Fantasy Life (36 page)

This time, Gabriel looked pointedly at the stream of creatures. “This has nothing to do with the weather.”

The man rolled his eyes. “You can believe whatever you want. I’ve been speaking to some of my people and they insist that there is some kind of weather-related problem from last night’s storm that’s causing this. They believe that if you just park a car in the center of that mess, you’ll divert the mindless mass, and it’ll go back to the sea.”

For the first time, Gabriel noticed that the man was clutching a small, black cell phone in his right hand. He had a beeper on his hip, and another electronic device in his shirt pocket, next to a pair of sunglasses, which he was pointedly not wearing.

That made Gabriel wonder if the man expected Gabriel to recognize him. Even if Gabriel had, he wouldn’t have given the man the satisfaction of knowing it.

“Your people aren’t here,” Gabriel said with as much patience as he could muster. “They probably haven’t seen the school parking lot. These creatures aren’t going around anything. They’re going over and under, but not around. I doubt I can change that.”

At the word
creatures,
the man glanced toward the exodus. For a moment, he seemed to understand that this was no ordinary event. Then his jaw tightened and he turned back to Gabriel.

“Look, it’s imperative that I get out of here. Do you have an airstrip?”

“In Whale Rock,” Gabriel said. “That’s about twenty minutes south—”

“I know where it is, and that does me no good.” The man shook his phone at Gabriel. “I stayed in that second-rate hotel until almost noon, when I finally got assurance that the highway south was open. I just got off the phone with my people, who have been in touch with the highway workers, and they tell me the roads north and east are still closed. You have to get these things off the highway. I have to get out of here.”

“I would change my flight if I were you,” Gabriel said.

The man’s cheeks flooded a dark shade of red, but the skin near his lower eyelids did not, confirming Gabriel’s notion that this man had had a lot of plastic surgery.

“I don’t have that luxury,” the man said.

“You don’t have a choice.” Gabriel skirted around him and headed back to the highway. He could hear the man scurrying after him, demanding that he do something.

Gabriel would do something if the man wasn’t careful. He’d have Zeke lock him up for threatening an officer of the law.

As Gabriel reached the mouth of the parking lot, Zeke was waiting for him. The man caught Gabriel’s arm, and Gabriel looked down at the man’s thick, manicured fingers.

Then Gabriel looked up at the man’s face, slowly enough to intimidate anyone.

“I’d rethink that gesture if I were you,” Gabriel said.

The man glared at him. “You need to do something.”

“I am trying, but you’re interfering. And the longer you bother me, the less time we have to get anything done.”

“Look,” the man said. “I’ll pay you. I’ll give you ten grand to cover any problems I cause, and then I’ll just drive through this mess. If I run over a few of the critters, so what. That’ll probably convince the others to go around. What do you think?”

Gabriel was actually tempted. It was an interesting plan, and if he didn’t know how magical these creatures were, and
how important they were to Anchor Bay, he would have taken the man up on his offer.

“What do I think?” Gabriel asked. “I think you have more money than sense.”

He shook his arm out of the man’s grasp and threaded through the parked cars to Denne. Gabriel looked out of the corner of his eye and saw Zeke blocking the man from following. Zeke was gesturing as he did so, probably threatening the man with arrest.

The nice thing about Zeke was that he would follow through if he had to.

Denne was still in the same position that Gabriel had left him in. Denne was older than Gabriel by nearly a decade, but Gabriel didn’t think his knees could handle a crouch for this long.

Denne didn’t even seem to notice.

Gabriel crouched beside him and heard his own knees crack. The sound, which seemed like a gunshot to him, got the attention of a few of the bystanders, but not the creatures, and not Denne.

“What do you think this is?” Gabriel asked.

“It’s not a natural migration,” Denne said. “We’d have records. And we’ve been keeping records of this area for more than a hundred years, so this isn’t a twenty-year locust cycle either. I can’t tell you much more than that. I don’t know what these creatures are. I’ve never seen them before. I don’t even think I’ve seen pictures of them or drawings or read accounts of them.”

Gabriel frowned. “I thought all of the things that lived offshore have shown up in one myth or another.”

“I would have thought so too, but I don’t pretend to know all of the world’s folktales.”

Gabriel looked at the stream. The creatures seemed lined up by height and speed. At the northern edge were black beings
not much bigger than his thumb. They didn’t have obvious heads, but they did have legs and feet, and they were moving forward with great determination.

The size progression moved up, sometimes with isolated creatures, and sometimes with an entire platoon of them. Some were frog-green, and others a deep ruby red, and still others seemed to emit some sort of camouflaging gray goo.

But they were all different. It disturbed Gabriel that Denne didn’t recognize any of them.

“I will say this. Judging from their smell, they don’t come up from the depths very often.”

“Things farther down smell worse?”

Denne shook his head. “It’s just that someone would have commented if they saw things this tiny and this stinky. That’s all. And if no one’s mentioning them, and if they haven’t shown up in fishing nets to be tossed over, then they probably come from somewhere deep.”

“What does that mean to us?” Gabriel asked.

Denne shook his head. “Maybe nothing. Except that I’m pretty sure some of them don’t have eyes—at least not as we know them. This sunlight has to be hard on all of them.”

Gabriel sighed. “None of this is helping me, Hamilton. I have to get them off my road.”

“You might just have to wait.”

“I’ve got some rich asshole from California who wants to drive over these things because he has to catch a plane. I’ll wager that he’s not the only stranded driver who’s thought of that solution. I don’t have the manpower to guard this spot.”

Denne nodded. Gabriel wasn’t sure Denne even heard him.

“To make matters worse, we have kids in that school, and some of them have to go north to get home. Parents aren’t going to like being separated from them.” Gabriel looked across the stream.

More cars were stopped on the other side. There, no one had bothered to get out. They were watching from inside their vehicles, patiently waiting as if some ODOT employee was going to use a
Stop/Slow
sign to tell them when to drive forward.

“That’s not your problem,” Denne said.

“Like hell it isn’t. I’ve got a situation here that could easily get out of hand. I need your historical and folklore-filled brain to figure out what I can do to reroute these things.”

“Where would you reroute them?” Denne asked. “You can’t avoid 101.”

“The storm drains.”

“And keep them going east? Who knows what’ll happen to them in the mountains or even on cross streets farther up.”

“I can’t worry about that at the moment. One problem at a time, Hamilton.”

“I can’t tell you how to control creatures I’ve never encountered before.”

“Then get on the phone, call your friends in South County who’ve dealt with this stuff. Figure it out for me.”

“What phone?” Denne asked.

Gabriel smiled and pointed at the guy with the red hair. “Borrow his. I’m sure he can afford the minutes.”

Denne gave Gabriel a dirty look, then stood. Getting out of the crouch appeared to be difficult, which somehow pleased Gabriel.

Then Denne threaded his way through the idling cars toward the troublemaker still arguing with Zeke.

Gabriel braced himself with his hands before he tried to stand and wished he hadn’t. The pavement was covered with a thick slime. He looked down at his fingers. They were coated. The slime appeared to have many different ingredients, all of them different colors.

He stood quickly, his knees creaking in protest. Then he
hurried back to his car to find something to wipe his fingers with. Some nonmagical creatures secreted acids. The last thing he wanted to do was wipe his fingers on his pants only to have them melt away.

Once he wiped his fingers, he grabbed the bullhorn. Then he sighed. The moment he told these people that the problem wouldn’t be solved quickly was the moment the troubles really began.

But he didn’t have a choice.

He braced himself, put the bullhorn to his lips, and hoped he wasn’t making things worse.

Anchor Bay Elementary School

Lyssa slouched on the driver’s seat. She could no longer see out of any of her car’s windows. They were all covered with multicolored sludge. Most of it was opaque, allowing just a bit of light through—at least when the creatures weren’t pounding over the glass.

The sludge wasn’t running either, so it wasn’t wet, at least not like water. Some of it glistened, like slug trails, and she wondered what it was doing to the glass.

The one thing she did know was that it was getting thicker. She could still see the feelers and the suckers and the tiny feet making prints in the sludge, but she couldn’t see much more. And about fifteen minutes before, not even the bottoms of the suckers got through to the glass anymore.

She had a moment of panic shortly after the sludge blocked all her views. She toyed with turning on the windshield wipers, using wiper fluid to clear the window. But she had a
hunch that would be as bad as driving over the creatures, and she was still feeling a modicum of responsibility for them.

She suspected as the day turned into evening turned into night, that feeling of responsibility would disappear.

Her head ached, not just because she was tired, thirsty, and overwhelmed, but because she’d been trying to contact her mother. Whatever Cassie had done to block their link had worked; so far, there was no response at all.

Lyssa knew that there wouldn’t be one, and this time, it would be her fault. She had insisted for so long that her mother not pry into her affairs that when she needed Cassie, she had no way to contact her.

Of course, this was one of the first times Lyssa had needed her mother in decades.

The car rocked and moved and creaked. No more dents forced their way into the roof, but the rear passenger window had cracked a while ago.

Lyssa desperately prayed that these things wouldn’t break in. She wasn’t sure if she could get away from them before they covered her.

Then something squealed outside, and some of the creatures on her windshield skittered, as if the sound had broken their stride. They caught themselves quickly enough and kept moving, but Lyssa noticed, and for one brief moment, it made her heart rise.

Hey, folks—

The voice came through a bullhorn, accompanied by squeaks and small shrieks. The mechanized sound meant that it took a moment for Lyssa to identify the voice, but she had it by the time the voice identified itself.

I’m Gabriel Schelling, sheriff of Seavy County. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but we don’t know what’s going on either. Believe me when I tell you that this is not something we’ve ever encountered before.

Lyssa’s breath was coming in short gasps. Gabriel was out there. Gabriel and a bunch of other people whom she couldn’t see. She wondered how long they’d been outside, how long she’d thought she could see through the windows when she actually couldn’t.

We’re pretty certain some of these creatures are on the Endangered Species List, which does not give us the right to drive over them willy-nilly—

What unadulterated bullshit. Lyssa grinned. None of these creatures were on any list, except maybe Athena’s. But good work on Gabriel’s part, apparently sidetracking a bunch of tourist traffic before it did the kind of damage that Lyssa was hesitant to do.

We’re going to try to divert them, but as you can see from the school parking lot, these creatures don’t seem to differentiate between road and obstacles. So it’ll take us a bit of work to figure out what will divert them and how we can do it.

Long speech for someone with a megaphone. Lyssa would mention that to him when—if—she got a chance to speak to him. She would tell him that no one ever made friends by forcing them to listen to the tinny feedback from an electronic bullhorn.

I can’t give you an ETA. I’m sorry. I can tell you that 101 North is still closed just outside of Anchor Bay, and 19 has been shut down on the valley side because there are problems in the corridor. In other words, those of you on the north side of the exodus stream are stuck in Anchor Bay for a while.

Lyssa swallowed, compulsively. They’d been outside long enough to call in Gabriel, and for him to gather enough of a crowd to speak to.

That meant no one knew she was inside this car. And how could they? It was covered with what Gabriel had just called an “exodus stream.”

Those of you who would like to enjoy our hospitality for another
day, I’d suggest you go back to the hotel you just left. As for the rest of you, shut off your ignitions and walk down to one of the nearby restaurants to wait this out. We’ll work as fast as we can.

Over the rocking and creaking of her own car, she could hear engines race, and doors slam. The outside sounds were faint. No wonder she hadn’t noticed them before.

I know you have a lot of questions. We don’t have any answers for you. Please let us do our jobs, and we’ll get you out of here as fast as humanly possible. Thanks.

With that, the megaphone squealed a final time.

Now Lyssa could only hear the slap of feet and amphibious body parts against metal. Even the chittering that some of the creatures had done had stopped.

Gabriel was out there, and maybe Athena, and certainly those two deputies that had been working the night before.