Flood Plains (25 page)

“That sounds risky,” said the other suit-wearing man.

“Sounds that way because it is,” said Scott.

“Let me get this straight,” said the city councilman. “Your plan is to drop paint thinner onto these things and try to set them on fire like a circus act?”

“And your plan is to keep going up and pray these things run out of rope before you do?” Scott shot back. “These bastards killed my whole family today. Killed everybody at my place of work except these guys. Most of this city’s dead. How many more have to die to prove to you that there’s nowhere you can run?”

Everyone went silent. Finally, Mayor Bresnan spoke.

“I’m truly sorry for your loss. There don’t seem to be any survivors from my daughter’s school or my husband’s office. This is obviously a disaster on a scale difficult to comprehend. You’ve seen fire work against this thing?”

“Not on this scale, but we didn’t have cans full of kerosene either,” Scott replied.

Big Time held up his burned hand.

“A can of WD-40 and a lighter saved my life earlier.”

“We’re just trying to give you and everybody else here a shot,” Scott said. “If it doesn’t work, haul ass back up here and wait it out. If it does, then spread to the four winds and make sure that nobody stays in groups more than two or three. That said, I can’t tell you how long it’s going to be discombob…discom…
shit
.”

“Discombobulated?” Mayor Bresnan asked.

“That’s it right there. Suffer from a little of it myself.”

Mayor Bresnan chuckled. Big Time realized, in another context, he’d think his friend was flirting with her.

“Were you in the military?” she asked, eyeing him curiously.

“407
^th
Army Field Support here in Texas.”

For some reason, Mayor Bresnan nodded as if this meant everything in the world to her.

“Between me and my two friends here, I think we can get this job done for you,” Scott concluded.

“Two friends? That the discombobulation talking again?”

That’s when they realized Muhammad was no longer with them.

•  •  •

When Mia passed out, Sineada just about panicked. She looked at this little girl lying there with her eyeballs rolled up into her head and suddenly worried that the mental strain might’ve caused an aneurysm or something else to burst.

“What’s wrong with her?” Alan cried through gritted teeth, cold rain water pelting his face..

Sineada searched her mind and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Part of it is dehydration. It knocked her down, sure, but it shouldn’t have had this effect on her.”

Alan was in tremendous pain. He was sweating out of every pore and thought that he’d be going into shock at any moment. He was suddenly worried that if he went unconscious, it might become increasingly difficult to revive him if Sineada was concerned with Mia.

“Can’t you use your ‘talent’ on me?” Alan barked. “This is killing me!”

Sineada turned to Alan, her eyes filled with anger.

“I don’t know what kind of con you’re planning to run to save your hide, but using Mia is out of bounds,” Sineada hissed. “You want my help? You’re going to need to behave, understood?”

Alan nodded quickly. It struck Sineada as insincere, and she sent a bolt of psychic pain through Alan’s nervous system, something she didn’t even think she was capable of. When Alan winced, she felt a guilt over the sense of satisfaction she got from it.

“
Understood?
” she repeated.

“Yeah. I’ll go where you go. I won’t be a problem.”

“Fine.”

Alan began to feel his pain ebbing away. It was still present but muted.

“You’re not as powerful with this as she is, huh?” Alan said.

“No, I am not,” Sineada said, pouring water from one of the bottles across Mia’s lips.

“But you can tell what this thing’s thinking, too?”

“Yes, but only because it’s not thinking all that much. Seek out and kill, consume, repeat. It’s broadcasting that with a vengeance, so even I can pick up on some of it. It’s just with all the different voices within it, it can be overwhelming.”

“Then why can’t you tell it what to do?”

“I don’t know. So far, that’s been Mia-only.”

“What happens if she tries again and it just pushes back twice as hard?”

“I don’t know,” replied Sineada, shaking her head. “Believe you me, I wish this burden was on me, not her. But if she’s the only one who can reach it, then we’ve got to try.”

•  •  •

Muhammad picked his way through the hundreds of people on the thirtieth, desperately seeking his wife. When he came up dry, he hurried to the stairs, only to be rebuffed.

“Back of the line, asshole.”

Scanning around, he spotted a wooden ladder one of the construction workers had propped up near a service access point cut in the ceiling. He hurried over, set up the ladder, and clambered up to the next floor.

As he emerged onto the thirty-first floor, he was struck all over again by the blistering cold so high up in the building. There was even less hung up around the exterior of the level to keep out the elements, and rain poured in from holes cut in the ceiling as well. There were only two floors left to go.

People were huddled together in small groups stretched out across the entire level of the building. Most looked shell-shocked by the events of the day or, perhaps more accurately, resigned to their impending doom.

One group looking over the side of the building had a woman with them about Fadela’s height, so Muhammad rushed over, only to be disappointed when he saw it wasn’t her.

“They’re getting closer,” one of the people said.

Muhammad saw that they were positioned directly above one of the gently swaying sludge worms, which now approached from only a couple hundred feet below them. From the street level, they looked like giant earthworms straining upwards as if to climb over a rock. But now, the sight brought to mind what it’d look like to stare straight down over an oil geyser as it exploded from the ground. Something Texas was famous for, even in India.

“Muhammad?”

Muhammad wheeled around and saw Mrs. Fredrik standing behind him.

“Oh, my Lord, it is you,” Mrs. Fredrik exclaimed, holding her face in her hands.

She walked over and immediately embraced her neighbor, tears leaping to her eyes. It was then that Muhammad knew his wife hadn’t made it.

“She saved my life,” Mrs. Fredrik whispered. “I would be gone if it wasn’t for her.”

“How?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know. She was in the garage, I heard her cry out, but when I went down she was nowhere to be seen. I don’t know. I went back upstairs, but then a truck going by looking for survivors picked me up and took me here. I was carried up here in a chair.”

Muhammad had thought he’d steeled himself against the inevitable, that even though his wife might have made it out of their apartment, that didn’t mean she had made it to safety. But as he felt his body reacting to the news, he realized he’d never believed she was alive.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Mrs. Fredrik said.

“It’s okay,” he said finally. “I’m sure I’ll be with her soon enough.”

Chapter 30

I
t was time to go.

With the columns of sludge now only four flights below them, the poltergeist wind was already blasting through the twenty-ninth floor. For safety’s sake, the mayor and her aides had evacuated the three thousand survivors to the highest floor. There, they had divided them into three lines positioned around each of the fire stairwells. Controversy abounded as to places in line, the younger and presumably faster wanting to be at the front. The slower, the injured, and the elderly refused to go along with it at first, but as there was so little time for dissension, their voices were soon drowned out.

One of Mayor Bresnan’s aides had actually confronted Big Time with the possibility that what they intended to do might bring down the building.

“You’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in property damage with possibly hundreds of millions more if this affects others in this corridor,” he had charged.

“You’re willing to
die
to save Houston taxpayers a couple of bucks?” Scott had asked, incredulous. “Hell, you ever decide to run for office, you’ve got my vote!”

Still, everyone knew this was a possible no-win scenario. Everyone could die up on the top floors of the building, or they could die in the floodwaters below. There were no guarantees either way. Big Time’s worst fear was that setting these fires could lead to a conflagration that would send smoke up the stairwells, killing hundreds. There was no way to avoid it—chances were good that the fire would be out almost as quickly as it began—but it was a possibility to consider.

Big Time was trying to force this idea from his mind when Muhammad returned, coming down a wooden ladder from the upper levels.

“Did you find your…?”

But Big Time didn’t need to finish the question to know the answer.

“I’m sorry.”

Muhammad nodded but then moved towards the cans of paint thinner set up at the corners of the floor. Officers Gonzales and Franklin had volunteered to help Big Time and Scott, but Gonzales welcomed the return of Muhammad.

“I’m going to head for the stairs. You guys are crazy.”

“I don’t know if I could argue with that,” Scott said.

Muhammad stared down at the approaching worms with grim fascination. Somewhere inside it lay whatever was left of his wife. He saw his mission as one to free her from its maw. It wouldn’t bring her back, but at least he wouldn’t let the beast win.

Scott came over and extended his hand to Muhammad.

“See you down there?”

“Will do,” Muhammad replied, shaking the man’s hand.

“Sorry about all the, you know, douche-y shit.”

“Sorry for wishing you’d be plagued by monstrous sludge worms in return.”

Scott’s eyes lit up.

“A joke! I hope you don’t die, man. I’ll bet you got more of those in you.”

As Scott headed back to his corner, Franklin and Big Time hurried to theirs. Thin strips of cloth hung from the mouths of the paint thinner cans, the caps keeping them loosely in place. Franklin’s hand was shaking as he tested the lighter in his palm. Each man had five lighters, all requisitioned from the survivors upstairs. They all worked, in theory, but Scott hadn’t wanted to take any chances.

“What happens if I drop it and it misses the worm?” asked Franklin.

“Don’t think twice,” Big Time replied. “Light the next one and let it drop. We’ve each got three five-gallon cans. It’s all theoretical, but it should only take one.”

“How so?”

“When the can blows up, it’ll ignite the thinner, and instead of one fire, there’ll be fifty raining down on the worm. The worm itself it flammable as all hell, and if a handful of those fires lands on it, the flames should just suck down that fuel like mother’s milk.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, we’re going for the big prize on this one. Good luck.”

The officer shook Big Time’s hand and took up his position on the northwest corner as Big Time stood over the worm moving up the northeast side. It had only gotten larger in the intervening ten minutes or so since he’d checked it out. It looked like a tower of ebony, polished to a shine. As the rain spattered down onto it, it was hard to conceive that it was in some way alive instead of a rocky edifice that had been rising there for generations.

The go-signal was a nod from Big Time that would lead Officer Franklin to discharge his firearm three times into the rain. The exodus of people would begin down the stairs, and the makeshift bombs would be dropped.

Big Time looked over at Scott on the southeast and nodded. Scott quickly lit the wicks on his bombs and signaled for Muhammad, outside Big Time’s plane of vision, to do the same. He then knelt down and lit his own as, fifty feet away, Officer Franklin did similarly.

A quick glance from Scott and Big Time signaled Franklin. Franklin had only fired his weapon a handful of times in the line of duty, but as he pulled the Heckler & Koch 9mm from his holster, he wondered if he’d ever get the chance again. He pulled the trigger three times, and three shots echoed out over the storm.

“Here goes nothing,” Big Time whispered to himself.

He took the first can and quickly lowered it as far as he could over the flimsy wooden guard rail, positioning it directly over the slowly moving sludge worm. With rain now threatening to douse the flames, Big Time let go. He immediately pulled himself back from the edge, but glanced down to see the effect.

Which was nothing.

The can hit the worm straight on, but immediately bounced off. The wick was extinguished, the cap fell off, and the thinner splashed out of the can as it spun harmlessly down to the flooded street below.

“
Shit!
”

Big Time tightened the caps on the next two before hesitating a beat. He waited for the wicks to burn down, almost to the can. He then picked both up, lowered them as far as he dared, and dropped the pair together.

The wind blew out the wick on one of the cans almost as soon as it was airborne, and it landed harmlessly on top of the worm. The second can missed the worm entirely. Big Time was about to curse his luck and run to the fire stairs when he heard the can explode.

The small blast had an incredible effect. Having exploded a few feet below the top of the worm but directly alongside it, super-heated shards of metal and flaming liquid were showered onto the creature. At multiple contact points, the worm immediately caught fire.

But instead of the flames spreading across the surface as Scott had postulated, each small fire ignited veins that shot deep into the worm like lightning bolts tearing through the body. This had the effect of shattering the worm like a split log. Several splinters, glowing orange and red with fire albeit still attached to the main body, peeled away and down into the floodwaters.

Like a blossoming flower, the sludge worm divided into thousands upon thousands of ever-thinning tendrils as it thrashed against the building and sank.