Flood Plains by Mark Wheaton (best reads txt) 📗

an hour north of Houston in the cozy suburbs, home to many of the company’s top executives.

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