Creatures of the Storm (31 page)

He’d be in a better
position than ever. No one, not some brain-dead grandson of one of
the founders, not some slime-fingered corporate stooge, could
challenge him then. And something like this would never happen
again. The place would be
his,
forever, as he’d always planned. After all, the
good thing about a five hundred year storm like this was that he’d
have at least five hundred years before the next one
came.

“Sheriff, this is Eight Eleven.” It was Bo
Cameron, sounding strangely unnerved. Usually not enough
information made it all the way into Bo's head to give him any
trouble. “Are you…Sheriff, are you all right?”

“Eight Eleven, this is Peck. Of course I am,”
Peck said. “Are you?”

There was a long pause. All he heard was Bo
Cameron breathing in and out, in and out, hard and fast. He was
about to click off when the cop spoke. “I guess,” he said, not
certain of that at all.

“Any contact with the others?” Bo asked.
“Mindy? Fultz?”

“No, sir. I think Mindy went home for the
night. Fultz? Who knows?”

Okay,” Peck said, wondering what had happened
to them, but not really caring. “You’re done, are you?”

“I’ve made a full circuit,” Bo said over the
police band. “Rousted the civilians, sent ‘em packing or to the
Conference Center. I’m ready to—”

There was a crash of breaking glass and the
scrape of metal on metal, clearly audible over the police
channel.

“Bo? What is it?
Bo!
”

Bo went
“Wha—
”
and then
there was…

Peck heard it as a
chomp.
The sound of
something huge biting into something meaty. Then there was
screaming. And swallowing. And more screaming, and this time it
wouldn’t end. Sherriff Peck listened until there wasn’t anything
more to listen to. Then he turned off the radio, knowing there was
no one left to answer, and no one left to call.

He thought about that for a moment.

Okay
.
So…things got a little simpler.
That’s all.

There was still the plan. Still the vision.
Still his unstoppable determination.

This just makes it
easier
.
Now it’s
all up to me.

Ken led his daughter back to the atrium with the
high-domed ceiling of glass, but she couldn’t stand it
there.
Things
were tapping at the glass two stories above them, and that
was too much to bear.

Without asking permission, Rose fled upstairs
to the sitting room, a wide, low-ceilinged room with dark beams and
white adobe walls. Four sets of casement windows looked out over
the huge broken tooth of stone in the driveway to the dim glow of
the town beyond and below, little more than a faint smudge through
the rain. Her father was close behind her, his long face tight with
tension.

“Maggie,” he said to the open air. “Are you
all right?”

It seemed like an odd question to Rose, but
the disembodied voice of the house seemed to understand what he was
asking. “I lost two processors and the far south surveillance
cameras,” Maggie said very calmly. “One of the memory back-ups has
failed, too, but we’re thrice redundant there. All Uninterruptable
Power Systems and the back-up generator are still solid, too.”

God, Dad,
she thought.
Overbuild
much?

He nodded. “Satellite link?”

“Still intact, but the one-way mirror is
still in place.”

“So all in all…what’s your
self-assessment?”

Maggie didn’t answer right
away, and even that was odd. Rose couldn’t recall her
pausing
before.

“I’m a little slower now,” Maggie said,
almost as if she was admitting a secret weakness. “But I’m still
here.”

“What are you two talking about?” Rose
asked.

“Maggie isn’t a single
computer,” Ken said. “She’s actually a whole series of distributed
processors, sensors, memory drives, a bunch of stuff, that are
installed all over the house. Her higher functions – her fuzzy
logic drivers, some of her conversational protocols, and what we’ve
come to call her ‘implication engines’ – are handled through her
uplink to a commercial geostationary satellite
up there
,” he pointed over their
heads, “which, in turn, links her to microseconds of commercially
available share-time on a series of networked
supercomputers.”

“So there isn’t like one glowing mechanical
brain in a closet somewhere,” Rose said. “She’s got bits of her
scattered all over the house…and all the hard decisions are done,
in fractions of a second, by talking with other, smarter computers,
far away.”

Ken smiled. He looked proud of her. “You got
it,” he said.

“…and the other side of that,” Maggie said,
“is that when the house is damaged, and some of the sensor or
processors go offline, I lose some of my reasoning and
communications capacity.”

“You get stupider,” Rose said helpfully.

“Right,” Maggie agreed.
Rose caught it that time. It took a measurable
beat
for her to respond this
time.

“What are you going to tell Mom?” Rose asked
abruptly, knowing she was interrupting and not really caring. Her
Dad, preoccupied with the screen and his own thoughts, turned to
her abruptly, surprised at the question.

“What?”

“You told her we would be out of here, over
the ridge, by dark. But somebody ate our ride.”

He blinked and looked out the windows.
Lightning flickered, thunder cracked like wet wood, and for a
moment—just a moment – something whistled past the second floor
balcony, a huge, filigreed wheel of bone, edged in teeth and
talons, twirling on the wind. It flashed for only an instant, then
disappeared in a black-on-black afterimage.

He opened his mouth say something and Maggie
interrupted.

“Ken,” she said with unexpected volume and
urgency. “Somebody’s coming in the gate.”

The TV flickered to a green, grainy
night-vision view of the front gate and the first half-mile of
private road. A blocky, dented Jeep was bouncing towards them,
trailing sparks as it barreled through the water at the bottom of
the first hill and spun off sheets of water as it surged up the
second incline.

“Anybody we know?” Ken asked, peering at
it.

“Not that I can tell,” Maggie said. “Do you
recognize the vehicle?”

“Nope.”

“Dad,” Rose said, “if he hits the driveway
he’ll sink like you did.”

“Crap,” Ken said.

“
Deep
crap,” she agreed.

They pounded down the stairs. “Maggie!” he
called. “What’s going on with our…wildlife out there?”

“All cameras show it’s clear at the moment,”
Maggie said as they skidded on the overpolished floor of the
entryway. “They seem to have followed the big ones, the
leg-things—”

“Bone spiders,” Rose and Ken said together,
and then looked at each other in surprise.

“Bone spiders, then,” Maggie said. “They all
seem to have left with them.”

Ken nodded. “Good. Then–”

“Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” Rose said. She
couldn’t resist.

“Whatever you say, Dave,”
Maggie said. The door-lock went
thunk
, and Rose thought,
You may be down, Maggie, but you’re not out – not
nearly.

They ran onto the porch, right to the edge of
the roofline. The Jeep’s lights were visible at the top of the
second hill, still climbing.

Ken waved his long arms frantically. “STOP!
STOP THERE!”

Rose hopped up and down next to him and did
the same. “WAIT! WAIT!” She noticed a single headlight, much
dimmer, far behind the battered Jeep. She couldn’t see what kind of
car it was.

Maggie swiveled the exterior lights to
illuminate the path. The Jeep was outlined in stark
black-and-white, the rain etched in thick vertical slashes, slicing
the scene into a thousand narrow, flickering strips.

The Jeep kept coming. They shouted louder,
knowing they wouldn’t possibly be heard, and waved even more
frantically as the car topped the third hill and accelerated down
the paved drive, straight towards them, and straight towards the
lake of mud.

“STOP!” Rose screamed as
the Jeep hit the edge of the road, the point where it would start
to sink, and ridiculously, impossibly, the car actually
sped up
. For an instant
it flew into the air, jumping like a jalopy in some absurd
reenactment of a
Dukes of Hazard
stunt. She could see the muck-encrusted
undercarriage all too clearly in the searchlights as it soared
through the air and came down right in the middle of the liquefied
landfill with the most extraordinary sound.

The Jeep went
splurch
and
k’tang!!
simultaneously,
the sound of a car splashing into mud as thick as clay
and
the sound of a car
hitting another car at full speed, both at the same time. Muck and
dirty rainwater flew up in a perfect circle with the Jeep at its
center, a full three-hundred-sixty degrees of filth in a six-foot
splash. Rose and Ken staggered back, arms up, as the mud-wave
splattered over the porch.

When Rose looked back, she fully expected to
see the Jeep sinking swiftly into the ground, as the Land Rover had
earlier.

But it didn’t. It sat
there, buried halfway up its wheels, as if it was
floating
on the muck
instead of sinking into it.

“Son of a bitch,” Ken said,
so softly Rose barely heard it. “I think it’s
on top of the Rover
.”

Rose noticed it was in exactly the same place
that the Rover had sunk. She had a momentary vision of the buried
four-wheel-drive, submerged in the mud, with the Jeep sitting on
top of it like a seven-ton Easter bonnet.

Maggie’s swiveling searchlights turned and
adjusted like the eye-stalks of some vast mechanical snail. There
was a stout woman with very short hair sitting inside the Jeep,
eyes as big as saucers, mouth gaping. She looked as stunned by the
experience as Rose was. After a long moment her eyes shifted from a
thousand-yard stare to Ken and Rose.

“Get out!” Rose shouted,
gesturing to her. “Quick, before you sink,
get out!
” She moved out into the
rain, put her boot into the bubbling muck beyond the red-brick
porch and immediately started to sink. It was as bad as ever. Maybe
worse.

The woman in the car didn’t
notice. She scooted across to the passenger door, kicked it open,
hauled herself out…
and sank into the watery mud, almost to
her waist. She was
fast
,
though, Rose saw. She yelped, recovered, clutched, and pulled
herself back up into her seat, dripping and filthy, before the mud
could take her completely.

She looked up across the
ten-foot gulf between them with an expression that clearly
asked,
What the fuck?

“
Quicksand!”
Ken bellowed, making
huge, sweeping gestures that were impossible to decipher.
“All around you!”

Rose didn’t know if the woman could hear them
or not.

The Jeep woman got the idea. Without missing
a beat, she squirmed around, stood up in the doorway of the Jeep,
and scrambled out onto its broad, mud-spattered hood. Now she was
only eight feet from the red brick porch.

As she struggled to stand on the shuddering,
denting sheet metal, the whole car lurched two feet forward and
nosed downward twenty degrees. The woman danced to keep her
balance, and Rose knew exactly what was happening.

“
You’re sliding off!
” she screamed,
knowing that would mean absolutely nothing to the woman.
“
You’re sinking in! Quick!
JUMP!”

The car slid another foot
down. The woman got the idea, took three pounding steps that
covered the length of the hood, and
leaped
, as far and as high as she
could, straight towards the porch, feet first.

She missed.

She fell short by exactly three feet, knifing
feet-first into the muck. A brown wall of mud flew up and slapped
Rose square in the face. She gagged and used the back of her wrist
to scrape the crap out of her eyes, cursing at it, and found the
short-haired woman right in front of her, beyond her feet, sinking
fast. She was already up to her chest in the liquefied
landfill.

Without even thinking about it, Rose threw
herself onto her stomach and put out a hand. The Jeep woman tugged
her own hand from the mud, the motion driving her six inches deeper
down, and clutched at Rose’s straining fingers. They intertwined,
held tight.

Rose started to slide forward, belly-first,
into the mud.

Ken saw what was happening
and threw himself forward, covering Rose’s legs, pinning her to the
bricks. He used his weight to stop her, wrapped his long fingers
around her ankles, then shuffled back and
pulled
, as hard as he
could.

Rose felt her vertebrae
go
pop-pop-pop
as
she stretched, but she moved back. Ken pulled
with all his might again, and she inched back a little
farther.
Look at me,
Rose thought as the pain clamped on her spine.
I’m a human tow rope.