

  A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

  Published at Smashwords

  ISBN: 978-1-61868-605-3

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-606-0

  CREATURES OF THE STORM

  The Rain Triptych Book 1

  © 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.

  Permuted Press

  109 International Drive, Suite 300

  Franklin, TN 37067

  http://permutedpress.com

  For Alice & Lily

  Contents

  What Comes Next

  THE FIRST DAY

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  THE SECOND DAY

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  THE THIRD DAY

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  About the Author

  What Comes Next

  Ken Mackie stood over the body and thought about the last two days.

  None of it seemed possible. None of it made sense.

  Two days ago he was digging in his dying garden, terrified at the thought of a ringing phone.

  Yesterday he was running for his life, escaping from a building as big as a football field, trying to stay alive a little longer as a newborn lake rose around him.

  And now he was standing in the driving rain, looking down at a corpse with a hole as big as a dinner plate in its chest, made by a monster that simply hadn’t existed hours before.

  He fell to his knees as rainwater filled the hollowed body. She had been alive just moments before, grinning, triumphant, ready to go, go …

  He barely saw the dripping shadow standing over him.

  “What do we do now?”

  He looked back across the roiling lake of mud at the ruined house he had loved so much. Years of work, shattered now. Sinking.

  Rain poured out of the black desert sky, blood-warm and so dense it made him choke on his own breath. He couldn’t feel single droplets anymore; it flowed off his head in tiny rivers and disappeared into the darkness.

  It will never end, he told himself, and he believed it. Never.

  They could go north. There was a small chance – a small one – that they could avoid the bone spiders and scumbles and needleseeds, all the eyeless and endlessly sharp creatures of the storm. Someone must have escaped from the drowning town in the last three days. Somebody must have.

  Or they could go south, towards the source of the evil – towards the thing that was trying so hard to kill them all.

  The sky cracked open and thunder fell like a bludgeon on his shoulders. He cringed under the power of it, still staring at the body as the water rose to cover it forever.

  “Please,” the looming shadow said again. “Tell me: what are we going to do?”

  Ken looked up with empty eyes.

  He had no idea.

  None at all.

  THE FIRST DAY

  “Swift as a shadow; short of any dream; brief as the lightning in the coiled night.”

  - William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

  One

  Ken Mackie would always remember where it began: in his failing desert garden under a hazy blanket of spring heat. He had spent more than a year trying to coax something, anything, out of that sad patch of dirt behind his sprawling hacienda. He had churned a hundred bags of fertilizer into the crumbling soil, he had sown every seed that Dos Hermanos Feed and Grain could find. Hundreds of gallons of water had disappeared into the dust without so much as a stain, like spit on a sponge. And in all the hours he’d spent outdoors, painted in sweat and raising blisters, never once had it actually rained.

  Not until today.

  It started when he was scratching at the chalky, pale grit and trying to think only of what he was doing at that precise moment: the tool in his hand, the dirt under his nails, the sudden turn of his wrist. The sickly green plant in front of him – what was that, a watermelon vine? A tomato? – looked half-dead now, flattened against the parched earth as if it had been stepped on by a desert boot.

  How did I let this happen? he asked himself. He wasn’t thinking only of his tiny, ill-advised garden. He meant everything: the stupid contract that had brought him to the ass-end of nowhere, his headlong flight from Los Angeles and his daughter and his wife (all right, his ex-wife), his –

  The cell phone at his hip played the opening bar of “What'll I Do?”, and Ken jumped in surprise. He plucked it off his belt and peered at the screen.

  Great, he told himself as he tapped it. Just what I needed

  “Hello, Marty,” he said. He was already tired of the conversation and it hadn’t even begun.

  “Where is it, Ken?”

  “It’s not ready.”

  He could almost hear his nervous little boss scowling and twitching on the other end. Ken had promised Marty, VP of Product Development at VeriSil International, a prototype of “Everybody’s Assistant” no later than March first. It was going to be great, a personal assistant/organizer that was everything Siri wanted to be and wasn't, a true artificial intelligence, as smart and responsive as any human being. Effortless voice recognition, flawless human-sounding vocal synthesis – not that tinny waka-waka the Apple product made – high conversational functionality, continuing self-actualized upgrades, background RF satellite uplinks for high-level “fuzzy” queries, he had promised all of it. He had convinced the big guys at VeriSil that EA was going to be it, the first killer app of the year, maybe the decade, a nearly seamless and individualized ‘personality’ for the masses.

  That deadline had passed almost two months ago. Ken Mackie was late. Very late.

  “I don’t have to tell you what a mess this is,” Marty said, painful and annoying as a fly stuck in his ear.

  Ken sighed. “No, you don’t.”

  “You have handed me one total, rolling, six-by-six-foot fuck-up, you know that.”

  Ken stood up straight, knees popping, and gazed blindly into the crater valley below his rented home. The sad little town of Dos Hermanos, California looked like a set of worn-out building blocks tumbled on the desert floor below him. I’m king of the butterflies! He quoted only to himself. King of the air! Ah, me! What a throne! What a wonderful chair!

  “Give me one more week, Marty,” he said aloud, knowing it was a lie even as he said it.

  “Kenny, come on!” Marty sounded ready to cry. “I got a whole development team here screaming at me!”

  “One more week. Then I’ll deliver the full package – working m
odel, code, everything.” I’m Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! For I am the ruler of all that I –

  A drop of rain as big as a Concord grape plopped onto the top of Ken’s head.

  He looked up in dumb surprise. Rain? he thought. Here? It hadn’t rained in Dos Hermanos in more than four years. This was the most arid spot in North—

  Another drop hit him right in the center of his upturned forehead. Almost involuntarily, he backed up and put himself under the wide eaves of the hacienda, shoulder blades bumping against the soft adobe bricks. It made him feel oddly trapped, even out in the open.

  More drops fell. And more. Suddenly the rain was thumping against the ground, a dull drumming that grew louder and more insistent every second. A roll of thunder grumbled out of the north, and Ken felt a chill when he looked downhill again. The town had been replaced by a strange, colorless mist. Dos Bros was nothing more than a smudged blur now.

  “Come in for a meeting,” Marty said. “Tomorrow, ten a.m.”

  “Jesus, Marty, you want me to get this done, or you want to waste time with–”

  “Tomorrow,” Marty said flatly. It was the first time he'd sounded certain about anything in the entire conversation. “Ten a.m. The boss – the big boss, Mr. Josephson himself – is gonna be here. You have to show him what you have. And it has to be something real this time, Kenny. Something we can stand on.”

  Ken put a hand over his eyes and squeezed. Oh, Christ, he thought. I am in so much trouble. When he took the hand away, he could see that the ground was mottled now, uneven and discolored like blistering skin. Droplets gusted onto his cheeks, warm as blood.

  “Look,” he said, desperate to end the call, “I have to go. My daughter’s about to get here and–”

  “Your daughter? Oh, man, that’s great!”

  Ken closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “No, it’s not,” he said. “But it won’t get in the way. I promise. I just have to go, that’s all.”

  “All right, Ken. But–”

  “I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Tomorrow,” Marty repeated.

  “Ten a.m., Marty. I heard you.”

  Ken tapped the phone off and looked back at the half-dead plants in his garden. “Chow down, you poor bastards,” he said, then edged his way along the side of the house until he came to the sliding glass doors that opened into his study. Another roll of thunder rose up out of the ground as he slipped inside.

  The study was beautiful and serene, all teakwood and leather-bound books bought by the pound. His desk was ominously clean, only a computer monitor with the keyboard hidden in a flat drawer.

  “Maggie,” he said, “what is that all about?”

  Maggie answered in a mellow, slightly amused voice. “Which that is that?” she asked.

  “The rain, damn it,” he said. He ran his fingers through his hair. They came away wet and gritty, a mixture of sweat and dirt and rain water.

  The monitor on his desk flickered, and an enhanced satellite map appeared: a perfect brown oval surrounded by flat desert yellow. The oval was the meteor crater they called the Valle de Los Hermanos; the irregular blue blotch inside it was the town, neatly labeled DOS HERMANOS, CA, 14:15 PDT. A thin red line, twisted as a capillary and marked as CA HWY 181, connected DH to Barstow, almost 150 miles away. As Ken watched in silence, a swarm of gray-blue blots scuttled along the top of the screen.

  “An unusually wet cell, part of a distant tropical storm series in the northern Gulf of California, is backing up against the Piedras Blancas Range,” Maggie told him, “causing the formation of thunderheads. There will be some heat lightning, possibly resulting in brush fires in the foothills. However, the cell is expected to pass at least thirty miles to the north of us. It will dissipate entirely by midnight tonight. Chance for local precipitation is negligible.”

  Ken smiled and shook his head. “You know,” he said, “Fifty years ago, I would have grunted, ‘Gonna rain?’, and my faithful Gal Friday – that would be you, Maggie – would have stuck a pencil in her bun and said, ‘Don’t think so, Boss.’”

  “You asked.”

  He sighed. “Yes, I did. It’s my own damn fault.”

  He looked down at the single photograph on his nearly vacant desk: Ken, Lisa, and Rose, taken more than two years ago. He loved that picture. It captured perfectly what they had been, who they had been: Lisa’s reluctant smile, Rose’s mouth open in happy astonishment, his own wide grin as he threw his arms around them both.

  What had happened to that girl in the picture, he wondered. That Rose had been a sarcastic fourteen-year-old fascinated by politics; an intense twelve-year-old who was dedicating her life to veterinary medicine; a serious nine-year-old obsessed with PlayStation. He couldn’t make any connection between that Rose and the one who was about to arrive – the hollow-cheeked teenager, white as typing paper, last seen lying on the gurney in the St. Johns Hospital ER. The one in the smeared, stolen makeup, with a witch’s brew of cocaine, meth, and something they never identified swirling through her veins, who had awakened, taken a single look at him, and said “Fuck you,” in a sandpaper whisper he never would have recognized…just before she passed out for a week.

  “Boss…” Maggie said, almost gently.

  “What?”

  “They’re at the front gate. I’m letting them in.”

  It was like a bucket of cold water in the face. “Shit,” he said. He looked around the study as if there was somewhere else to go. Then he took a deep breath and started down the long hallway to the front of the house.

  A flash of blue-white light exploded over his head as he opened the front door. Thunder rolled through him like the roar of a passing train.

  “Maggie,” he said, “I think we need to redefine the concept of ‘negligible precipitation’.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” she told him. Her voice was tinny and distanta few feet onto the porch.

  There was the car, rising up over the first ridge, half a mile away on the edge of the property. He could see the gray silhouettes of two figures in the front seat, and the jittering aura of raindrops jumping like popcorn off the hood and roof.

  Silently, suddenly, a bright red ATV, a squat little bug-shape, nothing more than a curved and shining cowling with huge cartoon-sized tires, shot over the low ridge ahead of Lisa’s BMW and slammed into the road right in front of the car.

  The BMW swerved and plunged into the muddy ditch at the side of the road, rear wheels spinning madly. In a heartbeat it shot completely off the road and tipped forward, then lurched downhill at high speed. Ken watched helplessly as two things happened at once: the ATV threw out a rooster-tail of muddy water, surged up the steep incline on the far side of the road and disappeared…and the BMW slammed grille-first into a granite boulder as big as a steamer trunk.

  He shouted into the storm as the car went up on its nose, back wheels spraying mud and water. The BMW teetered there, balanced on its headlights, and for one horrible, endless moment he could see his ex-wife and his daughter through the windows. Lisa had one hand braced on the wheel, the other thrown in front of Rose; Rose herself was pushed back in the passenger seat, as far away from the windshield as she could get. Then the sky cracked open in a burning white flash –

  – and the car fell onto its roof with a thundering SLAM, wheels in the air. The windshield shattered into white crystals, doors flying open, roof collapsing.

  “Maggie! Maggie! Call 911!”

  He didn’t wait to find out if he’d been heard. He jumped off the porch and ran down the quarter-mile of road, sandy mud shifting under him.

  “ROSE! LISA!”

  He slipped and slid down the incline to the side of the car. The rain roared and gurgled all around him.

  “ROSE!”

  He knew they were dead. He knew it. First there was Pat, then the divorce, then hiding in the desert and now this.

  Now he had lost everything.

  Two

  Lucy Armbruster looked
deeply into the blank young faces staring up at her and seriously considered mass murder.

  You little bastards. I come all the way down here in your hour of need, and the best you can do is gape at me like a bunch of sheep.

  It was obvious that the combined second through eighth grade classes of the Dos Hermanos Public School were just as bored as she was. They had sat and squirmed through her forty-five minute presentation on “The Living Desert” only because their teachers were lined up at the back of the Cafetorium like vultures on a power line, waiting for somebody to make trouble.

  This is what I get for being nice, she told herself, staring down at them from the stage. Another line drive to the tits. She scrubbed at her short russet hair in a habitual gesture of annoyance and self-control. This was all Frannie’s fault, she decided. She was simply trying to do what Frannie would have wanted, trying to help this pathetic little town through its current crisis. And what do I get? Cattle. Worse: pre-teen cattle.

  “Okay,” she said. “Enough. I’m only going to share one more thing with you, and then I’ll let you go.”

  There were a few faint, sarcastic cheers from the back of the house. You and me both, she thought. She reached down under the podium, dug her hand into the box she had brought with her, and held up a loose fist, leaking dirt and rocks.

  “What’s this?” she asked them.

  A little boy in the first row – one of the precocious ones she hated, the kind who always had the answer hiding in his mouth – piped up with “Dirt!”

  Ass-kissing dolt. “This guy here said ‘dirt,’” she said aloud. “And he’s partly right. Soil, stones, bits of plant matter. I picked this up right here from your playground, so it’s nothing special…but there’s something hiding in it, right now. You know what?”

  Nothing again, though this time they actually seemed to be paying attention. “Seeds,” she said, and she let the dirt pour out right onto the podium. It made a sandy, hollow thump-bump-hiss sound as it fell.