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

water, selected their targets, and rocketed forward like torpedoes.

Within seconds, the waters in the parking garage were running red with blood.

•  •  •

Sineada had revived Mia seconds before the fire bombs were dropped on the four rising sludge worms. The little girl was just getting a sense of her surroundings when she was struck by the thousands of voices bellowing in confusion at the strike.

“Oh, my God!” Alan cried. “Did they just kill it?”

“No,” replied Mia. “They’re just trying to get everybody out.”

Regardless, they had an amazing front-row seat to the madness that ensued. The tendrils splintered off in their many directions and, moments later, Mia detected the first people racing out of a parking garage a block from the tower and into the floodwaters. Rather than staying together, they went off in a dozen different directions.

“Smart,” remarked Sineada.

This elation was replaced only a second later by anguish. The creature, far from being dead, began rolling over and over in the water. At first, the main body was about as wide around as a city bus. But as it kept going, it increased in mass, pulling its distended tendrils in on itself.

Then it attacked the building all over again. Rather than surrounding it, this time it injected itself directly into the superstructure. Almost immediately, Brammeier Tower began to bend and bow. Chunks of its outer walls crashed down into the street or bounced off the creature, though it hardly seemed to notice.

“Zakiyah?” Alan cried.

Mia’s gaze remained fixed on the worm as it altered its shape to slide quickly into the lobby, a snake squishing itself into a quarter-sized hole, but then nodded.

“She’s in there, but it doesn’t seem to know that. It’s going after everybody else.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Sineada asked.

Mia shook her head.

“No. But we have to get closer. We’ll be needed in a minute.”

•  •  •

As the dump truck raced up the ramp between P3 and P2, everybody could hear the sounds of mad panic coming from above. The building was shaking furiously and great cracks were forming across the walls, suggesting collapse was imminent.

“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Big Time said, hitting the accelerator.

P2 was flooding as well, and rivers of blood poured in from the ceiling and stairwells.

“Oh, God,” Tony muttered.

“Don’t look at it, son,” Big Time said.

Halfway up the ramp to P1, the truck almost slipped backwards as a torrent of bloody water slammed into the front of the vehicle. Big Time hit the brakes and turned, skidded a few feet, but then righted the truck and kept pushing forward. When they crested the lip of the ramp, they came up on a massacre.

Brammeier Tower survivors splashed in every direction, some even swimming, as the finger-like sludge worms shot towards them, elastic as rubber bands. They grabbed the people, consumed them, and returned to the large black mass pouring in from a hole in the roof.

“It’s faster than before,” Zakiyah observed. “It wasn’t moving like that at Deltech.”

“It’s pissed,” Scott suggested. “Didn’t know it was capable of that.”

“We still don’t,” Big Time retorted.

Gunning the engine to drown out the screams of the doomed, Big Time plowed the dump truck through the rushing floodwaters towards the exit. They had just reached the final ramp when the truck was hit so hard that the only thing keeping it from being knocked on its side was the roof punching into the garage ceiling.

“Shit!” Big Time yelled. “Hold on!”

The truck slammed back down onto its wheels in time for the poltergeist force to punch it again, this time sending a tidal wave of bloody water over the cab. Big Time smacked his head into the driver’s-side window so hard he cracked the glass.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Scott cried.

Woozy from the hit, Big Time couldn’t even see through the windshield, but he hit the gas anyway. The truck awkwardly lurched forward but not before the poltergeist effect hit it again, crushing it against the wall. There was a tremendous bang and the truck shook.

“The tires,” Big Time surmised.

He tried to pull the truck forward and realized it was probably more than one that had blown. He braced himself for the next attack, but it didn’t come. Instead, the ground shook, and they heard a loud roar.

“The tower’s coming down!” Scott yelled.

•  •  •

A block away from Brammeier Tower, Mia, Sineada and Alan felt the tremor of the building’s imminent collapse.

“We’ve gotta get back!” Alan yelled, paddling in reverse as best he could.

The trio retreated as the tower came down, crumbling into multiple pieces as it smashed into the floodwaters, sending up waves. At the moment the largest piece broke off and fell lengthwise down Fannin Avenue, the giant sludge creature extracted itself from the wreckage and disappeared under the water’s surface.

Due to the heavy rain, the dust cloud was muted, and even then, the pile of rubble that had so recently been a skyscraper under construction was surprisingly small. The first six or seven floors still remained, with jagged chunks of its exterior skeleton shooting skyward, but filling it and the parking garages below were the other twenty-five floors that had pancaked down on top of one another.

“Did she make it?” Alan asked breathlessly.

Mia scanned the area and nodded.

“There,” she said, pointing across the street from the fallen tower to the Shell building. “Coming up from the parking garage.”

At that moment, the dump truck came into view. It was limping along, but finally made it out onto the street. That’s when the monster resurfaced, erupting out of the water behind the dump truck, its poltergeist force lifting it out of the water and throwing it across the street. The truck smashed into the second-floor windows of the building opposite’s glass façade, shattering windows and twisting metal, before crashing down onto its passenger side in the floodwaters below.

“MOMMY!” Mia screamed.

Without a single thought to her own safety, Mia bolted off the raft. She half-swam, half-slogged through the waist-deep water the rest of the way to