Flood Plains (3 page)

What had awoken was still hungry. It turned towards the outer platforms, registering the hundreds of crew members still out there who had successfully ridden out the worst of the storm. But then, it felt the pull of the millions on land. It collected itself, turned, and followed in Eliza’s wake as it neared land.

Chapter 3

T
he rain came down in buckets. Alan booked it from the bus stop through the grass so recently bent by Muhammad’s footfalls. Catching amused looks from the long line of night-shifters now heading down Deltech Drive to the highway feeder roads, Alan knew he was late but didn’t think he was
that
late. He reached the garage, bounced past a minivan, and hurried up to the security guard’s desk.

“Badge?”

Alan fumbled in his pockets for a moment, incredulous at the idea he might’ve forgotten it, and finally found it. The guard zapped him in a second later, and he was halfway to his line when he saw the line’s supervisor, Dennis Webb, on the stairs leading to the second-floor offices.

“Hey, Dennis,” Alan said, feeling like a truant sixth-grader about to be confronted by his principal. “Sorry, I missed my ride. Again.”

Dennis Webb was a wiry, middle-aged white guy who wore khakis and a Deltech polo almost every day of the week except when pulling a rare Saturday shift. On those days, he invariably wore a Houston Astros away jersey his kids had gotten him for his birthday with “Webb” and “40” stitched on the back.

That’s when Dennis reminded Alan that, more than anything, he just wanted to be seen as one of the guys.

“If it bothers your conscience, work 3.5-percent harder for the first three hours of the shift. I think you’ll be square with the company.”

“Appreciated, man.”

Alan thought that would be it, but Dennis fixed him with a conspiratorial gaze.

“So? What time did you hit this morning?”

Alan bit his tongue to do some fast math, which Dennis took to be the tardy athlete playing coy.

“Come on. Just tell me.”

“1:59…,” Alan said. “…
15.
”

Dennis grinned from ear to ear.

“I’m telling you. There’s going to be a day I’m just ‘kicking it with the fam’ and there you’ll be on ESPN, running circles around your competition.”

“Thanks, Dennis.”

As Alan hurried up to the line, his mood darkened. He needed it to be 1:59:15, needed it more than anything in the world, but that just didn’t make it so.

•  •  •

“Whoa, Native Son! Getting better and better!”

Big Time smiled as wide as Dennis when Beverly Larson, a rotund, forty-something who worked the station just before pack, added Alan’s daily time to a dry-erase board. The board had four columns: 400-meter indoor, 400-meter outdoor, 800-meter indoor, and 800-meter outdoor. The list of numbers in each column descended with regularity, indicating the time Alan chiseled off each day as he continued to train.

Alan had felt bad the first time he’d reported a time that wasn’t altogether accurate. He figured he’d make it up the next morning or later in the week. After a couple of months had gone by, the board was filled with more wishful thinking times than real ones. But Alan knew people, and not just Dennis, cut him slack because they were rooting him on. They wanted to eventually have known him “when,” and he didn’t want to disappoint them.

“What’s that get you to?” Big Time asked as Alan reached the pack station.

“At the beginning of summer, I had two whole seconds to shave off my times to be in the collegiate elite: top ten athletes in the country,” Alan began. “Those two seconds dropped two weeks ago, and I’m now running times just under that, fastest
unofficial
times in college track.”

Elmer, who was stacking manuals and cords to be placed in each outgoing box, let out a low whistle.

“But if I can drop another second and a little more than a half off of that, I’m top ten in the world.”

“That’s major, Alan,” Beverly rang out. “Major!”

“How many times have you complained that this job is messing up your training?” Big Time asked. “I’m telling you, working pack, you’re building stamina. My boys are pulling for you, too. I tell them, another NOLA fugee out here, going to be that big story in the news one day.”

Alan nodded. He’d thought Big Time was the biggest blowhard he’d ever met when Zakiyah had hooked him up with the job at the beginning of the summer. Four months later, he was a second father.

“Yeah, you want to switch today, let me do some upper-body?” Alan said, nodding to the hydraulic lift. “I could use the stretch.”

Elmer scoffed. “Oh, that’s rich. You’re gonna make an old man throw frames and roll pallets ‘ cause ‘you need the stretch?’”

“You keep going with that ‘old man’ shit, and we’ll find those seven or eight boxes to tape together and ship you back to Juarez or wherever so they can finish the job.”

“What do you know about finishing the job, Louisiana trash?” Elmer shot back. “Every time I turn on the news, they got some guy looking just like you on TV from New Orleans standing in front of roof with no house under it all, ‘Yeah, I been rebuilding. Don’t it look good?’ Fuckin’ NOLA trash.”

“Oh,” Big Time nodded as the line started rolling again. “Bring it, Fat Boy. You think Houston’s got one step on the Crescent City, then you’re thinking wrong.”

“Hey, hey, I’m just saying,” Elmer replied, shoving boxes of manuals and cords into a still-open computer box as it made its way to the tape machine. “Here in Houston, we don’t flood the streets with raw sewage and free all the prisoners out of County and call it ‘Mardi Gras.’ God had to build up the worst hurricane anyone’s ever seen to finally clean all that shit up. And you guys were doing that by choice!”

“Oh, you want filthy?” Big Time retorted. “Go downtown, take the elevator to that observation deck on the Transco Tower the day
before
the window washers come. You’ve got a film on there an inch thick. Now go on the roof and take a breath. Tastes like the tits of a dead mule. You guys do know you beat out Los Angeles as the most polluted city in the nation, right? Mardi Gras is filthy, but that’s a week and it’s all sex.”

“Wow, that is just some of the most backwoods, Cajun bullshit I ever heard roll out of anyone’s mouth,” Elmer replied. “Like everybody knows the taste of a dead mule’s tits.”

Beverly snorted. Alan jumped in.

“Nah, just he knew most everybody round the factory had taken turns sucking at your mom, so it was just natural.”

All eyes went to Elmer as his mind raced. For a second, he looked like he had the perfect comeback at the tip of his tongue, but then he deflated.

“I got nothing.”

“Ha-hah!” Big Time crowed. “New Orleans in the house!”

“Hey, you guys want to know what really stinks?” Beverly asked, leaning in. “You smell that Indian guy this morning? Smells like a bucket of ass.”

Elmer chortled, but Big Time shook his head.

“Yeah, I knew a guy like that on another job,” Big Time said. “It’s like deodorant’s against their culture, sort of their religion. You’ve got to go unadorned by perfumes or something. I never understood it.”

Everybody glanced down the line towards Muhammad’s station. He worked alongside another Indian man, Mukul Patel, doing random system checks of computers pulled off the lines at the midpoint. If the computers passed, the pre-installed software was loaded. The units were then placed back on the line to be finished and have their hoods screwed on before being packed and shipped out the back door.

“You’d think walking through the rain would help, but it’s even worse,” Beverly said, waving a hand under her nose.

Big Time rolled his eyes and got back to work. He looked over at Alan, only to see him staring down the factory.

“Dreaming of Olympic glory?”

Alan chuckled and grabbed the hydraulic lift. Though he seldom thought of anything else, today he had actually had other matters on his mind.

•  •  •

“All right…
go!
”

The four third-graders standing at the front of the classroom began analyzing the math problems on the chalkboard. Two began working the problem out on the board. The third stared at the numbers as if hoping the answer would simply reveal itself. The fourth, Mia, seemed to be doing the same thing, but the sharpness of her gaze gave away how quickly her mind was racing.

She marked down the answer to the first problem, eliciting cheers from the other members of her math “team” sitting behind her. Even her teacher, Mr. Klekner, allowed himself a non-objective grin from where he sat on the edge of his desk.

The answers corresponded to letters chalked up on a separate board. Mia glanced over at it and then wrote a “T” under her problem before moving to the next of a dozen quotations.

By the time Mia was on the ninth problem, her closest competition was just beginning his fifth. But there had never really been a question. While Mia wasn’t necessarily the best in her class at math, she was as competitive as her father when it came to contests like this. She knew the most important thing to do was get out ahead early, as this would give her a subconscious edge against the other kids. She had also figured out the “secret word”—trigonometry—after four letters and had discreetly matched up the letters she knew would come next with the answers. She still worked out the multiplication in her head but avoided the simple mistake of eight times eight being fifty-six. This answer was what first jumped into her mind when she saw that the “m” she wanted was next to “sixty-four.”

“Trigonometry,” she said, putting down her chalk.

“Correct.”

Mia beamed as her team cheered. She liked school fine, but a lot of that was the grading. She liked getting a 100-percent on tests others were happy getting a 90-percent or less on. They might have studied enough to understand all of the material, but she studied hard enough to then be tested on it.

“All right, Mia’s team’s prize is that they only have to turn in the odd-numbered problems on tonight’s homework,” Mr. Klekner announced. “That’s assuming we even have classes tomorrow.”

Mia’s triumph was short-lived, as everyone’s thoughts moved on to the exciting prospect of a day off due to the incoming hurricane. It had been raining when Mia had climbed into Mrs. Whittaker’s car to be driven to school, but she’d forgotten all about it midway through the morning. There were no windows in Mr. Klekner’s classroom, either..

For Mia, it was just as well. She still had nightmares from the last big storm. They’d been trapped for days by that one, watching the water rise through a crack in their roof. It was sweltering. With every sound coming up from the flooded house below, Mia had imagined the attic collapsing and everyone inside being sucked down into a whirlpool, never to surface again.

They would end up like the bodies they began to see floating down the street the morning of the second day, drifting out to the ocean, never to be recovered, never to be heard from again.

Chapter 4

“T
hese guys are fucking idiots. Seriously. What are they thinking?”

Ike Griggs was an assistant harbormaster at the Port of Houston, part of the crew assigned to the con tower. Their assignment was to make sure no ships came in or out of the port during the twelve hours before the hurricane was set to make landfall. An experienced pilot, Griggs had sailed on container ships for years, eight of them as captain. He knew ships would avoid putting in at Houston no matter what, given the size of the storm bearing down on them. No one wanted to lose cargo and a couple of days circling out in the Gulf or dropping anchor off New Orleans or even Mobile were preferable.

Except in the case of the
Table Mountain
, a container out of Visakhapatnam that had taken on fuel in Cape Town before making the trans-Atlantic journey up to Houston. For some reason, the
Table Mountain’s
captain seemed determined to make it to port ahead of the storm.

“I’m afraid they might be all cabin fevered up out there,” Griggs reported to the director of operations, a woman named Holly.

“You’ve radioed the danger?”

“Constantly. They’re the only ones that haven’t broken away.”

“What’s their speed and heading?” Holly asked, increasingly peeved.

“That’s just it. For a ship trying to race a storm, it’s got all the wind of a pleasure cruise.”

“Then it’s my call. Flip it over to Coast Guard. We’ve got enough problems.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Griggs hung up and looked back down at the vessel traffic radar display. He knew the storm’s heading and speed, and did a quick calculation of same for the
Table Mountain
.

“Nope, no way,” he said, shaking his head. “These guys are in for a hell of a fight.”

He couldn’t have known the entire ship’s complement were, at that very moment, being consumed by that which would do the same to him in less than twenty-four hours.

•  •  •

Big Time wheeled a pallet of computers to the loading dock. The doors were open, and rain was pouring down in ropes of white that splashed into the factory. The noise from the assembly lines was drowned out by the roar of the storm. Big Time looked past the trucks to the trees on the other side of the road and saw that they were just beginning to sway. He tried to envision what it would look like once the hurricane reached Houston’s north side the next day. Deep down, he prayed landfall would slow it down to the point that it wouldn’t look much worse than what he was looking at now. The memory of endless stretches of highway bracketed by flattened trees was still fresh in his memory.

When he returned to the line, Elmer signaled him.

“We’re almost dry on keyboards.”

Alan, who had been waiting for this moment, didn’t look up. He kept his eyes on the lift and lowered the next unit into its waiting box.

“You already ask Kyle?” Big Time asked Elmer.

“He said there weren’t any more in the building, but he’s still looking.”

Big Time nodded. Part of his job was to keep an eye on parts to make sure the line stayed up. Contrary to popular belief, the last thing anybody wanted on an assembly line was down time. If the line ran out of just one part and there was no alternative build, they would have to wait for a rush shipment of the missing parts to be brought down from warehouses up the highway in Conroe. Though it would only take a truck, if one was even available with a driver, an hour to cover the distance, requisitioning enough of the parts to make it worthwhile, and getting them loaded and then off-loaded once they arrived could take up to six excruciating hours.