Flood Plains (8 page)

When he turned onto Crosstimbers, he was amazed to see the Louisiana-hating gas station owner still had the lights on. He could even make out the guy inside watching the news.

Pulling onto his driveway a couple of minutes later, Big Time got a shock when he saw his mother, Erna, sitting on the porch. Though the porch had a good, strong ceiling and she was sitting a ways back in her metal rocker, Big Time knew the wind must be blowing a cold, steady spray of rain in her face.

He parked in the garage and hurried around the sidewalk to join his mom.

“How’s it going?”

“Gettin’ cold. I need my red coat.”

Big Time considered suggesting she simply come inside but then realized who he was dealing with.

“I’ll get it. In the closet?”

“That’s my camel coat. I need the red one. It’s on my bed.”

Big Time came back with it and slipped it over her shoulders.

“You want some chicken?”

“Maybe so.”

Big Time knew what this answer meant.

“Something on your mind?”

“Your brother called to see how we were. Said he was looking forward to my ‘visit.’”

Oops.
Big Time had known delaying this talk would eventually bite him the ass.

“We’re seven in a house built for three,” Big Time began. “He’s got twice as much room…”

“I ain’t livin’ by the water anymore. Learned that lesson.”

“They’re eight miles inland. And that’s Mississippi, not Louisiana. High ground. Also, most everything we saved from your house is already over there in his garage. You just have to go through it.”

As soon as he said that, Big Time realized that was the wrong tack. Her house had been completely destroyed when the levees broke. Anything they salvaged would only point towards all that now missing.

“I told you, I don’t want none of it,” Erna retorted. “Throw it away. Give it to somebody who needs it or wants it because that’s not me.”

“Mama,” Big Time sighed.

But Erna had already ended the conversation by turning her back on her son to look out towards the driving rain.

Chapter 9

J
ohnson Space Center, twenty-five miles inland from Galveston, had been battered all evening by strong winds and heavy rain. All non-essential personnel were sent home, which meant a cancellation of training, tours, a pair of scheduled lectures, and maintenance work. Scientists and engineers, some accustomed to camping out in their offices for a couple of hours of sleep in between marathon laboratory sessions, were incredulous to find security officers directing them out of the buildings. Some had no idea a hurricane was approaching.

At nearby Ellington Field, the familiar T-38 Talon trainer planes were taxied into their hangars. Delicate meteorological equipment was brought inside, while tanks were drained and vehicles parked underground.

Though the storm was now being categorized as a Category 5, the administrators at both facilities were mostly concerned with the financial hit the destruction of the sites’ landscaping would entail. Primary communications with the International Space Station had already been transferred to the back-up facility at Cape Canaveral despite Johnson maintaining its own electrical grid that was backed up deep underground.

Mission Control had been designed to withstand a lot. Few thought Eliza would fit into that category.

“How’re we looking up there?” Flight Director Chuck Bartiromo, one of four members of the flight control team still at the Mission Control Center at midnight, radioed up to the International Space Station on a line bounced through Canaveral.

“Can’t even see the Gulf, much less Galveston Bay,” came the voice of James Foster, a longtime friend of Bartiromo’s who was the ISS’s current science officer. “Thought we saw a piece of Anahuac, but not even that. Looks like the eye is going to cover everything from Port Arthur all the way down to Matagorda. You bring in your dogs?”

Bartiromo chuckled.

“Would you believe they’re up in Oklahoma with Susan and the girls? They’d been planning to be away this week for months..”

“Lucky break. Pretty sure my pool’s going to be a total loss. Hope the roof doesn’t leak.”

“Yeah, heard that. Want me to swing by tomorrow?”

“Could you?”

Bartiromo was about to reply in the affirmative when he heard the new FAO (flight activities director), a recent transfer from the air force named Simon, exhale in surprise.

“Are you going to elaborate?” Bartiromo asked after the man kept staring at his monitor.

“Something happened in Galveston,” Simon said. “We picked up a distress transmission from the tower at Scholes Airport. Either some kind of collapse or a crash. They’ve got casualties. Sounds like a lot of them.”

“Any specifics?”

“No, the transmission fuzzed out. It sounds like their relays are getting pounded anyway. Cell towers are down, phone lines, causeway’s fucked. Galveston’s cut off.”

Bartiromo nodded. If the causeway was damaged, he knew repairs were hours away, particularly as first responders started dealing with the storm as it moved north. By the time it got past La Marque and up to Texas City, Galveston would be back-burnered. When Eliza reached Houston, anyone still needing assistance down on the island might be out of luck.

Bartiromo was wondering if NASA had any resources he could divert to Galveston when the door to the MCC burst open. Two contractors hurried in, only to be caught up short when they recognized where they were.

Bartiromo suppressed a smile. He loved the effect the control room had on civilians. Somebody had once compared it to stepping onto the pitcher’s mound at Fenway or walking into the Oval Office. The flight director, who had the rare privilege of having done the latter, felt the comparison apt.

“You guys lost?”

“Um, no, sir. We’ve got a crew working on the tank. We were heading home when we got a frantic call. They said to find you, find emergency services, security, some major catastrophe or break. They were panicked.”

“At the tank?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bartiromo sighed.

The tank referred to the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, an underwater training lab where astronauts grew accustomed to working in a near-zero gravity environment. Bartiromo reached over to the phone and dialed the front office there. When there was no answer, he dialed the extension inside the tank room itself. As the room was notoriously loud, the ringer on that phone was all the way up. He’d been in there a couple of times when it had rung, making even the most steely-nerved astronaut jump out of his skin.

When no one answered, Bartiromo leaped to his feet and nodded to Simon.

“Have security and EMS meet me in the Buoyancy Lab.”

The flight director hurried out of the MCC with the two contractors in tow and made a bee line for the tank. Johnson Space Center was laid out like a college campus, so Bartiromo and the contractors had to exit the MCC building and brave the lacerating rain. The wind blew so hard it was akin to walking through an ice storm. Making it worse, the exterior lights flickered and then faltered. The emergency generators instantly kicked on, but the lights were all dimmed to half-power.

The group finally found their way to the tank building, aka the Sonny Carter Training Facility, and, upon entering, heard a loud alarm ringing out like a battleship’s klaxon.

“Oh, shit,” Bartiromo grimaced. An alarm meant some kind of physical breach.

He led the contractors down a short, dark corridor to the massive tank room at the center of the building. The lights here were at near-full brightness, showing off a space about the size and shape of an Olympic swimming arena, just without the bleachers or high dive boards. At the center of this was, technically speaking, the largest indoor pool on the planet. Only, instead of gazing into the clear blue water to the training mock-ups below (currently, a solar panel array off the International Space Station), it looked as if the pool had been filled with oil, the surface shimmering black.

“Crap, the roof must’ve gone,” Bartiromo cursed as he looked up. He radioed the security office. “Major leak at the Buoyancy Lab. We’re going to need some kind of patch.”

When no one responded, he cursed again.

“Didn’t you say you had a crew down here?”

“Four guys.”

“Where are they?”

The contractors looked around, their gazes finally settling on a couple of tool boxes on the far side of the pool. Everyone had the same terrible thought and peered into the black of the underwater lab.

“Is that oil?”

“Could be,” Bartiromo said. “Something off the hydraulics, something backed up out of the filters. Who knows?”

Somewhere, someone shut off the alarm and the lab was cast into an eerie silence. Bartiromo tried to determine if something was leaking down from the ceiling, but the stillness of the pool’s oily surface made him reconsider his theory.

As he took a couple of curious steps closer to the pool, however, the hairs on the back his neck rose as if something had walked up behind him. He shook it off and squatted next to the edge. He gingerly touched the liquid, collecting a little on the tip of his finger. It had the consistency of oil, but where it should’ve been smudged brown-black, it was streaked with red.

Like blood.

“Oh, shi…”

Before he could finish his thought, he was hit from behind by a great force that knocked all the wind out of his lungs. He was still trying to catch his breath when it carried him up over the pool and held him in mid-air for a moment before dropping him. He hit the water with a slap, the thick oil giving it the consistency of yogurt. Sinking quickly, Bartiromo was paddling back up to the surface when he felt the impact of the two contractors landing in the pool as well

His head had just broken through to fresh air when he heard the screams of one of the contractors.

“Something’s got my foot’s caught on something!”

The contractor was flailing his arms, desperately trying to get to the edge of the pool even as he was being pulled backwards. Suddenly, an unseen force yanked him straight down, and he disappeared from view.

Bartiromo looked around for the other contractor, but the fellow was nowhere to be seen. The flight director didn’t need to be told twice that he needed to get out of the pool immediately. He began paddling towards the edge when sharp pains began coursing through his body. It was as if he’d been doused in flames.

In agony, he reached out to the tank’s concrete lip and dragged himself onto dry ground. This did nothing to arrest the burning. When he looked back towards the pool, he saw that the streak of black he’d trailed onto the flooring contained chunks of his skin and drizzles of blood.

Gasping for air as his body sent him into shock, Bartiromo saw a security team fast-walking into the pool area, their eyes widening the moment they saw him. He raised a partially skeletonized arm and tried to wave them away, but they interpreted it as a summons.

“Goooo…,” he whispered, his throat constricting.

A second later, the security team was aloft. Some were smashed against the ceiling, some had their bones broken in midair, while others were simply dropped into the tank, where the oil tore the flesh from their bones. These men drowned as blood and water filled their lungs.

Bartiromo looked down as best he could and watched as the rest of his body was eaten away. He felt himself fading away but then heard a noise and saw another group of security guards arriving, trailed by maintenance workers.

This time, he didn’t have the energy to wave them away.

•  •  •

The storm wall slowly made its way up from Galveston through Clear Lake, over the Johnson Space Center and into Houston. Power lines, many of which were designed to stand up to 200-mph winds, toppled and plunged city after city into darkness as Eliza crept towards South Houston. Phone lines were dragged to the ground, cell towers were destroyed, the main roads were made impassable by fallen trees, and side roads were done in by flooding.

Like a self-repeating Rube Goldberg device, the storm became downright predictable in its actions, sending Houston’s southern suburbs back to the Stone Age within minutes of its arrival.

But this was normal.

Variations of the same had been felt in Houston since the area was settled. What was different this time was what was piggybacking the hurricane, sluicing its way through the newly flooded byways to get at any human being in the area. Though Houston had a population just over two million, the hurricane-affected area was closer to six million. With the addition of an estimated half a million illegals, it made Houston and its environs among the largest urban population centers in the western hemisphere, alongside Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York.

A million and a half people had evacuated the area for Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, or, ironically enough, New Orleans, with several thousand simply spread across motels and hotels they’d deemed “a safe distance away” throughout Texas and Louisiana. These people waited in front of the television for news while eating bad room service cut with whatever was left in the vending machines.

A number of these people would later call themselves “Eliza survivors.” This was not without controversy, as those who survived the storm despite having stayed behind in Houston claimed only they were the actual survivors of Eliza, given what they’d endured. They heaped scorn on the evacuees-cum-cowards until the end of their days.

Not that their voices were heard, so tragically outnumbered were they.

Chapter 10

“M
ama! They’re closing school today!”

Zakiyah rolled over and looked at her clock, and saw that it was blinking “12:00.”

“What time is it?”

A flashlight clicked on, and Zakiyah saw that Mia was in the doorway.

“Five o’clock.”

Zakiyah suddenly got suspicious.

“If the power’s out, how did you hear that school was closed?”

“I got a text from Becky, who heard from Louis whose mother works for the district.”

Zakiyah sighed. She had read an article that suggested kids who slept with their cell phones by their pillows didn’t get real sleep, as their brains were programmed to wake with every text and Facebook update.