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

the flooded streets, the remnants of a handful of corpses, but also the blinking beacon at Brammeier Tower.

Fadela didn’t trust her life to the turn of a valve somewhere in the basement and felt that the snakes would eventually discover some route in. After some real soul searching, she and Mrs. Frederik decided to chance it, taking Mrs. Frederik’s car into the city.

Fadela left a note for her husband, and the pair moved towards the stairs. When they got to the lobby, they found that the floodwaters were continuing to rise. Dirty water was pouring down the steps leading to the parking garage.

“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