Stephen Baxter - Flood

Rich or poor, everybody carried a whistle around her neck. Lily had seen in London how water just knee-high could knock you off your feet in a moment. Rubber boots were advisable too. The sidewalks were all damp, the tarmac running with what looked like river water, dense and foul, and sometimes you saw it bubbling up out of the drains. In places the sidewalk had collapsed altogether, where a broken sewer or subway tunnel had washed away its footing, and you had to walk around the mess. But people just plodded through all this, surviving, getting on with their lives, here as in London and elsewhere.

And, under the blue winter sky, many of the shops were open. The food stores and drug stores and restaurants and even the bars bore notices that biometric ID and ration cards had to be produced by all customers. Lily couldn’t tell how current the fashions were in the clothes stores. A lot of stuff on display, in fact, looked like AxysCorp gear, Nathan’s famous lines of durables, sensible coveralls and all-weather coats and boots and hats, good for ten years or more. Nathan Lammockson was still selling to the world, still making money. But some of the other stores were piled high with random heaps of goods, from toys to cellphones to coffee percolators to Angels. Lily had learned from Nathan that this was another symptom of the global economic dislocation. Firms kept on trying to function as long as they could, until their suppliers and markets were disrupted or disappeared altogether, and when they failed they dumped their stock in fire sales.

Some newspaper dispensers worked. Out of curiosity Lily paid ten dollars for a copy of the NewYork Post. The edition was thin and printed smudgily on coarse, many-times-recycled paper. The headline was the final cancellation of the soccer World Cup in England scheduled for the summer, for which the US team had been among the favorites.

At the 45th Street junction Thandie consulted the map on her wrist. “This way.” Abruptly she turned right, heading west.

They followed, but Gary protested, “The Empire State is south and east of here.”

Thandie just kept walking, following her map.

Lily knew roughly where she was heading. This was the Garment District, the hub of the city’s fashion industry, where, back on Seventh, the likes of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein were commemorated with granite plaques embedded in the sidewalk. She’d walked here once with Amanda, who cared a lot more about clothes than she ever had. Now it seemed largely abandoned.

They came to a place where a couple of fire appliances were working. Firemen were pumping out a gushing drain. They sent the water through thick yellow hoses along 45th, running west, parallel to Thandie’s path. The appliances’ engines roared, and the men didn’t look up as the walkers passed.

Beyond Eighth there were no more pedestrians. And at the intersection with Ninth, Thandie, consulting her map, stopped and looked up. Here was the water, covering the sidewalk.

It was a strange urban shore of the kind Lily had seen in London. The water, murky gray-brown stuff slick with oil, lapped around the feet of the buildings and the hulks of long-abandoned cars. Those hoses from the fire appliances ran underwater here, and there was bubbling and turbulence as they dumped the noxious stuff they had pumped out of the drains. In the buildings themselves there were lights in some of the upper-story windows, but most windows were smashed, and pigeons roosted, their guano staining the brown brickwork.

“This is a major transgression,” Thandie said, pointing. “Runs south as far as 19th Street, covering Clinton and Chelsea, and to the north of here for a dozen blocks or so. The waterfront developments are abandoned. The GPS flood mapping is very good, it has this shoreline to within a few meters. I used to go skating at Chelsea Piers,” she said, suddenly surprisingly wistful. She stepped forward until she was paddling ankle-deep in the murky water. She dug in her pack and produced a knife, folded it out, and prized something loose from a wall. She brought it back to show Lily and Gary. It was a mussel, about the size of a postage stamp, and a smaller clam. “Mytilaster lineatus,” she said. “And this little clam is Cardium edule.”

“So what?” Lily asked.

“Ocean creatures. You see them, their shells, in the sediment record. Among the first species to colonize when the sea overwhelms the land. Just as it’s doing here.” She dropped the shells back in the water.

They stayed for a moment at the edge of the water. It lapped, grimy, full of floating rubbish, plastic bags and fast food trays and aluminum cans and condoms, the detritus of a time that already seemed remote. And the water approached Lily’s booted toes a little more with each small wave, like a tide coming in.

“Let’s get on with it,” Thandie said. She turned and led them back along the street.

Back on Seventh, which was relatively busy with bundled-up shoppers, it was as if the river incursion just a couple of blocks away wasn’t happening, as if the three of them had walked through some kind of portal from a parallel world of sinking and submergence.

They headed to Times Square, making for Broadway. The square’s giant billboards were dead, great black windows into emptiness-all save a couple of small panels shining red and white with Coke advertising, which must somehow have got around the city’s power restrictions, unless the display was for morale purposes. The square was eerie, a huge empty space, the traffic sparse and few people around. But music echoed out of loudspeakers suspended from posts, Ella Fitzgerald singing “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

At the intersection with 34th Street they passed Macy’s. The store was open, but blankets and towels hung drying out of the upper-story windows. A giant billboard proclaimed that the world’s largest department store was proud to host displaced New Yorkers in a time of crisis.

Piers Michaelmas was waiting for them, as promised, at the foot of the Empire State Building. He was in his British army uniform. He looked relaxed, his arms folded. “I knew you’d be late,” he said, eyeing Thandie. “Been skimming stones, have we?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lily embraced him briefly.“You’re looking good, Piers. You’ve got to be the only man in NewYork in his dress uniform. How are you keeping your cuffs clean? My God, you’re even wearing polished shoes.”

“Oh, I always step carefully. One must look the part if one is attending meetings at the UN on behalf of HMG.”

Thandie glanced at her GPS map.“You’re working at the UN building? But there’s a flood from the UN Plaza to the river.”

“So there is, the whole area is a lagoon. You have to take a boat. But the upper floors are habitable; the organization is still working, though most of its functions are being mirrored in Geneva. There is a sense that one shouldn’t give up, you know. My father ran a small firm of quantity surveyors. Once he was blasted out of his premises, in Manchester, by an IRA bomb. The next morning he set up shop in a pub at the bottom of the road, and hung a sign outside the door saying ‘Business as usual.’”

Lily shook her head. “I never knew that about you, Piers. And I thought we’d talked each other dry in Barcelona.”

“How dull if that were true. Now then, I would recommend we cut east, actually, things get a bit trickier further downtown…”

Piers led the way now, striding between the puddles down Fifth until they got to the intersection with Broadway at the Flatiron Building. From there they continued down Broadway, heading southeast toward Union Square. Thandie peered into her map.

The three hostages, Gary, Piers and Lily, walked together. Impulsively Lily walked between the men and linked their arms.