Creatures of the Storm (30 page)

Jimmy sincerely doubted if
the elderly and entirely sedentary Lazenbys had ever put the silly
thing in the water, but they had proudly displayed it in the
turnabout of their estate, right out in the open, and assigned
their servants to clean it and polish it all year round, simply to
remind people how rich and important they were. They had a
boat,
in the middle of
the
desert
. A
boat they didn’t even need. Take
that,
peasants.

Now, at least, it would
finally be put to use. Jimmy tried to scrape the pounding rain out
of his eyes with the back of his wrist, but that didn’t work very
well. Still, even half-blind and buffeted every which way, it
didn’t take long to undo the latches and untie the lines. One good
tug on the stern and
Dragonfly
was free of the trailer and floating in the two
feet of water coursing down the driveway.

Jimmy nearly tripped over his own feet
climbing into the boat, and it bobbed and teetered under him until
he got settled, but eventually he got it all under control. The
outboard started with the first touch, and he was happy to see it
even had a full tank of gas.

Despite the rain driving into his face like
cold, sharp fragments of glass, Jimmy Fultz couldn’t have been
happier. For the first time in a long time, maybe in his entire
life, he was on his own.

Captain of my own
fate
.
In a manner
of speaking.

The outboard was a pleasant rumbling under
his hand. It was easy to steer southward with one hand while he
held the bullhorn in his other and chanted the alert:

“THIS IS THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. EVACUATE
IMMEDIATELY. I REPEAT: EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU HAVE TRANSPORT,
LEAVE THE VALLEY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE TRANSPORT,
MEET AT THE CONFERENCE CENTER AT SIX PM. REPEAT, THOSE WITHOUT
TRANSPORT MEET AT THE CONFERENCE CENTER AT 6 PM.”

He’d made up the little speech himself, and
he was rather proud of it. He particularly liked the way it bounced
off the churning water and the glistening walls of the houses in a
soggy kind of echo.

“THIS IS THE SHERRIFF’S DEPARTMENT…” he began
again.

He had been underway for no more than half an
hour when he floated past the Squire, a bar that was housed in a
rusting Quonset hut owned by the grandson of one of the city’s
founders. Lights were still burning in its windows, though how it
was still getting power this far south into the floodplain was
beyond him.

He cut the motor and used the bullhorn to
hail any survivors.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Anybody in there? In the
Squire?”

He saw a shadow plaster itself against one of
the windows, struggle for a minute, then lower the pane. It was
Steve Chapin from the hardware store, his hair matted with
rainwater or sweat, his gray eyes too large and a little wild.

“Hey!” he said back. “Pretty bad out there,
huh?”

Jimmy nodded. “Gettin’ worse, too. You guys
okay?”

“Fine,” Chapin said, and
then grinned crookedly. “Well, not
fine,
exactly. You know what I mean.
We’re waiting for Richie Riegel to get here with his big ol’
utility truck. He’s taking us all out. But…I don’t suppose you’ve
seen Jennie Sommerfield? The blonde with the…you know, the
blonde?”

Jimmy knew Jennie very well. He’d been at the
homecoming game where she’d been crowned queen. He’d also busted up
a couple of the bachelor’s parties where she’d been dancing, and
answered a couple of her stalker complaints about that guy that was
always after her, what’s his name, the scientist.

“Nope,” he said. “She goin’ with you?”

“Yeah,” Chapin said, though Jimmy could tell
there was a whole story behind that one word. “Soon as she gets
here.”

He let it go. He had other things to do.

“Good luck gettin’ out!” he shouted, and
turned the tiller to the west and south.

“Good luck to you, too!”

Jimmy lost them in the
storm just a few seconds later. He had to stop soon after to bail
out the rainwater, and thought he might have seen a bright orange
streak to the north—Richie Riegel’s famous W&P truck, though he
couldn’t be sure. Soon he crossed Farantino, now so deeply
submerged that the street sign was lower than the gunwale of
the
Dragonfly.

After that he stopped bothering with the
bullhorn at all. There was no longer anyone left to hear—not this
far south, not anymore.

Down here, Dos Hermanos already belonged to
the monsters.

They twisted though the water around him.
They tiptoed and scurried on the few remaining outcrops of roofs,
gas station signs, street lamps. They wheeled and spun on the
misting winds, flights of them, cells of them, sometimes single
huge eyeless creatures made of wings and talons and nothing
else.

The water was so deep it
had a wind-driven chop. It was almost like being on an open lake.
It was easy for Jimmy to forget he was cruising a few feet above
people’s homes, businesses, backyards. Even as the day grew later,
the storm grew more violent, and the wind rose higher, Jimmy urged
the
Dragonfly
farther south towards VeriSil. Towards the Two
Brothers.

Something in him, something deep and
resonant, wanted to see it all.

As the skeletons rose out
of the mist of dusk, he sensed that he was fighting a current in
the water that he hadn’t expected. It wasn’t a strong one. It
should have been far stronger. Water should have been flowing
freely through Arroyo Verde, draining the Valle as it filled.
Instead, there was nothing more than a slight
pull
,
barely more
than a drift.

He was thinking of turning towards it when he
saw the first structure, and he forgot everything else.

It was built on the remains
of a microwave tower, one of VeriSil’s outlying structures. Now it
was covered, twined, raddled with…
something else.
With the same gray,
craggy material as the creatures themselves, growing in twisted
parasitic networks over the metal beams, gathering in knobs and
knuckles, splaying outward, upward in cantilevered branches,
dressed in rocky scales and plates that fluttered and cracked
against the wind. It was something like a tree, something like a
minaret. Something like an insect disguised as a tree or a
minaret.

And it was alive. In the way it trembled, in
the way it moved in the wind—not pushed by the gale, but turning of
its own volition. Beyond it, the superstructure that was supposed
to have been VeriSil’s new headquarters was overwhelmed by new
growth. It was farther away, still dim in the gathering gloom, but
Jimmy could see bone spiders, brickteeth, dragontongues, stains,
clambering and crawling over it, moving industriously here and
there, swarming and separating, joining and breaking and joining
again.

Building
,
he realized. Under some unified
direction, according to some plan.
Building.

The water boiled right in
front of him, in a band thirty yards wide, and a rough archway,
five times wider than the
Dragonfly,
studded and filigreed
with living stone, lifted itself from the trembling water. Without
knowing how, Jimmy knew that it was another creature entirely, one
without a name yet, rising up to take him.

He didn’t want to go. Not yet.

He pulled hard at the
tiller, gunned the little motor and peeled off to the left –
to
port,
he
corrected himself,
port
– and fled. He aimed the pointed bow of the
little skiff at the central cleft of the Two Brothers where they
still rose above the water, their foothills a new
shoreline.

There was something there, it was calling
him. But a mad population of creatures to the east of that, where
Arroyo Verde should be draining the Valley, was roiling and
twitching, distracting him horribly.

He had a chance to see it only for a moment,
in a fleeting gap between sheets of rain. First he glimpsed a
rickety staircase rising up out of the water, winding up to a
ramshackle house halfway up the Brothers. Then he was looking past
the staircase, directly at Arroyo Verde.

There was a wall there, a
barrier that had never been there before. The creatures of the
storm were swarming over it, building it,
creating
it from their own rocky
flesh. Sealing off the only natural outlet to the water, making the
flooded Valle their own.

Forever.

Some water was still
escaping, in a roaring torrent so narrow and violent it would crush
anything that was caught between its walls. That’s where
he
would be heading soon
if he didn’t turn back now, he knew, to be chewed between the teeth
of the hungry current.

Belatedly, it occurred to
Jimmy that he should call this in. He didn’t know how he was going
to explain it to anyone, how he could possibly make them understand
all he was seeing, but he had to try. This was
important
. Somebody,
everybody,
needed to
know about this.

His hand had barely touched the TRANS button
on the radio mic at his shoulder when the twisting arc of the
unnamed creature came up again, rising before him with an eerie
kind of majesty. He looked up in astonishment as it teetered above
him for a moment…and then saw it fall, straight towards him.

The creature plucked Jimmy
Fultz out of the
Dragonfly
like a doll on a string.

It was the last thing he ever saw.

Mindy Bergstrom closed down the Dos Hermanos
Sheriff Department Headquarters all by herself. She hadn’t heard
from Bo or Jimmy or even Sheriff Peck in hours. It was so long ago
she’d stopped trying to raise them on the radio or the phone. It
had been longer than that since her sister Cindy had been in touch,
and she knew in a secret part of her brain that Cindy was already
gone. Thinking back, she imagined she knew the exact moment when
Cindy-girl had blinked away. It was that quick and that final.

Mindy Bergstrom loved Dos Hermanos. She had
spent most of her first twenty-five years in St. Paul, Minnesota
and she had always detested the cold and wet that hunched there
like an angry old man. Now, barely past fifty years old, ‘cold and
wet’ was almost all she remembered of her life before DH. Here she
was warm all the time, living with the only family she’d ever
loved, in a place filled with light and devoid of the mud, the
mildew, the sniffles, the clamminess of…well, of everywhere else on
Earth.

She stared through the
storefront window, through the half-raised Venetian blinds that
looked out on the shimmering, deserted vista of North Poplar
street.
It was so sad
. Everything that had happened in the last thirty-six hours
reminded her of that awful other place she thought of as the
outside world. All the calls she’d taken, all the things she’d seen
traveling to the Conference Center and back, to her home and
back…

It was never going to be the same again. That
was obvious to any old fool. And small and simple as Mindy
Bergstrom was, she was no fool.

She sighed as she took off her headset and
shut down the phones. She made sure the coffee machine was turned
off and the mini-fridge was shut tightly, as she did every night.
She almost smiled as she shrugged into her only coat, the one she
wore when it got a little chilly at night in December and January,
and she was careful to close and lock the door as she left.

Mindy Bergstrom had come into this world,
into this town, and into this life very quietly. She had lived very
quietly, and she knew it would end very quietly as well.

So when she left the office, exactly on time,
she decided to walk home all by herself. Just this once.

Donald Peck didn’t know
shit about poetry. Never had. He sat in his tricked-out police
cruiser on the East Ridge, not all that far from where Jimmy Fultz
had stolen the
Dragonfly
hours earlier. He didn’t think of Coleridge or
Ozymandias as he looked down on the dimly visible remains of his
drowning city. Hell, “Ozymandias” was the name of a space shuttle
or a WWA wrestler.

It was hard to believe that
yesterday he’d been all worked up about a handful of missing girls.
Like they mattered. Like they were any real threat to him. He
should have remembered that, after thirty years of hard work,
nothing
was a real threat to him in this
town. As far as he was concerned, he pretty much owned Dos
Hermanos, California.

Which was what made it so
frustrating, so maddening
.
That something as simple as the fucking weather
could bring him down so quickly and so completely.

“It’s rain,” he said into
the padded dashboard of the cruiser. “Just
rain.
”

The sight of the
devastation below him would have overwhelmed a normal man. Filled
him with grief or despair. Not Donald Peck. Peck felt only one
emotion, just as overwhelming but entirely
different
.

Rage,
seasoned with desperate, unbreakable
determination.

He wasn’t going to let it
happen. He simply
wasn’t
. The plan was simple: he’d
gather together the last few assholes who were still in town, the
ones too poor or too stupid to get out on their own, and he would
lead them to the Promised Land, up the highway and through the
Notch, like some fucking Aryan Brotherhood Moses. He would become
the brave local hero who saved the last few survivors of the Great
Dos Hermanos Flood, and soon he would return to rebuild their home
as their chosen leader.