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

within seconds. It wasn’t so much a voice as a strong intuition tied to a direction. She knew the gambit had worked.

“It’s coming!” she called up to Big Time.

Big Time had been staring out over the water when the little girl’s words traveled up to him. It took a moment for it to register, but once it did, he snapped into action.

“All right!” he called.

He turned and lowered himself over the edge of the pipe’s hatch. There was a matching ladder on the inside of the pipe, but as it followed a concave curve, it was a lot more difficult to use. Still, he hurried down it to where Sineada sat at the base. He’d made the climb a few minutes before when helping Sineada, but the latent oil fumes had been too much for him and he’d headed out. Now he barely noticed them.

“Mia says it on its way.”

“Good. Time to see if we can make this work.”

Big Time reached the bottom and hopped off the ladder, a metallic thud echoing down the pipe from his landing.

“What do you need from me?”

“Not a thing. I didn’t even need you to come down here. But I thank you anyway…Isaac.”

Big Time chuckled at the sound of his real name, amused by Sineada’s demonstration of her psychic prowess. He moved over to where she was sitting, her shoes and dress stained with oil, and sat down.

“You want me to stay here?”

“Will it make it easier on your conscience if I refuse?”

“I think so.”

“Then get. I don’t need you. You’re wasting my oxygen just sitting there. You’ve got your son to think about anyway. Go on. Who needs you?”

Big Time put his arm around the old woman and hugged her tight to him. She embraced him back as he kissed her gently on the cheek.

“You take care, okay?” he said, getting to his feet.

“You, too.”

As Big Time headed slowly back up the ladder, he was struck anew by the immensity of the situation. He wondered how much of the world’s remaining population would believe it if they heard the fate of mankind rested with a little old black lady sitting in a pipe down in Texas.

Chapter 35

Zakiyah’s heart beat a mile a minute as she stood in ankle-deep water beside the pipe her grandmother was preparing to die in. The minute any danger arrived, Mia would take care of it, but Zakiyah was still nervous about putting all her survival eggs into the basket of a little girl and her aged granny. It seemed like someone in authority should step in. This was exactly the kind of thing that should be left in the hands of someone who had worked out all the angles, not a professional psychic and an eleven-year-old.

To make things worse, the sun was setting and a cold wind blew in off the Gulf, cutting straight through her wet clothes to chill her to the bone. The rain had momentarily stopped, but the air remained heavy and damp.

Someone took her hand.

“You ever heard someone called ‘Flinty’?”

It was Alan, pulling himself over to her. Tony and Mia were over where the pipe split into three, keeping their eyes on the floodwaters. Big Time was up on top of the pipe but, given the gray skies, wasn’t in a particularly better vantage point.

“Nope, never heard that,” Zakiyah said, lightly gripping his hand back.

“It implies somebody that has a lot of sharp edges, more than any other rock,” Alan explained. “But a flint’s what you use to create a spark in order to start a fire ’cause you need that friction to make the flame. So, it’s a double-edged comparison. Can mean ‘implacable, unmovable, or stubborn,’ but can also mean, I suppose, ‘incendiary.’”

“Incendiary? I like that.”

“How’d you know I was talking about you?”

Zakiyah was about to say something nasty but then noticed Alan was grinning. She smirked. Alan turned wistful.

“Makes me wish I’d known your mother a little better, as I think that’s where you got it from,” Alan continued. “Remember meeting her a few times, sure, but never really got to know her. Hanging with your grandmother, I see it’s a family-thing.”

“Is this you trying to be insulting?” Zakiyah scoffed.

“Is that what you hear?” Alan asked. “I’m telling you you’re tough. I’m telling you you’re incendiary. I’m telling you that when the chips are down, you have reserves I never knew about. These are things I should’ve known to tell you a long time ago.”

Zakiyah was surprised but quickly recovered.

“I think that would describe my mom, too.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re such a good mom.”

“Maybe. But maybe you forced me to be by making me realize that if I didn’t do something right, no one else would.”

“Harsh, but true,” Alan admitted. “But here we are, the parents of the girl who’s going to save the planet.”

“What’s your angle? What happened to the Alan who earlier wanted to turn his back on all this?”

Alan sighed. He tried to move his legs a little but couldn’t. The numbness had climbed up his torso and moved down his arms. His mind was drifting away, ready for a rest he couldn’t fight off much longer.

“That was the old me. Knowing what I know now and seeing what might’ve been, I’d love nothing more than to get the chance to put some of that into practice. Start over with you and Mia. I want that so bad I can see the house we’d have, see what we’d get up to on weekends. I see our family together for good. But we both know that’s not how this is going to end. I’ve got a couple of hours to go, but I’ve been dead since this morning.”

This information hit Zakiyah pretty hard. A part of her had known it to be true, but to hear it spoken aloud was still a shock.

“I’ll be with you,” Zakiyah said.

“I know you will. I just wanted to tell you that.”

Zakiyah nodded, fighting back tears. She squeezed Alan’s hand