“Oh, what sort of fit has got into your head?
I’m glad for to see you so merry;
It’s now twelve o’clock when you should be in bed,
Speak low or you’ll waken my Mammy!
Well if I am jesting, my jesting is true.
I have courted twelve months, faith I think it will do.
And before that I sleep I’ll be married to you.
If you’ll come with me over the mountain…”
Big Time?
He closed his eyes and thanked the Lord.
I’m here.
Where are you? I can’t see you…
I’m on the move. Go where it’s cold.
Big Time began climbing down farther into the pipe. It was an endless procession of steps, and he began to hallucinate that he was on some kind of treadmill. It seemed like an eternity before he heard the sludge sliding down the pipe walls above him.
He stopped to make sure it wasn’t another hallucination, perhaps brought on by the now-toxic level of fumes he was inhaling, but there it was. It was picking up speed. At the rate it was going, it might soon overtake him.
He wasn’t about to risk flicking on Scott’s lighter now, knowing that the fumes and residual oil would ignite so quickly that it would likely cause an explosion. No, there’d be a time and place for that.
Instead, he gingerly turned around until his back was against the ladder. Investigating the pipe wall with one foot, he found the metal slick and dangerous alongside the rungs. Taking a deep breath, he slid himself over onto the sloping wall and, when he thought he was far enough away from the steps, let go of the ladder.
• • •
In the time it took for Mia to pull the entire mass of the spirit collective into the pipeline, leaving not a whisker behind, the world had mobilized. Aerial photographs began to appear on the Internet. The military had over 20,000 troops rolling towards Houston from Fort Hood, Fort Bliss, and Fort Sam Houston. A mass evacuation of the rest of the state was headed in the opposite direction.
By the time the sludge was far enough down the pipe to be completely underwater, the President was on television. Coast Guard Group Corpus Christi delivered an audio and video playback of the disaster on the Van Ness to the Pentagon. When compared to the footage the army had collected from the attacks to its troops on the highway, bioterrorism was momentarily put back on the table as a culprit. But then, the coincidence of it coming during a hurricane seemed to rule it out again.
The focus returned to the natural world, which provided the fewest answers. They had innumerable protocols for a bioterror attack. They had no suggestions for this.
Given what they’d heard about the creature’s retreat, the President ordered that the military make rescue their primary mission. If they encountered “the hostile unknown,” they weren’t to engage, given what little they knew about it, coupled with the futility of their efforts in the previous encounters.
“Good luck and God protect you,” the President said gravely over the phone, addressing senior commanders on the ground.
• • •
“Gnnnh…”
Big Time’s bright idea to slide down the pipe resulted in a very painful broken ankle. He’d slid about a hundred feet down, only to reach a part of the pipeline that momentarily leveled out before hurling him down a much steeper grade. Instead of descending on his back like an oil-slicked toboggan ride, he went end over end, rolling and crashing into the pipe walls as he fell. When he reached the bottom, he landed on his ankle, and it broke clean. As he inspected it, he mused that it could have been his neck.
That’s when a new pain began, a throbbing in his ears that indicated just how far below sea level he had fallen.
“Lord, I am in hell,” he said aloud.
The skin of his arms and face burned as a hundred tiny cuts had been exposed to patches of residual oil. The air was so thick with oil that he could only wheeze in short snatches of breath, pulling in whatever oxygen there was left to find.
He was in perfect darkness now. There was more light when he closed his eyes, his retinas playing tricks on him with little flashes of red and white. He fished the lighter out of his pocket. He had worried that it might fall out in his fall but then realized that when he hit bottom, it would, too. It wouldn’t be hard to recover.
He didn’t hear the sludge anymore but thought it was just a matter of time before it showed up.
Mia?
He waited, but this time there was no response. He didn’t mind. These were his last minutes, and he was trying to assess and organize his life. What if Tony had been killed up there and he just didn’t know it? What if he burned himself alive a moment later, but this did nothing to stop this sludge-thing? If the spirits were trapped within the oil, where would they go once they were free?
He was mulling all this over as he played with the lighter in his hands. But then, there it was, the sound of something massive moving down the pipeline from above.
Mia? He thought. Can you hear me?
A far-off voice came back to him.
I’m here. We’re here.
Big Time raised the lighter, holding it inches from his chest. He was reminded that, after Katrina, many had turned to the Bible to tell them why this had happened. Popular quotes would relate to the Ark or the cities God had smote from the earth. But Big Time hadn’t seen it like that. Instead, he took everything that happened upon himself. He was Ezra, the man who, when faced with the sins of Jerusalem, confessed it all to God and awaited punishment for the sins of others. He was the
