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

good sign that the storm was survivable,” Kubena replied. “You boys progress on in to the interior, but be careful. I don’t want to see anybody coming back with Mardi Gras beads.”

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem, Captain.”

•  •  •

The collective was on the move. Just as the storm began to slow, it discovered the Rio Grande River, which could take it west; the Brazos, which it could take north; the Colorado, which it could follow to the northwest; the Sabine, which would arc east; and the Red River, which it could take all the way to the Mississippi.

An embarrassment of riches.

But beyond being an eating machine, the creature had a highly developed hunting instinct. Within a second of detecting prey, a series of calculations began. The distance to the prey was contrasted with the allocations of resources required to retrieve it. Also, if there was more than one, this number was brought into the equation as well. If this was resolved with a positive assessment, the appropriate-sized tendril would be launched in the direction of the human prey. The computing and reaction happened so quickly and seamlessly that to the human eye, it would appear like a reflex.

The moment the twelve members of the Coast Guard detachment landed on the beach at Galveston, the collective detected the number and the decision was made. It wasn’t so far away, and twelve was a good number.

A tendril was dispatched to follow the waterways back down south.

•  •  •

Big Time stared into the water as the raft slipped along. The rain was heavy now, like standing in a shower, but he’d stopped noticing it. He was freezing cold, bone tired, and, along with his son, had just heard the craziest story he’d ever been told. He’d wished Scott had lived to hear it as, the king of bullshit, he would’ve enjoyed such a yarn.

“You’re saying it’s haunted?” he asked Sineada. “Not some kind of fucked-up mutated animal, but ghosts—spirits of dead people—physically inhabiting oil?”

“Not ‘physically.’ A spirit is amorphous. There’s no matter to it, only force and direction that can be easily dissipated. Normally, if there’s a vengeful spirit, it stays close to where it was in life. A single house, the cemetery where the body was laid to rest, tied to an important object. In this case, it was something that allowed for locomotion.”

“But oil?”

“Oil is organic material,” Sineada countered. “It’s made up the dead already, just not humans. Still, there’s a connection on a biological level. Not something you see Shell Oil slapping on the side of their service stations, but it is what it is.”

“So what can we do about it?”

Sineada went quiet. Mia was sitting with her mother on the far side of the raft, ducked under a piece of tarp. Alan, mostly covered with a tarp himself, shot Big Time and Tony a gallows smile.

“Mia seems to be able to communicate with it. Sineada seems to think she’s the key to putting it back under the ground.”

“Deep under the ground,” Sineada added. “So far down it’ll never come back.”

She went on to explain how Mia had been able to stop it from attacking Alan. She’d succeeded again by moving it away from Big Time and the others in the dump truck, just not in time to save Scott.

“Galveston has all those oil wells off the coast,” Sineada explained. “We send it down one of those wells and seal it in. The spirits stay buried this time.”

Sineada hadn’t been sure how much to tell the newcomers of what she knew, figuring they’d think she was crazy. But what had originally been a theory was now clear to her as fact. When they’d gotten close to the creature’s collective mass downtown, Sineada did some reaching out of her own. They were the ghosts of the unburied dead of 1900, but worse, many of them seemed to think they were in the same hurricane that took their lives. Their hell was an everlasting maelstrom.

The anger seemed to come from a different place altogether. There was a sense of fury towards being kept in stasis under the ocean floor for a century and disallowed from leaving the mortal plane. This madness was everywhere, hardly married to one spirit or another. Just as prevalent, however, was a sense that many simply moved with the herd. This hierarchy of spirit motivation baffled Sineada.

This led to Sineada’s most horrifying realization, one that she hadn’t spoken of aloud yet as she didn’t want to admit what she knew to be true. The thing was no more capable of understanding its hunger than knowing how to satiate it. It might stop after killing every human being on the planet, an action that might spark a new result or evolution. But until then, it was absorbing the dead of Houston to replicate what had happened to itself so many years ago. In fact, the killing part of it was almost an afterthought. The important part of its mission was to trap the souls of the newly dead within the very oil that had so long been their prison.

Only then would it count as revenge.

Zakiyah emerged from the tarp she was sharing with Mia and sat next to Sineada.

“Hey, Abuela.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Good as I’m going to be, I guess,” Zakiyah sighed. “You?”

“Getting there. Day’s not over yet. How’s Mia?”

“Fine. Guess that’s a lot because of you.”

“She had a lot to do with it herself,” Sineada suggested. “She’s a tough cookie. What’s on your mind?”

But Sineada knew. She’d noticed it in Zakiyah’s countenance from the moment she’d gotten on the raft and heard about the plan from Alan. Sure, there was a part of her rejoicing in finding her family alive, but there was another part that didn’t understand why they had to be the ones to fix it for everybody else. Now, she was ready to let her feelings be known.

“So, I talked to Alan…”

Alan. Naturally.

“…and, I already lost my daughter today. It was unimaginable the