Then, the wind would return, smashing him flat against the guard rail, and he’d be back to hanging on for dear life like a character out of a silent comedy.
He kept thinking he heard screaming coming from both sides of the bridge. He’d look towards Fifth Ward and see no one, the same when he turned towards downtown. He tried to convince himself that it was the wind.
He knew Fifth Ward a little. Zakiyah’s grandmother was there. He remembered the first time he’d gone with Zakiyah and Mia to meet her, a woman alleged to be psychic. When she practically met them at the door with a small check she said she wished to gift them with, Alan wondered if Zakiyah was wrong about Sineada’s lack of powers.
Daddy…
Alan stared out into the driving rain. He thought his mind was playing tricks on him. But it wasn’t like the screams. He heard this inside his head, clear as his own thoughts.
Mia?
“Mia?”
Daddy…we need you…
Alan looked out towards Fifth Ward and suddenly realized where the voice was coming from. The whole thing unfolded in his mind. Dennis offering time-and-a-half, Zakiyah making an arrangement with Sineada, the drive down as the storm wall approached, and then Mia in the attic. The same things that killed everybody in downtown were now moving on his daughter.
She was in danger of being taken by the storm.
Daddy! Please…
Alan had no idea how he was going to get to her, but he knew that he had to. When there was a break in the rain, he began gingerly moving down the bridge. He lost his balance several times as the wind continued to try to blast him over the edge and into the bayou, but somehow he managed to stay on his feet.
I’m on my way, Mia. Sit tight. Daddy’s on his way.
Chapter 16
Nobody had any idea how to get up to the roof until Muhammad suggested that there must be some kind of service access to reach the air conditioning, which always seemed to be blowing compressors. The problem then was, no one wanted to be the first out of the conference room.
“C’mon, people,” Scott grunted, leading the way.
Except for what water the group had tracked in from the break area, the hallway carpeting was dry. This did little to assuage nerves, and the group fanned out with caution.
“Is this it?” Amber asked, less than a minute in the hall.
Scott and Big Time hurried over to the narrow door she’d located and, sure enough, a ladder extended up to a trap door about twelve feet above them. Big Time clambered up and tried to get the door open but then shook his head.
“Locked.”
Scott retrieved a mop from the utility closet and raised it up to Big Time. Violently pounding it upwards, the large man made quick work of the door, bending it out of shape until the latch snapped.
Instantly, water came pouring down from the roof.
“Shit!” Big Time cried, trying to get away from it but becoming saturated in the process.
At the bottom of the ladder, Scott eyed the water as it pooled on the floor.
“It’s just rain water. As I said, I think it’s coming up from the ground, not the sky.”
Big Time nodded and climbed up the rain-slicked rungs onto the roof. By the time he was out of the trap door, he was soaked through with rainwater and shivering in the cold. He turned in every direction and saw only darkness. The power was out for miles, and the storm was showering the area with more water than Big Time thought clouds could hold.
The factory roof was massive, at least the size of a football field, but the trap door had been at the front of the building. Big Time looked over the street-facing side and saw that there was at least two feet deep of water racing by like a raging river. There was a sign of the pedestrian skyway connecting the factory with one of the administrative buildings that advertised a clearance of nine feet. Big Time eyed the space between the water and the skyway and re-estimated the water level at three feet and rising.
That’s when he heard screaming.
Worried that his cohorts were being attacked even as he got his bearings, he went to the trap door, only to find the exodus up the ladder going smoothly.
“It’s over there,” said Ro-Ro, who had heard the same thing.
Big Time jogged towards the far side of the roof over Lines 1 and 2, sloshing through the standing water as he did, and found himself looking at the parking garage. There were fire sprinklers in the garage, too, and the black oil tendrils were making efficient use of them to dispatch the survivors who had fled there. The dwindling group was being herded into a corner by a multitude of black strands. Big Time knew he’d arrived for the final act. One person was thrown into a truck and engulfed, another smashed into the roof of the level and devoured. A third person leaped out of the garage altogether to escape in the waters below, only to have one of the tentacles erupt out of the flood and catch him before he even touched the surface.
The final five had almost made it to the top level when an equal number of tentacles swam up the rainwater washing down and cornered them next to an SUV. Two of them were women Big Time knew, and they huddled close, hugging
