by Mark Wheaton
“Now, the pain’s an illusion,” Sineada began quietly. “You’re not actually in pain, but looking at your body, you think you should be in pain. If you just relax and lessen the tension coursing through your muscles, you’ll know what I’m saying is true.”
Alan did this, having not realized that he had been keeping his body rigid since the attack. He let himself go just a little limp, and was rewarded as the pain really did seem to ease away.
Sineada saw this and nodded. “A little more?”
Alan looked up at Mia, but her eyes were closed. He relaxed more and was rewarded a second time. The pain was still present, but he had to tense to make himself really feel it. It wasn’t all-pervasive anymore. He felt Sineada’s hand on his shoulder.
“Now, take a deep breath and let it all go,” Sineada said.
Alan nodded, relaxed his body completely, and sank into a painless sleep.
As soon as he was out, Sineada touched Mia’s shoulder and the little girl’s eyes opened.
“Come. We need to try and get some place dry.”
Sineada said this not only because she knew how quickly any infection that got ahold of Alan would race through his body as long as they found it cool, wet, and inviting, but also because of her fears for Mia. Alan had been right. Helping her father had helped the little girl. Sineada thought giving her another task could aid in extending that.
Mia picked up a roofing truss that Alan had used to pole the raft over to Sineada’s house, handing a second one to her great-grandmother. As Sineada rose to take it, she immediately felt a stab of pain down her back and in her legs.
“You okay, Abuela?” Mia asked.
“Getting there,” Sineada nodded. “Forgot I took a spill on the attic ladder. But we need to talk, you and I.”
Mia nodded.
“How did you stop it?”
“Well, it’s not an ‘it,’ it’s a ‘who,’” Mia replied, choosing her words carefully. “Actually, it’s a ‘they.’”
This confirmed one of Sineada’s hypotheses.
“What do you know about them?”
“They’re dead, but they died a long time ago.”
“All of them?”
“There are new ones who just died, but they’re confused. They don’t understand what’s happening. Then, there are the others. They all died together, too.”
“How many is ‘they all’?”
Mia didn’t answer for a moment. Sineada thought she was counting individual voices. Then, as Mia stared at her through the cold rain, the old woman realized her great-granddaughter was afraid the answer would scare her and was holding back.
“Tell me.”
When Mia said a number, Sineada’s eyes went wide. She looked up to the dark skies with a new feeling of terror. That many? That was the madness fueling the day?
Sineada sat back, staring out at the floodwaters, imagining what lurked beneath. She considered the implications of Mia’s words. A whole life lived, watching people come into this world and then leave it, and suddenly she was no longer certain what it might even mean that she was going to “die” that day. If what Mia said was true, what did death mean anymore?
Chapter 21
As Big Time angled the eighteen-wheeler up the freeway ramp and out of the floodwaters, he could feel the tension in the cab ebbing. No one had said much on the way out of the Deltech campus. He wondered if they didn’t believe they were out of the woods yet or were just beginning to come to grips with the scope of what happened, as he was. The rain was still heavy, but it wasn’t until the truck rolled up on a bridge that Big Time realized how strong the wind was gusting. The trailer shuddered under the onslaught but didn’t tumble away.
“Good thing it’s not empty after all,” Scott said.
“Yeah, must have a few units back there.”
“So…where are we going?”
Big Time didn’t have an answer to this. Scott nodded out the front windshield towards Houston to the south.
“They’re all dead. I know what you’re thinking. All y’all. ‘My wife’s okay, she made it.’ ‘My boyfriend, my daughter, they’re okay.’”
Scott lowered his voice as he turned to Big Time.
“My kids knew what was coming and they got out. They got my mom, they found my wife, and they’re just waiting for me down this stretch of road.”
Scott went quiet. Big Time was about to respond when Zakiyah shook her head.
“Fuck you, Scott,” she whispered.
“You think I’m immune? I know my kids didn’t get out of this. My wife, either. I’ve got a brother down in Danbury. I know he and his wife and their daughters didn’t get out. My Uncle Jimmy lives down in Victoria. He was the one who said we should get out. At least spend the night in San Antonio. My brother and I took turns calling him last night telling him how it was gonna be fine. He’s dead, and my curse is to be alive knowing I’m the one who killed him. So, fuck you.”
There was no venom in these last words, as far as Big Time could tell.
“So, what?” Big Time asked. “You want to take this thing north?”
“Did I say that? I said that everybody was dead. What we do with that information, well, I think you put to a vote.”
Big Time stared at Scott, trying to get a read on his thoughts. But Scott was all deadly serious, the look of a very old, haunted man behind his thick glasses.
“I know this road,” Big Time said. “If we go north, we’re still in the storm for hours and hours. It’ll flood up around us. We can blow fire at them until we run dry, but we’re going to run out at some point. If we go south, we’ll run into the eye of the hurricane at some point. Not long after that, the floodwaters are going to start going down and these things won’t have such a leg up on us. In doing so, we can look for our people. We try and go east or west, and we’re going to be in the water for a long time until we come to a highway. That’s what we’ve got.”
Muhammad was staring at his hands. Once he realized Big Time was done speaking, he looked up.
“I’m ready to vote,” he said, challengingly. “Who else?”
No one spoke. Muhammad nodded sharply, ready to get underway.
“Show of hands. All in favor of heading north?”
A beat.
“All in favor of heading south?”
A moment later, and the group had voted.
• • •
Sineada and Mia managed to pole their makeshift raft not only off Sineada’s street but out of the neighborhood. It was still raining—endless, endless curtains of rain—but the intensity was falling off.
“The eye’s coming,” Sineada explained to Mia. “We should think about what we might try to accomplish, if anything, when it stops.”
“Could we follow the eye? Maybe stay in it as it travels?”
“No, it’s too unpredictable. The storm can turn, and before you know it, you’re miles from where you want to be. Better to stay put, find an overpass to hide under. We have to think ahead for when the storm moves on and the floodwaters go down. The closer we are to the highway search and rescue teams come down, the faster we can get them to take care of your daddy.”
Alan had gone from bad to worse. They’d managed to cover him with a tarp they’d pulled off a sunken tool shed, but he’d lost a lot of blood. Every fifteen minutes or so, Sineada would check on his wounds, only to find that the tourniquets had loosened and needed to be re-done. This meant more blood loss. If he was going to survive, he needed medical attention and fast.
“There’s another one!” Mia called out.
Sure enough, a few strands of black crested the water about twenty feet away. They seemed to be sniffing out the raft but never came close enough to present an actual threat. Mia’s force of mind seemed to keep them away.
Sineada corrected herself. It, not them.
Ever since Mia told her about the thousands upon thousands of spirits within the black mass, she’d come to think of it as a sort of great, collectiv
e “ghost,” spirits trapped in the oily pitch. The hurricane had dredged this graveyard of co-mingled dead souls and bio-matter that was now moving freely among the living like an organism.
But Sineada knew about spirits. They wanted nothing to do with the living, mostly. To have this collective not only have the capacity but also the drive to act in such a brutal, animal fashion against every human it came across told her there was some terrible wrong that the hive mind felt had been committed and this was the only solution. The spirits they consumed were simply along for the ride.
“But what are they haunting?”
As soon as Mia asked this, she clammed up, realizing that she had effectively admitted to eavesdropping on her great-grandmother’s thoughts. Sineada just smiled and waved this concern away.
“A haunting is generally seen as a connection to someplace that the spirit recognizes from their life even if it doesn’t entirely make sense in a contemporary framework. If it’s a person being haunted, it could merely mean they bear a strong physical or spiritual resemblance to someone the soul knew in life.”
“But there has to be a connection,” Mia stated. “Right?”
“I believe so. In this case, those doing the haunting seem to personify everyone in the city as something that’s wronged them.”
“But what about the invisible part? The part that attacks outside of the water?”
“That’s the actual ghost-part,” Sineada explained. “Or, at least, what we think of as a ghost or poltergeist. There’s the spirit, but then there are the angry, destructive actions it can manifest in the world of the living. Every person has two parts, the physical body and their spirit or soul. What’s invisible in this case is the spirit, and that’s what was banging on the attic ceiling and knocking me down. Then there’s the physical side. The spirit can’t travel far from its physical remains, as the connection between spiritual and physical exists even after life. But these poltergeists are on the move, traveling miles with the flood.”
“So their bodies…”
“…or at least part of what’s left…”
“…are part of the black mass. They’re in the tentacles. I know from school. Oil’s dead animals. This is dead people, and their souls are trapped inside of it.”
Sineada realized that, on some level, it made sense. Mia was right that there was a biological component to oil no matter how many millions of years in the past the creature that made it had been alive.
“You may be on to something, but why are they doing it?” Sineada asked.
The reply presented itself in Sineada’s mind like the answer to a prayer. But then she looked at Mia and knew it was her great-granddaughter who had provided the answer.
“Is that what you think?”
It’s what they told me.
Sineada’s blood ran cold.
• • •
The drive down into the city was grim.
Hundreds of cars and trucks turned the highway into an obstacle course for Big Time and his rig. But with a clear windshield and good brakes, this was hardly insurmountable. No, what took its toll on the driver and his passengers were the stories each wreck told. Blood streaked across broken windows, was splashed across roofs, hoods and trunks, and repainted upholstery. It ran in rivers down the side of the road and pooled in great crimson lakes. Entire stretches of median grass had been dyed red.
Every few feet, new signs of a horrific massacre and the last actions of desperate individuals. Only, of course, there were no bodies.
For Big Time, it was the stillness that got to him the most. It was still raining, but as they neared the eye, it was beginning to ebb into a steady shower rather than a deluge. This meant the floodwaters started receding almost immediately. There was standing water on either side of the highway. The fast food joints, furniture stores, strip malls, and used car lots were flooded up to two or three feet as well, but it wasn’t the violent, raging water he’d seen with Katrina. Instead, Houston looked like a peaceful lake with nothing so much as rippling the surface.
As soon as he had made this analogy to himself, he knew what memory was coming next and tried to force it out. He had taken his two oldest boys on a day trip to Sam Houston Jones State Park in Lake Charles once. The place had been virtually deserted. They rented a boat with the intention of fishing in the swampy byways. But they hadn’t taken their rods out once.
The water was covered in green sphagnum moss, and great bald cypresses rose to the sky making it look like they were rowing straight through a forest. They kept expecting to see an alligator snout or two poking up through the moss. The closest they came was seeing a nutria swimming along, and even then his boys had initially mistaken its nose for a water moccasin.
His boys.
He hoped it had been quick.
“This is me.”
Scott nodded towards the exit coming up on the right. After the vote, they’d decided to go to everyone’s homes in geographic order. Scott’s house was the closest, just off the Pecore exit in the Heights. Big Time was next in line in Fifth Ward, followed by Sineada. Muhammad was last, as he lived just west of downtown off the Allen Parkway.
Big Time pulled off the highway for the first time since they’d left the Deltech campus, easing the rig into the flooded frontage road. The water rode high on the door, and Big Time drove slowly, hoping not to hit anything obscured in the muck. This was near impossible, as the floodwaters were gathering alongside the highway it seemed, pulling detritus of every stripe with it. For every fallen tree limb, there’d be something torn off a living room wall. If a car slipped by, it’d be followed by the contents of a garage.
Scott pointed up ahead to a stop sign that seemed to indicate an intersection was under the water.
“Take a right.”
“I can’t see the road.”
Scott peered through the muck and shook his head.
“It’s there somewhere. Would you believe this used to all be trees?”
A sign that read “Norhill Boulevard” was bent over next to the stop sign, just dipping its corner into the water. As the rig rolled past fallen telephone poles and trees torn from their roots, Scott sank deeper into his seat. The houses on either side of the road looked as if they’d been abandoned and left to the elements for years ago. Most of the windows were shattered. Roofs were either missing most of the shingles or were caved in. Doors were off their hinges.
Big Time was struck by a feeling of recognition. He’d driven to Scott’s once or twice and recalled his place as a large, two-story yellow wood-frame job on a corner. Mona had made fun of the color to Scott, who pointed out that it matched the banana trees he’d planted out back, so it was right by him.
But now, the house was gone. The force of the hurricane had lifted it off its foundation, carried it across the street, and smashed it into another house. It was in splinters. Only the southern-facing wall still stood on the original property, looking like the false front on an Old West movie set.
“I’m so sorry, Scott,” Zakiyah whispered.
“Who knows,” he replied wistfully, his eyes fixed on the last remaining wall. “They could’ve made it out, right? Might’ve been evacuated. You never can tell.”
A single tendril of black emerged from alongside the wall and began swimming towards the truck. As it neared, it split off into four threads, as if knowing precisely how many people were within the cab. A second later, the poltergeist force slammed into the truck, rocking it backwards.
Scott didn’t flinch.
“We got anything left in that can?”
Big Time handed him the bottle of WD-40 and the lighter. Scott popped a damp cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and took a long drag as the truck was hit a second time. As the first of the four sludge worms rose to strike, Scott kicked the passenger door open and blasted it with fire.
“FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!”
The ferocity of Scott’s words startled everyone in the cab. The first worm, completely ablaze, sank back into
the water as the other three slowed their progress, as if reacting to the injury.
“Fuck you, too,” Scott added, much more calm this time as he blasted them as well.
As the three worms burst into flames and fell into the floodwaters, Muhammad nodded appreciatively to Scott.
“That’s four more dead.”
“What’re you talking about?” Scott asked. “There’s only one of these motherfuckers. Has the ability to split off into a million threads, but it’s all the same critter.”
As Scott said these words, Big Time was struck dumb. It seemed so obvious, but he hadn’t made the connection his friend had. It was a horrifying thought that there was something that large with those abilities out there. Its size if all its tentacles were retracted in must be unfathomably massive.
But there was a part of him that was relieved. A million sludge worms, there’d always be a survivor. One that got away. One creature, no matter how big, could be put down. At least, that’s what he believed.
“Let’s get going,” Scott said, voice full of resignation and finality.
Big Time nodded and put the truck in gear.
Chapter 22
“There should’ve been holdouts,” Gloria said. “We should’ve seen somebody by now.”
Upon seeing the hurricane, Kenneth had suggested that they go farther south rather than potentially head right into the storm. The more rain that came down, the more Gloria was all for it. So he swung them back west and south, skirting the clouds entirely. It may have been raining across much of South Texas but where they were, it was barely drizzling. Riding in on the southwestern fringes of Eliza, they were entering towns that appeared to have been flooded at one point, but the waters had since receded.
“Maybe there were mandatory evacuations.”
“And it got to a hundred percent? No way. These are Texans. People would’ve stayed.”
Kenneth knew she was right. The towns they were creeping through were small, but this was the fourth or fifth that appeared eerily devoid of life. There was storm damage on the streets of the “business districts,” usually just the main drags where the city hall, a couple of gas stations, the post office, churches, and banks would be. They saw broken windows, fallen trees and the odd vehicle carried onto a sidewalk by rising floodwaters, but nothing that would indicate a catastrophe.