by Mark Wheaton
“Wait here,” Fadela told the old woman, fearing she might have a hard time once they were in the water. “I’ll see how flooded the garage is.”
The garage wasn’t as flooded as Fadela expected, maybe a foot of water all told. She found Mrs. Frederik’s Le Baron easily enough despite the dim light shining in from outside. The floodwaters appeared black as pitch, and the young Indian woman was certain that it must be filled with the black snakes lying in wait.
With a preternatural fear of what would happen the moment her foot broke the surface, Fadela edged her right foot into the water. She kept it suspended, waited for the reaction by the black tentacles. She knew she’d never be able to outrun the creatures if they were in the garage. But if they weren’t, she thought she just might be high and dry in the car before her splashing through the floodwaters sounded the dinner bell.
When nothing came, she leapt into action and ran across the garage as fast as her feet would carry her.
• • •
The stairs leading up Brammeier Tower were completely dark, the monstrosity climbing up the outside of the building blocking out all sunlight. As the trio of Deltech survivors made their hurried ascent, they were engulfed not only in black but also the endless cacophony of the monstrous sludge worms bashing at the side of the building.
When they reached the fifth floor, dim light shone through the narrow windows in the fire doors. That light moved and undulated with the movements of the oily mass creeping its way up the side of the building. What gave it an even more sinister, belly-of-the-beast feel was the ever-changing scale of the darkness due to the occasional translucent areas on the creature’s “skin,” giving it an alien feel. As it grew upwards, it gave the men a feeling of being swallowed whole.
Muhammad paused to try to get a look at it through the window, but Scott shook his head.
“Don’t even look, man,” Scott said. “It’s not worth it, and it’ll only freak your shit out worse.”
“It’s just so unfathomable,” Muhammad replied. “How could anything this massive even share the earth with us?”
“Doesn’t seem to want to share,” Big Time scoffed.
This even made Scott chuckle, but they kept going in silence.
When they reached the twelfth floor, the solid black outside the stairwell windows was replaced by a wavering darkness brought on by the swaying sludge columns. But as they climbed higher, the clamor outside the stairwell walls grew in its intensity.
“What the hell’s going on out there?” Scott yelled, his smoker’s lungs forcing him to slow down. “Sounds like the building’s coming down.”
“That’s gotta be the poltergeist effect it’s got riding shotgun,” Big Time suggested. “It’s banging around the floors looking for people to drag out to the main body. We saw its work from the street.”
“Think it can get to us in here?” Muhammad asked.
“I don’t know,” Big Time replied. “From what I can tell, it’s got some kind of relationship to the sludge worms that doesn’t give it a lot of range. If it did, I would’ve been dead the second I hit the water back at the loading dock. Here’s hoping it can’t, but there’s no telling with this thing.”
As they neared the levels where the force was doing the most damage, they weren’t so sure. It sounded as if the hurricane had found a way to localize itself within the building. The roar of the poltergeist force gusted like a 200-mile-per-hour wind that never slowed. When the group reached the nineteenth floor, the pounding outside the stairwell was at its apex.
“Jesus,” Scott cried, his words sucked away as if offered inside a wind tunnel. “You sure this was a good idea?”
“Just keep going!” Big Time yelled back.
Muhammad tried to force himself on, but as he passed the window in the stairwell door, he had to take a look.
It was an almost comical sight. The entire floor was covered in construction-site trash, wiring, and broken panels of gypsum board. It gave the offices an almost monochromatic look, broken up only by streaks of blood painted across the ceiling directly above the stairwell door.
Muhammad gasped but then felt Big Time’s hand gruffly grabbing his arm.
“We’ve got a ways to go and it’s not going to get any prettier.”
“You’re right.”
But as Muhammad turned, he looked out one last time. At that moment, one of the sludge worms passed by the windows, blocking the light. It looked less like the things they’d encountered at Deltech and more like a muddy cyclone. It was twisting and writhing in on itself as it moved upwards.
How? Muhammad asked himself, shaking his head. How did they think they could fight that?
• • •
Zakiyah eyed her watch nervously. The guys had only been gone fifteen minutes, but it seemed like hours.
“My dad told me a trick he used at work was to reward yourself for not looking at your watch,” Tony said. “Look away for as long as possible so that by the time you see what time it is, it’s a surprise.”
Zakiyah stared at Tony for a moment, then burst out laughing. As he was starting to look offended, Zakiyah quickly shook her head.
“No, I’m not laughing at what you said. It’s just that that’s exactly—exactly—what I do to make the day go by, too. I thought I was the only one.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It may be the most brainless job in the world, but that doesn’t means it’s easy.”
“Mom tried it at her job. Man, she hated that job.”
Sensing sensitive territory, Zakiyah tread carefully.
“What’d she do?”
“I don’t even really know,” Tony shrugged. “Something with credit cards. She worked at Deltech doing customer service calls when we first moved here. Hated that, too. Did you ever meet her?”
“No, unfortunately. I kind of know your dad from work, but he was more my boyfriend’s friend.”
Boyfriend? Really? Zakiyah thought, catching herself. A mental shrug later and she continued.
“You guys were from New Orleans, too, right?”
“Pines Village near the lake. How about you?”
“Lower Ninth, right in the soup.”
“Ah, I’m sorry. Sucks.”
“Yeah, well, we made it out. Can’t say that for everybody down there.”
“Yeah.”
“What’d your dad do there?” Zakiyah asked, finding herself suddenly curious.
She’d found the answer to this question was always so surprising, no matter how many survivors she’d meet in Houston. Some guy bagging her groceries had been an assistant manager at a bank. A woman who was doing the paperwork to get Mia into classes had been a real estate agent. A guy stocking shelves at the beauty supply store had been a nurse.
Mia.
Zakiyah tried to force the name from her mind. There’d be days ahead for that. She wasn’t ready to go there.
“City planner,” Tony said.
“What?”
“You asked what my dad did. He was a city planner. Worked for Orleans Parish.”
“Really?” Zakiyah exclaimed, surprised. “Big Time was some kind of architect?”
“So you guys really call him that?” Tony laughed.
“Nobody knows what his real name is,” Zakiyah said. “Elmer used to call him Big Money, think Scott called him something else once or twice, but everybody else on the floor calls him Big Time. Guess I never really thought about it.”
“No offense, as I know he’s everybody’s friend and people like him, but it kills him to go there every day,” Tony said. “I kind of think he doesn’t want anybody to know his real name so he can keep up this façade that one day his old life will be back. Then he can go back to being the man he was.”
Zakiyah was amazed at how much Tony could read off his own father. She completely understood where Big Time was coming from, though.
But a city planner? For a city that done drowned itse
lf? Oh, boy, she was going to get some play out of that at some point.
Chapter 29
The cacophony outside the stairwell began to dissipate around the twentieth floor and was down to a dull, machine-like roar by the twenty-third.
“Feel like taking a peek?” Scott asked.
“Not really,” replied Big Time.
Scott ignored him and cautiously pushed open the stairwell door. The noise got louder but was still far away, drowned out by the driving rain. The level was still under construction and there were no windows, only more of the plastic sheeting they’d found in the garage below. The ceilings and floor were concrete, with heavy columns running in between every few feet. Some construction lamps were set up around the floor, but it was mostly empty.
“What’re we looking for?” Muhammad asked.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” said Scott.
Three floors later, and Scott had his eureka moment.
“There!” he said, pointing to a stack of five-gallon metal drums.
“What’re we looking at?” Big Time asked.
“Hopefully, some kind of silver bullet,” Scott said. “Grab as many of ’em as you can carry and let’s get up there.”
“Up there” turned out to only be two floors later. The sounds of footfalls on metal steps echoed above the noise of the sludge worms and the hurricane though they were going up, not down.
“Hey!” Big Time called out. “Three people coming up!’
A few of the footfalls, slowed and inaudible words were yelled back out to the thirtieth floor. A moment later, two uniformed Houston police officers, hands on holstered weapons, came down and met Big Time and the others with the suspicion natural to their profession.
“Where are you guys coming in from?” the lead officer, a young Latino, “Gonzales” on his nameplate, asked.
“North side. Up past Tomball.”
The second officer, a tall black man—”Franklin”—regarded Big Time with surprise.
“You came in to the city?”
“We were looking for our families,” Big Time replied. “My friend here thinks his wife might be up with you guys.”
Franklin gave Muhammad an appraising look, then nodded.
“If she’s here, you’re more than welcome to look for her. We’re heading up to the highest two floors. I’m afraid you guys should’ve chosen a different building, though.”
“We’re not here to stay,” said Scott. “There’s a way out for all of you. Unfortunately, that means trusting us.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Gonzales said. “We’ve sent people down. Next thing we know, they’re flying out the windows from that ghost wind. Saw that happen at the precinct earlier. You guys came in through One Shell Plaza, right?”
“Yep.”
“It’s suicide.”
Scott stared at the man, incredulous.
“You think help’s on the way or something? Helicopters? You’re running out of floors, and that thing ain’t running out of pitch. You stay here, all of you people are going to die!”
Above them, the footsteps slowed. People were listening now.
“Are you trying to cause a panic?” Gonzales asked, leaning in. “Don’t you think we know all that? Don’t you think everybody in this fucking building knows that?”
“Well, what you don’t know is that we fought the thing and beat it back,” said Big Time, moving in front of Scott. “Better yet, we think we can replicate our results on a grand scale up here. Now, are you interested in hearing what we have to say? I mean, we made it all this way, so we must be doing something right.”
Gonzales turned to Franklin, who regarded Big Time coolly.
“All right, man. We’ll take you to the mayor. She’d be interested in hearing what’s going on in the rest of the city anyway.”
For a second, Big Time thought Franklin was being metaphorical. The survivors had elected somebody “mayor” to run the show. But as he was escorted out onto the thirtieth floor, a cold, wet wind blasting through the unfinished level that had had all its plastic sheeting torn away, he saw the error of his ways.
As they passed hundreds of people, if not over a thousand, waiting to head up the stairs, they spotted the mayor of Houston, Connie Bresnan. She was a short woman wearing a gray-and-pink suit with whiter hair than Big Time remembered seeing on television. Every line on her face was showing. She was in conference with two suit-wearing men when Officer Franklin signaled to her.
“These men just came up the stairs. They say they drove down from Tomball.”
“How is that possible?” Bresnan asked Big Time, not mincing words.
“We found a way to fight it off.”
“You fought it on the stairs just now?”
“No, it left us alone. We think it’s a numbers-thing with this. It’ll sacrifice going after a couple of stragglers if that means consuming…how many people you have up here?”
“Just over three thousand,” one of the suit-wearing men, who Big Time thought he recognized as a city councilman, replied.
“Yeah, that,” Big Time nodded.
“We’ve watched people getting torn apart all day,” the mayor continued. “Why not you?”
Scott held up six large cans of paint thinner.
“It’s oil. We burn the motherfucker with shit like this when it gets close.”
Though the proceedings were deadly serious, Big Time detected a hint of glee in Scott’s voice at getting to play the badass who swore in front of the city mayor.
“They think we can get out,” said Gonzales.
“How?” asked the mayor.
“We use this as accelerant,” explained Scott. “Make fire bombs and drop ’em on the four worms. As I said, it’s oil. The second it ignites, it loses its shit. There’ll be a chain reaction through every bit of the creature, and it’ll sink like a stone back into the floodwaters to douse itself. You will have a couple and only a couple of minutes to get down those stairs and out of here.”
“That sounds risky,” said the other suit-wearing man.
“Sounds that way because it is,” said Scott.
“Let me get this straight,” said the city councilman. “Your plan is to drop paint thinner onto these things and try to set them on fire like a circus act?”
“And your plan is to keep going up and pray these things run out of rope before you do?” Scott shot back. “These bastards killed my whole family today. Killed everybody at my place of work except these guys. Most of this city’s dead. How many more have to die to prove to you that there’s nowhere you can run?”
Everyone went silent. Finally, Mayor Bresnan spoke.
“I’m truly sorry for your loss. There don’t seem to be any survivors from my daughter’s school or my husband’s office. This is obviously a disaster on a scale difficult to comprehend. You’ve seen fire work against this thing?”
“Not on this scale, but we didn’t have cans full of kerosene either,” Scott replied.
Big Time held up his burned hand.
“A can of WD-40 and a lighter saved my life earlier.”
“We’re just trying to give you and everybody else here a shot,” Scott said. “If it doesn’t work, haul ass back up here and wait it out. If it does, then spread to the four winds and make sure that nobody stays in groups more than two or three. That said, I can’t tell you how long it’s going to be discombob…discom…shit.”
“Discombobulated?” Mayor Bresnan asked.
“That’s it right there. Suffer from a little of it myself.”
Mayor Bresnan chuckled. Big Time realized, in another context, he’d think his friend was flirting with her.
“Were you in the military?” she asked, eyeing him curiously.
“407th Army Field Support here in Texas.”
For some reason, Mayor Bresnan nodded as if this meant everything in the world to her.
“Between me and my two friends here, I think we can get this job done for you,” S
cott concluded.
“Two friends? That the discombobulation talking again?”
That’s when they realized Muhammad was no longer with them.
• • •
When Mia passed out, Sineada just about panicked. She looked at this little girl lying there with her eyeballs rolled up into her head and suddenly worried that the mental strain might’ve caused an aneurysm or something else to burst.
“What’s wrong with her?” Alan cried through gritted teeth, cold rain water pelting his face..
Sineada searched her mind and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Part of it is dehydration. It knocked her down, sure, but it shouldn’t have had this effect on her.”
Alan was in tremendous pain. He was sweating out of every pore and thought that he’d be going into shock at any moment. He was suddenly worried that if he went unconscious, it might become increasingly difficult to revive him if Sineada was concerned with Mia.
“Can’t you use your ‘talent’ on me?” Alan barked. “This is killing me!”
Sineada turned to Alan, her eyes filled with anger.
“I don’t know what kind of con you’re planning to run to save your hide, but using Mia is out of bounds,” Sineada hissed. “You want my help? You’re going to need to behave, understood?”
Alan nodded quickly. It struck Sineada as insincere, and she sent a bolt of psychic pain through Alan’s nervous system, something she didn’t even think she was capable of. When Alan winced, she felt a guilt over the sense of satisfaction she got from it.
“Understood?” she repeated.
“Yeah. I’ll go where you go. I won’t be a problem.”
“Fine.”
Alan began to feel his pain ebbing away. It was still present but muted.
“You’re not as powerful with this as she is, huh?” Alan said.
“No, I am not,” Sineada said, pouring water from one of the bottles across Mia’s lips.
“But you can tell what this thing’s thinking, too?”
“Yes, but only because it’s not thinking all that much. Seek out and kill, consume, repeat. It’s broadcasting that with a vengeance, so even I can pick up on some of it. It’s just with all the different voices within it, it can be overwhelming.”