Flood Plains (26 page)

Big Time watched all this for a moment, enraptured, until Scott’s hand grabbed his arm and pulled him away.

“Time to go.”

•  •  •

Three thousand people or not, the rapid descent down the three stairwells was nowhere near as harried as everyone expected. People were terrified and going as fast as they could, but a strange order ruled the day. It was as if after all they’d suffered, they were determined to prove they weren’t willing to sacrifice their humanity even in the face of death. Young people helped senior citizens. When people fell down, there were six hands offered to help them up. No one pushed or shoved. Because of this, it was only five minutes before the first few made it down to the parking garage.

Big Time had told them about the obstructions, but no one seemed to care. Everyone shared a single-minded goal of exiting out the Shell building parking lot, barricades be damned. Despite what they’d glimpsed through the stairwell windows and heard as rumors went up and down the chain of people, no one believed that the monster had been vanquished.

Scott, Muhammad, Officer Franklin, and Big Time had joined the crush of people in the center stairwell, receiving a round of applause even as folks raced past.

“Hope Zakiyah didn’t get itchy down there and head off without us,” Scott joked.

“You really think she knows how to drive that thing?” Big Time called back. “She wouldn’t get six feet.”

Muhammad smiled at this but then glanced up. Something hit him clear as day. He patted Big Time on the shoulder.

“Don’t wait for me.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

Muhammad simply smiled and headed up the stairs against the current. Scott eyed him curiously but then hurried after Big Time.

“Where the hell is he going?”

“No clue. Didn’t look like a guy ready to throw himself off a building.”

“Yeah, but neither do we,” Scott said. “It’s been hitting me. We get out of this, what do our lives look like, anyway? Is it really worth going to all this trouble?”

Big Time knew what his life was going to look like, as he’d already been down this road. He’d have to find a new city to settle in, hopefully somewhere with jobs. He’d have to find a new school for Tony. He’d probably want to be near his brother. He knew what it was to lose his house, job, health insurance, car, etc., but he’d had his family to hold onto.

“Don’t think like that, man,” Big Time said, as much to Scott as to himself. “We’re in this together. You and me and my son, Tony. That’s a start, right?”

Scott nodded, but didn’t reply.

When Big Time and Scott reached the parking garage, they split off from the rest of the evacuees and kept going down to the lower level.

“Where are you headed?” called Officer Franklin.

“Got a truck and some friends waiting a few levels down,” Big Time called.

Franklin pounded Big Time’s fist and offered him a grin.

“See you on the street.”

“Good luck.”

•  •  •

On P5, water had begun rising almost as soon as Big Time and the others had headed up the stairs, a source of increasing alarm for Zakiyah and Tony. One foot became two feet and just as quickly became three.

“Maybe they need our help,” Tony said, antsy. “Should we drive around and look where the water’s coming in?”

“You want to be halfway across the parking lot when your daddy comes tearing out of there with twenty of those things chasing after him?” Zakiyah asked.

“No.”

“Well, then, we sit tight.”

A few minutes later, they heard a tremendous noise coming down the stairwell. Zakiyah thought it was the building coming down, but the water remained still around the truck. Still, she turned the key in the ignition and fired up the dump truck.

“Holy
shit!
” exclaimed Tony as the sound got louder. “You think those are people?”

They didn’t have to wait long for confirmation. Dozens of voices could be heard echoing down the stairwell along with the parade of footsteps.

“You know what the best part of this is?” asked Tony. “They’re not screaming.”

Zakiyah snorted and waited. A minute or two later, Big Time and Scott came racing out of the stairwell, looking ragged. Tony leaped out of the truck and hugged his dad as Scott clambered into the front seat.

“What about Muhammad?” Zakiyah asked, alarmed.

“Don’t know the answer to that one,” Scott sighed. “Seems he had something to do.”

“Did he find his wife?”

Scott shook his head. Zakiyah dropped it and scooted over to hand driving duties back to Big Time. Moments later, they were racing through the water towards the exit ramp.

•  •  •

“Are you going to go back to India?”

Muhammad was surprised by Mrs. Fredrik’s question. He tried to figure out what answer would make her happy before deciding on the affirmative.

“Yes, probably,” he replied. “I still have family there.”

He hadn’t wanted to tell her that they’d probably be dead within minutes.

“I have a sister in Round Rock,” Mrs. Fredrik said. “That’s just north of Austin. Only thing is, she lives with my niece’s family, so I don’t think I can go there.”

Mrs. Fredrik had told Muhammad that she’d been carried up all the flights of stairs on a chair. He figured she’d need his help on the way down. Sure enough, he’d found her alone on the thirty-first floor, staring over the city. Taking her by the arm, he began to lead her down the long flight to the lobby.

“I’m getting nervous,” she whispered as they reached the twentieth floor. “I keep waiting to hear it, but nothing’s coming.”

Muhammad eyed her curiously at this. He’d been listening to the distant screams and pounding against the walls for the last three or four minutes. At the very least, he thought the old woman would feel the vibrations running up the guard rail as the foundation of the building began to quake.

Then he realized, she probably did.

“It’ll be all right,” Muhammad said calmly. “We’ll hear it soon enough.”

Laa ilaaha illa-Allah.

Chapter 31

T
he monster felt no pain even as it was torn apart by flames, only confusion. It had been driving relentlessly forward on its task when it was interrupted. The momentum was lost, and for a moment or two, there was no guidance. The collective had lost its unifying integrity. Several thousand tendrils splashed down into the floodwaters with no direction where next to go. The entire mass reacted as if stunned, caught unawares by a vicious opponent and sent to the mat.

But even as it fell, attempts were being made to reunify its movements.

It could feel the human exodus in the nearby building, but was temporarily unable to do anything about it. No, the creature was temporarily stretched too thin to make any kind of attack.

Besides, the people were moving towards the water.

A reflex of motivation surged down every tentacle at once. As it had done after detecting the large numbers populating Brammeier Tower an hour before, the collective began pulling itself back together into a single contiguous mass.

Just as the last few stragglers made it into the parking garage and began racing over to the Shell building, the revived monster attacked with renewed vigor. Instead of having to ascend the sides of the tower, it found its target far more concentrated in the sublevels. A single, massive strike from the poltergeist effect shattered the flooded first floor of the building, sending water sweeping into the parking garage. Several people were killed outright by the ceiling collapse. Others screamed. They knew what was coming next.

Thousands of tentacles rode the floodwaters down from the lobby and into the sublevel. The garage was only flooded by a foot or two, but that was all that was necessary. The sludge worms entered the safe confines of the water, selected their targets, and rocketed forward like torpedoes.

Within seconds, the waters in the parking garage were running red with blood.

•  •  •

Sineada had revived Mia seconds before the fire bombs were dropped on the four rising sludge worms. The little girl was just getting a sense of her surroundings when she was struck by the thousands of voices bellowing in confusion at the strike.

“Oh, my God!” Alan cried. “Did they just kill it?”

“No,” replied Mia. “They’re just trying to get everybody out.”

Regardless, they had an amazing front-row seat to the madness that ensued. The tendrils splintered off in their many directions and, moments later, Mia detected the first people racing out of a parking garage a block from the tower and into the floodwaters. Rather than staying together, they went off in a dozen different directions.

“Smart,” remarked Sineada.

This elation was replaced only a second later by anguish. The creature, far from being dead, began rolling over and over in the water. At first, the main body was about as wide around as a city bus. But as it kept going, it increased in mass, pulling its distended tendrils in on itself.

Then it attacked the building all over again. Rather than surrounding it, this time it injected itself directly into the superstructure. Almost immediately, Brammeier Tower began to bend and bow. Chunks of its outer walls crashed down into the street or bounced off the creature, though it hardly seemed to notice.

“Zakiyah?” Alan cried.

Mia’s gaze remained fixed on the worm as it altered its shape to slide quickly into the lobby, a snake squishing itself into a quarter-sized hole, but then nodded.

“She’s in there, but it doesn’t seem to know that. It’s going after everybody else.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Sineada asked.

Mia shook her head.

“No. But we have to get closer. We’ll be needed in a minute.”

•  •  •

As the dump truck raced up the ramp between P3 and P2, everybody could hear the sounds of mad panic coming from above. The building was shaking furiously and great cracks were forming across the walls, suggesting collapse was imminent.

“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Big Time said, hitting the accelerator.

P2 was flooding as well, and rivers of blood poured in from the ceiling and stairwells.

“Oh, God,” Tony muttered.

“Don’t look at it, son,” Big Time said.

Halfway up the ramp to P1, the truck almost slipped backwards as a torrent of bloody water slammed into the front of the vehicle. Big Time hit the brakes and turned, skidded a few feet, but then righted the truck and kept pushing forward. When they crested the lip of the ramp, they came up on a massacre.

Brammeier Tower survivors splashed in every direction, some even swimming, as the finger-like sludge worms shot towards them, elastic as rubber bands. They grabbed the people, consumed them, and returned to the large black mass pouring in from a hole in the roof.

“It’s faster than before,” Zakiyah observed. “It wasn’t moving like that at Deltech.”

“It’s pissed,” Scott suggested. “Didn’t know it was capable of that.”

“We still don’t,” Big Time retorted.

Gunning the engine to drown out the screams of the doomed, Big Time plowed the dump truck through the rushing floodwaters towards the exit. They had just reached the final ramp when the truck was hit so hard that the only thing keeping it from being knocked on its side was the roof punching into the garage ceiling.

“Shit!” Big Time yelled. “Hold on!”

The truck slammed back down onto its wheels in time for the poltergeist force to punch it again, this time sending a tidal wave of bloody water over the cab. Big Time smacked his head into the driver’s-side window so hard he cracked the glass.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Scott cried.

Woozy from the hit, Big Time couldn’t even see through the windshield, but he hit the gas anyway. The truck awkwardly lurched forward but not before the poltergeist effect hit it again, crushing it against the wall. There was a tremendous
bang
and the truck shook.

“The tires,” Big Time surmised.

He tried to pull the truck forward and realized it was probably more than one that had blown. He braced himself for the next attack, but it didn’t come. Instead, the ground shook, and they heard a loud roar.

“The tower’s coming down!” Scott yelled.

•  •  •

A block away from Brammeier Tower, Mia, Sineada and Alan felt the tremor of the building’s imminent collapse.

“We’ve gotta get back!” Alan yelled, paddling in reverse as best he could.

The trio retreated as the tower came down, crumbling into multiple pieces as it smashed into the floodwaters, sending up waves. At the moment the largest piece broke off and fell lengthwise down Fannin Avenue, the giant sludge creature extracted itself from the wreckage and disappeared under the water’s surface.

Due to the heavy rain, the dust cloud was muted, and even then, the pile of rubble that had so recently been a skyscraper under construction was surprisingly small. The first six or seven floors still remained, with jagged chunks of its exterior skeleton shooting skyward, but filling it and the parking garages below were the other twenty-five floors that had pancaked down on top of one another.

“Did she make it?” Alan asked breathlessly.

Mia scanned the area and nodded.

“There,” she said, pointing across the street from the fallen tower to the Shell building. “Coming up from the parking garage.”

At that moment, the dump truck came into view. It was limping along, but finally made it out onto the street. That’s when the monster resurfaced, erupting out of the water behind the dump truck, its poltergeist force lifting it out of the water and throwing it across the street. The truck smashed into the second-floor windows of the building opposite’s glass façade, shattering windows and twisting metal, before crashing down onto its passenger side in the floodwaters below.

“MOMMY!” Mia screamed.

Without a single thought to her own safety, Mia bolted off the raft. She half-swam, half-slogged through the waist-deep water the rest of the way to the truck.

“Mia, no!” Sineada cried, but her great-granddaughter wasn’t listening.