Flood Plains (21 page)

“How do you know this thing won’t just go away when the storm dissipates?” Alan challenged.

“It’s got a foothold now,” Sineada replied. “The hurricane is an afterthought. If it’s using the water, it can go up any sewer, river, or waterline. If it’s going after people, what does that mean for Conroe? Huntsville? Heck, even Dallas? When it’s done with Texas, what’s to say it won’t roll out into Louisiana? How many dead are there going to be in Shreveport? Then it’s on to Little Rock, then maybe St. Louis. I can keep going.”

“And you think the one thing standing in its way is you and Mia?”

Sineada didn’t have to read much of Alan’s body language to know where this was coming from. She saw it all over his face and heard it in his voice.

“As you said, it’s already killed a
lot
of people, maybe even millions,” Alan continued. “I under being selfless, but that’s suicide.”

“Every time they kill somebody, it gets stronger,” Mia began, walking over to her father. “When it started, it had about
maybe
ten thousand souls. Now it’s gotta be millions. At that rate, it could keep going until it ate up everybody on the planet.”

“Then why isn’t this about the three of us getting to the top of a mountain somewhere? We should be thinking about survival. We get to Galveston, then what?”

“That’s where I come in,” interjected Sineada. “It’s a collective, but one that’s easily led as no one knows what they’re driving to. They’re just moving. But think about it like birds. One bird gets spooked and changes direction, and the whole flock blindly follows. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

“Follows you where?” Alan asked.

“Straight to the bottom of the sea,” Sineada replied matter-of-factly. “We just have to get them in the door first.”

Alan stared at Sineada with incredulity, then turned to Mia expecting to see the same expression on her face. Instead, he saw only disappointment. She knew exactly what her father had been thinking and didn’t understand why he wasn’t a better man.

This is who I am, baby
, he thought.
Someday you have to learn that no one’s going to look out for yourself except you.

Mia looked unconvinced.

Chapter 25

T
hey found the dump truck midway between where they rescued Tony and the exit for Sineada’s house. It had a full tank of gas, was higher off the ground than the eighteen-wheeler, and just as difficult to maneuver.

The even better news was that it had a bucket of cleaning supplies stowed behind the seats. No aerosol cans, but plenty of flammable liquids that could be used as accelerant if and when they came across more sludge worms.

The sludge worms.

Since they’d been inside the eye, they’d actually seen very few.

“Maybe they’re following the front wall of the storm,” Scott suggested. “Could be miles from here.”

Big Time shook his head.

“I don’t think so. They’re there in the water—we just don’t see them. Something that big isn’t going to be easy to move.”

Scott was about to reply when he heard Zakiyah gasp.

Though Big Time and Sineada both lived in the area known as Greater Fifth Ward, Big Time was farther to the north in a more wooded area, whereas Sineada was right off downtown. An area that, due to the flooding of Buffalo Bayou, was now completely underwater. Only the tops of trees remained, a handful of islands across a lake that stretched all the way to the skyscrapers. A church steeple was the only manmade structure in sight. Everything else was easily sixteen feet underwater.

“Oh, my God,” Zakiyah whispered, covering her mouth.

No one spoke. Scott rubbed at his jaw, while Muhammad looked down at his hands. Big Time reached over and put his arms around Zakiyah letting her cry on his shoulder. Her entire body was shaking as tears poured from her eyes. After a moment, her sobs became a high-pitched, keening cry.

“Just go,” she whispered after a moment. “Just go…”

But Big Time didn’t move. He held Zakiyah as if she was his own daughter who’d just lost everyone she’d ever called family. After a moment, Scott nudged Big Time aside and they switched places.

“Muhammad?”

Muhammad reacted as if surprised to hear his name. He nodded quickly, pointing out the window.

“Fourth Ward. Off Allen Parkway.”

“We’ll take the 45.”

“No, no,” Big Time said, shaking his head. “It’ll be nothing but cars. Take the surface streets.”

Scott chose a route that took them back through the Heights to come at Allen Parkway from the northeast. If it had been a typical day in Houston, the drive would’ve taken forty-five minutes. Today, however, Scott made it in ten, swerving around thousands of cars, bouncing curbs, and splashing through puddles large and small. At every turn, Scott expected to see
somebody
. A person on the street, someone staring out from the front seat of a car, or just a face in a house window, it didn’t matter. The absence of people was its own unique claustrophobia.

Where’d they all go?
Scott kept asking himself.
How could it take every last shred of a person and leave nothing?

It was like they never existed at all. Like Big Time, he hoped that when it came to his family, it was quick.

“That’s it.”

Muhammad pointed up ahead to a large, fairly recently constructed building on the south side of the parkway. It looked relatively intact, all things considered.

Scott pulled the dump truck up onto the apartment’s front lawn, right next to the front door. The lobby had been flooded at one point but was dry now. The row of buildings was elevated over the Parkway and had been the first to drain when the water began to recede.

Scott set the parking brake but shook his head.

“I know it looks all right from here, but it’s got as many pipes as the factory. The second we’re in there, that could be it for us.”

“You’re right,” said Muhammad. “I’ll go in alone.”

Big Time was a second away from protesting, but then he glimpsed his son and reminded himself that things were different now. He fell silent as Zakiyah did similarly. Muhammad nodded, reaching for the door.

But that’s when Scott made a big show of sighing and opening the driver’s-side door.

“All right, let’s go.”

“You don’t have to,” quipped Muhammad. “It isn’t my time to die, but I don’t know about you.”

“What floor are you on again?”

“Third.”

“Fuck, man,” Scott said. “You’re not making this easy on yourself.”

Muhammad shrugged and moved towards the building.

“Good luck,” called Tony.

Scott resisted an urge to flip the bird at the kid.

•  •  •

It was gathering.

After spending so much of the day stretching itself thin to cover miles and miles of ground, devouring everything in its tendrils’ paths, it discovered a task that required all of itself. An impulse traveled the lengths of its millions of threads, a reflex more than a command.

Come back…come back…come back…

•  •  •

“How long have you been married?” Scott asked as Muhammad led the way to the fire stairs.

“Seven years.”

“My wife and I were married twenty-four years. We were going to try and do something for twenty-five next year, but the money wasn’t looking right. We weren’t sure it was going to work.”

Muhammad nodded, unsure what to say. The carpet in the lobby had been soaked through, and even the water that rose around his shoe with each step had made him nervous. Once they were in the stairwell, the steps were metal, but a faint black stripe a couple of feet up the wall indicated a recent high-water mark. Muhammad didn’t want to be in there if the water began to rise again.

“You guys have any kids?” Scott asked.

“No, thankfully,” Muhammad replied but then bit his tongue.

“Nah, that’s okay,” Scott said, coming up to the second-floor landing. “I wouldn’t wish this on anybody. It’s the fatalist in me, but I think I’ve always known that my kids would go before me. Having been in the army, you get used to preparing for the worst. When we first had them, I knew losing them would be the worst. Every year they get older, you know they can take better care of themselves, but it doesn’t matter. You just never get to the point where you’re not thinking the world is just going to take them away for your sins.”

“So you think you’ll be okay?” Muhammad asked softly.

“I don’t know yet. Might be why I came with you. If I get killed up here, I’m some kind of hero, especially if I save you in the process. Then I never have to deal with it, right?”

Muhammad thought about this for a moment but then shook his head.

“That would put your death on me, though. I don’t want that.”

Scott burst out laughing.

“I’m just kidding with you, Muhammad. If I get killed up here, you’ll be killed, too, and you know it.”

•  •  •

Out in the dump truck, Big Time kept his eye peeled for sludge worms. The street that ran past Muhammad’s apartment building was parallel to Allen Parkway but elevated, the parkway having been carved through a hill that once stood on the west side of town. Though the elevated road was devoid of standing water, Allen Parkway was still flooded. Raging water clouded with dirt raced away from downtown, using the parkway as a culvert.

“There!” Tony shouted.

Sure enough, a thick tendril of pitch moving against the current snaked its way towards the central part of the city.

Big Time’s hand went to the gear shift, ready to pull the truck away, but the sludge worm seemed to take no notice of the people up on the frontage road.

“Me and Ed watched them for hours,” Tony said. “We didn’t see any tails either. We’d see one end going after a person, but the other end would just go and go and go. He joked there was some octopus down in the Gulf with a million arms.”

“Where the hell is it going?” Zakiyah asked.

“Joining up with the main mass, maybe,” Big Time offered. “Remember that thing reaching from the floor of the factory all the way to the ceiling? That wasn’t one of those little strings. More looked like a bunch of those pitch whips all pushed together into one. They pull together when they have to concentrate their efforts.”

The
bang
of the apartment building’s door startled everyone in the truck. Muhammad and Scott came tearing out the lobby like bats out of hell.

“Oh, shit,” muttered Big Time, gunning the engine.

“It’s all right!” Scott yelled, shaking his head. “They’re not in there.”

The pair, both out of breath, piled into the cab.

“Show him the note,” Scott said.

Muhammad handed Big Time a piece of paper. Scribbled across it was what he assumed must be Muhammad’s name in Arabic script but then the words “Brammeier Tower.”

“It’s that new building just on the other side of the 45,” Scott said. “Still under construction. The framing’s up, floors are there, but I doubt there’s a single water pipe in the whole place.”

“How’d your wife know all that?” Zakiyah asked.

“I don’t think she did,” Muhammad replied.

He pointed to the building in the distance. In one of the highest floors, a single light flashed off and on.

“We’re not the only survivors,” Scott said.

“But up in some sky rise?” Big Time asked.

“Why the hell not?” Scott asked. “You figure it, stay away water, stay off the pavement, take to the high ground, but as high as you possibly can where that shit can’t reach you. If you’re not in an airplane, where are you?”

“Brammeier Tower.”

Chapter 26

S
omething was wrong.

As Mia and Sineada, along with whatever help they could drag out of Alan, struggled through the hazardous floodwaters, the little girl sensed something new coming off the tendrils racing past. The tentacles of black oil hadn’t bothered them since Mia mentally rent them from her father. This seemed to lend credence to Sineada’s hive mind theory that they were being controlled as a collective. Once it had decided something, it was set in stone.

In this case, that decision seemed to be that the entire organism was retracting. She knew this because any “ends” or fingertips she saw were always pointed away from downtown, dragging back like tails.

As a particularly large section roped by, kicking up a hell of a wake as it went, Sineada glanced back to Mia.

Where are they going?

Mia shrugged. Though they were still in the eye of the hurricane, the haze of the rain at the rear eye wall filled the sky behind downtown. This only served to better clarify the steadily flashing beacon coming from near the top of one of the buildings on the west side..

“Do you see that?” Mia said, pointing to the light. “Right there!”

Alan turned around as best he could. The beacon was flashing. He recognized it as the only Morse code he knew.

“It’s an SOS. Means there are other survivors.”

Mia nodded, focusing on the tower.

“There are a lot of people in there.”

“What? You
know
that?” Alan asked.

“No, I can see them from here,” Mia said. “The building’s not finished, so people are just moving around on a bunch of the upper floors.”

Alan was shocked. He tried to look that far, but his eyes wouldn’t let him.

“Think there’s a doctor up there?” he asked.

“Could be,” replied Sineada warily. “But there’s no telling what else. If there are people, that thing’s going to be looking.”

“Well, you know what my vote is. I’m looking to stay alive. If that means a detour, I’d like to take it.”

“I’m trying to sound pragmatic here. If there are people up there, then that’s probably where all these pitch worms are going. We might only get one shot at this thing. I don’t want to waste it.”

“Oh, so those people over there can die? How many are in there, Mia?”

Mia concentrated on the tower for a moment and then shook her head.

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Hundreds, maybe a couple thousand.”