Flood Plains (6 page)

“Jesus,” he exclaimed, relieved.

He was looking around for his cigarettes when he was raised three feet off the ground and thrown into the living room. He would’ve made a clean landing, too, as his trajectory was taking him directly to the sofa, except that his television was rolled out a little from the place where it normally stood. His face smacked into it, sending him smashing through a cheap wicker coffee table.

“Gnnnnh,” Phil groaned, looking up at his ceiling.

For a moment, he thought he’d tripped or slipped on something. Anything that would explain how he got from one side of the shack to the other in so short an amount of time. But then he was lifted up again, as if unwittingly battling an invisible wrestler in a decidedly one-sided bout. He was thrown a second time, this time bashing into his closed bathroom door, cracking it down the middle.

As Phil sank to the floor, he realized that the throbbing in his ankle was because it was broken. He tried to focus his eyes well enough to see who was attacking him.

That’s when he was attacked a third and final time. Rather than being thrown, his unseen assailant drove itself towards Phil’s throat with such force that it first cut off his air and then broke his neck.

Winded, incredulous and dying, Phil found himself looking back towards the sink. The tap was off, but oily liquid was descending out of the faucet. It rapidly filled the sink and began washing onto the floor. Phil’s eyes went wide as the liquid glided across the floor, reached his left foot, and began to eat.

•  •  •

Alan sat at a table in a small conference room. The broken microchips recovered from the loading dock trash can sat on the table in front of him, a DVD/TV cart being the only other item in the room. He couldn’t take his eyes off the chips no matter how hard he tried, and it was beginning to drive him a little crazy. He wished he could just will the chips whole again, make them vanish from the room and return to their boxes in the high-dollar cage, but it wasn’t going to happen. How could he have been this stupid?

The door swung open, and a well-built, well-dressed black man with a salt-and-pepper mustache-and-beard combo walked in. He smiled at Alan and extended a hand.

“Hey, Lester Montgomery,” the man said by way of introduction. “My sister’s boy ran for Tulane when you were a freshman at LSU. When I told them you were here in the factory, it was the first time that boy’s uncle managed to impress his nephew.”

“Tulane’s got some runners,” Alan offered, trying to bring his brain around to this line of thought.

Lester snorted.

“Not like the Tigers. Not like you. Sorry everything went the way it did after the storm. Are you running for anyone now?”

“I just transferred in to Prairie View. Getting on my feet.”

“Running for the Panthers,” Lester said, nodding. “Good man. Good school.”

Lester hesitated a moment as if needing to do some mental recalibration of his own but then saw the microchips and nodded.

“Okay, so tell me what happened here.”

“The chips were damaged,” Alan sighed, remembering what he’d rehearsed. “So I tossed ’em.”

Alan held his breath, waiting for Lester’s response. The old man hesitated but only for the briefest instant. Finally, he nodded as if willing to let that be the reason.

“You are aware you’re supposed to write up every damaged part, right?”

Alan exhaled in relief.

“Yeah, but there’s the way it’s supposed to be and the way things are. If you check the bins, you’ll see it doesn’t happen that way. It’s all go-go-go out there on the floor. Get those units out the back door. Bring up the number.”

“Too true,” Lester acknowledged. “That’s what happens when corporate can’t stop raising the quotas.”

Alan nodded. As he watched Lester write this down on what he took for official documentation, he wondered if he’d be back on the line that afternoon. He might have to take some extra training or something. That was to be expected. But rather than go through some major disciplinary action, he was giving them a good excuse to bury the matter.

“If what you’re saying is true, it sounds like Scott Shipley’s got a hand in this mix-up,” Lester said without looking up. “Those cages are his responsibility.”

“I didn’t want to say anything, but that guy’s kind of out of it,” Alan joked. “He’s a nice fellow, but those cages could be on fire and he’d be the last to know.”

Lester burst out laughing. He eyed Alan for a moment, but then his face darkened. Without a word, he rose and walked to the television. Flipping on the set, he hit “play” on the DVD player, a DVD starting up immediately, having already been set up.

“Man, I could feed you rope all day long and you’d keep finding creative ways to hang yourself, am I right?”

Alan’s heart started racing as security footage played on the screen. It alternated between three different angles clearly showing Alan stealing the chips. One of the cameras, set for night vision, appeared to have been directly in front of him, his fingers glowing bright green as they moved to within inches of the camera’s lens.

“We’ve been losing chips from all over campus the past few months,” Lester explained. “We know times are tough. We even let it slide, hoping it would stop, but it’s gotten out of hand. So, we installed cameras.”

“I never went to any of the other buildings,” Alan said, scrambling. “I swear…”

“Mr. Terrell, you’ve been lying since I walked in the door,” Lester said, sounding disappointed. “Why should I believe you now?”

“Look, I’m sorry…”

“Sorry was five minutes ago. You’ll have to talk to the police now.”

Chapter 7

A
large birthday cake was carried out from the refrigerator in the break room to a table where Rolanda “Ro-Ro” Higgins was waiting. People started singing “Happy Birthday,” and one-dollar bills were pinned to her shirt. Because of all the attention, it was Muhammad, sitting a little ways away and eating a sandwich from a Tupperware container, who was the first to notice Alan. Flanked by two uniformed sheriff’s deputies, he was walked down the steps towards the break area, his eyes staring at the ground.

It didn’t take long for everyone else to look over, and the singing slowly stopped. Once the trio reached the first floor, the lead deputy pushed through a propped-open fire door and led Alan out into the now-driving rain.

It was only then that many of the day-shifters glimpsed the handcuffs.

Just outside, Big Time huddled close to the building with Scott and a couple of others as they lit up their break-time cigarettes. When the door swung open, Big Time saw it was Alan and made quick, searching eye contact.

“All right, Big Time,” the young man said, nodding.

Big Time just nodded back, though his heart wasn’t in it. He could feel the young man’s tough-guy defiance that he was planning on carrying to County. From his own youthful experiences, he knew it would be the first thing driven out of him.

As if looking to give Alan a particularly hard time, fat rain drops started splashing down as he was still a few feet from the car. Big Time leaned as far back as he could under the narrow overhang and thought about quitting smoking then and there to mark the moment.

•  •  •

In the women’s restroom, Zakiyah sat on a closed toilet seat, idly playing with her cell phone. She was looking at various photos of Mia, but occasionally one would pop up of Alan or was one she remembered he had taken.

She heard the bathroom swing open and glimpsed Mandy through the space between the door and the stall wall.

“They brought him out.”

Zakiyah was about to respond, but only a cry escaped her lips. She covered her mouth and nodded, forcing herself to sound relaxed.

“Okay, thanks,” she managed

Once the door closed and she was certain she was alone, Zakiyah burst into tears, sobbing long and low, holding nothing back.

•  •  •

Mia carried the blue ribbon Mr. Klekner had given her for winning the math challenge down the covered walkway to the parking lot.

“You blew that pick,” Michael Whittaker bellowed at his younger brother, Emmitt, as they walked in front of Mia. The boys were in sweaty basketball uniforms and stank. Badly.

“Two steps, turn,
stop
. Got it?”

Emmitt nodded as they reached the end of the walkway. Their mother’s SUV was only a few feet away down the curb, but it was raining buckets.

“
Go!
” Michael cried.

The two boys took off running, splashing water in every direction as they ran. Mia waited a moment before following. When she took off running, she kept the ribbon as close to her body as possible, shielding it from the weather.

Just as she reached the SUV, Emmitt slammed the door shut, flinging droplets of water in her face. She heard his mother yell at him and Emmitt turned back, having not registered Mia’s presence.

“Oh,” he said dumbly, opening the door and allowing Mia to climb in.

“Seatbelts,” Mrs. Whittaker said.

In unison, the children buckled their seatbelts and the SUV pulled away from the curb. As the boys resumed their basketball strategy argument and Mrs. Whittaker sank back into her talk radio, Mia realized “oh” would be the only word spoken to her the whole way home.

Ten minutes later, Mia hopped out, ran the fifty yards to her apartment door and was finally out of the storm. After being out in the rain, Mia relished being home in a dark apartment. She put her school books on the kitchen table, pulled a bag of chicken pieces from the freezer to thaw on the counter, turned on the television to catch the end of
Judge Judy
(her favorite show despite her mother’s protestations), and waited to look at her ribbon again.

When she was halfway through her social studies homework, she finally allowed herself a peek, having left it to dry on the television. It was a deep blue with gold lettering. Any suggestion that it was an award for math was absent, but Mia didn’t care. After a moment, she brought it over to the boxes of her father’s trophies and gently laid it among them.

•  •  •

The noise on the factory floor may have been loud on its own, but as the day went on, the rain heralding the arrival of Eliza was even louder. The thin metal roof sounded made it sound like buckets of roofing nails were being poured on it en masse.

The day-shifters cast nervous glances to the ceiling. Most were worried about the drive home, but there were a handful of Katrina survivors looking up as if believing it might be torn away at any moment. Around five o’clock, the intensity of the downpour got so loud several people went to watch at the windows and loading docks. The sky had gone completely dark as if it was the dead of night rather than a late summer afternoon.

“Man, I gotta drive home in this?” Elmer complained. “The 45 is gonna be
fucked.
”

“Nah, the sane ones left work a long time ago,” Beverly suggested. “Might not be that bad.”

“Are you kidding? You gotta go all the way to the Heights, right? Better stick to the cross-streets. How ’bout you, Big Time?”

Big Time had been pretty quiet for most of the afternoon, doing double duty on Alan’s station and his own with limited results. As the weather got worse and everyone up and down the line began gossiping about the storm, he was finally able to get caught up.

He shrugged at Elmer.

“I’ve got my truck. It made it through Katrina. Think it’ll survive a little Houston storm.”

Elmer laughed and was about to retort when Dennis’s voice came bellowing over a loudspeaker from the second-floor catwalk.

“Hey, can I get everybody’s attention? Stop the lines a second.”

Big Time reached over and hit the red rubber button that would bring Line 10 to a halt. The ten lines quickly went silent, and everyone looked up at where Dennis and a couple of the other supervisors were gathered. With the machinery stopped, the sound of the pounding rain was only more ominous, like a thousand angry beasts trying to break their way into the building.

“Harris County has just announced a multi-city flood warning. There will be mandatory evacuations of homes in floodplains and low-lying areas.”

A murmur went through the factory. Every third neighborhood in Houston qualified, the poorest ones especially.

“Obviously, we’re not going to expect any of you to come in tomorrow, but we will be running a couple of lines with skeleton crews to get at least a few units out the door.”

This got Big Time’s attention. He really hoped Dennis was about to say what he hoped he was going to say.

“So, we’ll be paying time-and-a-half to anyone who wants to come in. We’ll have sign-up sheets up front at the end of shift so we’ll know how many to expect.”

Big Time grinned. This was precisely what he wanted. He looked around, trying to gauge who else was going to take the bait, but figured most were going to take the day off whether they feared being flooded out or not.

“Shit, I’m in,” said Elmer. “That’s good money.”

“Thought you were all worried about the 45,” said Big Time. “How do you think it’s going to be in the morning?”

“For time-and-a-half, I guess I’ll find out.”

•  •  •

For Alan, the ride down to Harris County Jail was about as miserable as he was. The cruiser had smelled terrible even before three men in wet clothes climbed in, the windows shut tight due to the gale outside. With the thick partition between the front and back seats, even if the deputies had the air on, it wouldn’t reach him any time soon.

Instead, Alan was stuck in a claustrophobic space smelling of blood, vomit, and whatever else was tracked in by the last prisoners to occupy the space. When he had tried to protest, the deputies ignored him and kept discussing the possibilities presented in the upcoming Houston Texans season. He considered saying something shitty about the Texans just to elicit a reaction, maybe start a conversation, but held his tongue. He couldn’t be sure if they’d take it in the spirit it was meant.

They’d been driving twenty minutes when, suddenly, the car nosed down into a wall of water and Alan was thrown forward, tumbling off the backseat bench.