Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  The tenders cache consisted of the shed, which provided cover —against what the Junior Conductor could not imagine—for a communication station and a set of track monitoring sensors on a wooden bench, and of carelessly organized piles of rail stock and cross ties. A short spur of track curved off the main lines to a deck on one side of the shed, and it was here that a tenders cart was parked, covered in a tarp.

  The Junior Conductor considered pulling off the tarp and going right to work in powering up the cart, but paused. He went over to the shed instead, and turned on the overhead lights, which flickered on and flooded the area with fluorescent white. The communications station was powered down, but the track monitors showed backlit gauges, red arrows pointing to the center, green sections of their readouts. That was good, anyway. Nothing immediately endangering to the Point a Punto locally.

  He looked at his watch. Two and half hours since the train had stopped.

  These comms might be hardwired, he thought, and decided to take the time to power up the unit instead of jumping on the cart. A few minutes of work and some painfully loud squawks from the speakers later, he was slowly turning the frequency dial.

  No signals on the standard channels, and the emergency channel seemed to be overloaded to the point that nothing coherent could be made out at all. He caught snatches of words and phrases, but nothing that made any sense. He went to switch off the unit when, for just a moment, a single voice clarified out of the background.

  “This is Substation TR-549 in Brownsville, calling active crews in the area. Attempting to reach any coordinated response to the crisis.”

  It was a calm voice, bespeaking confidence and competence. It was his wife’s voice.

  HE TRIED FOR exactly ten minutes to raise her on comms. He got no indication that she, or anyone else, could hear his increasingly frantic calls. “This is Tender Cache Beta 81 on the express line—personnel late of the Point a Punto calling. The express has stopped short of Brownsville and needs information about the situation there. Can anyone hear me?”

  He was aware that there were protocols for radio communications, even in times of crisis—especially in times of crisis—but he found that he could not remember them, exactly. He found that he didn’t particularly care.

  After the ten minutes he had assigned to the task expired to no apparent effect, he turned up the volume on the speakers and moved out onto the little boarding deck next to the tender cart. He pulled off the greasy tarp and was relieved to find that the batteries on the conveyance were fully charged, at least if he was reading their gauges correctly.

  The controls seemed simple, but the Junior Conductor was sure that this seeming was a deception. There was a bar set horizontally above the operator’s lap that could be moved from left to right, and that was almost certainly what fed power to the motors and accelerated and decelerated the cart. There was a large foot pedal that was probably a brake. There was a lever set into the control panel that seemed too robustly built to be a power switch, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to use it at all.

  He walked out to where the spur met the main line and threw the switch that would allow the cart access to the seaward tracks, the tracks that led to Brownsville, which was north of him at this point in the arc. He boarded the cart and took a seat at the controls. And realized he was facing the wrong way.

  The cart was parked with its prow pointing toward the wall. He would have to back it out.

  Experimentally, he moved the horizontal bar a fraction of an inch. The motors whirred to life, but the cart did not move. “Have to engage the drive,” he said aloud. He pressed the foot pedal, but nothing happened.

  Hash marks on the control panel showed that the mystery lever had three positions, which the Junior Conductor thought of as top, middle, and bottom. Currently, the lever was in the top position. He took hold of the lever and moved it to the middle. He felt more than heard the drive engage, and when he moved the horizontal bar again, the cart lurched forward, in the wrong direction, and was only stopped from jumping the tracks by a strapped-together bundle of crossties positioned, it now seemed obviously, to prevent that very thing.

  Okay, so the bottom position must be reverse.

  This proved correct, and the Junior Conductor had soon maneuvered the cart onto the main line. He disengaged the motor, hopped off to throw the siding switch back into its closed position, then boarded again.

  If the cart had any running lights or headlights, he could not find them. So he held up his flashlight with one hand, and fed power to the drive with the other. Sliding the horizontal lever less than a third of the way across found him moving down the track at terrific speed, the humid air feeling like a tropical wind.

  He found that he was moving so fast that he probably wouldn’t have time to decelerate or stop if his flashlight revealed something blocking the track. He thought of his wife’s calm voice on the radio. He increased his speed.

  THE SENIOR TECHNICIAN ran as fast as she could, but lugging two large fire extinguishers slowed her down considerably. Up ahead, Givens exhausted a third extinguisher’s foam and threw it aside in disgust.

  “This is pointless!” he shouted over the sound of the flames crackling from the electrical conduit pipe. “The water will be up to this level in another hour or two anyway! Even if we do get this put out we won’t have time to rewire this junction before it’s flooded.”

  The Senior Technician wearily handed over one of her extinguishers and waved her hand at the fire, indicating that he should get back to work. There was only room at the access panel for one of them to operate an extinguisher, so she stepped back to give him a little more room and to take a moment to breathe.

  The harsh smoke rising from the plastic wrapped cables in the junction caused her to cough. Givens was right. This was pointless. But there had to be something she could do, some good she could do.

  They had encountered two other roving bands of utilities workers as they made their way through the access tunnels in the heart of the city, neither of them in communications with anyone else, neither of them with anyone higher ranked than her among their number. One group had been panicked, rushing from communications station to communications station, desperate for orders. Those she had set to clearing a fouled sump pump before continuing south with Givens. The other group, three very junior technicians, had been grimly monitoring the rising water levels in the transportation tunnels on a panel they’d repurposed with a surprising show of ingenuity. She’d left them to it, telling them to send runners up to the populated levels with news as they saw fit.

  “We’ve been up there a couple of times already, ma’am,” one of them had said. “The security patrols are all working to keep people from looting or from rushing the train station, or at least that’s what they say they’re doing. I don’t know how word spread so quickly about the flood with comms down everywhere.”

  Word of mouth. It was a commonplace bit of accepted wisdom that a rumor born in Cancún at breakfast would be making the rounds in Key West by lunch, all by dint of people whispering to their neighbors. Impossible, of course, but if the flooding was confined to just the sectors around Brownsville then she could believe the locals would hear about it quickly.

  Not that she believed the flooding was confined.

  Givens tossed aside the extinguisher, turned to her with hands held out to accept their last one. She shook her head. “No, just kick the panel closed. That will keep the worst of the smoke routed inside the conduit anyway. We’ve still got another mile or more to make it to the arch.”

  He didn’t answer her, but turned and did as she said. He was slump-shouldered and moving with obvious effort, if anything more exhausted than she was despite the difference in their ages. She’d been leaning on him hard for the last few hours.

  She found herself trying to remember the procedure for recommending a commendation for an apprentice, then laughed aloud. There was an edge to it, and she clamped her mouth shut.

  If Give
ns wondered why she’d laughed, he didn’t bother asking her about it. He leaned against the wall, hands on his knees, head down.

  “How many times have you been outside?” he asked, quite unexpectedly.

  She considered ignoring him, telling him to get moving, but then said, “I’ve left the city many times. I’ve even been overseas. I’ve visited my parents in Africa twice, and I attended a conference in Paris just last year, you remember that.”

  “But you took trains and submersibles when you went, right? I mean outside. How many times have you seen the sky without a foot-thick matrix of plexiglass between you and it?”

  The Senior Technician thought carefully, counting on the fingers of one hand. “I went out in a hurricane eye to help secure a pontoon mooring when I was around your age. When we still thought we could complete the loop with floating sectors secured on Cuba. I went to an observatory near my parents home in the Mountains of the Moon that had a ceiling that could iris open, and they let us see the stars that way for a few minutes, that was, oh, twelve or fifteen years ago. It seems like there was some sort of field trip when I was a little girl to the interior of the Florida peninsula, but I don’t remember if we left the vehicles. So, twice, I guess. How about you?”

  Givens said, “I’ve been outside forty-four times.”

  “What? How is that possible? Why?”

  “It’s a religious thing. I mean, I’m not religious, but my mother is. And her church teaches that we have to spend time, they say it like this, they say we have to spend time ‘between the ground and God.’ So they bribe people in our directorate to guide them to exterior exits when the weather’s not too bad. It’s the whole reason I have this job, really. I was supposed to be an inside man for her congregation.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” asked the Senior Technician.

  “For two reasons. One to tell you why I’m leaving you now—we’re really not doing anybody any good anyway and I would stay if we were, but I’m going to go find my mother and her friends and see what they’re planning. The second reason is to tell you that if you can get out, if you can head inland, up the rivers, you can find colonies of people who live outside all the time. If anybody can make it out, I think you can. And I hope you do.”

  He opened the access door to the stairwell that led up to the populated levels. He paused fractionally as he went through, but did not turn to say goodbye, and neither did she try to stop him.

  After a moment, she spoke to herself, alone in the empty corridor. “Okay, okay. That limits my options somewhat,” she said. Then she turned and trotted south, toward the endangered arches.

  THE JUNIOR CONDUCTOR tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The tracks stopped, ripped apart by some titanic force he couldn’t imagine, and there was a crack running below them and the sidings. He could look down through that crack to see water. To see waves.

  This, he believed, was the estuary of the Rio Grande. And he was staring through a tear in the bottom of the city.

  A great groaning noise sounded and he felt a tremor that wasn’t just his hand. The whole tunnel was vibrating. He thought for a moment that it was a sign that the city was collapsing around him, but then he felt the push of air at his back.

  Something was moving up the tunnel behind him. Something large, something moving fast.

  The Junior Conductor’s jaw dropped open. The Point a Punto was approaching. It couldn’t be anything else.

  Why? he had an instant to wonder before leaping clear of the tenders cart. He landed on his bad foot and stumbled, rolled awkwardly on his right shoulder, and found himself up again, scrambling to get as far from the seaward tracks as possible. He had no idea what would happen when the train reached the breach in the tracks, but he didn’t imagine his odds for survival were very high, even if he made it all the way to the wall. This didn’t stop him from desperately trying.

  The two engines both made it over the crevasse but jumped the tracks. The line of cars suffered from competing shearing forces, gravity drawing them downward while the deceleration and alternating side-to-side motions of the crash juddered back from each coupling, through the superstructure of each car. The train collapsed up against itself like a released spring, filling the tunnel with fire and noise and calamity. It seemed to last for hours, and in fact must have lasted for long minutes, and even when everything was finally still there were aftershocks and explosive noises as parts of the great pile of twisted train collapsed in on itself.

  The Junior Conductor, ears ringing, unable to move, unable to see anything but smoke and dust, coughed. He tried to raise his hand to cover his mouth and nose against the fumes and heat, but found that he could not move his arms any more than his legs, could not raise his head or sit up from where he lay flat on his back.

  Was he pinned by something, or was he paralyzed? Injured or trapped?

  Probably both, he thought.

  The ringing in his ears began to subside. He thought he heard the sound of someone crying, and then a cut-off scream. And there was something else, something rhythmic and susurrating. It took him a moment to realize he was hearing the sound of waves. He wondered if this was what an incoming tide sounded like.

  He coughed again. His mouth was full of blood. When he turned his head to spit, he thought nothing of it immediately. But then, Wait, I moved.

  Slowly, tentatively, he curled his hands into fists, then flexed each foot. There was a spike of pain from his previously-injured ankle, and he welcomed it. There didn’t seem to be any weight crushing him down, so maybe, maybe…

  More long moments passed as the Junior Conductor explored the limits of his mobility, strength slowly returning. The smoke cleared somewhat, the wan light of the crevasse now somewhat stronger as the impact of the train had widened the crack in the sidings.

  Finally, he sat up.

  He had apparently been thrown some distance up the tracks, because the tear in the city was behind him, the bulk of the debris on the far side. The emergency lights extinguished, and only a few flames and the light from outside showed the extent of the devastation. The Junior Conductor thought he could make out the broken form of a human body in the wreckage, but saw no signs of motion.

  JT-XX0-0. All aboard lost.

  He patted his pockets and looked around him in the gloom. His flashlight was nowhere to be seen.

  He struggled to his feet, took one last hopeless look around, then began limping blindly into the dark toward the station.

  THE TRAIN STATION, to the Senior Technician’s surprise, was abandoned. There was one train in, a local on the upper tracks, its doors open and the battery-operated flashing signs reading ‘now boarding’ just beginning to dim. But there was no one to board, and certainly no one to operate the train.

  The screens showing in and outbound traffic were black, inoperative. She checked her timepiece. Even if the Point a Punto had made it to the station after its unscheduled stop, it would have long since departed. She had no way of knowing whether or not her husband was still stuck in the tunnel or was instead bound northeast at high speed, toward who knew what danger.

  No way of knowing, but perhaps some way of finding out.

  She moved down into the lower levels of the station, its appurtenances growing richer and more luxurious as she approached the platform where the great express made its brief stops in Brownsville. The marble flooring was polished to a high sheen. She sat on the edge of the platform and let her feet dangle above the track sidings. She breathed in, trying to detect some recent sign of smoke and soot. There was none, but, but…

  Salt air?

  Brownsville Station was near the northern terminus of the arch of city that stretched over the Rio Grande estuary. She had detected no further signs of a collapse in the integrity of the city’s superstructure, not unless what she was breathing in could be interpreted as such.

  She clicked her flashlight off and on. The beam was strong.

  She hopped down onto the sidings, and walke
d into the express tunnel toward the Matamoros side of the river.

  IMPOSSIBLY, THE WOMAN with the flashlight walking resolutely up the tracks turned out to be his wife.

  IMPOSSIBLY, THE FILTHY man limping toward her out of the darkness turned out to be her husband.

  THE RIOTERS TORE through the station but never entered the tunnels, so they stayed safe, hiding together for several days. The emergency stores from the bridge tenders shack they found kept them from dying of thirst. They ignored their hunger as best they could.

  “Do you think the whole city is like this?” he asked her.

  She had been thinking about that very thing. “Yes,” she said. “Probably the Cuban coastal conurbations, too. And the other islands.”

  “How could the sea rise so fast? How could there be no sign?”

  “I don’t think it was fast,” she said. “I think there probably were signs.”

  ON THE FIFTH day, a series of tremors drove them into the station. She told him that she was afraid the entire arch was going to collapse.

  “We can’t just stay hidden down here on the tracks,” she added.

  He had lived most of his life on the tracks, but he nodded. “Where can we go? If the whole city is madness and flooding, where can we go?”

  There was only one answer.

  “Do you remember my apprentice, Givens?” she asked.

  THE ACCESS PANEL fell out and down, landing with a splash of mud that didn’t quite reach them. He had thought there would be some hesitation, something said to mark their leaving the city they had served, that had been all they had known. But they heard a shout and the sound of running footsteps behind them.

  So they leaped.