Flood Plains Read online

  The campus was meant to feel collegiate. Built up over several acres of forest, hundreds of trees had been carefully preserved during construction to retain its woodland feel. The two dozen buildings and ten parking garages were connected by walking paths as well as a handful of enclosed second-story skyways. These were particularly trafficked on inclement weather days like today.

  Muhammad Abdul Salaam, however, slogged through the wet grass from the bus stop towards Manufacturing Building #4 without an umbrella. The rain was really starting to come down and the slightly overweight, slump-shouldered Indian’s brown shoes and matching pants were now soaked black. The thirty-eight-year-old could feel the stares from his fellow day-shifters comfortably waiting in their cars to enter the parking garage ahead of him, but he didn’t look over.

  More than that, he refused to run.

  He finally reached the mouth of the parking garage and threaded past the line of incoming cars to the building’s entrance. There was already a line of workers moving slowly past two security guards who peered into the lunch boxes and bags of all the workers as they came in. Coming from inside the building, a massive thump-a, thump-a, thump-a, thump-a echoed into the garage every time the door opened. The loud cadence was meant by those beating out the tattoo to sound like jungle drums.

  “Open it up.”

  Muhammad opened his bag for the guard, got his badge scanned, and filed down the short hallway into Building #4. There were already a number of day-shifters milling around the break area at the front of the hangar-sized factory building waiting to take over their work stations from the night-shifters at 6:15. Though there was always some down time between shifts, the line supervisors tried to keep this to a minimum. Typically, it would only be about ten minutes before computers started rolling off the line again, but this depended a lot on how the night-shifters left things.

  The factory floor consisted of ten assembly lines that ran the width of the building. The front of the lines were located just up the steps from the break area, really just a couple of tables, a kitchen, and restrooms. The last stations were at the back, where ten garage doors opened out to a loading dock where tractor-trailers waited to take away the shift’s haul each day. The line supervisors constantly reminded their workers that every Deltech computer built had already been sold.

  The workers in the pack stations used upside-down six-foot by six-foot by four-foot chassis boxes for their drums and beat on them with three-foot cardboard packing corners. Coupling this with the noise of the jangling wheels of the assembly line, the hydraulic lifts, the taping machines, the screwdrivers and the clatter of moving hundreds of half-built computers on and off the lines and into work stations made for a noisy workplace on its own. Populate that cavernous space with four hundred people, and it was like working on a busy airport’s runway. Rain pouring down on the steel roof should’ve added to the cacophony but was mostly drowned out.

  Muhammad shoved his lunch into one of the break room refrigerators. He rejoined the 320 some-odd day-shifters now waiting to take their places on the line. A clock with a red digital display hanging high above the factory floor showed that it was 6:04.

  The jungle drums got louder and louder, resembling rolls of thunder.

  “Hey there, Big Time.”

  Still drinking his coffee and cola combo, Big Time sidled up next to a twenty-five-year-old hyper-obese onetime gangbanger named Elmer Gonzales who worked with him in pack.

  “Mornin’, Elmer. They sound like they mean it this morning.”

  The 350-pound tattooed and mohawked giant laughed, causing his glasses to almost pop off his pumpkin-like head, so stretched were they. He would show anyone who asked the scythe-shaped scar around his midsection from where he’d been shot up many years before, but his jovial nature made him anything but threatening.

  “Let’s hear it, Big Money,” Elmer quipped.

  Big Time cupped his hands around his mouth and angled his head up.

  “ARF!!! ARF!!! ARF!!!”

  Above the cacophony of the drums, two night-shifters quickly responded.

  “Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-AH!!! AH!!! AH!!!” came a pair of gibbon-like monkey calls.

  “RRRRRROOOOOOWWWWRRRRRRR!!!” a jaguar joined in from a different line.

  Elmer and a couple of the other day-shifters laughed.

  “You got another one in ya?”

  “Let’s see,” Big Time replied, taking a deep breath. “WOOOOF!!! WOOOOF!!! WOOOOF!!!”

  Big Time’s Doberman yell got a couple of appreciate claps from coffee-sipping day-shifters. Before any night-shifters could respond, the shift-change buzzer sounded and bodies immediately swept off the line. Big Time pulled his ground wire out of his pocket, slipped it onto his wrist, and climbed the six short steps to the floor.

  “Aw, shit,” said Elmer, glancing around. “Guess Big Time Jr. didn’t make it.”

  Elmer was right. No Alan.

  Big Time spotted Zakiyah and figured she had to leave without him again.

  “He’d better not leave us shorthanded. Gonna have to whip that boy.”

  • • •

  The Gulf of Mexico was notoriously tempestuous, particularly at the Port of New Orleans, where the rushing Mississippi smashed into the swirling sea. Oilfield services workers toiled around the clock to keep up with repairs to the pipelines running from the oil platforms to the refineries that ringed Pontchartrain. When a hurricane entered the Gulf, the services teams went into overdrive to make certain everything was ready to weather the storm. These same teams took a hit in the public opinion department when New Orleans’s refineries were back in operation four days after Hurricane Katrina while much of the citizenry continued to suffer.

  The workers wore this as a badge of honor, however, and considered themselves just about the only people who knew how bad the hurricane would be and acted accordingly. When Eliza made landfall at Banes, Cuba, and continued across the mainland past Holguin, Las Tunas, Camaguey, and Matanzas before returning to the Gulf at Havana, it was expected that she would slow down. When instead it had the effect of distributing its energy outward rather than being dulled by the gradations of the land below (the topography having the effect of concentrating its power on a secondary wind maxima that relieved the pressure on the eye wall), the services team knew that this could be a very, very bad storm and began to prepare accordingly.

  Skeleton crews were sent to lock down the platforms just as their regular workers were sent back to the mainland to weather the storm at home. But as the hurricane got close and its powerful winds churned the ocean below, something began to stir under the ocean floor.

  At the continental shelf, the loose silt layer was stripped aside as if hit by a water cannon that the hurricane effectively created as it neared land. The churning silt was swept into the underwater cyclone and shot back down to the floor, where it sandblasted the rocks below.

  What emerged from subterranean confinement was hungry.

  Barely affected by the churning seas, it quickly moved to the surface. Though there were close to four thousand oil platforms in the Gulf, only a couple hundred were directly in Eliza’s path. Only thirty-one of these were near-shore platforms, easily sighted from land. The skeleton crews on each of these numbered four men a piece and would become the first to die. Poor communication was expected. The lack of radio traffic back to the mainland on that Tuesday afternoon set off no alarm bells, as the readings from the monitoring equipment on each platform suggested stability and expected working conditions.

  What had awoken was still hungry. It turned towards the outer platforms, registering the hundreds of crew members still out there who had successfully ridden out the worst of the storm. But then, it felt the pull of the millions on land. It collected itself, turned, and followed in Eliza’s wake as it neared land.

  Chapter 3

  The rain came down in buckets. Alan booked it from the bus stop through the grass so recently bent by Muhammad’s footfalls. Catching amused looks from
the long line of night-shifters now heading down Deltech Drive to the highway feeder roads, Alan knew he was late but didn’t think he was that late. He reached the garage, bounced past a minivan, and hurried up to the security guard’s desk.

  “Badge?”

  Alan fumbled in his pockets for a moment, incredulous at the idea he might’ve forgotten it, and finally found it. The guard zapped him in a second later, and he was halfway to his line when he saw the line’s supervisor, Dennis Webb, on the stairs leading to the second-floor offices.

  “Hey, Dennis,” Alan said, feeling like a truant sixth-grader about to be confronted by his principal. “Sorry, I missed my ride. Again.”

  Dennis Webb was a wiry, middle-aged white guy who wore khakis and a Deltech polo almost every day of the week except when pulling a rare Saturday shift. On those days, he invariably wore a Houston Astros away jersey his kids had gotten him for his birthday with “Webb” and “40” stitched on the back.

  That’s when Dennis reminded Alan that, more than anything, he just wanted to be seen as one of the guys.

  “If it bothers your conscience, work 3.5-percent harder for the first three hours of the shift. I think you’ll be square with the company.”

  “Appreciated, man.”

  Alan thought that would be it, but Dennis fixed him with a conspiratorial gaze.

  “So? What time did you hit this morning?”

  Alan bit his tongue to do some fast math, which Dennis took to be the tardy athlete playing coy.

  “Come on. Just tell me.”

  “1:59…,” Alan said. “…15.”

  Dennis grinned from ear to ear.

  “I’m telling you. There’s going to be a day I’m just ‘kicking it with the fam’ and there you’ll be on ESPN, running circles around your competition.”

  “Thanks, Dennis.”

  As Alan hurried up to the line, his mood darkened. He needed it to be 1:59:15, needed it more than anything in the world, but that just didn’t make it so.

  • • •

  “Whoa, Native Son! Getting better and better!”

  Big Time smiled as wide as Dennis when Beverly Larson, a rotund, forty-something who worked the station just before pack, added Alan’s daily time to a dry-erase board. The board had four columns: 400-meter indoor, 400-meter outdoor, 800-meter indoor, and 800-meter outdoor. The list of numbers in each column descended with regularity, indicating the time Alan chiseled off each day as he continued to train.

  Alan had felt bad the first time he’d reported a time that wasn’t altogether accurate. He figured he’d make it up the next morning or later in the week. After a couple of months had gone by, the board was filled with more wishful thinking times than real ones. But Alan knew people, and not just Dennis, cut him slack because they were rooting him on. They wanted to eventually have known him “when,” and he didn’t want to disappoint them.

  “What’s that get you to?” Big Time asked as Alan reached the pack station.

  “At the beginning of summer, I had two whole seconds to shave off my times to be in the collegiate elite: top ten athletes in the country,” Alan began. “Those two seconds dropped two weeks ago, and I’m now running times just under that, fastest unofficial times in college track.”

  Elmer, who was stacking manuals and cords to be placed in each outgoing box, let out a low whistle.

  “But if I can drop another second and a little more than a half off of that, I’m top ten in the world.”

  “That’s major, Alan,” Beverly rang out. “Major!”

  “How many times have you complained that this job is messing up your training?” Big Time asked. “I’m telling you, working pack, you’re building stamina. My boys are pulling for you, too. I tell them, another NOLA fugee out here, going to be that big story in the news one day.”

  Alan nodded. He’d thought Big Time was the biggest blowhard he’d ever met when Zakiyah had hooked him up with the job at the beginning of the summer. Four months later, he was a second father.

  “Yeah, you want to switch today, let me do some upper-body?” Alan said, nodding to the hydraulic lift. “I could use the stretch.”

  Elmer scoffed. “Oh, that’s rich. You’re gonna make an old man throw frames and roll pallets ‘ cause ‘you need the stretch?’”

  “You keep going with that ‘old man’ shit, and we’ll find those seven or eight boxes to tape together and ship you back to Juarez or wherever so they can finish the job.”

  “What do you know about finishing the job, Louisiana trash?” Elmer shot back. “Every time I turn on the news, they got some guy looking just like you on TV from New Orleans standing in front of roof with no house under it all, ‘Yeah, I been rebuilding. Don’t it look good?’ Fuckin’ NOLA trash.”

  “Oh,” Big Time nodded as the line started rolling again. “Bring it, Fat Boy. You think Houston’s got one step on the Crescent City, then you’re thinking wrong.”

  “Hey, hey, I’m just saying,” Elmer replied, shoving boxes of manuals and cords into a still-open computer box as it made its way to the tape machine. “Here in Houston, we don’t flood the streets with raw sewage and free all the prisoners out of County and call it ‘Mardi Gras.’ God had to build up the worst hurricane anyone’s ever seen to finally clean all that shit up. And you guys were doing that by choice!”

  “Oh, you want filthy?” Big Time retorted. “Go downtown, take the elevator to that observation deck on the Transco Tower the day before the window washers come. You’ve got a film on there an inch thick. Now go on the roof and take a breath. Tastes like the tits of a dead mule. You guys do know you beat out Los Angeles as the most polluted city in the nation, right? Mardi Gras is filthy, but that’s a week and it’s all sex.”

  “Wow, that is just some of the most backwoods, Cajun bullshit I ever heard roll out of anyone’s mouth,” Elmer replied. “Like everybody knows the taste of a dead mule’s tits.”

  Beverly snorted. Alan jumped in.

  “Nah, just he knew most everybody round the factory had taken turns sucking at your mom, so it was just natural.”

  All eyes went to Elmer as his mind raced. For a second, he looked like he had the perfect comeback at the tip of his tongue, but then he deflated.

  “I got nothing.”

  “Ha-hah!” Big Time crowed. “New Orleans in the house!”

  “Hey, you guys want to know what really stinks?” Beverly asked, leaning in. “You smell that Indian guy this morning? Smells like a bucket of ass.”

  Elmer chortled, but Big Time shook his head.

  “Yeah, I knew a guy like that on another job,” Big Time said. “It’s like deodorant’s against their culture, sort of their religion. You’ve got to go unadorned by perfumes or something. I never understood it.”

  Everybody glanced down the line towards Muhammad’s station. He worked alongside another Indian man, Mukul Patel, doing random system checks of computers pulled off the lines at the midpoint. If the computers passed, the pre-installed software was loaded. The units were then placed back on the line to be finished and have their hoods screwed on before being packed and shipped out the back door.

  “You’d think walking through the rain would help, but it’s even worse,” Beverly said, waving a hand under her nose.

  Big Time rolled his eyes and got back to work. He looked over at Alan, only to see him staring down the factory.

  “Dreaming of Olympic glory?”

  Alan chuckled and grabbed the hydraulic lift. Though he seldom thought of anything else, today he had actually had other matters on his mind.

  • • •

  “All right…go!”

  The four third-graders standing at the front of the classroom began analyzing the math problems on the chalkboard. Two began working the problem out on the board. The third stared at the numbers as if hoping the answer would simply reveal itself. The fourth, Mia, seemed to be doing the same thing, but the sharpness of her gaze gave away how quickly her mind was racing.

&
nbsp; She marked down the answer to the first problem, eliciting cheers from the other members of her math “team” sitting behind her. Even her teacher, Mr. Klekner, allowed himself a non-objective grin from where he sat on the edge of his desk.

  The answers corresponded to letters chalked up on a separate board. Mia glanced over at it and then wrote a “T” under her problem before moving to the next of a dozen quotations.

  By the time Mia was on the ninth problem, her closest competition was just beginning his fifth. But there had never really been a question. While Mia wasn’t necessarily the best in her class at math, she was as competitive as her father when it came to contests like this. She knew the most important thing to do was get out ahead early, as this would give her a subconscious edge against the other kids. She had also figured out the “secret word”—trigonometry—after four letters and had discreetly matched up the letters she knew would come next with the answers. She still worked out the multiplication in her head but avoided the simple mistake of eight times eight being fifty-six. This answer was what first jumped into her mind when she saw that the “m” she wanted was next to “sixty-four.”

  “Trigonometry,” she said, putting down her chalk.

  “Correct.”

  Mia beamed as her team cheered. She liked school fine, but a lot of that was the grading. She liked getting a 100-percent on tests others were happy getting a 90-percent or less on. They might have studied enough to understand all of the material, but she studied hard enough to then be tested on it.

  “All right, Mia’s team’s prize is that they only have to turn in the odd-numbered problems on tonight’s homework,” Mr. Klekner announced. “That’s assuming we even have classes tomorrow.”

  Mia’s triumph was short-lived, as everyone’s thoughts moved on to the exciting prospect of a day off due to the incoming hurricane. It had been raining when Mia had climbed into Mrs. Whittaker’s car to be driven to school, but she’d forgotten all about it midway through the morning. There were no windows in Mr. Klekner’s classroom, either..