Flood Plains (27 page)

Mia reached the front of the truck and found her mother, bleeding from cuts to her head and arm, with a small group of people she didn’t recognize. The cab was filling up with water. The man behind the wheel was trying to pull a teenager up to the driver’s side as if to climb out on top. When he saw Mia, his eyes went wide.

“
RUN!
” Big Time exclaimed. “Get out of here!”

“That’s my mom!” Mia cried, pointing at Zakiyah.

Big Time was flabbergasted. He thought he’d heard wrong. But then Zakiyah, her eyelids fluttered, looked up and saw Mia.

“Baby?” Zakiyah said, as incredulous as Big Time. “Oh, my God! You have to get out of here.”

But Mia had already shimmied up to the top of the truck and was trying to get the driver’s-side door open. Big Time got to the door, only to find it wouldn’t open. Figuring it was bent, he gave it a shove but almost fell over.

“Hey, Scott. Could use a hand.”

Scott, who had been up against the passenger-side door, was holding himself out of the water flooding into the truck cab as best he could with his left arm gripped behind the seat. His legs appeared to be trapped beneath the dashboard. Blood was pooling around them, suggesting serious wounds.

“Hold on, Scott!” Big Time exclaimed.

He balanced himself against the back seat and began kicking out the windshield. The safety glass spider-webbed and finally bent enough out of its frame for Big Time to knock it free.

“Tony, grab my hand.”

A little more lucid now, Tony did as he was asked and stepped sideways through the windshield. Once on the other side, he helped Zakiyah out as well.

“Mommy!” Mia cried, racing into her mother’s arms.

“Baby, I don’t know how you got down here, but I thank God all the same you’re all right.”

Inside the cab, Big Time squatted down next to Scott.

“Man, we’ve got to get you out of here,” Big Time said, surveying the damage.

“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Scott replied, muscles taut with pain. “Pretty sure this stitches me up. All that’s uncertain now is whether I’ll die from blood loss or lose my grip and drown.”

“Drama queen.”

Scott snickered, but this quickly became a wheeze. Big Time slid down next to him and tried to lift up the dashboard. The engine block had been shoved backward along with much of the front end of the vehicle, meaning Scott was trapped under about a ton of metal.

“Holy shit, is that Alan?” Scott croaked.

Big Time turned quickly. Sure enough, rowing up to the truck in what looked like an upside-down roof, was Alan. It looked like he’d suffered a grievous injury to his legs.

“Well, what do you know?” Scott sighed. “Zakiyah, her daughter, Alan. Somebody got a happy ending after all. Where’s the critter?”

“Dunno,” Big Time admitted. “It threw us out the door, we landed, and that was the last I saw of it. I thought we were dead.”

“It doesn’t see you anymore,” said Sineada, walking over to the two men. “Zakiyah’s daughter is protecting us.”

“How’s that work?” Scott asked.

Sineada shrugged. Seeing how much pain Scott was in, she glanced back at Mia. The little girl broke away from Zakiyah and walked over, eyeing Scott.

“Will you let me help you?” she asked.

Scott looked bemused.

“Did you really scare off the big bad sludge worm?”

“No, I just talked to it,” Mia replied.

“What’re you going do to me?”

Same
.

Mia took Scott’s hand and silenced the part of his brain that was telling him how much pain he was in. He sighed, sinking into his seat.

“I don’t know what you did, but I thank you just the same,” Scott said, a wry grin on his face.

But Mia didn’t return the smile. In fact, she suddenly looked quite sad. Scott could guess why but said nothing. Mia gave him a kiss on the forehead and then climbed back out of the cab.

“Funny kid Alan’s got, huh?” Scott said, his voice weak.

Big Time nodded.

“Are you okay?”

“If you mean ‘am I comfortable’? I’m a lot more now than before she walked over and did whatever she did,” Scott replied. “If you mean ‘do I mind dying?’ I think I’m glad it’s not going to be at the hand of those sludge worms. Only think bothering me is that it looks like you guys got a boat, got some magic kid, and just might get out of here in one piece. Can’t help feeling like that ‘last soldier to die.’ I’m going to miss you guys.”

Scott said the last part with such sincerity that Big Time had to smile.

“Oh, okay, ’cause you’re a doctor?”

“I’m a realist,” Scott whispered.

Scott closed his eyes, exhaled a rattling cough, and seemed to deflate.

“C’mon, dickhead. You’re not really going to play that shit, are you?”

Big Time touched Scott’s shoulder, but he was unresponsive. He shook him for a moment, but the muscles were loose, and he just flopped back and forth. Big Time hadn’t cried that day but now felt tears welling in his eyes.

He leaned over and whispered something in Scott’s ear, gripped his shoulder one more time, and then clambered out of the truck. The constant rain had seemed to let up for a moment but now was back with a vengeance.

The others were gathered on the makeshift raft, Sineada tending to Zakiyah and Tony’s wounds. Big Time joined them, his eyes sunken and hollow.

A moment later, Big Time and Tony manning the oars this time, the raft began to make its way back towards the bayou.

•  •  •

From the cab of the dump truck, Scott watched Big Time and the others leave. He had decided on his ruse, knowing Big Time would stay with him no matter what out of a misplaced sense of duty. The easiest way around it was to just accelerate the process and die, or at least pretend to. He’d gotten up close and personal with a dying person only once. He’d been in the army and a convoy he was a part of got involved in a crack-up outside of Waco. The troops had done what they could, but it was too late for a young mom and what Scott later learned was her aunt.

She begged Scott to make sure the kids in the back seat were safe. He assured her they were, and this knowledge allowed her to die in peace. The scene had burned into Scott’s mind. He felt silly trying to re-create it but figured he could fake it well enough to fool Big Time.

When his friend had moved to leave, Scott was impressed by how well his scheme had worked. But then Big Time leaned over and whispered in his ear.

“I know you’re not dead, motherfucker.”

It took all of Scott’s self-control not to laugh or even flinch. He felt Big Time’s eyes on him for a long time, but the big man finally moved away.

It’s better this way
, Scott thought.

He listened to the hurricane rains beat a tattoo against the metal of the truck. He idly wondered what the search-and-rescue people would think when they found him. Could he perhaps be the one corpse left intact in all of downtown Houston? He hoped Big Time or the others might live in order to tell the police what happened, but also imagined the not-knowing had its own appeal.

Is this guy some kind of superhero?! Was his blood poisonous or something? Who IS this guy?

Scott chuckled to himself. He thought of police, scientists, even the military pondering how come some white trash motherfucker in a dump truck wasn’t worth the monster’s time and energy.

A moment later, and he was gone.

Chapter 32

O
ut in the Gulf, rain continued to pour down on the
Van Ness
. The winds had subsided for the most part as the hurricane’s rear wall moved further onto land. Eliza would likely soon be downgraded to a Category 2 or 3 storm.

The
Van Ness’s
commander, Coast Guard Captain Leslie Kubena, was originally from the Virgin Islands. She’d grown up on the water and had weathered several storms long before becoming a sailor. If she did the math, she thought it would come out that she’d actually spent about twice as many hours of her life on the sea than on land. Though her first consideration was always the safety of her sailors, she felt a strong sense of responsibility towards the people on Galveston Island, particularly after the discovery of the collapsed causeway.

What disturbed her the most was that there was still no communication with the island. She didn’t expect telephones, but there should’ve been something on the radio by now even if it was just picking up traffic from first-responders.

Instead, there was nothing. Multiple lookouts had reported seeing no signs of life. Yes, visibility was extremely poor, but there hadn’t been one vehicle, one civilian, or even so much as a flashlight spotted from the ship.

“The roads on this side of the island are flooded,” reported the
Van Ness’s
executive officer, a young lieutenant commander named Bruce Arrington. “People might just be waiting for the waters to go down.”

The
Van Ness
was anchored off the east side of the island, selected because it was the most protected side. The danger of capsize was real even with so large a vessel.

“Yeah, but people are unpredictable, and storms make them crazy,” Kubena countered. “Someone would panic. Someone would decide to be the Good Samaritan. Somebody would go on patrol and another would just be stupid. Heck, someone would decide to loot. We’ve been sitting here six hours, and we’ve haven’t seen a soul. We need to get somebody on the beach just to make sure it’s not worse than we think.”

Though the seas were still rough, Arrington had served with his captain long enough to know she’d weighed the danger to her men before suggesting such a course of action.

“Two fast boats, twelve men?”

“Sounds right. Check the weather again, but then get ’em in the water.”

“Aye-aye.”

It was a routine the men had drilled several times, so the boats were in the water less than five minutes later. They swung wide around the island in order to let the current do some of the work for them but also to scope out the best landing zone. Even in the relatively light boats, they were still wary of underwater hazards. With rain pattering down on their waterproof boonie hats, they kept the boats over deep water until the last possible moment. Then they took the last few yards slow.

They needn’t have worried.

The ride in was a dream. Everything went according to their training and most optimistic models. The sailors swept up towards the shallows, hopped out, and dragged their boats up onto the beach. Tying the fast boats up to a guardrail thirty feet from the water, they moved out and headed inland.

The low-lying areas of the island were flooded up to two and three feet. For just this reason, many of the roads around Galveston were slightly elevated or up a grade. Though they were slick with rainwater, there were few puddles on the streets.

“Anything yet, lieutenant?” Arrington asked over the radio to the team leader, Dobson.

“These roads are drivable, sir,” Dobson replied. “We’re looking at lots of water, likely some real property damage, but nothing compared to what we saw with Andrew or Katrina.”

From their position on the bridge of the
Van Ness
, Kubena and Arrington could see through their binoculars the men fanning out over the shoreline. Kubena feared that once they’d landed, the only means of communication would be with handheld strobes, tiny signaling lights that could be used to blink Morse code messages. She was relieved then that, despite a little wind distortion on the throat mics, radio communication was possible.

“Have you seen any signs of life?” Kubena asked.

“Negative…oh, wait. Ma’am, we just spotted a dog.”

Through her binoculars, Kubena spotted a small white terrier trotting towards the sailors.

“I’m going to take that as a good sign that the storm was survivable,” Kubena replied. “You boys progress on in to the interior, but be careful. I don’t want to see anybody coming back with Mardi Gras beads.”

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem, Captain.”

•  •  •

The collective was on the move. Just as the storm began to slow, it discovered the Rio Grande River, which could take it west; the Brazos, which it could take north; the Colorado, which it could follow to the northwest; the Sabine, which would arc east; and the Red River, which it could take all the way to the Mississippi.

An embarrassment of riches.

But beyond being an eating machine, the creature had a highly developed hunting instinct. Within a second of detecting prey, a series of calculations began. The distance to the prey was contrasted with the allocations of resources required to retrieve it. Also, if there was more than one, this number was brought into the equation as well. If this was resolved with a positive assessment, the appropriate-sized tendril would be launched in the direction of the human prey. The computing and reaction happened so quickly and seamlessly that to the human eye, it would appear like a reflex.

The moment the twelve members of the Coast Guard detachment landed on the beach at Galveston, the collective detected the number and the decision was made. It wasn’t
so
far away, and twelve was a good number.

A tendril was dispatched to follow the waterways back down south.

•  •  •

Big Time stared into the water as the raft slipped along. The rain was heavy now, like standing in a shower, but he’d stopped noticing it. He was freezing cold, bone tired, and, along with his son, had just heard the craziest story he’d ever been told. He’d wished Scott had lived to hear it as, the king of bullshit, he would’ve enjoyed such a yarn.

“You’re saying it’s haunted?” he asked Sineada. “Not some kind of fucked-up mutated animal, but ghosts—spirits of dead people—
physically
inhabiting oil?”

“Not ‘physically.’ A spirit is amorphous. There’s no matter to it, only force and direction that can be easily dissipated. Normally, if there’s a vengeful spirit, it stays close to where it was in life. A single house, the cemetery where the body was laid to rest, tied to an important object. In this case, it was something that allowed for locomotion.”