Flood Plains by Mark Wheaton (best ereader under 100 .TXT) 📕

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