Flood Plains Read Free

was soon on the road making up the time she’d lost.
    •  •  •
    Deltech Computers was created by four friends who had been laid off from their respective computer companies in the mid-eighties. Reagan had called in the small business loans, and demand for business computers crashed. As the story went, these fellows, who had gotten to know one another working booths across countless business conferences, met at a Luby’s Cafeteria in North Houston. Over iced tea and Jell-O, they designed a new kind of personal computer that would be cheap to manufacture, far lighter than anything on the market (making it cheaper to ship), but it would still include all the bells and whistles they knew their clients desired with none of the costly ones that tended to go unused for the life of the machine.
    Fifteen years later, they had leapt past several competitors to compete with the likes of IBM and Packard Bell to become one of the largest providers of business computers in the world. Their manufacturing, service, and administrative departments employed over thirty-five thousand people worldwide. Around eighteen thousand of these worked at the main Deltech campus 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