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.
Amanda cut her off. “You’ve been spending too much time with Gary Boyle. What’s an earthquake off Ireland got to do with us?”
“This,” the pilot said. He produced a laptop and opened it up before them. “This is a view from Exmoor, looking west.”
It was an image of the sea, and a line of black on the horizon, a line that thickened as Amanda watched. And in the foreground you could see that the sea was retreating, exposing drowned towns, fields.
“Tsunami,” Kristie said immediately.
“A tsunami, heading for England,” Amanda said, still disbelieving.
“It’s happened before,” Lily said.“It’s in the geological record, tsunamis hitting the Channel ports and the Severn estuary and Scotland, because of quakes off Ireland and in the Channel and off the coast of Norway.”
“How high?”
“We don’t know, not yet,” Lily said. “We should be safe here. But it’s going to make a hell of a mess of the whole west coast.”
Amanda recalled images of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and Istanbul just a year ago, and Macao and Hong Kong since. Bodies hanging from trees. “So Dartmoor’s not safe after all.”
“Amanda, you can see why I had to get you out. This is going to smash apart what’s left of Britain, and there won’t be the resources to recover.”
Kristie was staring at the screen. “What about Molly and Linda, and Barry and George-?”
“Local kids in Postbridge,” Amanda explained to Lily.
“Can we warn them?” Kristie asked.
Lily handed over her phone. “Call whoever you like, honey. There will have been an official warning by now anyhow.” Kristie immediately began to make calls.
Benj was angry.“You knew this was coming, didn’t you, Lily? It’s just like Greenwich. We just ran off and left them to die, even though you knew this was going to happen.”
“Yes. But if I’d shot my mouth off none of us would have got away. Look-you’ve got a conscience, Benj, and that’s a good thing. But can you see what I had to do?” She glared at him until he subsided.
Much later, when they were in the air aboard the AxysCorp chopper, Lily’s phone chimed with another urgent incoming call. Kristie was still making her calls to Postbridge; she handed the phone back.
The call was from AxysCorp, in fact from Nathan himself. Helen Gray had been staying with family in Chester. She had been lost when the great wave hit.
Amanda took Lily’s hand.“I know what that means to you. The first of you gone.”
“I promised to look after her kid,” Lily said desolately.“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
Stephen Baxter
Flood