by Brad Munson
“Next door” was generous, Ken thought distantly. The hacienda he’d leased two years ago was at the center of a sprawling, rugged bit of ridge crest terrain. The next mini-mansion over was barely visible on a good day. But yes, that was Rex What’s-His-Name, and this definitely wasn’t a good day.
Rex tic-tic-tic’d again and shouted something Ken couldn’t make out over the thick insulation and the raging storm. It sounded like an inarticulate bellow: “Rah RAH row aooo…”
“Turn on the patio lights,” Ken said, still not moving. There was something wrong here.
“They’re already on,” Maggie said, and Ken raised his eyebrows in surprise. The storm had cut visibility to mere inches. Rex was standing in front of nothing more than a churning black background.
“Ra OOoo ra? Rowww?” he said.
Ken turned away for an instant, looking for a place to put the tablet. I don’t have time for this, he thought as he set the device on the polished credenza. He was only slightly embarrassed by his lack of charity. I’ll let him in, find out wh—
He turned back, and Rex was gone.
In the instant he’d turned away, the man had disappeared completely, as if he’d never been there.
“What happened?” he said. “Where’d he go?”
“I have no idea.”
Well, that was frustrating. “Turn on your lights. I mean, more light. Look around.”
Now it was Maggie’s turn to sound frustrated. “What, activate my sensors and engage the tractor beam? Please.”
Ken stepped to the window and peered out, so close his nose touched the glass. He strained to hear anything, see anything.
The house lights behind him and above him dimmed and guttered. He heard a deep throb run through the house: VUMMM.
He turned around. “Okay,” he said. “Now what?”
The lights did it a second time, and the sound came again. VUMMM
“Rose is having a little trouble upstairs,” Maggie said. “Maybe you should check on her.”
It was as if he’d touched a live wire. He bolted forward, then stopped suddenly. “What?” he said. “Is it drugs? Is she hurt?”
“Just go check on her, Ken. And calm down.”
He ran out the room, any thoughts of Rex Tartaglione long disappeared.
* * *
Rex Tartaglione hated his fucking dog. It wasn’t even his fucking dog, really, it was his wife’s. She had insisted they get it, a tiny little rat-thing not ten inches tall at the shoulder, if you could call that bony little joint a shoulder at all. Rex thought it was too small to be a real dog in the first place. Anything taller than your waist was a fucking horse; anything below your knee was vermin. However, Denise had whined and mewled and poked at him, so fine, sure, yes, she could have a fucking ‘dog.’
Which meant, of course, he was the one who had to walk the little turd three damn times a day: first thing in the morning, last thing in the afternoon, and once at night so the little cretin wouldn’t lay a load on the sheepskin rug. Denise couldn’t do it – oh, no, she couldn’t go out at night, what with the coyotes and the homeless and her nails.
It was days like this he was sorry he’d ever sold the car dealership in Fresno and moved to DH in the first place. Or brought his fucking trophy wife with him.
Usually walking the rat wasn’t that big a deal. Sometimes it got a little chilly for a late night stroll, and at least it got him out of the house when Denise was blaring Real Housewives of Wherever-the-hell-they-were-this-week. But tonight? When the sky was literally falling down around them? If he’d thought it through, he would have settled for a load on the sheepskin.
Still, the third time Denise yawped at him, Rex slapped the leash on the little turd and literally braved the storm.
It was even worse than it looked from inside. Not so much cold as everywhere. Rex had to hunch inside his jacket and keep his head down to keep from choking on the downpour.
The plan was one quick turn around the backyard and that was it. Step-step-poop, step-step-porch, done and done. But the fucking dog had other ideas. When they reached the far end of the manicured back lawn, the one they never stepped on for fear of mussing up the landscaping, the little shit made the weirdest sound, a kind of yelp/bark/growl all at once, – and surged into the hedges. It happened so fast Rex lost his grip on the leash, and it went flying into the dripping, rustling underbrush with a wet smack.
“Goddamn it!” Rex bellowed into the rain. “Come back here, you little fuck!”
Without truly thinking about it, Rex barreled into the brush himself, sure he’d find the fucking dog three feet ahead of him, soaked and shivering when it realized what it had done.
But no. Ten steps into the unlandscaped, real-life scrub of the ridge crest, Rex not only lost track of the dog, he lost track of the house.
“Come back! NOW, goddamn it, NOW!”
Nothing.
He staggered deeper into the storm, completely unwilling to go back to the house without the fucking dog in hand. Denise would pop a vein. At one point, between bellows, he thought he heard the little monster, another one of those weird bark/growl/yelp things that seemed to cut off right in the middle. It was almost five minutes later that he nearly tripped over the thin strip of red canvas with a stitched loop at one end, the damn dog’s leash drooping pathetically on a thorn bush, with no dog in sight.
He kept looking. The storm slapped at him, cut at him, screamed at him, but he was damned if he was going to lose that yippy little shit-bucket because of some bullshit rain.
He was out for nearly half an hour in the dark and wet when he finally had to admit he was completely lost. He didn’t even know which way was ‘home’ in the vaguest sense, and then he saw the glowing light.
It was the house, or a house. Some house, for fuck’s sake, and he was going to reach it. He slammed through the scrub grass and bushes, fell down twice and pulled himself up, not caring about the mud or the scratches, and slammed through some more until he lurched onto the shimmering flagstones of a patio that wasn’t his.
He stood there for a moment, still clutching the leash, and stared at the man on the other side of the sliding glass door. The one who was talking to himself.
Rex Tartaglione stumbled over to the glass, weary beyond words. The man didn’t notice him. He tried knocking on the glass with a knuckle so soaked he wondered if it had actually softened. No, it was the glass: it was thick and insulated. He couldn’t get more than a weak, tiny thud-thud from it.
The weariness was getting worse. He was having trouble standing. He reversed the leash in his hands, held up the curved metal hasp that should have been connected to a dog collar and tapped on the glass: tic-tic-tic.
The guy still didn’t notice him. Now that he thought about it, Rex recognized him a little. It was that computer guy from VeriSil, the one who lived in the old DelGado place. He’d seen him at a picnic once, and down at the market, maybe.
Tic tic TIC!
This time the man looked up, startled. His eyes went big but he just stood there, still talking to himself.
“HEY!” Rex shouted. “IT’S ME, REX! I LIVE NEXT DOOR!”
The asshole still didn’t move. He looked down at his iPad or whatever and said something else.
“IT’S REX! THINK YOU CAN LET ME IN? ASSHOLE?”
And then the man turned away.
Rex couldn’t believe it. The bastard had simply turned away, like he couldn’t be bothered. It looked like he was actually going to leave the fucking room, ignore Rex entirely, and Rex lifted hand to really knock on that fucking glass –
-- and something snatched him away. In an instant, in a blink, it pulled him away from the glass and off to the side so fast he didn’t even have time to make his own growl/yelp/barking sound.
Sharp, thorny branches wrapped around his chest, so hard and tight he couldn’t move. More were wrapping around his ankles, his thighs. He could feel one at the back of his head, reaching around for his face. And th
ey were sharp. Each thorn bit into him, everywhere, all at once, like barbed wire but worse. Like wire covered in fish hooks that moved like fingers. And squeezed.
He couldn’t even the glass door anymore. Couldn’t even see the house. All he could do was gasp as the wires tightened, closed in, squeezed him.
He tried to gasp again, but the breath gushed out instead. When he tried to move, the thorns bit deep. He felt a finger pop off and fall away. He felt his belly open up in a long, meandering slice. He felt the tiny razor-branches creep over his temples, coming around from behind to cover his eyes, cover his mouth.
Seal him up.
Stop, he pleaded. Stop stop st—
It happened in an instant, between one heartbeat and the next. The hookweed clutched him, so fast and hard and tight that Rex Tartaglione actually heard his body pop, like a balloon filled with blood.
It was the last thing he heard.
Eleven
My, my, my, Michael Steinberg thought, shaking his head in happy amazement. I’m really very good at this God stuff.
He scarcely noticed the stiffening of his joints or the strange ashen undercolor his flesh had acquired. It had become harder to ignore over the last few hours, but he'd managed. There had been work to do, after all.
Now he stood in the middle of his half-destroyed lab space and gazed upon the dozens of bins, bowls, containers, cups, saucers, tubs and tubes that covered every horizontal surface in his lab, and the things that were growing in each of them. He found that it was good.
Nothing should be growing there, of course. The Valle de Los Hermanos was a hyper-arid climate; virtually no evapotranspiration, a climatic aridity index of less than .03.
Look at all this, he told himself, grinning like a little boy. Look at it!
He smiled lovingly into the tray right in front of him, where a thin, wide plate of…tissue?...was twitching lazily in less than an inch of water. ‘Tissue’ wasn’t exactly the right word, though. It was translucent, he could see the hairline crack in the old specimen tray beneath it, right through the creature. And it was milky, like a sheet of moist wax paper, but he already knew it was far stronger than human or even reptilian skin. It was very thin as well, a few cells at most, though absurdly durable. He also knew what it would do to mammalian flesh if it came in contact with it, how it would literally suck the fluid right out of it in a matter of moments, and not stop until there was nothing left.
All of his little friends would do that, it was the one thing they had in common. No matter how big, how small, how sharp, how flat, they were all infinitely, relentlessly thirsty.
He was beginning to feel the same way himself.
Michael had happily whiled away the last few hours moving from specimen to specimen, awarding them with names of his own choosing, building a New Taxonomy, being – what had the bitch called it? The Darwin of the twenty-first century?
Yeah, he thought. That’s me.
They weren’t really his names, he knew. They were coming from…somewhere else. From that greater mind, the one that spoke to him. He claimed them as his own; translated them into the common tongue so all his new subjects would know.
“Stain,” Michael said to the wide, flat, creature on the tray. “I will call you a ‘stain.’” Small ones moved by growing in a specific direction and dissolving portions that remained in an unwanted direction, a bit like algae or lichen, but at a ridiculously fast rate. He’d already seen one move ten inches in twenty minutes simply by foaming a new leading edge and letting it harden while the old trailing edge powdered away. Once they grew above a certain size, stains would let go of the Earth completely. First a corner, then a whole edge would come loose and actually start to wave, as if it were hailing a cab. Then they could literally fly away on a gust of wind, driven like a thistle, randomly encountering water-bearing organisms to encase and suck dry.
Michael thought they were strangely beautiful when they flew. He cleared his throat. “When you take to the air, I will call you ‘flumes’,” he announced. He liked the sound of it. “Flumes,” he said again, tasting the word on his spiny tongue.
Behold my New World.
The needleseed, a sphere no larger than a golf ball made entirely of sharp points, constantly and subtly changing shape as its tiny spines grew and broke, dissolved and regrew.
Or ‘biting sand’, churning in a blue plastic bucket, ready to envelop any water-bearing organism and grind it up like sandpaper on a slab of steak so it could desiccate it easily, almost instantly. Michael had watched in mute fascination as the sand had done exactly that to a stray cat he had snagged from town. Now he had to resist watching more. The slow, unending Brownian movement of the tiny grains rolling and turning was so hypnotic, so magnetic, it was all he could do to keep from and falling face-first into the bucket.
He turned instead to the ‘turnbuckle’. Such a wonderful design! Two nearly perfectly circular hoops, some as small as wedding rings, some as large as bicycle wheels, joined along one edge. They could open themselves at any part, wrap around a tree trunk or a barrel or a human torso and then turn counter to each other as they squeezed, drawing tighter and tighter until the hoops pierced the soft flesh and chewed it to paste. So patient. So sleek.
He took a long probe and poked at the ‘hookweed’. In the laboratory, it grew in its platter of water into an almost perfect sphere, each silver-white tendon studded with wicked hooks that speared the air in every direction. In the wild, that flawless globe would be warped by wind and debris into a thousand twisted shapes that would become tumbling sculptures made of living barbed-wire. Barbed wire that could move if it had to.
The ‘scumble’ was a smaller, even deadlier version of the same design. He had a whole family of them in a bowl under the broken window. It was only a pile of ribbed sticks, but any animal unfortunate enough to step into that pile would never escape. Its broken ends would snap at moist flesh with the ferocity of an old-fashioned bear-trap, then rub and rub until there was nothing left but grit.
And then there was his very favorite: the ‘bone spider’. He glided over to the largest cage he had in the lab, a huge four-by-four-foot terrarium made from half-inch Plexiglas, with a hose attached to a flange he had installed in one side so he could feed regular and large amounts of water into the box.
The creature inside had a constantly changing number of cantilevered legs that grew from a central point so tiny it couldn’t be called a body at all. In effect, the thing was nothing but legs – no eyes, no mouth, no visible sensory organs or central trunk at all, just incredibly sharp legs, in constant movement, graceful as underwater ballet, that resembled a praying mantis as much as spider while somehow resembling neither one at all. Each leg was a ribbed talon with ragged teeth, part of a swaying, ticking predator, iron gray and bone white, that looked like an insect made of razors and wire. The legs skirled and shrieked against each other when they moved. They made the same sound as sharpening knives.
Michael loved this creature the most. He had watched it grow from a twitching little thing no bigger than an apricot to a meter-high monster in a matter of hours, and it was still growing. From all he could tell, it couldn’t stop growing. Given the impossibly light, hard, and resilient material that served as flesh, skin, and bone for the creature, even the inverse square law didn’t seem to apply. Bone spiders could be as big as elephants, as big as mountains, and still they could grow.
How does it see? How does it hear? Does it need to, when all it wants to do is kill and drink and kill and drink?
The creatures shared one other characteristic as well, the ability to infect any living thing with their dry and sandy simulacrum of tissue. His tests had shown him that any cut, bite, or scratch could change you, make you their own, with a single, swift incision. It didn’t happen that often, Michael told himself, because so few survived the first encounter. They didn’t want recruits; they wanted to eat.
It was happening to him. Right now. He could feel it happening to half
a dozen other people all across the Valle.
It began happening the instant he had cut himself. The seeds had taken him the instant the claw had pierced his skin, and now he could feel his skin getting thicker, his teeth growing together into a single jagged ridge of…something beyond bone, something closer to marble. He could feel the crackle and snap of new growth breaking in his joints every time he flexed an arm or a leg, then he could feel brittle new tendons growing back in the new position so fast they almost leaped together.
And he could hear something, too. That other voice, that guiding Intelligence at the back of his brain. It was the tiniest whisper of Something Else that kept telling him how good this was, how smart he was, how perfect he was becoming.
Michael loved every minute of it. It was all he had ever wanted.
He stood in front of his utility sink and looked out his single window at a slice of the Valle de Los Hermanos, hundreds of feet below. It wasn’t the best view; that dyke bitch Lucy had kept that for herself. Besides, the rain was worse than ever, and the town was barely visible. It didn’t matter anymore. Michael didn’t really need a window at all. He could see the entire crater laid out before and below him with a new kind of sight. And he could see all his creatures there, pinpoints of light, patches of shimmering silver against a bottomless, lightless black, scattered all across the valley and twinkling, burning, guttering, glowing.
The tiny part of him that was still a scientist wondered what he was seeing. Electromagnetic energy, maybe, at a special frequency or level of activity. Not that it mattered; they were simply there, and he could sense every one of the creatures. Deep under water, huddled in bedrooms, hiding in bushes, sprawled on rooftops exposed to the wind and rain – everywhere. Growing. His.
His new mouth cracked itself into a smile.
Michael Steinberg had been raised by two perfectly decent people who considered themselves “recreational Jews”. That’s what his father had called them. They celebrated Hanukkah, complete with their very own Hanukkah bush, went to temple twice a year whether they needed it or not, and regularly gave money to World Jewish Relief. But deep in his heart, like so many other young Jewish boys, Michael had this thought, this persistent thought that maybe, maybe, he was The One. The one they had all been waiting for.
