Secrets of the Storm (The Rain Triptych)
Page 25
Buildings were rising out of the water all around them now. Creatures were everywhere, jostling for space to attack. They could see the roofs of single-story homes now, even some windows. There were street signs, high hedges, eight-foot fences sprouting all around them … and all of them teeming with gray, rocky monsters. The green line they had spotted earlier was clearly visible in the mist: it was actually the line of the shore, the green grass of Windhaven Farms and the white gravel path that ran through the fields around it. Lisa remembered seeing it when they’d first driven into town, just a few days earlier. A few days, she thought. It’s not possible.
Suddenly Jim Greenaway threw himself off his inner-tube raft and into the water. Lisa started to scream at him –
– but he didn’t sink. He stood up straight … and the water only reached to the middle of his chest.
It was less than five feet deep. But the monsters were barely ten feet away.
“QUICK!” he shouted, seizing two of the closest children. “RUN FOR IT!”
Every able-bodied adult plunged into the water, a few scant yards from the stalking creatures of the storm. Some grabbed children that were small enough to carry; others towed the floats, pulling as hard as they could, hauling them to shore.
The creatures attacked. They came up from below, roared in from the side. The tasers snapped, but power was low, and the creatures didn’t seem to mind them much – not anymore.
Lisa heard an adult bellow behind her as a creature pulled a child from his arms. There was a wet chop, and the bellowing stopped. The water boiled red.
They were so close. So close …
Kerianne was right in front of her, surging through waist-deep water. Lisa dug in with the oar, moved to pace her –
– when something pulled the little girl under the water in an instant. One moment she was there, running for all she was worth. The next she was gone, snatched beneath the surface.
“NOOOO!”
Allison Bryce surged past her, a whirling mass of arms and legs. She plunged into the water in exactly the spot where Kerianne had disappeared. The muck heaved and surged. Lisa dug in an oar and stopped, not caring about the others, unaware of who was making it to shore and who wasn’t, focused entirely on the thrashing, boiling confusion of water and blood and arms and legs right in front of her.
Allison heaved out of the water. Kerianne was in her arms. The little girl’s right arm was bent in the wrong direction; there was a gash in her opposite shoulder at least an inch deep, leaking watery blood.
“TAKE HER! TAKE—”
Allison convulsed. Shuddered. She dropped straight down by six inches, and Lisa immediately remember David Drucker and what she’d seen. How smooth and flat the cut.
“TAKE HER!”
The bottom of the kayak’s hull bumped against something hard. She recognized it immediately: it was dirt. Mud.
They had reached the shore.
She threw herself out of the kayak and lunged for Allison. The other woman thrust her daughter into her arms and fell back, wailing, splashing madly. People were all around them, sprinting out of the water, high-stepping like acrobats and scattering water, panting and screaming. But Kerianne’s mother was gone, disappeared, as if she had never been there.
And monsters were all around them.
Lisa turned, an unconscious Kerianne in her arms. She ran desperately for shore. They could be amphibious, she thought as she ran. They could follow us right out of the water and up onto shore. But she couldn’t worry about that, she didn’t dare. She just had to run for safety, run for dry land, run and hope and pray …
She threw herself out of the water, struggled for ten more yards with the weight of the girl in her arms, then finally, exhausted, fell to the white gravel path beneath her feet. There were others all around her, collapsing on the pebbles, gasping and groaning from the effort.
Don’t come out, she silently commanded. Don’t come out, stay in the water, stay away …
She had a sudden image of a multi-legged creature, eyeless and mouthless but studded with hooks and talons, stalking through the shallows, already dry as dust, and reaching down to stab her in the stomach …
It doesn’t matter, she told herself, and pushed it away. We’re done. We stop here now or we die.
The wind was raw and stinging-wet, blowing harder than ever. It pierced her like needles where it touched her. Above them, behind them, the windmills of Windhaven Farm had long since lost their vanes to the storm; now they were simply twisted white-metal stubs that screeched in the gale like dying children.
But the monsters had stopped.
Lisa lifted her head to look at the water, out across the tiny, wind-driven waves, and saw the creatures out there: waiting, twitching, turning on each other for a quick, angry swipe and then falling back, fading away. The nearest ones were twenty feet away, no more, and their thrashing made the water boil madly … but they didn’t come closer.
Lisa finally pulled herself to her feet. Sharon Greenaway appeared at her side and put out her arms. “Let me take her,” she said. “I want to help.”
Lisa was reluctant to let Kerianne go, but … but she was so tired. She could barely stand. She handed her over and took a deep breath. “Thank you,” she said. “We’re almost there.”
Others started to rise. They clustered together one final time. “Just up to Highway 181,” she told them, just as James Barrymore had told her. “Then out through the Notch …”
Trini was next to her, standing with difficulty and counting heads. It seemed to be something teachers did compulsively and continually.
“Oh, my God,” Trini whispered. “Oh my God.”
Forty-one
“Thirty-two,” she said under her breath. “That’s all: thirty-two.”
They had begun with seventy-four.
Lisa bowed her head. Nothing to be done, she told herself. No other choice. She forced herself to face away from the water, and saw a short path leading to a small front yard and a ruined Airstream trailer. There was a big, hand-painted wooden sign right in front of it: WELCOME TO WINDHAVEN FARM.
From what she could see through the driving rain, the trailer was crushed, collapsed like a stepped-on shoebox. Slivers of metal and glass were driven into the spongy ground all around it.
Never mind, she thought, and squared her shoulders. She started down the white gravel path that paralleled the new lake that covered Dos Hermanos … but Trini started off in a different direction.
“The gate’s up that way,” she said over the rush of the rain and the howling of the towers. “We can cut across the grass.” She called back over her shoulder. “Kids? Come on!” She started across the path, towards the high, wild green just beyond it –
– and Lisa saw the woman next to the Windhaven sign for the first time.
She should have noticed her earlier, she knew, but they were all too tired to think clearly, and it was hard to see anything in the gray light left by the rain. Ultimately it was a slash of lightning that revealed her: a young woman, slim and dark-skinned, leaning on the sign itself, held up by one long arm, standing very, very still.
She was as gray as weathered bone.
Trini kept walking towards the grass, a slow but steady trudge. Lisa didn’t follow. She kept looking at the woman …
She had been pretty once. She had a mass of curly hair, a little like Elli’s, but longer. Handsome features. She resembled the movie actress Halle Berry, though this girl was barely out of her teens, with a lovely trim body that was clearly visible as she leaned almost lazily against the wooden sign …
She’s short, Lisa thought. So short.
Too short.
Trini was almost to the grass when a second flare of lightning illuminated the field, and Lisa saw what was truly wrong:
The woman’s feet were gone.
And her legs were gone. And half her thighs were gone. And she was still standing flat against the ground as if –
– as i
f –
Lisa threw herself after Trini. She crossed the ten feet of gravel in two seconds flat, thrust out her hands and seized the teacher by the very ends of her luxurious hair.
Trini screamed as Lisa snatched her back from the edge of the lawn and her feet flew out from under her. The razor-sharp blades that had eaten the pretty young woman from the bottom up twitched as Trini’s bare toes grazed them … and twitched again when her feet flew away, too fast to be taken.
The women fell together, a tangled heap on the white gravel. “Stay away from the grass!” Lisa shouted to the others. “Don’t touch it, STAY ON THE PATH!”
It only took a moment more for the other adults to see what she had seen. Then they pulled the children close, muttering and staring.
Lisa helped Trini to her feet. “Sorry,” she panted. “So sorry, it’s just I—I saw the grass. I saw that woman …”
Trini stared at the scene for a long moment. Then she nodded. “Thanks,” she said, and swallowed. “I think we can skip the shortcut.” She backed away from the edge of the lawn very carefully, and they moved down the path together, side by side. They kept their eyes straight forward after that, not looking at the monstrous ocean on one side and the carnivorous turf on the other.
Thunder exploded like dynamite in the clouds above them. And still, the rain never stopped.
As they moved down the gravel path to the edge of Highway 121, the storm seemed to grow even worse. Lightning flickered continuously around them; thunder was an endless roar; and the torrent doubled its strength and volume, with drops as big as grapes thudding against them like stones. Even inside the two coats she wore, Lisa felt as if she was being pummeled.
The freeway itself had acquired an eerie unreality. The asphalt was too straight, too smooth. It flowed like black ice out of the Notch in the ridgeline and rolled gently downhill, slipping like a huge dark tongue directly into the newly formed sea. At first she didn’t even want to touch it – it didn’t seem real, it didn’t seem solid after the churning nightmare of the storm-lake. But after a moment she planted her foot on the blacktop … then put the other foot in front of it.
“Come on,” she told the others. “Time to go.” The group turned to follow the yellow line painted down the center of the road.
Together, silent, exhausted, thirty-two survivors of the great Dos Hermanos Flood turned and walked north, out of the Notch, and into their final surprise.
***
As the walls of the Notch rose around them, left and right, the storm began to subside. With every step into the canyon, the rain slacked off and the wind receded. By the time the group staggered to the ridge wall’s mid-point, the rain had actually stopped.
Stopped.
They saw a golden band of sunlight open up on the roadway, in front and below them. Sunlight, Lisa thought, and said it aloud: “That’s sunlight.” It seemed like a thousand years since she’d seen anything like it.
There was a collective sigh from the others as they stepped into the light and warmth. Lisa was reminded of an ancient movie, something about Shangri-La, where Ronald Colman stepped out of a blizzard and into a spring day. That’s what they were doing. Out of the storm, and into …
She stopped short when they passed the ridgeline and saw the Anza Borrego desert laid out below them.
They all stopped.
On a normal spring afternoon, there would be a wide and very empty expanse of brownish sand, dotted with a few wildflowers, shimmering in the heat. There would be the black ribbon of Highway 181, snaking its way north to Palm Springs, Barstow, and the rest of the world. And there probably wouldn’t have been a human in sight – not even a car. There rarely was.
But the survivors of the storm found something completely different. They found themselves looking down on a tent city of at least three thousand people – military people. There were trucks and jeeps and armored personnel carriers. There was a set of huge black helicopters. There were temporary shacks and some kind of headquarters at the rest stop they’d passed on the way in, and what looked like a field hospital decorated with a huge red cross on a white field.
Soldiers were everywhere – men and women, bustling around on business of their own, throwing up plumes of yellow dust, shouting orders and obeying others, all just a few hundred feet below them.
The sky above them was a hard desert blue. The wind was from the west and dead-dry. There wasn’t a cloud or a raindrop in sight. Nowhere. At all.
“What the hell?” Jim Greenaway said.
“More like what the fuck?” Trini said, truly angry for the first time.
“Language,” Lisa said absently. “Language.”
A khaki-green Army Jeep was speeding up the road towards them. A man with a buzz-cut and fancy wraparound sunglasses was standing in the jump seat, one hand on the windshield, one arm raised. The group stopped in the middle of the road to wait for him, too tired to keep going, too astonished to try.
The Jeep pulled to a stop ten feet in front of Lisa.
“My name is Michael Danziger,” he said. “We’re here to help.”
Lisa shook her head – back and forth, back and forth. “Boy,” she said, unable to keep it to herself. “Do you have some ‘splainin’ to do.”
Forty-two
“You’re taking me with you,” Lisa said to the colonel. She had come to hate the man almost instantly, and that had been hours ago.
“I most certainly am not,” he said, with an expression that looked as if he’d swallowed something bitter. They were standing in his control center, a spacious tent with half a dozen busy soldiers all around, at computers and clipboards. And it was all utterly meaningless to her.
Lisa lowered her head. I’m going to get through this, she promised herself. No matter what. “Look. I don’t care – none of us care – what this was all about. What happened. We’ll stay quiet and confused if you want us to.”
“Damn right you will,” Danziger said. “This is a Homeland Security issue.”
Like that matters, she thought bitterly. Like that’s true. “… and there are too many of us to just … deal with, aren’t there?” she said, watching him closely. “I mean one or two, that you could handle, but … thirty-two? Maybe more?”
“”I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, and a wide patch of blue-gray skin-pebbles washed across his face, temple to temple. Lie, she thought. You know exactly what I’m talking about. “The fact is, however,” he continued, “you’re right. We … we have no alternative to cooperation.”
And this time … truth. No pebbling. Good, she thought. At least we won’t be spending the summer in Guantanamo Bay. Or worse.
“So once again,” she said. “You’re going in as soon as this … thing, this climatic abnormality or whatever the hell you’re calling it, finally ends.”
He nodded. “Satellite data says tonight. It should be over before dawn.”
“And when you go in, you’re going to be searching for survivors. Assessing damage. You’re going to need someone who’s been all over that little hell-hole and can tell you where to look.”
He made the sour face again. “You overestimate yourself, Ms. Corman. We are well aware you’re not even a local. I’ve made that mistake before.”
Truth, she realized. She wondered what that meant.
“I have a daughter in there,” she said. “And a husband – ex-husband. I know of at least a few other sites where there may be survivors, but given the damage, I have to show you – show you, not tell you.”
He was already shaking his head. “Too dangerous,” he said. “Not a chance. We’ve already lost some good men in there ...”
True, she saw.
“Not that there was anything we could have done about it,” he hurried on. “Completely unavoidable.”
Lie, she saw, as an ugly band of rough blackness welled up from his collar and disappeared under his hairline.
“That’s not true,” she said.
He bridled
at her tone. “It most certainly is! I won’t have you—”
“Tell the truth,” she ordered him. As it turned out, it was the last time she would say those words in that voice.
But he told her. Every word. In just under two minutes, he related the entire incident with the veteran Tyler Briggs, and the attack of the breaker, and how Danziger himself had fled.
Lisa kept herself from shedding a tear. You’re just lucky as hell Ty’s not alive, she thought. He’d beat the shit out of you right here and now. But she would do worse. Now that she knew: she would do far worse.
But for the moment Lisa Corman Mackie did some lying of her own. “I tell you what, Colonel Danziger. We will keep that little story to ourselves, all right? I won’t go looking for corroborating testimony or any reports you might have falsified. If you take me with you when you start the search.”
He stared at her, lockjawed at his own stupidity, filled with hatred. But he nodded.
“Promise?” she said.
“I said I agreed.”
Truth, she saw. Only because he had no choice.
She turned to look at the other men in the tent. They were all working very hard to appear as if they hadn’t heard the story that Danziger had just blurted out. “You all heard that, right? We’re all on the same page?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said one soldier. His cheeks were ruddy and his eyes were bright at what he’d just heard. “We’ll make sure.” And the unearthly color she saw in that boy’s face reassured her. They hated this man. They probably always had. And now …
Good.
“I’m going to go check on my people,” she said. “May I take Private …?”
“Farrel,” the young soldier said.
“… Farrel with me? As escort?”
Danziger could barely trust himself to speak. “Yes. Of course. Thank you.”
“No,” she said graciously. “Thank you.” You fucking murderous cowardly son of a bitch. You’ll get yours.
She was at the entrance to the tent, just about to step outside, when the explosion came.