Stephen Baxter - Flood

He was clutching the bloodied mess of his boot. “You stupid bitch, you’ve shot my fucking toe off!”

“If you make another sound I’ll shoot out a kneecap. What use will you be then to your survivalist buddies?”

He glared, his face a mask of pain and rage, the sweat making rivulets in the dirt on his brow. But he said no more.

Amanda, shaking, took a breath. “You do keep interfering in my life, Lil,” she said.

Lily turned to the children. “You two OK?”

“Yes,” Kristie said.“Auntie Lil, don’t blow his kneecap off if he makes this sound.”

“What sound?”

She ran up to Wayne, timing the run as if taking a penalty at soccer, and kicked him in the balls. He howled and writhed.

“ That sound,” she said. She yelled at him, “Creep!”

“Kris, I’m sorry,” Amanda said sincerely.

“Don’t sweat it,” Kris said coolly, her tears gone now. “He never would have got near me.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Benj said firmly.

“My God,” Amanda said. “I’m raising vigilantes.”

Lily checked her watch. “Look, he doesn’t matter now. None of this does. We need to get to Cheriton Bishop to meet the car.” She eyed the bikes. “We could be there in fifteen minutes on these things, if we had two drivers.”

“I can ride a bike,” Benj said.

Amanda said, “I know-”

“And so can I,” Kristie said brightly.

“That I didn’t know,” Amanda said sternly.

“Leave my fucking bike alone, you witches,” Wayne said from the ground.

“Shut up,” Lily said mildly. “Well, then. Kris, can I hitch a ride with you?”

Wayne cursed as they got the bikes started and, apparently unable to contain his rage, actually got to his feet and staggered forward. Lily kept her gun visible. Amanda was grateful to get out of his sight.

Once they were in the AxysCorp SUV the kids were quiet, to Amanda’s relief. It was the first time they’d been driven any distance since Wayne had brought them from Aylesbury in his Land Rover. But they looked big, over-muscled, grimy in the car’s smooth interior.

They had to stick to the high ground all the way, mostly following minor roads. It would take them the best part of twenty-four hours to travel by car from Postbridge to Marlow, where the AxysCorp boat waited for them, a journey that might have taken a few hours before the flooding. Lily fretted over the slowness of the journey. Evidently whatever she feared was imminent.

They headed northeast, descending from Dartmoor to the Black-down Hills, where they glimpsed the oil terminal at Taunton and the sea beyond. Then they headed east through Dorset. They had to cross various boundaries, roadblocks and barbed wire, as they traveled from one of England’s petty new fiefdoms to the next. But aboard the car was a police officer, attached to this expedition by Nathan Lammockson. There was generally still enough deference for the central authorities for the copper’s presence to see them waved through. But the car also carried a stash to pay tolls and bribes: sterling, euros, dollars, even gold coins.

When they drove northeast across the Salisbury Plain they glimpsed Salisbury itself, where the cathedral’s spire, truncated by a storm, stuck out of a placid pond like a broken bone. Further to the north Stonehenge stood untroubled by the world’s latest problems, though a ragged band of would-be druids had made permanent encampment around it, and prayed daily for relief from the flood.

They stayed the night at Newbury, sleeping in their seats in the parked-up SUV. Then, after crossing a swollen Thames, they continued northwest through the White Horse Hills, bridged the Cherwell at Goring, and then made their way across the Chilterns to High Wycombe and descended into Marlow. Here, moored over the drowned lawn of a riverside villa that had once been worth millions, a small AxysCorp powerboat was waiting for them.

Even as far inland as Marlow, Amanda discovered when she got out of the car, you could smell the salt in the air.

The boat’s engine humming, they sailed through Maidenhead and Windsor. Benj and Kristie clung to the rails, looking at the view, drinking coffee and eating sweet biscuits. The pilot used GPS to keep to the centerline of the river’s old course, to avoid buildings and trees and other submerged hazards.

They stared as they passed Windsor Castle, standing proud on its brooding keep, though their tame copper was wary, saying he thought it had been occupied by a breakaway military unit. Elsewhere, where the banks were lower, the swollen waterway spread to the horizon on either side, its placid surface broken only by the occasional church spire or tower block. They may as well have been at sea, Amanda thought, and it was only the pilot’s GPS that kept them on the river’s original course. But no sea was as grubby as this, its surface covered by slicks of oil and Sargasso masses of plastic bags and tree branches and upended wheelie bins, garbage islands that were home to squabbling seagulls. On they went, the pilot intoning the names of the drowned suburbs below: Shepperton, Hampton, Kingston, Richmond, ancient places now lost tens of meters beneath the boat’s prow.

The kids got bored of the unchanging view, and started playing card games with the copper. Amanda was pleased about that; they didn’t notice when they sailed over Fulham, their own abandoned home.

They passed on downstream, skirting the abutments of drowned bridges. As they approached central London the traffic on the river began to thicken, rowboats and yachts, few powerboats. The kids perked up as there were more monuments to see here, glass monoliths protruding from the grimy water. Rafts constructed of ganged-together rubber tires nosed cautiously between the cliff faces of the buildings, and Amanda saw that divers were descending into the swollen water, hauling down plastic tarpaulins and power lines.

“What’s this?” she asked Lily. “Salvage?”

“Some of it. But also storage. It’s amazing how much stuff there was in London the day the Barrier was overtopped, Amanda, just a normal day, and it’s mostly still down there-tools, machinery, even bottled water and tinned food. There’s too much to bring up all at once. What they can’t retrieve quickly they’re trying to make safe from the rising water. A store for the future.”

They passed through Westminster. Most of the London Eye was still above the water, like an immense bicycle wheel. You could make out ropes dangling from broken-open viewing pods, relics of the last rescue operations. On the opposite bank, the Big Ben clock tower stood a brave sixty meters above the water line. But one of its clock faces was smashed, only fragments remaining. The copper knew about that. “Some little-Britain nutter with a rocket-propelled grenade…”

Lily’s phone chimed. She dug it out of her pocket. It was a heavy mil-spec model, a radio phone.

The copper’s radio crackled.

And the AxysCorp pilot’s screen lit up.

Benj saw this. “What’s happening?”

Lily looked saddened, but oddly relieved. “What I’ve been waiting for. The seismologists got it spot on.”

Amanda snapped, “Got what spot on?”

“There’s been a major ocean earthquake, southwest of Ireland.”

That sounded ridiculous. Amanda found herself laughing. “Ireland? You don’t have earthquakes in Ireland-”

“It’s what this has been all about, Amanda,” Lily said. She started talking patiently about “isostatic subsidence,” about how drowned land could be forced by the weight of the water down into the softer rocks beneath the crust, by as much as a third of the depth of the water above it. But the semi-rigid crust didn’t like being bent. And thus the flooding was causing huge seismic stresses all over the world.