Flood Plains (5 page)

All that security had the additional effect of making the inside of the cage fairly private. Alan’s heart raced as he entered the cage, picked up a clipboard off a nearby shelf, and pretended to studiously thumb through the attached pages. The inside of the cage was ringed by shelves, each stocked with heavy plastic boxes that held the various types of microchips used by Deltech. The chips would be signed out of the cage and carried to a single workstation on each line. There, they would be attached to a motherboard, scanned to make them part of that computer’s registry, and then sent down the assembly line. The plastic boxes the chips were held in had clear plastic lids, which gave them the appearance of resting in a jeweler’s case.

Alan had heard about the big money people would pay for the hard-to-find chips but had vetoed it as an option long ago. He’d boosted a couple of cars to joyride around in with friends when he was younger but had never been caught. He’d also stolen a few things here and there but again, it wasn’t to sell. More like a new pair of shoes or running gear.

This was different.

Having cased the cages a week before, Alan moved right past the newer chips that were still in use and found his way to a stack of dusty old cases on a rear shelf. They’d been there so long they were covered with a thin layer of the pulverized metal dust that settled on surfaces all over the factory. He popped the lid open on one of the boxes, palmed six of the chips inside and then did the same with the dusty box next to it.

His palms were sweaty, and he tried to control his breathing. He closed the boxes again, did a fast count of the chips he was actually there to find, and headed for the exit.

“We’ve easily got four hundred CT3-U chips in there,” Alan announced to Scott. “Probably’ll do the changeover.”

“Color me thrilled.”

Alan smirked and walked away.

Keeping his eyes on his newspaper until Alan disappeared from view, Scott turned and glanced into the area of the cage where the young man had been standing. Realizing what had happened, he took off his glasses, dragged his fingers over his eyelids, and pinched his sinuses.

“
Shit
, man…,” Scott said, a man who knew his day had gone to hell.

•  •  •

Alan walked along the back of the factory by the loading docks on the way back to Line 10. As he looked down the other lines at his various co-workers, the thing that had always struck him from his first day on the job was the odd shape people’s bodies would take. You’d have the most obese woman in the factory, but after she’d done some repetitive task every day for a few years in a row, she’d have that one upper—or lower-body muscle group in perfect shape standing in contrast to everything else. Huge ass, huge belly, fat face, fat everything else, but hard, muscular arms like a weightlifter. It made people look like cartoon characters.

In his peripheral vision, Alan noticed some security guards moving along the second-floor catwalk over the break area up front. Though the factory workers stayed on the first level, the supervisors had their offices overlooking the floor on the second level. As the skyways connected the Deltech campus buildings on the second floor, day-shifters joked that it was a way for the white-collar execs to never mingle with the blue collar workers.

At first, Alan told himself that the guards were probably just grabbing a coffee together. Then he chanced a look over and saw that the guards were pointing right at him.

“Oh, shit,” Alan hissed.

He tried to walk as normally as possible. He felt around in his pocket for the twelve chips and then began cracking them in half using his thumb and forefinger. Without looking back to the catwalk, he palmed the broken pieces and discreetly tossed them into a trash container beside a parked forklift.

•  •  •

“Took your time,” Big Time joked when Alan returned.

That’s when he noticed how pale Alan looked, the color drained from his face.

“You look like my kids when I catch ’em pulling shit.”

When Alan didn’t reply, Big Time realized that was exactly what happened.

“Shit, son. What’d you do?” he asked, lowering his voice.

“I’ve been standing right here the whole day,” Alan said, eyeing Big Time. “Right here on the line.”

Big Time hesitated but then nodded.

“Yeah. Right here, man.”

Elmer turned, nodding an oblivious “hello” to Alan, having heard none of this exchange. Alan took his place at the hydraulic life and had just wheeled the next unit off the line when Dennis’s voice rang out.

“Terrell?”

From up the line, Dennis approached with a couple of guards. He looked weary.

“Hey, Dennis, what’s up?” Big Time said, trying to sound casual.

“You stand by there, Big Time,” Dennis said. He turned to Alan. “Could you come with us?”

Everyone witnessing this went silent, waiting for someone to reveal what was going on. Alan felt himself sweating all over. The security guards looked as if they were just waiting for him to bolt. Though he knew he could outrun them, he also knew there was nowhere for him to go. Finally, he nodded to Dennis and stepped forward.

Big Time watched as Alan was escorted away, a dull throb beginning in his stomach. He kept waiting for Alan to look back and give him an indication of his guilt or innocence. He knew the truth, though.

Elmer shook his head.

“Man, if I’d known he was busted, I would’ve snuck him out back in one of the boxes.”

“Shut up, Elmer.”

•  •  •

Muhammad watched as Alan and the security guards walked past. He aimed a questioning glance at Mukul, who simply shrugged and got back to work, plugging and re-plugging cables into the computers they pulled off the line.

All down the line, everyone was talking and pointing, incredulous looks on their faces. Except, Muhammad noticed, Big Time, who was already burying himself back in his work.

•  •  •

Word traveled fast, and everyone on the factory floor was soon watching as Alan was escorted up the stairs to the second-floor catwalk. As he disappeared into the offices beyond, the girl at the station next to Zakiyah’s, Mandy, glanced over at her co-worker.

“Ain’t that your man?”

Even as he was being led away, Zakiyah could still see Alan’s swagger in his step. For some reason, this made her angrier than the thought that he’d done something criminal.

“He’s my baby’s daddy, but that don’t make him a man.”

All the women within earshot started laughing. Zakiyah forced a smile but could barely keep it together.

Chapter 6

P
hil Snyder loved living on Galveston Island. He’d been coming here with his parents and grandparents since he was a little boy in the late ‘60s and had always hoped to retire early there. But by “early retirement,” he hadn’t meant buy one of those ten-bedroom affairs on the water the wealthy tended to purchase, only to use it as a rental property for most of the year.

No, he wanted to be a local, an
islander
.

When he got just enough money together to buy a one-bedroom fishing shack off the seawall, he did it and left his old life in Houston behind. Instead of financial planning, his admittedly meager income now came from selling fish he pulled out of the Gulf to various area restaurants. This generally consisted of speckled trout, bull reds, flounder, and sheepshead. Sometimes he got lucky with a rare redfish or found himself taking up an empty slot on a charter boat. Out in the Gulf, he was able to bring back snapper, dorado, kingfish, or even grouper. A single good-sized tuna or sailfish could pay for his groceries for a month. A 600-pound blue marlin he once caught eighty miles out made him $3,000. He hadn’t had to work for months after that, but did anyway because he enjoyed it, using the money to pay for long-needed repairs to the shack.

Like a lot of islanders, he had come to appreciate hurricane season if only because it meant the tourists thinned out completely, leaving only the thirty-eight percent of the population that was there year-round. With Eliza now predicted to make a direct hit on Galveston’s shores, folks stocked up on water and supplies to weather the storm. The rain had been coming in pretty steady since the night before and the tide had gone out much lower than normal, sure to return with a vengeance with the storm surge.

Among the locals, there was more a feeling of giddy anticipation in the air, almost a party atmosphere tinged with nervous excitement. Making it through a hurricane was a rite of passage for islanders. This was just another opportunity to prove they were of heartier stock than the mainlanders. Boards were dragged out of garages and nailed over allegedly storm-proof windows. Police cars drove up and down the seawall, informing residents which high schools would be open and which would have food if they needed a place to go. A lot of the cops were islanders or lived just on the other side of the bridge in Kemah or League City. They tended to treat islanders like neighbors, not a populace to be shepherded (as had been his experience as a younger man in the Houston suburb of Spring), so Phil got along with them.

There were three things that Phil liked telling strangers about his adopted city.

“First, Galveston, not Houston, was originally the center of Gulf trade; Strand Avenue, where all the banks were located, dubbed ‘the Wall Street of the South.’”

“Second, that when Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked there in the 1500s, he’d dubbed the place Isla de Malhado, ‘the island of misfortune,’ though some translate that to ‘the island of doom.’”

“Third,” Phil would continue, lowering his voice, “the Galveston hurricane of 1900 is still the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, having claimed between 6,000 and 12,000 lives, though many put that number way up around 25,000. The discrepancy is due to just how many bodies were swept away but also the lack of any kind of updated census. I mean, Galveston was a boom town attracting folks from all over. Some people were swept off the face of the earth, but if their family back home weren’t up to date on their whereabouts, their absences weren’t noted by anyone.

“A lot of bodies poured into the Gulf that day. Ships were pulling them onto their decks for days, weeks, months, only to have to re-bury them at sea when they were radioed from shore that there wasn’t enough dry land for any more graves. When
those
bodies just washed back up on the beach, they built giant funeral pyres and burned the corpses.”

It was a spooky story, and Phil would nod his head as if to suggest he had witnessed the horror first-hand. His grandfather had told him about it, claiming he’d heard all about it from an uncle who’d rode down from Bell County to assist in the recovery effort. As a child, it was like some black-and-white movie in his mind. A fiction. After Phil had been living there awhile and got to know the pieces of the island that still harkened back to that era as well as the descendants of survivors, it became much more of a real thing to him.

When Katrina came and went and the news stories began talking about residents of New Orleans “getting past it,” Phil knew these were just words. People weren’t going to be over that for a very long time.

After making a quick run through driving rain to the gas station for cigarettes (evoking “islander privilege” long after the proprietor had placed an “outta smokes!” sign in the window), Phil wandered down to the beach to look at the receding ocean. Having stood in a similar spot for a couple of other big storms, he knew that the surge on this one would really be something. Fifteen feet? Twenty? He figured his house would be fine, as it was up on eighteen-foot pylons. If the surge reached twenty-two or twenty-three feet, he might get flooded out, but the house wouldn’t be carried away.

When he got to the waterline, the sight was like something out of an alien invasion flick. Rather than blue, the sky was a bruise, all purple, yellow, and a sick gray-green. This was almost blocked out by a broad wall of swirling white clouds that ran the length of the entire horizon. The clouds were uniform in height, low on the water, and had was looked like a black-gray brush riding under them. indicating just how much rain was pouring down out of the them.

“Hell’s bells,” Phil muttered.

He wandered back up to his shack, climbed the steps, and stripped off his wet shirt and shoes before considering a nap. There’d be no fishing today or tomorrow, though by tomorrow night he imagined the beach would be littered with the soon-to-be rotting carcasses of thousands of unfortunate fish. A waste.

He went to pour himself a glass of water from the front dispenser on the refrigerator, ignoring the glowing “replace filter” indicator for the three-hundredth time. A dollop of water spit itself into his waiting glass followed by an oily black discharge that sluiced down in a sticky trail.

“Gross,” he murmured, turning the glass over in his sink.

As he watched it slither down the drain, he got annoyed. Oil coming up through the water lines meant there was already a pipe broken somewhere and it had already leaked into the Galveston Reservoir. This would be a priority for the city repairmen, but would be a bitch to repair. In fact, that could about be the last glass of water he’d draw out of a tap for a week.

He felt an odd burning sensation and looked down at his finger. He saw that when he’d dumped the glass, a drop of the oil had stayed on his skin. He hadn’t cut himself, so he wasn’t sure why it was burning, but he turned on the kitchen faucet to wash it off regardless. Unfortunately, it only spit out more of the oil-and-water mixture, which had the effect of scalding his finger even worse.

“Shit!”

He shut off the tap, went back out his front door, and hopped down to the sand below, dragging his fingers through the wet sand to get it off. As the rain came down around him, he tried to scrub the oil off his fingers but found it near-impossible. The burning sensation only got worse and seemed to spread.

Cursing the whole way, he climbed back up into his shack to find a rag to wipe it off. He went straight to a kitchen drawer, dug around for a clean dish towel, and settled on a potholder. Using it like a scouring pad, he tore at his irritated fingers and finally managed to transfer the smear of now-sandy oil from skin to cloth.