“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Scott.
“The Wal-Mart started to flood, but they were taking care of it,” Bud said, shaking as he spoke. “Then people started screaming. I was seeing shit I ain’t never seen. Folks getting lifted off the ground, blood everywhere. It was crazy.”
“What do you mean it was ‘in the water’?” asked Big Time.
“I caught a glimpse. It was like an eel but lots of them. Solid black. They shot through the water, grabbed people, and just pulled them right under. A second later, they’d come back for someone else.”
• • •
As people in the factory building began to panic and run around like chickens with their heads cut off, Zakiyah was trying to call her grandmother. Like the rest, she couldn’t even get a dial tone.
Outside the building, people continued to run past, and the floodwaters were rising, water splashing up the windows. Even from her temporary station on Line 9, Zakiyah could see the fear on the people’s faces as they went by, some beating on the glass as if to warn workers in the factory of what they saw.
“What the hell is going on?” someone two stations down cried, already hysterical.
What made everything worse was that people had stopped working. This only amplified the terrifying sound of the rain blistering away at the roof
“Listen up, everybody!”
It was Big Time. He was standing up over Line 10, addressing both lines.
“We’re going upstairs to the second-floor conference room. Something happened at the Wal-Mart. Couple of pipes burst. People got hurt. There’s a chance we might flooded out, too, so we’re going to take to the high ground.”
Zakiyah wondered why Big Time was lying and what he was lying about, but grabbed her purse and began moving towards the break area regardless. Like a flock of birds, everyone began moving from their posts to follow her out until it was a human traffic jam between the lines.
Over on Line 10, Big Time flipped open his cell and tried to call home but got nothing. The faces of his co-workers betrayed real fear now, like worried animals being driven to slaughter. Big Time tried to smile reassuringly when their gazes fell on him, but it was doing little good.
He bumped into Elmer for the third time. Elmer moved aside a little to let him pass.
“Go ahead, man. I’ll see you up there.”
Elmer looked just as scared as everyone else. Big Time nodded and pushed ahead.
“Hey! Where’s everybody going?” Dennis yelled from the catwalk. “Big Time? You starting a panic?”
“Just trying to be proactive,” Big Time called back. “We’ll discuss when we get up there.”
Outside the window, the gray skies had gone almost to black, and the water was now at least two feet high. A car floated past. Water seeped under the fire doors at the front and the garage doors on the loading dock.
Big Time’s heart rate accelerated. He felt death’s hand like he had only one time before. In that instance, he’d lost everything but really nothing. His family had survived; they’d picked up and moved. They’d started over.
If he believed even a quarter of what Bud had just told him, he didn’t think his odds of surviving this would be anywhere near the same.
He tried to focus on one memory in particular. It was the drive to Texas across the twenty-mile stretch of bridge between Baton Rouge and Lake Charles that crossed the Atchafalaya Swamp. He’d made this drive four weeks after Katrina in the dead of night in bumper-to-bumper traffic. He’d counted the yellow lines in the middle of the road and tried not to imagine the black water below rising up to swallow him. It had taken eight hours to go twenty miles. He’d almost wept when they made it to the other side.
It took everything in his being not to simply push everyone ahead of him aside and race to the second floor, just as he hadn’t been able to bounce onto the curb of the bridge and try passing everyone in his borrowed truck as some had done.
As people reached the break area ahead of him and started up the stairs to the catwalk, he knew it would be less than thirty seconds before he was there, too. This eased his mind.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
It started with a rattling in the pipes that ran above the factory floor, both ones that fed the sprinklers but also that ran water to the faucets on the back of the building. The rain was coming down so hard that it had obscured the sound until the pipes had just about burst out of their C-clamps and shackles. People only noticed once screws began dropping onto the lines.
“Shit, what’s going on?” Mandy asked after a screw dropped directly on her head.
Before the pipes could come down, there was a different sound from the front of the building. Inside the kitchen and restrooms, a series of small bangs could be heard. A faucet was blasted off one of the sinks, firing water up to the kitchen ceiling.
“What the hell?” Dennis cried, pushing past everyone to get down the stairs to the kitchen.
“Dennis!” Big Time cried. “Stay up there!”
By now, the water had filled the sink and even more was starting to push under the restroom doors to flood the break area. The smell of raw sewage permeated the air. Down over Lines 1, 2, and 3, the pipes broke, showering the far side of the factory with black water. It knocked over tubs of parts, triggering a domino effect that sent tools and drives and instruction booklets into the spreading water.
“There!”
Big Time looked where Bud was pointing and saw a black shape slipping through the water from under the restroom doors. It got longer and longer with no tail end, only a tendril that seemed to be headed straight for Dennis.
“Dennis! Look out!”
Dennis turned just
