Stephen Baxter - Flood

The last of the convoy, a couple of police motorcycles, roared past. “Right, they’re through,” said the driver. She dragged at the steering wheel, gunned the engine, and pulled the car out into the lane that the police had cleared. She was among the first to react, and she pushed the car hard past walls of stationary cars.

Just for a few minutes, before the traffic pulled back out onto the empty road, they made good progress. They overtook cars and yellow buses full of evacuated schoolkids, and ambulances and paramedic vehicles coming from the emptying hospitals. They hurried over the junction with Tower Bridge Approach. Then, with the brooding mass of the Tower itself to their left, they passed the big tube station with its open plaza. Helen saw thousands of people swarming up from the underground ticket halls, some of them looking shocked, many soaked even before they came out into the rain. Maybe the tube network was flooding, then. If so, she wondered where all these thousands spilling into the heart of the city were supposed to go.

On a bit further they went, down Byward Street and along Lower Thames Street, the traffic slowing and clogging all the time. There were roadworks everywhere, great pits dug into the surface; London was always in the process of being rebuilt, and today the holes and ditches brimmed with water. Helen glimpsed the river itself, high and raging, looking as dense as some molten metal, like mercury, not like mere water at all, rising high beneath the functional concrete arches of London Bridge.

The traffic congealed further as the driver maneuvered the car around the approaches to London Bridge. To her right Helen glimpsed the City’s spindly new skyscrapers, extraordinary sculptures of glass erected since her capture. Helicopters slid past their impassive faces. Still they kept moving, past Cannon Street and Southwark Bridge. But now their luck ran out, the road clogging like a furred-up artery. Worse, she could see pedestrians streaming over the spindly Millennium Bridge from the South Bank, adding to the congestion.

The driver shrugged.“I guess this is it. Sorry. You want I should turn around? The worst problems are going to be in the West End, up ahead. We could go north and-”

“No. I’ve got to get to Whitehall. There or the RAF Memorial on the Embankment. That’s where I said I’d meet my contact if I couldn’t get to Whitehall.”

The driver glanced at her, not unsympathetic. “Whitehall? Look, it’s not my place to give you advice. You’re the one who’s trying to find out about her kiddie, aren’t you?”

“That’s my business,” Helen snapped.

“It’s just that Whitehall’s practically on the river. If anywhere’s going to flood it will be there.” She showed Helen a kind of sat-nav screen, a bit more advanced than the technology Helen remembered. It showed flickering high-resolution map panels, Westminster and the West End, whole areas marked by a gray overlay.“Mr. Lammockson trained us up in flood scenarios. They’re probably evacuating the government buildings, if they haven’t already.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Helen said miserably.

“Are you sure? I can still get you out of here, you know.”

“I know. Thank you. I have to do this… What will you do now?”

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“Do you have family?”

The driver turned away. “Two boys. Their dad pissed off back to Greece with them five years ago. At least they won’t get flooded out there, hey. You see, we’re in the same boat, you and me. Although today I wish I had a bloody boat, ha-ha. You don’t know London, do you?”

Helen shrugged. “Only as a tourist.”

“Well, it’s not a good day to be sightseeing. Listen. If you get stuck, head for the Strand. Off Trafalgar Square. You can’t miss the Strand.”

“Why there?”

“Because that’s where the old shore used to be, the docks, before they concreted over the river. ‘Strand’ means ‘shore.’ And even if the river’s bursting its banks it’s not going to go higher than that, is it? Stands to reason.”

“I’ll remember. Thanks.”

“You take care.”

Helen lifted her hood over her head, and pulled it tight at her neck and around her face. She checked her coverall was zipped up. Then she braced herself and opened the door.

She had to push against the wind. Gusts of rain soaked her face immediately, and stuck lanks of hair to her forehead.

She moved away from the car, shoving through panicky crowds, working her way westward, toward the Blackfriars bridges and the West End beyond. There wasn’t much difference between the road and the pavement now, with people working their way around the stationary traffic. Drivers were abandoning their cars too, the doors opening like shells cracking, people emerging wincing into the rain. Above the babble of shouted conversations she heard car alarms and the wail of sirens, the flap of helicopter rotors somewhere overhead, and everywhere the hiss of the rain, from the roofs of the cars, the tarmac, the clothes and umbrellas of the pedestrians. The world was cold, windy, wet, noisy.

And under it all she thought she heard a deeper growl, coming from the east, from downstream, like the shuddering snarl of an approaching animal.

It was slow going. It was barely possible for Helen to get ahead a meter or two before being brought to a halt by the anxious directionlessness of the crowd. There were people with kids, tourists. She saw a huddle of Japanese or Koreans in see-through plastic ponchos, their eyes wide with shock, shouting into mobile phones. The men wore shorts and sandals, their legs black from the murky water.

After a time, pissed off and already tiring, Helen stopped at a Coke machine, dug out some money and bought a bottle. A soldiers’ trick she’d picked up in her time in Barcelona: you drank the soda for the sugar rush and the caffeine. She drained the bottle quickly, and just dumped it and walked on. It wasn’t a day to be too concerned about litter.

Past Blackfriars she rounded the curve of the Victoria Embankment. The road here was lined by trees and lamp posts, and monuments stood in memory of Britain’s grander past. The river side had a protective wall at about waist height, with steps where you could climb over to get down to a jetty or a pleasure boat. Today the river raged high, splashing just below the lip of the wall, sending showers of spray into the road. She hurried on toward Waterloo Bridge. The south bank opposite was crowded by the IBM building and the National Theater, with a huge new block of flats behind the theater, yet another newcomer dominating the view.

And then a tremendous sheet of water rose up above the embankment wall, towering into the air and splashing down over the hurrying crowds. The water was filthy, muddy. People screamed and cowered back. But others lifted their cameras and phones to capture the show. Helen pushed on, booted feet splashing through muddy water that ran down the camber of the road to the drains. But the drains themselves were full, backing up, spilling more water than they swallowed.

Passing under Waterloo Bridge, with the Eye a fine circle on the opposite bank, she could see the pale sandstone of the Palace of Westminster, far down the curve of the river. Still the river roared, its uneven surface flecked with white-capped waves. Helen got past the Cleopatra obelisk and under the Hungerford railway bridge. No trains were running, and people were fleeing over the bridge on foot, fleeing in both directions, spilling onto the road. Everywhere people were staring into their phones, pressing the keyboards, shouting into them. Others, desperate for news, crowded around the stationary cars, many of which had radios working, powered by their batteries. Cars and phones and running people, and the surging river, and the endless rain.