Voices of the Storm Read online

  Maybe it was the rain, or what Lucy knew the rain would bring. Maybe it was because Lucy really was scared and lonely and didn’t want to admit it, or maybe it was simply because she was tired, but the sound of that relentlessly happy, insistently shallow, constantly demanding voice made some small but important restraint in Lucy Armbruster’s head go pop.

  For the first time in a long time, Lucy said what she really wanted to say. She said, “Cindy? How long have we known each other?”

  That took Cindy back a bit. “Oh… five years now, Dr. A?”

  “Six, actually, since you came to join our happy family. And in those six years, I’ve learned a lot about you. A lot. I’ve learned that your house in Lake Geneva is exactly the same color as your house in Dos Hermanos. Exactly. I’ve learned that your favorite yogurt flavor is pistachio, that you raise African violets as a hobby but not very well, and that your daughter Denise has a taste for her own fingernails. And I’ve learned that you always, always speak in code.”

  Cindy paused, as if she was swallowing. Hard. “In…code, Doctor?”

  Lucy was going up the hill past the SCENIC VISTA. The single picnic table and drinking fountain in that bedraggled flat patch of land looked even more pathetic than usual in the iron gray light of the storm. Sunset would be coming soon. Then things would get even worse.

  “Yep,” she said. “CindyCode. Like, ‘Gotta keep in touch with the family, y’know!’ means, ‘I’m about to make another long-distance personal telephone call on company time.’ And ‘Whew! Boy oh boy! Down in Mexico, it’d be siesta time right about now!’ means, ‘I don’t intend to do any more work today,’ whether it’s morning or afternoon when you say it. And ‘So how are things goooooin’,’ means, ‘Can I go home early?’”

  “But… I …”

  Lucy was at the wide driveway to the Station. The modest wood-burnt sign on the left read,

  TOMAS J. RIVERA

  AGRICULTRUAL RESEARCH STATION

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

  No. 312

  She slowed to a crawl and turned in. Water was coursing down the gutter at least a foot deep. “I’ll tell you what,” she said into the no-hands phone as she turned, “Chances are you will get to go home early today. Hell, chances are you won’t even be able to come in to work at all tomorrow, and isn’t that good news? But you’ll stay in that damn chair and answer the damn phone until I get back and damn well decide that. And you won’t go any-damn-where at all until we’ve had a nice, long conversation about Cindy Code, and about that highly innovative ‘come in late/leave early’ employee benefit you’ve built for yourself, ‘cause, damn, girl, I’d like to start trying that out myself!”

  “But, Dr. Arm–”

  “I’m here! I’ll be inside in two minutes!”

  She clicked off the phone with a single decisive punch of her thumb, wishing for the millionth time that it was possible to slam these things down the way you could a real phone. She pulled the Civic into its customary spot right next to the Station’s red All-Terrain Vehicle.

  She was halfway out of the car when she saw that the ATV was steaming. It stopped her cold.

  For a long moment Lucy simply sat there, barely aware of the wind whipping around her, shielded from the brunt of the rain by the driver’s side door. It was clear as day, even in the dimming light: wisps of steam were twisting off the plastic cowling, only to be lashed away by the driving rain moments later.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said into the open air. “Son of a bitch!” She climbed the rest of the way out of the car and slammed the door as hard as she could, and heard something crash and tinkle in the door.

  She turned back for a moment, expecting to see a crack in the window or a broken mirror. It looked fine. She started to open the door again, and the pull-handle flopped uselessly in her hand. The door didn’t budge. She would have to pop it open from the passenger side if she wanted to get in.

  Oh, great, she thought. Perfect. Now the goddamn door is broken.

  One more thing to worry about later. She sighed bitterly and turned her attention to the ATV, ducking down between the vehicles as the wind picked up.

  She put her bare hand against the cowling. The body-temperature rain hadn’t cooled it completely; it was still warm. And there was mud in a dark brown rill along the bottom of the chassis.

  Lucy got down on her hands and knees, not giving a damn about dirtying her best pair of pants, and saw a thick layer of mud coating the undercarriage as well. Not dirt or dust, sheltered from the rainfall, but mud, thick as a finger and still glistening.

  The goddamn thing had been run out into the storm. That was clear as the new-potato-nose on Lucy Armbruster’s face. It had been returned only moments before her own arrival, and there was only one person at the Station with access to the ATV’s keys who was stupid and arrogant enough to break all the rules and go joyriding on a day like this.

  One single, solitary, smart-ass son of a bitch.

  She stalked to the entrance without conscious thought, the rain and all it meant momentarily forgotten. She swept open the glass double doors with a thump…then stopped in her tracks.

  Cindy Bergstrom was sitting behind the reception desk, wide-eyed and wary as a whipped dog waiting for another whack. Lucy barely even remembered their conversation. Standing next to her – or rather, half-sprawled over the corner of the desk – was a tall, emaciated, gangling, hairy, patch-covered creature with granny glasses and a walrus mustache. Fender, their neighbor from across the highway. Lucy winced at the sight of him.

  “Hey, Doc!” Fender said, showing a crooked double line of yellow teeth. “How about that weather, eh, man? I mean, man, you know? He used the heel of his hand to sweep his long graying hair back out of his face. “Man!”

  Lucy looked dead-eyed at her receptionist, asking the clear and unmistakable question: What in hell is HE doing here?

  Cindy understood perfectly. “Fender came by to make sure we were all right,” she said breathlessly. “What with the storm and, and–”

  “Is Steinberg in his office or his lab?”

  Cindy blinked. This was clearly not the response she had been expecting. “Dr. Steinberg?”

  Lucy clenched her teeth so hard it hurt. “Is Steinberg in his office or his lab?”

  Cindy swallowed. She was a round, wide partridge of a woman with tightly curled hair and a face like an Oslo hausfrau. “Office,” she said. “Last I knew.”

  Lucy pulled a tight left and pounded through the swinging doors towards the labs. She thought she head Fender say, “Wow, what–” before the closing door shut him off.

  I’ll get to him later, she told herself. I’ll get to the BOTH of them later.

  The Station was laid out in a huge “X” with the reception area and lobby at the intersection. One leg was administrative offices, one a series of small personal labs, and the other two hydroponic gardens and terraria, along with storage and server space. All of it had been built under the guiding vision and direct intervention of Dr. Lucy Armbruster. It was all her responsibility, her baby, her destiny.

  And it was all about to come crashing down because of one semi-psychotic, egotistical idiot with a permanent hard-on instead of brains.

  She would kill him. She would simply have to kill him, there was–

  A beautiful young black woman came out of a side door marked COMMUNICATIONS and slammed directly into Lucy. Papers went flying; the woman tried to skitter back to keep her balance on her black patent high heels…and failed. Her shapely rump, wrapped in a nicely fitted black skirt, made a pleasantly meaty thump when it hit the cool green linoleum. More papers flew.

  For one instant Lucy considered simply ignoring her and keeping on. Fortunately, good judgment prevailed, and she stopped to offer her hand.

  “Jesus, Rebecca, what are you doing?”

  The woman gratefully accepted the help and wobbled back to her feet. “Building up a really good workers’ comp claim,” she said a little br
eathlessly. “How do you like it so far?”

  “You okay?”

  “Fine, fine.” Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson, her intern from UC Riverside, was twenty-two, brilliant, beautiful, and obviously in the wrong place. Her skin was a light mocha brown; her chestnut hair was loosely curled and cascaded down her back almost to her waist. She had hazel eyes that made everyone, man and woman, stop and stare. Narrow-shouldered, narrow-hipped, long-legged, and with a brilliant smile that revealed equally brilliant teeth, it had been obvious to Lucy from the day she interviewed her more than a year ago that Rebecca was hideously overqualified for this year-long gopher-and-grunt assignment. What was she supposed to have said to a PhD candidate with qualifications like this? ‘Sorry, too pretty? Too good?’ The Oversight Committee would have been on her like a bird on a bug if she did that, particularly given Lucy’s well-known “gender issues.”

  What they didn’t know was that Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson had “gender issues” of her own. For most of the last ten months she had suffered through a painful and painfully obvious crush on lumpy, gruff ol’ Dr. Armbruster, twenty years her senior and of the same sex.

  It made for a wonderfully ironic life, Lucy had noted on more than one occasion, but she really didn’t have time for it. Not now.

  “I have to go find that idiot Steinberg,” she said.

  “You’ll want to see these first,” Rebecca said, scooping up the escaped papers.

  “It can wait,” Lucy said.

  “It’s the satellite data on the storm. I know–”

  “Rebecca, it can wait.”

  There was a sudden, deep, bone-rattling peal of thunder from above and beyond the station, an unavoidable reminder of how bad it was getting out there, and how quickly. It made Lucy pause.

  Goddamn it, she thought. I get myself all revved up for a good ass-chewing, and something always interferes.

  “Okay. You have a point,” she admitted. “What’s up?”

  Rebecca handed her a photo from a high-altitude weather satellite, one that showed only the widest planetary view, from the North Pole nearly to the equator. There was the North American continent, there the tail of Florida, there the wide bulb of …

  “Jesus,” she said. There was a spiraling flower growing from the Gulf of Mexico, or was that the Gulf of California? Its arms spread out across half the print-out, beyond the edge of the image. “What are they calling this one?”

  “Calliope,” Rebecca said. “Pretty, isn’t it?” She passed across another shot, this one much closer to home. “Biggest storm of the year so far, and the season’s just begun. Winds topping one hundred twenty, centered north of Guadalupe Hidalgo.”

  Lucy had already moved on to a page of figures relating to the storm and the resulting weather in northern South America, the Isthmus, and southern North America. This one was big, truly big, and it was being felt as far south as Brazil and as far north as, well, as far north as Dos Hermanos, California.

  “The perfect storm,” she muttered.

  “What?” Rebecca asked.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  It was a term she had admired at first. It came from a good book, and it was a nice metaphor in its own way, but she’d come to hate it more recently for its constant, inaccurate reuse. Besides, she’d realized long ago, there was nothing perfect about a storm. Perfection implied something beautiful, something flawless and even admirable. Weather wasn’t like that at all, not really. It was the brutal collision of massive, often dangerous physical forces. It was messy and uneven; weather fronts were crooked and turbulent battle-lines of temperature and pressure that threw off swirls and currents, eddies and anomalies that defied not only mapping but real prediction of any kind. Hell, the entire field of chaos theory was created because of the great, huge, dark, hairy, damnable, impossible imperfection of the weather. It would never – it could never – be conquered or managed, let alone controlled.

  Here was a perfect example of that. The high-altitude photography gave the event a smoothness, a beauty that simply wasn’t real. In fact, this was really a huge, uneven landscape as messy as a close-up of bad skin, full of low-pressure pockmarks and high-pressure pimples. And the crater valley of Dos Hermanos was the biggest, nastiest lesion of them all.

  Lucy didn’t even have to hold out her hand before Rebecca slipped a new photo under her eyes – the tightest shot yet, and a perspective she had seen a million times before. It was ‘her’ half of the Anza Borrego Desert, as seen from only a few hundred miles up. El Valle de Los Hermanos and the surrounding desert for a hundred miles in every direction.

  Sure enough, the swirling far edge of the massive hurricane with the pretty name thousands of miles to the south had set up a whole line of low-pressure systems and squall lines that defied geography and seasonal trends. One of those systems had snaked up from the southwest and wrapped itself around their little crater valley, a fat tentacle of supersaturated air pumping millions of gallons of water and God only knew how much energy into the upper atmosphere.

  “And thus come the rains,” she said more clearly this time. Rebecca nodded and popped another picture on top of the last. Lucy scowled. “You already showed me this one,” she said. “I need to see some time lapses instead. Every hour, maybe? Every two?”

  “This is it. Look at the time code.”

  Lucy opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. “Shit,” she said. “Do you have…?” Rebecca gave her the third in the series. And a moment later the fourth. Lucy swallowed. “Well,” she said with false calm. “That’s not moving at all, is it?”

  The storm had created a stationery front, solid as stone, right over the Valle. They might as well have run a hose as wide as five football fields from the Gulf of Mexico to the Anza Borrego and opened the faucets all the way. Combine that with the data she’d already seen on monsoonal flow, and the mountain-shadow effects they saw around here all the time…

  Damn. The cloud cover kept her from knowing for sure, but it was possible that it was bone-dry – or at least nothing more than humid – outside the crater, while inside it was raining like never before. So far, there was no end in sight.

  She tore herself away from the printouts and looked directly into Rebecca’s beautiful hazel eyes. “You were right,” she said. “I’m glad you showed me these.”

  Rebecca’s smile was like the summer sun, so bright and warm it made Lucy uncomfortable to look at it.

  “So when are you leaving?” Lucy asked her.

  The beaming stopped. “What?”

  “Come on, you can read this as well as I can. This place is a disaster waiting to happen…except it’s not waiting anymore. Your cute little house down by the VeriSil campus is going to be underwater in a matter of hours. You have to pack up and get out.”

  “Get out of that house, maybe, sure,” Rebecca said defiantly, “but I’m not leaving the Valle. No way. This is a unique meteorological event, and I’m a meteorologist.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, you’re Indiana Jones now?”

  “This is high ground, Dr. Armbruster. It’s got the most sophisticated technology available and a complete uplink to all the major weather satellite systems and databases. It’s a ringside seat, and it’s a seat right next to the exit, too, if things do get hairy.” Her grin was incandescent. “Heck no, I’m staying.”

  “No, you’re not,” Lucy said firmly.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No. You’re. Not.” Lucy dumped the papers back into Rebecca’s hands. “I still have to talk to that idiot Steinberg, so we’ll continue this later. After I’ve killed him.”

  She left Rebecca standing in the hall and fumbling with papers, her own mind whirling. There really wasn’t much time. Lucy’s own little condo was nearby; it would be one of the last to go underwater, worst-case. The rest of these people had something to worry about, and soon. She should let them all go right now. That might give them time to pack.

  But first things first…

  She re
ached the door marked LABORATORY #3 and knocked. It drifted open at her touch. She stuck her head inside and saw Michael Steinberg hunched over his computer terminal, busily punching and clicking. His narrow shoulders were high up and trembling.

  He seemed to be laughing. Giggling, actually.

  Behold the mad scientist in mid-cackle, she thought. She stepped fully inside. “Michael?”

  It was as if she had set a firecracker off between his feet. He went “ACK!” and jumped – actually jumped – three feet to the right, clawing at a counter for balance as he spun to her. His eyes were huge and bulging under his limp, dirt-colored bangs. She was sure it took him a moment to recognize her.

  “Dr. Armbruster,” he said. “Ah. AH, Dr. Armbruster!”

  “Michael, where did you take the ATV?”

  “You’ve got to see this,” he said, scrambling to the stainless-steel sink, knocking aside furniture and carts as he bulled through. It was as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “Michael, what did you do with the ATV?”

  He waved it away without even turning around. “I had an errand. It doesn’t matter. Look at these. Look.”

  He hauled up a steel tray filled with specimens, a wide collection of strange shapes, all twisted and stretched in different ways. They shared only one thing: an ash-white color somewhere between bone and chalk. “Don’t even think of claiming this,” he said. “I’ve got it all documented, locked up tight. This one is mine.”

  She almost laughed in his face. “Don’t worry, Doctor. I’ll leave it all to… what the hell is this supposed to be?” She reached out to pick up a long cylindrical item, roughly serrated along one side and hollowed completely through its long axis. Steinberg jerked the tray back before she could touch it, almost upsetting the entire affair. If he’d been able to, he would have slapped her hand away. “Careful!” he brayed. “They’re very delicate!”