Flood Plains

by Mark Wheaton

  “KEYS!” he bellowed.

  Alan nodded and finally saw the edge of a key ring poking out of the man’s left breast pocket. But just as he reached for them, the liquid swam over his torso and subsumed the man’s entire chest. Alan, fearing exposure, leapt backwards.

  “What the fuck, man?” the gangster shouted, turning the shotgun on Alan. “Keys!”

  “They’re gone.”

  The gangbanger pulled the dead man’s wrist close in order to activate the gun and shoot Alan. He pulled the trigger, but there was no report, no kick. The ooze had already eaten away much of the man’s fingers, dropping the ring to the floor.

  “Shit!”

  The gangbanger tried to yank his arm away even as the liquid sluiced across the handcuffs and began burning into his hand.

  “Keys!”

  But it was too late. The oil was now racing up his arm, burning away his flesh as it marched towards his face. The gangbanger tried to wipe it away with his other hand and ended up leaving his fingers behind as he yanked his arm away a second later.

  That was it for Alan and the prisoners. They’d been frozen in place by the horrific sight, but as the man melted into the ground, they got the message. It was now or never. Several ran towards the door leading to the garage. Alan rose to follow them just as seven of the prisoners were lifted off their feet and thrown across the room.

  Alan ducked down as the men screamed and flew overhead. He looked back up when he realized they hadn’t landed. Instead of crashing into the wall, the prisoners were now being held aloft by towers of the black ooze. It swarmed over them in torrents, obscuring them from sight. They would begin to scream and shout for help, only to have their voices get sucked away a second later.

  The surviving prisoners ran back to the cafeteria, but Alan held still. Even though he couldn’t see the invisible force, he could feel the change in the air as it rushed past. The oily liquid on the floor was trailing after it.

  The stairs up to the cell block.

  Alan could barely see them in the dark, but there appeared to be only the thinnest of liquid tendrils trailing down them. He knew it was now or never.

  Leaping to his feet, he crossed the room in seconds flat. He took the stairs three at a time, careful not to step in the oil. With each footfall, the liquid shot towards him, as if attracted by the scent of his flesh, but it was too diluted to reach him. Expecting to have his legs yanked out from under him at any second, Alan closed his eyes and powered his way up to the next floor.

  The smell hit him first. Like stepping into an abattoir and a sewer at the same time, the odor of blood and shit filled his nose. On the floor were half a dozen guards, including the sergeant who had come up before, now shredded. Two cell doors were open, and piles of bodies were crowded at the exit as if the occupants of each had flooded to the doorway in a last-ditch effort to escape when they were attacked.

  All that was left were bones and bloody clothes. The walls, floor, and ceiling were stained deep red with the blood of two dozen men.

  Alan looked into one of the closed cells and saw the same thing. Stains of black appeared around the sinks and toilets in each. It suggested that that was where the villain emerged.

  At the end of the hallway, the remains of a guard were hanging from a fire door left slightly ajar. The magnetic lock was clicking angrily, frustrated at being left unlatched.

  Alan thanked the Lord for small favors and raced straight for it. He tried to avoid stepping in the blood as he went, but this proved impossible. Still, it didn’t seem to be burning through his shoes, so he kept going.

  When he reached the fire door, he kicked it open. The empty and, more importantly, dry stairwell extended down to…somewhere. Hearing more slams and screams below in the cafeteria, Alan took a deep breath and raced down the steps.

  • • •

  As the candles flickered in her parlor, Sineada did her best to parse the cacophony she was hearing on the other side. It frightened her. She tried to extend her voice to any one individual, but the rush of anguish shut her out completely. Fighting against it, she concentrated on one idea and pushed aside all others, trying to find its match.

  When she did not, she breathed out a sigh of relief. She looked across the table at Mia and smiled.

  “Your daddy’s fine. He’s got a ways to go, but for the moment, he is safe where he is.”

  Mia nodded furtively but didn’t seem as relieved as Sineada hoped she’d be. There was something else hiding behind her eyes, troubling her mind.

  Chapter 13

  Muhammad thought it would be easy when he got to America.

  He would learn English, he would present his impressive credentials (a bachelor’s and a master’s in computer engineering from a prestigious college in Kharagpur) at the right company, and he’d get a marvelous job.

  He’d heard anti-Muslim sentiment described as “the last socially acceptable prejudice in America” but had spoken with a few former colleagues in Houston who said they never felt. They didn’t grow out their beards, and their wives might wear a hijab to cover their heads but never a burqa. They joked that Muhammad would be at a disadvantage because of his name.

  Mostly, Muhammad was told, he’d be lumped in as “Indian” and taken for someone who believed in reincarnation and the sacredness of cows.

  But then they arrived just after the mass migration into Houston following Katrina and Muhammad had been unable to find an engineering position. He blamed his lack of English. His wife, Fadela, was better at meeting people than he was and quickly discovered the temp agency that supplied assembly line workers to Deltech. By hiring temps, the State of Texas didn’t require the company to pay health and social security benefits to its factory employees until they worked 750 hours. The workers were complicit in this arrangement, working their 750 as quickly as they could. Double-shifting, working overtime, people did whatever it took to finish their Deltech tour in just three or four months, bank the money, and then work a second seasonal job the rest of the year like driving a truck or roughnecking on a rig in the Gulf.

  Some just stayed home and collected unemployment, stretching the money as far as they could.

  Muhammad, however, looked at it as an opportunity. He wanted to do a good job and get noticed by the corporate bosses. His partner at the test station, Mukul, had warned him away from this belief, saying that Deltech never promoted from the floor. There was just a separation between the two. Mukul was banking his money to buy into a convenience store franchise that relatives of his had some success with in Houston and invited Muhammad to join him.

  Muhammad was determined to work in his field, however, and had declined.

  “You gonna be okay running ‘test’ by yourself today?”

  Muhammad nodded to Big Time as the big man walked down to his station from pack.

  “Guess Mukul didn’t need the money,” Big Time offered.

  “He drives in from Baytown. Hour and a half both ways.”

  “Is that right?” Big Time asked, realizing this was the most he’d heard Muhammad ever say.

  “Yes. Would be twice that with this typhoon.”

  “Well, if it gets too much, I’m sure I can find someone to pick up the slack,” Big Time said, noticing Scott walking by. “You know ‘test,’ right?”

  Scott scowled, eyeing Muhammad.

  “No fucking clue.”

  Big Time rolled his eyes. He knew Scott could be a racist fuck, but also knew that without any supervisor around, it was highly unlikely that they’d be getting any real work out of him that day.

  A couple of months back, a group of observers from a consulting firm were brought on to measure the line’s efficiency. They went from line to line, timing each station. When they reached Scott’s, he spent the entire twelve hours creatively dragging his feet to such a degree that it skewed the results for entire factory.

  Big Time was dismayed that Scott wasn’t reprimanded. What he soon learned was that the observers didn�
��t give a shit any more than Scott did. They were there to start and stop a timer and report their findings. While the rest of the workers had doubled their efforts under the watchful eye of the consultants and earned near-impossible daily quotas, Scott was handed one that allowed him to get paid the same for goofing off most of the day.

  Big Time was among many who were simply impressed by Scott’s foresight.

  “Regardless of my friend’s bullshit, if you need help, we’ll find it for you,” Big Time told Muhammad. “Cool?”

  “Cool.”

  Big Time headed back to pack, leaving Muhammad to ponder the strangeness of America. A black man who was close friends with a white man who clearly hated people because of the color of their skin? He would enjoy debating this conundrum with Fadela that night.

  • • •

  Alan ran as fast as he could through downtown. He had no idea where the hell he was going but was focused on finding one thing: dry land.

  He had never been in rain this heavy. The storm drains were overflowing, water was a foot high on the sidewalks, and was sluicing into the lobbies and parking lots of buildings, but this was hardly paramount in Alan’s mind. What Alan was trying to avoid looking at, what he was trying to force from his ear, were the sights and sounds of every other human being in downtown being torn apart or inside-out.

  What he had seen in the county jail was nothing compared to the madness on the streets of Houston. Thousands of torn bodies floated down the block. Buses and cars were stopped at odd angles, their drivers and passengers having been pulped against the windows and dashboards. Thunderous splashes sent up geysers of bloody water as the bodies of people who either jumped or were thrown from great heights slapped into the flood.

  Alan had made the mistake of looking up at one point after noticing blood drizzling down both of his arms. Hundreds of people, far more than he imagined had struggled in to work that day at all, were being held in mid-air as the thick, black tendrils of oily liquid snaked out shattered windows, dissolved their skin, and then dumped the refuse into the streets.

  “Shit!” Alan cried, leaping aside as a partial torso slammed onto the sidewalk in front of him.

  Dry land.

  Alan kept looking, but the more he ran, the more he feared that there was no such thing. The entire city was on the verge of flooding. If what was happening up in the buildings was any indication of this strange killing machine’s ability, dry land might not be enough.

  But Alan kept running.

  When he could, he launched himself off the sidewalk and ran along benches, retaining walls that circled trees or flags, or even jumped from garbage cans. If it was any other day, the leaps he was making from one ledge to the next wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. The distances were impossible and the landing area too slick. He’d obviously slip and go crashing down, breaking every bone in his body while cracking his skull.

  Right now, however, he landed with supernatural authority. He was like one of those guys in the movies, a stunt man who never lost his footing.

  To cross streets, he’d jump from a wall to the top of a bus shelter and onto the roof of a car, all without skipping a beat. When he landed on the other side, he just kept running. His lungs burned with the effort. His muscles strained. Like the screaming, he ignored this, too.

  He’d glimpsed the tendrils of black hunting him in the floodwaters. Like eels, they cut through the streets and were sometimes only a few feet behind him. But then, somebody slower would stagger out of a building or car or just down the sidewalk, and the eels would engulf them in a shroud of black oil instead.

  He saw this happen more than once. A shell-shocked soul covered in the blood of their co-workers would run out of their building, believing that they were safe. When the black tentacle torpedoed straight for them, Alan could see bewilderment, horror, disappointment, and resignation all flash across a person’s face within a single second.

  Then the tentacle would expand like a hooded cobra, wrap around them, and, if Alan was close, he could just hear screams turn to gurgling panic as the liquid forced itself into every pore.

  He’d come around the corner of one building and had seen a middle-aged woman, completely nude for no reason he could ascertain, standing still and watching the water race past. She had made eye contact with Alan and he detected no madness, only resolve. When a great black hand emerged from the water next to her, she turned to face it.

  What haunted Alan now was that even with all of that stoicism, he could still hear her wail in agony as the dark mass enveloped her.

  Alan made it another block and finally saw something akin to Shangri-La. Past the last skyscraper was the bridge over Buffalo Bayou that connected downtown Houston with Fifth Ward. He had this idea that the bridge would be safe. Water would drain off to either end, leaving the center high and dry. Though there would be water flowing under it, he imagined he’d still be high enough to avoid either whatever the black oil was that used water to travel and the invisible force that seemed to presage it. He wasn’t sure how the poltergeist effect worked, but it never seemed to trawl too far away from the physical black sludge part it ran in tandem with.

  He also noted that the tendrils of sludge never had a tail. They might have looked like snakes or eels, but endless ones that seemed to be connected back to a whole. Also, the thing in the water didn’t have eyes or a mouth, absorbing its victims, not eating them. What it did have was some sort of extrasensory ability to become alerted to the presence of humans that fed its single-minded determination to then consume them. In this way, it was like a perfect, mindless predator, moving like a shark.

  An animal elegance.

  No mercy, no hesitation, absolute efficiency. The only time much more than clothes and bones were left behind was when the eater seemed to be called away to a greater prey.

  The bridge was now only a few dozen yards ahead. Shutting out all else, Alan ran the race of his life, counting the strides.

  Thirteen…still alive…fifteen…still alive…seventeen…still alive…nineteen…still alive…

  • • •

  Sineada.

  The voice startled the old woman. She’d been in the kitchen with Mia making snacks by candlelight. Sineada hesitated, not wanting to alarm her young charge.

  “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Sineada stepped out of the kitchen and made as if she was heading for the bathroom. Once out of sight, she ducked into her reading room off the parlor. She knew she could “commune” anywhere, but she was accustomed to doing it here, and there were few distractions. The handful of times she had hallucinated during a session, knowing every centimeter of her surroundings had helped pull her out of it.

  Hello…? She asked in her head as she stood in the doorway, looking into the dark room. I am Sineada.

  She waited. All she heard was the sound of the rain pounding on the roof until:

  Sineada. Your time is today.

  Sineada was surprised by this but worked to maintain her composure.

  The storm? Sineada asked.

  No. What the storm brings. Multitudes died and multitudes will follow them into death.

  Sineada puzzled over this. Something about this wasn’t right. She knew that, often, the words were her own, manufactured by her mind as they interpreted a feeling from the other side. But this was ominous. There was a meaning she couldn’t quite divine.

  What is in the storm? she asked.

  But this time, there was no answer.

  Despite this, Sineada found herself strangely elated. She had always feared that death would catch her unaware and she wouldn’t be ready. Now, in the moment, she felt ready for whatever this might bring.

  Something else made her happy, too. This was one of only a handful of times she had been able to communicate rather than merely listen. The voices came to her disorganized, and a line thrown out into the ether might be returned with little more than a fleeting thought or instinct. A response that confirmed something was
there but then did not engage further. This time, someone had come to her. She’d become that beacon her own grandfather told her she might grow into becoming. She marveled at what this told her. There would be no real death, no end to this life if she could communicate back to the living. This simple realization filled her with such a joy she didn’t even notice Mia coming up behind her in the parlor.

  “Oh, did you finish the sandwiches?”

  Mia eyed her curiously for a moment as if having trouble formulating a question. She scrunched her brow as she looked up at her great-grandmother.

  “What does that mean, ‘What the storm brings’?”

  Chapter 14

  The storm had arrived.

  Everyone in Building Four could hear the winds rattling the walls as the sky went black outside the windows and the rain lashed at the roof. The trees outside the break area windows had been bent over for much of the morning, but they were now beginning to snap away. Branches flew against the windows. Despite their being safety glass, Big Time could tell just by listening when a new crack was made.

  Trying to distract himself, Big Time lowered another unit into a waiting box and shoved it through the tape machine. Though Dennis had given them a low quota, most people were working just as hard as they usually did to make the time go faster.

  “At this rate, corporate’s going to be hoping for hurricanes every day,” Scott moaned, slapping labels on the finished boxes. “You can tell the hamsters all you want that it’s nothing but free food and laziness on the menu, and they’ll still get bored and climb right back up on that wheel.”

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” Big Time chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you work so hard in my life, Hamster Scott.”

  Scott rolled his eyes and got back to work.

  Big Time raised the next computer and was moving it over to Elmer so he could slap the Styrofoam corners on it when the power went out in the building. A couple of people screamed, but Big Time didn’t have time to react as the hydraulic lift bucked upwards. The vacuum released the computer, which dropped five feet onto the concrete floor, where it landed with a crash.