Flood Plains (12 page)

What he had seen in the county jail was nothing compared to the madness on the streets of Houston. Thousands of torn bodies floated down the block. Buses and cars were stopped at odd angles, their drivers and passengers having been pulped against the windows and dashboards. Thunderous splashes sent up geysers of bloody water as the bodies of people who either jumped or were thrown from great heights slapped into the flood.

Alan had made the mistake of looking up at one point after noticing blood drizzling down both of his arms. Hundreds of people, far more than he imagined had struggled in to work that day at all, were being held in mid-air as the thick, black tendrils of oily liquid snaked out shattered windows, dissolved their skin, and then dumped the refuse into the streets.

“Shit!” Alan cried, leaping aside as a partial torso slammed onto the sidewalk in front of him.

Dry land
.

Alan kept looking, but the more he ran, the more he feared that there was no such thing. The entire city was on the verge of flooding. If what was happening up in the buildings was any indication of this strange killing machine’s ability, dry land might not be enough.

But Alan kept running.

When he could, he launched himself off the sidewalk and ran along benches, retaining walls that circled trees or flags, or even jumped from garbage cans. If it was any other day, the leaps he was making from one ledge to the next wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. The distances were impossible and the landing area too slick. He’d obviously slip and go crashing down, breaking every bone in his body while cracking his skull.

Right now, however, he landed with supernatural authority. He was like one of those guys in the movies, a stunt man who never lost his footing.

To cross streets, he’d jump from a wall to the top of a bus shelter and onto the roof of a car, all without skipping a beat. When he landed on the other side, he just kept running. His lungs burned with the effort. His muscles strained. Like the screaming, he ignored this, too.

He’d glimpsed the tendrils of black hunting him in the floodwaters. Like eels, they cut through the streets and were sometimes only a few feet behind him. But then, somebody slower would stagger out of a building or car or just down the sidewalk, and the eels would engulf them in a shroud of black oil instead.

He saw this happen more than once. A shell-shocked soul covered in the blood of their co-workers would run out of their building, believing that they were safe. When the black tentacle torpedoed straight for them, Alan could see bewilderment, horror, disappointment, and resignation all flash across a person’s face within a single second.

Then the tentacle would expand like a hooded cobra, wrap around them, and, if Alan was close, he could just hear screams turn to gurgling panic as the liquid forced itself into every pore.

He’d come around the corner of one building and had seen a middle-aged woman, completely nude for no reason he could ascertain, standing still and watching the water race past. She had made eye contact with Alan and he detected no madness, only resolve. When a great black hand emerged from the water next to her, she turned to face it.

What haunted Alan now was that even with all of that stoicism, he could still hear her wail in agony as the dark mass enveloped her.

Alan made it another block and finally saw something akin to Shangri-La. Past the last skyscraper was the bridge over Buffalo Bayou that connected downtown Houston with Fifth Ward. He had this idea that the bridge would be safe. Water would drain off to either end, leaving the center high and dry. Though there would be water flowing under it, he imagined he’d still be high enough to avoid either whatever the black oil was that used water to travel and the invisible force that seemed to presage it. He wasn’t sure how the poltergeist effect worked, but it never seemed to trawl too far away from the physical black sludge part it ran in tandem with.

He also noted that the tendrils of sludge never had a tail. They might have looked like snakes or eels, but endless ones that seemed to be connected back to a whole. Also, the thing in the water didn’t have eyes or a mouth, absorbing its victims, not eating them. What it did have was some sort of extrasensory ability to become alerted to the presence of humans that fed its single-minded determination to then consume them. In this way, it was like a perfect, mindless predator, moving like a shark.

An animal elegance.

No mercy, no hesitation, absolute efficiency. The only time much more than clothes and bones were left behind was when the eater seemed to be called away to a greater prey.

The bridge was now only a few dozen yards ahead. Shutting out all else, Alan ran the race of his life, counting the strides.

Thirteen…still alive…fifteen…still alive…seventeen…still alive…nineteen…still alive…

•  •  •

Sineada.

The voice startled the old woman. She’d been in the kitchen with Mia making snacks by candlelight. Sineada hesitated, not wanting to alarm her young charge.

“I’ll be back in a moment.”

Sineada stepped out of the kitchen and made as if she was heading for the bathroom. Once out of sight, she ducked into her reading room off the parlor. She knew she could “commune” anywhere, but she was accustomed to doing it here, and there were few distractions. The handful of times she had hallucinated during a session, knowing every centimeter of her surroundings had helped pull her out of it.

Hello…?
She asked in her head as she stood in the doorway, looking into the dark room.
I am Sineada.

She waited. All she heard was the sound of the rain pounding on the roof until:

Sineada. Your time is today.

Sineada was surprised by this but worked to maintain her composure.

The storm?
Sineada asked.

No. What the storm brings. Multitudes died and multitudes will follow them into death.

Sineada puzzled over this. Something about this wasn’t right. She knew that, often, the words were her own, manufactured by her mind as they interpreted a feeling from the other side. But this was ominous. There was a meaning she couldn’t quite divine.

What is in the storm?
she asked.

But this time, there was no answer.

Despite this, Sineada found herself strangely elated. She had always feared that death would catch her unaware and she wouldn’t be ready. Now, in the moment, she felt ready for whatever this might bring.

Something else made her happy, too. This was one of only a handful of times she had been able to communicate rather than merely listen. The voices came to her disorganized, and a line thrown out into the ether might be returned with little more than a fleeting thought or instinct. A response that confirmed something was there but then did not engage further. This time, someone had come to her. She’d become that beacon her own grandfather told her she might grow into becoming. She marveled at what this told her. There would be no real death, no end to this life if she could communicate back to the living. This simple realization filled her with such a joy she didn’t even notice Mia coming up behind her in the parlor.

“Oh, did you finish the sandwiches?”

Mia eyed her curiously for a moment as if having trouble formulating a question. She scrunched her brow as she looked up at her great-grandmother.

“What does that mean, ‘What the storm brings’?”

Chapter 14

T
he storm had arrived.

Everyone in Building Four could hear the winds rattling the walls as the sky went black outside the windows and the rain lashed at the roof. The trees outside the break area windows had been bent over for much of the morning, but they were now beginning to snap away. Branches flew against the windows. Despite their being safety glass, Big Time could tell just by listening when a new crack was made.

Trying to distract himself, Big Time lowered another unit into a waiting box and shoved it through the tape machine. Though Dennis had given them a low quota, most people were working just as hard as they usually did to make the time go faster.

“At this rate, corporate’s going to be hoping for hurricanes every day,” Scott moaned, slapping labels on the finished boxes. “You can tell the hamsters all you want that it’s nothing but free food and laziness on the menu, and they’ll still get bored and climb right back up on that wheel.”

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Big Time chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you work so hard in my life, Hamster Scott.”

Scott rolled his eyes and got back to work.

Big Time raised the next computer and was moving it over to Elmer so he could slap the Styrofoam corners on it when the power went out in the building. A couple of people screamed, but Big Time didn’t have time to react as the hydraulic lift bucked upwards. The vacuum released the computer, which dropped five feet onto the concrete floor, where it landed with a crash.

“Holy shit!” Elmer cried, hopping backwards as shattered plastic fired in all directions.

As the back-up generators kicked in, casting the factory in a dull orange glow, Big Time could see the computer was a wash. It had splashed out its motherboard, drives, and wires across the ground as if they’d been busted out of a piñata.

“This one’s fucked big time, Big Time,” Scott said, looking it over.

“How long have you been waiting to say that?”

Before Scott could answer, Dennis appeared on the second-floor catwalk over the break area.

“We all right?” he called.

“A unit was up on the lift when the lights went,” Big Time yelled back. “Don’t think we’ll be able to resuscitate.”

“All right. Pull the chips and the belts and write up the rest.”

Big Time was about to reply in the affirmative when gasps of astonishment started coming from the front of the line. He looked out towards the break area windows and saw people racing by in the driving rain.

“What the fuck is going on?” Elmer asked, angling for a better view.

A handful of folks became a flood. A car whipped past, only to spin out of control and bounce onto the curb. Its driver piled out and kept running.

That’s when they saw a middle-aged woman in a print dress stagger past. She was covered in blood, her right arm hanging from its socket by little more than a tendon.

“Oh, shit. There’s been an accident,” Big Time surmised.

Everyone on the line moved away from their stations, as if worried that whatever violence was being visited upon the people running by would hit them next. Several grabbed for their cell phones and frantically dialed numbers, only to get no signal.

“Big Time!”

Big Time wheeled around as one of the night-shifters, a fellow Katrina survivor named Bud-something, came in a side door that opened onto Line 10, a door everyone in factory knew was broken but never fixed.

“There a tornado?”

“Something’s in the water,” Bud said, catching his breath. “Coming up the pipes, coming in with the flood water, maybe coming down with the rain, even. But whatever it is, it’s killing people.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Scott.

“The Wal-Mart started to flood, but they were taking care of it,” Bud said, shaking as he spoke. “Then people started screaming. I was seeing shit I ain’t never seen. Folks getting lifted off the ground, blood everywhere. It was crazy.”

“What do you mean it was ‘in the water’?” asked Big Time.

“I caught a glimpse. It was like an eel but lots of them. Solid black. They shot through the water, grabbed people, and just pulled them right under. A second later, they’d come back for someone else.”

•  •  •

As people in the factory building began to panic and run around like chickens with their heads cut off, Zakiyah was trying to call her grandmother. Like the rest, she couldn’t even get a dial tone.

Outside the building, people continued to run past, and the floodwaters were rising, water splashing up the windows. Even from her temporary station on Line 9, Zakiyah could see the fear on the people’s faces as they went by, some beating on the glass as if to warn workers in the factory of what they saw.

“What the hell is going on?” someone two stations down cried, already hysterical.

What made everything worse was that people had stopped working. This only amplified the terrifying sound of the rain blistering away at the roof

“Listen up, everybody!”

It was Big Time. He was standing up over Line 10, addressing both lines.

“We’re going upstairs to the second-floor conference room. Something happened at the Wal-Mart. Couple of pipes burst. People got hurt. There’s a chance we might flooded out, too, so we’re going to take to the high ground.”

Zakiyah wondered why Big Time was lying and what he was lying about, but grabbed her purse and began moving towards the break area regardless. Like a flock of birds, everyone began moving from their posts to follow her out until it was a human traffic jam between the lines.

Over on Line 10, Big Time flipped open his cell and tried to call home but got nothing. The faces of his co-workers betrayed real fear now, like worried animals being driven to slaughter. Big Time tried to smile reassuringly when their gazes fell on him, but it was doing little good.

He bumped into Elmer for the third time. Elmer moved aside a little to let him pass.

“Go ahead, man. I’ll see you up there.”

Elmer looked just as scared as everyone else. Big Time nodded and pushed ahead.

“Hey! Where’s everybody going?” Dennis yelled from the catwalk. “Big Time? You starting a panic?”

“Just trying to be proactive,” Big Time called back. “We’ll discuss when we get up there.”

Outside the window, the gray skies had gone almost to black, and the water was now at least two feet high. A car floated past. Water seeped under the fire doors at the front and the garage doors on the loading dock.

Big Time’s heart rate accelerated. He felt death’s hand like he had only one time before. In that instance, he’d lost everything but really nothing. His family had survived; they’d picked up and moved. They’d started over.