by Mark Wheaton
Either way, he knew there’d be no survivors on the vessel.
The crack of a rifle echoed across the bay, and a muzzle flash was visible before anyone on the raft could make out the shooter. It appeared that a sailor had managed to climb to the highest rung of the ship’s antenna array and was firing down at the sludge worms. He only managed to get off four shots before the poltergeist force threw him over the side. Big Time thought he could make out the man’s mouth open in a scream as he tumbled towards a sludge worm rising from the waves to meet him but couldn’t be sure.
“It’s not as big as the one we saw downtown,” Zakiyah observed.
“Yeah, it’s just a piece of it,” Big Time suggested. “Bigger than a single sludge worm, but still not the entire collective.”
But it might be enough, Sineada thought.
She estimated the Coast Guard cutter probably contained at least a hundred souls, now dead. She quietly thanked the universe for allowing them to sacrifice their lives to bring the beast back to Galveston, hopefully to be among the last to do so.
Chapter 34
As the sludge worm finished draining the cutter of its complement of officers and crew, Big Time and the others quickly poled around the Texas City Dike towards Galveston. Sineada kept one eye on it but knew it was unlikely to retract its tendrils all the way back to the main body before they were in place.
At least, that’s what she hoped.
Rather than the beach Lieutenant Dobson had chosen for his landing, Sineada indicated for Big Time and the others to angle out towards the Gulf-facing southern side of the island. In the distance, oil derricks were arranged against the gray horizon like birds perched on alternating fence posts. Behind them on the island like a matched set were endless refineries, one company’s plant squeezed right up next to its neighbors with only a chain-link fence between them. There were pipes and tanks and smoke stacks to burn off natural gas, and storage towers as far as the eye could see.
Big Time surmised that if you got a good start, you could leap from one company’s tanks to the next. He then immediately hoped by conjuring this, he wasn’t going to have to prove it in a harried moment when the sludge worms attacked.
“It’s like looking across the Mississippi from the Quarter,” Tony said.
Big Time nodded in agreement, but the strange thought that if this all resulted from the anger of the unburied dead from the Galveston hurricane, what about all those Katrina blew out to sea? Didn’t New Orleans have the same coastal oil industry as Houston? He figured he’d be long dead by the time the wronged spirits of Katrina took their revenge on the Crescent City but hoped someone pointed them up the river to Baton Rouge or around and up the Atlantic Coast to Washington, D.C. That is, if they truly wanted to get at the root of the weed.
They docked the raft on one of the concrete piers and ascended a short flight of steps over a high breakwater that had been constructed to prevent the refinery from flooding during storms. But Eliza had been no ordinary hurricane, and there was standing water of at least a foot around the various tanks and service buildings. With the ocean in the background, the floodwaters created an optical illusion that suggested the refinery was actually floating at sea, a visual helped along by the water gently lapping up their sides suggesting movement.
Though they’d been worried about how to transport Alan, the question was solved almost as soon as they’d docked. The workers had lashed pieces of equipment too large to stow indoors to posts and dockside pilings. Big Time had spotted a pallet jack roped to a building with bungee cords, and he quickly went to free it.
“You can sit on a pallet,” he called to Alan, who Tony and Zakiyah were carrying over the breakwater.
“You’re shitting me,” Alan replied.
“Like we’re boxing you and shipping you out,” Big Time replied.
He jacked up the rabbit until its fork was completely out of the water. He then grabbed the top pallet from a nearby stack and jammed it into place. The pallet was waterlogged due to the rain but hadn’t been subjected to flooding. He hoped Alan wouldn’t find it too uncomfortable.
When Tony and Zakiyah lowered Alan onto the pallet, he got as comfortable as possible, but he was struck with a new realization. This was his future. Carried, moved, unable to do for himself. What surprised him most was how light he now was. He’d lost flesh, bone, and blood, but also water weight. He’d spent much of the past few hours sweating out through every pore as his body tried to keep warm. Now he tasted the salt on his lips and knew how dehydrated he had become.
Worse, when Tony and Zakiyah had picked him up, they grabbed him roughly like a man. After they’d seen how frail he’d become, they set him down as gingerly as they’d handle a baby bird. It was a horrible feeling, a shot directly into Alan’s pride.
Big Time, meanwhile, was trying to determine what unseen dangers might lurk beneath the deceptively shallow sheen of water. He’d already taken a bad step off what turned out to be a curb, twisting his ankle. He limped a couple of steps before turning back to Sineada.
“What are we looking for?”
“The big pipes. Ones that run all the way out to the derricks. They go across the sea floor and then up to the derricks, where oil is pumped up from below the crust, transferred into those pipes, and sent here to be refined. A lot of that drilling goes hundreds of feet under the ocean floor. I’m going to wrestle this thing all the way to the center of the Earth.”
“All by your lonesome?”
“Well, somebody’s going to have to light the candle and burn us on down. Then, seal us up when it’s over. And you’d better seal it right. One drop of this mess gets out, and it might start up all over again.”
Big Time really, really wished Scott was there. This was so impossible, so unlikely, that he thought he would benefit greatly from his friend’s counsel.
“Well, let’s get you to one of those pipes.”
The ragtag group carefully waded through the refinery. They saw signs that suggested more than a few men had been manning the place when the storm hit, only to be violently killed by the sludge worms.
Tony seemed to be the most numb to the signs of carnage, which worried Big Time. He’d pass broken glass saturated in blood and not so much as give it a second glance. Big Time wondered what his son thought of Sineada’s plan and if, perhaps, part of his attitude was tied to the fact that he didn’t believe in it at all. His resignation came from knowing he was soon to join the tally of those killed out here in the middle of nowhere.
They reached a massive steel pipe painted white. It was as wide around as a small family house. Behind it and heading towards the interior of the refinery were three smaller pipes connected to the large feeder. Big Time assumed these took the raw crude pulled in from the derrick and whisked it off to three separate areas to be refined, though he didn’t really understand what went into that process. In front, the giant pipe extended across the refinery, cut through the breakwater, and descended into the Gulf at a forty-five-degree angle.
At the very top of it was a watertight hatch. A large wrench was attached to the hatch in order to wrest it open. To get there, one would have to climb a small, steel-rung ladder built onto the pipe.
“Think you can get all the way up there?” Big Time asked Sineada.
“You’ll help me, won’t you?” Sineada quipped.
“Anything to get out of this water. My feet are starting to itch.”
Zakiyah was helping Mia along when her grandmother came over and took her hands.
“I wish I’d gotten to know you and your family a little better,” Sineada said. “You take care of your daughter.”
“Wait, you’re doing this now?” Zakiyah asked, surprised.
“Every second we wait, that could mean another person dead. It can’t wait, so we can’t wait.”
Tears sprang into Zakiyah’s eyes, and she surprised herself by leaning forward and hugging her grandmother.
“I will, Abuela.”
&
nbsp; Sineada nodded towards Alan.
“You, too.”
Alan, the words not coming fast enough, simply nodded.
Sineada then turned to Mia.
“You need something off of me, you just say as much and I’ll be there. Okay?”
“Okay,” Mia replied quietly, forcing herself not to cry.
“Okay. I love you.”
Sineada turned to let Big Time help her up the ladder. Mia’s eyes were red and the tears were coming, but her apprehension came from not knowing if she should tell her great-grandmother what she knew or not.
Finally, she spoke up.
“It’s going to hurt!” she cried out, stopping Sineada on her ascent. “But only for a minute. It’s fast. But I could hear the people when they died.”
Big Time’s veins went cold. He couldn’t imagine what that must’ve been like for the little girl, hearing everyone’s pain all day. Sineada simply nodded a little.
“I know, baby. I heard them, too. Doesn’t last long, though. There and gone.”
With that, Sineada gripped the nearest rung of the steel ladder and continued her slow climb with Big Time right behind her.
• • •
The storm had been downgraded to a Category 2 but was continuing on through Central Texas, arcing towards the Texas-Louisiana-Arkansas border. The spirit collective didn’t seem to care.
When it rampaged through Houston and the surrounding cities, people had evacuated or otherwise sought shelter. The farther it moved inland, however, the more people it found freely going about their lives. There was no word out of Harris County except for reports of widespread blackouts and folks discovering they couldn’t call in to check on friends or relatives, but no one panicked.
What no one knew was that the military had come under attack in two separate incidents already, one on Interstate 45 north to Dallas and another on Route 290 out to Austin. These were the first filmed attacks by the collective. The soldiers had been lightly armed but were as unprepared for this kind of encounter as the crew of the Van Ness had been. The images of the attacks had been broadcast onto monitors at Fort Hood, which immediately bounced them to the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs were rounded up, and all sorts of judgment calls had to be made. There were rescues to be considered, but the idea that this was some sort of biohazard run amuck weighed heavily on the decision-making process.
It took a full two hours to agree that two navy helicopters would be flown in from the naval air station in Pensacola for low-level reconnaissance with ground units mobilized but not deployed. What they couldn’t have known was that while they deliberated, the sludge worms consumed another thirty-two thousand people.
After devouring the sailors of the Van Ness, the tendrils began retracting to join the main body back upstate. It was then that it became aware of six people on Galveston Island suddenly appearing as if from thin air.
The only pertinent fact was that they were alive and that the resources necessary to collect them were minimal. A thin tendril spun off from the main worm and shot back down south to the island.
• • •
When Mia lifted the psychic veil that cloaked their presence, she felt the response of the creature within seconds. It wasn’t so much a voice as a strong intuition tied to a direction. She knew the gambit had worked.
“It’s coming!” she called up to Big Time.
Big Time had been staring out over the water when the little girl’s words traveled up to him. It took a moment for it to register, but once it did, he snapped into action.
“All right!” he called.
He turned and lowered himself over the edge of the pipe’s hatch. There was a matching ladder on the inside of the pipe, but as it followed a concave curve, it was a lot more difficult to use. Still, he hurried down it to where Sineada sat at the base. He’d made the climb a few minutes before when helping Sineada, but the latent oil fumes had been too much for him and he’d headed out. Now he barely noticed them.
“Mia says it on its way.”
“Good. Time to see if we can make this work.”
Big Time reached the bottom and hopped off the ladder, a metallic thud echoing down the pipe from his landing.
“What do you need from me?”
“Not a thing. I didn’t even need you to come down here. But I thank you anyway…Isaac.”
Big Time chuckled at the sound of his real name, amused by Sineada’s demonstration of her psychic prowess. He moved over to where she was sitting, her shoes and dress stained with oil, and sat down.
“You want me to stay here?”
“Will it make it easier on your conscience if I refuse?”
“I think so.”
“Then get. I don’t need you. You’re wasting my oxygen just sitting there. You’ve got your son to think about anyway. Go on. Who needs you?”
Big Time put his arm around the old woman and hugged her tight to him. She embraced him back as he kissed her gently on the cheek.
“You take care, okay?” he said, getting to his feet.
“You, too.”
As Big Time headed slowly back up the ladder, he was struck anew by the immensity of the situation. He wondered how much of the world’s remaining population would believe it if they heard the fate of mankind rested with a little old black lady sitting in a pipe down in Texas.
Chapter 35
Zakiyah’s heart beat a mile a minute as she stood in ankle-deep water beside the pipe her grandmother was preparing to die in. The minute any danger arrived, Mia would take care of it, but Zakiyah was still nervous about putting all her survival eggs into the basket of a little girl and her aged granny. It seemed like someone in authority should step in. This was exactly the kind of thing that should be left in the hands of someone who had worked out all the angles, not a professional psychic and an eleven-year-old.
To make things worse, the sun was setting and a cold wind blew in off the Gulf, cutting straight through her wet clothes to chill her to the bone. The rain had momentarily stopped, but the air remained heavy and damp.
Someone took her hand.
“You ever heard someone called ‘Flinty’?”
It was Alan, pulling himself over to her. Tony and Mia were over where the pipe split into three, keeping their eyes on the floodwaters. Big Time was up on top of the pipe but, given the gray skies, wasn’t in a particularly better vantage point.
“Nope, never heard that,” Zakiyah said, lightly gripping his hand back.
“It implies somebody that has a lot of sharp edges, more than any other rock,” Alan explained. “But a flint’s what you use to create a spark in order to start a fire ’cause you need that friction to make the flame. So, it’s a double-edged comparison. Can mean ‘implacable, unmovable, or stubborn,’ but can also mean, I suppose, ‘incendiary.’”
“Incendiary? I like that.”
“How’d you know I was talking about you?”
Zakiyah was about to say something nasty but then noticed Alan was grinning. She smirked. Alan turned wistful.
“Makes me wish I’d known your mother a little better, as I think that’s where you got it from,” Alan continued. “Remember meeting her a few times, sure, but never really got to know her. Hanging with your grandmother, I see it’s a family-thing.”
“Is this you trying to be insulting?” Zakiyah scoffed.
“Is that what you hear?” Alan asked. “I’m telling you you’re tough. I’m telling you you’re incendiary. I’m telling you that when the chips are down, you have reserves I never knew about. These are things I should’ve known to tell you a long time ago.”
Zakiyah was surprised but quickly recovered.
“I think that would describe my mom, too.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re such a good mom.”
“Maybe. But maybe you forced me to be by making me realize that if I didn’t do something right, no one else would.”
“Harsh, but true,” Alan admitted. “But here we are, the parents of t
he girl who’s going to save the planet.”
“What’s your angle? What happened to the Alan who earlier wanted to turn his back on all this?”
Alan sighed. He tried to move his legs a little but couldn’t. The numbness had climbed up his torso and moved down his arms. His mind was drifting away, ready for a rest he couldn’t fight off much longer.
“That was the old me. Knowing what I know now and seeing what might’ve been, I’d love nothing more than to get the chance to put some of that into practice. Start over with you and Mia. I want that so bad I can see the house we’d have, see what we’d get up to on weekends. I see our family together for good. But we both know that’s not how this is going to end. I’ve got a couple of hours to go, but I’ve been dead since this morning.”
This information hit Zakiyah pretty hard. A part of her had known it to be true, but to hear it spoken aloud was still a shock.
“I’ll be with you,” Zakiyah said.
“I know you will. I just wanted to tell you that.”
Zakiyah nodded, fighting back tears. She squeezed Alan’s hand a little tighter as the air grew colder.
• • •
Up on top of the pipe, Big Time listened in as his son quizzed Mia on her powers.
“Where is it?” Tony asked. “Can’t you hear it?”
“It’s there,” Mia assured him. “It’s coming.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“I just want it over with,” said Tony, lowering his voice. “If this thing really does have my mom and my brothers and my grandma trapped inside of it, I want it dead. I don’t want to think of them trapped in there forever.”
Big Time felt like he’d stuck a finger in a light socket. This is what his son was thinking about. Fifteen years old and already capable of imagining a hell worse than death.
“Do you hear my family?” Tony asked.
“No,” Mia replied. “I don’t hear any one voice, and they don’t sound like anybody in particular. Just words appearing in my head that are said aloud only in my thoughts.”
