Creatures of the Storm

RAIN:

Creatures of the Storm

Book One of the Rain Triptych

What Comes Next

THE FIRST DAY

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

THE SECOND DAY

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

THE THIRD DAY

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

About the Author

Ken Mackie stood over the body and thought
about the last two days.

None of it seemed possible. None of it made
sense.

Two days ago he was digging in his dying
garden, terrified at the thought of a ringing phone.

Yesterday he was running for his life,
escaping from a building as big as a football field, trying to stay
alive a little longer as a newborn lake rose around him.

And now he was standing in the driving rain,
looking down at a corpse with a hole as big as a dinner plate in
its chest, made by a monster that simply hadn’t existed hours
before.

He fell to his knees as
rainwater filled the hollowed body. She had been alive just moments
before, grinning, triumphant, ready to go,
go
…

He barely saw the dripping shadow standing
over him.

“What do we do now?”

He looked back across the roiling lake of mud
at the ruined house he had loved so much. Years of work, shattered
now. Sinking.

Rain poured out of the black desert sky,
blood-warm and so dense it made him choke on his own breath. He
couldn’t feel single droplets anymore; it flowed off his head in
tiny rivers and disappeared into the darkness.

It will never end,
he told himself, and he believed it.
Never
.

They could go north. There
was a small chance – a
small
one – that they could avoid the bone spiders and
scumbles and needleseeds, all the eyeless and endlessly sharp
creatures of the storm. Someone must have escaped from the drowning
town in the last three days. Somebody
must
have.

Or they could go south,
towards the source of the evil – towards the
thing
that was trying so hard to
kill them all.

The sky cracked open and thunder fell like a
bludgeon on his shoulders. He cringed under the power of it, still
staring at the body as the water rose to cover it forever.

“Please,” the looming shadow said again.
“Tell me: what are we going to do?”

Ken looked up with empty eyes.

He had no idea.

None at all.

THE
FIRST DAY

“Swift as a shadow; short of any
dream; brief as the lightning in the coiled night.”

- William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Ken Mackie would always remember where it began: in his
failing desert garden under a hazy blanket of spring heat. He had
spent more than a year trying to coax something,
anything
, out of that
sad patch of dirt behind his sprawling
hacienda.
He had churned a hundred
bags of fertilizer into the crumbling soil, he had sown every seed
that Dos Hermanos Feed and Grain could find. Hundreds of gallons of
water had disappeared into the dust without so much as a stain,
like spit on a sponge. And in all the hours he’d spent outdoors,
painted in sweat and raising blisters, never once had it
actually
rained
.

Not until today.

It started when he was scratching at the
chalky, pale grit and trying to think only of what he was doing at
that precise moment: the tool in his hand, the dirt under his
nails, the sudden turn of his wrist. The sickly green plant in
front of him – what was that, a watermelon vine? A tomato? – looked
half-dead now, flattened against the parched earth as if it had
been stepped on by a desert boot.

How did I let this
happen
? he asked himself. He wasn’t
thinking only of his tiny, ill-advised garden
.
He meant everything: the stupid
contract that had brought him to the ass-end of nowhere, his
headlong flight from Los Angeles and his daughter and his wife (all
right, his
ex
-wife), his –

The cell phone at his hip played the opening
bar of “What'll I Do?”, and Ken jumped in surprise. He plucked it
off his belt and peered at the screen.

Great
, he told himself as he tapped it.
Just what I needed

“Hello, Marty,” he said. He was already tired
of the conversation and it hadn’t even begun.

“Where is it, Ken?”

“It’s not ready.”

He could almost hear his
nervous little boss scowling and twitching on the other end. Ken
had promised Marty, VP of Product Development at VeriSil
International, a prototype of “Everybody’s Assistant” no later than
March first. It was going to be great, a personal
assistant/organizer that was everything Siri wanted to be and
wasn't, a true artificial intelligence, as smart and responsive as
any human being. Effortless voice recognition, flawless
human-sounding vocal synthesis – not that tinny
waka-waka
the Apple product made –
high conversational functionality, continuing self-actualized
upgrades, background RF satellite uplinks for high-level “fuzzy”
queries, he had promised
all
of it. He had convinced the big guys at VeriSil
that EA was going to be
it,
the first killer app of the year, maybe the
decade, a nearly seamless and individualized ‘personality’ for the
masses.

That deadline had passed
almost two months ago. Ken Mackie was late.
Very
late.

“I don’t have to tell you what a mess this
is,” Marty said, painful and annoying as a fly stuck in his
ear.

Ken sighed. “No, you don’t.”

“You have handed me one total, rolling,
six-by-six-foot fuck-up, you know that.”

Ken stood up straight,
knees popping, and gazed blindly into the crater valley below his
rented home. The sad little town of Dos Hermanos, California looked
like a set of worn-out building blocks tumbled on the desert floor
below him.
I’m king of the
butterflies!
He quoted only to
himself.
King of the air! Ah, me! What a
throne! What a wonderful chair!

“Give me one more week, Marty,” he said
aloud, knowing it was a lie even as he said it.

“Kenny, come
on
!” Marty sounded ready
to cry. “I got a whole development team here screaming
at me!”

“One more week. Then I’ll
deliver the full package – working model, code, everything.”
I’m Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! For I am
the ruler of all that I –

A drop of rain as big as a
Concord grape
plopped
onto the top of Ken’s head.

He looked up in dumb
surprise.
Rain?
he thought.
Here?
It hadn’t rained in Dos Hermanos in more than
four years. This was the most arid spot in North—

Another drop hit him right
in the center of his upturned forehead. Almost involuntarily, he
backed up and put himself under the wide eaves of the
hacienda,
shoulder
blades bumping against the soft adobe bricks. It made him feel
oddly trapped, even out in the open.