Flood Plains (23 page)

“How’re we doing on roof space?” Big Time asked.

Muhammad, who had been keeping one eye out the window, nodded.

“We’re about ten feet high, and the ceiling is maybe eleven or twelve. Don’t hit any speed bumps at speed, and I think you’ll be fine.”

As soon as they were down a level, the cacophony of wind and rain was replaced by the stillness of the empty garage. The sound of the dump truck’s engine echoed through the subterranean parking lot, only a handful of cars having checked in that day. Like Muhammad’s building, it appeared that, at one time, the garage had been flooded, but that all the water had sluiced away, likely to lower levels. The few puddles that remained hardly indicated a hurricane had gone by.

“This lot probably goes down what, seven or eight levels?” Scott asked. “I guarantee you the bottom three or four are all the way to the ceiling with water. It stays there, this thing will come down.”

“It’s that bad?” Big Time asked.

“Well, yeah. It’ll erode the concrete, but the main problem is the weight. These floors aren’t meant to withstand that much pressure. All it takes is one or two columns going, and the rest of the structure will go with it.”

“Pleasant thought,” snarked Zakiyah.

Big Time tried not to think about it, but as he wheeled down a lane towards the building’s elevators, he imagined every creak being a precursor to getting buried alive.

“Is that the tower side?” Muhammad asked, pointing ahead.

“Oh, shit,” muttered Big Time.

Though construction of the parking garage under Brammeier Tower had been completed before the rest of the building went up, it was sealed off from the Shell side with concrete dragon’s teeth-style barricades. Large sheets of plastic were taped together to curtain off the dust and dirt of the work next door from settling on the vehicles of the Shell building workers. Big Time rolled the dump truck over alongside, but the barricades formed a solid border all the way across the garage.

“Where’s the Brammeier stairwell?” Big Time asked.

The translucent sheeting made it hard to see, but Tony finally pointed it out half the distance across the garage floor on the other side of the barrier. Big Time did a couple of quick mental computations, then scoffed.

“If we’re coming down those stairs with a few thousand people and we’re trying to book it? Half of them are going to get caught right up in those barriers.”

“Also, if it’s our necks, I don’t want that much distance between me and the truck,” Scott added. “Let’s see what it looks like on P2.”

Hoping they weren’t making a grievous error, Big Time wheeled the truck around.

•  •  •

Mia’s headaches were worsening to the point that she could barely see. The pounding behind her eyes carried with it a white-hot intensity that throbbed in time with her heartbeat. She didn’t want it to show, but it was hard.

When one pulse sent her to one knee, Sineada hurried over to her.

I can handle it
, Mia thought.

“I know you think you can,” Sineada said. “But we don’t know what this is going to be like.”

Alan watched this back-and-forth for a moment but then got an idea.

“Mia? Come here a sec.”

Sineada shot a glance over at Alan, hoping he wasn’t trying to use his daughter’s pain to his advantage. He didn’t return the look. Mia sat down beside her father.

“If you’re going to try to talk me into running away, it’s not going to work,” Mia said. “I’ve made my mind up. This is
important.
”

Good for you, Mia
, Sineada thought.

“No, no, it’s not that,” Alan said, speaking carefully. “I just wanted to thank you.”

“For what?”

“Saving my life. I don’t think I did that yet.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Mia shrugged, embarrassed. “It just happened.”

“Oh, you think I meant earlier today?” Alan smiled. “Yeah, I guess that qualifies, but I’m talking a long time ago. I’m talking when you were born.”

“What do you mean?” Mia asked, regarding him in surprise.

“You’re good with math. You know how old I was when you were born, right? Three years older than how old you are right now. Think about that. That’s crazy, right?”

Mia nodded.

“Kids that age shouldn’t be having babies, but then me and your mom had you,” Alan continued. “I’m glad you’ll never know the me from back then. I didn’t care about anything. I was drinking, I was stealing, I was hanging out with the worst people. But then you came along and I had a choice. Leave you and your mom or hang tight. You know what I did. But the truth is, you didn’t let me leave. From the minute you were born, you were in my heart.”

But you
did
leave
, thought Sineada, getting angry.

“I’m not saying my priorities weren’t screwed up, but I started changing,” Alan continued, as if having heard Sineada. “Those guys I used to hang out with? A couple of them aren’t around anymore, and without you, maybe I wouldn’t be, either. When you came along, I got serious about school, I got a job, got serious about track. That’s how I got my scholarships. Track led to good things, but then the storm happened and I lost my priorities all over again. I felt sorry for myself and took it out on everybody. I let myself forget what you’d taught me. That wasn’t right. I’m sorry. This is the truth now and maybe, yesterday, two days ago, you were too young to hear it. But today, I think you’re older than me.”

Mia stared at her father, tears welling in her eyes. She put her arms around him and hugged him tightly.

“We’ll find Mommy,” Alan said. “And then we’ll be a family again.”

Sineada had been listening to this, trying to figure out Alan’s change of heart. When she realized what it was, she couldn’t believe Alan had sunk so low. Mia had never been more vulnerable or impressionable. This was Alan being her “rock” and making it that much harder for her to sacrifice him over strangers. It was so simple, a twelve-year-old could see through it. Unfortunately, Mia was eleven.

She caught Alan’s eye, and he stared back at her with a look that chilled her to the bone. This was a wounded lion that wasn’t going to go down easy, even if it meant manipulating his own daughter. The one thing that had been drummed into her the most over her many years of listening to people was that they would always surprise you.

Mia, arms still around her daddy, focused on the ascending columns of sludge with renewed determination. She thought they looked like some kind of witch king’s crown from a book, gnarled and black as if cracked from the twisted branches of a dead tree.

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” Mia said. “I’m ready for this.”

She turned to the building, but the mass seemed to know she was there. She began searching for a spirit to latch onto in hopes of turning the beast away from the ones escaping.

Hello? Where should we go? What should we be doing? This isn’t where we should go. This isn’t right. We should turn. We should turn around…

In the split second before the psychic roar flung itself at Mia with the force of a comet, Sineada sensed that the collective was inculcated against the very thing they were attempting. She had just turned to her great-granddaughter—
Mia!
—when she saw the little girl lifted off the raft and thrown back half a dozen feet. She landed on the edge of the raft, her arm dangling into the floodwaters.

Sineada rushed over, but Mia was unconscious. Alan, whose nerve endings were exposed to tremendous pain all over again, screamed in agony.

•  •  •

The second parking level down—P2—was blocked off the same as the first. When they encountered the same thing on P3 and P4, Zakiyah began to feel a small sense of hope.

Though she voiced the support for Scott’s plan, there was a bigger part of her that wanted nothing to do with this detour. Once they’d seen the sludge mass gathered in one place, she had imagined them driving as fast and as far west as they could go on their current tank of gas. No more questions about highways—they could just take the 45 around to the 290 or Interstate 10 and go and go and go. She understood wanting to believe that Muhammad’s wife might be up in the tower, but she didn’t think a single note with “Brammeier Tower” scrawled on it was worth risking their lives.

Still, she said nothing.

When they reached P5 and the familiar sight of concrete barriers and plastic sheeting was absent, Zakiyah deflated. She knew that Scott was trying to rescue his own family by saving Muhammad’s but was shocked that Big Time would put his only surviving child in harm’s way for a man he barely knew. She wished she could feel selfless and wondered if now, at the moment of truth, she was discovering she was a bad person.

“You okay?” Muhammad asked, his hand on her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” she lied as Big Time pulled the dump truck over to the Brammeier Tower stairwells. “So, how are we gonna do this?”

“
Very
carefully,” said Big Time. “But you and Tony are staying in the truck.”

“Wait, what?” Tony protested. “I can help you guys.”

“This whole thing could come down at any minute,” Big Time explained. “We could start a riot. Whatever the case, everyone’s going to get to P1 and start hauling ass to the garage exit no matter what we say. You’re
our
escape plan.”

“Dad!” Tony cried. “I want to stay with you.”

“Tony, I’m telling you. I’m not going to be able to do what I have to do unless I know you’re safe.”

Tony shrugged, hardly placated.

“All right, then.”

Big Time hugged his son. Then he nodded to Zakiyah.

“Key’s in the ignition. You get a bad feeling, leave us behind.”

Before she could respond, Big Time, Muhammad, and Scott were out the door and heading to the stairwell. She felt even worse now as a feeling of relief coursed through her body.

Chapter 28

M
uhammad’s wife, Fadela, had been on the phone with a friend across town when the attacks began. The friend, Ava, had been at a Lebanese market picking up last-minute supplies to ride out the hurricane when she began reporting what she saw.

“It’s like some big snake!” Ava cried. “It rose from the sink behind the butcher’s counter and killed the man. I don’t know what kind of animal it is.”

Fadela had listened as her friend went to hide in the ladies room, only to find a similar scene of horror there. Seconds later, the phone dropped to the ground. Fadela wasn’t sure if Ava was attacked or fumbled away her cell as she fled the scene. But then she came to the conclusion that it would take something as momentous as her death to separate her friend from her phone and decided it was the former.

She listened to the sounds on the other end of the phone. People were screaming, and the viciousness of the attacks by what she imagined must be multiple snakes was terrifying. Water gurgled into the phone, and it soon went silent.

Fadela’s power had gone out fifteen minutes earlier. Part of why she’d called Ava was to discover if she’d heard anything about the progress of the storm. Eliza’s outer rain spirals were already blasting rain against her windows, and she had no designs on leaving the apartment. She wondered if Ava was dead and realized that she believed she was. This led to her wondering why she wasn’t more panicked.

But that’s when she saw something else out her window. Behind her apartment building was another complex which had a large swimming pool, though only one family, a Latino clan with five children, seemed to ever use it. Something else was in the pool now: a thin black snake that emerged directly from a drain below the diving board. It broke the surface and moved across the top of the water to a filter on the side of the pool. It sluiced through the filter and flowed into pipeline shared with the building. Rather than finally emerging from the drain, it simply got longer and longer, like a long rope issuing forth from the bottom of the pool.

Within seconds, panic consumed the apartment complex. People ran out of their rooms into the rain, pursued by what appeared to be two dozen of the snakes, the one from the pool having broken off into several different heads like the mythical hydra.

“Mrs. Salaam!! Something’s happening in the other buildings! It’s coming up the pipes!”

Fadela recognized the voice from the other side of her door as a neighbor, Mrs. Frederik, who was as a white as a sheet with panic.

“It was coming out of my sink. I tried to call my son, but the phones are down. We have to get out of here.”

That’s when they heard it, a distant clanging noise from deep within the building. The pair slowly walked towards the kitchen and saw that, with each clang, the water faucet over the sink shuddered.

“It’s trying to get in,” Mrs. Frederik whispered.

Fadela backed away, but chanced a look out the window to where she saw people running in the streets. Water was rising out of the sewers, and snakes were coming out of the storm drains, grabbing people and consuming them whole.

“We have to get out of here!” cried Mrs. Frederik.

“No, wait.”

What Mrs. Frederik couldn’t have known was that Fadela’s sister had survived the Indian Ocean typhoon and told her sister about the mistakes of those who didn’t. They panicked, thinking they’d be safer outside a building in case of collapse. They were proved wrong.

“It’s out there in the streets, it’s in the other buildings, it’s around town, but for some reason, it’s not in here.”

That’s when Fadela remembered the notice that had been posted near the row of mailboxes in the lobby the day before. There was going to be construction in the building and the water would be turned off starting at nine. Fadela looked over at the clock on the mantel and saw that it was nine-thirty.

“I think we might have gotten lucky.”

An hour later, this was confirmed. They had called out to any others in the building, but they received no responses. The level of violence outside, including the killings of several drivers on Allen Parkway, had finally subsided. Fadela, who had no desire to witness the carnage, finally went to the window. She saw the empty cars, the flooded streets, the remnants of a handful of corpses, but also the blinking beacon at Brammeier Tower.