Stephen Baxter - Flood

“With what?”

“The local scrip.” She dug in her pocket and showed Lily a handful of money. It was old sterling or euro notes and coins, marked or clipped to reflect a local barter rate. “We do get stuff from outside, of course, but-”

“Can you call the kids? Do you have mobiles?”

“Of course we have mobiles.” Reflexively Amanda took her phone out of her jacket pocket. It was four years old, elderly by former standards; it had actually come through the flooding of London with her.

“Call them,” Lily urged her.“Right now. Get them to come meet us. Maybe at the tor you mentioned? Would they know how to get to it?”

Amanda weighed the phone in her hand, frowning. “I don’t know if I should.”

“Please, Amanda. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“And then what?”

“I told you. We get out, the four of us, to the car at Cheriton Bishop.”

“It must be twenty kilometers. More.”

Lily glanced at the sun. “It’s not late. I walked here yesterday and this morning. I stayed over in a pub. Four, five hours should do it. The car will wait until the sun goes down, later if I call.”

“And then we all just drive off, is that the idea?” Anger flared in Amanda.“You know, you’ve got a nerve, Lily. Without any warning you parachute back into the middle of my life. My life, the life I’ve been building for myself here, me and the kids. It hasn’t been easy, you know.”

“I don’t mean to mess things up for you.” Lily sounded strained, tired; she seemed drained behind her South American tan.

“You’re doing your best to come between me and Wayne, aren’t you?”

“I don’t mean to do that either. Look, please, Amanda-you have to trust me.”

“Why?”

“I promised I wouldn’t say.”

“Promised who? AxysCorp, the great Nathan Lammockson? Why won’t you say?”

“Because it would cause panic.”

That made Amanda pause. Panic? Amanda had seen panic, a frantic sort in Greenwich on the day the Thames Barrier fell, and later a more long-drawn-out miserable sort of panic when the river started rising again and west London had to be evacuated. But here she was in Dartmoor, far above any flooding. What could there possibly be to panic about? She felt resistant, angry, unwilling.

Lily saw this in her face. “Please, Amanda, the kids.”

Amanda had to trust her; this was her sister. And besides she could always come back when the fuss was over, whatever it was. She hefted her phone. “Shall I have them call at the caravan first, pick up their stuff-”

“No,” Lily said. “Forget the caravan, forget packing. Just get them to meet us.”

“Wayne won’t take kindly if he finds out you’re having us sneak off, if that’s the idea.”

“So don’t tell him.” Lily closed her eyes, and a muscle in her cheek worked. “Look, I’ll make a deal. Once I have you and the kids in the AxysCorp car you can call Wayne, or whoever you like. My priority isn’t Wayne. It’s not even your feelings. My priority is only you and the kids. Your safety.”

“You’re scaring me,” said Amanda, though she was still more angry than frightened.

“Good,” Lily said bluntly. “Make your calls. Please, Amanda.”

So Amanda pressed the fast-key numbers, and called.

It would take a while for the kids to catch up with them. Lily and Amanda walked slowly to the tor.

A farm vehicle buzzed in a field. “More fields being broken,” Lily said.

“Yes. They’re growing crops up here now, instead of raising sheep and cattle. You can thank the warmer weather for that. There are problems, though. Like bluetongue, and African horse sickness. New kinds of viruses nobody’s dealt with here before. The government vets still come around sometimes.” It was another result of the flood-induced warming, a spreading out of the old hot regions of diseases of animals and of humans, like chikungunya and Rift Valley fever.

Lily asked, “Where do you get your fuel from?”

“There’s a tanker port at Taunton.” The lowland of Somerset was all but drowned, but harbors and port facilities had hastily been improvised close to what had been an inland town. “It’s rationed, of course; it’s really just for the farm vehicles and the power stations. We use the cars for emergencies. We’ve a few bikes too, Wayne has one. They’ve had to rebuild the port once already, when the sea kept rising.”

“It’s the same story all over.”

“Nobody seems to know how long the tankers will keep calling.”

“Who controls the rationing?”

Amanda looked at her. “Well, the police. Who do you think?”

“It’s just that you’re kind of remote up here. All that barbed wire. The SAM missiles,” Lily said frankly. “Is it true the locals ‘nationalized’ the Tesco’s in Taunton?”

“Sort of,” Amanda said. “There was a lot of objection to the profits they were taking out of the area.”

“That wouldn’t have happened in the old days, would it? A lot of England is disconnected from the center nowadays.”

“Well, the government is hundreds of kilometers away, in Leeds. They don’t worry about us. Wayne says we could be self-sufficient here on Dartmoor, if we don’t get swamped.”

“ ‘Swamped’?”

Amanda ignored that. “The climate’s better than it used to be. It’s because of the sea level. It’s as if we’ve sunk by thirty meters, so what was highland becomes lowland. Wayne takes samples of the changing populations of flowers, the moths and butterflies and birds. He’s keeping a kind of log on his laptop.”

“So this toyboy of yours is some kind of biologist, is he?”

“Toyboy, oh shut up. He’s a marine biologist. He’s from London. But he worked at the Dove Marine Laboratory in Northumberland before the floods.”

“You never told me much about him, in your mails. What did you do, glom onto the first strong man you could find?”

Amanda flared again. “Speak to me like that again and you can walk to bloody Cheriton Bishop by yourself.”

“All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“You fucking did.” But Amanda walked on. “Look, Lil, he’s not perfect, but he’s a decent enough man. He’s got a PhD. He specialized in coastal life, but now the coasts are gone. Sometimes we travel, you know, even as far as the Solent, just to see how the flooding’s progressing. Wayne says it’s a sort of extinction event. It will take a million years for nature to make a proper coast again, the rock pools and sea caves and mud flats with their plovers and their whooper swans. Even the sand dunes are drowned. It’s all gone now, and we won’t see the like again in our lifetimes. Isn’t that sad?”

“So he has a soul,” Lily said. “Go on, then. Tell me how you met him.”

They had met in the holding camp at Aylesbury, in a queue for a water bowser.

When the flooding had started, Wayne had decamped down from Northumberland to Charlton in south London, to be with his family. They had managed to get out, and joined the flow to Aylesbury. After their chance meeting Wayne and Amanda had become close, sort of, spending time together in the refugee camp’s “pubs,” marquees stocked with beer salvaged from the abandoned suburbs.

But the flooding continued. The sea had pushed far into the great river estuaries. The Thames was now an inland sea as far as Buckinghamshire. The Severn had intruded through the Vale of Evesham as far as Warwick, and with Liverpool Bay extending inland as far as Chester, it looked as if Wales was becoming detached from England altogether-just as the estuaries of the Forth and the Clyde, drowning much of Edinburgh and Glasgow, were cutting Scotland adrift. And the Cornish peninsula, dominated by the great upland masses of Exmoor and Dartmoor, looked as if it too was soon to be severed from the mainland by tongues of the sea. As for the rest of England, you could draw a line south from Middlesborough down as far as Cambridge, to the east of which there was only a ragged peninsula formed by scraps of high land like the Yorkshire Moors. In the southeast the sea had pushed far into the vales of Kent and Sussex, leaving the bands of higher ground, the North and South Downs and the Weald, protruding like the fingers of a rocky hand.