The Last Storm, page 26
She struggled upright and carried the apparatus from the car as Jesse backed across the sidewalk. The Land Rover had cracked a wall and smashed through the bar’s front window, and after a quick glance over his shoulder he backed up to the opening, stepped over the low sill and pushed inside past the vehicle’s hood. Ash helped, half-walking as he half-dragged her.
“He killed Cee,” Ash said.
“Yes.” Karina couldn’t find any more words, but now wasn’t the time for talking. Ash’s eyes closed again, and it looked like she was crying tears of blood.
Inside the bar it was darker, quieter, and Karina took a deep breath to try to level herself. Jesse kept carrying Ash backwards, shoving chairs aside with one foot, and Karina followed with the apparatus still fixed into both of Ash’s forearms.
“What the fuck are those things, Jesse?”
He shook his head.
“We need to put her down and take these needles out.”
Jesse slumped back against the bar, and Ash began to slip from his hands as he slid down to the floor. He let out a long, low groan as he placed her gently down beside him. Then Rocky was at his side, and his eyes closed, and Karina heard someone or something scrambling into the bar behind them.
JIMI
Whatever it was, it fucking stank worse than a skunk.
Jimi kicked himself away from the creature hunched against the wall. It was shaking as it bled out, the blood darker than it should have been. He’d put two bullets into its head just as its grotesque mouth snapped down on his shattered foot. He might have lost his toes, but he couldn’t bear to look.
It didn’t matter.
And the dead thing, whatever the hell it was and wherever the hell it had come from, fucking stank!
“This way, mister!” Someone emerged from the shadows. A short boy, maybe sixteen years old, eyes wide with a mixture of excitement and fear. “Shit, that thing bite you?” The boy grabbed one arm and dragged Jimi, screaming, into the alley and away from the dead thing. It was darker in there, but the scene was still revealed in flashes of lightning near and far. A couple of parked delivery trucks. A pile of refuse in bags chewed open by rats or dogs, or other things. A kid’s plastic playhouse, multicoloured and happy and incongruous in such a place.
The boy dropped his arm and backed away. “You okay, mister?”
“No,” Jimi said. He bit his lip, trying to drive back the dizziness that threatened. He didn’t think he was losing too much blood, but he was a wreck. Every stab of pain made him more determined. I don’t have time for this! He hated the idea of those things getting the Rainmaker and his family before him. And just what the fuck were they? he thought, and then the kid answered and Jimi realised he’d been speaking aloud.
“Right? What the fuck, eh? Like blood raining down, probably dust or something taken up in thermals from the fire. Desert dust getting wet and making it look all red like blood, but those other things falling down, eh? What the fuck? I heard about a rain of fish once, in South America or somewhere, and they think a tornado took them up from a lake and dropped them down again, but I seen things here too big for that, and things I think don’t belong here, weird fucking things. A snake with two heads, mister, what do you think of that? My daddy said his pa’s pa saw one of them once in the Pacific during the war, but here and now? I dunno, something weird.” He nodded at the corpse close to the mouth of the alley. “And those big things with, like, an octopus on their heads? I saw one land on Mrs Doubleday’s car and all the windows smashed out, and it tried walking but one of its legs was broke and it’s still going round in circles now, and is that hair on its head? Or fungus?”
“I need your help to stand,” Jimi said.
“Oh, right, yeah.” The kid picked up Jimi like he was hardly anything, propping him against the wall. “And all this thunder and lightning and stuff, you think the Rainmaker’s here? I saw her online, my pal Casey told me about it, said there was some girl dancing naked on the news—that’s why I watched, gotta be honest, but maybe she’s come here now? She brought snakes down with the rain in Abbey Springs, that’s what I heard.”
“I heard that too. Yeah, she’s here.”
“Cool. Maybe she’ll put out all the fire.”
“You seen the fires?” Jimi asked.
“No, mister, we’re getting ready to leave, me and my family. I was just picking up food from McMurty’s, then the rain started and I heard stuff in the street, a crash then shooting.” He stood back from Jimi, pausing in his gushing talk to look him up and down. “You get shot?”
“Got bit,” Jimi said, showing the boy his holed arm.
“Shit. You’ll need to clean that.”
“I need a crutch, I’ll get back to my car then. Your family must be worried.”
The kid frowned. Red rain flowed from his huge mop of soaked hair and down his face. Jimi had been naive and open like him once. Despite what Papa did for a living, Jimi’d had a positive outlook on the world. The Rainmaker had taken all that away.
“Kid!” Jimi said. “A crutch. Something to lean on.” He held up his gun. “And ammo, or another gun.”
“Wait here, mister.” He ran back along the alley.
“Hey!” Jimi called. The kid held up one hand and disappeared around a corner.
Jimi leaned back against the wall. The kid hadn’t abandoned him, he was sure of that, and he’d give him a minute. He needed that time to gather himself, prepare for what was to come. His leg was alight with pain. Every bit of him hurt, but he fed from it, absorbing agonies from his smashed teeth, shot and bitten ankle, mauled arm, crushed ribs. He swallowed the pain and prepared to let it all out again in one single direction. He tasted blood, unsure whether it came from his mouth, or inside from his cracked ribs nicking his lungs, or from somewhere outside.
The kid returned after just a couple of minutes. In his left hand he had a pump-action shotgun, in his right a heavy plastic bag. He was grinning.
“Crutch,” he said, handing Jimi the shotgun. He delved into the bag and brought out a pistol, holding that out to Jimi, too. “Got me one as well!” he said as Jimi took the weapon, pulling his own gun from the bag. “Lots of ammo! McMurty’s got a sporting goods part out back, he’s supposed to keep it locked up. He ain’t there but I’ll call him and tell him what I took, he’ll understand. We can pay him later, he knows my pa.”
Jimi checked the pistol’s clip was full. “Shotgun loaded?”
“Six shells.”
“Good work, kid.”
“Come on, then! You can come with us, we’re getting the hell out.”
“How close is the fire?”
“Can’t you smell it?”
Jimi couldn’t.
“It’s fucking close, mister. Come on, we got room in our truck, we’re going east. I can’t wait to tell my family about those weird creatures. Or maybe they already know.” The kid frowned, and his fear shone through for the first time.
“I’m not coming,” Jimi said.
“Huh? Course you are.”
“Go to your family. Watch out for those things.”
The kid shook his head, frowning. Looked around. “But I thought you were coming with me?”
Jimi shook his head. “Fuck off, kid.”
The boy backed away, glancing at the pistol in Jimi’s hand, the shotgun he held against his side as a crutch. Then he turned and ran along the alley, only glancing back as he rounded the corner and disappeared from Jimi’s life forever. Jimi had run away like that once, afraid and confused, but there had been no one waiting at the end of his run.
Every step he’d taken had led here.
“Save your family,” Jimi muttered. Using the shotgun as a walking stick, gun ready in his other hand, he hobbled back into the street, heading in a diagonal towards the crashed Land Rover and smashed bar-front window.
Halfway across the road, he took in a deep breath and smelled smoke and fire. It was raining blood, towering cliffs of smoke and fire were closing on the town, and demons stalked the streets. Jimi gritted his teeth against the pain as he walked through hell.
JESSE
Jesse heard a bark from Rocky, a shout from Karina, and he felt Ash’s weight on his outstretched right leg, the warmth of a daughter he had assumed dead and cold more important to him than the furnace of pain in his right side.
Her world, he thought. This is Skunksville, but I still know some of it.
Rocky barked non-stop, and he thought Karina might have shouted his name as she lifted his right arm and tugged the weapon from his grasp.
The Shore was mine, but those things… they were there, too, in the distance. Her world, my world. Different, and the same.
He caught a sudden whiff of ozone from the components of Ash’s apparatus, and his eyes snapped open as he thought, Maybe I know how to stop all this.
He pointed, eyes wide, and Karina turned and fired four times at the thing crawling through the smashed front window. It jerked and rolled, and the fourth shot struck one of its piercing eyes. It shuddered several times, and the dozen long tentacles protruding from its strange head were the last parts of it to grow still. They clasped and waved at the air in an almost beautiful dance, before curling in on themselves like the legs of a dying spider.
Karina crouched by his side, one hand on his shoulder, the other passing gently across his stomach. Jesse gasped and bit down a shout.
“I’m okay!”
“You’re not.”
“I think… I might know how to stop this. Stop her.”
“You mean help her?” Karina was so close she was almost a blur. She was soaked, fierce with blood.
“Sit her against the bar,” Jesse said. “Is she still awake?”
“In and out,” Karina said. “She recognised me, but I’m not sure she’s in control anymore. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going in through her apparatus.”
“Is that safe?”
“Safe?” Jesse laughed, then cried out as it hurt his stomach. He had no idea how severe the wound was, and he didn’t want to know. He might only need a few minutes. After that, whatever would be would be.
Karina grabbed his shirt and pressed her face close to his. “You mean to help her, Jesse. Right?”
“Right,” he said, because he heard the fear in her voice, the mistrust after last time. “Of course.” But he wasn’t sure about any of this. And he knew that if he couldn’t help her, couldn’t stop her, then he might only be left with one alternative.
Ash had opened something up, and Jesse had to close it.
“What about that hopping bastard?”
“Son of the drug dealer I killed,” Jesse said.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. So we’ve got to get somewhere safe, somewhere he won’t find us, before I—”
“I can protect you both.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Jesse said. “But it’s too much of a risk. If something happened to Ash while she was still connected…”
“It might stay like this?”
Jesse shook his head, because he really didn’t know. “We need to move,” he said. “A basement, somewhere out back.” He glanced at Ash, and her apparatus. It seemed to pulse with a life of its own, and he remembered what that was like. Exciting. Chilling. When he was young and building his own apparatus he’d been fired up with a passion to change the world.
Perhaps he still could.
Something howled outside, a sound not from a human mouth. It rose and rose until it was beyond his range of hearing.
A car sped along the road, and he caught sight of its silver chassis as it flashed by the damaged bar frontage. It was silent but for the shush of wheels splashing through water.
The storm growled again, still directly above the town, and Ash. This was her storm, and the only way he could stop it was to be in her world. Take possession of her storm. Because he recognised the creatures in the streets of Rockfield, and maybe The Shore and her Skunksville weren’t as different, and as individual, as he had always believed. He had no idea if it would work, but it was the only move he could think to make, and he was the only one who could do it. He believed that Ash had come here to practise her skill and save the town from the encroaching flames, but the cost was too great.
A fire would go out. But those things, and whatever else might fall, could spread and procreate.
“Ash,” he said. He nudged her shoulder and her head rolled, then she startled upright and looked at him.
“He killed her,” she said.
“You’ve got to help me,” he said. “We have to—”
She screamed.
It was shocking, long and loud, and her eyes rolled before her head tipped back and hit the bar front.
“I’ll drag her,” Karina said, shaken. “But can you lift this?” She tapped the guitar case.
Jesse wasn’t sure he could even lift himself, but he had to try. Everything depended on him now. Karina had searched for and found their daughter, but now only he could save her.
He tried to stand but could hardly move. There was no strength in his legs and the waves of pain from his gut made him almost pass out. Only Karina shouting his name kept him there, and he was sweating, panting.
“No time,” he said. “We’ll have to do it here.”
“And Jimi?”
“Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s gone. Keep watch… Don’t hesitate. If you see him, you shoot, understand?”
“Just whatever you’re planning, hurry!”
“You think I’ve got a plan?” He tried to laugh but it hurt too much, so he simply reached for Ash’s left arm, plucked out the needle, and plunged it into his own right forearm. The pain was sharp and bright and brief, and then he felt a rush of something he had missed for so long.
Not pleasure. Not joy. It was more like belonging.
Ash stiffened and froze, and he wasn’t sure she was still breathing. His world began to blur, and overlaid across it was another. He saw the strange sea and high cliffs and the beach in between, and he understood that the mysterious place she went to was nothing like his own.
His Shore had been worse than his mother’s version of this place, and Skunksville was much, much worse than his. The decline echoed the fall of their world and the terrible changes they had wrought over it. It was so obvious and awful that his vision blurred with useless, wretched tears.
He could see her in the distance, standing on the beach with one foot planted in the still, oily sea, one on the blood-red sand. There were no waves, no currents, and he recognised that this land was still and dead, apart from the things even now seeking escape through Ash. Creatures large and small spiralled towards her like water into a hole, rolling and running, slithering and tumbling and flying, and from every one of them he sensed a burst of relief and excitement.
And most of all, hunger.
Ash, he said, and his voice was shatteringly loud. She turned to him, looking back over her right shoulder. He’d expected rage, or hate, or even delight in what she was doing. What he hadn’t expected was horror.
Dad, Ash said, her voice loud as if it was spoken directly into his ear, help me! I’m the storm and it won’t let me go.
Seeing his girl in such distress gave Jesse strength. They were in this together, and as father and daughter they would survive together.
He took his first few steps along the beach of Skunksville.
ASH
I never believed I would lose control.
I stand on the beach and I’m a conduit, not a conductor of things. I try to slow them down but I can’t. I try to ease back on the storm flowing through me, but the storm is a living thing that has me in its grasp. It refuses to let go. It has always been waiting for me to return, weaker and more vulnerable than ever before.
Seeing Jimi kill Cee changed everything.
Ash, my father says, and his voice is a shock, his uttering my name more so. He’s close behind me and I can feel the warmth of his presence. I can’t imagine how difficult it is for him to be here, although I can see how it’s possible—I still have an eye onto the real world, and I can see the bright trails of wires into my arm and his like constant streaks of lightning. He’s come here for me, and it’s all because he couldn’t stop me before. I realise now that he never meant to kill me, only save me.
“I never knew how hard it would be,” I say. The creatures of Skunksville rush towards me and disappear as they draw close, and I know they are falling with the rain. My father does not disappear. He does not fall.
I never went anywhere like this, he says. He looks around, his eyes terrified and fascinated. At the sea, so calm compared to the upset in my soul. At the cliffs, impossibly high and unattainable. And at the dreadful beach, with its denizens seeking freedom through me. I wonder if they have been waiting a long time, but I’m not sure time means much here. Another of the tall humanoid shapes approaches, its eyes fixed on us as it fades into the storm.
That one might kill my mother. It might kill me.
Our talent is from a gentler time, my darling girl. There’s nothing gentle about it anymore, however much you want it, and are desperate for it to help.
“Then tell me how to stop it,” I plead. “You tried before, but I wasn’t ready for it to end then. I was younger, selfish, more headstrong. But I’m ready now.”
I think maybe we have to do it together, he says. He holds out his hands, and this time they’re empty. He’s not holding a hypodermic ready to inject me. He’s offering togetherness and kindness, not violence and fear.
I take his hands, and they feel warm against the coolness of this place.
“How?” I ask.
How have you ever gone back? he asks. We close it down. Together, we can let go of the storm.
For a moment I am already mourning losing this terrible, wonderful power. I could bring rain to dry places, tend harsh thirsts, water the Desert.
But it’s become clear that I cannot bring only rain. The other things that fall are as much to do with my state of mind as they are the state of this world, and ours. In this world of change and drought, hunger and chaos, I can never find myself completely at peace. The danger outweighs the benefits. I have to let go.
