Creatures of the Storm by Brad Munson

no car headlights in either
direction when they crossed; they were alone on the northbound
lanes of Highway 181.
    “It was like… God walking, or something.”
Fender managed to sound reverent even while shouting over the
storm. “It was… it was …”
    She stopped when they reached the center
median. “If you say 'far ouuut,' Fender, I swear to God I will
leave you here to get hit by the next oncoming car.”
    He blinked at her from behind his speckled
granny glasses. “Well,” he said, “I was going to say ‘awesome,’
but… never mind.”
    “Good thinking,” she said. They cross the
southbound lanes without incident and walked down the off ramp to
the wide, whitewashed gate with the overhead sign that read SUNMILL
WINDFARMS. TOURS DAILY. Lucy knew, the last tour that Fender had
given was in January, and even then the visitors had been lost and
drunk.
    They trudged shoulder-to-shoulder up the
gravel driveway. Ankle-high grass stretched out on both sides of
the road, dancing in the twisting breezes of the storm, hissing
sharp and loud as the rain slashed down. The only illumination was
from a set of forty-watt bulbs set at irregular intervals along a
single power line that was strung between crooked poles running
from the gate to Fender’s trailer. The line was swinging back and
forth, dancing up and down. Lucy half-expected it to loop-the-loop
entirely, like a jump-rope twirling in the hands of giant invisible
children.
    The windmills that gave the farm its name and
Fender enough cash to buy good dope were scarcely visible beyond
the hillocks of grass. Lucy could see their naked steel legs
shuddering in the wind, the rotor blades locked in place to avoid
being damaged by the unpredictable winds. She knew he couldn’t
possibly afford any serious breakage here. Fender barely eked out a
living as it was, selling his excess wattage to the local grid.
    For all the eeriness of the scene, the storm
seemed less harsh on this side of the highway. Lucy found she could
actually hear something other than the splatter of the raindrops on
her hood and the blackboard scratch of the wind whistling past her
ears.
    “Glad that crazy lightning didn’t hit my
mills,” Fender said as they approached his trailer. “It'd blow ‘em
right out of the ground, I bet.”
    “I bet,” she said. She wanted to keep the
conversation to a minimum. Her plan was to get this poor creature
into his home and get the hell out, so she could take her own sweet
time getting back to the Station for another go-round. She longed
to be alone for a while. It was no fault of Fender’s; he was a
braincase and a burnout, but not a bad neighbor. It was just too
much to deal with his constant questions and comments right now,
not to mention his entirely obvious crush on the totally clueless
Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson. That was why he had come by as soon as the
storm got serious, Lucy knew. He wanted to make sure his girl was
okay. He was probably hoping to rescue her from some horrible
storm-related crisis, so she would finally see him for the prince
he was.
    Poor
Fender , she thought. A knight in shining armor, smelling of pot and patchouli, in
love with a gay-girl Guinevere.
    His trailer was a classic Airstream, a huge
aluminum-colored slug as big as a train car, up on blocks at the
dead center of his wide, gently rolling parcel of land. The
well-worn patch of gravel directly in front of his wooden porch – a
little platform slapped together from bits of cast-off lumber – was
a puddle now, brown as chocolate milk and as churned-up as a
ten-year-old’s bathwater. It was a little too wide to step over.
They paused at its edge to figure out their next move.
    “Hope you got this thing anchored pretty
well,” Lucy said, squinting up at the Airstream. “You could end up
floating away before morning.”
    Fender grinned at the thought. “That’d be
kinda cool, wouldn’t it? Wake up halfway to Hawaii.”
    There was a small movement at the edge of