Stephen Baxter - Flood

Gary stepped away from the road, treading over the scrub grass of the prairie. A city guard eyed him, but made no move to intervene. Looking down the line Gary tried to see what was going on at its head. Vehicles in military olive were lined up on the road, blocking it, and a quite enormous Stars and Stripes hung, unruffled by any breeze.

“Roadblock,” he murmured.

“You got it,” said the guard.

From the head of the line, whistles started sounding, blown by the mayor’s officials. That’s it for the day,” the guards called along the line of the column. “Break the line, form up, everybody off the road.” An electric car came driving down the line with a tannoy broadcasting the night’s instructions. “Surnames E to F on latrine duty, I to K on water sourcing, please report to the guards for local details. E to F on latrines…” The line split around the axis of the road, people clearing the tarmac, plodding into the dust. Packs were dumped on the ground, and the components of tents were drawn out, groundsheets and inflatable struts and guy ropes. Reluctant-looking men and women came out of the column bearing shovels and picks, preparing for the chore of digging the night’s latrine trenches.

Gary helped Grace shove their cart away from the road. They moved back fifty meters or so until they found a clear space. Grace threw their plastic tarp on the ground and lifted Thurley out of the cart. Wasted, worn out by walking, he was light enough for her to lift by herself.

Gary got out his cellphone. He pressed the power button gingerly, wincing at the single pip that showed how low the battery had run. But he left it on, and set it on the blanket beside Thurley, letting it make its connections and figure out where it was, and pick up any messages.

The sun was still high; that was one advantage of the unscheduled halt, earlier than the mayor generally planned. So Gary dug his mirror stove out of his pack and began to set it up. They had no fuel for a fire. Gary sometimes imagined the whole of the North American continent had been scoured clean of lumber by the clouds of human locusts that had passed back and forth across its face for years. But the mirror stove was a valuable piece of gear. It was a parabolic mirror with hollow struts, blown up with a few brisk breaths, that sat on a little wire stand. If you positioned it right, face up to the sun like a silvered sunflower, you could set a small pan of water to boil on a wire frame at its focus.

Grace said, “I think he’s OK. He’s not lost any more blood. And the wound hasn’t reopened.”

Gary grimaced. “Well, that’s good.” In fact it was a miracle, given the only doctoring Michael had had, for a wound that would have seen him in intensive care back in better days, had been first aid from Gary and Grace.

“Let’s let him rest a bit,” Grace said. “Then we’ll try to feed him.”

“Sure. Later I’ll walk up the line and see if I can get some time from a doctor.”

Gary dug in his pack for their tea leaves and tin cups, and he checked over their food. It was travelers’ fare, tough, difficult to chew, long-lasting: a jerky of rabbit meat, slabs of hard unleavened bread provided by the mobile city’s bakeries, and sun-dried fruit, raisins and apricots.

Grace saw he had his phone turned on. “So where are we?”

He picked it up and paged for the GPS functions.“A few kilometers north of Lincoln. I don’t think we would have made it tonight. Tomorrow, for sure. All depends on the holdup by the roadblock.”

Such a blockage was a genuine problem. The mayor had negotiated a stay on open ground north of Lincoln for a few weeks at least, with lodging and food and water in return for labor on flood defenses and harbor work around the Nebraska town, as well as work in the fields. The walkers could carry little in the way of supplies, and they were running low on food. A holdup of more than a day or two could see real hunger setting in. But there was nothing Gary could do about that now.

He took his boots and socks off, always a key moment of the day. He dug out the plastic sandals he wore around camp, open and soft, so his feet had room to breathe and relax. He hid his boots under a blanket, and took out his penknife and rasp, meaning to get to work on the hard skin of his heels. Like a soldier, he thought absently, maybe like the guys in the roadblock up ahead, and every infantryman right back to Alexander. You always took care of your feet.

“You’re daydreaming,” Grace said. “Switch your phone off.”

“Yeah.” He held it up regretfully. Its small screen shone like a window to a better place. Here was his only connection to the rest of the world beyond the walking city, the family he hadn’t heard from since his mother had died, his science colleagues, Lily from Barcelona. He had a charger but no power source. It had broken his heart when he had had to trade away his portable solar-cell array for food when the city had been going through its worst time, trapped by a dust storm somewhere near Dodge City. Occasionally, very occasionally, you came across a community where there was power, from the sun or biofuels or the wind or geothermal heat, and he was able to top up the phone’s battery in return for labor. But the last charge-up had been a long time ago, and the few seconds or minutes each day he allowed himself to turn it on were steadily draining the energy.

He held his thumb over the power button. But then the screen sparked to life, with a text message. “Don’t switch off. Am coming. Will find U.” It was from Thandie Jones.

A jeep came barreling along the road, open-topped, driven by some guy in uniform, with Thandie and another woman in back. The jeep was at least fifteen or twenty years old, and looked a lot older. But evidently the Army at least still had access to gasoline. People stared. Aside from the city’s own little electric carts, you rarely saw a moving vehicle nowadays.

This was a thrill for Gary. He hadn’t seen Thandie for five, six years, not since the time she had briefed Lone Elk in Cadillac City. He knew she’d been roaming the shore of America’s gathering inland sea, studying its formation and advising the Denver government on its navigability, ecology and other issues. He’d actually been expecting to meet up with her in Lincoln, if the mobile city got that far. Now here she was coming out to find him.

The car pulled up alongside Gary’s little encampment. Gary could smell it, smell the rubber of its tires and its oil and the sickly sooty exhaust, the scent of an American childhood.

Thandie swung her legs out of the jeep and came striding over. She had to be forty-five now, or more. But though the hair she wore scraped to her scalp was now shot through with gray, and her face was grooved and tough-looking, almost mannish, she moved with strength and grace. And when she gave him a hug, wrapping her arms tight around his chest, he felt his ribs crush.

“Jeez, Thandie, you’re keeping fit.”

She stood back and held him. “Well, so are you. The life we live nowadays, huh? The global extinction event has claimed the couch potato.”

Her companions followed her. The slim ash-blond woman who came to stand by Thandie, about forty, her expression serious, was Elena Artemova. The Russian ecologist was just as Gary remembered from all those years ago when he had met her en route to the Caspian Sea, if anything her beauty enhanced by the lines around her mouth, the hint of silver in her hair. When she stood by Thandie their arms brushed, but Thandie didn’t move away; they both seemed unconscious of the touch.

“You know,” Gary said,“ what I remember of you two is how you fought the whole time. When we were in that dacha by the Black Sea-”