For Mia, it was just as well. She still had nightmares from the last big storm. They’d been trapped for days by that one, watching the water rise through a crack in their roof. It was sweltering. With every sound coming up from the flooded house below, Mia had imagined the attic collapsing and everyone inside being sucked down into a whirlpool, never to surface again.
They would end up like the bodies they began to see floating down the street the morning of the second day, drifting out to the ocean, never to be recovered, never to be heard from again.
Chapter 4
“These guys are fucking idiots. Seriously. What are they thinking?”
Ike Griggs was an assistant harbormaster at the Port of Houston, part of the crew assigned to the con tower. Their assignment was to make sure no ships came in or out of the port during the twelve hours before the hurricane was set to make landfall. An experienced pilot, Griggs had sailed on container ships for years, eight of them as captain. He knew ships would avoid putting in at Houston no matter what, given the size of the storm bearing down on them. No one wanted to lose cargo and a couple of days circling out in the Gulf or dropping anchor off New Orleans or even Mobile were preferable.
Except in the case of the Table Mountain, a container out of Visakhapatnam that had taken on fuel in Cape Town before making the trans-Atlantic journey up to Houston. For some reason, the Table Mountain’s captain seemed determined to make it to port ahead of the storm.
“I’m afraid they might be all cabin fevered up out there,” Griggs reported to the director of operations, a woman named Holly.
“You’ve radioed the danger?”
“Constantly. They’re the only ones that haven’t broken away.”
“What’s their speed and heading?” Holly asked, increasingly peeved.
“That’s just it. For a ship trying to race a storm, it’s got all the wind of a pleasure cruise.”
“Then it’s my call. Flip it over to Coast Guard. We’ve got enough problems.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Griggs hung up and looked back down at the vessel traffic radar display. He knew the storm’s heading and speed, and did a quick calculation of same for the Table Mountain.
“Nope, no way,” he said, shaking his head. “These guys are in for a hell of a fight.”
He couldn’t have known the entire ship’s complement were, at that very moment, being consumed by that which would do the same to him in less than twenty-four hours.
• • •
Big Time wheeled a pallet of computers to the loading dock. The doors were open, and rain was pouring down in ropes of white that splashed into the factory. The noise from the assembly lines was drowned out by the roar of the storm. Big Time looked past the trucks to the trees on the other side of the road and saw that they were just beginning to sway. He tried to envision what it would look like once the hurricane reached Houston’s north side the next day. Deep down, he prayed landfall would slow it down to the point that it wouldn’t look much worse than what he was looking at now. The memory of endless stretches of highway bracketed by flattened trees was still fresh in his memory.
When he returned to the line, Elmer signaled him.
“We’re almost dry on keyboards.”
Alan, who had been waiting for this moment, didn’t look up. He kept his eyes on the lift and lowered the next unit into its waiting box.
“You already ask Kyle?” Big Time asked Elmer.
“He said there weren’t any more in the building, but he’s still looking.”
Big Time nodded. Part of his job was to keep an eye on parts to make sure the line stayed up. Contrary to popular belief, the last thing anybody wanted on an assembly line was down time. If the line ran out of just one part and there was no alternative build, they would have to wait for a rush shipment of the missing parts to be brought down from warehouses up the highway in Conroe. Though it would only take a truck, if one was even available with a driver, an hour to cover the distance, requisitioning enough of the parts to make it worthwhile, and getting them loaded and then off-loaded once they arrived could take up to six excruciating hours.
With no radio, TV, or internet and the workers disallowed from waiting in the break area, the dayshift suddenly turned into a prison sentence.
“Don’t we have all those Jaguar keyboards dumped over at the end of the dock from last time?” Alan asked. “If we’ve got the chips, the Jaguar chassis is the same as what we’re building right now. It’s just a different chip.”
Alan searched Big Time’s face for any signs of suspicion but realized he was simply considering the suggestion.
“Is Scott back from the inventory meeting?”
“I can check,” Alan replied, hoping to not sound too eager.
“Okay. Go see what he’s got in the cages.”
Alan’s heart raced. He got the same kind of butterflies that struck every time he stepped up to the starting blocks. There was no turning back now.
• • •
Over on Line 8, Zakiyah zapped four screws into a plastic support bevel that locked the CD-ROM drive into place. She worked quickly, moving the line along but occasionally made a mistake: three screws instead of four. Sometimes two.
She didn’t give a shit, though. She hated this job. Zakiyah spent most of the day making up little games to keep herself from looking up at the ceiling clock. Mostly, she found herself stealing glances at regular five—or ten-minute intervals. If she surprised herself by going fifteen minutes between looks, she gave herself all sorts of positive vibes. If she managed to go
