Stephen Baxter - Flood

Ollantay was thirty now; his neck was thicker, his skin heavier, his boyish looks gone, but he was as cocky as he had ever been. He smiled.

Lily blew her cheeks out, and sat down herself. “So that’s why you called us here, Kris.”

“You’re family,” Kristie said. “You’re my aunt.” She took a breath. “ She’s my mother. I wanted to tell you in person. I hoped you might be happy for me.”

“Happy!” Amanda snapped. “Oh, you bloody little fool.”

“Ollantay’s family are happy. His mother-”

“For God’s sake, Kristie, I couldn’t care less about a pack of flea-ridden alpaca herders.”

Ollantay glared at Amanda. “In my culture,” he said, “lovers live together before the wedding. It is a period we call sirvinakuy, which means ‘to serve each other.’ We marry only when we conceive, and have demonstrated we will bear strong children. Everything about our relationship has been honorable, in my tradition.”

Piers stood up. “Oh, this is all-it’s not to be tolerated.” He stalked out, ducking to get through the low doorway.

Amanda glared at Kristie. “What’s it going to take to make you give this up? Shall I speak to Juan, or Nathan? Shall I have this clown who’s knocked you up arrested?”

“Oh, Mum-”

Amanda stood and closed on her daughter. “How about a forcible abortion? I could do it, you know.”

“Mum, I’m seven months gone!”

“You think that matters? I’m not talking about an NHS hospital. It would only take a word to Nathan. Is that what you want?”

Kristie turned her face away. Ollantay stood up to protect her. Lily got up quickly, trying to get between them before it turned to violence.

And Sanjay, in his corner, peering into his phone’s screen, was laughing. “I knew I’d seen that profile before. It’s the Queen Mary. Nathan Lammockson is rebuilding the Queen Mary halfway up the bloody Andes! Oh, thank you, Ganesh, for keeping me alive long enough to see this!”

September 2031

Gary set one foot after another on the cracked, dusty blacktop. Grace walked at his side, sixteen years old, slim, erect, almost feral. Between them they pushed the shopping cart that contained the inert form of Michael Thurley. Michael slept uneasily under a plastic tarp, curled up in the big wire mesh basket.

And before them and behind the walkers shuffled, a line that stretched for kilometers. The mayor’s guards walked parallel to the main column with their shotguns and pistols visible. Around them the flat desolation of the Great Plains stretched to the horizon.

This was Walker City, a city on the move. To walk was the world. To walk was life.

Much of Gary’s time passed in a kind of daze. So long as the walk itself wasn’t too strenuous he would lose himself in its slow rhythm, the gentle rock of his body, the working of the muscles, one foot after another, walking his youth away over this tremendous, continent-spanning, mind-numbing plain. Gary thought sometimes that this excursion was a karmic response to his experience in the cellars of Barcelona, that age of enclosure now balanced by these years of semi-infinity, the plain beneath his feet, the huge sky above.

And every morning, after a couple of kilometers or so and the muscles were warmed up, his mind wandered away like a balloon cut loose of its tether. At thirty-nine years old he seemed to have shed so much, his obsessive questing for meaning in the past, his fears over what was to come for himself and Grace and Thurley. None of it meant anything when all you could actually do was walk, put one foot after another, a slow propulsion into the real future.

But every so often he came back to himself.

He had long since shed every gram of excess fat. His feet were like pads of leather, the muscles of his legs and buttocks hard as rock. His boots were so worn and supple and polished they were like part of his skin. He wore his old AxysCorp-durable jumpsuit, so faded it was the color of the dust itself. On his back was his pack containing another jumpsuit, his single change of clothes, underwear washed so often you could see through it, and other lightweight gear, plastic sandals, a silvered poncho that could keep out the rain or the sun’s heat, a thin but warm sleeping bag and inflatable bed roll, elements of a blow-up tent, cooking gear. He had a few things that wouldn’t fit into the pack, a light spade and pick, and another bag was slung at his waist, heavier, holding food and water canteens.

All his stuff had self-selected in the long years of walking, surviving a Darwinian filtering based on utility, robustness and lightness, where other junk had broken down or proven too awkward or heavy. All of it products of a civilization that had pretty much vanished, all of it unbearably precious.

Which was why, of course, Thurley had got himself into so much trouble a few days back. You couldn’t afford to let your boots be stolen, even at risk of your life.

This country wasn’t like Iowa, where at harvest time they had walked through country that glowed with life, the red barns bright in the yellow and green fields, the gleaming water towers, the mighty white grain elevators. There had always been a good chance they could find work, for nobody had any gasoline now. The big harvesters stood idle, and the gathering had to be done by human and animal muscle.

But in Nebraska there was nothing but emptiness, a plain that went on and on. The towns were little one-street places with not much more than grain silos and defunct gas stations and dead cars, with ad billboards painted over with uncompromising messages: NO FOOD. NO GAS. WE SHOOT. KEEP WALKING. DOGS. Between the towns the roads were empty save for an occasional motor home or SUV abandoned where some earlier emigrant had run out of gas. The population was gone, save for those who found it easier to prey on those who passed by than to produce anything for themselves. And in the end Thurley had been preyed upon.

That was why, today, Gary couldn’t switch off his awareness of the walk, because of the burden of Thurley. The shopping cart, that had traveled far from the supermarket where it belonged, was on loan to them from the mayor. It was just big enough to carry Michael with his thin legs tucked up to his chest, though he was jolted when the small wheels jammed. Michael’s boots were lodged underneath his body at his own insistence. Michael had nearly given his life for the damn things, and he wasn’t about to lose them now.

Gary was sharing the burden of pushing the cart with Grace. But walking like this was unbalancing him, and as the kilometers clicked away he could feel that asymmetry niggling in his hips and back. He resented it, he admitted it to himself, as the long day bore down on him, and his aches grew worse.

By mid-afternoon he felt so bad he was actually relieved when the F-15 came screaming down the road over their heads.

Everybody ducked, stumbling. Gary let go of the handle, and the cart tipped off the blacktop. Thurley was rattled around, and groaned in his pain-filled sleep. The column stopped, raggedly, and a murmur of conversation replaced the steady shuffle of feet.

“Wow,” said Grace. She took off her worn baseball cap and wiped sweat off her brow. The plane was a glittering jewel, receding along the dark stripe of the road.“What do you think? Denver or Salt Lake City?”

Gary grunted. “Far as I know the Mormons haven’t got an air force yet.” But, he reminded himself, he actually knew very little, and that plane had been an antique.

Grace checked on Thurley. He had fallen back into his deeper sleep. He was drooling, the spit clinging to the papery flesh of his thin cheek. “Yeck,” Grace said, pulling her face; sometimes she looked much younger than her sixteen years. But she bent and wiped his mouth with the collar of his own jumpsuit. Then she dug a canteen out of her pack to give him water.