Voices of the Storm Read online

  Brake lights flared. The SUV jumped forward, misting the tarmac. A moment later it was gone, and Cling was standing alone in the middle of Maynard Road, soaked through and dripping like a drowned man.

  There wasn’t a thing Ken could do. He had barely made it up the hill once, and it would take forever to get around to the other side, to Cling, if the road behind him wasn’t underwater already.

  Get a clue, man, he said to the distant figure. There are acres of cars waiting at the off ramp half a mile away. Walk a little, hitch a ride.

  Cling was standing there as if he couldn’t believe what had happened.

  And then the monsters came.

  They skittered out of the sea of mud around Cling, twenty-five, thirty of them, each the size of a small dog (a puppy, Ken thought for some reason. The size of a puppy). For an instant he thought they were impossibly huge spiders, fresh out of some cheesy horror movie, but they didn’t look right. There were too many legs, moving in too many directions at once, and spikes that thrust up from the bodiless center of the things that seemed to grow as he watched.

  They swarmed all around the chubby little man. He stepped back towards the end of the slope, water coursing downhill like a waterfall now, but they were behind him as well. Ken watched in mute horror as they surged up his body, over his shins, over his knees. Cling thrust his hands down to push them off, get away, then snatched them back with a jerk, splatters of blood flying, visible only for a moment against the gray downpour.

  They cut him, Ken realized. All those spikes…

  They climbed up his thighs, to his waist. Cling’s jaw distended as he screamed, so loud and long that Ken though he might have heard it in spite of the storm and the distance: a thin, high, inhuman sound as Cling fell to his knees into the growing mound of twitching creatures that welled up and covered him, cut him up, dragged him into the mud.

  Ten seconds later, there wasn’t even a lump in the roiling mass of…things…to show that a man had been there at all. The creatures separated, spread off in different directions. Some slid down the waterfall of mud into the arroyo…

  And Ken realized they were coming in his direction.

  “Ken,” Maggie said from the phone. “It’s getting worse. You need to get up to West Ridge now.”

  “No shit,” he said, and gunned the engine. He almost lost control three more times as he veered higher, away from the campus, away from the rising water…

  …but not away from the things.

  * * *

  The trip back to the hacienda was long and insane. First he came to a yawning “Y” intersection, one narrow turn to the left, the south, led upward to the crest of the ridge itself. It was really little more than a footpath. He veered right instead, heading more gradually uphill to the north, to the posh high-rent district of West Ridge Road. Reaching the paved suburban streets did no good at all. He had to steer widely around sinkholes as big as trucks that had opened up spontaneously in the middle of the asphalt. Three times he had to back up and try a different route that would take him around fallen trees and six-foot flows of rocky mud. Ultimately he made it to West Ridge Road itself, to the Arco station that marked the midway point between VeriSil and his home, if only to catch his breath.

  The rain pounded down, harder than ever. The clouds were so low they were mere feet above the Rover, pressing down on the canopy over the gas pumps and making the windows of the AM/PM Mini-Mart gleam dully like dead eyes. There were some people moving around inside, he saw, loading up baskets with snack foods and soft drinks, survival supplies for a long weekend stuck inside.

  I think it's going to get worse than that, he thought as he peered through the wavering curtain of rain that flowed down the windshield. This may be problem too big for even Doritos and Coke Zero.

  He took a deep breath and turned the Rover north, up the increasingly steep incline towards the hacienda. It was slow going. Whenever he did manage to move faster than ten miles an hour, he felt as if he was drag-racing through the Andes.

  Less than a half-mile further on, the creatures began to appear. First they were vague shadows barely out of sight, moving in the mist and downpour. Then he saw a flash of gray or black or bone-white, and they began to take shape as they boiled out of the storm.

  Ken stopped using the brake at all. This was not a part of the world where he wanted to take a pause. He wondered at how blind he had been on the trip down hours earlier. Had these things been there when he’d driven down? Had he simply been so preoccupied he hadn’t even noticed the crawling, teetering, churning creatures rising up out of the rushing water all around him?

  Now they were horribly clear, etched against the glittering sheaf of afternoon rainfall. He saw a monster that looked like a huge snake made entirely of bony nodules with a head like a carved jade plant. It slithered across the road inches in front of his SUV, a wriggling fleshless spine looking for...something. Something awful.

  He passed a wide place in the road, what he thought had been a scenic vista barely twenty-fours ago, and he saw a set of flapping, translucent sheets (flumes, they’re called flumes) change course in mid-air to wrap themselves around a red-tailed hawk that was struggling to fly through the storm. The shimmering, silvery sheets brought the bird to the ground like a captured stone. By the time it splashed down five feet from the car, Ken could see it had become nothing but a knot of dried feathers and a single, desiccated claw.

  He'd never been more happy to pass through the river stone pedestals at the end of his driveway. But as he approached he saw a flexing, ashen wall of tumbleweed (no, he corrected himself, hookweeds. They're called 'hookweeds') that looked as if they were woven from bony fishhooks, stretching to block his way.

  No way.

  Ken hunched his shoulders, gripped the wheel, and stomped on the gas, and the Rover surged forward. The hookweeds leaped at the windshield and left scratches like metal teeth.

  What were those things? He thankfully burst through. How had this happened?

  For one moment, as he raced along the last arc of the ridge road to his home, he glimpsed the southern half of the crater valley through the churning gray-on-gray scrim below him. It was a view he’d seen virtually every day for the last two years, and it was unrecognizable now. Half of the South End was already underwater, with only roofs and the tops of high walls still visible. The rest was disappearing, even as he watched.

  The Valle was filling with water like a great, huge bowl. Though the VeriSil campus and construction site had been the first to go, it was clear: this was only the beginning. If the rain didn’t stop now, right now, the whole of the Valle would be underwater very shortly.

  Just get me home, he prayed to a God he’d never really believed in. Just get me home.

  His heart was pounding madly when he caught sight of his hacienda’s lights, pale yellow behind the storm. Relief burst in his chest. He hadn't felt this kind of happiness since he’d come to DH.

  Thank you, he said as he blazed towards the roundabout. Thank you.

  Nineteen

  “What do you mean you’re not coming?” Rose howled.

  “Not yet, I said,” her mother buzzed through the phone. It was the worst connection Rose had ever had on her iPhone.

  “Mom,” she whispered. “You can’t leave me here. This place is so weird. This mechanical voice comes right out of the air, and Dad is acting like a prick about half the time, and…Mom, I keep seeing these things outside.”

  Her mother didn’t say anything for moment. Rose knew what that meant.

  “No, I’m not taking anything!” she snarled.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “No, but if you’d thought it any louder, I’d be deaf! Jesus!”

  “Okay,” Lisa said. “Let me talk to your Dad.”

  A short, stubborn pause. “You can’t,” she said. “He’s not here.”

  “What? Where is he?”

  “He had to go to a meeting at VeriSil.”

  “Great,�
� Lisa said bitterly. “Just like old times.”

  “It was really important. They were going to, like, take away the project or cancel it or something. Maggie told me—”

  “’Maggie’?” Lisa repeated, not quite believing what she was hearing. “The computer told you?”

  Another stubborn pause. “Yes. I mean, why not? Nobody else wants to talk to me.”

  “Honey, I promised Dr. Chamberlain I’d stay for a while and help. Things are pretty crazy now, with the storm and everything, and his other doctor didn’t show up and–”

  “And what? Now you’re Clara Bow?”

  “I think you mean Clara Barton. Clara Bow was a silent movie star.”

  “Great. Fine.” Rose was mad enough to spit bricks, and her mother was talking about dead celebrities.

  “Honey, please try to understand. I’ll be there as soon as–”

  “Oh, I understand,” she said coolly. “You’d rather be in a hospital and Dad would rather be at work than be with me. God help us if both of you were actually in the same place for five minutes.”

  Now her mother sounded as cold as she did. “That’s not fair.”

  “Sure it—”

  “Rose,” Maggie said right behind her.

  She spun around and squeaked.

  “Don’t do that!” she shrieked.

  “Sorry. Your Dad is coming through the main gate, and I think there’s going to be trouble.”

  “Trouble?” Rose echoed.

  “Out in front. It’s a mess.”

  “What’s going on?” Lisa asked through the phone.

  “It’s Daddy,” Rose said. “Something’s going on, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later, okay? I’m going to call in two hours.”

  “Two hours,” Lisa said. “Every two hours.”

  “Right. Love you, Mom,” she said, and hung up.

  Rose bounced off the bed even as some tiny, cool part of her mind repeated it: Love you. She thought that was the first time she’d said that out loud in years.

  At a distant honk honk, beyond the bedroom window, Maggie told her unnecessarily, “Here he comes.” Rose turned and the bedroom door began to open even before she put her hand on the knob. “Stop that,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Maggie said.

  Rose took the wide, curving staircase two steps at a time, pausing only for a heartbeat before she threw open the broad front door and lurched onto the covered porch.

  The storm swallowed her, shoving at her with a wind so high it nearly threw her off her feet. It was almost as wet under the roof as it was in the open yard; she was soaked within seconds. She staggered to stay upright and peered into the storm, straining to pick out the distant, dark shadow of the Range Rover and its guttering headlights from the twisting gray-brown chaos across the yard.

  She crossed her arms and hugged herself tightly as the Rover bounced up the last hill, made the sharp right turn and swayed into the turnabout. The whole driveway was a vast, jittering brown mud puddle, more like a lake than a yard. But a four-wheel-drive shouldn’t have any trouble with that, she figured.

  “So what’s the problem?” she said. “He looks–”

  The Rover hit the edge of the gravel driveway, tipped up, and then tipped down, straight down, and plunged grill-first into the water as if it was falling off a cliff.

  Rose watched in horror as the Rover sank – surged – into the quicksand twenty feet in front of her, and began to disappear into bottomless liquefied mud.

  “Dad!”

  The hood was already buried. The back end was tipped up at better than a forty-five degree angle. And still it sank. And sank. Her father, trapped inside, was slamming his shoulder against the driver’s door, hard as he could, trying to open it before the Rover vanished completely.

  Too late. The quicksand had sealed the door shut. It was like trying to push solid rock. And still it fell, deeper and deeper.

  Rose started to wade into the muck. She had no plan at all, nothing in mind except to get to him, to help him somehow. The only thing that stopped her was the sound of Maggie’s voice:

  “Rose! Don’t! You can only help him from here! Don’t go out there!”

  She stopped herself right at the edge of the patio. The Rover sank even lower. Only a slice of windshield was visible now. Her father’s wide blue eyes were all she could see of him, trapped behind the glass.

  Surprisingly, unexpectedly, she saw his booted feet come up. He was showing her his soles. He kicked against the windshield, both feet at once, and she suddenly understood what he was doing.

  “Yes!” she called over the howling wind. “YES!”

  Ken kicked again and the windshield starred and pushed outwards. Again, and it shattered, his muddy boots thrusting through two huge holes in the safety glass.

  He came out butt-first, legs flailing. He struggled to turn, stand up on the submerged hood even as it continued to sink, dancing to keep his balance as the car shifted under him. And sank again. Even farther.

  He needed help, Rose realized stupidly. She looked around wildly, lost for a moment, then got an idea. “WAIT!” she bellowed into the gale, then turned and ran back inside.

  Rose ripped open the broom closet in the hallway and snatched the long-handled mop out of its clamp. Without a breath, she turned and ran back out onto the porch, gasping at the sudden slash of rain across her face.

  He was already a foot lower, shin-deep in watery mud and sinking.

  Rose moved to the very edge of the covered porch and looped on arm around the four-by-four support. She dug her nails into the coarse gray hair at one end of the mop and flung the other end as far as she could, towards her father. “Take it!” she shouted. “TAKE IT!”

  The handle splattered into the mud, a yard from his closest foot. Ken ducked down and seized the end with one hand, wobbling like a man standing in a rowboat, then grabbed it with his other hand as well.

  Rose took a step back, put both hands in the mop, and pulled as hard as she could. “Come on,” she said between clenched teeth. “Come on…”

  He fell down, flat on his belly. But he fell forward, toward Rose, and never lost his grip on the mop handle. She took another step back and hauled on the stick. And another. And hauled, while he climbed up the mop handle, hand over hand.

  His knuckles brushed the red brick porch. Then his elbows. Then his torso. And only then did he let go of the mop handle and pull himself the rest of the way out of the rushing, sucking mud, sprawling on the glittering brickwork, panting like an animal.

  Safe, Rose thought wildly and flung the filthy mop-handled aside. Safe.

  She fell down next to him and threw her arms around him, covering herself with mud. “Daddy,” she said. “Oh, God, Daddy, Daddy…”

  Twenty

  It was 11:07 a.m. when Lucy awoke from a sleep she never intended to have, a prolonged doze at her Station desk.

  The last thing she remembered was trying to send her notes to the UC Riverside server. The next thing she knew it was, well, now.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” she asked, entirely to herself. She pulled herself out of her chair and lurched to the doorway. The desk clock said it was almost lunch time. Where was Cindy? Where was Carole? Had they taken her advice and gotten the hell out of Dodge?

  She plopped down in Cindy’s chair at the reception desk and looked around helplessly. “This is grea—”

  There was a banging thump at the far end of the corridor. She spun around to face the glass entrance doors and gaped at what she saw.

  It was a man made of rain. A man shape, anyway, covered by running water that clung to him like a thick second skin. Underneath, the pulpy flesh was gray-white and the hair was white-gray; even the eyes were white. Only the faded blue-jeans and the rapidly decaying red Pendleton had any color at all.

  That Pendleton.

  “My God,” Lucy whispered. “Fender.”

  She had locked the front doors when she’d come back late last night. Now she dug for
the master keys in her lab coat pocket as she trotted across the lobby. Fender pawed at the glass, spreading gray, gritty mud with every touch.

  She unlocked the door and popped it open. Fender lunged inside and fell into her arms. “Doctor,” he gurgled. “Doctor, help me.”

  He weighed next to nothing. Lucy felt as if she could pick him up like a baby if she tried. “It’s okay, Fender,” she said, thinking he needs a physician, not a fuckin’ Ph.D. “Come on, come with me.”

  He didn’t stand up. He just pushed at her, his filthy shoulder against her chest and said, “Help me, Doctor!” again, with even greater urgency.

  He was backing her across the room. “Fender,” she said. “Fender, stop it!” Her back rammed into the reception desk and she fell, Fender still bearing down on her.

  “GIMME SOME FUCKIN WATER YOU BITCH! CAN’T YOU SEE I’M DYING??”

  He was hovering over her now, pawing at her with an impossible strength, and for the first time she saw his face clearly, or what was left of it.

  It had grown together. The nostrils had filled in, they were shallow dents now. The lips were sealed against the teeth; the teeth were nothing more than a ridged line in front of a whistling gray hole. Even the eyes were carved half-spheres inside immobile lids, statue eyes in a cracked, flaking sculpture. She wasn’t even sure how the voice was being made, but it wasn’t human. It emerged from the mouth-hole as fully formed words, without the lips moving, with no sign of a tongue.

  Lucy crab-walked out from under him and struggled to her feet. “Take it easy, Fender,” she said. “Come on, let me help you lie down, I’ll call an ambulance and—”

  “NO!” he bellowed. “WATER! NOW!” He lunged for her clumsily and hit the desk, scattering office supplies everywhere. She was dimly aware of how cliché the situation had become. Tough, independent woman reduced to victim status by violent stalker, fleeing all alone through a deserted building, screaming and weeping like a baby.