Hurricane #38: The Humans (Patreon)

Since Patreon is still screwing up italics (at least on some browsers; it seems inconsistent now), I’m starting an experiment of attaching a screen-friendly PDF version of the chapter. Let me know if this seems like a good idea!

You frantically paddle, try to howl, but just get a mouthful of water. The world is nothing but the storm, all-consuming—

But you are the storm’s handmaiden, its avatar, its chosen. You can’t control it, but you can…no, not direct it, not this storm, being forced along a path it should never be able to take, drawn by powers that should have no say over it. But you can ride it.

Impossibly, the river picks up speed, carrying you with it, along it. It moves faster than sound, faster than light. You move faster than light. You are the river. You are the storm—

—you are breaking up—

Serrano fell out of the bottom of the river. And kept falling.

The coyote blinked rapidly, trying to get her bearings as she tumbled, wind roar-whistling in her ears, electric crackling sounding from above. Was she in free fall? Three Lords, she was. The crackling came from a constant, yards-wide lightning bolt searing the sky above her, painfully bright to look at, unimaginable voltage arcing off it in deadly streams. Was that the way the “river” manifested itself?

No, don’t worry about that now. Worry about the approaching ground. How do you break your fall without a parachute? Summon the wind. But if this wasn’t her world, was she still a storm goddess here? She’d better fucking be, or she was less than a minute away from painting the countryside in coyote parts.

Grimacing and shoving down her rising panic, she reached out for the wind.

It didn’t feel like her wind, her air currents, her storms. But it felt close enough, letting her direct it, letting her gather it. Her tumble became a controlled fall, then a glide.

Okay. So. She guided the wind, cajoled it, following the path of the lightning. If she stayed under it as she descended, it might make her harder to see, since nobody on the ground would be looking straight up at it.

This was definitely a suburb. At first glance, she couldn’t tell it from any of the ones back home. But those cars moved really fast along some of the roads, as fast as the regional train system, and keeping perfect pace with one another. Was this what they did here instead of trains? Some kind of autopilot electric car thing? Okay, kind of cool, although it didn’t seem like it’d be as efficient. Of course, maybe when you were stealing another world’s entire natural energy system, your energy got real damn cheap.

She looked ahead, toward where the lightning river met the horizon. How far away was that? Damned if she could tell, but it wasn’t close. The suburb looked like it gave way to light industrial, then to miles and miles of nothing.

A helicopter flew into sight off to her right side. No, not a helicopter. A plane? A flying car? Whatever it was, it was pacing her. And switching on flashing red and blue lights. Great. She needed to lose it, fast.

When Ulohne had first intervened with her outside of dreams, she’d lifted her up in a small tornado. So, she just needed to create one and have it set her down. Sure. Easy. Trying not to grimace, Serrano pulled thunderclouds together as quickly as she could, swirling a frigid downdraft and warm updraft together around her. If she did that right—

She didn’t have time to process having the wind knocked out of her—ha ha, ironic—before she began violently spinning, a funnel cloud whirling about her at dizzying speed.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Serrano put monumental effort into not barfing, then shifted the tornado until she started to fall down its center. This time it was a controlled fall, the cyclone’s deafening howl an unsettling contrast to how smoothly it lowered her to the ground.

The flying cop car was still there, now diving after her. She brought the remains of the cyclone down toward it like a hammer. It spun out of control, tumbling toward the ground out of sight. A loud crash sounded a couple of seconds later.

She sat up, rubbing her face. Where had she touched down? From the looks of it, just into the light industrial district, in the middle of a street running between low shared warehouses and office spaces. Good. There wouldn’t be as many gawkers around as if she’d dropped into, like, a shopping mall or something.

Not that it would matter much if she ended up destroying the world, which as far as she was concerned was still an option on the table. A far-fetched option, yes, but if the only way she could stop Sark was to turn everything from horizon to horizon into a paw print, she’d do it without a second thought.

Grunting, she started to stand up, then froze. She’d attracted onlookers. A crowd of at least a dozen humans had filtered out of the buildings to stand at what they assumed was a safe distance, pointing at her and holding up their phones.

“Nothing to see.” She waved her hands in a shooing motion. “I’m fine.”

The crowd burst into conversation. “Holy shit, it can speak!” “Are you an alien?” “An alien dog?” “It’s a costume!” “Can you understand us?” More phones came out.

Serrano rubbed her face. Somehow she hadn’t put together that she would be the only coyote woman in a world full of humans. So much for blending in.

“Yeah, okay. Let’s go with alien dog.” She pointed up at the lightning. “I want to know about the guy responsible for that. Somebody named Sark.”

The humans looked at her, at each other. “I’m calling the cops,” one muttered. “I’m calling the news!” another exclaimed.

“Sark instead of the government?” a burly guy in mechanic’s overalls said, laughing. “Guess he really is more of a leader than they are.”

A pencil-thin guy standing next to him snorted, crossing his arms. “Great, even the aliens are asshole industrialists.”

“Shh!” A woman behind them made a little pointing gesture at a light pole.

What? Serrano looked up at it. The round thing at the top was a camera?

“Christ, Kathy.” The mechanic rolled his eyes. “It’s monitoring for crime, not insults.”

A yell came from somewhere behind Serrano. “Police are on their way!”

“Fuckballs,” Serrano muttered. She looked up at the sky. The dark clouds from the quick tornado hadn’t broken up yet. Another tornado was too extreme—she could almost feel Snep giving her a doleful look—but she had less dramatic options.

She closed her eyes a moment, tugging the clouds back into action. With a clap of thunder, rain started, building from light to torrential in a matter of seconds. The onlookers ran back into the buildings, no one seeming to notice the nearly dry circle right around the coyote. With any luck, the rain was too heavy for them to easily see her now—or to easily see her start running down the street, the dry circle keeping pace with her.

All right, now what? She couldn’t just run like this very long. Running as a taur would be easier and faster, but it’d attract attention. Doing it as a giant taur would be just as easy, even faster, and a thousand percent more awesome, but would attract literal military-grade attention. She needed to stop standing out. Steal a car?

No sirens yet, but she had to assume they’d be coming. She headed down a side street, then another, finally coming to rest by a plastic “sandwich” sign pointing at a driveway. Stenciled black lettering surrounded a cartoon drawing of an atomic explosion:

GROUND ZERO ALES – OPEN!

Huh. Well, people there might be distracted enough not to notice her. Looking around, she didn’t see any of the camera-festooned streetlights, either, so maybe she’d be off the radar for a while.

She let the rain lighten up, slinking into the parking lot. The brewery was just in another warehouse row, sharing space with a machine shop, a restaurant equipment company, and a barebones gym. The cars were just as motley as the building they sat to the side of, ranging from utilitarian work trucks to luxury sports cars to beat-up sedans.

One of the beat-up sedans caught her eye. Okay, not so beat up, but definitely well-used, and festooned with bumper stickers. At least five were for breweries, including Ground Zero. Others looked like they must be for bands, and from the lettering style, she guessed punk bands. One on a striped blue, pink, and white background proclaimed TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. Another white-on-black one simply read SMASH CAPITALISM.

Then Serrano’s ears skewed. Someone was in the car, a tall pale young woman with short, spiky black hair, sitting in the driver’s seat looking down at her phone. Her window was open. As far as the coyote could tell, she hadn’t been seen yet.

Okay. On the one paw, it’d be way easier if she could get help, and if anybody might be sympathetic to her, it’d be an anticapitalist queer punk. On the other: coyote woman in a world full of humans.

Taking a deep breath, she walked around to the driver’s side and rapped on the door. “Please don’t scream.”

The woman looked up, startled, then dropped her phone, eyes going wide. As far as humans went, she was pretty cute, in a tomboyish way. She wore the kind of denim and faded tee combo Serrano would wear herself.

Serrano raised her hands. “No scream. Please. I need your help.”

Her mouth opened and a strangled noise came out. “Are—are you a werewolf?”

“A what? Come on, I’m clearly a coyote.”

“Werecoyote?”

“No. Look, do you know who somebody named Sark is?” She pointed up at the lightning. “That guy?”

She narrowed her eyes. “The techbro billionaire everybody treats like a god while he barfs up fantastic inventions at an impossible rate, always with weird democracy-destroying catches? Yeah, heard of him.”

“He’s stealing those inventions from other worlds. And that lightning river up there is literally the energy from my world’s hydrologic cycle, and I’m here to stop him from draining it all away before it’s too late to reverse.”

“That’s—are you saying what he’s doing that’s supposed to fix our climate crisis is shoving it onto another world?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew it had to be some kind of bullshit, but Jesus.” She ran a hand through her hair. “How do you stop it?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’m kind of a storm goddess. I’ll figure out something.”

The woman eyed Serrano. “A storm goddess.”

Serrano snapped her fingers. A lightning bolt struck the closest tree and it caught on fire, before a torrential shower just the width of the tree fell on it for just long enough to extinguish the flames.

The woman stared at Serrano wide-eyed. “So what do you want from me?”

“A ride. They probably already know I’m coming, but I wanna be as stealthy as I can for as long as I can.” She waved at herself. “And I attract attention here.”

She chewed on her lip, then jerked a thumb at the passenger door. “Get in.”