The Canadian Civil War: Volume 4 - Mississippi Beast

by William Wresch

  Chapter 26 –

  Can it really be this bad?

  LeClerk led me out a back door. I noticed the minute our little group left the room, it was filled with drivers. Nature -- and truck drivers - abhors a vacuum. As we walked, LeClerk filled me in.

  "Six foreman and I spent the night in the warehouse." I looked at him and was about to say something when he guessed where I was going to go. "My family is fine. Our house is on high ground north of the city. My brother-in-law and his brood have moved in with us until they can get back to their home. I would rather be at work than listening to that fool while he drinks my wine."

  "And the foremen?"

  "No one is working who does not want to be working. We are going to blow through the entire year's overtime budget, but we will have the people we need. People is not the problem. Water is the problem, as you will see soon enough." As if on cue, we got to the end of a street and found one of the foremen standing in ankle deep water, a small motor boat behind him. He pulled on the painter and brought the boat scratching up against the concrete pavement. We waded out to the boat, pushing it back into deeper water as we climbed on board. "When I left Guy he was fifty yards farther down the street. The water is still rising." Guy and I shook hands and then paddled down the street. It didn't take long for the water to be deep enough for Jacques to lower the outboard and start the engine.

  Jacques quickly took us west into the warehouse district, and I quickly saw how much trouble we were in. It wasn't just the water, although there was no shortage of that, it was the things in the water. We had to maneuver around a ghost car that slid across the street right in front of us, then go around a street that was barricaded by a huge semi trailer lying on it side, only to be nearly capsized by a floating tree that came out of nowhere. The water was rising, the current was amazingly strong, and the beast was spitting debris at us.

  When we finally got to Murphy Manufacturing, we could see that things were getting worse here too. Water had risen above the level of the loading docks, and LeClerk drove the boat right into the warehouse through an open door. I can’t tell you how odd that felt. Worse, he didn’t even have to raise the engine for shallow water. That meant there was at least three feet of water in our warehouse. And, I should point out warehouses are not built at ground level. The lowest level is always the level of the back of a truck, roughly five feet high. It didn’t take a math whiz to calculate the depth of the water on our street. It had to be over eight feet.

  That would be trouble enough, but the water was moving. How could there be a current this far from the river? Our warehouse had to be six or seven blocks from the Mississippi, or at least from where the Mississippi should have been. Yet as we slowed to a stop, I could feel the boat slip to the side – in the warehouse! This was nuts. Two men in the warehouse grabbed our boat and held it steady while we stepped out into the muddy water. Much as I hated what the dirty water would do to my cool new Canadian pants, I was far more concerned about what it would do to all the electrical equipment in the building. At what point did the water destroy every machine in the place?

  LeClerk led the way to a stairway. As I waded after him, I wondered what was in the water with me. The warehouse employees had the same concern, and waded over to the door to close it. It was not water tight, of course, but it might keep out the bigger problems. I tried not to imagine what bigger problems might come floating or slithering through.

  “What we could move upstairs is already moved.” LeClerk said over his shoulder as he climbed. “You know if this were a modern facility, it would all be on one level. But it is old and in a congested area, so it has three floors. As much as we have cursed these stairs in the past, they are saving us huge problems this time around.”

  I got to the top of the stairs and saw an endless line of pallets in neat rows with just enough room between them to walk. “How long did this take? I asked.

  “We were at it all night. We burned out two forklifts, and all the rest are getting recharged. Although, at the moment there is nowhere else to go. If the water comes up to this level, we have no place to put pallets. The third floor is already full.”

  “What about our electrical equipment?”

  “The computers are up here, all portable electronics are up here, and we took the motors off our conveyor belt and pallet elevator and got them up here. But the servers are already toast. We couldn’t get them out of the wiring closet fast enough. They, and the rest of the office, are all underwater.”

  “You brought up the motor from the pallet elevator? How much did that weigh?”

  “It was over a hundred kilos. Two men got it out about ten minutes before the area flooded. They managed to drop it on a forklift and get it up the ramp just in time.”

  “Amazing.” We now stood on the second floor, staring down the stairway at the water. I thought I saw something move in the water, but then I convinced myself I hadn’t. Really. There was nothing in the water. I would just keep repeating that every time I had to go into it. “So what do we do now?”

  “I told the men to get some sleep. We will need to keep watch tonight. If we can bring a boat in here, so can the bad guys. While the men sleep, let me give you a tour and show you what we need to open again. By the way, fourteen days is a pipe dream. We will still be cleaning surfaces a month from now.”

  ”If you are right, Canada has some serious trouble.”

  “Dr. Murphy, Canada has been in serious trouble for years. This is just one more side of the problem. Now, let me show you where the worst damage has occurred.” And off he went on a building tour, and yes, in several places it led back down stairs and into the water. But there was nothing in the water. There was nothing in the water. There was nothing in the water. I repeated that mantra over a hundred times while we looked at loading dock doors that had been bashed partially in by debris, then went even deeper into the water to see what a floating office looked like. If there was a good backup system in Philly we might be okay, but otherwise we had just lost all customer records, all invoices, all inventory information. In one day we had gone from RFID coding to pencil notes scrawled on note paper. Fifty years of technology were submerged in muddy water.

  Finally, wet and smelly, we climbed out of the water up to an area of the second floor that the men had taken over for sleeping. These guys were pretty clever. They had taken sheets of cardboard and turned them into sleeping covers laid over some of the pallets. It looked like some of the boxes underneath were getting crushed, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I would be sleeping on pallets soon enough as well.

  “I want to report back to the Ministry,” I said as we settled on top of two piles of cardboard. It looked like I had selected a pallet of laundry detergent. “What should we put on the top of our requirements list?”

  “As I see it, we need three things. We need the water to go away, and we need the criminals to go away. That is for tonight. If they can do that, then we need the streets cleared. I hate to think of what is under the water. All of it will have to be hauled away before we can get trucks in here.”

  “You think there will be trouble tonight?”

  “Dr. Murphy, this part of town always draws criminals. Starting tonight, it will be non-stop. Every place that is unguarded will be stripped bare by morning. And the places that are guarded? We will have a fight of it.”

  “Call me Shawn.”

  “Thanks. Jacques. If the Ministry can keep a few police boats running up and down First Avenue, it will help a lot.”

  “I’ll see what the Ministry can do for us.” With that, Jacques laid down on his cardboard to get some rest, while I pulled some paper out of my backpack (who had packed this thing so well?), and started going through the texts that had accumulated in the last couple hours. What did I learn? I was able to upgrade my French profanity considerably. They had lots of new and creative uses for the muddy water flowing
through their warehouses. As for requests, there were several calls for food and water, more numerous calls for shot guns, and a universal request that the damn bridge be blown up sooner rather than later. I counted up the texts. Thirty one companies – more than had attended the meeting -- had sent me requests. I took that as a good sign. Word of the Council was getting around, and at least for the moment, people were willing to use me as a conduit. Now was a good time for me to deliver.

  I gave Elise a call. She picked up right away.

  “Hi Shawn, I hear you are chairing the warehouse Council.”

  “Please, Elise, if there is a Warehouse Council, it is because you created it, and if I am on it, it is because you made it so. Let’s be honest. Who but you would even think of a warehouse council?”

  “Okay. Yes, I did it. But you were here when we were defining the critical path. You know why we needed to jump on the warehouses right away.”

  “Well we had a good first meeting, and I have been collecting information. Now I need to ask for your help. First, blow the damn bridge. Water keeps rising, and it is getting pretty bad in this area. Second, there seems to be a general consensus that bad guys will be out at night. A police presence on First Avenue could do some good.”

  “The demolition has been delayed again. They tell me the site is unbelievable. The bridge is a tangle of concrete and steel, and water is shooting through cracks with the force of a fire hose. Two men have already been killed trying to get explosives where they need to be. They’re trying, Shawn. Try to communicate that. As for the police, I think we can help there. Most of the police reported for duty this afternoon, and the military has been bringing in troops all day. I will tell them about First Avenue.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Now what’s this I hear about my curfew?”

  “Don’t fight me on this,” I said. “You know it is the right move. Sitting up all night won’t be good for your health, and it won’t lead to good responses to this crisis.”

  “So you asked a two star general to be my nanny?”

  “There wasn’t a three star in the room.”

  “You are amazing, Dr. Murphy. Make sure you get some sleep too. Now tell me you love me, and we’ll both get back to work.” I’m not sure that’s how Council reports normally end, but that’s how mine ended. And I did close my eyes for a little bit. I assumed if trouble came, I would know about it fast enough.