by Brad Munson
“Alexander …” she said, with a hint of unsteadiness in her voice.
“Before the water comes to choke us all!”
“Alexander!” she said severely. “Simmer down!”
“Deseret Nine Fifty-Six Fifty! Deseret Nine –”
Miriam Lazenby, once again fully in control, looked as if she wanted to spit. “Oh, for pity's sake,” she muttered. “Come along, Alexander.” She took him firmly – almost roughly – by the arm and spun him around, back towards the front entrance. Her ceramic blue gaze shot back over her shoulder at Geoff Chamberlain. “You will be there tonight, Doctor,” she ordered him. “The picture of professional command. Eight o'clock. The Convention Center. And change that lab jacket. It has blood on it.”
“Choke us!” the mayor told her, trying to explain something very, very important. “Choke us all, every one!”
The double doors grumped open and she almost duck-walked him out of the clinic. A long, black limousine was waiting at the curb. The instant they appeared a burly man in a chauffeur's cap popped out and opened the back door. They were inside and gone in a heartbeat.
Lisa blinked at the automatic doors as they thumped shut again. The silence after all that talk, after that hissing rumble of rain, was like a solid thing.
Choking, Lisa thought.
“Well,” she said, finding herself a little breathless. “That was interesting.”
“Pathetic, more like it,” the young doctor said, as much to himself as to her. This time he didn't even flinch; apparently he had abandoned professional courtesy completely.
Less than five minutes later, Lisa was back in her room with a well-thumbed copy of National Geographic in her hand. Geoff Chamberlain checked on her roommate for all of three seconds; he was still dead sleep, more coma than nap, behind the hanging curtain.
Geoff tucked her into bed with well-practiced, professional care and a bit of amusement. “Okay now,” he told her, “any more trouble and I really will have Carrie give you something thick and ugly that'll put you down for the count, just like Snow White on a bad day.”
She smiled. “You mean Sleeping Beauty.”
He smiled back. “I mean get some rest, Lisa. Please.”
She nodded. “You'll be here when I wake up?”
“Most likely,” he said. “We never close here at the Borrego Clinic. And apparently I never go home.”
She put her hand over his and gave it a squeeze. “Thanks, Geoff. Really.”
He almost blushed. It was the most charming thing she'd seen in days. “Not a problem,” he said. “Just doing my job.”
He left her alone in her curtained half-room and turned the light down very low. Lisa never even got the National Geographic open. She was asleep in seconds.
* * *
The screaming baby woke her. At least she thought it was a baby. It startled her out of some dark, dry dream, made her sit up with her heart racing and her hands clenched into fists.
It all came back to her in an instant: the road trip, the accident, the revelation, the Clinic. She took a deep breath and blew it out. What was going on now?
“Hey …”
She caught her breath and turned.
It was the roommate. The one who was supposed to sleep for hours.
He looked terrible: waxy pale skin, gaunt and undernourished, gasping for breath with a dry, low rattle in his throat. He was wrinkled and wispy-haired; Seventy if he's a day, Lisa told herself. She thought he'd looked much younger when she glimpsed him early, but …
She watched helplessly as he tried to speak to her again.
“Hey …” he rasped.
There was a sudden bellowing in another room, a name being called, a distant crash of glass as if a pitcher had been dropped or a window broken. But Lisa didn't take her eyes off the old man. She was sure he was dying; she even imagined that she could see him shrinking, sinking farther into himself, wrinkles growing deeper even as she watched.
Without warning, his wasted arm came up and he pawed at the plastic mask that covered his mouth. It took three attempts but he managed to hook it with his crooked fingers and pull it back. He opened his eyes very wide. They were bright blue, almost luminous in the near dark.
“Thirsty,” he whispered. It was a dry croak, air hissing out of him like a leaky pipe. “Thirsty …”
She heard a strange sound and looked up at the plastic bag of saline solution that was connected to his arm. She gasped as she watched the level of the liquid fall, as the old man sucked inch after inch into his body. In less than ten seconds, the bag collapsed completely, and then the bag was empty. Dry.
She looked back at the old man's face, ready to call out. He grunted as he caught her eyes and smiled at her. Smiled … and a tooth fell out of his mouth. Right in front, one of the main incisors. It simply dropped from the gum, bounced on the mattress, and hit the linoleum floor with a plink.
“It hasn't got a mouth,” the man said, “but it bites.” He gasped and twitched once, and the tube in his arm flexed as if it was straining to pull one more drop from the exhausted saline pouch. “It bites.”
He turned away and stared at the ceiling, gasping for air, and the rash that Lisa was beginning to recognize all too well raced across him, rippled down from the crackling scraps of hair on his head, gushing over his cheeks and chin to his throat and beyond.
He was telling the truth, she realized. He wasn't hallucinating; it wasn't a dream. He had seen something, felt something … something that was killing him.
Lisa tried to lift a hand to the call button, but she didn't do it – couldn't do it. Her hand dropped back to the mattress and she fell, struggling against the pillow as the old man died.
Warren Baxter was a mid-level marketing executive for VeriSil Computers, the same company that employed Lisa's ex-husband. He was divorced, unhappy, and smoked too much weed every night because he had nothing better to do.
At 2:37 that afternoon, just a few hours after the rain began, he was snagged by a tumbleweed made of bone or something like it. It had been driven against the windshield of his Lexus by the storm. When he tried to pull it off so he could drive home with his fresh batch of dope, it scratched him all over his arms. It hurt like a son of a bitch.
Two hours later, thoroughly high, he began to feel like shit.
One hour later, he called 911. He was one of the last deliveries that particular ambulance ever made.
He was thirty-seven years old.
Lisa pulled those facts, and far too many more, right out of the air when she heard him tell the truth. The sudden rush of it, of feelings and thoughts that were not her own, made her nauseated and dizzy all at once.
The last thing she saw were his gnarled fingers twitching, grasping for something in the air that he couldn't reach. The last thing she heard before the nausea of revelation overwhelmed her, before an unnatural sleep took her away, was the dry rasp of his breath as he said one final word, over and over:
“Thirsty. Thirsty …”
THE FIRST NIGHT
Nine
Tyler looked through the front windows of the El Grande Gas Mini-Mart and saw eleven ways to die in sixty seconds.
As the last of the daylight drained away, he saw the thornwheels, some as small as poker chips, some as big as hula hoops, hurtle out of the storm. They cut through anything soft enough to slice up or shattered like blown glass against anything hard enough to fight back. The normal, everyday wind-blown debris – sheets of metal, daggers of plastic and glass – shot past as well, sharing space with twisting sheets of translucent tissue – the ones he'd mistaken for cellophane or plastic wrap earlier on – that writhed through the air, sometime pausing, sometimes changing direction. A name came into his head: Flumes. He didn't know how or why he called them that, but he knew it was right.
But when the soot-black, sharpened sticks, no bigger than the fingers of the dead, began to boil up out of the trembling mud beyond the asphalt, grasping for the air, tangling and clut
ching and pulling free of the muck …
Time to get the fuck out of here, he knew. Like … now.
Tyler took a step back from the glass as the hundredth thornwheel smashed against the glass. It broke into pieces and fell away. The rushing water, six inches deep against the bottom of the bolted doors, pulled the remains away in an instant, just as it had the ninety-nine other examples before it.
Land line, he thought. This place is old enough to have one of those, and even with this fucking storm, it might still work.
He found the phone hidden on a shelf under the cash register, dusty and greasy from Dead Leonard's long-ago touch. He picked up the receiver with two fingers, wincing at the slippery-gritty feel of the old plastic, and punched in 9-1-1.
At least it rang. But it rang for a very long time. He watched the storm through the window of the mini-mart as he waited. Something big and dusty-silver stagger-floated past – something he couldn't quite see through the downpour, but something that carried a feeling of weight and danger and awareness that actually made him flinch.
The phone clicked in his ear and a voice came on. “Dos Hermanos Sherriff’s Office, what is your emergency?” It was a woman's voice, somehow round and plump. She sounded vaguely disturbed and annoyed at the same time.
“Hey. I'm at, um, 'El Grande Gas and Auto,’ up here at the El Grande exit off the 121?”
“Oh, sure. Leonard's place.”
“Uh, yeah. That's it. Look, there's been … an accident. Leonard's been hurt; he's lying out there in the storm right now and you gotta get somebody over here.”
“Oh, my,” said the voice. She sounded genuinely concerned. “Oh, my, that's awful. Um …”
Um? You're 911, with the ambulances and cops and all … and you say 'Um'?
“Well, we have a real situation here,” the woman said. “Yes. A real situation. At the … who am I speaking with?”
He was taken aback all over again. Are you even allowed to ask that? “I'm … my name is Tyler. Ty. Briggs. I just got into town.”
“Oh. Okay, then. I didn't think I recognized your voice. Nice to meet you, Tyler.”
He shook his head for more than one reason. “Okay. Look, Leonard, he's in a really bad way.”
“Oh, I understand that. I do. But both of our ambulances are already out, and everybody is just so – so busy.”
Ty pulled the phone away from his ear and just stared at it. “Busy,” he said. Thunder bounded against the roof. A fusillade of raindrops clattered against the windows.
She started to talk again and he put the phone back to his ear, ignoring the slimy feel of it against his skin. “… what I can do,” she said.
“I'm sorry, what?”
“I said let me see what I can do. But no promises! We just didn't expect this rain, you know? No one did. And then there's the big meeting down at the Convention Center that's just about to start, so it's not like I can make that go away. You see what I'm saying.”
I have no idea what you're saying, he thought. But it doesn't matter. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever.”
“Okay then. You take care.”
“Wait—”
Too late. The phone made a thick, final click, and 911 cut off.
Ty kept holding it to his ear for a long time, half-expecting her to come back on the line to offer something more. But … no. Nothing.
He put the receiver back in its filthy cradle very carefully. “All right,” he said aloud to absolutely no one. “Time for Plan B.”
Now what was Plan B, exactly?
***
He cruised the crowded aisles of the mini-mart, thinking hard as the storm grew even more violent. It made the entire building shudder and shift around him, but he pushed away thoughts of the roof simply ripping off the dilapidated old structure, exposing him to the elements and the things hiding in the dark.
Instead, he kept moving. He pulled a cookie sheet from the kitchen supplies shelf, three rolls – no, he decided, four rolls – of duct tape from the hardware section, and a pair of tin snips hanging from a hook behind the counter. He stopped by the toy aisle and pawed through everything he could find there. He didn't like the options, but … okay. He picked up the life-sized hard plastic head-mask of Iron Man and put it into his shopping basket, then snagged a set of pizza pie tins from behind the warming racks where the snack foods sat, slowly rotting away. A thick canvas painter's cap was added to the pile as well.
He was flexing one of the pie tins, just starting to bend it, when red and blue cop-lights jittered across the room. Ty looked up and out to see a black-and-white with a single man inside cruising into the parking lot. An instant later he heard the quick, creepy bloop of the siren, up and down.
“Hell, yes,” he said, and moved to the door.
The rain had become a vertical, relentless downpour, so thick it partially obscured the black-and-white as it trundled across the lot and made a hard right so it could slide right along the front of the store. Ty could see the single cop inside, his face illuminated by his own dashboard and the lights of the mini-mart. He had short, dark hair, a heavy brow, a deep frown that made him look fierce and terrified at the same time. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five years old.
Ty waved at him. “Hey, man!” he said, knowing damn well he couldn't be heard. “Hey, man! Look! Look at Leonard!” He made extravagant sweeping-pointing gesture to the right, towards the tow truck. The cop looked over his shoulder, to the sodden lump that was Leonard's body sprawled next to the truck itself. Ty saw him reach down; he recognized the push-thump of changing gears and the cruiser's back-up lights came on …
… and the tiny, jagged bone spiders swarmed out of the mud and attacked the car.
They were no bigger than clenched fists, many of them not even that large. They swarmed into view from under the car itself – probably from beyond it, Ty realized, from the flat, bubbling surface of the submerged parking lot. As he watched he saw them surge up over the front and rear tires, tumbling onto the hood and trunk, and even through the boom and rush of the falling water he could hear the high, thin shriek of claws against steel.
The cop didn't see or hear it. He was busy trying to back up.
“Hey!” Ty started to wave at him semaphore-style: big, sweeping gestures. “HEY!”
The cop must have caught the gesture out of the corner of his eye. He turned to face Ty, opened his mouth as if to speak … and the claw-things spread up from below the window frame and covered the glass in one chittering wave.
Can they get inside? Ty wondered. Could they crack the glass and get in the cruiser and just … just eat the poor guy?
The car was almost completely covered now. Ty jumped half a foot when it suddenly lurched backwards and jerked to a stop … then lurched forward once, twice, and jerked to a stop again. The biting, scrabbling things that covered it, ash-gray and bone-white, glistened with rain water as they scrabbled and skittered for purchase, but they didn't fall away. Then the cruiser roared – so loud Ty could hear it clearly through the storm and the glass – and barreled away, trying to run from the creatures. It cut a wide arc across the flooded parking lot, spraying water from under its tires in all directions, slamming into the deserted street, and screeching to the south. Its red-and-white lights still flickered and flared, and the tiny bone-spiders kept clinging to it everywhere, like ticks on an animal hide.
The last hint of the lights faded away in seconds. Ty was alone again.
He sighed deeply. “Okay,” he said to the empty room. “Plan B.”
***
The thornwheels and flumes showed up whenever the wind was blowing, but the wind was as unpredictable as the rainfall itself. There were moments when it was almost dead calm outside, when the rain fell on the mini-mart like a waterfall. There were other times when it returned with near hurricane force, hammering the flimsy walls of the minimart like artillery. Ty knew he couldn’t go outside and expect the wind and the cutting creatures to simply leave him alone. He w
ould have to protect himself from them. Armor himself.
Just like Iron Man.
He bent a medium-sized pizza pan almost double, then wrapped it around one shin and secured it with generous loops of duct tape. He did it again a second time. Left, then right. Then he laid down three long strips of duct tape on Dead Leonard’s filthy counter and put the cookie sheet and another pizza platter, side by side, on top of the tape. When everything was safely stuck together, he took a deep breath and wrapped the entire rig around his torso – sheet in the front, platter in the back.
He took a deep breath … held it … released. Everything stayed in place.
Yeah, he thought, hating it. That’ll work.
He already had a pair of heavy-duty work boots on. He would add equally heavy work gloves at the very end. First, however: lower legs.
Once the platters had been lashed into place he put on two well-used but still serviceable work aprons – the kind that Leonard's mechanics would wear to keep grease and oil off their clothes. One went on frontwards; the other backwards. Then he slipped any flat piece of metal he could find into every pocket and pouch on the aprons: bits from the oven, the fryer, the edge of the counter. He even found a hip flask hidden in the top drawer. He used that, too. Anything hard and heavy that might deflect a cutting edge, even for a moment. He could already feel just how much weight he was hauling. He groaned at the sheer absurdity of the entire enterprise.
Almost done. He took the hard plastic Iron Man head-mask and pulled it apart, front and back, with a single jerk. He tossed the face aside – too restrictive, no good sight lines, barely an air-hole – and put the back part against the back of his head. He was almost sorry to find that it fit fairly well, covering the whole of his skull from just over his ears all around the back, leaving only his face exposed.
He secured it to the work-cap with more duct tape. He put on a pair of cheap-ass wraparound sunglasses and secured those to the sides of the helmet. That was as much of his head as he could protect. He’d just have to keep his face down, movet as fast as he could, and keep his face down.