Voices of the Storm Read online

  Who was to say the Messiah would know he was the Messiah at all until God told him? Even the near miss, that preacher from Nazareth, seemed to have had a normal childhood before he stepped out at age 30 and began his slow walk to Golgotha. So…it could happen. One day the sky could open up and the celestial finger could point to him, him, Michael Steinberg, and his destiny would be revealed.

  It was a common dream. Lots of little Jewish boys had it. But he hadn’t forgotten like most of them had.

  He stood in the middle of his laboratory, surrounded by the clacking, ticking, popping of his creatures as they grew. He spread his arms wide to take in all that he saw, and it was good. So good.

  I was wrong, he told himself. He wasn’t God, though he could hear God’s Voice in his head. He wasn’t Adam, though he had been charged to name all the beasts of this new world. He was something in between: part God, part Man, more than both.

  It’s obvious, he realized.

  I’m Jesus.

  Twelve

  Rebecca stepped out of the Agricultural Station, staggered to the left, tripped forward, and stood hanging on a light post in the parking lot to keep from being pushed flat onto her face.

  Hey Mom and Dad, she thought giddily. You ought to see me now.

  Rebecca had grown up in Santa Cruz, California, home of one of the most hospitable climates in the known world. Her parents, one black, one white, were both products of the Bay Area as well, and they had fully expected her to be like them and never stray too far from Paradise. She remembered clearly how they had responded to the news that she was going to do her graduate work not at UCSC, or even at nearby UC Davis, but in dirty, conservative, hot little Riverside, of all places. When she’d announced her appointment to the Anza-Borrego Desert for an inexplicable one-year internship…

  Little did they know, she thought as she braced herself against the battering wind and staggered across the parking lot, rooster-tails of water spraying in front of her boots. The wind was like a physical force; the raindrops felt like grapeshot against her unprotected flesh.

  Why did I agree to do this again? She knew the answer without even thinking about it. Easy, because LUCY asked.

  Rebecca had been happily and openly bisexual since early puberty, and her parents, both far left of center, had seen no problem with her succession of boyfriends and girlfriends…so far. She was sure, however, they would freak if they guessed at her true feelings for the knobby, foul-tempered, teacher she was crushing on so completely at the moment. Even Rebecca herself didn’t quite understand it. Yes, she was well aware that Lucy was almost twice her age. Which mattered exactly why?

  Rebecca thought about what the relationship meant, if it meant anything at all, as she climbed the outdoor stairs to the shoulder of Highway 181. It was well past five o’clock, and the last of the natural light was slipping away. She could barely see the tarmac in front of her rubber boots, much less anything resembling an oncoming car. One bit of bad timing, and a truck could come rushing out of the darkness and squash her flat.

  Fortune favors the bold and all that shit, she thought, half-quoting her mother. Without another moment’s hesitation, she stomped into the road, head up and eyes forward. Her boots sent out broad crescents of spray with every footfall, and soon enough, sooner than she’d expected, she was across the highway and standing at the wide wooden gate to the wind farm.

  She tried to remember the last time she had made the walk over to see Fender in his native habitat, and couldn’t come up with a date. It must have been longer than she’d realized. She distinctly remembered that the carefully maintained white-gravel path from the highway to his trailer was wide enough to accommodate three people walking side-by-side, and that the grass that surrounded his massive windmills was always meticulously trimmed. Now the path was barely wide enough for one person to walk, and the grass was so long and invasive it looked shaggy. Not at all the image that Fender worked so hard to maintain.

  The sheets of rain suddenly, momentarily, cleared and she got an unobstructed view of the windmills. She stopped dead in her tracks.

  The windmills were singing. No, she corrected herself. As her father would say, Check that. The windmills were singing and dancing.

  They sprang up out of the deep green sod, flawless white towers of heavy pipe and plastic more than three stories tall. At the top were the wide propellers – vanes, she remembered, hearing Fender’s uncharacteristically serious voice in her head. They’re called vanes, man. And now, in the ripping gale of the storm, those vanes were spinning so fast, so irregularly they were a milky blur at the apex of the towers.

  The music came from the roaring, whining, swooping sound of the vanes as the wind screamed through them, hollow, howling tones that wandered up and down the scale, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Each tower sang a different song in a different key; all of them blended together into a wild, wailing roar that was more animal than mechanical.

  It was the wind that made them dance, too. They shimmied and trembled, flexed and bobbled, waggled and twisted, coming that close to lifting their concrete-bound feet right out of the earth. In fact, Rebecca thought that if she watched a moment longer, one of the towers would actually lift a leg and come walking towards her in a wind-driven march towards the open road, its whirling vanes roaring.

  The massive, multi-story strangeness of it made her take a step back, and she felt the shaggy grass rustle and pluck at the heels of her boots. She jerked forward again, terrified.

  No, she told herself very sternly, REALLY now, FUCK that noise. She wrapped the pea coat tightly around her shoulders and ran the last fifty feet of gravel path, past the stout wooden sign that read SUNMILL WIND FARMS – FREE TOURS AT 1:00 and 3:00 COME WIN THE ENERGY WAR…WITH WIND! She had always loved that hand-painted sign – so weird and friendly, so Fenderish. She ignored it now as she sprinted to the silver slug-shape of the Airstream trailer, jumped up onto the wooden porch, and pounded on the screen door with the flat of her hand.

  “Fender? Fender, it’s Rebecca, from the Station! Let me in!” Not How are you or I came by to check up on you. Just a desperate Let me in!

  The screen collapsed under her hand and the pressed-wood door flew inward with a bang. Rebecca fell into the humid warmth of the trailer and nearly lost her balance in the debris that covered the floor.

  The trailer was in shambles. It looked as if every container, every jar or bottle or jug in the place had been opened, emptied, and thrown on the sodden carpet.

  The sound of the rain on the trailer’s stainless steel roof was deafening. “Fender!” she shouted. She could barely hear her own voice. “FENDER!”

  Beneath the rattle-bang of the rainfall she heard another equally wet sound: rushing water. Gushing water, actually, like an open fire hose. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen nook.

  “Fender!” she bellowed. “It’s Rebecca! Are you OKAY?” She kicked her way through the wreckage to the narrow little door and peered in.

  Fender was sitting huddled over the sink, his neck twisted, his head turned, so his mouth was suspended directly under the water faucet in his small one-basin sink. The water was on full-blast, pouring directly into his yawning mouth.

  Rebecca simply stared for the longest time. He was conscious, that much was clear. She could see his Adam’s apple, half-obscured by his drenched beard, working up and down and up and down.

  “Fender?” she said again. She put out a hand and touched his knee. “Fen—”

  He jumped like a startled animal, leaping up, water spraying everywhere. “Wha – Oh!” He turned and saw her, and for a moment Rebecca was positive he didn’t recognize her. Then: “Oh! Oh!” He twisted again, facing her, unmindful of the water gushing from the tap. “Rebecca,” he said, his voice raspy and dry. “Hi. Hey. Nice to…um…”

  He looked awful. His skin had turned dull, almost ashen. His eyes, usually bright and a little unfocused, were tiny dark beads buried in nests of new wrinkles, and there was a network of
cracks in dried skin around his mouth, on his neck, even between his fingers. It looked like he’d lost twenty pounds since she’d last seen him, and she’d seen him only hours before.

  “My God, Fender,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Great!” he said, and swept a handful of sodden hair away from his face. “Fine, really. It was only…some kind of fever or something, you know? Makes you thirsty as hell. Totally thirsty.” Without a thought he cupped a hand under the running water and threw it square in his face. He didn’t even close his eyes. An instant later he seemed to be dry again, as if the moisture had evaporated…or been absorbed. “Damn,” he said. “Damn, I’m dry.”

  He looked at her with a strange, thoughtful expression. A speculative look, as if he was judging how easy it would be to pop her open and drink up the paltry few quarts of blood and fluids she carried in her body.

  That’s crazy, she told herself. Fender’s a gentle old soul, he’d never…

  His attention abruptly shifted, away from her and to a new inspiration. “I got it!” he said. “That’s the ticket!” He threw open the doors to the cabinet below the sink and began rummaging through the pile of cleaning fluids and tools hidden there.

  “Fender,” she said, worried. “That stuff is poisonous, honey, you don’t want to–”

  He pulled out a long green-painted crowbar, sharpened and notched at one end and viciously curved at the other. He stood up and hefted the bar in one hand, testing its weight…and for the first time, Rebecca realized how big Fender really was.

  “That's the ticket,” he said again. He looked right at Rebecca and grinned like a crazed animal, and for one horrible instant she was sure that he was going to split her open her like melon, right up the middle.

  Instead, Fender heaved on the bar, bellowing with all his might, swinging the tool straight up and whanging it into the aluminum ceiling right over his head.

  Rebecca jumped in surprise at the sound of the collision. Before she could say a real word, Fender pulled the crowbar loose of the three-inch dent he’d made and swung it upwards again, even harder. The second clanging, crunching whanngg! was like the ringing of a broken bell.

  “Fender!” she screamed! “Stop it!”

  Too late. He had managed to punch a hole through the ceiling, and rainwater was pouring in.

  Fender grinned even wider and jerked on the crowbar twice, pulling part of the torn metal inward. More water gushed right onto his head. “Yes!” he said, elated. He breathed a huge, guttural sigh of relief, tossed the crowbar aside and sat back down in the kitchen chair where she’d found him, head thrown back, arms spread wide. The gout of water from the ceiling pounded directly onto his face, his neck, his chest.

  “Tha-a-a-at’s the ticket,” he said, sighing with relief. “Yeah, thaaa-a-t’s it…”

  Rebecca backed away. He had already forgotten she was there, and that was perfectly fine with her.

  Something was wrong with him. Some toxic substance, or bad drugs, she didn’t know, but she knew she couldn’t help him directly. She’d get back to the Station and call 911. Send them over to get him, make him better.

  Rebecca left him there, sprawled in his waterfall. This is nuts, she told herself as she dragged open the broken front door, horribly glad to be out of the sodden, overheated trailer and back into the storm. This is totally nuts. Without a second thought, she hopped down the wooden stairs, crossed the gravel path and cut to her left, trotting across the overgrown, soggy lawn, in a straight line towards the main gate and the highway. There was no time for pathways, she had to move quickly.

  She was five footsteps into the grass when it started to grab at her feet.

  At first she thought it was just the water that was making it so difficult to walk, making the blades snag her shoes like sea grass could tangle up a diver. She pulled free with some difficulty the first time, then the grass pulled even harder. She was barely able to free herself at all the second time.

  She looked down and saw that it wasn’t the water at all. The grass had grown into silver-green tendrils – tentacles – that were snaking around her feet, her ankles, and even the cuffs of her pants.

  Rebecca stopped walking when she was less than ten feet from the white gravel path. She kicked, hard, and managed to take one step back towards the road, directly towards the stout wooden sign that read TOURS DAILY. That was as far as she could go.

  She pulled one foot free and took another step, then she almost fell over. She had to stagger to keep her balance, and when she plunged her foot back into the grass she saw the rubber was actually cut in a dozen places, deeply slashed as if someone had gone at them with a butcher knife.

  They’re brand new boots, she thought. Fresh out of the closet. How –?

  The grass-blades were tightening around her feet. This time she could see them cutting right through the boots, like razor wire cutting into flesh.

  “Oh my god,” she said, a tiny voice in the roaring of the wind, the hissing of the rain, the singing of the wind towers so close behind her. “Oh my god.”

  She managed to pull her foot up one more time and take a long, lurching step towards the sign, towards safety –

  – and saw as she pulled her leg up, that the boot was gone, cut to shreds, along with three of her toes and a chunk of her heel.

  In one cold flash of clarity, Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson knew what was happening. It was like when she’d cut off the tip of her finger with an X-acto blade, years earlier. The blade had been so thin, so scalpel-sharp, that it had trimmed away a piece of her and she hadn’t even felt it. She hadn’t even realized it until she saw the blood. The razor-grass was like a field full of scalpels, all painlessly slicing her into small pieces.

  The grass was eating her alive, from the bottom up.

  She couldn’t let that happen, she decided. She wouldn’t. She would take one more step, two more at most, and then she could haul herself up on Fender’s stout wooden sign. The grass couldn’t get her there. She would be safe.

  She ducked into the driving rain and kicked as hard as she could. One foot came free and she lunged to take one more step. As her knee came up and her leg pulled away from the tangling grass, she saw that it wasn’t the foot she had freed at all. There was no foot left. It was just a stump that ended in mid-shin, coursing with water and mud and spurting dark blood.

  At that moment, she knew it was too late. Still, she didn’t stop.

  She drove the remains of her leg down again, jamming it against the ground. She held on a moment longer, somehow stayed upright, and directed her fall towards the sign.

  Rebecca wrapped both hands around the heavy wooden uprights as they flew past. She tried to pull herself up, haul herself free. She could feel consciousness slipping from her, draining away like the last of her blood, but she wouldn’t let go. In a last act of defiance, she laced her fingers together and gripped that sign, clutched it, so she wouldn’t fall over. Even as she felt herself slipping into grayness, felt herself dying, she held on and thought of her Mom and Dad one last time, and her first lover, and her last kiss, and that movie she always loved and that dog she would never see again. She thought of Lucy and all the things that would never happen now.

  Still standing, she told herself as the grayness took her away. Still…

  Her body never did fall over. When the razorgrass did all the damage it could, when it reached the maximum cross-section of this particular water-bearing organism, it simply stopped cutting and drank, pulling every molecule of moisture it could through the Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson’s flayed trunk.

  The whole process took less than five minutes. At the end, the beautiful woman’s desiccated body, dry as petrified wood, still clung to the four-by-four posts, remarkably unchanged. She looked like a lovely, bone-dry mannequin standing hip-deep in wet, waving grass, leaning on a wooden sign, clinging to it with a look of infinite sadness.

  It was her final anchor against the storm. An anchor that had inexplicably failed her.


  Thirteen

  “You three are idiots,” Sherriff Peck said to his deputies. “Each of you is actually stupider than the other two. I don't know how you manage it.”

  Jimmy Fultz blinked at him.

  Mindy Bergstrom stuck out her lower lip.

  Bo Cameron stuck out his chin.

  Peck closed his eyes and sighed. “Jesus wept,” he said.

  He had commandeered one of the smaller conference rooms in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Conference Center, a thin-walled, three-story Kleenex box, the bastard child of a federal development grant and the tax windfall that accompanied the arrival of VeriSil International.

  “Let's get this straight,” he said. “This storm is killing us. Half of the south side is already underwater. We lost a line of houses at the bottom of the East Ridge to a mudslide about an hour ago. There's no time and no resources to go looking for those missing kids, so...they're a write off.”

  Bo Cameron worked his prominent jaw a little bit more. “So you mean, they're, like, dead. Or something.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mindy Bergstrom said and shook her round little head. “That's not good at all.”

  Peck bit off another sigh. “Alive, dead, it’s irrelevant,” he said. “We can't go looking for them. We're going to have enough to do just trying to keep this place from going under until the fucking rain lets up. We cannot let the people coming here tonight know that. As far as they're concerned, we are a hundred percent committed to the search.”

  Cameron looked like a bigger, dumber version of Buzz Lightyear without the cool suit; Mindy was the female version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Jimmy Fultz looked like a six-inch ruler: flat and fragile as a fence picket, the same width at shoulder and hips, and six inches too short to be any good to anybody. He actually took his deputy-hat off to scratch the top of his head in consternation, and Peck sighed all over again.