by Mark Wheaton
Within seconds, the waters in the parking garage were running red with blood.
• • •
Sineada had revived Mia seconds before the fire bombs were dropped on the four rising sludge worms. The little girl was just getting a sense of her surroundings when she was struck by the thousands of voices bellowing in confusion at the strike.
“Oh, my God!” Alan cried. “Did they just kill it?”
“No,” replied Mia. “They’re just trying to get everybody out.”
Regardless, they had an amazing front-row seat to the madness that ensued. The tendrils splintered off in their many directions and, moments later, Mia detected the first people racing out of a parking garage a block from the tower and into the floodwaters. Rather than staying together, they went off in a dozen different directions.
“Smart,” remarked Sineada.
This elation was replaced only a second later by anguish. The creature, far from being dead, began rolling over and over in the water. At first, the main body was about as wide around as a city bus. But as it kept going, it increased in mass, pulling its distended tendrils in on itself.
Then it attacked the building all over again. Rather than surrounding it, this time it injected itself directly into the superstructure. Almost immediately, Brammeier Tower began to bend and bow. Chunks of its outer walls crashed down into the street or bounced off the creature, though it hardly seemed to notice.
“Zakiyah?” Alan cried.
Mia’s gaze remained fixed on the worm as it altered its shape to slide quickly into the lobby, a snake squishing itself into a quarter-sized hole, but then nodded.
“She’s in there, but it doesn’t seem to know that. It’s going after everybody else.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Sineada asked.
Mia shook her head.
“No. But we have to get closer. We’ll be needed in a minute.”
• • •
As the dump truck raced up the ramp between P3 and P2, everybody could hear the sounds of mad panic coming from above. The building was shaking furiously and great cracks were forming across the walls, suggesting collapse was imminent.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Big Time said, hitting the accelerator.
P2 was flooding as well, and rivers of blood poured in from the ceiling and stairwells.
“Oh, God,” Tony muttered.
“Don’t look at it, son,” Big Time said.
Halfway up the ramp to P1, the truck almost slipped backwards as a torrent of bloody water slammed into the front of the vehicle. Big Time hit the brakes and turned, skidded a few feet, but then righted the truck and kept pushing forward. When they crested the lip of the ramp, they came up on a massacre.
Brammeier Tower survivors splashed in every direction, some even swimming, as the finger-like sludge worms shot towards them, elastic as rubber bands. They grabbed the people, consumed them, and returned to the large black mass pouring in from a hole in the roof.
“It’s faster than before,” Zakiyah observed. “It wasn’t moving like that at Deltech.”
“It’s pissed,” Scott suggested. “Didn’t know it was capable of that.”
“We still don’t,” Big Time retorted.
Gunning the engine to drown out the screams of the doomed, Big Time plowed the dump truck through the rushing floodwaters towards the exit. They had just reached the final ramp when the truck was hit so hard that the only thing keeping it from being knocked on its side was the roof punching into the garage ceiling.
“Shit!” Big Time yelled. “Hold on!”
The truck slammed back down onto its wheels in time for the poltergeist force to punch it again, this time sending a tidal wave of bloody water over the cab. Big Time smacked his head into the driver’s-side window so hard he cracked the glass.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Scott cried.
Woozy from the hit, Big Time couldn’t even see through the windshield, but he hit the gas anyway. The truck awkwardly lurched forward but not before the poltergeist effect hit it again, crushing it against the wall. There was a tremendous bang and the truck shook.
“The tires,” Big Time surmised.
He tried to pull the truck forward and realized it was probably more than one that had blown. He braced himself for the next attack, but it didn’t come. Instead, the ground shook, and they heard a loud roar.
“The tower’s coming down!” Scott yelled.
• • •
A block away from Brammeier Tower, Mia, Sineada and Alan felt the tremor of the building’s imminent collapse.
“We’ve gotta get back!” Alan yelled, paddling in reverse as best he could.
The trio retreated as the tower came down, crumbling into multiple pieces as it smashed into the floodwaters, sending up waves. At the moment the largest piece broke off and fell lengthwise down Fannin Avenue, the giant sludge creature extracted itself from the wreckage and disappeared under the water’s surface.
Due to the heavy rain, the dust cloud was muted, and even then, the pile of rubble that had so recently been a skyscraper under construction was surprisingly small. The first six or seven floors still remained, with jagged chunks of its exterior skeleton shooting skyward, but filling it and the parking garages below were the other twenty-five floors that had pancaked down on top of one another.
“Did she make it?” Alan asked breathlessly.
Mia scanned the area and nodded.
“There,” she said, pointing across the street from the fallen tower to the Shell building. “Coming up from the parking garage.”
At that moment, the dump truck came into view. It was limping along, but finally made it out onto the street. That’s when the monster resurfaced, erupting out of the water behind the dump truck, its poltergeist force lifting it out of the water and throwing it across the street. The truck smashed into the second-floor windows of the building opposite’s glass façade, shattering windows and twisting metal, before crashing down onto its passenger side in the floodwaters below.
“MOMMY!” Mia screamed.
Without a single thought to her own safety, Mia bolted off the raft. She half-swam, half-slogged through the waist-deep water the rest of the way to the truck.
“Mia, no!” Sineada cried, but her great-granddaughter wasn’t listening.
Mia reached the front of the truck and found her mother, bleeding from cuts to her head and arm, with a small group of people she didn’t recognize. The cab was filling up with water. The man behind the wheel was trying to pull a teenager up to the driver’s side as if to climb out on top. When he saw Mia, his eyes went wide.
“RUN!” Big Time exclaimed. “Get out of here!”
“That’s my mom!” Mia cried, pointing at Zakiyah.
Big Time was flabbergasted. He thought he’d heard wrong. But then Zakiyah, her eyelids fluttered, looked up and saw Mia.
“Baby?” Zakiyah said, as incredulous as Big Time. “Oh, my God! You have to get out of here.”
But Mia had already shimmied up to the top of the truck and was trying to get the driver’s-side door open. Big Time got to the door, only to find it wouldn’t open. Figuring it was bent, he gave it a shove but almost fell over.
“Hey, Scott. Could use a hand.”
Scott, who had been up against the passenger-side door, was holding himself out of the water flooding into the truck cab as best he could with his left arm gripped behind the seat. His legs appeared to be trapped beneath the dashboard. Blood was pooling around them, suggesting serious wounds.
“Hold on, Scott!” Big Time exclaimed.
He balanced himself against the back seat and began kicking out the windshield. The safety glass spider-webbed and finally bent enough out of its frame for Big Time to knock it free.
“Tony, grab my hand.”
A little more lucid now, Tony did as he was asked and stepped sideways through the windshield. Once on the other side, he helped Zakiyah out as well.
“
Mommy!” Mia cried, racing into her mother’s arms.
“Baby, I don’t know how you got down here, but I thank God all the same you’re all right.”
Inside the cab, Big Time squatted down next to Scott.
“Man, we’ve got to get you out of here,” Big Time said, surveying the damage.
“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Scott replied, muscles taut with pain. “Pretty sure this stitches me up. All that’s uncertain now is whether I’ll die from blood loss or lose my grip and drown.”
“Drama queen.”
Scott snickered, but this quickly became a wheeze. Big Time slid down next to him and tried to lift up the dashboard. The engine block had been shoved backward along with much of the front end of the vehicle, meaning Scott was trapped under about a ton of metal.
“Holy shit, is that Alan?” Scott croaked.
Big Time turned quickly. Sure enough, rowing up to the truck in what looked like an upside-down roof, was Alan. It looked like he’d suffered a grievous injury to his legs.
“Well, what do you know?” Scott sighed. “Zakiyah, her daughter, Alan. Somebody got a happy ending after all. Where’s the critter?”
“Dunno,” Big Time admitted. “It threw us out the door, we landed, and that was the last I saw of it. I thought we were dead.”
“It doesn’t see you anymore,” said Sineada, walking over to the two men. “Zakiyah’s daughter is protecting us.”
“How’s that work?” Scott asked.
Sineada shrugged. Seeing how much pain Scott was in, she glanced back at Mia. The little girl broke away from Zakiyah and walked over, eyeing Scott.
“Will you let me help you?” she asked.
Scott looked bemused.
“Did you really scare off the big bad sludge worm?”
“No, I just talked to it,” Mia replied.
“What’re you going do to me?”
Same.
Mia took Scott’s hand and silenced the part of his brain that was telling him how much pain he was in. He sighed, sinking into his seat.
“I don’t know what you did, but I thank you just the same,” Scott said, a wry grin on his face.
But Mia didn’t return the smile. In fact, she suddenly looked quite sad. Scott could guess why but said nothing. Mia gave him a kiss on the forehead and then climbed back out of the cab.
“Funny kid Alan’s got, huh?” Scott said, his voice weak.
Big Time nodded.
“Are you okay?”
“If you mean ‘am I comfortable’? I’m a lot more now than before she walked over and did whatever she did,” Scott replied. “If you mean ‘do I mind dying?’ I think I’m glad it’s not going to be at the hand of those sludge worms. Only think bothering me is that it looks like you guys got a boat, got some magic kid, and just might get out of here in one piece. Can’t help feeling like that ‘last soldier to die.’ I’m going to miss you guys.”
Scott said the last part with such sincerity that Big Time had to smile.
“Oh, okay, ’cause you’re a doctor?”
“I’m a realist,” Scott whispered.
Scott closed his eyes, exhaled a rattling cough, and seemed to deflate.
“C’mon, dickhead. You’re not really going to play that shit, are you?”
Big Time touched Scott’s shoulder, but he was unresponsive. He shook him for a moment, but the muscles were loose, and he just flopped back and forth. Big Time hadn’t cried that day but now felt tears welling in his eyes.
He leaned over and whispered something in Scott’s ear, gripped his shoulder one more time, and then clambered out of the truck. The constant rain had seemed to let up for a moment but now was back with a vengeance.
The others were gathered on the makeshift raft, Sineada tending to Zakiyah and Tony’s wounds. Big Time joined them, his eyes sunken and hollow.
A moment later, Big Time and Tony manning the oars this time, the raft began to make its way back towards the bayou.
• • •
From the cab of the dump truck, Scott watched Big Time and the others leave. He had decided on his ruse, knowing Big Time would stay with him no matter what out of a misplaced sense of duty. The easiest way around it was to just accelerate the process and die, or at least pretend to. He’d gotten up close and personal with a dying person only once. He’d been in the army and a convoy he was a part of got involved in a crack-up outside of Waco. The troops had done what they could, but it was too late for a young mom and what Scott later learned was her aunt.
She begged Scott to make sure the kids in the back seat were safe. He assured her they were, and this knowledge allowed her to die in peace. The scene had burned into Scott’s mind. He felt silly trying to re-create it but figured he could fake it well enough to fool Big Time.
When his friend had moved to leave, Scott was impressed by how well his scheme had worked. But then Big Time leaned over and whispered in his ear.
“I know you’re not dead, motherfucker.”
It took all of Scott’s self-control not to laugh or even flinch. He felt Big Time’s eyes on him for a long time, but the big man finally moved away.
It’s better this way, Scott thought.
He listened to the hurricane rains beat a tattoo against the metal of the truck. He idly wondered what the search-and-rescue people would think when they found him. Could he perhaps be the one corpse left intact in all of downtown Houston? He hoped Big Time or the others might live in order to tell the police what happened, but also imagined the not-knowing had its own appeal.
Is this guy some kind of superhero?! Was his blood poisonous or something? Who IS this guy?
Scott chuckled to himself. He thought of police, scientists, even the military pondering how come some white trash motherfucker in a dump truck wasn’t worth the monster’s time and energy.
A moment later, and he was gone.
Chapter 32
Out in the Gulf, rain continued to pour down on the Van Ness. The winds had subsided for the most part as the hurricane’s rear wall moved further onto land. Eliza would likely soon be downgraded to a Category 2 or 3 storm.
The Van Ness’s commander, Coast Guard Captain Leslie Kubena, was originally from the Virgin Islands. She’d grown up on the water and had weathered several storms long before becoming a sailor. If she did the math, she thought it would come out that she’d actually spent about twice as many hours of her life on the sea than on land. Though her first consideration was always the safety of her sailors, she felt a strong sense of responsibility towards the people on Galveston Island, particularly after the discovery of the collapsed causeway.
What disturbed her the most was that there was still no communication with the island. She didn’t expect telephones, but there should’ve been something on the radio by now even if it was just picking up traffic from first-responders.
Instead, there was nothing. Multiple lookouts had reported seeing no signs of life. Yes, visibility was extremely poor, but there hadn’t been one vehicle, one civilian, or even so much as a flashlight spotted from the ship.
“The roads on this side of the island are flooded,” reported the Van Ness’s executive officer, a young lieutenant commander named Bruce Arrington. “People might just be waiting for the waters to go down.”
The Van Ness was anchored off the east side of the island, selected because it was the most protected side. The danger of capsize was real even with so large a vessel.
“Yeah, but people are unpredictable, and storms make them crazy,” Kubena countered. “Someone would panic. Someone would decide to be the Good Samaritan. Somebody would go on patrol and another would just be stupid. Heck, someone would decide to loot. We’ve been sitting here six hours, and we’ve haven’t seen a soul. We need to get somebody on the beach just to make sure it’s not worse than we think.”
Though the seas were still rough, Arrington had served with his captain long enough to know she’d weighed the danger to her men before suggesting such a
course of action.
“Two fast boats, twelve men?”
“Sounds right. Check the weather again, but then get ’em in the water.”
“Aye-aye.”
It was a routine the men had drilled several times, so the boats were in the water less than five minutes later. They swung wide around the island in order to let the current do some of the work for them but also to scope out the best landing zone. Even in the relatively light boats, they were still wary of underwater hazards. With rain pattering down on their waterproof boonie hats, they kept the boats over deep water until the last possible moment. Then they took the last few yards slow.
They needn’t have worried.
The ride in was a dream. Everything went according to their training and most optimistic models. The sailors swept up towards the shallows, hopped out, and dragged their boats up onto the beach. Tying the fast boats up to a guardrail thirty feet from the water, they moved out and headed inland.
The low-lying areas of the island were flooded up to two and three feet. For just this reason, many of the roads around Galveston were slightly elevated or up a grade. Though they were slick with rainwater, there were few puddles on the streets.
“Anything yet, lieutenant?” Arrington asked over the radio to the team leader, Dobson.
“These roads are drivable, sir,” Dobson replied. “We’re looking at lots of water, likely some real property damage, but nothing compared to what we saw with Andrew or Katrina.”
From their position on the bridge of the Van Ness, Kubena and Arrington could see through their binoculars the men fanning out over the shoreline. Kubena feared that once they’d landed, the only means of communication would be with handheld strobes, tiny signaling lights that could be used to blink Morse code messages. She was relieved then that, despite a little wind distortion on the throat mics, radio communication was possible.
“Have you seen any signs of life?” Kubena asked.
“Negative…oh, wait. Ma’am, we just spotted a dog.”
Through her binoculars, Kubena spotted a small white terrier trotting towards the sailors.
“I’m going to take that as a good sign that the storm was survivable,” Kubena replied. “You boys progress on in to the interior, but be careful. I don’t want to see anybody coming back with Mardi Gras beads.”
