by Mark Wheaton
“Crap!” he yelled over the noise of the storm.
He was only in for a second before the sludge worms came around either side of the canopy, aimed right at his legs. Reaching his hands to the trailer, Edwin launched himself out of the water onto the relative safety of the trailer.
Tony had waited for him, but now Edwin was hurrying him towards the overpass.
“Come on, Tony!” Big Time cried, his son climbing up the rain-slicked trailer towards him.
Tony slipped and slid, clawing frantically for a finger hold, but he finally made it within a few feet of Big Time’s outstretched hand.
“You’ve almost made it!” Scott yelled. “Keep coming!”
“Dad!” Tony cried, nearing his father.
“I’ve got you, son!”
But no sooner had Big Time said this than the poltergeist force attendant to the sludge worms bashed into the fallen trailer. Edwin slipped, smashing his face directly into the steel trailer wall. Tony whipped around to grab him, but gas station manager was already sliding back down towards the water.
“No!” yelled Tony.
It was too late. A thick tendril of black shot out of the water like a whip, wrapped itself around Edwin’s ankle, and dragged the unconscious man under.
This was too much for Big Time. He leaped off the bridge and onto the trailer, causing it to lean far to one side. He grabbed Tony, turned, and ran him back to the bridge. He slipped as he went but immediately got back on his feet.
“Scott!” he yelled, lifting Tony off the trailer and handing the hundred-pound teen up to his friend like a sack of potatoes.
Scott grabbed Tony by the arms and lifted him straight onto the overpass. As soon as Tony was airborne, the poltergeist effect slammed into the trailer. Big Time was dropped to his knees, the air punched out of him. He waited to feel the lasso of the sludge worms, but he was apparently just slightly out of their reach. But now the trailer itself was starting to slide off the junk pile, which would send Big Time right into the water.
Jumping to his feet, Big Time lunged for the bridge. His fingers missed, but hands grabbed for his wrists. As the trailer slid away into the floodwaters, Muhammad, Scott, and Tony dead-lifted Big Time straight up and over the guard rail.
“Jesus Christ, you’re heavy!” Scott exclaimed as soon as soon as Big Time was on his feet.
The big man was about to retort when he saw his son standing in front of him. His eyes were full of tears as Big Time wrapped him up in a hug.
“I thought you were dead,” Tony cried.
“Yeah, I thought I was a few times, too. But knowing you might be out here kept me going.”
Tony nodded and buried his head in Big Time’s shoulder.
“Mom?” Big Time asked quietly. “Grandma? George? Robert? Wesley?”
When Tony’s only answer was to cry harder, Big Time had his answer. He nodded and hugged his son tighter. He didn’t want to admit that, in his heart, he was overjoyed, so strong had been his belief that he’d never see any of his boys again.
Chapter 24
The eye of the hurricane was forty miles across. It had reached Houston at midday and seemed to hover directly above the skyscrapers of downtown. Anyone outside the eye was still caught in the storm, sheets of rain cascading down from black clouds above. Inside the eye, it was like any other day, the sun streaming down through an otherwise cloudless blue sky. It was akin to being on top of a mountain, able to look down at storms roaming the valleys below.
After so long inside the storm, Alan felt a true sense of tranquility inside the eye. There was no rain, barely any wind. To be unaffected by weather even for a fleeting moment was a godsend.
The raft was still tied up below the overpass, but everything around it was different. The city was suddenly so quiet that they could hear the water lapping against the overturned roof.
“Should we try and yell out? See if anyone can hear us?”
Sineada, who was tying down the water bottles together with strips of plastic as if in preparation to leave, shook her head.
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea. No telling who or what may respond, and we aren’t in any position to defend ourselves.”
Alan knew she was probably right. Mia stood in the center of the raft, utilizing the newfound visibility to survey the area.
“What do you see?” Alan asked from his prone position.
“Not a whole lot.”
“What’re you looking for?”
Mia was about to reply but then looked over to Sineada, unsure if she could say.
“What? What’s going on?”
“She’s looking for Buffalo Bayou,” Sineada said. “We have to get to Galveston.”
“Galveston?” Alan was startled. “What about getting me to a hospital?”
“There’s not going to be a hospital in the city,” Sineada began. “If we can get down to Galveston, there’ll be boats, Coast Guard, more than likely. That’s how it was during Katrina, wasn’t it? Navy hospital ships?”
“Yeah, but that’s not why we’re going to Galveston, is it?” Alan asked.
“There is something else,” Sineada said, wondering when Mia’s daddy got so perceptive. “We may have a rare opportunity to stop this creature from killing more people.”
Alan tried to process this. He knew she meant to do something related to her and Mia’s psychic abilities but couldn’t fathom how. What it did tell him was that Sineada thought he was going to die and there wasn’t much they could do to prevent this. He wondered if Mia knew this, too. He tried to imagine if death would be preferable to living without his legs.
No answer was forthcoming.
• • •
“Tell me what happened.”
Big Time said this so softly that Tony and the others weren’t sure he’d said anything at all. But then he looked up at his son, a pleading look in his eyes.
With the rig gone, the Deltech survivors had hurried to an SUV parked haphazardly at one of the highest points of the overpass. The keys in the ignition but no sign of its occupants, they’d driven it down the highway a few hundred yards. When the highway dipped low enough to flood, they’d parked to wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass overhead. The hope was that the floodwaters would recede at least a little, making it less dangerous to travel in a vehicle with all its windows busted out. The rain was steady, but the wind had already begun to let up.
Tony stared at the floor of the SUV for a moment as if looking for a starting point amongst the carpet threads. Finally, he shrugged.
“The rain was coming down pretty hard. The power had been off for hours. Water was coming in the back door and in from the garage. We kept putting towels down. I heard George screaming in the kitchen first and ran in to see. Those creatures were coming up from the sink and the dishwasher. It was tearing him apart. Grandma grabbed me and pulled me to the hall.”
Tony swallowed hard, holding back tears. Big Time put his arm around his shoulders.
“We ran through the house and saw it coming out of the sink in the bathroom. Robert and Wesley were waking up Mom, as they’d been in the kitchen with George. They got attacked from you guys’ bathroom. Grandma got me to the front door and pushed me out. She didn’t say nothing. The yard was flooded, but I could see it coming out of the sprinkler heads. Grandma closed the door and I got on my bike. People were coming out of their houses missing arms and legs. I saw a woman with a baby. They both got killed. I didn’t know where to go.
“You know that hotel that’s a crack house down by the highway? There were giant sludge worms tearing that thing apart. They were the size of trains. People were flying out windows, getting shredded in mid-air. Everybody was dying. They were running for the highway, so I followed. The rain was coming down hard. The guy from the gas station was warning everybody, saying to climb up onto the roof with him. He had a ladder set up, but everybody was ignoring him. Something told me he was right. The water was rising fast. These people weren’t g
oing to outrun it.”
“It was just you two?” Big Time asked.
“Some guy joined us for a awhile, but when the floodwaters got really high, he panicked and tried to get to the highway. He didn’t make it five feet.”
Zakiyah was listening but couldn’t help playing this out with her daughter and grandmother in mind.
“You okay?” Scott asked, breaking her trance.
“Define ‘okay,’” Zakiyah replied, eliciting a twisted grin.
“’Okay’ means being able to keep going in hopes of finding your daughter alive even though the odds of us finding two of our people out here surviving feels improbable at best.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Well, I’m telling you to shut that voice off. It’s not going to do you any good. It’s taking all my energy not to exit this car and jump off the bridge. You’re still in the land of hope. That’s where you have to stay. Everything else is bad enough.”
“All right.”
Zakiyah bumped Scott a little and he grinned.
“The rain is letting up,” Muhammad said. “Is this the eye?”
The darkness began to fade and the glow of sunlight began to illuminate the SUV.
“Yeah,” said Big Time. “Everybody’s eyes on the road. The second the waters part, we keep going. Anybody sees a vehicle worth stopping for, we’re on up and in it. Time to get this show back on the road.”
• • •
Sineada decided that the best way to get to Galveston was to try to pick up Buffalo Bayou where it met the White Oak Bayou on the downtown side of Fifth Ward. That would carry them to the Houston Ship Channel and from there, they’d ride the current out to Galveston.
Alan, even in his weakened state, couldn’t disagree more.
“I was on a bridge over Buffalo Bayou. It was nothing but junk racing down that river. It was raging, probably a hundred miles an hour. We try to get on that and we’ll be torn to pieces.”
“What about following it, then?” Sineada asked. “Get up alongside it, use it as our guide but stay in the floodwaters, easing into the Ship Channel at the mouth?”
“I’m sorry, but that’s nuts. I’m surprised this thing has held on as long as it has.”
He indicated around their makeshift raft.
“Well, what would you suggest?” Sineada asked, exasperated. “This storm’s on the move, and every minute that we don’t use our knowledge to do something about it is another person dead.”
There it was. Alan was the bad guy if he didn’t go along with this. If he didn’t willingly sacrifice himself to this mission, he painted himself the villain who wanted to let people die so he could live. Worse, he was in no condition to protest. If they left him somewhere, he would be just as likely to die. He’d risked his life to save theirs, and now they expected him to do it again.
“How do you know this thing won’t just go away when the storm dissipates?” Alan challenged.
“It’s got a foothold now,” Sineada replied. “The hurricane is an afterthought. If it’s using the water, it can go up any sewer, river, or waterline. If it’s going after people, what does that mean for Conroe? Huntsville? Heck, even Dallas? When it’s done with Texas, what’s to say it won’t roll out into Louisiana? How many dead are there going to be in Shreveport? Then it’s on to Little Rock, then maybe St. Louis. I can keep going.”
“And you think the one thing standing in its way is you and Mia?”
Sineada didn’t have to read much of Alan’s body language to know where this was coming from. She saw it all over his face and heard it in his voice.
“As you said, it’s already killed a lot of people, maybe even millions,” Alan continued. “I under being selfless, but that’s suicide.”
“Every time they kill somebody, it gets stronger,” Mia began, walking over to her father. “When it started, it had about maybe ten thousand souls. Now it’s gotta be millions. At that rate, it could keep going until it ate up everybody on the planet.”
“Then why isn’t this about the three of us getting to the top of a mountain somewhere? We should be thinking about survival. We get to Galveston, then what?”
“That’s where I come in,” interjected Sineada. “It’s a collective, but one that’s easily led as no one knows what they’re driving to. They’re just moving. But think about it like birds. One bird gets spooked and changes direction, and the whole flock blindly follows. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”
“Follows you where?” Alan asked.
“Straight to the bottom of the sea,” Sineada replied matter-of-factly. “We just have to get them in the door first.”
Alan stared at Sineada with incredulity, then turned to Mia expecting to see the same expression on her face. Instead, he saw only disappointment. She knew exactly what her father had been thinking and didn’t understand why he wasn’t a better man.
This is who I am, baby, he thought. Someday you have to learn that no one’s going to look out for yourself except you.
Mia looked unconvinced.
Chapter 25
They found the dump truck midway between where they rescued Tony and the exit for Sineada’s house. It had a full tank of gas, was higher off the ground than the eighteen-wheeler, and just as difficult to maneuver.
The even better news was that it had a bucket of cleaning supplies stowed behind the seats. No aerosol cans, but plenty of flammable liquids that could be used as accelerant if and when they came across more sludge worms.
The sludge worms.
Since they’d been inside the eye, they’d actually seen very few.
“Maybe they’re following the front wall of the storm,” Scott suggested. “Could be miles from here.”
Big Time shook his head.
“I don’t think so. They’re there in the water—we just don’t see them. Something that big isn’t going to be easy to move.”
Scott was about to reply when he heard Zakiyah gasp.
Though Big Time and Sineada both lived in the area known as Greater Fifth Ward, Big Time was farther to the north in a more wooded area, whereas Sineada was right off downtown. An area that, due to the flooding of Buffalo Bayou, was now completely underwater. Only the tops of trees remained, a handful of islands across a lake that stretched all the way to the skyscrapers. A church steeple was the only manmade structure in sight. Everything else was easily sixteen feet underwater.
“Oh, my God,” Zakiyah whispered, covering her mouth.
No one spoke. Scott rubbed at his jaw, while Muhammad looked down at his hands. Big Time reached over and put his arms around Zakiyah letting her cry on his shoulder. Her entire body was shaking as tears poured from her eyes. After a moment, her sobs became a high-pitched, keening cry.
“Just go,” she whispered after a moment. “Just go…”
But Big Time didn’t move. He held Zakiyah as if she was his own daughter who’d just lost everyone she’d ever called family. After a moment, Scott nudged Big Time aside and they switched places.
“Muhammad?”
Muhammad reacted as if surprised to hear his name. He nodded quickly, pointing out the window.
“Fourth Ward. Off Allen Parkway.”
“We’ll take the 45.”
“No, no,” Big Time said, shaking his head. “It’ll be nothing but cars. Take the surface streets.”
Scott chose a route that took them back through the Heights to come at Allen Parkway from the northeast. If it had been a typical day in Houston, the drive would’ve taken forty-five minutes. Today, however, Scott made it in ten, swerving around thousands of cars, bouncing curbs, and splashing through puddles large and small. At every turn, Scott expected to see somebody. A person on the street, someone staring out from the front seat of a car, or just a face in a house window, it didn’t matter. The absence of people was its own unique claustrophobia.
Where’d they all go? Scott kept asking himself. How could it take every last shred of a person and leave
nothing?
It was like they never existed at all. Like Big Time, he hoped that when it came to his family, it was quick.
“That’s it.”
Muhammad pointed up ahead to a large, fairly recently constructed building on the south side of the parkway. It looked relatively intact, all things considered.
Scott pulled the dump truck up onto the apartment’s front lawn, right next to the front door. The lobby had been flooded at one point but was dry now. The row of buildings was elevated over the Parkway and had been the first to drain when the water began to recede.
Scott set the parking brake but shook his head.
“I know it looks all right from here, but it’s got as many pipes as the factory. The second we’re in there, that could be it for us.”
“You’re right,” said Muhammad. “I’ll go in alone.”
Big Time was a second away from protesting, but then he glimpsed his son and reminded himself that things were different now. He fell silent as Zakiyah did similarly. Muhammad nodded, reaching for the door.
But that’s when Scott made a big show of sighing and opening the driver’s-side door.
“All right, let’s go.”
“You don’t have to,” quipped Muhammad. “It isn’t my time to die, but I don’t know about you.”
“What floor are you on again?”
“Third.”
“Fuck, man,” Scott said. “You’re not making this easy on yourself.”
Muhammad shrugged and moved towards the building.
“Good luck,” called Tony.
Scott resisted an urge to flip the bird at the kid.
• • •
It was gathering.
After spending so much of the day stretching itself thin to cover miles and miles of ground, devouring everything in its tendrils’ paths, it discovered a task that required all of itself. An impulse traveled the lengths of its millions of threads, a reflex more than a command.
Come back…come back…come back…