In a different situation, some of the prisoners would be assigned to sleep in the rec areas or even the visitor’s lobby. But with all of the HPD and Harris County sheriffs on high alert due to the storm, there were no extra bodies to guard these men.
After a particularly bloody altercation between a gang member and a male nurse who’d been selling prescriptions on the side, a steady stream of discharges were made. A handful of drunk-and-disorderlies, petty thefts, and even possession cases were shown the door with “order to appear” citations and a couple of vague threats. With the weather as bad as it was, a couple of those released begged to come back in as they had no way of getting home, but were refused.
As word got out about the releases, everyone in the cells began rationalizing how their charges were so minimal that they would be obvious candidates, from those busted with grand theft auto all the way to manslaughter.
Alan figured himself a shoo-in. His wasn’t a violent crime, he hadn’t used a gun, it wasn’t petty theft because it was still a high-dollar object, but it wasn’t like he’d stolen a car. Also, unlike just about everybody else next to him, he had no priors.
But after a sleepless night punctuated by the clatter of fighting prisoners and the thunderclaps from the coming storm, Alan realized he was going to be stuck there. He hadn’t managed a bunk for himself, spending the night hunched in a corner.
At day-break, he looked out the narrow, south-facing window. Outside, it looked more like night was falling than morning. The city was completely gray, and it looked like many of the buildings had already lost power. Beyond that, he could see the purple-blackness of the storm wall stretched across the horizon. He could see the dusting of white on gray below the clouds that indicated just how much rain the hurricane was bringing with it.
A part of Alan, however small, suddenly didn’t feel so bad about being in such a secure structure when a storm of that magnitude rolled in.
• • •
In Pearland, Brandon Pool had just made love to his wife of six months, Jessica, when he’d heard something splashing into the bath tub. He’d made it off the bed and had taken two steps towards the bathroom door when he was thrown across the room. He landed against the window, shattering it. Jessica sat up in bed, only to be yanked into the bathroom, where her jaw was displaced and four teeth chipped out when she smashed into toilet. They were dead and consumed by the tendrils of black liquid within seconds.
At an ironworks in Baytown that was waiting until the very last minute to shut down, a crew of seventeen were threading rebar. The elaborate network of pipes overhead were antiquated but still checked out every time the city sent a fire inspector down to make sure everything was up to code. When they began drizzling water now, the workers figured it was a malfunction having to do with the storm. As the drops of liquid burned into their skin like acid, tearing through down to bone, they raced out into the driving rain to try to wash it off. Once there, they found themselves confronted by even greater concentrations of the black oil, slithering through the flooded parking lot. The attendant poltergeist-like force flattened them to the ground, where they were quickly torn apart by tentacles swimming in from every angle.
At a gas station in Friendswood, an armed robbery was in progress when a loud bang was heard from the walk-in freezer. The robber, a junkie named Leonard, shot the clerk behind the counter dead for lying to him about there being no one else in the store. As he cleaned out the already open cash register, Leonard saw an expanding pool of black liquid coursing over the floor of the store, emanating from the dairy locker. He paid it no mind until, a few seconds later, it had climbed over the counter and was devouring his fingers even as they gathered the last remaining bills.
A one-time navy man who’d retired to Texas City and had taken to photographing meteorological extremes was just setting up his camera to capture lightning flashes within the storm wall when he felt a burning sensation in his feet. He had been standing on his back porch and immediately wondered if there had been a lighting strike nearby that had electrified the air around him. When the pain increased, he looked down and saw the black, sludge-like liquid boiling up his ankles.
Like a defense mechanism, he angled his camera down and fired off a couple of shots, capturing the very first images of the phenomenon. But then his bones were completely burned through, amputating his legs at the mid-calf and sending him sprawling forward. The navy man died befuddled, still unsure if he was having some sort of hallucination associated with stroke.
Most people died in their beds. Some in their cars. Some in their places of business. Few understood what was happening and even fewer managed a hapless attempt at escape before being chased down. The one constant was that there were no survivors, with the oily tendrils of black able to locate anyone near water. Whether that meant a flooded road, a water main, or a sewer line mattered little or naught.
Before the storm wall had even reached the Houston city limits, hundreds of thousands of souls had already been consumed by that which hid within it.
• • •
When Big Time had headed out that morning,
