“I’ll be back in a moment.”
Sineada stepped out of the kitchen and made as if she was heading for the bathroom. Once out of sight, she ducked into her reading room off the parlor. She knew she could “commune” anywhere, but she was accustomed to doing it here, and there were few distractions. The handful of times she had hallucinated during a session, knowing every centimeter of her surroundings had helped pull her out of it.
Hello…? She asked in her head as she stood in the doorway, looking into the dark room. I am Sineada.
She waited. All she heard was the sound of the rain pounding on the roof until:
Sineada. Your time is today.
Sineada was surprised by this but worked to maintain her composure.
The storm? Sineada asked.
No. What the storm brings. Multitudes died and multitudes will follow them into death.
Sineada puzzled over this. Something about this wasn’t right. She knew that, often, the words were her own, manufactured by her mind as they interpreted a feeling from the other side. But this was ominous. There was a meaning she couldn’t quite divine.
What is in the storm? she asked.
But this time, there was no answer.
Despite this, Sineada found herself strangely elated. She had always feared that death would catch her unaware and she wouldn’t be ready. Now, in the moment, she felt ready for whatever this might bring.
Something else made her happy, too. This was one of only a handful of times she had been able to communicate rather than merely listen. The voices came to her disorganized, and a line thrown out into the ether might be returned with little more than a fleeting thought or instinct. A response that confirmed something was there but then did not engage further. This time, someone had come to her. She’d become that beacon her own grandfather told her she might grow into becoming. She marveled at what this told her. There would be no real death, no end to this life if she could communicate back to the living. This simple realization filled her with such a joy she didn’t even notice Mia coming up behind her in the parlor.
“Oh, did you finish the sandwiches?”
Mia eyed her curiously for a moment as if having trouble formulating a question. She scrunched her brow as she looked up at her great-grandmother.
“What does that mean, ‘What the storm brings’?”
Chapter 14
The storm had arrived.
Everyone in Building Four could hear the winds rattling the walls as the sky went black outside the windows and the rain lashed at the roof. The trees outside the break area windows had been bent over for much of the morning, but they were now beginning to snap away. Branches flew against the windows. Despite their being safety glass, Big Time could tell just by listening when a new crack was made.
Trying to distract himself, Big Time lowered another unit into a waiting box and shoved it through the tape machine. Though Dennis had given them a low quota, most people were working just as hard as they usually did to make the time go faster.
“At this rate, corporate’s going to be hoping for hurricanes every day,” Scott moaned, slapping labels on the finished boxes. “You can tell the hamsters all you want that it’s nothing but free food and laziness on the menu, and they’ll still get bored and climb right back up on that wheel.”
“When you’re right, you’re right,” Big Time chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you work so hard in my life, Hamster Scott.”
Scott rolled his eyes and got back to work.
Big Time raised the next computer and was moving it over to Elmer so he could slap the Styrofoam corners on it when the power went out in the building. A couple of people screamed, but Big Time didn’t have time to react as the hydraulic lift bucked upwards. The vacuum released the computer, which dropped five feet onto the concrete floor, where it landed with a crash.
“Holy shit!” Elmer cried, hopping backwards as shattered plastic fired in all directions.
As the back-up generators kicked in, casting the factory in a dull orange glow, Big Time could see the computer was a wash. It had splashed out its motherboard, drives, and wires across the ground as if they’d been busted out of a piñata.
“This one’s fucked big time, Big Time,” Scott said, looking it over.
“How long have you been waiting to say that?”
Before Scott could answer, Dennis appeared on the second-floor catwalk over the break area.
“We all right?” he called.
“A unit was up on the lift when the lights went,” Big Time yelled back. “Don’t think we’ll be able to resuscitate.”
“All right. Pull the chips and the belts and write up the rest.”
Big Time was about to reply in the affirmative when gasps of astonishment started coming from the front of the line. He looked out towards the break area windows and saw people racing by in the driving rain.
“What the fuck is going on?” Elmer asked, angling for a better view.
A handful of folks became a flood. A car whipped past, only to spin out of control and bounce onto the curb. Its driver piled out and kept running.
That’s when they saw a middle-aged woman in a print dress stagger past. She was covered in blood, her right arm hanging from its socket by little more than a tendon.
“Oh, shit. There’s been an accident,” Big Time surmised.
Everyone on the line moved away from their stations, as if worried that whatever violence was being visited upon the people running by would hit them next. Several grabbed for their cell phones and frantically dialed numbers, only to get no signal.
“Big Time!”
Big Time wheeled around as one of the night-shifters, a fellow Katrina survivor named Bud-something, came in a side door that opened onto Line 10, a door everyone in factory knew was broken but never fixed.
“There a tornado?”
“Something’s in the water,” Bud said, catching his breath. “Coming up the pipes, coming in with
