Stephen Baxter: Flood

A small helicopter stood by, resting on its rails in the rubble-strewn wreck of some building. When the hostages emerged, a couple more AxysCorp operatives who stood by the bird came running. Lily, a pilot five years out of the game, didn’t recognize the model; it bore the bold cradled-world logo of AxysCorp.

As the AxysCorp people got themselves organized, the four hostages stood together, Helen cradling her baby, Gary blinking in the light with a grin like a kid at Christmas. Unbearably, Piers Michaelmas still wouldn’t remove the dirty towel that hid his face. Lily peered up longingly. At least she had got to see the sky again. But the cloud was solid, and the rain quickly soaked her bare scalp and thin clothes. It was July; at least it was warm. But, surrounded by the men in their dull green battle dress, she felt oddly diminished, all but naked in her T-shirt and shorts.

An AxysCorp man with a Red Cross flash on his arm took a quick look at the four of them, and then, with apologies, lifted Helen’s baby from her arms. “Just for a bit-just until we’re out of here. I’ve a cradle for her. She’ll be safer that way.” Helen protested, but could do nothing about it as he walked away with the baby, jiggling her in his arms. Lily thought she could feel the bond between mother and daughter stretch like steel under tension.

George Camden murmured to Lily, “I’m surprised she’s so close to the child. It was the product of a rape-”

“She’s Helen’s,” Lily shot back.“The father doesn’t matter. Said’s gone anyhow. His comrades chased him out.”

“We know about him,” Camden said gently. “Look, it’s all right, take it easy. You really are safe now.”

“None of this seems real.” It was true: the helicopter, the battered cathedral, the leaden sky, were all like elements of the hallucinations she had suffered when in solitary.

“I knew John, you know.” Camden smiled. His teeth were clean, cleaner than Lily’s had been for five years. “I still can’t believe we came so close to saving him, after all this time. If he was standing here he’d be complaining about the rain.”

“That was John,” she conceded. “But it’s been raining a long time. We heard it in our last holding cell, out in the suburbs somewhere. I don’t remember this kind of weather in Barcelona.”

“Things have changed in the five years you’ve been gone, Captain Brooke.” There was distant gunfire, a hollow crump. Camden listened to something, though he wore no earpiece. “I think we’re set to get out of here.” He walked toward the chopper.

Just for a moment, the four of them were left alone again.

“I guess this is it,” Gary said certainly. “After all the months and years.”

Lily looked at them, hopeful young Gary, bruised mother Helen, brittle Piers. “We shared something, didn’t we?”

“That we did,” Helen said. “Which nobody else is ever going to understand.”

And now here they were released into a world evidently transformed. Lily said impulsively, “Listen. Let’s make a vow. We’ll stay in contact, the four of us. We’ll look out for each other. If one’s in trouble, the others come looking. That includes Grace, by the way.”

Gary nodded. “If something good comes out of this shit, I’m in.” He held out his hand, palm up. Lily put her hand in his. Then Helen laid hers on top of Lily’s. Even Piers reached out blindly. Lily had to help him take hold of the others’ hands.

“For life,” Lily said. “And for Grace.”

“For life,” Helen and Gary murmured.

George Camden came bustling back.“Let’s go. We’ve a C-130 waiting at the airport.”

They hurried after him.

They clambered aboard the chopper and strapped into canvas bucket seats. Even here Piers kept the towel over his face. Helen wasn’t allowed to hold her baby, though Grace was only a couple of meters away, strapped into a bucket seat in a cradle beside the medic.

The chopper lifted with a surge. Lily, professionally, thought the pilot’s handling was a little rough.

The bird rose up past the face of the cathedral. Sprawling and shapeless, it was more like a natural sandstone outcropping than anything man-made. Lily could see the scars of war, shell pocks and shattered spires and gaping holes in a burned-out roof.

Then she was lifted higher, and she peered out curiously at the cityscape. In the five years she had been cooped up she had seen little but the inside of suburban cellars and warehouses. Barcelona was a blanket of development bounded by the Mediterranean coast to the southeast and mountains to the northwest, and on either flank by rivers, the Llobregat to the south and the Besos to the north. Neighborhoods clustered around low hills. The newer districts inland were a neat quilt of rectangular blocks, and glass-needle skyscrapers studded the business district and the coast.

There were obvious signs of the conflict, the burned-out buildings and rubble-strewn streets where only armored vehicles moved, a glass tower block with a blown-in frontage, one district burning apparently uncontrolled. But amid the damage there were signs of prosperity, whole suburbs walled off and made green and white by lawns and golf courses and bright new buildings. Even from the air you could see that Barcelona, distorted by violence and the invasion of international agencies, had become a city of fortresslike gated suburbs for the rich, surrounded by older neighborhoods that were crumbling into shantytowns.

And water lay everywhere. It pooled in the streets, lay at the feet of the tall buildings in the business district, glimmered on the flat roofs of the houses and in gullies and drains, mirrored surfaces reflecting the gray sky like pools of melted glass. Those bounding rivers seemed to have spread over their flood plains. She had thought Spain was supposed to be drying out. That was why Gary had been here in the first place: to map a climate evolving toward aridity.

To the southeast a surging Mediterranean broke against sea walls, with no sign of the sandy stretches she remembered. She tapped Camden on the shoulder. “Where’s the beach?”

He grinned at her. “I told you,” he shouted back. “Things have changed. Just as well for you, actually. All this flooding has been driving the extremist types out of their cellars like rats out of drains. They had nowhere left to hold you. As to the rest-well, you’ll see.”

The chopper surged and swept away, heading inland. Lily felt dizzy, her empty stomach growling.

When they walked out of the Savoy, Lily and Gary had to negotiate a chest-high maze of sandbags that blocked off the short access road to the Strand, where their car was to meet them. A uniformed footman showed them the way through. He carried a big monogrammed umbrella that kept off most of the steady, hissing rain, and he wore Wellington boots that shone as if polished.

Gary pointed at the sandbags, which were made of some silky-looking fabric and marked with the hotel’s logo.“They even do their sandbags in style. You Brits are amazing.”

“Thanks.”

Out in the street, waiting for the car, Lily was in the open, if only for a few seconds. After days of choppers and planes and cars and trucks, military bases and embassies and hotels, she still felt as if she hadn’t yet been released from her confinement. But the sky was all cloud, and the London air, though it tasted cleaner than she remembered, was hot and wet.

She glanced along the length of the Strand, at the shop fronts and the grand hotel entrances. So much was the same, so much had changed. London buses were now long snaking vehicles like trains, their carriages bright red, hissing through the sheets of water on the road when they got a chance to move forward in the jams. Every surface, including the taxi doors and bus panels, was covered with animated commercials for West End shows and TV events and Coke and Pepsi, and ads for “AxysCorp durables” like clothes and white goods, and for various competing brands of electronic gadgets whose nature she didn’t even recognize: what was an “Angel?” Football was bigger business than ever, judging by the ads for the FA Cup Final, moved from May to July and to be played between Liverpool and Newcastle United in Mumbai. And everywhere she saw slogans for the World Cup: “England 2018-Two Years To Go.” All this animation was a shimmering layer spray-painted over the world, reflected in the oily sheets of water on the road.