Voices of the Storm Page 15

  The end.

  Seventeen

  The first night of the storm was a relatively quiet one for Dos Hermanos, especially in view of what would happen next.

  The rain that began at 11:14 that morning continued. It didn't grow much worse after the first lightning storms, but it didn't get any better either. It was relentless, unending, the same thundering waterfall at two a.m. that it had been at two p.m.

  Sometime during the night the construction site on the east side of the VeriSil campus began to teem with a new kind of life. The tiny attic of the Dos Hermanos Public School became a refuge for a far more familiar but no less dangerous species. Herb McCandless' DH Emporium, the one and only shopping mall in town, shifted on sand that should never have been its foundation when the soil first began to liquefy and then began to move with a mind of its own.

  A few very smart or easily frightened citizens suddenly decided to visit a distant friend or family member. One hundred and thirty-two made it out that first night, and found a hell of a surprise on the other side of the Notch. Three hundred and eighteen more died during that same eleven hours, early victims, like Rex Tartaglione. They were the unlucky ones; they met the first few creatures of the storm.

  That, of course, was only the beginning.

  The electrical storms were the most terrifying. The waves of lightning that spanned the Valle always began in the same place. The first strikes, the ones Lucy saw from her office, hit Rocky Point, the highest reach of the Northern Rim, far above the Notch. Then the front moved south very slowly, lightning striking left and right, back and forth, like the ponderous march of a spider as big as God. The strikes returned every forty-five minutes to an hour all night long, on past dawn. And they ended in the same place every time, fading into a flurry of sizzling bolts at the foot of the sloping black expanse of Two Brothers’ double peaks.

  Just before midnight that night, Lucy Armbruster returned to the Tomas Rivera Agricultural Station far to the north, below the Notch and Rocky Point. She found that Station deserted and the doors wide open, lights still burning in the reception area, doors unlocked on all sides. She cursed that idiot Cindy Bergstrom and wondered briefly why she hadn’t seen her with her sister Mindy at the Town Meeting. Not that it mattered now. She had work to do.

  She went to her office and called up the latest satellite data on her laptop. None of it was good. When she tried to e-mail her colleagues back at the University, then tried to contact other schools, nothing happened. No e-mail was getting through, not even to law enforcement or FEMA. Nothing.

  She tried to call her former office mate in Riverside, and the phone didn’t even ring. She tried calling her cold and heartless sister in Seattle. Nothing. It didn't make any sense, she had four bars, but when she entered the number…not even static. It was like it was blocked.

  Though she didn't know it then, internet, cell phone, and even land line service to all of Dos Hermanos had been cut off at precisely 8:17 p.m., while most of the town was in the Conference Center. It would never be restored.

  On a whim, she tried calling the Sheriff’s Department. That worked with no trouble at all. Mindy Bergstrom answered, sounding obscenely perky. “The Sheriff’s already gone home for the night,” she said. “He’ll be back bright and early tomorrow. Would you like to leave a messa—”

  Lucy hung up. She tried calling outside town, to the Highway Patrol office in Barstow. Then Bakersfield. Then Palm Springs. And every time: nothing.

  Inside the Valle, she could call anywhere she liked. Beyond the rim, however…

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said aloud, startled at how loud her voice was in the empty building. “It’s like we’re quarantined…or…”

  Or trapped.

  She scrubbed at her short russet hair and tried to calm down. You’re getting paranoid, she told herself. Don’t jump to conclusions.

  It was time for a cup of coffee. She’d go the break room, make a pot, and then call Cindy Bergstrom at home and ask her what the hell she was thinking, leaving the place wide open like this.

  It'll be fine, she told herself as she settled down to a long night.

  A short distance to the southwest, at the Mackie hacienda, the spider-god would have found Rose Mackie lying alone on the bed in her beautiful, silent second-story room, staring at the glowing screen of her iPhone and listening to the sound of her own beating heart.

  It was late, and her mother was certainly sleeping. However, there was something wrong here, something terribly wrong, and she needed to talk to her.

  Fuck it, she thought. It’s not the first time I’ve woken her out of a sound sleep. She hit the speed dial for her mother’s cell.

  Her call went to voice-mail immediately.

  She tried to google the clinic’s address, but the internet failed her. She searched the room a bit, and found a phone book politely stored in the drawer of her bedside table. Thank you, Maggie, she thought. Or Dad. Or whatever. She located the phone number for the Borrego Clinic’s 24-hour desk with no trouble.

  It rang seven times before anyone answered, and even then the female voice on the other end sounded unaccountably angry, as if Rose had already done something to piss her off.

  “Can you tell me the status of Mrs. – Ms. – Lisa Corman?”

  “She’s fine,” the woman said shortly. There was a yelp and the clang of a metal behind. There goes somebody’s bedpan, Rose thought, and couldn’t help but smile. “She’s asleep. Why are you calling now?”

  “I just wanted to check,” Rose said, annoyed at being challenged.

  “She was up earlier,” the woman said. “We gave her something, a sedative. She’s sleeping.”

  Rose frowned. “You gave a sedative to a concussion patient? Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. I wasn’t there. I don’t kno—Carrie, damn you!”

  “Let me talk to somebody else. Let me talk to a doctor.”

  “We’re busy! Everyone’s busy! Call tomorrow. In fact, come get her tomorrow. We need the bed!”

  She hung up. Rose pulled the phone away from her ear at the harsh clack of the disconnection and stared at it in disbelief.

  “What the hell…?”

  She called again and the phone rang and rang. Even without another conversation with the angry woman, she knew she’d been right about one thing.

  Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

  Down in the hacienda’s study, directly below Rose, Ken was hearing things. He'd long since become used to the thumps and crackles of the mini-mansion. Every house had them. And of course the wind, rain, and thunder of the storm had added a whole new orchestra to the night.

  This was something more, a rhythmic crunching, grinding, cracking sound, sometimes loud, sometimes barely above a whisper. It was bothering the hell out of him, too. He was trying to concentrate, trying to get the script for the presentation down perfectly, but that goddamn noise...

  “Maggie?”

  “Lisa is fine. She’s asleep. I called and asked again, and they hung up on me.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask,” he lied. “Do… do you hear that? What the hell is it?” He heard it again, that grumbling, grinding rats-in-the-walls sound.

  “What the hell is what?”

  Ken suddenly realized the AI couldn't differentiate those particular sounds from the chaos of other audio artifacts hitting her microphones. It was a pattern-recognition function still reserved only for humans. It was odd, but strangely comforting. At least there were some things they couldn't do. Yet. It didn't really matter. It was annoying, that was all. It couldn't be an actual threat, even if... even if it did sound like something huge was chewing on the house.

  Something huge and hungry.

  Mindy Bergstrom, holding down the fort from the Sheriff’s Department Headquarters, dead center in the Valle, tried to call her sister for the twenty-seventh time. She knew it was the twenty-seventh: she was keeping a tidy little row of hash-marks on the blotter in front of h
er.

  She couldn’t keep the tremble out of her voice, hard as she tried. “Cindy? You call me, now. I’ve been trying and trying, and you wouldn’t believe all the crazy calls we’ve been getting from all over town, so…seriously now, I’m not joshin’, you call me.”

  She hung up the hand set very carefully, like it would jump out of her hand at any moment. She hoped it would ring. She really did. She was so worried.

  She jumped, startled, at the bray of the police band radio at her shoulder. A grating, blurred version of Bo Cameron’s voice, choked with static, came out of the three-inch speaker. “I'm outside the Emporium,” he said. “Looks quiet.”

  “Bo,” she said, “you go home for the night. You can’t do nothing single-handed, and the Sheriff and Jimmy are already signed out.”

  “But what if—”

  “I’ll call if there’s an emergency,” Mindy said. “You keep roamin’ around out there in the dark and wet and you’re likely to catch your death.”

  There was a pause, and then he grated, “Roger that.” She could hear the pouting even through the static.

  He signed off and she turned away from the twenty-year-old police band radio.

  After a moment’s thought, she reached over and pulled the cord out of the back of the official Sherriff’s Department land line. The crazy calls had started to taper off after midnight, but really, she couldn’t take another one. Cindy could still get hold of her through her cell phone, and the boys always knew that was the number to call if they really had to talk, so that was fine. She didn’t want to think about the rest of it for a while. When she did, she could feel the town dying all around her, and that was just too much right now.

  Really, it was just too much.

  The rest of Dos Hermanos scarcely knew what was happening. They electricity was still on, and even if satellite TV and the internet was screwed up because of the storm, they still had their DVDs and reading lamps, their tablets and e-readers. Most of the townspeople spent the night tucked away, watching movies, reading, or simply turning in early.

  Remarkably few people enjoyed sex, drugs, or drinking that night, including those who usually made a habit of it. There was something about the storm itself that discouraged it, that made you want to stare into the dark and do nothing, or sleep, or simply stay still. When sleep did come, it wasn't especially restful. Most of the surviving men and women of Dos Hermanos awoke on Friday morning feeling just as weary as they had felt when they'd gone to bed Thursday night, maybe even a little worse.

  Still, they were glad to see the new day, even if the light was the color of lead and just as heavy. There was work to be done, clocks to punch, meetings to attend. So they got up. They showered. They went to work. They did what they thought they had to do, and not a speck more. And they waited for the rain to stop.

  After all, they told themselves, three thousand voices, minus the recently escaped and the already dead, it couldn't get much worse. This wasn't the end of the world, was it? Seriously, this was only a goddamn rain storm. This was the twenty-first century, this was America, they were almost all employed (even if they hated their jobs) and well-fed (if not well-nourished), and living in a nice little town where no one could hurt them, a safe and simple place to hide from a frightening and complicated world.

  The rain would stop soon. It always did.

  Really, it couldn't get much worse.

  THE SECOND DAY

  Over hill, over dale,

  Thorough bush, thorough brier,

  Over park, over pale,

  Thorough flood, thorough fire,

  I do wander everywhere,

  Swifter than the moon's sphere.

  - William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

  Eighteen

  The presentation was not going well. Not at all.

  Simply getting there had been a nightmare. The floodwaters rose with every hundred feet Ken traveled south in the crater valley, and he could have sworn the Rover had floated the last forty feet to the underground parking structure. It had started off badly, from 9:45 a.m. on Friday morning, the moment he’d walked into too-large, too-empty, too-cold Conference Room One on the seventh floor of VeriSil's corporate headquarters.

  He hated this room. It was cruelly spacious. The human voice sounded small and unimportant in its hollow, lacquered depths, and the room-wide, floor-to-ceiling picture window that spanned one wall was blinding in its brightness and beauty. It showed the steep face of the South Ridge, a few feet away, dotted with vegetation and earth tones. It made the room even larger, even more impressive, and made the unprepared feel that much less significant in the Grand Scheme of Things.

  That was exactly how Ken was feeling at the moment. Despite his best efforts, he looked damp and nervous and, worse yet, unready as he faced the two most powerful men in the company.

  Carl Josephson, the severely trim CEO of VeriSil, was forty-eight years old, sleek and bald and lipless. His smile reminded Ken of the expressions drawn on Disney cartoon snakes like the ones in Jungle Book or Robin Hood: far too wide, slightly goofy, and very, very dangerous. Josephson quite intentionally displayed it on a regular basis, as if to counter the natural horror his normal expression generated, and Josephson had given him one of those smiles when they shook hands twenty minutes ago.

  “Here’s your chance, Ken,” he had said in a surprisingly mild and resonant baritone. “Wow me.”

  Wow, Ken thought. Wow.

  Josephson wasn’t smiling now. In fact, he looked as if he’d swallowed a bug. He had not said a single word during the first twenty minutes of the stumbling presentation. His ubiquitous and over-lotioned executive assistant Stefan Cling, round-faced and doughy, had spoken for him, pursing his lips and looking sour at even being out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere to meet this loser.

  And then there was Ken’s old buddy Marty Fein, sweating like a pig and looking even more squashed than usual. He had been radiating uncontrolled anxiety like a space heater with a busted switch ever since Ken had arrived. Now he was obviously ready to melt directly into the shag carpet.

  Ken had been trying to explain the concept of Everybody’s Assistant, and he had been doing a remarkably bad job of it. There was a tattooed drift of bullet-pointed pages, schematics, and full-color screen shots scattered across the polished walnut table in front of him, but none of them made much sense. He even had a giant flatscreen monitor on the wall behind him, cued and ready to wow, but he hadn’t put anything up yet.

  He was lost.

  “Look,” he said, clenching his fist and then forcing it open again. “I know this sounds like a whole lot of nothing right now,” he said. “Just another jumped-up version of Outlook with really good voice recognition or something. Big deal.”

  Josephson’s lips got even thinner. He was obviously agreeing with him.

  Ken nodded tightly. “Okay. Okay. I know it’s only, you know, paper. I can show you what I mean.”

  “Please do,” Josephson said, clearly adding in the next two minutes, or else… without saying it aloud.

  Cling leaned to the side and spoke to his boss out of the side of his mouth, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. “It’s getting late,” he said. “We better start thinking about that long drive out of here.”

  Josephson ignored him.

  Ken opened his battered briefcase again. “It’s right in here,” he said. “I burned a demo DVD late last night. It’ll show you what…”

  He pawed through the papers still in his valise, but came up with nothing.

  “It’ll show you what…” he said again, and zipped open the side pocket. There was nothing inside.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ken,” Marty said. “Don’t tell me.”

  Ken looked up at him, stark terror in his eyes. “I put it right here,” he said. “I’m sure I did, right before I left the house.”

  Cling gave a long, liquid sigh. “God…” he whispered loudly.

  Ken kept looking. And
looking. And looking.

  The speaker phone in the middle of the table went bleep. “Mr. Mackie?” said a husky British female voice. “Maggie is on the line. She insists on speaking with you.”

  Josephson almost smiled.

  Marty winced. “Oh, for–” He looked at the CEO. “His secretary,” he said. “Really nice woman, but Adrienne, tell her we’re in conference.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. She says it’s urgent.”

  “Umm…it might be about the demo disk,” Ken said, clearing his throat. “If you don’t mind?

  Josephson gave him half a nod. He was watching him very, very closely.

  “Put her through,” Marty said, trying not to look at anyone.

  Maggie’s pleasant, measured tones were a welcome relief. “Ken?” she said. “I’m afraid you left the demo disk here.”

  He smiled weakly. “I was afraid of that. At least I wasn’t going crazy. Ha. Ha.”

  No one else smiled.

  “I’d e-mail or upload it to you, but you know it’s far too big for that,” she said from the phone.

  “Shall we send a messenger over?” Marty said.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Fein,” Maggie said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “How did that necklace work out for you?”

  Marty smiled spontaneously, then looked embarrassed. “An anniversary present,” he explained to the cold-eyed men next to him. “Maggie had a great suggestion for my wife’s present this year.” Then, to Maggie: “Great idea, Maggie. Thanks.”

  “I hope it got you everything you wanted, sir,” she said slyly.

  Even Josephson had to smile at that. “Yeah,” Marty said, “it did fine, thanks.”

  Cling looked impatiently at his Rolex. “We really can’t wait for a messenger service,” he said. “Mr. Josephson has an evening appointment back in Westwood, and the weather —”