Creatures of the Storm by Brad Munson Page A

the
puddle. They both looked down on what Lucy mistook for a cluster of
seed pods or thistles. Some optical illusion of the churning foam
made it look as if they had rolled out of the water under their own
power. Of course they were just lying there, bumping against the
tiny lake’s tiny wavelets.
    Fender crouched down next to the cluster.
They were spherical and spiky, a little bigger than golf balls, a
little smaller than tennis balls. “Now, what the heck are these
here?” he asked. He reached forward and then stopped suddenly.
“Hey!” he said. “Did you see…?” He scowled at the things, then
shrugged and reached forward again, more carefully this time. He
got a thumb and a forefinger on one spike and stood up, holding it
out like a Christmas ornament on a string. “Weh-hell,” he said
wonderingly, “will you look at that, now?”
    Lucy stepped forward and looked hard…and felt
another cold blue current shudder down her back.
    It was all spikes. Some were as thin and
straight as needles from top to bottom; others were thick at the
base, then sloped up like cactus-thorns or sea-urchin spines to a
glistening point. There wasn’t a curve anywhere on the thing,
either. Each spike was made up of flat planes, three- or four-sided
pyramids, even a few with eight or ten, each face like a facet of
unpolished quartz, all meeting at a single tiny center-point you
couldn’t quite see. The thing seemed to have no real center at all.
It was all thorns.
    And they were moving.
Growing, actually, or shrinking. Lucy resisted the urge to put her
nose right up to the thing. She could see plainly from a foot away
that some of the spikes were getting longer while others appeared
to be falling back, becoming thinner and breaking away. The whole
ball of thorns was in constant, almost organic motion, moving,
reaching, retreating, like a living thing – a breathing thing, though it had no
mouth, no lungs, no life. Even the spine that Fender held seemed to
be growing longer, almost stretching, as if the weight of the
sphere was causing that one spine to grow thicker and
longer.
    “That’s not possible,” she said.
    “Wow,” Fender said. “I mean… wow.” He brought
it close to his face.
    A spike as thick as a darning needle shot out
from the ball, straight for Fender’s left eye. He flinched away at
the last instant and the point of it dug into the side of his face
instead, into the flesh below his cheekbone. Lucy gasped when she
saw it pierce him deeply, at least a quarter inch, then rake
through the skin and tissue as Fender’s head turned. Blood sprayed
as it sliced up and over, still going for the eye, still
growing.
    Fender yelped like a wounded beast and flung
the thing away as fast as he could into the shadowed grass. “Shit,”
he said and cupped his cheek. His legs started to buckle. “Shit,
shit, what was that?”
    Lucy got an arm under him
and held him up. She was surprised how light he was, and how
muscular, like a man made out of twisted wire. “Wait a minute,” she
said. “Come on, now, wait a minute, let’s get you inside.” She
turned and slogged through the puddle and got him up the porch. It
wasn’t until they were fumbling with the latch on the unlocked door
that she realized there could have been a whole swarm of those
things, those needleseeds, in the water she’d walked through. Stupid , she thought as
the door screeched open, but at least we
made it inside .
    “Shit,” Fender said, still doubled over and
clutching his face. “Shit shit shit.”
    The inside of the trailer was cramped and
precisely as messy as Lucy had expected, but there was one old
steel-and-stuffed-vinyl kitchen chair that wasn’t covered with
stacks of paper or dirty clothes. She levered Fender into it and
put a hand on his shoulder, comforting but firm. “Come on, Fender,”
she said. “Come on, look up here.”
    He didn’t respond. She was
still staring at the back of his trembling head. Lucy saw for the
very first