Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Lily said nothing. She looked extraordinarily sad.

  Amanda said, “That isn’t going to happen, is it?”

  “No.” Lily took her hands.“I’m sorry, sis. I really do have to take you away from here.”

  There was a sudden roar of an engine. A motorbike came bolting along the footpath. Benj was riding it, with Kristie clinging to his waist. Neither of them wore helmets.

  Benj brought the bike clumsily to a halt. Kristie clambered off, tearful, and ran to her mother. She had her battered old pink backpack on her back.

  Amanda launched in on them. “That’s Wayne’s bike! What the hell do you think you’re doing? He’ll be furious!”

  “He already is,” Benj said. “Hi, Auntie Lily.”

  “Hello, Benj, Kris.” Lily looked wistful.

  Amanda saw her kids through Lily’s eyes. They had grown so much, filled out, changed. The pasty, fashion-conscious, Angel-obsessed teenagers of the days before the flood would have looked like peacocks beside these sturdy rustic laborers.

  But Kris was crying. “Mum, it’s my fault. I know you said not to go back, but I had this feeling we were going away for good-”

  “ I had a feeling,” Benj said, “when you said Auntie Lily was here.”

  “I didn’t want to go without my stuff.” Kris tugged on her backpack straps.

  Amanda glanced at Lily, exasperated. “It’s the last of her London things. Accessories, you know, sparkly bits, her string of amber beads. And her teddy!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lily said quickly.“She can bring it, now she has it. The question is, why did you come on the bike?”

  “Because of him,” Benj said. “He saw us.”

  And Amanda realized she could hear another engine’s growl.

  Wayne came roaring down the track on a big Honda. It was Bill Pulford’s, Amanda realized. Wayne pulled up, killed the engine, and let the bike drop to the ground. He came stalking over, fists bunched.

  Amanda forced a laugh, trying to ease the mood. “You know, Bill’s going to kick up a stink if he knows you handled his bike like that-”

  Wayne pointed a grubby finger at her. “You shut up.” His hair was wild from the ride; his AxysCorp — durable coveralls were gray with muck, his eyes bright blue. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Off somewhere, are you? I knew it when I saw these two little arseholes running off.”

  Benj faced him. “I may be an arsehole, but don’t call me ‘little.’”

  Wayne raised a fist.

  To her own surprise Amanda grabbed his arm. “If you hit him it’s over. Don’t-you-dare.”

  He glared at her. But he backed off, and shook her hand off his arm. “Isn’t it over anyway? Aren’t you all fucking off with GI Jane here?”

  Lily said evenly, “I’ve come for my family. I’ve no quarrel with you.”

  “Well, I’ve got a quarrel with you, lady. I’ve got rights. It was me saved them when we got kicked out of Aylesbury. Ah, go on, fuck off,” he said to Amanda. “I’m sick of your whining. You can all go. All but you.” And he grabbed Kristie’s arm. She screamed and tried to struggle, but he was overwhelmingly strong.

  Benj made a lunge, but Lily held him back.

  Amanda advanced on him. “What are you doing? Let her go!”

  “No chance,” he snarled. He pulled Kristie against him, his big hand holding her waist, her arm twisted behind her back. “I’ve got what I want, the rest of you can fuck off. Go on.”

  Amanda saw it now. “It’s been about Kristie all along, hasn’t it?”

  “Of course it has. I’ve only stayed with you while I’ve been waiting for her. Did you think I wanted you, you ridiculous old bag? How many kids could you give me? Because that’s what it’s going to be about in the future. Kids, strong sons, fertile daughters.” Kristie struggled again, but he twisted her arm tighter until she subsided. “Of course it was always about her. While I was shagging you, I thought about her. Couldn’t get it up otherwise-”

  There was a soft detonation, like somebody spitting out a seed. Wayne let go of Kristie and fell to the ground, howling. His right boot had exploded.

  Benj hurried forward and grabbed his sister. Lily stepped up to Wayne, on the ground, her pistol in her hand.

  He was clutching the bloodied mess of his boot. “You stupid bitch, you’ve shot my fucking toe off!”

  “If you make another sound I’ll shoot out a kneecap. What use will you be then to your survivalist buddies?”

  He glared, his face a mask of pain and rage, the sweat making rivulets in the dirt on his brow. But he said no more.

  Amanda, shaking, took a breath. “You do keep interfering in my life, Lil,” she said.

  Lily turned to the children. “You two OK?”

  “Yes,” Kristie said.“Auntie Lil, don’t blow his kneecap off if he makes this sound.”

  “What sound?”

  She ran up to Wayne, timing the run as if taking a penalty at soccer, and kicked him in the balls. He howled and writhed.

  “ That sound,” she said. She yelled at him, “Creep!”

  “Kris, I’m sorry,” Amanda said sincerely.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Kris said coolly, her tears gone now. “He never would have got near me.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Benj said firmly.

  “My God,” Amanda said. “I’m raising vigilantes.”

  Lily checked her watch. “Look, he doesn’t matter now. None of this does. We need to get to Cheriton Bishop to meet the car.” She eyed the bikes. “We could be there in fifteen minutes on these things, if we had two drivers.”

  “I can ride a bike,” Benj said.

  Amanda said, “I know-”

  “And so can I,” Kristie said brightly.

  “That I didn’t know,” Amanda said sternly.

  “Leave my fucking bike alone, you witches,” Wayne said from the ground.

  “Shut up,” Lily said mildly. “Well, then. Kris, can I hitch a ride with you?”

  Wayne cursed as they got the bikes started and, apparently unable to contain his rage, actually got to his feet and staggered forward. Lily kept her gun visible. Amanda was grateful to get out of his sight.

  39

  Once they were in the AxysCorp SUV the kids were quiet, to Amanda’s relief. It was the first time they’d been driven any distance since Wayne had brought them from Aylesbury in his Land Rover. But they looked big, over-muscled, grimy in the car’s smooth interior.

  They had to stick to the high ground all the way, mostly following minor roads. It would take them the best part of twenty-four hours to travel by car from Postbridge to Marlow, where the AxysCorp boat waited for them, a journey that might have taken a few hours before the flooding. Lily fretted over the slowness of the journey. Evidently whatever she feared was imminent.

  They headed northeast, descending from Dartmoor to the Black-down Hills, where they glimpsed the oil terminal at Taunton and the sea beyond. Then they headed east through Dorset. They had to cross various boundaries, roadblocks and barbed wire, as they traveled from one of England’s petty new fiefdoms to the next. But aboard the car was a police officer, attached to this expedition by Nathan Lammockson. There was generally still enough deference for the central authorities for the copper’s presence to see them waved through. But the car also carried a stash to pay tolls and bribes: sterling, euros, dollars, even gold coins.

  When they drove northeast across the Salisbury Plain they glimpsed Salisbury itself, where the cathedral’s spire, truncated by a storm, stuck out of a placid pond like a broken bone. Further to the north Stonehenge stood untroubled by the world’s latest problems, though a ragged band of would-be druids had made permanent encampment around it, and prayed daily for relief from the flood.

  They stayed the night at Newbury, sleeping in their seats in the parked-up SUV. Then, after crossing a swollen Thames, they continued northwest through the White Horse Hills, bridged the Cherwell at Goring, and then made their way across th
e Chilterns to High Wycombe and descended into Marlow. Here, moored over the drowned lawn of a riverside villa that had once been worth millions, a small AxysCorp powerboat was waiting for them.

  Even as far inland as Marlow, Amanda discovered when she got out of the car, you could smell the salt in the air.

  The boat’s engine humming, they sailed through Maidenhead and Windsor. Benj and Kristie clung to the rails, looking at the view, drinking coffee and eating sweet biscuits. The pilot used GPS to keep to the centerline of the river’s old course, to avoid buildings and trees and other submerged hazards.

  They stared as they passed Windsor Castle, standing proud on its brooding keep, though their tame copper was wary, saying he thought it had been occupied by a breakaway military unit. Elsewhere, where the banks were lower, the swollen waterway spread to the horizon on either side, its placid surface broken only by the occasional church spire or tower block. They may as well have been at sea, Amanda thought, and it was only the pilot’s GPS that kept them on the river’s original course. But no sea was as grubby as this, its surface covered by slicks of oil and Sargasso masses of plastic bags and tree branches and upended wheelie bins, garbage islands that were home to squabbling seagulls. On they went, the pilot intoning the names of the drowned suburbs below: Shepperton, Hampton, Kingston, Richmond, ancient places now lost tens of meters beneath the boat’s prow.

  The kids got bored of the unchanging view, and started playing card games with the copper. Amanda was pleased about that; they didn’t notice when they sailed over Fulham, their own abandoned home.

  They passed on downstream, skirting the abutments of drowned bridges. As they approached central London the traffic on the river began to thicken, rowboats and yachts, few powerboats. The kids perked up as there were more monuments to see here, glass monoliths protruding from the grimy water. Rafts constructed of ganged-together rubber tires nosed cautiously between the cliff faces of the buildings, and Amanda saw that divers were descending into the swollen water, hauling down plastic tarpaulins and power lines.

  “What’s this?” she asked Lily. “Salvage?”

  “Some of it. But also storage. It’s amazing how much stuff there was in London the day the Barrier was overtopped, Amanda, just a normal day, and it’s mostly still down there-tools, machinery, even bottled water and tinned food. There’s too much to bring up all at once. What they can’t retrieve quickly they’re trying to make safe from the rising water. A store for the future.”

  They passed through Westminster. Most of the London Eye was still above the water, like an immense bicycle wheel. You could make out ropes dangling from broken-open viewing pods, relics of the last rescue operations. On the opposite bank, the Big Ben clock tower stood a brave sixty meters above the water line. But one of its clock faces was smashed, only fragments remaining. The copper knew about that. “Some little-Britain nutter with a rocket-propelled grenade…”

  Lily’s phone chimed. She dug it out of her pocket. It was a heavy mil-spec model, a radio phone.

  The copper’s radio crackled.

  And the AxysCorp pilot’s screen lit up.

  Benj saw this. “What’s happening?”

  Lily looked saddened, but oddly relieved. “What I’ve been waiting for. The seismologists got it spot on.”

  Amanda snapped, “Got what spot on?”

  “There’s been a major ocean earthquake, southwest of Ireland.”

  That sounded ridiculous. Amanda found herself laughing. “Ireland? You don’t have earthquakes in Ireland-”

  “It’s what this has been all about, Amanda,” Lily said. She started talking patiently about “isostatic subsidence,” about how drowned land could be forced by the weight of the water down into the softer rocks beneath the crust, by as much as a third of the depth of the water above it. But the semi-rigid crust didn’t like being bent. And thus the flooding was causing huge seismic stresses all over the world.

  Amanda cut her off. “You’ve been spending too much time with Gary Boyle. What’s an earthquake off Ireland got to do with us?”

  “This,” the pilot said. He produced a laptop and opened it up before them. “This is a view from Exmoor, looking west.”

  It was an image of the sea, and a line of black on the horizon, a line that thickened as Amanda watched. And in the foreground you could see that the sea was retreating, exposing drowned towns, fields.

  “Tsunami,” Kristie said immediately.

  “A tsunami, heading for England,” Amanda said, still disbelieving.

  “It’s happened before,” Lily said.“It’s in the geological record, tsunamis hitting the Channel ports and the Severn estuary and Scotland, because of quakes off Ireland and in the Channel and off the coast of Norway.”

  “How high?”

  “We don’t know, not yet,” Lily said. “We should be safe here. But it’s going to make a hell of a mess of the whole west coast.”

  Amanda recalled images of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and Istanbul just a year ago, and Macao and Hong Kong since. Bodies hanging from trees. “So Dartmoor’s not safe after all.”

  “Amanda, you can see why I had to get you out. This is going to smash apart what’s left of Britain, and there won’t be the resources to recover.”

  Kristie was staring at the screen. “What about Molly and Linda, and Barry and George-?”

  “Local kids in Postbridge,” Amanda explained to Lily.

  “Can we warn them?” Kristie asked.

  Lily handed over her phone. “Call whoever you like, honey. There will have been an official warning by now anyhow.” Kristie immediately began to make calls.

  Benj was angry.“You knew this was coming, didn’t you, Lily? It’s just like Greenwich. We just ran off and left them to die, even though you knew this was going to happen.”

  “Yes. But if I’d shot my mouth off none of us would have got away. Look-you’ve got a conscience, Benj, and that’s a good thing. But can you see what I had to do?” She glared at him until he subsided.

  Much later, when they were in the air aboard the AxysCorp chopper, Lily’s phone chimed with another urgent incoming call. Kristie was still making her calls to Postbridge; she handed the phone back.

  The call was from AxysCorp, in fact from Nathan himself. Helen Gray had been staying with family in Chester. She had been lost when the great wave hit.

  Amanda took Lily’s hand.“I know what that means to you. The first of you gone.”

  “I promised to look after her kid,” Lily said desolately.“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

  Stephen Baxter

  Flood

  40

  June 2019

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  A patrol of river police searching for survivors in submerged districts of Paris came under automatic fire from an apartment building.

  A raid was organized. A gang of teenagers was flushed out; one officer was lost. Half-starved, many of them ill from drinking polluted floodwater, the teenagers had plenty of alcohol, and weapons. All but one had carried Kalashnikov AK47s.

  This was a global phenomenon. Even before the flood there had already been something like a hundred million Kalashnikovs, or close imitations, circulating in the world, so simple was the AK47 to manufacture, so reliable was it at doing its job. Even more had been churned out by factories around the world before they had drowned. Many guns had been stashed away by “ faux Napoleons,” the French police spokeswoman said, fueled by visions of future wars over the high ground. Nobody knew how many of these stashes might exist across the planet, or where they were, or how many AK47s existed.

  The AK47 was said to be the most effective weapon ever invented, in terms of lives taken. Now it was emerging as a final bloodstained monument to the age of industry and mechanized killing that had spawned it, and was likely to be a shaping force in the age to come.

  The Parisian teenagers were, all but one, killed with the weapons in their hands.

  41<
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  October 2019

  Gary Boyle was working at the instrument reel on the aft deck of the Links. He saw Sanjay McDonald hurry aboard just as the ship was about to cast off. He called and waved.

  Sanjay made his way aft. Laden with a bulging backpack, Sanjay was sweating from the heat of the day, and he wore a thin linen mask over his bearded mouth to keep out the smoke from the Istanbul fires. He dumped his bag with relief, and accepted a flask of cold water from Gary. He lifted his mask and took a deep slug of water; then he poured the rest over his head and face. “Do you mind?”

  “The ship’s got its own desalination plant,” Gary said. “Fill your boots.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was time to leave. A boatswain lined up cast-off hawsers into neat parallel rows. Gary could see the captain on the bridge, standing alongside the Turkish pilot who would navigate the boat through the strait. The whole boat shuddered as the twin screws churned the waters of the Golden Horn. Some of the scientists came up from the main laboratory below decks to see the sights. Mostly young, mostly weather-beaten and shabby, they milled around the deck, peering at the murky water, the walls of the channel. But this was a working cruise, and in the small compartment above the bridge, which they called the top lab, a couple of researchers were already booting up the echo-sounding gear.

  Sanjay leaned on the rail and looked out at the skyline of Istanbul, gliding slowly past the ship. Despite the flooding, despite the quakes, it was still a stunning sight. Eighteen months after the initial quakes the stubbornly unbroken dome of the Hagia Sophia had become an iconic image for a stressed world, and the low morning sun glinted from the minarets and gilded domes of the mosques that crowded the old city. But smoke rose up in lazy towers from the burning districts, and choppers flapped through the murk.