Voices of the Storm Read online

  “Sheriff Peck?”

  He turned on her with an expression that clearly said he had already taken about as much as he could stand. “What?”

  “You have a town meeting tonight, correct?”

  He did everything but tap his foot with impatience. “Yes. So?”

  “I want you to urge everybody who shows up to leave town for a while. Immediately. At least until the storm breaks.”

  That stopped him. He shook his head as if to clear his ears. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “I know tonight’s meeting is about the little girls who are missing, but look, we have data here that indicates it’s going to continue to rain like this for at least the next two days, maybe longer.”

  He set his jaw. “Not a chance.”

  “No, it’s not a chance, Sheriff, it’s a fact. There’s no way this town’s drainage or emergency personnel can handle what’s going to happen. What’s already happening. You know that.”

  “When exactly did you become an expert on what my people can and can’t handle?”

  “Your people, Sheriff?”

  “The people of this town are my people, yes.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment, sizing each other up, but Lucy wouldn’t let it go. “You don’t have to call it an evacuation if you don’t want to. Just tell people it might be safer if they–”

  “Oh, for …” He rubbed his eyes for a moment, clearly trying to control himself. “It’s only been raining for three hours, Dr. Armbruster. And you’re telling me I’m supposed to tell the whole town to up and go? And based on what, again? On the word of a scientist that nobody’s ever heard of, who I met this afternoon? I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not about me, Sheriff. It’s about the facts. I can show you.”

  “I have to go,” he said, and fit his flat-brimmed hat back on his crew cut. “Let’s talk tomorrow, if there’s a reason to.” He pulled open the glass door and almost threw himself out.

  “Sheriff, come on!”

  “Tomorrow!” he bellowed over his shoulder, and disappeared into the billowing darkness. Ten steps from the building, he faded into the mist like a bad dream.

  Lucy stood in front of the glass doors for a long time, staring into the slate gray storm as the last of the daylight dissolved. Finally she turned around and faced the desk.

  They were waiting for her. Looking at her. She didn’t have a single clue what to say.

  She spread her hands. “Go home if you want. Stay if you want. It’s safer here on high ground no matter what happens. There are cots and bedding in storage, but…you know that. Of course you know that.”

  Cindy Bergstrom was gazing at her from under her cap of curls, still looking like a well-whipped dog. Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson was almost glowing with ready-to-serve sympathy. Fender, as usual, did not seem entirely clear on what had just happened. And Michael Steinberg was doing his best not to laugh out loud.

  He was the first to break the silence. “I’ll be in my lab if anyone needs to check up on me,” he said. Then he turned on his heel and sauntered out of the room. The swinging door shut behind him with a flatulent whuff.

  It was as if his exit caused an audible pop, and suddenly everybody was moving, looking busy, coming towards her, talking at once.

  “What will we–”

  “That cop was such a–”

  “—got this rain gear from–”

  “Stop it,” she said, putting up her hands. Everyone kept talking and bustling around the room. “STOP IT!” she shouted... and they froze, all of them, and stared at her again.

  She took a deep breath. “Give me one of the parkas,” she said to Cindy. “I’m going to walk Fender back home.”

  Cindy held one out to her. It was yellow and shiny as a schoolgirl’s slicker. “I’d be glad to do it, it’s no–”

  “No. Thank you. I could use the walk.” Lucy nodded at Rebecca without looking her in the face. She couldn’t bear to see the moist-eyed pity she knew was waiting there. Big Boss gets ignored by the cop, she thought. Big Boss ain’t so big after all.

  She motioned to the confused long-hair. “Come on, Fender,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “’Kay,” he said, and put his head through a cowhide poncho that made him look like a badly dressed Guernsey. “Comin’ atcha.” They pushed through the door together, and ducked against the wet wind that tried to push them back again.

  The trip from the Station parking lot up the cement staircase to the highway was usually a quick and easy climb. Even Lucy could take two steps at a time on a regular day. Now, in the gathering darkness, with the wind and rain lashing at them from all sides, it was a slow and careful slog, one riser at a time with both hands gripping the cold, wet banisters fashioned from one-inch pipe.

  They paused when they reached the yellowed gravel of the highway’s shoulder, already weary.

  “Totally insane!” Fender shouted into her ear. All Lucy could do was nod in agreement, and momentarily appreciate the smell of good dope and bad oral hygiene that came from him in a warm burst.

  There was a sudden flash of blue-white light high and to the right. They both looked up as the first blast of thunder struck them like a fist. They staggered back, half in surprise, half from the actual force of it. They watched together, dumbfounded, as lightning struck the ridge to the north again. When the second thunder-roll hit, it struck again, a little farther to the south...and again…and again.

  They stood in the pouring rain for five full minutes watching the lightning travel down the Valle in an almost straight north-to-south line, striking at rock outcroppings, trees, buildings, each strike a little farther from them than the last. The entire town was lit by a burst of sterile blue illumination with each arc. From where they stood, it looked like a slide show of stark black-and-white photographs, a serial portrait of a small American town in the midst of drowning. Lucy was distantly surprised that the Water Tower, Dos Bros’ tallest structure – sheet steel filled with water, no less – was somehow spared a strike. She assumed it was well-insulated and equally well-grounded, but still.

  They couldn’t make themselves move. In spite of the wind and rain, they waited until the electrical storm finally collapsed in a web of lightning-strikes on the VeriSil campus, far to the south, half a mile from the bald, shadowy twin peaks of The Brothers. When the light flickered away and the thunder fell to an ominous grumble, Lucy forced herself forward. “Come on,” she said. There were no car headlights in either direction when they crossed; they were alone on the northbound lanes of Highway 181.

  “It was like… God walking, or something.” Fender managed to sound reverent even while shouting over the storm. “It was… it was …”

  She stopped when they reached the center median. “If you say 'far ouuut,' Fender, I swear to God I will leave you here to get hit by the next oncoming car.”

  He blinked at her from behind his speckled granny glasses. “Well,” he said, “I was going to say ‘awesome,’ but… never mind.”

  “Good thinking,” she said. They cross the southbound lanes without incident and walked down the off ramp to the wide, whitewashed gate with the overhead sign that read SUNMILL WINDFARMS. TOURS DAILY. Lucy knew, the last tour that Fender had given was in January, and even then the visitors had been lost and drunk.

  They trudged shoulder-to-shoulder up the gravel driveway. Ankle-high grass stretched out on both sides of the road, dancing in the twisting breezes of the storm, hissing sharp and loud as the rain slashed down. The only illumination was from a set of forty-watt bulbs set at irregular intervals along a single power line that was strung between crooked poles running from the gate to Fender’s trailer. The line was swinging back and forth, dancing up and down. Lucy half-expected it to loop-the-loop entirely, like a jump-rope twirling in the hands of giant invisible children.

  The windmills that gave the farm its name and Fender enough cash to buy good dope were scarcely visible beyond the hillocks of grass. Lu
cy could see their naked steel legs shuddering in the wind, the rotor blades locked in place to avoid being damaged by the unpredictable winds. She knew he couldn’t possibly afford any serious breakage here. Fender barely eked out a living as it was, selling his excess wattage to the local grid.

  For all the eeriness of the scene, the storm seemed less harsh on this side of the highway. Lucy found she could actually hear something other than the splatter of the raindrops on her hood and the blackboard scratch of the wind whistling past her ears.

  “Glad that crazy lightning didn’t hit my mills,” Fender said as they approached his trailer. “It'd blow ‘em right out of the ground, I bet.”

  “I bet,” she said. She wanted to keep the conversation to a minimum. Her plan was to get this poor creature into his home and get the hell out, so she could take her own sweet time getting back to the Station for another go-round. She longed to be alone for a while. It was no fault of Fender’s; he was a braincase and a burnout, but not a bad neighbor. It was just too much to deal with his constant questions and comments right now, not to mention his entirely obvious crush on the totally clueless Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson. That was why he had come by as soon as the storm got serious, Lucy knew. He wanted to make sure his girl was okay. He was probably hoping to rescue her from some horrible storm-related crisis, so she would finally see him for the prince he was.

  Poor Fender, she thought. A knight in shining armor, smelling of pot and patchouli, in love with a gay-girl Guinevere.

  His trailer was a classic Airstream, a huge aluminum-colored slug as big as a train car, up on blocks at the dead center of his wide, gently rolling parcel of land. The well-worn patch of gravel directly in front of his wooden porch – a little platform slapped together from bits of cast-off lumber – was a puddle now, brown as chocolate milk and as churned-up as a ten-year-old’s bathwater. It was a little too wide to step over. They paused at its edge to figure out their next move.

  “Hope you got this thing anchored pretty well,” Lucy said, squinting up at the Airstream. “You could end up floating away before morning.”

  Fender grinned at the thought. “That’d be kinda cool, wouldn’t it? Wake up halfway to Hawaii.”

  There was a small movement at the edge of the puddle. They both looked down on what Lucy mistook for a cluster of seed pods or thistles. Some optical illusion of the churning foam made it look as if they had rolled out of the water under their own power. Of course they were just lying there, bumping against the tiny lake’s tiny wavelets.

  Fender crouched down next to the cluster. They were spherical and spiky, a little bigger than golf balls, a little smaller than tennis balls. “Now, what the heck are these here?” he asked. He reached forward and then stopped suddenly. “Hey!” he said. “Did you see…?” He scowled at the things, then shrugged and reached forward again, more carefully this time. He got a thumb and a forefinger on one spike and stood up, holding it out like a Christmas ornament on a string. “Weh-hell,” he said wonderingly, “will you look at that, now?”

  Lucy stepped forward and looked hard…and felt another cold blue current shudder down her back.

  It was all spikes. Some were as thin and straight as needles from top to bottom; others were thick at the base, then sloped up like cactus-thorns or sea-urchin spines to a glistening point. There wasn’t a curve anywhere on the thing, either. Each spike was made up of flat planes, three- or four-sided pyramids, even a few with eight or ten, each face like a facet of unpolished quartz, all meeting at a single tiny center-point you couldn’t quite see. The thing seemed to have no real center at all. It was all thorns.

  And they were moving. Growing, actually, or shrinking. Lucy resisted the urge to put her nose right up to the thing. She could see plainly from a foot away that some of the spikes were getting longer while others appeared to be falling back, becoming thinner and breaking away. The whole ball of thorns was in constant, almost organic motion, moving, reaching, retreating, like a living thing – a breathing thing, though it had no mouth, no lungs, no life. Even the spine that Fender held seemed to be growing longer, almost stretching, as if the weight of the sphere was causing that one spine to grow thicker and longer.

  “That’s not possible,” she said.

  “Wow,” Fender said. “I mean… wow.” He brought it close to his face.

  A spike as thick as a darning needle shot out from the ball, straight for Fender’s left eye. He flinched away at the last instant and the point of it dug into the side of his face instead, into the flesh below his cheekbone. Lucy gasped when she saw it pierce him deeply, at least a quarter inch, then rake through the skin and tissue as Fender’s head turned. Blood sprayed as it sliced up and over, still going for the eye, still growing.

  Fender yelped like a wounded beast and flung the thing away as fast as he could into the shadowed grass. “Shit,” he said and cupped his cheek. His legs started to buckle. “Shit, shit, what was that?”

  Lucy got an arm under him and held him up. She was surprised how light he was, and how muscular, like a man made out of twisted wire. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Come on, now, wait a minute, let’s get you inside.” She turned and slogged through the puddle and got him up the porch. It wasn’t until they were fumbling with the latch on the unlocked door that she realized there could have been a whole swarm of those things, those needleseeds, in the water she’d walked through. Stupid, she thought as the door screeched open, but at least we made it inside.

  “Shit,” Fender said, still doubled over and clutching his face. “Shit shit shit.”

  The inside of the trailer was cramped and precisely as messy as Lucy had expected, but there was one old steel-and-stuffed-vinyl kitchen chair that wasn’t covered with stacks of paper or dirty clothes. She levered Fender into it and put a hand on his shoulder, comforting but firm. “Come on, Fender,” she said. “Come on, look up here.”

  He didn’t respond. She was still staring at the back of his trembling head. Lucy saw for the very first time that there were streaks of gray in his long blond hair, and a noticeably thin spot was starting to show right at the crown. Even ageless hippies get old, she thought with an unexpected tenderness. Doesn’t seem fair…

  “Come on, Fender,” she said again. She put her other hand under his chin and slowly, steadily, forced him to look up.

  He was crying freely. His glasses were crooked, almost falling off. She removed them and put them on the counter, then pried his hands away, still muttering meaningless, comforting things: “It’ll be fine, let’s just get a look. Come on, Fender, help me out here, man, let me look, you’ll be fine.”

  “Shit,” he keened. “Shit shit shit…”

  It was worse than she thought. A gash over two inches long and a half an inch deep ran from the middle of his right cheek to within a quarter-inch of the corner of his eye. It was gushing blood, red and plentiful and, if anything, thinner and messier than she had expected. She had heard that head wounds were bad, that much she remembered that from her first aid classes. But this?

  She looked around his tiny kitchenette and caught sight of a roll of paper towels. “Hang on a second, Fender, give me a second.” She grabbed at it, tore off three sheets, and folded them rapidly into a thick pad. “Here. Hold this against your cheek, man. Tight, now, tight as you can. And no taking it off to look.” She put the pad in his palm and pressed it hard again his face. Apply pressure to the wound, she told herself, if only to keep the idiot from freaking out at all the blood.

  “Do you have a first aid kit?”

  “Shiiiit,” Fender said, groaning thinly as he held the pad to his cheek. He was starting to rock back and forth like an autistic child.

  “Fender!” she said, and jerked him by the shoulder. “Join me, here, man! Do you have a first aid kit?”

  He stopped groaning and shaking. After a moment he gulped in a mouth full of fresh air and said, “Kinda. Band-Aids and Bactine. Above the sink.” He pressed down harder on his cheek and started to double o
ver again. “Shit!”

  She found it in the half-broken cupboard and brought it out. Just as directed: Bactine, Neosporin, a used athletic bandage, and three half-empty boxes of Band-Aids in different sizes, surrounding an unopened bottle of Tylenol.

  “The best that modern medicine has to offer,” she said. She pulled out the boxes, quickly locating the type of Band-Aid that was the large square pad usually used for scraped knees.

  She turned back and pulled Fender’s face up to her again. He didn’t fight as hard this time. “What was that?” he asked, his eyes squeezed shut in pain.

  At least that’s better than ‘shit shit shit’, she thought. “I haven’t got a clue,” she said, “but the wind must have caught it and blown it into you.”

  “No way,” he said. “It bit me, Lucy. That thing jumped on me, man! It bit me!”

  “Okay,” she said. The truth was, it had looked like that to her, too, but that wasn’t possible. Seed pods generally didn’t attack at will. At the moment, it didn’t really matter. This guy had a serious facial wound, and they had to deal with that first.

  “Never mind,” she said, “We’ll get this cleaned up and get you over to the Clinic.”

  “No way,” he mumbled. “I hate those guys. Always thinking I’m OD’ing or something, even when I just got the flu.”

  She nodded in understanding. The Borrego Clinic wasn’t exactly Cedars-Sinai, but it was all they had. This looked like it was going to need stitches and antibiotics at the very least. “We’ll see,” she said, then she reached out to gently pull the hand with the blood-soaked paper towel away from wound. She was braced to see the worst.

  She saw a thick, scabby, almost dry line of blood no more than two inches long. That was it. No bubbling gash, no bright red gush, just a dark and crusty blot on his cheek. As if he’d barely bled at all.