Creatures of the Storm (24 page)

“One second,” Marty said, and hit the CLOSE
button. “One second.”

The elevator door closed.

Nobody moved. The three men stood there mute
as the elevator lights moved to P2.

They heard the churning of
the cables and the
thunk
of the car as it stopped one floor down. Ken held
his breath for a long moment, waiting … and then he heard the doors
part with a prolonged
squeeeal
.

The water roared under their feet, deep and
loud, nearly erasing the musical drip-and-gurgle all around them.
The elevator doors in front of them shivered at the impact, and Ken
took an involuntary step forward when the screaming came.

It was Marty. High,
throaty, panicked, but still
Marty
, cutting through the pounding
of the water, rising and rising until, quite suddenly, it was
swallowed up in a sudden, liquid
gulp
.

Then something exploded on P2. It made the
concrete floor buck under their feet like a restless animal. Cling
nearly lost his balance; a woman dragging herself towards her
mini-truck fell flat into the water with a huge splash.

“What’s happening?” Cling
asked, staggering and clutching at his stomach. “What’s
happening?
”

Ken raised his fists to
pound on the elevator door, but Maggie interrupted him, almost as
if she could see him. “You can’t do anything now, Ken,” she said.
“Go. Just
go
.”

“But—”

“
Please.
There’s no time.”

Ken stared at the door for a long moment.
“Shit,” he said, and turned away. His eyes met Josephson’s where he
stood a few feet behind him.

The water was past their ankles and rising
every minute. It was done. They had to go.

Carl Josephson’s own cell phone rang, a
dignified excerpt from Mahler. “That’s me calling, Mr. Josephson,”
Maggie said through Ken’s cell. “I’ll make sure you get out of here
safely.”

Josephson looked miffed in
spite of himself. “This number is confidential,” he said. “How did
you–” He looked up at Ken with new respect. “Oh,” he said.
“She’s
good
.”

They were in their separate cars an instant
later. Ken took two full seconds to admire the cream-colored Audi
SUV, then it jumped away from him as Josephson put it into gear and
sprinted for the exit.

Ken gunned the Rover and followed, barreling
out the exit ten yards behind him, cutting off the last of the
other evacuees.

The storm hit them like a stone wall. It was
even worse than he had expected. Ken had to turn the wipers to
their highest setting to see ten yards ahead. It was just as Maggie
had said: VeriSil Road, the usual route to Highway 121, was already
choked with cars trying to flee the rising water, and speeds had
dropped to near-zero.

“Make the first left,”
Maggie told him. “It will take you along the north edge of the
construction site.” Ken did has he was told, and glanced over to
see Josephson doing the same thing. The CEO was in two
conversations at once: one with Maggie on the cell, nodding and
answering her questions in short, simple sentences; the other with
Stefan Cling, who seemed to be going on and on and
on
about something that
Josephson simply didn’t want to talk about at the
moment.

Ken made a hairpin turn onto the rutted
frontage road, Josephson’s brake lights flickering in front of him.
This road was only intact because the rainwater wasn’t building up
on it; it was sluicing off from north to south and spilling into
the huge pit, five stories deep, that was scheduled to be the
future subbasement of the newest VeriSil building.

If anybody lives long
enough to build it
, Ken thought
grimly.
If we ever come back here
ag—

Josephson slammed on his brakes, and Ken
pounded on his own an instant later. He fishtailed to the right,
cranking the wheel as hard as he could. He missed ramming the SUV
by mere inches.

“You stopped,” Maggie said. “What’s the
problem?”

“Don’t know,” he said shortly. “Be right
back.” He popped the door and lurched into the rain. He saw the
problem even as Josephson climbed out of his SUV.

A huge supply of steel reinforcement bars had
fallen into the roadway, blown and washed down from a graded
storage area that had simply disappeared in the storm. Even a
four-wheel drive couldn’t climb over the spiky mess without blowing
its tires.

“Let’s clear a path!” Josephson shouted, his
voice barely audible over the screeching wind. Ken nodded and they
set to work, seizing armfuls of the eight-foot lengths of bar and
throwing them onto a wooden skid that was off to one side, resting
on more stable ground. They were soaked to the skin within seconds,
but they kept at it, covering their hands and feet with mud as they
worked.

Ken distantly admired the fact that the
millionaire CEO didn’t seem to give a damn about ruining his
thousand-dollar suit or his five-hundred-dollar shoes in the
downpour. It wasn’t until their fourth load had been dropped that
Josephson turned and glared at his assistant, still huddling inside
the SUV and looking terribly miffed.

Josephson grinned as he leaned into Ken’s
ear. “I was going to fire the little shit!” he shouted. “Now I
guess I’ll just have to kill him!”

His ball-bearing eyes, cold
as blued steel,
clicked
to meet Ken’s. Then he kicked a smile into place
to show he was only kidding.

It took five more slippery, filthy minutes,
but they managed to clear a narrow path that would accommodate one
car at a time. When the last of the metal clanked onto the pile,
Ken noticed that it was actually floating like a raft. Josephson
had even tethered it to a leaning lamp pole at some point to keep
it from drifting away.

This was getting
bad,
really bad.

They didn’t stop to admire their work. The
moment it was done Josephson simply shook the water out of his
eyes, stuck out his hand and said, “Thanks.”

“Thank
you,
” Ken said, and gripped the
CEO’s tightly for a moment.

Their eyes met again. “I’ll call!” Josephson
bellowed. “We’ll talk!”

Ken felt a rush of
excitement, and then a little sick. In spite of the disaster, in
spite of his oldest, best friend in town drowning mere
minutes
before…that felt good.

God,
that felt good.

Ken levered himself back into the Rover
seconds later. “—e when you get back,” the phone was saying over
and over. “Tell me when you get back, tell me when you—”

“I’m here,” he said, “I’m here.” He instantly
left an inch-deep puddle on the Rover’s rubber floor mat.

“Good,” Maggie said, and he
could almost believe she sounded relieved.
Not possible,
he told
himself.
It’s only a really,
really
good voice
simulator. I think…

“You’ll both come to a ‘T’ intersection about
two hundred yards ahead,” she told him. Ken imagined her saying the
same thing to Josephson on his own cell as he gunned the Rover’s
engine and the SUV pulled out first. It took a long, nasty gouge
from one errant piece of rebar as it wedged its way through the gap
they had made. Ken got the Rover past unscathed.

Just as Maggie had told them, the
intersection drifted out of the silver mist a few hundred yards
farther on. “Ken,” she said, “you’ll go to the left; Josephson will
go to the right. I’ll send him north on Indiana, and he can enter
the freeway up by the DH Emporium.”

Even as he watched, the
Audi SUV turned abruptly to the right and surged up the steep
incline. Rooster-tails of mud and water flew out behind it as
wheels spun, but it bit in
hard
and took the hill like a charging
rhino.

Ken learned from watching.
He turned sharply to the left as he hit the ‘T’ and gunned the
engine, bounding upwards, struggling with the wheel. He nearly fell
back once, and then again, but the tires found purchase and pulled
him up, up,
up
to
the crest of the ridge. The rubber squealed on water-soaked
asphalt.

He crowed when he hit the roadway and tapped
his brakes, turning to look over his shoulder, across the man-made
arroyo in hopes of catching a last glimpse of the escaping
Audi.

Josephson had stopped at
the top of the ridge, directly across from Ken. He wasn’t moving at
all. Ken turned all the way around, wondering if there was some
kind of trouble, staring at the rear of the vehicle when the SUV’s
passenger door flew open and Stefan Cling toppled out in a
backwards stagger. He looked as if he was being propelled from the
car against his will. Ken was almost sure he saw a muddy black
shoe
pushing
the
executive assistant out into the rain.

Cling struggled to find his
feet, sliding and slipping in the mud as he screamed
soundlessly
and pawed at the door to get
back in the cab to no avail. This time Ken got a clear look at
Josephson’s hand as it reached out of the SUV, seized the passenger
door by its recessed handle, and
slammed
it in the plump little man’s
face. Cling fell back again, stunned, staggering to keep from
falling on his ass.

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.