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

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, collective “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