Creatures of the Storm (13 page)

Because the gravity never
let up. The pull
never went away. It
didn’t
get any better, she didn’t
get any happier, and all the really good reasons
she’d had to run in the first place were still there, still cutting
her, still working
,
especially her fucking father and his fucking toys and her
fucking mother and her paper smile and… everything.

The world she was living in now, the one
without all that wonderful stupid shit she had put into her body,
was simply too hard. It was all sharp edges and hard landings,
nothing but dead eyes that made her sick and angry. It was all
…

Too much.

She turned her face and
buried it in the double-thick pillows and
screamed.
She let it go on and on,
and when she ran out of air, she turned her head, gasped in another
breath, and did it
again
. When the second scream ran
dry, she lifted her head up…and found that she actually felt a
little better. A
little
.

There was a
clink
against the window
above the bed. She looked up to see a twig – no, a whole tangle of
twigs – pasted against the window screen. Some of the sticks were
thin as a pencil; others thicker than a finger. They looked eerie,
bony, illuminated by the spilled light of the bedroom and, for a
pulsing instant, the flash of lightning far across the
Valle.

As she stared, the pile of
twigs seemed to shift in place –
twitch
, as if plucked at by the wind
or…

There was a knock at the
door and she
jumped
again…then forced herself to stop.
Too fucking much JUMPING going on here
, she thought. She was acting like a third-rate actress
in
Halloween 14
.

The knock came again, short, soft,
polite.

“Nobody home,” she called out.

“Rose? It’s Maggie.”

Rose felt a sudden chill.
She spun around and sat up on the bed, cross-legged. “How
the
hell
are
you
knocking on the
door
?”

“Special effects,” Maggie told her. Her voice
seemed to be coming, quite convincingly, from the other side of the
door. It was distant, muffled, slightly hollow. “You like?”

“Frankly,” Rose said, “it
creeps me out.
You
creep me out.”

Maggie paused, almost as if she were taking a
breath, choosing her words. “I only wanted to tell you that you
have all the privacy you need in there.”

There was a strange,
metallic
zipping
sound behind her head. Rose looked over her shoulder and saw
that the bundle of sticks – was it
bigger
now? – had actually cut its
way through the window screen, driven hard against the window by
the force of the wind.

“…not listening to what you’re saying, and
your Dad can’t hear you either. Just so you know.”

Rose had missed the first part, but she got
the gist. “Okay,” she said shortly. “Thanks.”

There was a long, deep pause. “Okay,” Maggie
said. “If you need something, all you have to do is open the door
and call out.”

Rose didn’t bother answering.

Another pause. “I’m gone, then,” Maggie
said.

“What, are you going to make tiny little
footstep-sounds that get softer and softer?” she asked.

Maggie chuckled. Rose was
sure she heard it, a
chuckle.
“No,” she said, “I’ll go. ‘Bye.”

Rose was alone. She could feel it. She
glanced at the sticks jittering against the window as she fumbled
for her purse and pulled out her cell phone. The twigs had worked
their way even more deeply into the cut in the screen. And they
were definitely bigger now. How was that possible?

She speed-dialed her
mother’s cell phone. It rang twice before a voice answered –
a
male
voice.

“Um … Lisa Mackie’s cell phone,” the voice
said. It was vaguely familiar to Rose, but she couldn’t quite place
it.

“Lisa Corman, actually,” she said. “She
changed it back. And who is this?”

“Rose? That you? It’s Bryan Chamberlain. At
the clinic.”

Oh, right, the cute doctor-guy. “You normally
answer your patient’s phones?” she asked.

He laughed easily. “Hardly. I was checking on
your mom and the phone went off. It was sitting on the end table,
and I didn’t want it to wake her so …”

“Oh,” Rose said,
disappointed. “She’s asleep?” She didn’t realize until that moment
how much she’d wanted to talk to her mother, just to hear her
voice. How embarrassing was
that
?

“Finally drifted off a few minutes ago. She
was having a tough time of it. She got up and walked around with me
a bit.”

Skreek
. The sharp shriek of metal on glass. Rose turned with the
cell phone still in her hand and saw the sticks scrabbling against
the window glass. They were bigger than her fist now, and it didn’t
look like the wind was pushing them; it looked like they
were
moving
, all
by themselves. Like fingers on a hand, but a hand with no palm, no
wrist, no–

“Rose?” the doctor said. “You still
there?”

“Yeah,” she said distantly.
“So… Mom’s okay?” She stared at the sticks in fascination.
What
were
they?
She got up on her knees in front of the window and lifted one hand.
There was another flicker of lightning outside, far across the
Valle. It made her hand a black-etched shadow against the window
for an instant. The sticks were a scrabbling, twitching
blur.

They were reaching for her.
She could feel it.
Reaching
for her.

“Rose? You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, fascinated. “Yeah,
I’ll…we’ll talk tomorrow …” She dropped the phone and brought her
hand up to touch the window right where the sticks–

They jumped
at her, grabbed
for her
right through the glass. The cutting noise became a mad shrieking
as they scrabbled frantically to get
at
her.

Skree-skree-skree–

“
Jee-
sus!” Rose snapped her hand back
and jumped away, clear off the bed. The finger-sticks scrabbled and
scratched and
jerked
to get at her now, the cutting-noise getting higher and
sharper than ever.

Skree! Skreet-SKREE!

“Daddy?” she called out. “Daddy, can
you–”

There was a voice at her shoulder, a deep,
rich female voice, like Julie Andrews without the English
accent.

“I’ll take care of it, Rose,” Maggie
said.

SKREET! SKREET! SKREE—

There was a deep, grating
VUMMMMM that came from nowhere. Blue and white sparks jumped from
the window-screen to the sticks, an angry, blinding spit of light.
The sticks jumped
again, but this time it
was more like a convulsion. The humming stopped for a moment, then
came again, louder: VUMMMM. More sparks, and the sticks
hopped
off of the
window, away from the screen, and were snatched away by the wind
and rain.

Gone in an instant. All that was left was a
ragged three-inch incision in the window screen, and a triangle of
mesh that whipped around in the storm-driven gale like a waggling
flap of skin.

“That’s better,” Maggie said. She sounded
grimly satisfied.

Rose stared at the window. She swallowed
hard. “What’d you do?”

“Electrical charge,” Maggie said. “All the
windows and doors are wired for it. Discourages break-ins when I
activate it.”

“You activate it much?”

“Actually,” she said, “this was the first
time.”

The door flew open and Ken barreled in,
tripping over his own feet. “Rose? You okay? Maggie said something
was happen—”

Rose put up a hand and smiled. “I’m fine,
Dad. It’s cool. Something just … hit the window. From the storm.
Made me jump.” For some reason, she didn’t want to tell her father
about this, not yet. He had other things to think about, and they’d
had enough weirdness for one day.

Ken looked suspicious. He frowned at her.
“You sure? Maggie said–”

“Positive,” she said. It
occurred to her that Maggie was the ultimate multi-tasker: she had
been talking to her Dad downstairs even as they’d had their
conversation about privacy up here. “Just a jittery teenager,
that’s me. Probably
withdrawal
symptoms
, y’know.” She grinned
wickedly.

Ken went pale, and she realized it wasn’t yet
a joke to him.

“Kidding,” she said.
“Jesus, Dad, really, come on. I was
kidding
.”

“Sure,” he said uncertainly. “I knew
that.”

“Anyway, Rosie the Robot here zapped the
thing away, so–”

Something occurred to her.
She turned from her father and addressed the empty air. “Hey,” she
said. “I thought you said you couldn’t hear me unless I called out
into the hall. I didn’t even get
near
the door.”

“Oh, that,” Maggie said. “I lied.”

Rose
sighed
.

Sheriff Donald Peck was having a particularly vicious fantasy
about beating the living shit out of Doctor Daniel Fucking
Steinberg, geekfart cocksucking pain in the ass that he was, when
his smart phone
bleep-bleeped
.

He froze behind the wheel of his parked
cruiser and clamped his teeth together.

The phone went
bleep bleep
again.

Only four people were supposed to have that
number, and none of them were people he could afford to ignore.

Shit, shit,
shit
.

He pulled the phone free and looked at the
Caller ID.

“What the
fuck
?” Without another
thought he took the call. “Armbruster? Who the
hell
gave you this
number?”

The dyke scientist’s brassy voice was as
clear and painful as a fucking French horn. “I work with computers
all day, Sheriff,” she said. “It was no big challenge.”

“Never use this number,” he
ordered her. “This is for official business
only
.”

“Sure,” she said, dismissing him.

He closed his eyes and
ground his teeth again.
Bitch. If you
ever, EVER get on my side of the line, I will fuck you up SO
bad.

“I’ve got more information from the NWS and
Earthwatch, not to mention our own sampling stations around the
ridge line,” she said. “Satellite data confirmed–”

“Don’t tell me,” he said,
already bored. “Let me guess. It’s
raining
.”

Now
she
was the one giving a bitter
sigh. “Brilliant, Sheriff. Really. The point is, it’s not going
to
stop
raining
for at least forty-eight hours. Maybe longer. It’s not even going
to slack off.”

“Or so you think.” Peck
massaged his temples with thumb and forefinger. Was this
bitch
never
going
to let him go? If she didn’t already have the ear of everybody at
the goddamn public school, and through them all the parents who
were already hating his guts, he would cut her off right
fucking
now.

“This isn’t opinion,
Sheriff. It’s
fact
. This little crater valley of yours is like a, a
teacup
that’s already starting to fill up,
and it’s going to fill up
completely
in the next two
days.”

“You can’t know that,” he said.

“I can. I
do
. You have to start
evacuation procedures immediately.”

“
Evacuation?
Are you out of your fuc–
are you –” He stopped himself, took a breath. “Doctor, do you
have
any
idea how
much money the city would–”

“There
isn’t
a city, you ass! Not anymore!
That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

“I’m supposed to take your
word for it, and tell three thousand people to leave their
homes?
A
fter less
than, what,
six hours
of rain? What makes you think I could
do that, even if I wanted to?”

“You’ve got that town
meeting tonight. Do it then.
Convince
them. Get them to pack up
and move out, if only for a little while.”

He was already shaking his head. “No,” he
said. “No way.” The storm closed in around the cruiser, as if on
cue. He lost sight of the hood ornament not five feet away in a
chattering wash of rain and debris.

“If I’m wrong, I’ll take full
responsibility,” Lucy said.

“Oh,
that
would make
all
the difference,” Peck laughed.
“No one even knows who you
are
, Doctor. You’re just another
crackpot scientist to these people, like your crazy friend
Steinberg.”