Flood (15 page)

“But we must try,” Lily said. “I think you’re looking forward to the challenge, actually, Piers, for all you’re a doom merchant.”

“Well, perhaps. I admit it is nice to get up in the morning with something to
do
. I think I’m a realist, however. Things won’t be as they were before. But we will recover, one way or another, if the waters go down.”

And she noted that word again.
If
.

They sailed under Lambeth and Westminster bridges. The Palace of Westminster, lapped by water, was lit from within, a rump of the government machine defiantly functioning inside its walls.

Harry nosed the craft cautiously toward the shore, away from the course of the river, just before Hungerford Bridge. “I’m aiming for the centerline of Northumberland Avenue,” he murmured, concentrating, watching his sensors and the lamp posts and building fronts that protruded from the water around him. “Have to be careful not to snag . . .”

Trafalgar Square came into sight. Lily saw that a Chinook sat proudly before the steps of the National Gallery.

Harry killed the engine, and jumped out into water that rose up to the crotch of his waders. He tied up to a lamp post before the ruined shopping parade on the south side of the square, and helped Piers and Lily down into the water. Then he went back to wait with the boat.

They waded the few meters to the square itself. The water was grimy here, even worse than upstream in Fulham, littered with floating garbage, splitting bin bags, the corpses of pigeons. In the square itself the water was only centimeters deep, but they had to pass through a military cordon to get to it. Aside from more squaddies around the square’s perimeter, and what looked like gallery staff coming and going laden with packages, the square was empty. Lily looked back the way they had come, down Northumberland Avenue. The buildings of London stood proud of water that stretched to the horizon, flat and calm and gleaming in the sun.

“I can’t help thinking of those elders from Tuvalu,” Piers said. “You remember, at Lammockson’s party.”

“What about them?”

“I wonder if they’re gloating.”

“Hm. So why the Chinook? Why the perimeter?”

“Can’t you tell? They’re stripping the National Gallery. The water didn’t quite breach the steps, but it did make a mess of some of the cellars. We’ve got squaddies helping the staff move their treasures to upper stories, or shipping them out altogether to the higher ground. I just thought you’d like to see what’s a pretty unusual sight—a Chinook at the feet of Nelson.”

“You’re showing off, is what it is, Piers.”

Gary Boyle came strolling up, grinning. Lily hadn’t seen him since Lammockson’s party on the afternoon of the flood. And here came Helen Gray, walking arm in arm with an older man Lily didn’t recognize. Lily felt inordinately glad to see them all, islands of familiarity in a world full of strangeness. They embraced each other.

Piers said, “We did promise to keep in touch, back in Barcelona. I thought we should get together again before the winds of fortune scatter us. Oh—lest I forget.” He handed the others mil-spec radio phones of the type he’d given Lily.

Helen introduced her companion. He turned out to be with the Foreign Office; he was called Michael Thurley. “Mike was assigned to help me sort out the issues around baby Grace. And no,” she said with a forced smile, “I haven’t got her back yet. Don’t even know where she is.”

Gary said grimly, “I can guess what your future plans are, then.”

“Well, I don’t have a choice, do I?”

Thurley said, “And I’m intending to help her.” He said he had got a kind of sabbatical leave to travel with Helen full time. Their first destination was to be Saudi Arabia, home of the baby’s father. “It’s become something of a cause for me, I’m afraid. We of the FO didn’t achieve a great deal for Helen—and she did pretty much save my life on the day of the flood.”

He sounded tweedy, self-mocking in a very English way that reminded Lily of Piers. His mannerisms seemed exaggerated, and he linked arms with Helen like an older brother. Maybe he was gay. Lily sensed a strength in him, under the public-school bullshit. She did wonder if there was something else he was really after, if he was glomming onto Helen to serve some need of his own. But the flood had been a great trauma for a lot of people. Maybe Michael was simply as he said he was, his motives uncomplicated.

Gary said, “So what about you, Lily? You going to stay with your sister?”

Since coming out of the hole in Barcelona she’d been living from day to day, without thinking much further. Her USAF pay was coming in for now; she supposed she’d be pulled back into the fold eventually. But ahead of that she’d made no plans. “I haven’t decided.”

Gary said immediately, “Then come with me.”

That took her aback. “Where?”

“Iceland.”

“Say what?”

He told her of his encounter with an old friend at the Barrier, a ragged-sounding American oceanographer called Thandie Jones.

“There’s more to what’s going on than they’re releasing to the public.” He waved south over the square, at the placid water. “This wasn’t a freak event, a one-off storm. Thandie thinks there’s a global sea-level rise going on. And that’s why there’s been flooding all over the country, all over the damn world—”

Piers said, “Now hold on. Much of the flooding has come from flash flooding, freak rainstorms—”

“Caused,” Gary said, “by an exceptional loading of water vapor into the atmosphere, driven in turn by heat energy in the rising ocean. The science, the modeling is there, Piers. I grant you it’s patchy, and there’s no consensus. But Thandie thinks her data is good, and she’s going out to collect more. We’re talking about sea-bottom exploration, Lil. How cool is
that
? Thandie’s reporting this up through her own hierarchy, to the National Science Foundation in the US. But no government, no intergovernmental agency, will back her—in particular the IPCC, the climate change panel—because, she says, if they did it would be a tacit admission that there’s a real problem.”

Piers snorted.“Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? As opposed to the possibility that her ‘science’ is a whole lot of nonsense.”

Gary said, “Well, now she’s got funding—thanks to me.”

Helen saw it. “Nathan Lammockson. She’s tapped him up.”

Gary grinned. “Old Nathan likes to splash the cash where it will do some good, especially if it’s visible. What could be more visible than saving the world? Anyhow this new program of exploration is being run out of Iceland, and that’s where I’m going. And I want you with me, Lily. I don’t know what we’re going to face out there. I’d like to have somebody with me I could trust.”

She smiled. “And I’m the best you could come up with?”

“You’ll do,” he said earnestly. “And besides you’ll help keep Nathan on board.”

Helen was frowning. She pointed to the south.“Isn’t that water level a little higher than it was before? That bin over there is almost submerged now—the shop fronts—I’m sure it wasn’t like that before.”

Harry the Marine was waving from the boat, in water that was waist deep.

“My God, you’re right,” Piers said. “We have to go. That’s that, then.”

For one last moment they stood together, the four hostages,Thurley. Helen said wistfully, “Don’t forget me. Or Grace.”

“We won’t,” Lily promised.

“Come on, Lily,” Piers snapped,“let’s get you home.” He grabbed her arm and hurried her down the steps, splashing in ever-deepening water toward the boat.

By the time they got back to Fulham the river had already pushed out dramatically, a small rise in level translating to a major wash inland over the shallow streets. This time there was no storm, nothing but a clear blue sky. Without apparent cause, the water just rose.

From the boat Lily hurried toward Amanda’s home. She glimpsed a police van splashing up the Fulham Road, heard an amplified voice ordering an evacuation. Residents were piling stuff in the street, carrycots and water bottles, suitcases, bundles of gear wrapped in blankets. Others, evidently intent on staying put even now, were feverishly sandbagging their drives and doors. The bowser was standing in a pool. Residents were queuing even so, in rubber boots and waterproof trousers, the Yuppies and Single Dad; water still poured from the brass tap. But there would be no more deliveries here, Lily saw.

Amanda’s front door was open. Lily hurried in. Filthy water poured down the stairs, black and reeking. Lily saw the two kids sitting before the TV, which was, by some miracle, working, the power still on. The kids looked subdued, unwilling to move.

Amanda came stamping down in her rubber boots, carrying rucksacks and clothes. She still wore her work suit. “Lily, thank God you’re back. Can you give me a hand with this lot? It’s started pouring out of the toilet again like last time. You’re supposed to drop a sandbag down there, but that didn’t work last time either. Well, this is it, isn’t it?”

Lily grabbed bundles. “I heard them calling for evacuation.”

“It’s on the news.” Amanda glanced around at the filth on the stairs, the damp, moldy patches on the walls. “Just when you think it’s over, when you’ve had enough it starts up again.” She seemed more angry than stressed, grim rather than panicking. Lily wondered if she was in some way relieved that the worst was here at last. Amanda called to the kids, “You’d better get up there and sort out what you want, you two.”

But Benj said, “I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere, Mum.” He pointed at the TV screen. It was showing a live news broadcast, a helicopter view of cracked tarmac, fallen flyovers, crushed and burning cars.

Lily stepped closer, trying to read fallen signs.“That’s the M25. Junction with the M40.”

“That’s all we need,” Amanda said. “Is it something to do with the flooding?”

“Maybe.” But now postcard-sized cutaways showed more devastated junctions. All the major junctions around London’s orbital motorway had been blown up: the M1 and M11 to the north, the M40 and M4 to the west and Wales, the M3 toward Hampshire, the M23 south to Sussex.

“They’ve smashed up the roads,” Benj said simply. “The trains too. Nobody wants us.”

Kristie said flatly, “Watch the Cockneys swim dot com.”

The picture froze, broke up, and died.

Two

2017-2020

Mean sea-level rise above 2010 datum: 5-80m

22

May 2017

P
iers Michaelmas sent an oil company jet to pick Lily up from Denver, where she’d flown in from England, and bring her to Texas.

Houston from the air was utterly flat, a grid-plan cityscape set down in a country of low hills, pine forests, swamps and bayous. The only topography was man-made; the glass blocks of downtown looked like a huge sculpture set up on the plain. To the east was the bay, with the lines of the Ship Channel clearly visible and more industrial sprawl beyond. This was the area colonized by the petrochemical industry, domed storage tanks and spindly fractionating towers like a comic-book city of the future, spreading kilometers away toward the Gulf of Mexico. On the bay itself a tracery of levees and barriers gleamed, protection against the rising sea, huge constructions in themselves, brand new. But Lily saw that, despite the new defenses, the bay waters had already penetrated the old coastline, and pooled at the feet of the white storage tanks. All this under a pale smoggy sky, in heat so intense the air shimmered, a city under a grill.

Lily looked along the sweeping curve of the Gulf Freeway, hoping to glimpse the blocky architecture of the Johnson Space Center where tomorrow she was due to meet Gordon James Alonzo, a real-life astronaut. But it was lost in the detail.

On landing she took a call from Piers, advising her on where to meet him.

The airport terminal building was a glass block so aircon-cold she considered digging a sweater out of her carry-on bag. Then she had to walk a few meters under the open Houston sky to a waiting limousine, and it was like stepping into a sauna. When she got into Piers’s car it was so cold it made her shiver again.

Piers wore an open-necked, short-sleeved white shirt, and black shorts that looked like cut-down suit trousers. It was nine months since Lily had last seen Piers, back in London; she’d suggested meeting up when she found out they were both going to be in the Houston area. He patted her shoulder brusquely, and took her bag and lodged it on the floor. The car pulled out. The driver was all but hidden behind a screen of smoky glass.

“You still travel light,” Piers said.

“I live light,” Lily said as she buckled up. It was true; what she owned wouldn’t have filled more than two or three backpacks. “I’ve never felt the need to acquire much stuff. Certainly not since Barcelona.”

“Quite. It’s not really a time to put down roots, is it? Not unless you’re a banyan tree.” There was that mordant wit, the infrequent flashes of which had always made her feel warm. “So was the flight OK? How do you feel?”

“Like I just jumped into a plunge pool.”

He laughed. “Ah, that’s Houston for you. Always been a tough environment, as hot as Calcutta, barely a human place at all. And, I must say, when I started working here I came down with a string of colds. My doctor said my immune system was weakened by the temperature swings. And how are Amanda and the kids?”

“Fine. Still in their caravan park outside Aylesbury. They still haven’t been allowed to go home to Fulham. The kids swim to school. I’m kidding! My own work’s going OK.”

“On this diving project, I suppose.”

“Just background stuff for now, mostly in England.”

They were driving toward downtown; the central skyscrapers loomed ahead. Houston seemed to be a mash-up of residential, industrial and retail developments. It looked rather dated, Lily thought, very 1960s. She saw sprinklers working away at lawns of tough-looking thick-bladed grass.

Piers’s manner and accent hadn’t changed at all, despite his immersion in Texas for so many months; he was still cool, ironic, officer-class British. But his eyes occasionally unfocused. He must have an Angel, or the latest mil-spec equivalent, speaking in his head; even in her company he remained separated, alone. But, clear-eyed, clean-shaven, his hair neatly cropped, he looked healthier than she’d ever known him.