Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  He took his boots and socks off, always a key moment of the day. He dug out the plastic sandals he wore around camp, open and soft, so his feet had room to breathe and relax. He hid his boots under a blanket, and took out his penknife and rasp, meaning to get to work on the hard skin of his heels. Like a soldier, he thought absently, maybe like the guys in the roadblock up ahead, and every infantryman right back to Alexander. You always took care of your feet.

  “You’re daydreaming,” Grace said. “Switch your phone off.”

  “Yeah.” He held it up regretfully. Its small screen shone like a window to a better place. Here was his only connection to the rest of the world beyond the walking city, the family he hadn’t heard from since his mother had died, his science colleagues, Lily from Barcelona. He had a charger but no power source. It had broken his heart when he had had to trade away his portable solar-cell array for food when the city had been going through its worst time, trapped by a dust storm somewhere near Dodge City. Occasionally, very occasionally, you came across a community where there was power, from the sun or biofuels or the wind or geothermal heat, and he was able to top up the phone’s battery in return for labor. But the last charge-up had been a long time ago, and the few seconds or minutes each day he allowed himself to turn it on were steadily draining the energy.

  He held his thumb over the power button. But then the screen sparked to life, with a text message. “Don’t switch off. Am coming. Will find U.” It was from Thandie Jones.

  59

  A jeep came barreling along the road, open-topped, driven by some guy in uniform, with Thandie and another woman in back. The jeep was at least fifteen or twenty years old, and looked a lot older. But evidently the Army at least still had access to gasoline. People stared. Aside from the city’s own little electric carts, you rarely saw a moving vehicle nowadays.

  This was a thrill for Gary. He hadn’t seen Thandie for five, six years, not since the time she had briefed Lone Elk in Cadillac City. He knew she’d been roaming the shore of America’s gathering inland sea, studying its formation and advising the Denver government on its navigability, ecology and other issues. He’d actually been expecting to meet up with her in Lincoln, if the mobile city got that far. Now here she was coming out to find him.

  The car pulled up alongside Gary’s little encampment. Gary could smell it, smell the rubber of its tires and its oil and the sickly sooty exhaust, the scent of an American childhood.

  Thandie swung her legs out of the jeep and came striding over. She had to be forty-five now, or more. But though the hair she wore scraped to her scalp was now shot through with gray, and her face was grooved and tough-looking, almost mannish, she moved with strength and grace. And when she gave him a hug, wrapping her arms tight around his chest, he felt his ribs crush.

  “Jeez, Thandie, you’re keeping fit.”

  She stood back and held him. “Well, so are you. The life we live nowadays, huh? The global extinction event has claimed the couch potato.”

  Her companions followed her. The slim ash-blond woman who came to stand by Thandie, about forty, her expression serious, was Elena Artemova. The Russian ecologist was just as Gary remembered from all those years ago when he had met her en route to the Caspian Sea, if anything her beauty enhanced by the lines around her mouth, the hint of silver in her hair. When she stood by Thandie their arms brushed, but Thandie didn’t move away; they both seemed unconscious of the touch.

  “You know,” Gary said, “ what I remember of you two is how you fought the whole time. When we were in that dacha by the Black Sea—”

  “That’s dykes for you. Women without men, eh, buddy?” This was the soldier who had driven them. He was a strong-looking man, stocky. He wore a sergeant’s stripes, and his face was hidden under a helmet and behind big dusty sunglasses. “Gary Boyle, right? You don’t remember me.” He took off his helmet, rubbed a grizzle of gray stubble on the scalp of his head, and plucked the glasses off the bridge of his nose. He was older than the others—sixty, maybe, Gary thought. He had striking bright blue eyes in a suntanned face, but the eyes were bloodshot, and his fleshy nose was marked by crimson blood vessels. “The Trieste, remember?”

  “Gordo,” Gary said, remembering. “Gordon James Alonzo.”

  “That’s me.” He tapped the stripes on his arm. “Sergeant Alonzo now. I joined up again when the Mormons started kicking up shit. I’m too old, but hell, they aren’t going to turn away an astronaut.” He glanced around at the linear encampment, the people scratching in the dirt. “And I guess there are no spaceships to fly around here, right?”

  “No,” Thandie said. “But soon there’s going to be a harbor for ocean-going ships at Lincoln. A harbor in Nebraska! Makes you boggle. Gary, it’s thanks to Gordo that we made it out here to find you. I’m not sure you’re going to reach Lincoln anytime soon.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s a war a-brewing,” Gordo said. “So you going to invite us in? Some hospitality you’re showing here, fella. You got anything to drink?”

  Gordo walked into Gary’s little camp, glancing around at Thurley and Grace and their bits of gear. Grace sat by Thurley, uncertain; she was always wary of strangers, and Gary saw she had the hilt of her knife showing at her belt. To Gary’s relief Gordo didn’t show much interest in Grace. Perhaps older women like Elena were more to his taste.

  Gary fussed about, spreading more of their blankets on the dusty ground, setting rolled-up sleeping mats for the guests to sit on. He showed them his solar stove. “Hot drinks we can do. Tea, if you like it stewed. Otherwise it’s water. We filter it well enough.” He looked at Gordo. “Alcohol, no.”

  Gordo grunted. He dug out a hip flask, unscrewed its cap, took a slug. He held it out to Gary. “You want?”

  Gary stared at it longingly; he could smell the whiskey. But he shook his head. “I guess not. When we started walking it took me a while to kick a habit I didn’t know I had. Probably isn’t a good idea to go back to it now, right?”

  Thandie and Elena came into the camp area and sat down, side by side, cross-legged. “We’re not going to impose,” Thandie said. “We can see how you’re fixed. But we’ll stay the night, if that suits you. Look, we brought gear of our own in Gordo’s jeep. A tent, other stuff. I’ll take a tea, Gary, but you can be our guests later.”

  “Courtesy of me,” Gordo said, lifting the flask again. “Me and Uncle Sam.”

  Thandie turned to Grace. “I don’t know if you remember me, honey. You would have been about ten when we last met.”

  Grace looked away, studiously unconcerned. Gary knew the look. She was always uncomfortable whenever relics of the past showed up. She preferred to dwell in the present, this dusty world of camps and walking and latrine ditches and bandits—the only world she had known, save for those strange early years when she had been a hostage of a Saudi royal family.

  Elena got up and looked more closely at Thurley, where he slept under his blanket. “This man—”

  “He’s Michael Thurley,” Gary said. “Once a UK government guy who tried to help Helen and Grace.”

  “He is injured,” Elena said. She lifted the blanket cautiously to inspect Michael’s wound.

  “We ran into bandits,” Gary said. “A couple of days and a few dozen kilometers back. We’ve been walking down from the prairie, the Nebraska Sandhills.”

  “They must have wanted something pretty bad,” Gordo said.

  Gary forced a smile. “His boots. That’s all. But he fought back.”

  “And he won,” Grace said.

  “That he did. But he took an injury.”

  The bandit’s knife hadn’t gone deep into Michael’s belly; it had been a swiping slice rather than a stabbing, which might have been fatal. The wound was clean, but it was long and had spilled more blood than Michael could afford in his weakened state.

  Gary hadn’t been able to get hold of a doctor, so he and Grace had had to handle it themselves. Gary had pushed the flaps of slic
ed flesh together, while Grace had sewn it up with a length of their fishing line, precious stuff liberated from a broken-open sports store hundreds of kilometers back. With her finer fingers and clearer eyesight, she made a much better fist of jobs like that than Gary ever did; it was always Grace who patched their clothes. They had had no anesthetic, no disinfectant save the heat of water boiled by their mirror stove. But they had got it done.

  Elena nodded gravely. “Well, it was necessary. Good work. But now we live in a world in which it is commonplace for a sixteen-year-old girl to perform life-saving surgery on a wounded man.”

  “We do the best we can,” Gary said sternly, feeling as if he was being criticized.

  Grace stood up sharply. “Gary, I’ll go find my friends.”

  “Sure, honey, if you like,” Gary said. “But you don’t have to go—”

  “Yes, I do. Then you can all talk about me to your heart’s content. I can see that’s what you want.” And she stalked off, heading down the line of the column away from the roadblock.

  Gary said, “Sorry about that. I have a feeling she did the same thing last time you visited us.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Thandie said. “She’s got spirit. Why the hell shouldn’t she ditch us old stiffs? Hey, Gordo, couldn’t you get one of the Army medics to come out and see Michael?”

  “Nah-ah.” Gordo shook his head. “Strictly against regulation to treat refugee injured or sick.”

  Elena sighed. “The Army gets the best medical treatment. It is just as it was in Roman times. And the best food.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Oh, come on, big man,” Thandie pressed. “What’s the use of being an astronaut if you can’t pull a few strings? Get it done.”

  Gordo looked irritated. But he got up, walked back to his jeep and spoke into its radio.

  Thandie winked at Gary. “Still thinks he’s a hotshot.”

  “Yes,” said Elena, “and he seems to think every woman on Earth finds him irresistible. Once he even made a pass at me. A ‘bull dyke,’ he called me. It took a fist in the testicles to get him off me.”

  “You just have to know how to manage him,” Thandie said. “You’ve got to admit he’s useful.”

  The pot boiled. Gary threw in some leaves, swilled the potion around, and poured the drink into tin cups. He took rabbit jerky from his pack, and set it on their thin plastic plates.

  Gordo came back. He stood for a moment, sipping at his flask, and he surveyed the long roadside camp, his free hand curled into a fist on his hip. “Jesus,” he said. “I can’t believe you people live like this. Just hobos tramping in the dirt. Is it true there are women who’ve had kids on the move? Got knocked up, gone to term and pupped, all on the road?”

  “Nicely put, bozo,” Thandie said.

  Gary said, “Look, we might be on the road, but we still have to live. And for most people life means having kids. Anyhow we aren’t just wandering around. We’re organized. You can see that. We’re a city on the move. We have a mayor, who we elect, although it has to be a show of hands. We have cops and medical facilities, and we barter with other communities. When we stop we get organized, we dig latrines, we post guards. We have chaplains in every denomination, and imams and rabbis. We help each other; we bury our dead; we care for our children. And we stay out of trouble. The first mayor was a man called Lone Elk, a Seminole Indian—”

  “I remember him.” Thandie said. “Evidently a smart guy.”

  “He got taken out by a sniper, but the system he established endures. We’re not beggars. We’re Okies. We work in return for lodging or food. It’s not ideal, but it’s not meant to last forever. We’re looking for a place to put down some kind of roots. Until we find that, we’re on the move. An Okie city, but a city nevertheless.”

  But Thandie glanced at Elena as he said that, and Gary knew what she was thinking.

  The inland sea that had swept across North America from the east now lapped as far west as a line running north to south from the Dakotas through Omaha, Wichita and Oklahoma City, and on down to the Gulf. East of that ragged shoreline, save for scraps of the Appalachians, there was nothing left of the continental United States until you reached the old Atlantic shore, nothing but sea. Even America was running out of room.

  “You always get turned away,” Elena said.

  “That’s true. One place we came to, the mayor mobilized his National Guard against us. Said we deserved to die.”

  That made Elena angry. “Was the mayor a man? Only a man would say a child deserved to die.”

  There were other places they had chosen not to stay.

  The federal government’s brand new cities on the Great Plains, which had come to be known as “Friedmanburgs,” had turned out to be corporate playgrounds and enclaves for the rich, like experiments in raw capitalism. The usual shantytowns gathered around the gated Green Zones, living off the garbage of ages past, or providing cheap labor for the burgs. But a year ago, Gary had heard, things had started to change, at last. By now it wasn’t only the dispossessed poor who wound up in the slums, but many of the old middle classes of America, finally washed up, dwelling in cardboard shacks like the rest. There had always been opposition to the nature of the Friedmanburgs and their corporate dominance, from religious and civil rights groups among others. Now the former lawyers and accountants and teachers in the shanties grew vocal and articulate, and put pressure on their elected government. At the same time the power of the corporations began to flake as the complex international networks of information, money and resources on which they relied finally began to break down.

  The federal government was exhausted by the years of crisis and hollowed out by the money it had had to spend to save its citizenry from the flooding, at the very time its tax base was dwindling to nothing. But now, under intense pressure, it finally assembled the resources to act. The Friedmanburgs were forcibly nationalized, with National Guard units, tanks and fighter aircraft. The super-rich fled—but there were a diminishing number of enclaves they could flee to. Nathan Lammockson took in some of them, in Project City, repaying old debts; he always said he had got out of the States in anticipation of just such an outcome.

  But it didn’t help Gary and the others. By then Walker City was far away from the burgs, tramping down another dusty road.

  Gary asked Gordo, “So why the roadblock? Refugees?”

  Gordo shook his head. He took a bit of rabbit jerky and spoke while chewing. “Not that. It’s the fucking Mormons. It’s coming to a head over the I-80 . . .”

  Gary had heard little of this. “What have the Mormons got to do with it?”

  “Utah is high enough to have survived pretty much intact,” Thandie said. “They’re self-sufficient up there. And now the Mormon community has thrown up some hot-headed leadership. They couldn’t see what the Denver government was doing for them. First they blocked any incoming refugees at the state line, unless they were Mormon or would convert. Then they stopped paying their dues altogether. When Denver sent in the police and FBI and eventually the Army, the Mormons fought back.”

  “A war of independence sparked by a tax dispute,” Elena said. “American history is a wheel.”

  “Raised their own fucking army,” Gordo said. “ ‘The Soldiers of the Angel Moroni.’ I joined up when it looked like we were going to get an honest-to-God war out of it.”

  Gary asked, “And it’s a war over an interstate?”

  “Not just any interstate.” Thandie started sketching maps in the dirt. “At Lincoln you’re at the terminus of what is still a major cross-continental route. Look, the I-80 used to run across the continent, all the way from San Francisco to New Jersey. Right? And it still survives for most of its length to the west of here, from Lincoln, Nebraska, over the Continental Divide, all the way to the hills over San Francisco Bay.”

  “But,” Elena said, “not much further east of here it runs underwater. Lincoln is the new terminus.”

  Gordo said, “Denver is
thinking ahead, about how to use that sea, the new coastline. I’m talking trade, projecting military force. And a harbor at the terminus of the interstate would be ideal for trade and troop movements and the rest. But the trouble is—”

  Gary finished for him, “The trouble is Salt Lake City has the same idea.”

  “Exactly,” Thandie said. “The Mormons have set up a camp outside Lincoln itself. And now Buzz Lightyear here and his army buddies have sealed the area off. They’re still talking, is what I hear. There’s still hope of avoiding conflict.”

  “A hope not shared by all of us,” Gordo growled. “Some of us want to just stick it to the Mormons and get it done.” He screwed the top on his flask and shoved it back in his pocket. “I’ll get our tent set up. Hey, Madame Brezhnev, you want to give me a hand?”

  Elena scowled at him. But she got to her feet, dusted herself off and followed him to the jeep.

  Gary was left sitting with Thandie. “All this strategic thinking. Planning for war and the projection of power. But if the sea keeps rising . . .” It was the same question climatologists had been asking each other around their hearths for fifteen years.

  As the flood approached four hundred meters, some forty percent of the preflood land area had now been lost, removing the living space of at least seventy percent of the human population—four billion people. And amid the vast displacement of the flooding itself there was an ongoing carnival of tectonic events—volcanoes, quakes, tsunamis—as huge masses of water settled their weight over the drowned lands.

  Thandie said, “Then there are the climate shifts. Multiples of feedback processes are working to drive carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air, and there is a continuing failure of the mechanisms that might remove them. Even if the sea-level rise ceased tomorrow, those changes would continue to work through. We don’t actually know what the end state will be like. Certainly like nothing we’ve seen before.”

  “But the sea-level rise isn’t about to cease.”