The Last Storm, page 23
“You followed my dad. Or maybe your family did, you don’t look old enough.”
Jimi didn’t reply. He’d said the wrong thing, perhaps. Or maybe he’d said exactly the right thing.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Ash.”
“Like the world. Gone to ash.”
She nodded slowly, then rested her head back against the seat. Neck exposed. Hands palm-up on her knees.
“Ash?” Cee asked, coming closer.
“I’m good. He’s good.”
“Why isn’t he with you here?” Jimi asked, and Ash glanced up at him again through the open window. She seemed sleepy, almost dopey. It must have been taking a lot out of her.
I’ll take more out of her, he thought. I’ll drain her of every ounce of blood and rain it down on her father.
“He’s gone,” Cee said.
Jimi froze. Everything around him grew still, and for an instant the world was clear, and he perceived that instant with startling clarity. Even the raindrops stopped falling, and he saw himself reflected in every one of them.
He’s gone.
Nothing in Ash’s expression conveyed anything to make him doubt Cee’s statement.
He’s gone.
He remembered him running into the storm, box tucked under his arm, leaving Papa dying in the wet, bloody mud he had created.
“I missed him,” Jimi said.
Ash blinked softly, gaze elsewhere. He wondered what she might be seeing but didn’t care. He had missed her father, but he would not miss her. Killing her would have to be revenge enough for this life, and after she was dead, he might be able to become something or someone else.
Killing this Rainmaker was all the world could offer him, and Jimi would grasp that chance with both hands.
“I just want to take a photo,” he said, and as he reached behind his back he experienced another moment frozen in time. His life slowed to an imperceptible pace, all his focus here and now. His agonies faded, and his head was clear of pain and drugs for the first time in days, as if the thought of what he was doing could block the nerve messages from the damaged parts of his body, and flush the drugs from his mind.
He blinked and took a mental image of the Rainmaker’s daughter that he would remember forever. These were her last few seconds of life, and he would look into her eyes as she died, just as his Papa had looked into her father’s.
His fingertips brushed the cell phone projecting from his pocket, and he wished he’d kept it in his hand so that he could record what was to come.
He closed his hand around the gun handle, tucked his finger through the trigger guard, and pulled the weapon free, turning as he did.
Cee carried a gun and would have to go first.
CEE
Cee fell to her left against the car’s front wing, and as it struck her left hip and she pivoted onto the hood, something punched her high in the right leg. Shot! she thought, and her weight and momentum carried her onto the hood, and she twisted and writhed her way across the smooth wet surface, feeling nothing but shock.
The second gunshot planted a cold kiss across her right calf. A third creased the hood close to her face as she slid from the car and onto the wet ground in front of the bumper. She landed hard, tensing herself so the wind wasn’t knocked from her, scrabbling onto her hands and knees and crawling around the passenger side of the car. Her right hip felt hot and heavy and not part of her at all, but the pain hadn’t yet kicked in. Shock had her in its cool grasp.
Her crawl ended when her leg gave out and she fell onto her side in the mud. She was already tugging the gun from her belt, and as her head struck wet ground with a hard thud she saw beneath the vehicle.
Jimi was walking around the front of the car to finish her off.
From somewhere far away she heard a long, low scream, and a crack of lightning thrashed across the sky, sheeting a thousand ragged lines and imprinting the moment in time.
She aimed beneath the car, steadied her hand, and as Jimi walked past the front wheel she fired twice.
His ankle exploded, changing shape and colour. She waited only to make sure he was down, then reached up for the door handle and hauled it open. She feared that she wouldn’t be able to move, lift herself up, find strength, but she managed all three.
Gonna hurt like a motherfucker, she thought, but it wasn’t hurting yet, so she took advantage of the white-hot shock and dragged herself across the passenger seat, over the central console and behind the wheel.
“Cee!” Ash screamed, and another sheet of lightning crackled within the clouds of boiling smoke smothering the horizon. The sight was so epic, so Biblical, that Cee caught her breath and could only stare for what seemed like forever.
Jimi hauled himself upright in front of the car, the flames and smoke and arcing lightning his backdrop. He steadied himself on the car’s front grille and pointed his gun at the windshield.
The shot skittered from the glass, leaving a long, ploughed furrow from in front of Cee’s face to the upper frame.
She started the ignition and slammed her foot down on the gas, and that was when the pain roared in. Her whole hip and stomach and groin exploded into agony as if her blood had been replaced by lava, her bones ground into dust and then poured back in. She managed to grip the wheel so hard that her nails bit through leather to the plastic beneath, mouth open in a scream so pain-filled it came out silent. She was only half aware of the shape slamming onto the hood and rolling against the windshield, and instinct told her to spin the wheel to the left. Jimi struck his hands onto the car chassis in an effort to hold on, and his gun barrel caused another crack in the glass. As the car wheels span and skidded and the vehicle slewed in a half-circle, he slid off.
The passenger door window exploded inwards in a shower of glass and rain. The rain punched Cee in the side of her head so hard that it flipped to the side and impacted her own window, and she thought, Rain doesn’t hit that hard.
“Cee!” Ash called again. More lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and Cee wasn’t sure whether the lightning became a living, forever thing, because her vision was suddenly bright white and pale grey and nothing in between.
I’m fine, she tried to say, but she wasn’t sure she spoke the words. She wasn’t even sure she thought them as she meant them. Maxwell has me, he’s got me, I’m fine.
Lightning struck the car three times, rapid metallic thunks, and then she was driving along the road back the way they’d come.
We can rest there, she thought. Maxwell is there, and we can rest, and he’ll make me better again. He can put me back together. He always said I should be better.
From somewhere far away she thought she heard Ash calling her again and again and saying something else, but she couldn’t hear anymore because the thunder was too loud, the lightning too bright, and something with too many legs bounced from the cracked windshield and squealed as it fell past the smashed side window. She smelled and tasted blood. Some of it might have been her own. Trying to focus, trying not to fade too fast, Cee steered them back towards Rockfield.
ASH
Cee!”
She isn’t answering. She’s driving, steering, but if she can hear me she doesn’t know what to say, or can’t speak, and there’s blood in her hair and on her face, and her head is moving strangely on her neck as the car weaves back and forth across the road. The windshield is scarred from bullet strikes like exclamation marks. Rain blows through the smashed passenger window, and not just rain, because I can smell the blood as well. It’s not only Cee’s blood. It’s from elsewhere. It’s from—
—Skunksville, where it’s raining thick and heavy now, and the ground and sky are crawling with creatures that seem to be moving in patterns, there’s order to their flight or crawl or scamper. I am the centre of that pattern. They’re all coming to me, but that shouldn’t be the case. I had no fear for the first time ever—
—she’s been shot at least once—
—I was at peace, my ability as easy and unconscious as breathing for the first time—
—she won’t talk to me, she can’t hear me, and her head’s swaying and bobbing as if it’s going to fall off—
—and that peace and contentment, that fearlessness, has all been blown away.
I can feel Skunkville’s angry winds shoving me into the tumult, blasting into me and out of me at the same time. I’m the centre of the storm.
Rain stings my face, like spikes of sharp sand carried on a furious breeze.
Lightning flashes again and again, illuminating the landscape I believed I had come to master at last. Every flash shows those distant humanoid shapes moving closer, because they have noticed me. Of course they have. They’ve been waiting, and now that control has been violently ripped from me again, they see me, and they’re coming.
Stop, I say. Stay away. But I don’t really speak, and even if I could, they wouldn’t listen.
The storm has me out of control. I was crazy to believe it could be any different.
I try to reach for my forearms to draw out the needles, but in the real world I cannot move.
This place which I’d dared to believe I could master and control, Skunksville, now focuses entirely on me, and I can sense unknown creatures falling through me, into the tumult and out via the eye on the other side.
And those figures I have always feared the most are coming closer, running on long legs, spidery arms swinging as if they’re grabbing at the air to haul themselves forward. I don’t want to see their awful faces when they finally lift their bowed heads to look at me. I don’t want to hear their voices, because they will mutter terrible things in an unknown language.
I don’t want to let them through.
Cee! I try to shout, unsure whether I’m even making a sound.
But Cee has been shot. Cee can’t help me. My anger and rage, my grief and mistakes, are all my own.
JIMI
Writhing in rain and blood, Jimi wasn’t sure how much blood was his, and how much was falling from the sky. He had seen and felt the change. From pure fresh rain to something thicker, not every drop was red, but even the water now felt greasy and unclean. He could drown in it if he pressed his nose and mouth close enough to the ground, but he had never considered such a cowardly way out. Not even with the pain from his shattered ankle, like nothing he had ever experienced before. It smothered his other agonies, a white fire that started in his foot and ankle and lower leg and expanded and travelled to consume the rest of him.
He screamed into the storm. The wind had increased, drawn by distant fires but also exhaled by the Rainmaker. There had been a storm years ago when Papa died, but nothing like this.
Crawling towards his car, he was careful to keep his right leg elevated so his broken foot did not touch the ground. He hadn’t dared look at it yet, but he felt a sickening swing as he crawled, and every movement was like a dozen blunt blades being driven through his flesh and ground into his bones.
He’d hit Cee, but he didn’t know how badly. Once at least, and possibly again when he’d fired at the car as she drove back towards town. Getting shot by her hadn’t been part of his plan.
She was faster than he’d expected, more attuned to the danger he presented. But this wasn’t over. The Rainmaker had changed in front of his eyes the moment he’d heard her bastard father was gone—from a vague figure in the back of the car, to the main focus of his life.
His arms shook from supporting his weight and his cracked ribs boiled spikes of pain. His splayed fingers disappeared beneath thick mud as he crawled, emerging each time dripping with coppery water. More blood fell. Jimi couldn’t help thinking that he’d done that. Before he shot Cee, the Rainmaker brought down only rain.
Blood splashed and pattered around him, and he felt its warm caress across his back, like fingers tapping out a random rhythm. Other things fell, too. Long, thin worms snaked across the top of the mud like sidewinders, seeming to dodge the splashes and ripples of rain. A lone bird lay on the edge of the road, with plumage he had never seen before. Its wing was broken and it flapped itself in frantic circles. Further away something larger landed, and he scanned the road surface, searching for what might have made such an impact. A figure scuttled from view into the ditch on the other side of the road, and he caught a brief impression of scaled legs and a long, heavy tail.
He didn’t worry about something stinging or biting or poisoning him, leaving him to die squirming in the mud. His story was not yet done. He saw his future mapped with such clarity that he didn’t even raise the gun when a long, thick snake bounced from the hood of his car and slithered to the ground just three metres from where he crouched.
I’m not done yet.
His vision of his future was only minutes long, not hours or days. It was a mile long, not tens or hundreds of miles. It was here, back to the town, the Rainmaker in front of his gun, her blood adding to the blood she was already bringing down.
That’s why Jimi was not afraid. His future was set and assured, and any other outcome was not part of his world. Not even with the flames of hell bearing down on him. He saw the bush fires closing from behind, reflected in the car’s windows and the infinity-black eyes of the snake that had reared up before him, its head a metre above the ground as it tasted him on the air. He felt the heat of the fire on the back of his neck. Dizziness from blood loss tilted his world.
But Jimi was not afraid. Everything led to that one moment close in his future. Nothing would stop him. He wouldn’t let it, and each time he blinked water from his eyes he saw Papa’s disfigured corpse.
Jimi had grown up thinking he was nothing like his Papa, but from the moment his Papa had died, all that had changed.
“I’m just like you,” he said, staring at the snake. His dead Papa opened his eyes and grinned, his lips deformed from the toxic strings that had killed him.
The snake lowered its head and slithered away from the approaching flames.
Jimi grinned back.
“I’m just like you.”
* * *
The first time he tried to get into the car he almost passed out and had to lean against the door to catch his breath. His vision swam, stomach clenched, and when his injured foot impacted the door sill he almost puked from the pain. The deluge continued, and looking in the direction of the town he saw that the rains were also falling there. The Rainmaker was still bringing down the storm. He guessed that meant she was still alive, not mangled in a car wreck. That was good enough for him.
He eased himself around and down into the seat, keeping his foot lifted. He’d have to work the accelerator and brake with his left foot, but that wasn’t his main concern. If he passed out and drove off the road, there was no way he could crawl all the way back to Rockfield.
Everything became pain. He screamed, he roared, he raged and cried, lifting his leg into the car and trying to prop his knee so that his foot didn’t touch the floor or base of the dashboard. He nursed the gun between his legs. Things splashed and thudded down around him, and once or twice something hit the car. He wound up the windows just as a black shape scuttled down the wet windshield and disappeared off the side. A crab crawled down the rear window, segmented legs so long that they braced against the bottom of the window while the thing’s body still hung over the top.
The only time he took up the gun was when a canine creature limped into view and stood staring at him from astride the white line. It had powerful jaws, pricked ears, fur seared from its left shoulder and flank.
Did you really fall from out of nowhere? he thought. He’d seen coyotes and wild dogs, had even heard rumours of wolves in the Desert’s northern territories, but this was none of these. It was too small for a wolf. It had speckled colourings he did not recognise. Its eyes were loaded with intelligence. It sniffed the air as if sensing his injuries, looked at the gun in his hand, then trotted out of sight behind the car.
Jimi reached for the handle and swung the door closed.
He started driving because he had no choice. He crunched painkillers from his pocket, their bitter, gritty taste filling his mouth and nose.
The fires were closing, a glimpse of hell in the rear-view mirror. The wipers smeared blood, and for the first time he wondered where it all came from, and the pain that must be suffered there to make so much.
CEE
Cee tried to look at Ash but saw only darkness in the mirror, as if she could no longer see that far.
That doesn’t make sense. I can see the road ahead.
But could she? Or was she driving blind?
She saw rain and darkness, lit by frequent flashes of lightning that might have been inside her, not without. She couldn’t remember her own name, only Ash’s, and perhaps that was the only reality. She saw her hands on the wheel and they were both speckled with blood.
That blood on my forearm isn’t mine. It’s from somewhere else. The blood across my fingers is mine.
It was all the same colour. The windshield was gouged and starred, or maybe it wasn’t there at all.
It is. The rain hits it, and some of the rain is too dark, too thick. And those animals I know and others I don’t hit it, too.
Creatures bounced from the windshield now and then, and some of them might only have been confused or injured by the storm. A small bird with a broken neck, swept aside by the wipers and stuck in the grille beneath the window. An insect the size of her hand and with sharp-tipped legs that scored lines across the glass. A butterfly with torn wings.
More lightning flashed from inside the car. From the places I’ve been shot, she thought. I’m leaking lightning with every heartbeat. The crack of thunder came immediately after, so loud that she saw water droplets jump across glass. She felt it in her bones. In her hip, and face.
Her right leg wasn’t working and she drove with her left foot. She sat in a warm puddle. Her left foot still worked, so it wasn’t her spine. Probably not.
