Danny leaned into the window as the bus accelerated from the curb, merging into slow-moving traffic. “What did you mean?” he asked, lowering his voice.
“I meant,” said Derek, pacing himself now, seeming to consider his words before they accumulated speed, “I know how you feel about me. If I could avoid coming to you with this, I would. This isn’t any more pleasant for me than it is for you.”
Danny sighed. “So what is it, then?”
“Have you been paying attention to the news today?”
“No. I’ve been…working.”
“There was a plane crash off the coast of Florida,” said Derek. “It was an LA-bound flight.”
Danny squeezed himself into the corner between the window and his narrow seat, trying to avoid contact with the Lakers fan taking up more than his share of space. “I know about that,” he said. “It was yesterday.”
“Yes. And did you know there’s a storm circulating in the Gulf? It’s one wave of intense rain after another? There are flash flood warnings from east Texas to the Florida panhandle.”
“Okay,” said Danny. He didn’t know about that. It was obvious in the way the word trailed into a partial question.
“What if I told you the two are related?”
“They are,” said Danny. “I saw on the news last night that they think the weather was a factor in the—”
“No,” said Derek sharply. “That’s not what I mean.”
The bus slowed again. It was Danny’s stop. He gathered himself into as compact a package as he could and motioned for Kobe to get up from his seat. The man complied, barely, and Danny headed to the exit. He stepped onto the curb, managing to keep the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder. There were a few minutes to kill before he’d need to board the Purple Line bus to Santa Monica.
“What do you mean, then?”
“So here’s the thing,” said Derek. “I can’t talk about this on the phone. Can we talk in person?”
Danny adjusted the duffel on his arm. A waft of sweaty funk filtered from the bag. He wrinkled his nose and looked for the signage that would lead him to Route 805. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
“I don’t know yet if it does,” said Derek. Then he huffed. “Look, I’ve said enough already. I’m in LA. Can we meet?”
“I’m on my way to work.”
“I thought you’ve been at work.”
“I have,” said Danny. “I picked up an extra shift.”
“I can meet you there.”
Danny found the sign and started toward his bus. “I’ll be working,” he protested.
“You get breaks, right?” Derek pressed. “I can wait for you.”
Danny knew there was no winning this one. The more he tried to avoid Derek, the pushier he’d become. He was certain of it.
Whatever the source of your trouble, confront it.
“Okay,” said Danny. “Meet me in three hours. I’ll get a fifteen-minute break. You can talk to me then. Fifteen minutes.”
“What’s the address?”
“I’ll text it to you.”
“Will you? Or will I have to keep calling you?”
“I’ll send it as soon as we hang up.”
True to his word, and truer than his ex, Danny sent the address to Derek. He really didn’t want to talk to the guy. He especially didn’t want the tech gazillionaire seeing he worked in a diner as a fry cook. But what did it matter? If he were honest with himself, in the grand scheme of things, not much.
He boarded the empty bus and swiped his card again. The driver was talking on his phone and didn’t pay him any attention. Danny found a seat against a window toward the back of the bus and settled in for the longer part of his commute.
Nestled in the corner of his seat against the glass, with cool, damp air blowing onto the side of his face, Danny closed his eyes and thought about the bizarre conversation. Why would the weather and a plane crash thousands of miles away have anything to do with him? And whatever the connection might be, however tenuous, how did it involve Derek?
Before he dozed off, considering the unanswerable questions, he set an alarm on his phone. He didn’t want to sleep past his stop. That would be a disaster.
CHAPTER 6
April 4, 2026
New Orleans, Louisiana
Bob Monk pinched the bridge of his nose and leaked the grunt of a man who didn’t have the energy for much more than a weak attempt at attention-seeking. He was sitting in a cheap leather chair that faced the wall-mounted flat-screen television on the living room wall of his eldest daughters’ rented home. The father of three women—Kiki, Katie, and Keri—he’d adapted the use of hyperbole to be heard amongst his loving but dismissive flock.
“What is it, Bob?” asked his wife, Kristin, in a tone of voice that expressed to him she didn’t really care but was playing along for the sake of civility. She was sitting opposite him on a comfortable chenille sofa, rubbing her palms on and across the soft fabric.
“I don’t like the look of it,” he said. “Too much rain, too fast.”
“We’ll be fine,” said Kristin. “Nothing real to worry about, Bob. Some street flooding maybe.”
He shook his head. “I don’t like being away from the house. We’re close to water. Keri is there alone. I don’t like the look of it.”
“Keri isn’t alone,” said his wife. She folded her arms across her chest and looked at him over a pair of cheap readers she’d bought at Costco the week before. “She has Dub with her and another boy. Barker, I think.”
“What kind of name is Dub?” asked Bob. “That’s not a name, it’s a verb. And I don’t like that she’d be getting so serious with the boy.”
“Is there anything you do like, Dad?” asked Kiki, emerging from the tightly quartered but functional kitchen. “You don’t like the forecast. You don’t like Dub.” She handed him a drink, a whiskey and ginger ale.
“I like this,” he said, taking the glass from his daughter and toasting it toward her. “Three cubes and two fingers of whiskey. Perfect, thank you.”
He took a long sip of the drink, and Kiki slinked across the room to sit next to her mother. Rain was now falling with more intensity; it was slapping the roof and pelting the windows. Its rhythm might have been hypnotic had it not been for the concern about how much of it would fall over the next two days.
“Speaking of Keri,” Kiki said to nobody in particular, “she still at the game?”
“She texted a few minutes ago,” said Kristin. “The game’s over, and they’re on their way to get something to eat, and then they’ll head back to the house.”
“She’ll text you when she gets there?” asked Kiki. “I know she’s in college and all, but she’s still little Keri. I worry about her.”
Bob took a pull of his drink and smacked his lips. “I got her on a tracker. One of those apps. I know where she is all the time.”
Kristin put her hand on her daughter’s leg. “Your father is a worrywart. Always has been with all of you girls.”
“Yeah,” said Kiki, “but we never abandoned you and went to California.”
The three of them chuckled.
“This storm is going to put New Orleans underwater,” said Katie, Bob’s middle daughter, bounding into the room from her bedroom on the opposite side of the one-story house. She’d been sequestered there for much of the afternoon, sulking over something unspoken, as she frequently did. She’d learned from somebody that hyperbole was effective.
“She joins the living,” her mother announced. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”
Though Katie was in her mid-twenties, she frequently behaved as a seven-year-old who hadn’t comprehended the idea of how reason might sound. Everyone in the family blamed this on her being the baby for several years, until an unexpected third child slid her unceremoniously into the middle slot. Alfred Adler would have loved her. She proved his theories correct every time she feigned aggrievement for the sake of attention.
&nbs
p; “I’ve been watching the news,” she said, waving her hands dramatically. “I had plans tomorrow. Big plans. It’s the last day off before a long work week. But this rain is going to kill everything.”
Kiki rolled her eyes. “I forgot,” she said, aiming her veiled sarcasm directly at her younger sister.
Katie crossed the room to the sofa. “Forgot what?”
“This is your world and we’re all just living in it,” Kiki cracked.
Katie plopped onto the sofa on the other side of their mother. “At least you remember now.”
Had they been in their tweens or teens, Bob or Kristin might have felt compelled to play peacemaker, to gently chastise one or both of their children and caution them against their behavior. But the girls were adults now. They were free to be asses to each other, especially in their own house. Bob wondered sometimes how the two of them managed to coexist under the same roof without clawing each other’s eyes out. Deep down though, he knew the two were thick as thieves, and if push came to shove, which sometimes it did, they’d have each other’s backs.
He took another sip, savoring the electric buzz that coursed through his body as he swallowed, and tipped the glass toward the screen. He shook his head. “I don’t like the look of this. These bands of rain, one after the other, are going to cause a problem bigger than you missing an outing tomorrow, Katie.”
The four of them sat silently for a few minutes, watching the local news team talk about the weather. The anchor announced the city would be opening its emergency operations center, then introduced a press conference about to begin.
The mayor of New Orleans was at the lectern speaking. Her chief of police, fire chief, and director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness stood at her side.
“…real potential for serious flooding,” said the mayor. “We have initiated our emergency response plan. We’re staging assets where we see the need, and we will be here around the clock until the threat has passed. We remain hopeful that our precautions are just that, precautions. Still, given the forecast from the National Weather Service and data from our own meteorologists, we are being proactive.”
Bob looked at the couch to his right. All three of the women were paying close attention to the television now. Maybe his concern about the storm wasn’t as hyperbolic as they’d thought. He emptied his glass and held it in his lap, relishing the last of the sweet drink.
“We have also initiated our seventeen Evacuspots,” said the mayor. “These are typically reserved for use in advance of a category three hurricane. And we have historically begun the process some seventy-two hours prior to the storm hitting us. But we are so confident of the risks tonight and tomorrow, we are asking those who can leave their homes to go to one of the spots within the next thirty minutes. They are marked with identical fourteen-foot sculptures. From there, we can accommodate up to thirty thousand of our friends and neighbors. We will transport you from the city and return you to that same spot once the threat is over.”
The director of the OHSEP stepped to the microphone, adjusted it to his height, and cleared his throat. His tie was already loosened at the collar, and the swells under his eyes betrayed his perpetual lack of sleep.
“As many of you know,” he began, his gravelly voice as much distracting as reassuring, “we’ve been through this many times before. Unfortunately, our response has not always been adequate.”
Bob glanced at the women and chuckled derisively. “I’ll say.”
“We’ve worked hard for the last decade to implement effective measures to keep you safe. As the mayor suggested, we have already activated our real-time warning systems. These are computer-aided projections that help us deploy assets ahead of any problems. We have also initiated our early warning system. This will send alerts to motorists who may be approaching any of our eleven most frequently flooded underpasses.”
The mayor put her hand on the director’s arm, and he paused, then stepped aside. She adjusted the mic. “This is not to say we want anyone on the road tonight. We highly suggest that, unless you have absolutely no choice, you stay home.”
She stepped back and motioned for the director to resume his comments. He offered a nod and weak smile and readjusted the mic. “Our pumping system is functioning at full capacity. We’ve tested it as recently as three weeks ago, and despite past failures, we are confident in its ability to mitigate flooding in the most prone areas of the city.”
When he finished his remarks, both the fire and police chiefs gave short updates about their staffing and readiness. Bob thought it wasn’t much more than a pep talk.
“What are they going to say?” he asked. “Of course they’re going to tell us they’re ready. They always tell us they’re ready.”
“Let’s hope they are,” said Kristin.
“Let’s hope. But this evacuation plan? Ridiculous. You can’t take a system designed to work over three days and cram it into thirty minutes. They’re panicking. They don’t want to be accused of doing nothing. And I think they’re making things worse.”
The mayor was back at the lectern. She was taking questions from the assembled media, who were not on camera.
“Yes,” she said, “I am aware of the concerns about the pumps. We know they’ve failed in the past. But as you know, when I ran for office, flooding was a top priority for me. We are a sinking city. We all know that. I’ve seen the studies. Some areas are two inches lower than they were a year ago. Upper and Lower Ninth Ward, Metairie, and Bonnet Carré Spillway are settling at more than an inch and a half every twelve months. I can’t do anything about that. Mother Nature doesn’t listen to me. But my team does, the Army Corps of Engineers does, and I am confident we are as prepared as we can be.”
“I didn’t vote for her,” said Bob.
Kristin nodded. “We know.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with her being a woman,” he said.
“I know.”
“I just don’t buy what she’s selling. I liked that other woman who was running against her. What was her name?”
“Penny Rogers.”
“Yeah,” said Bob. “She’s whip smart. A real firecracker. I would have rather seen her behind that microphone.”
“She did just fine for herself,” said Kristin.
“I guess,” said Bob. “If you consider Congress ‘fine’.”
“That’s the thing of it, Bob,” said his wife. “If it weren’t for Rogers, this mayor wouldn’t have gotten anything done. All of that flooding mitigation was Rogers’s doing. She’s the one who greased the wheels and got the money from Washington. It wasn’t the mayor.”
“So you’re agreeing with me,” said Bob.
“I suppose.”
Bob’s wife didn’t speak much. She preferred to observe. When she did speak, it carried weight. She lived by the idea that one who speaks can’t be listening and therefore can’t be learning. Bob knew this about her. He respected it. It was one of her many traits he adored, in fact. That didn’t stop him from forgetting sometimes that she knew more than he did about subjects on which he considered himself an expert, or at least someone with a strongly held and correct opinion.
The hair on his neck tingled.
Lightning flashed again, strobing outside the window and casting a pale blue flicker across the room. A bone-shaking clap of thunder instantly followed.
Bob dropped his glass on the floor, spilling the ice onto the tile. The tumbler shattered.
“Cut him off,” joked Kristin. “No more drinks for you, Mr. Monk.”
“Sorry, girls,” Bob said, pushing himself from his seat to pick up the shards of glass.
Katie sprang from the sofa and hurried toward the kitchen. “No, Dad, I’ll get it. It’s no big deal.”
Bob picked up the larger pieces of glass and carefully laid them in his open palm. Katie emerged from the kitchen with a broom and pan and knelt on the floor beside him.
“I don’t want you cutting yourself,” he sai
d. “I’ve got it. I’m sorry though. It was a nice glass. I don’t know what happened. That thunder—”
Another flash of angry light filled the room at the same time a deafening crack of thunder shook the house. Bob fell back from his feet and onto his rear. His back hit the front of his easy chair or he might have toppled over completely.
Katie put down the pan and touched her dad’s leg. “You okay?”
Bob steadied himself and nodded. “Yeah. I guess I’m on edge, that’s all. I don’t like this one bit. And I certainly don’t like that Keri is out in it.”
Katie offered her father a reassuring smile. “She’s a big girl, Dad. She can take care of herself. Plus she’s got Dub with her.”
He picked up the shards of glass he’d dropped and noticed his hand was bleeding. He held it up with a smirk. “True. I’m the one everyone should worry about.”
CHAPTER 7
April 4, 2026
New Orleans, Louisiana
The hotel bar reeked of desperation. It smelled like bottom-shelf liquor and flat soda. Steve Konkoly, who went by the nickname Doc more than his own, was as familiar with the odor as he was with that of death. Neither was more appealing than the other. He slugged the last piece of ice from his drink and crunched the cube between his teeth.
He was a well-known lecturer at medical conferences the world over and had spent more nights than he cared to count in bars exactly like the one in which he now found himself ordering another dirty vodka martini.
He leaned on his elbows, feeling the heft of his gut weigh on his lower back, and mentally reminded himself to work out in the morning. He glanced up over his reading glasses at the large flat-panel display hanging on the wall behind the bar. The game wasn’t on anymore, which was fine with Doc. It was a blowout. The Gators were up by thirty with a few minutes left. Instead the screen was awash with a rainbow of colors on a map of the Gulf Coast.
“The rain’s getting worse?” Doc asked the bartender as the man replaced his empty glass with a fresh one.
The Alt Apocalypse {Book 3): Torrent Page 5
