Flood Plains (14 page)

•  •  •

When Alan had reached the bridge over Buffalo Bayou, the river level was only a few feet below the bridge but was running fast. He couldn’t see any sign of the black tentacles and wondered if they had a problem with the current. Maybe his intuition about the bridge would prove lucky.

The problem now was the wind.

The rain was coming down something fierce. With the hurricane-force winds blowing it horizontally into his face, Alan sat down and gripped the guard rail as tightly as he could to avoid being pitched over the side and into the torrent. The strangest thing about the hurricane was that the wind blew in gusts and the rain would actually let up for a couple of minutes here and there, becoming a mere shower rather than a monsoon. In those instances, Alan would relax, some semblance of visibility would return, and he would check to see how high the bayou had risen.

Then, the wind would return, smashing him flat against the guard rail, and he’d be back to hanging on for dear life like a character out of a silent comedy.

He kept thinking he heard screaming coming from both sides of the bridge. He’d look towards Fifth Ward and see no one, the same when he turned towards downtown. He tried to convince himself that it was the wind.

He knew Fifth Ward a little. Zakiyah’s grandmother was there. He remembered the first time he’d gone with Zakiyah and Mia to meet her, a woman alleged to be psychic. When she practically met them at the door with a small check she said she wished to gift them with, Alan wondered if Zakiyah was wrong about Sineada’s lack of powers.

Daddy…

Alan stared out into the driving rain. He thought his mind was playing tricks on him. But it wasn’t like the screams. He heard this inside his head, clear as his own thoughts.

Mia?

“Mia?”

Daddy…we need you…

Alan looked out towards Fifth Ward and suddenly realized where the voice was coming from. The whole thing unfolded in his mind. Dennis offering time-and-a-half, Zakiyah making an arrangement with Sineada, the drive down as the storm wall approached, and then Mia in the attic. The same things that killed everybody in downtown were now moving on his daughter.

She was in danger of being taken by the storm.

Daddy! Please…

Alan had no idea how he was going to get to her, but he knew that he had to. When there was a break in the rain, he began gingerly moving down the bridge. He lost his balance several times as the wind continued to try to blast him over the edge and into the bayou, but somehow he managed to stay on his feet.

I’m on my way, Mia. Sit tight. Daddy’s on his way.

Chapter 16

N
obody had any idea how to get up to the roof until Muhammad suggested that there must be some kind of service access to reach the air conditioning, which always seemed to be blowing compressors. The problem then was, no one wanted to be the first out of the conference room.

“C’mon, people,” Scott grunted, leading the way.

Except for what water the group had tracked in from the break area, the hallway carpeting was dry. This did little to assuage nerves, and the group fanned out with caution.

“Is this it?” Amber asked, less than a minute in the hall.

Scott and Big Time hurried over to the narrow door she’d located and, sure enough, a ladder extended up to a trap door about twelve feet above them. Big Time clambered up and tried to get the door open but then shook his head.

“Locked.”

Scott retrieved a mop from the utility closet and raised it up to Big Time. Violently pounding it upwards, the large man made quick work of the door, bending it out of shape until the latch snapped.

Instantly, water came pouring down from the roof.

“Shit!” Big Time cried, trying to get away from it but becoming saturated in the process.

At the bottom of the ladder, Scott eyed the water as it pooled on the floor.

“It’s just rain water. As I said, I think it’s coming up from the ground, not the sky.”

Big Time nodded and climbed up the rain-slicked rungs onto the roof. By the time he was out of the trap door, he was soaked through with rainwater and shivering in the cold. He turned in every direction and saw only darkness. The power was out for miles, and the storm was showering the area with more water than Big Time thought clouds could hold.

The factory roof was massive, at least the size of a football field, but the trap door had been at the front of the building. Big Time looked over the street-facing side and saw that there was at least two feet deep of water racing by like a raging river. There was a sign of the pedestrian skyway connecting the factory with one of the administrative buildings that advertised a clearance of nine feet. Big Time eyed the space between the water and the skyway and re-estimated the water level at three feet and rising.

That’s when he heard screaming.

Worried that his cohorts were being attacked even as he got his bearings, he went to the trap door, only to find the exodus up the ladder going smoothly.

“It’s over there,” said Ro-Ro, who had heard the same thing.

Big Time jogged towards the far side of the roof over Lines 1 and 2, sloshing through the standing water as he did, and found himself looking at the parking garage. There were fire sprinklers in the garage, too, and the black oil tendrils were making efficient use of them to dispatch the survivors who had fled there. The dwindling group was being herded into a corner by a multitude of black strands. Big Time knew he’d arrived for the final act. One person was thrown into a truck and engulfed, another smashed into the roof of the level and devoured. A third person leaped out of the garage altogether to escape in the waters below, only to have one of the tentacles erupt out of the flood and catch him before he even touched the surface.

The final five had almost made it to the top level when an equal number of tentacles swam up the rainwater washing down and cornered them next to an SUV. Two of them were women Big Time knew, and they huddled close, hugging each other and crying as the tendrils moved in. One of the men stared at his would-be destroyer with defiance, while the fourth and fifth closed their eyes.

A second later, all five had been swallowed into the black mass.

“Fuck me,” Scott said, having wandered up next to Big Time.

•  •  •

Down on Harper Avenue in Fifth Ward, the floodwaters were rising just as quickly. Up to six feet now, this meant most houses could be seen only by their roofs. Cars floated along, only to bottleneck at the end of blocks or at stone walls. When the waters rose again, the cars cleared their obstacles and continued their wanderings.

•  •  •

Tucked away in their attack, the only living souls within a twenty-block radius, Sineada and Mia watched this from gaps in the roof they’d knocked out to allow in light and air.

They had heard when the water and “whatever it was” began pouring from the faucets below in earnest. Soon thereafter, the floodwaters broke through the windows and doors and filled the house, making it even easier for the tentacles to try to locate them. Something pounded on the ceiling, trying to get at them which Sineada mistook for a person at first. That’s when she realized there was some kind of force in the black water that allowed it to project itself forward. She hoped it wasn’t strong enough to shatter through the ceiling timbers.

Sineada took the time to try to reach out to whatever was within the water. What she got back was unexpected, as if she’d tried to use her perception on a dog or, from what she knew of them, a shark. It was motivated solely by anger and instinct. It would detect them on the other side of the ceiling and launch itself forward like a striking cobra but with an attendant fury that Sineada found most human. And most troubling.

“What’s it trying to do?” Mia whispered to Sineada as the force hammered on the ceiling below with such force it just about drowned out the sound of the rain battering the roof above.

“It seems to know we’re here and is just trying to get to us, as if following a smell,” Sineada said, figuring her great-granddaughter deserved the truth. “It doesn’t seem to fully grasp there’s a ceiling between us, so it just pounds away.”

“You don’t think it’s looking for a weak spot?” Mia asked.

Sineada shook her head.

To make her point, the old woman slowly got to her feet, a little unsteady after sitting for so long. She stooped over and silently moved to another part of the attic. Responding to her movements, the impact of the poltergeist force coming up from below followed in Sineada’s footsteps. After reaching one side of the attic, Sineada turned around and came back, the force continuing to follow her as she walked.

“That’s
weird
,” Mia said.

Sineada smiled, feeling a strange sense of pride in her great-granddaughter. She knew she wouldn’t have been this calm, cool, or collected in the face of crisis when she was Mia’s age. That’s when she reminded herself of what Mia had already been through in her young life.

“We’ll be okay up here.”

“We will for a little while,” Mia replied, looking away.

Again, Sineada had to agree.

•  •  •

Sludge worms.

After some brief discussion, “sludge worms” was what everybody had agreed to call the animal-like creatures laying waste to Deltech. Scott had suggested “pitch worms,” as that’s what he thought they were looking at, not oil.

“Pitch is the more solid part of oil,” Scott had explained. “That’s what it looks like to me. Same consistency, same elasticity, same sheen. That ain’t oil. That’s pitch.”

But no one cared that much, and Scott shut up. Everyone was too busy trying to keep warm as the rain swept down in sheets. The roof had a series of gutters that prevented water from pooling, and whatever residual moisture there was poured right down the trap door into the offices. For the time being, everyone tentatively agreed that they were safe.

Hiding behind one of the massive rooftop air conditioner units, Big Time tried his phone again but still couldn’t get any kind of signal. In his mind, he was working out numerous scenarios that allowed for his family to have gotten out and away from their house or even the city before the floodwaters hit, but none of them seemed plausible. It couldn’t have been that long after he left for work that the black water had come down from the faucets. Part of him hoped they’d been asleep and didn’t suffer.

But maybe,
maybe
there was a chance.
Maybe
one of the boys woke up, saw what was happening, and alerted Mona, who got everyone to the car.
Maybe
the waters hadn’t been that high yet.
Maybe
they’d taken the toll road, too, and found it empty enough to head north. His family had been through Katrina. They were survivors. When their neighbors might stay and fall victim, his family would see the signs and know it was time to leave.

He realized that he had to believe this, or he’d simply throw himself into the waters below.

Scott seemed to have burned off his adrenaline rush and was now huddled by himself next to another air conditioning unit. Like Big Time, he gripped a cell phone in his hands. Unlike his friend, though, the light seemed to have gone out in his eyes.

Zakiyah knew how he felt. The past twenty-four hours had already turned her life upside-down, and now this? If she lost Mia, she didn’t know what she’d do. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d imagined what it would be like having to plan a funeral for her daughter if she had survived Katrina and Mia had not. Even conjuring the memory brought tears. She wondered if she’d be able to kill herself.

The rain wasn’t letting up, and it seemed like everyone was settling in to the idea of waiting out the storm there. Big Time waked over to talk to Scott. Muhammad appeared to be in prayer. Ro-Ro and Amber were huddled next to one of the air conditioners in the center of roof. Ro-Ro had a strange look on her face.

Just as Zakiyah was about to call out to her, black liquid began pouring over the woman’s face from behind. Alongside her, Amber shrieked and launched herself forward, but the sludge worm had sluiced out of the air conditioner as a two-headed snake and had a hold of her hair.

“What the fuck?!” Scott cried.

The two women were yanked back sharply until the backs of their heads were crushed up against the air conditioner. The galvanized steel vents bent as the fingers of black thickened and wrapped themselves around the two women like a spider spinning a web around its latest victim. The tendrils were then pulled tight and both Ro-Ro and Amber became to disintegrate. Ro-Ro’s mouth flopped open in a silent gasp as Amber’s skull collapsed, as if the bones inside had the tensile strength of twigs.

“Where’s it coming from?” Zakiyah yelled.

“It must’ve gotten into the air conditioning ducts,” Big Time replied over the noise of rain and tearing metal. “Everybody keep back!”

Muhammad, however, suspected something different. He walked briskly to one of the frosted skylights and bent down next to it. Angling as best he could, he could make out a wavering black line extending straight up from the flooded factory floor to approximately where the air conditioning unit stood above the roof. Angered, he sat down and cracked the heel of his shoe through the skylight, showering the line below with broken glass. Leaning back down, he got confirmation on what he didn’t want to believe possible.

All of the various tendrils of the sludge worm had gathered together to form itself into a single tower that rose from the factory floor. It was like a frozen black waterfall, the base of which was a large bulb resting just below the water line. Thin black roots extended away from the bulb in multiple directions. The water that had flooded the building was now a good seven or eight feet deep, having risen above almost all of the stations.

“Oh, my God,” whispered Zakiyah, who had come to see.

Muhammad wasn’t sure if she was reacting to the towering sludge worm or the fact that the floodwaters were a rich crimson, as if the factory had been turned into a gigantic wine vat.