Flood Plains (32 page)

The service ladder was disgusting, so sticky with crude that Big Time wondered if anyone had actually used it since it went into operation. He figured if they had, they wouldn’t have without heavy gloves, a jumpsuit, and a ventilator, but he didn’t have that luxury.

That’s when he realized that the sounds he’d been hearing of the sludge oozing down the sides of the pipe towards him had ceased. He stopped, flicked on Scott’s lighter, but couldn’t see a thing. He had no idea if had actually stopped or not.

No,
he found himself thinking.
No
,
come on
.
Follow me down. Follow me to Hell…

•  •  •

Zakiyah raced down the ladder as fast as she could and quickly pulled Tony’s head out of the water.

“C’mon, kid,” she said. “Not this way. Not after all we’ve been through.”

Tony lazily opened his eyes but barely seemed to register Zakiyah’s presence. She saw that one of his pupils was dilated far more than the other, which indicated a concussion. His head was bleeding from where it struck the pallet but wasn’t too bad. She checked the rest of him over and it seemed like the water had cushioned his fall just a little.

The sludge worm had peeled itself off the pipe and now snaked through the water towards Zakiyah and Tony. The rest of the collective had been in lockstep, pouring itself into the pipe, but had now frozen in place as this one tendril investigated this possible prey.

“Oh, dammit,” Zakiyah cursed. “Don’t tell me this is gonna fuck all this up.”

She couldn’t get Tony back up the ladder to the top of the pipe, but there was a work shed nearby. Pallets were stacked alongside it, and she thought she could drag him up to its steel roof. It just be enough to get him out of harm’s way.

“I’m going to need your help, Tony,” Zakiyah whispered. “You hear me?”

Tony nodded a little. Zakiyah got him to his feet and hurried him over to the pallets. The sludge worm was only a few feet away now but was moving slowly. Zakiyah was surprised, as throughout the day, she’d watched attacks uniform in their viciousness. Like watching a shark seize its prey. This was much slower. A python noiselessly gliding down a tree limb.

But then, something changed.

The sludge worm was yanked backwards as the collective mass was drawn back into the large tank. The steel around the hole bowed in to allow even more of the sludge to be yanked in, like meat pulled through a grinder.

Mama! RUN! I’m holding it back. Run!

At the same time as Zakiyah heard her daughter’s voice, the collective lunged backwards, pulling itself out of the tank. She expected a tendril to come after her and Tony, but it stayed away. Quickly, she carried the teen up the pallets and placed him on the roof.

Mama, hurry! I can’t hold onto it much longer. Too much is getting away from me. RUN! Get back in the boat.

But Zakiyah knew this wasn’t the answer. Mia’s concentration had been shattered and she might not know it, but the collective was getting away. Tony was lying down, passed out again. Zakiyah wondered if he might be dying but didn’t think so. Above in the darkening sky, the clouds had parted enough so that she could see stars. She couldn’t believe it, but without the lights of any city, they were as clear as she’d ever seen them.

Good-bye, Mia. I love you.

As the sludge collective continued its exodus, Zakiyah came down off the roof and stepped back into the floodwaters. Walking quickly, she approached the moving sludge and touched it with her hand. It burned like fire. The sludge rapidly traveled up her arm, burned off her clothes, and within seconds had engulfed her completely.

•  •  •

Mia screamed and screamed and screamed. She let everything go. She could feel the collective oozing towards a new goal and out of the cold but didn’t care. She wanted her Mama. She searched through the voices both near and far but couldn’t find her.

MAMA!
She cried again.
Where are you?! MAMA! Why did you do that?!

In the pitch black, Big Time could hear Mia’s cries in his mind as easily as if she was whispering into his ear. He knew what must’ve happened on the outside, and he shuddered to think what this meant for Tony.

But as the sludge collective continue to move away, he tightened his grip on the ladder and turned his head towards the retreating sound.

“Mia, listen to my voice. Follow me down.”

Big Time waited but heard nothing in response. Mia must be hurting, but this was the final act. They had to keep going. There was nothing to do but that. He’d lost too much. He thought about his wife, his mother. His sons. He thought about Muhammad and Elmer and Beverly. Finally, he thought about Scott.

Unless they burned this thing, they’d all be trapped within it forever. He’d never see them again, and it’d be his fault. He hesitated but then began to sing the only song he could think of:

“One night when the moon had illumined the sky,

When first I took a notion to marry,

I put on my hat and away I did hie.

You might think I was in a hurry.

Till I came to a spot where I often had been,

My heart gave a leap when my darling was seen.

I opened the door and I bid her good night and I said,

Will you come over the mountain?”

He barely knew the lyrics. It was an old, old song his mother used to sing, so he’d once sung it to his kids. He didn’t know what it was, but it was the only thing that came to mind.

“Oh, what sort of fit has got into your head?

I’m glad for to see you so merry;

It’s now twelve o’clock when you should be in bed,

Speak low or you’ll waken my Mammy!

Well if I am jesting, my jesting is true.

I have courted twelve months, faith I think it will do.

And before that I sleep I’ll be married to you.

If you’ll come with me over the mountain…”

Big Time?

He closed his eyes and thanked the Lord.

I’m here.

Where are you? I can’t see you…

I’m on the move. Go where it’s cold.

Big Time began climbing down farther into the pipe. It was an endless procession of steps, and he began to hallucinate that he was on some kind of treadmill. It seemed like an eternity before he heard the sludge sliding down the pipe walls above him.

He stopped to make sure it wasn’t another hallucination, perhaps brought on by the now-toxic level of fumes he was inhaling, but there it was. It was picking up speed. At the rate it was going, it might soon overtake him.

He wasn’t about to risk flicking on Scott’s lighter now, knowing that the fumes and residual oil would ignite so quickly that it would likely cause an explosion. No, there’d be a time and place for that.

Instead, he gingerly turned around until his back was against the ladder. Investigating the pipe wall with one foot, he found the metal slick and dangerous alongside the rungs. Taking a deep breath, he slid himself over onto the sloping wall and, when he thought he was far enough away from the steps, let go of the ladder.

•  •  •

In the time it took for Mia to pull the entire mass of the spirit collective into the pipeline, leaving not a whisker behind, the world had mobilized. Aerial photographs began to appear on the Internet. The military had over 20,000 troops rolling towards Houston from Fort Hood, Fort Bliss, and Fort Sam Houston. A mass evacuation of the rest of the state was headed in the opposite direction.

By the time the sludge was far enough down the pipe to be completely underwater, the President was on television. Coast Guard Group Corpus Christi delivered an audio and video playback of the disaster on the
Van Ness
to the Pentagon. When compared to the footage the army had collected from the attacks to its troops on the highway, bioterrorism was momentarily put back on the table as a culprit. But then, the coincidence of it coming during a hurricane seemed to rule it out again.

The focus returned to the natural world, which provided the fewest answers. They had innumerable protocols for a bioterror attack. They had no suggestions for this.

Given what they’d heard about the creature’s retreat, the President ordered that the military make rescue their primary mission. If they encountered “the hostile unknown,” they weren’t to engage, given what little they knew about it, coupled with the futility of their efforts in the previous encounters.

“Good luck and God protect you,” the President said gravely over the phone, addressing senior commanders on the ground.

•  •  •

“
Gnnnh…
”

Big Time’s bright idea to slide down the pipe resulted in a very painful broken ankle. He’d slid about a hundred feet down, only to reach a part of the pipeline that momentarily leveled out before hurling him down a much steeper grade. Instead of descending on his back like an oil-slicked toboggan ride, he went end over end, rolling and crashing into the pipe walls as he fell. When he reached the bottom, he landed on his ankle, and it broke clean. As he inspected it, he mused that it could have been his neck.

That’s when a new pain began, a throbbing in his ears that indicated just how far below sea level he had fallen.

“Lord, I am in hell,” he said aloud.

The skin of his arms and face burned as a hundred tiny cuts had been exposed to patches of residual oil. The air was so thick with oil that he could only wheeze in short snatches of breath, pulling in whatever oxygen there was left to find.

He was in perfect darkness now. There was more light when he closed his eyes, his retinas playing tricks on him with little flashes of red and white. He fished the lighter out of his pocket. He had worried that it might fall out in his fall but then realized that when he hit bottom, it would, too. It wouldn’t be hard to recover.

He didn’t hear the sludge anymore but thought it was just a matter of time before it showed up.

Mia?

He waited, but this time there was no response. He didn’t mind. These were his last minutes, and he was trying to assess and organize his life. What if Tony had been killed up there and he just didn’t know it? What if he burned himself alive a moment later, but this did nothing to stop this sludge-thing? If the spirits were trapped within the oil, where would they go once they were free?

He was mulling all this over as he played with the lighter in his hands. But then, there it was, the sound of something massive moving down the pipeline from above.

Mia?
He thought.
Can you hear me?

A far-off voice came back to him.

I’m here. We’re here.

Big Time raised the lighter, holding it inches from his chest. He was reminded that, after Katrina, many had turned to the Bible to tell them why this had happened. Popular quotes would relate to the Ark or the cities God had smote from the earth. But Big Time hadn’t seen it like that. Instead, he took everything that happened upon himself. He was Ezra, the man who, when faced with the sins of Jerusalem, confessed it all to God and awaited punishment for the sins of others. He was the guilty man. His sins had allowed his family’s future to be wiped away by the storm.

But now, he saw all of it for what it was. A storm. A bad one, sure, but as he sat there in the darkness, all those damning feelings of guilt finally began to lift. He was a man redeemed.

The sludge was only a few feet away now. He couldn’t wait any longer. He opened the top of the lighter, put his thumb on the thumbwheel, and was about to rake the flint when he heard Mia’s voice.

Tony is alive. Tony is safe.

The explosion was so great the entire pipeline buckled, threatening to burst. Fire raced across the pipe walls, igniting the pitch, and pumping out clouds of toxic smoke. The heat was tremendous, and the fuel seemingly endless. As it burned, the separation between the once inert oil and the “spirits” trapped within it began.

The fire would continue to burn for hours, scorching the metal to the point of weakness. Finally, it burst and sea water rushed in, dousing the last of the flames. But by then, the voices had been silenced, their anger finally sated.

Epilogue

T
ony awoke, staring up into the clear night sky. He was freezing cold, and his clothes were still wet. In fact, it was his shivering that had woken him. His head throbbed, and as he got to his feet, he found it hard to balance. He took a moment and pulled his body into a seated position in order to gather himself.

The glow of the moon was enough to afford him a view of the immediate area, but he saw no one. He smelled something burning, but it was acrid and poisonous like a chemical fire rather than the inviting campfire scent of smoldering wood. It tasted like oil on his tongue.

The refinery was still flooded as he descended the wooden pallets and stepped into the waters. There was no rain, and even the clouds seemed to have moved away.

He walked down the pallets and stepped into the water. His low body temperature made the shock of the cold water more pointed. Nothing broke the surface of the water as he walked, but he knew deep down that it was over the moment he awoke.

He climbed up the ladder on the side of the pipe, but he did so carefully this time. He planted his feet and gripped each rung as he went. He got to the hatch, only to find it still locked tight. The wrench his father used to open it was still attached, and he yanked it around. It took some doing, but the hatch mechanism finally sprang free. Tony turned the wheel and lifted it.

Smoke billowed from the darkness. The stench of burning oil was so heavy he almost passed out. Still, he knew where he had to go.

Covering his mouth and nose with strips torn from his wet shirt, he climbed over the lip of the hatch and began descending the ladder. When he reached the bottom, he began to head down the pipe. His journey was lit only by the occasional smoldering ember, its tiny flickering firelight casting the scorched pipe in eerie orange and yellow.