by Mark Wheaton
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 butto
n 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.
“Holy shit!” cried the driver, jamming on the brakes. “Trash must’ve piled up in the storm drains.”
Alan righted himself enough to look out the window and saw in the dim light that the street was completely underwater. A couple of vehicles were wading through it, but a handful were already stopped dead.
“Dispatch, this is Car 717 out here on West Mt. Houston Road near Ella. We’ve got some serious street flooding. Over.”
“Car 717, we’re getting reports like that from all over the city. Suggest you take Veterans Memorial. Over.”
“Will do, thanks.”
The driver hooked the mic back up and spun the wheel.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it this bad.”
The deputy in the passenger seat nodded and glanced at Alan in the side view mirror. Seeing him struggling to get back on the bench, the deputy turned his eyes back to the road and went right back to ignoring his prisoner for the rest of the ride.
• • •
In a kitted-out emergency services SUV, two police sergeants rolled through the dark, flooded streets of Galveston, windshield wipers whipping back and forth, looking for folks in need of aid. The electrical power grid was holding, but there was barely evidence of this in the downtown district, aside from traffic lights and the occasional street lamp. Eliza was expected to make landfall some time during the night, with the collective wisdom having it hit just before dawn. It seemed to have settled into a holding pattern, content to send waves of rain towards the island while swirling and gaining mass a few dozen miles offshore.
“We got anything on the broken pipeline?” Sergeant Kemp barked into the radio.
“They think it’s out past the breakwater,” came the voice of the dispatcher. “Gonna be a bitch to fix.”
“Jesus.”
Sergeant Burnett, clad in the same thick poncho, police hat complete with shower cap, and rain boots as his partner, let out a low whistle.
“I’ve been saying, oil’s gonna be the death of this place,” Burnett began. “How many derricks we got out there now? All it takes is one major fuck-up and that’s it. Good-bye, fishing. Good-bye, tourists. Got at least half a dozen complaints a day about ‘Little Billy’ or ‘Little Susie’ stepping in tar balls out on the sand.”
“Better that than a jelly fish.”
“Or dog shit.”
“One of Karen’s cousins works out on one of those rigs. Makes great money. Does that for a few months and then comes in and roughnecks out near Midland for the rest of the year.”
“Ain’t Texas without oil.”
Kemp snorted. Wasn’t Burnett from Arkansas or something?
“Got any more welfare calls off the sea wall?” he called back to the dispatcher.
“Yeah, one,” she replied. “Phil Snyder’s shack door is open and beating with the breeze.”
“Oh, that idiot’s probably passed out drunk,” spat Burnett. He’d picked up Phil on a bunch of drunk-and-disorderly charges through the years. Pain-in-the-ass type who thought he owned the beach.
“We’ll take a look,” replied Kemp. “Any more?”
“That’s it. Once you’re done, you’re on the bridge.”
Kemp grinned. “On the bridge” meant they were off-shift and crossing the Galveston Island Causeway back home. The long, curving bridge was the island’s only connection to the mainland. The northbound lanes had been completely jammed up for much of the day, but Kemp knew they’d be empty by now.
“Thank you, Carla. Keep your head down and stay dry.”
“You, too, sergeant.”
Kemp hung up the mic as Burnett shot him a bemused look.
“We could just hit the bridge. If someone took advantage of the storm to rob Phil, they’re going to be mighty disappointed.”
“Yeah, and maybe disappointed enough to take it out on Phil’s skull. People wait for opportunities like this to do their robbing.”
By the time the SUV made it to the sea wall, its headlights could barely penetrate the sheets of water crashing down around the vehicle, much less illuminate more than a few feet out onto the dark beach. Kemp hit the spotlight and angled it out towards Phil’s shack. Sure enough, the door was swinging back and forth with the wind.
“Shit,” sighed Burnett.
“C’mon, it’s our civic duty. He gave us those trout once, remember? Barbecued it that night?”
The two clambered out of the car and hurried down the sea wall steps to the beach. The rain had so infused the sand with wet that their boots sank deep as if in quicksand.
“This is ridiculous!” yelled Burnett.
Kemp reached Phil’s shack first, grabbing the guard rail as he climbed up. His hand found something sticky on the wood. Looking down, he saw that the stairs and railings both seemed to be covered in a thin sheet of tar.
“Watch it.”
Burnett was about to reply when he saw his partner standing stock-still in Phil’s doorway. Lying on the floor of the living room was whatever was left of Phil. He’d been torn to pieces as if by a wild animal, albeit one that had picked his flesh down to the bones. Only thin strips of sinew covered in blood and oil hung from his splintered skeletons. He looked like a turkey carcass the day after Thanksgiving.
“What the fuh…?” Burnett started to ask, only to find himself yanked backwards and out of the shack with great force.
The sergeant landed clear of the stairs out on the swampy sand, dazed but unhurt. He was just getting to his feet when thick tendrils of sand erupted around him and began to lash at his body
like a cat o’ nine tails.
“Gaaaahh!”
“Holy shit!” cried Kemp, reaching for his gun even as the fingers of sand dragged Burnett towards the surf, clawing into the man’s skin.
Before Kemp could so much as aim, he was picked up off the stairs and thrown backwards into Phil’s shack with great force. Smashing into the doorframe of Phil’s bathroom, Kemp landed on the tiled floor head—and wrist-first, cracking both.
“Jesus Christ,” he moaned, trying to get to his feet.
His arm throbbed. He felt around his head, and his fingers came back bloody. Dazed and fearful of another attack, the officer pushed himself farther into the bathroom and kicked the door shut. His gun having fallen onto the beach, he looked around for some kind of weapon. It was then that he noticed the bathtub was filled with oily water that had tumbled over the sides and had saturated the tiles. The palm of his non-broken hand was planted in it. When he tried to raise it, a new, searing pain tore through his body. As each finger lifted off the tile, it was leaving most of its attendant flesh behind.
Kemp screamed as the oil crept up both of his pants legs, burned through the cloth, and proceeded to dig into his flesh. He swung his body around to get away and only ended up slipping a disc in his back and tearing his arm out of its socket.
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” he whimpered.
It was on the third “oh, God,” that the off-balance police sergeant slid down to the floor, his face pressing against the sticky surface. Immediately, the oily liquid pooled around his nose and ear in welcome before beginning to dissolve away the cartilage.
Chapter 8
“You good for the fight Saturday?”
Scott was already flipping a cigarette into his mouth as he walked up to Big Time in the parking lot.
“Is it cool if I bring my oldest son? I know he wants to see this one.”
“Of course,” Scott nodded. “See you there.”
Big Time knew that was Scott’s version of checking in on him, and he appreciated it. When he’d first come on at Deltech, he was a stranger amidst cliques that had been working together for years. Then one afternoon, Scott had wandered over, asking him if he wanted to do “fight night” with some of the other day-shifters. For various boxing events, never UFC or Strike Force, Scott would rent a big suite in one of the nicer hotels off the highway, stock it with beer and snacks, and order the bout on pay-per-view. Some folks complained about the ban on mixed martial arts events, but Scott wouldn’t change his mind.