Flood Plains (2 page)

For a district with such a reputation for hardcore violence, the tall grass, dirt sidewalks, and overhanging trees gave this part of Fifth Ward a positively rural appearance. It reminded Big Time of the neighborhood he’d grown up in. Even though Slidell was just on the east side of the Pontchartrain Bridge from New Orleans, it might as well have been on another planet.

Nearing the highway, Big Time jacked the windshield wipers up a notch as the rain came down harder. At the intersection of Crosstimbers and the entrance and exit ramps to the 59 Freeway, a two-story hotel that had been boarded up and painted a uniform white stood on his right and a Chevron gas station on his left. Realizing he would have to get gas at some point and the rain would only get worse as the hurricane got closer, Big Time pulled into the Chevron.

After setting the hold-open to keep gas pumping into his tank, Big Time wandered into the station. As he entered, the owner was shouting obscenities at an emaciated young black man standing at the counter holding two half-gallon bottles of water.

“You fuckers gotta have four or five of my bathroom keys over in your crack squat,” the owner, a bearded, ponytailed, white fifty-something with the name “Edwin” stitched to his grimy shirt bellowed at the kid. “I know you sneak over here all hours of the day to use my facilities and I’m sick of it. I don’t care what you buy. Restrooms are off-limits. Next time I see one of you crackheads out there, I’m calling the police.”

The youngster stood glassy-eyed and took his dressing-down. When the owner finally went quiet, he nodded a sort of ‘good-bye’ and headed for the door. The owner turned an incredulous look at Big Time.

“Man, I don’t know what’s worse,” Edwin began. “The dopeheads or the fact that the City knew exactly what they were doing when they let all that trash come over in the first place.”

Big Time figured the guy had seen his Louisiana plates at least half a dozen times. Even now they were up on the rotating four-camera display alongside the register, but Big Time simply slid a twenty across the counter and said nothing.

“I used to know a mechanic, Romanian guy, who worked on German cars. He sold a lot of parts and won some trip to Germany, but when he came back, he was just shaking his head because of all the immigrants fucking up the country. I still remember he said, ‘If Hitler came back for just
one week
, place would be paradise.’ Funny guy, right?”

The owner waited for Big Time’s dirty look but got a grin instead. “You know Hitler killed all the Romanians, too, right? And your pal’s an immigrant, no? Sounds like he was plotting his own demise.”

The owner was struck dumb. Big Time gave him a little salute before heading back to his truck. Making a mental note to gas up at the Texaco up by Deltech from here on, Big Time hopped back behind the wheel and angled towards the highway.

Once up on the 59, he could see the dimly illuminated skyline of downtown. Unlike Dallas with its ball-topped Reunion Tower, Chicago with whatever they were now calling the Sears Tower, or Manhattan with the Empire State Building, Houston was downright anonymous. Even so, Big Time thought its cluster of modern skyscrapers looked like Oz when viewed against a foreground of the ramshackle, sub-poverty homes of Fifth Ward.

Chapter 2

Z
akiyah Weldele sighed as she looked at the moving boxes in her living room, trying to remember how much bigger the place had appeared before Alan moved in. Sure, Katrina had wiped him out and his trademark good luck hadn’t followed him to Houston, but was that any reason to extend a hand to the man who’d knocked her up at fourteen and had played the absentee father to Mia ever since?

Her cell phone said it was already 5:43, three minutes past her absolute, already-gonna-be-late cut-off time.

“You tell your daddy he’d better have all this off the floor or in storage by the end of the week or it’s going in the dumpster,” Zakiyah said.

Mia looked up from her breakfast cereal and giggled. Zakiyah tried unsuccessfully to stifle a smile.

“It’s not funny! This place is a sty.”

Most of the boxes were clothes, mostly workout gear with multiple pairs of shoes. The tread had been worn down to almost nothing on some of them, but Alan kept them anyway. Then there were three full boxes of trophies.

Those goddamn trophies
.

Zakiyah realized a couple of the plaques were ones she’d first seen in Alan’s bedroom over ten years ago. She’d thought it was really something to be this big handsome track star’s girlfriend at the time, especially since she’d never considered herself the prettiest girl in class. Now, the fact that this same fellow, now a grown man, was still carting around trinkets he’d won at a fifth-grade Field Day made her roll her eyes.

“Oink, oink,” Mia grunted, giving herself a pig nose with her index finger. She pretended to eat her cereal as if from a trough.

“That’s disgusting,” Zakiyah said. She walked over and kissed her daughter on the forehead. “I can’t be late, so tell Daddy to take the bus.”

Mia nodded. Zakiyah grabbed her packed lunch off the counter, pretending first to grab Mia’s faded pink plastic lunch bag.

“
Mom!
”

“Oh, sorry.”

Mia sighed and Zakiyah grinned.

“Do well today and make me proud.”

Once out the door, Zakiyah noticed that it was lightly raining. Quickly searching the parking lot for her faded blue Sentra, she spotted it only three spaces away from the front door. Deciding to take this as a good omen, she was soon on the road making up the time she’d lost.

•  •  •

Deltech Computers was created by four friends who had been laid off from their respective computer companies in the mid-eighties. Reagan had called in the small business loans, and demand for business computers crashed. As the story went, these fellows, who had gotten to know one another working booths across countless business conferences, met at a Luby’s Cafeteria in North Houston. Over iced tea and Jell-O, they designed a new kind of personal computer that would be cheap to manufacture, far lighter than anything on the market (making it cheaper to ship), but it would still include all the bells and whistles they knew their clients desired with none of the costly ones that tended to go unused for the life of the machine.

Fifteen years later, they had leapt past several competitors to compete with the likes of IBM and Packard Bell to become one of the largest providers of business computers in the world. Their manufacturing, service, and administrative departments employed over thirty-five thousand people worldwide. Around eighteen thousand of these worked at the main Deltech campus an hour north of Houston in the cozy suburbs, home to many of the company’s top executives.

The campus was meant to feel collegiate. Built up over several acres of forest, hundreds of trees had been carefully preserved during construction to retain its woodland feel. The two dozen buildings and ten parking garages were connected by walking paths as well as a handful of enclosed second-story skyways. These were particularly trafficked on inclement weather days like today.

Muhammad Abdul Salaam, however, slogged through the wet grass from the bus stop towards Manufacturing Building #4 without an umbrella. The rain was really starting to come down and the slightly overweight, slump-shouldered Indian’s brown shoes and matching pants were now soaked black. The thirty-eight-year-old could feel the stares from his fellow day-shifters comfortably waiting in their cars to enter the parking garage ahead of him, but he didn’t look over.

More than that, he refused to run.

He finally reached the mouth of the parking garage and threaded past the line of incoming cars to the building’s entrance. There was already a line of workers moving slowly past two security guards who peered into the lunch boxes and bags of all the workers as they came in. Coming from inside the building, a massive
thump-a, thump-a, thump-a, thump-a
echoed into the garage every time the door opened. The loud cadence was meant by those beating out the tattoo to sound like jungle drums.

“Open it up.”

Muhammad opened his bag for the guard, got his badge scanned, and filed down the short hallway into Building #4. There were already a number of day-shifters milling around the break area at the front of the hangar-sized factory building waiting to take over their work stations from the night-shifters at 6:15. Though there was always some down time between shifts, the line supervisors tried to keep this to a minimum. Typically, it would only be about ten minutes before computers started rolling off the line again, but this depended a lot on how the night-shifters left things.

The factory floor consisted of ten assembly lines that ran the width of the building. The front of the lines were located just up the steps from the break area, really just a couple of tables, a kitchen, and restrooms. The last stations were at the back, where ten garage doors opened out to a loading dock where tractor-trailers waited to take away the shift’s haul each day. The line supervisors constantly reminded their workers that every Deltech computer built had already been sold.

The workers in the pack stations used upside-down six-foot by six-foot by four-foot chassis boxes for their drums and beat on them with three-foot cardboard packing corners. Coupling this with the noise of the jangling wheels of the assembly line, the hydraulic lifts, the taping machines, the screwdrivers and the clatter of moving hundreds of half-built computers on and off the lines and into work stations made for a noisy workplace on its own. Populate that cavernous space with four hundred people, and it was like working on a busy airport’s runway. Rain pouring down on the steel roof should’ve added to the cacophony but was mostly drowned out.

Muhammad shoved his lunch into one of the break room refrigerators. He rejoined the 320 some-odd day-shifters now waiting to take their places on the line. A clock with a red digital display hanging high above the factory floor showed that it was 6:04.

The jungle drums got louder and louder, resembling rolls of thunder.

“Hey there, Big Time.”

Still drinking his coffee and cola combo, Big Time sidled up next to a twenty-five-year-old hyper-obese onetime gangbanger named Elmer Gonzales who worked with him in pack.

“Mornin’, Elmer. They sound like they mean it this morning.”

The 350-pound tattooed and mohawked giant laughed, causing his glasses to almost pop off his pumpkin-like head, so stretched were they. He would show anyone who asked the scythe-shaped scar around his midsection from where he’d been shot up many years before, but his jovial nature made him anything but threatening.

“Let’s hear it, Big Money,” Elmer quipped.

Big Time cupped his hands around his mouth and angled his head up.

“ARF!!! ARF!!! ARF!!!”

Above the cacophony of the drums, two night-shifters quickly responded.

“
Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-AH!!! AH!!! AH!!!
” came a pair of gibbon-like monkey calls.

“
RRRRRROOOOOOWWWWRRRRRRR!!!
” a jaguar joined in from a different line.

Elmer and a couple of the other day-shifters laughed.

“You got another one in ya?”

“Let’s see,” Big Time replied, taking a deep breath. “
WOOOOF!!! WOOOOF!!! WOOOOF!!!
”

Big Time’s Doberman yell got a couple of appreciate claps from coffee-sipping day-shifters. Before any night-shifters could respond, the shift-change buzzer sounded and bodies immediately swept off the line. Big Time pulled his ground wire out of his pocket, slipped it onto his wrist, and climbed the six short steps to the floor.

“Aw, shit,” said Elmer, glancing around. “Guess Big Time Jr. didn’t make it.”

Elmer was right. No Alan.

Big Time spotted Zakiyah and figured she had to leave without him again.

“He’d better not leave us shorthanded. Gonna have to whip that boy.”

•  •  •

The Gulf of Mexico was notoriously tempestuous, particularly at the Port of New Orleans, where the rushing Mississippi smashed into the swirling sea. Oilfield services workers toiled around the clock to keep up with repairs to the pipelines running from the oil platforms to the refineries that ringed Pontchartrain. When a hurricane entered the Gulf, the services teams went into overdrive to make certain everything was ready to weather the storm. These same teams took a hit in the public opinion department when New Orleans’s refineries were back in operation four days after Hurricane Katrina while much of the citizenry continued to suffer.

The workers wore this as a badge of honor, however, and considered themselves just about the only people who knew how bad the hurricane would be and acted accordingly. When Eliza made landfall at Banes, Cuba, and continued across the mainland past Holguin, Las Tunas, Camaguey, and Matanzas before returning to the Gulf at Havana, it was expected that she would slow down. When instead it had the effect of distributing its energy outward rather than being dulled by the gradations of the land below (the topography having the effect of concentrating its power on a secondary wind maxima that relieved the pressure on the eye wall), the services team knew that this
could
be a very, very bad storm and began to prepare accordingly.

Skeleton crews were sent to lock down the platforms just as their regular workers were sent back to the mainland to weather the storm at home. But as the hurricane got close and its powerful winds churned the ocean below, something began to stir under the ocean floor.

At the continental shelf, the loose silt layer was stripped aside as if hit by a water cannon that the hurricane effectively created as it neared land. The churning silt was swept into the underwater cyclone and shot back down to the floor, where it sandblasted the rocks below.

What emerged from subterranean confinement was
hungry
.

Barely affected by the churning seas, it quickly moved to the surface. Though there were close to four thousand oil platforms in the Gulf, only a couple hundred were directly in Eliza’s path. Only thirty-one of these were near-shore platforms, easily sighted from land. The skeleton crews on each of these numbered four men a piece and would become the first to die. Poor communication was expected. The lack of radio traffic back to the mainland on that Tuesday afternoon set off no alarm bells, as the readings from the monitoring equipment on each platform suggested stability and expected working conditions.