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

took on the appearance of a giant squid, its dozens of tendrils inserted into every portal, watertight hatch, and ventilation louver on the ship’s deck. Big Time thought he could see at least a couple of men go off the back of the ship into the ocean, but it was hard to tell at this distance.

Either way, he knew there’d be no survivors on the vessel.

The crack of a rifle echoed across the bay, and a muzzle flash was visible before anyone on the raft could make out the shooter. It appeared that a sailor had managed to climb to the highest rung of the ship’s antenna array and was firing down at the sludge worms. He only managed to get off four shots before the poltergeist force threw him over the side. Big Time thought he could make out the man’s mouth open in a scream as he tumbled towards a sludge worm rising from the waves to meet him but couldn’t be sure.

“It’s not as big as the one we saw downtown,” Zakiyah observed.

“Yeah, it’s just a piece of it,” Big Time suggested. “Bigger than a single sludge worm, but still not the entire collective.”

But it might be enough, Sineada thought.

She estimated the Coast Guard cutter probably contained at least a hundred souls, now dead. She quietly thanked the universe for allowing them to sacrifice their lives to bring the beast back to Galveston, hopefully to be among the last to do so.

Chapter 34

As the sludge worm finished draining the cutter of its complement of officers and crew, Big Time and the others quickly poled around the Texas City Dike towards Galveston. Sineada kept one eye on it but knew it was unlikely to retract its tendrils all the way back to the main body before they were in place.

At least, that’s what she hoped.

Rather than the beach Lieutenant Dobson had chosen for his landing, Sineada indicated for Big Time and the others to angle out towards the Gulf-facing southern side of the island. In the distance, oil derricks were arranged against the gray horizon like birds perched on alternating fence posts. Behind them on the island like a matched set were endless refineries, one company’s plant squeezed right up next to its neighbors with only a chain-link fence between them. There were pipes and tanks and smoke stacks to burn off natural gas, and storage towers as far as the eye could see.

Big Time surmised that if you got a good start, you could leap from one company’s tanks to the next. He then immediately hoped by conjuring this, he wasn’t going to have to prove it in a harried moment when the sludge worms attacked.

“It’s like looking across the Mississippi from the Quarter,” Tony said.

Big Time nodded in agreement, but the strange thought that if this all resulted from the anger of the unburied dead from the Galveston hurricane, what about all those Katrina blew out to sea? Didn’t New Orleans have the same coastal oil industry as Houston? He figured he’d be long dead by the time the wronged spirits of Katrina took their revenge on the Crescent City but hoped someone pointed them up the river to Baton Rouge or around and up the Atlantic Coast to Washington, D.C. That is, if they truly wanted to get at the root of the weed.

They docked the raft on one of the concrete piers and ascended a short flight of steps over a high breakwater that had been constructed to prevent the refinery from flooding during storms. But Eliza had been no ordinary hurricane, and there was standing water of at least a foot around the various tanks and service buildings. With the ocean in the background, the floodwaters created an optical illusion that suggested the refinery was actually floating at sea, a visual helped along by the water gently lapping up their sides suggesting movement.

Though they’d been worried about how to transport Alan, the question was solved almost as soon as they’d docked. The workers had lashed pieces of equipment too large to stow indoors to posts and dockside pilings. Big Time had spotted a pallet jack roped to a building with bungee cords, and he quickly went to free it.

“You can sit on a pallet,” he called to Alan, who Tony and Zakiyah were carrying over the breakwater.

“You’re shitting me,” Alan replied.

“Like we’re boxing you and shipping you out,” Big Time replied.

He jacked up the rabbit until its fork was completely out of the water. He then grabbed the top pallet from a nearby stack and jammed it into place. The pallet was waterlogged due to the rain but hadn’t been subjected to flooding. He hoped Alan wouldn’t find it too uncomfortable.

When Tony and Zakiyah lowered Alan onto the pallet, he got as comfortable as possible, but he was struck with a new realization. This was his future. Carried, moved, unable to do for himself. What surprised him most was how light he now was. He’d lost flesh, bone, and blood, but also water weight. He’d spent much of the past few hours sweating out through every pore as his body tried to keep warm. Now he tasted the salt on his lips and knew how dehydrated he had become.

Worse, when Tony and Zakiyah had picked him up, they grabbed him roughly like a man. After they’d seen how frail he’d become, they set him down as gingerly as they’d handle a baby bird. It was a horrible feeling, a shot directly into Alan’s pride.

Big Time, meanwhile, was trying to determine what unseen dangers might lurk beneath the deceptively shallow sheen of water. He’d already taken a bad step off what turned out to be a curb, twisting his ankle. He limped a couple of steps before turning back to Sineada.

“What are we looking for?”

“The big pipes. Ones that run all the way out to the derricks. They go across the sea floor and then up to the derricks, where