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

familiar sight of concrete barriers and plastic sheeting was absent, Zakiyah deflated. She knew that Scott was trying to rescue his own family by saving Muhammad’s but was shocked that Big Time would put his only surviving child in harm’s way for a man he barely knew. She wished she could feel selfless and wondered if now, at the moment of truth, she was discovering she was a bad person.

“You okay?” Muhammad asked, his hand on her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” she lied as Big Time pulled the dump truck over to the Brammeier Tower stairwells. “So, how are we gonna do this?”

“Very carefully,” said Big Time. “But you and Tony are staying in the truck.”

“Wait, what?” Tony protested. “I can help you guys.”

“This whole thing could come down at any minute,” Big Time explained. “We could start a riot. Whatever the case, everyone’s going to get to P1 and start hauling ass to the garage exit no matter what we say. You’re our escape plan.”

“Dad!” Tony cried. “I want to stay with you.”

“Tony, I’m telling you. I’m not going to be able to do what I have to do unless I know you’re safe.”

Tony shrugged, hardly placated.

“All right, then.”

Big Time hugged his son. Then he nodded to Zakiyah.

“Key’s in the ignition. You get a bad feeling, leave us behind.”

Before she could respond, Big Time, Muhammad, and Scott were out the door and heading to the stairwell. She felt even worse now as a feeling of relief coursed through her body.

Chapter 28

Muhammad’s wife, Fadela, had been on the phone with a friend across town when the attacks began. The friend, Ava, had been at a Lebanese market picking up last-minute supplies to ride out the hurricane when she began reporting what she saw.

“It’s like some big snake!” Ava cried. “It rose from the sink behind the butcher’s counter and killed the man. I don’t know what kind of animal it is.”

Fadela had listened as her friend went to hide in the ladies room, only to find a similar scene of horror there. Seconds later, the phone dropped to the ground. Fadela wasn’t sure if Ava was attacked or fumbled away her cell as she fled the scene. But then she came to the conclusion that it would take something as momentous as her death to separate her friend from her phone and decided it was the former.

She listened to the sounds on the other end of the phone. People were screaming, and the viciousness of the attacks by what she imagined must be multiple snakes was terrifying. Water gurgled into the phone, and it soon went silent.

Fadela’s power had gone out fifteen minutes earlier. Part of why she’d called Ava was to discover if she’d heard anything about the progress of the storm. Eliza’s outer rain spirals were already blasting rain against her windows, and she had no designs on leaving the apartment. She wondered if Ava was dead and realized that she believed she was. This led to her wondering why she wasn’t more panicked.

But that’s when she saw something else out her window. Behind her apartment building was another complex which had a large swimming pool, though only one family, a Latino clan with five children, seemed to ever use it. Something else was in the pool now: a thin black snake that emerged directly from a drain below the diving board. It broke the surface and moved across the top of the water to a filter on the side of the pool. It sluiced through the filter and flowed into pipeline shared with the building. Rather than finally emerging from the drain, it simply got longer and longer, like a long rope issuing forth from the bottom of the pool.

Within seconds, panic consumed the apartment complex. People ran out of their rooms into the rain, pursued by what appeared to be two dozen of the snakes, the one from the pool having broken off into several different heads like the mythical hydra.

“Mrs. Salaam!! Something’s happening in the other buildings! It’s coming up the pipes!”

Fadela recognized the voice from the other side of her door as a neighbor, Mrs. Frederik, who was as a white as a sheet with panic.

“It was coming out of my sink. I tried to call my son, but the phones are down. We have to get out of here.”

That’s when they heard it, a distant clanging noise from deep within the building. The pair slowly walked towards the kitchen and saw that, with each clang, the water faucet over the sink shuddered.

“It’s trying to get in,” Mrs. Frederik whispered.

Fadela backed away, but chanced a look out the window to where she saw people running in the streets. Water was rising out of the sewers, and snakes were coming out of the storm drains, grabbing people and consuming them whole.

“We have to get out of here!” cried Mrs. Frederik.

“No, wait.”

What Mrs. Frederik couldn’t have known was that Fadela’s sister had survived the Indian Ocean typhoon and told her sister about the mistakes of those who didn’t. They panicked, thinking they’d be safer outside a building in case of collapse. They were proved wrong.

“It’s out there in the streets, it’s in the other buildings, it’s around town, but for some reason, it’s not in here.”

That’s when Fadela remembered the notice that had been posted near the row of mailboxes in the lobby the day before. There was going to be construction in the building and the water would be turned off starting at nine. Fadela looked over at the clock on the mantel and saw that it was nine-thirty.

“I think we might have gotten lucky.”

An hour later, this was confirmed. They had called out to any others in the building, but they received no responses. The level of violence outside, including the killings of several drivers on Allen Parkway, had finally subsided. Fadela, who had no desire to witness the carnage, finally went to the window. She saw the empty cars,