Stephen Baxter: Flood

The Lammocksons reached Lily’s raft. Gently they laid Piers down in the bilge.“Found him on the prom deck,” Nathan said, panting, sweating hard. “Out cold. Got him in his jacket, hauled him here.”

Hammond just stood there, massaging one arm, his face crunched into a scowl. He looked as if he might be carrying some wound himself. Every so often he looked to the shore, back to where they had left Grace with Hammond’s unborn child.

“Well, you did the right thing,” Lily said. She threw Nathan a bottle of water from the raft’s small emergency supply. He swigged down a big mouthful, and poured more over his head before handing it to Hammond. Lily winced a bit at the waste, but it wasn’t the time to make a fuss about that.

She looked down at Piers. It was wet on the floor of the raft, but there was nowhere else to put him. She scrunched forward and took his head on her lap.

Kristie sat staring at Piers’s pale, motionless face. “Maybe it’s best not to move him.”

Hammond grunted. “Take a look under his life jacket.”

Lily leaned forward, unzipped the jacket, and exposed a mess, Piers’s overalls and ripped flesh mingling in a pool of sticky blood. “Oh, God.”

“Actually I think he got shot in the back,” Hammond said in a matter-of-fact way. “That looks like an exit wound to me.”

“He went down fighting,” Nathan said. “Always knew he would.”

“Is there a medic? Dr. Porter, or Doc Schmidt-anybody nearby?”

“No idea,” Nathan said.“And I don’t see any way of finding out right now. Sorry, kid-you’re on your own.” Suddenly the steam seemed to go out of him. “Ah, Christ.” He folded up and sat down on the boat’s inflated hull, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “We’ve got to go back in there, there are still people trying to get off the wreck. But I’m beat. Just give me a minute, son.”

Hammond shrugged. As ever in the shadow of Nathan, he wasn’t about to go anywhere without his father.

Lily glanced over at her niece. “Kris, the raft has a medical kit. Look, the zipper behind you. Can you pass it over?”

Kristie sat for a long second, cradling her boy. Then she squirmed around to fetch the kit.“You don’t want to waste it. We don’t know how long it has to last, the stuff in there.”

She was right, of course. With the Ark dying, with the crew unlikely to be allowed into Colorado, with even the New Jersey standing off, there was nowhere they could go, nowhere they could land-no place where they could ever get off this raft. But Lily put the thought aside. What else could you do?

Kristie handed the kit over. Lily opened it.

“No.” There was a touch on her wrist, cold and wet. It was Piers. His eyes open, he was looking up at her, his face upside down from her point of view, his mouth twisted with pain. It was as if a dead man had come to life.

“Piers?”

“Kristie is right.” His voice was a gurgle, indistinct, and the very act of breathing seemed to cause him pain. “You know it, and so do I. I’m sixty-five years old, for heaven’s sake.”

“So am I.” Lily began to unroll a bandage.

“Be sensible, Lily. That’s an order, by the way.”

Lily forced a laugh.“I haven’t taken orders from you since Barcelona.”

“Please. For me.”

She hesitated. Then she pushed the box toward Nathan, with a nod. Surreptitiously, out of Piers’s eye line, Nathan prepared a syringe of morphine.

Piers asked, “How is the ship, the crew?”

“Well, we lost her.” Lily looked up. The ocean was littered with orange boats from the Ark. The shabbier-looking craft of the attackers moved through this crowd like shark fins, and small battles were going on everywhere. But Lily could see that one by one the attackers were withdrawing, and the Ark survivors were pulling on plastic ropes to bring their boats closer together. The Ark herself was sinking into a bubbling oil slick.

She said,“I guess we got most of the people off. No way of counting right now.”

Nathan jabbed the syringe into Piers’s leg, right through his pants. Piers didn’t seem to feel it. Covering, Nathan said, “We’ll count it up later, when the arseholes who did this have got what they wanted and pissed off. I hope they’re proud of themselves. They sent a fucking ship to the bottom of the sea, nuclear reactor and all. What a damn waste. A vessel that could have lasted decades yet, and all for a few scraps of wood and steel and plastic so they could make more of their shitty little rafts.”

“The Americans,” Piers said softly. “The submarine. Couldn’t they help?”

“They wouldn’t,” Lily said.“Thandie Jones did speak to the captain.”

“They stay out of fights,” Nathan said.“That’s how you keep alive, for year after pointless year at sea. So much for the US Navy. Well. What’s done is done. I always knew this day could come, when we lost the Ark. Now it’s time for the next phase, is all.”

Kristie asked, “What next phase?”

Nathan gestured at the scum of debris.“Rafts, that’s what. Survival on the open sea. And the raw materials we need to do that are waiting for us, right over there.” He pointed back at the Ark. “We always arranged it so the stuff would just float off if we lost the ship suddenly. I’m talking about seaweed. Algae, gen-enged, by the boys in the Ark’s labs. From seaweed you can get algin, that is alginic acid, from which you can make emulsions, fibers… Construction material for rafts that will grow out of the sea, you just have to let it float there. You’ll see.” He stood up, and the raft rocked gently. “In the meantime we need to get back. Come on, boy.”

He stood and strode away, back toward the center of the scatter of ships, the graveyard of his Ark, working his way across the cluster of rafts. Hammond followed reluctantly, wincing at the pain of his shoulder.

“They wasted our water,” Kristie said. “Now we haven’t got a drop in this damn raft.”

“There’ll be more water,” Lily said, but she was uncertain. “Maybe it will rain.”

“No rain today,” Piers murmured. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated, and he stared up at the sky. “Do you remember how it rained when we came out of the vault under that cathedral, how it rained in London…”

“I remember.”

Kristie grabbed the medical kit, closed it and stuck it back in the zippered compartment. Piers watched Kristie, tilting his head. He actually raised his arm, reaching out to her.

“Come on, Kris,” Lily whispered. “Just hold his hand, just for a moment.”

But Kristie turned her boy’s face away from the dying man.

Piers lasted through the rest of the day, and into the night.

As the light faded, Manco complained of thirst and hunger, but at last fell asleep. Kristie kept him in the shade of the cover, and soon it was too dark for Lily to make out either of them.

Nathan didn’t come back to the raft. Lily just sat cradling Piers’s head. There was no moon, no cloud. The stars were extraordinary, set in a sky from which humankind’s pollution had all but washed out. Lily had spent years on a ship at sea, but even she had never seen the stars like this, for on the Ark there was always some nearby light or other to dazzle you.

Around the raft there was quiet, broken only by the soft lapping of waves, a murmur of voices, somebody crying, far away. It was a night to rest, a night many no doubt wished would never end, for tomorrow a new struggle would begin. But for now there was stillness.

Piers woke once more, in the dark. “Have you got it?”

“Got what, Piers?”

“For my face. You know. In case they come back.” He tried to shift, his hands lifting feebly. “It must have fallen on the floor.”