Flood Read online

  Synopsis:

  The "deeply scary" (BBC Focus) new novel from a national bestselling and critically acclaimed author. Four hostages are rescued from a group of religious extremists in Barcelona. After five years of being held captive together, they make a vow to always watch out for one another. But they never expected this—the world they have returned to has been transformed by water—and the water is rising. As it continues to flow from the earth's mantle, entire countries disappear. High ground becomes a precious commodity. And finally, the dreadful truth is revealed: before fifty years have passed, there will be nowhere left to run…

  Flood

  Stephen Baxter

  For Mary Jane Shepherd née Ramsey

  1930-2007

  One - 2016

  Mean sea-level rise above 2010 datum: 1-5m

  1

  July 2016

  Every pothole and every crevice in the road was flooded. As the truck swerved through the streets of Barcelona the water sprayed up over Lily in her pallet under the chassis, stinking, oily stuff that worked its way under the parcel tape that covered her eyes and mouth. It was raining, too, a hard persistent rain that hammered on the truck’s metal roof, adding to the engine’s roar and the distant rattle of gunfire.

  Another jolt slammed her body into the metal surface above. Grunting, her lips working against the tape over her mouth, she tried to wriggle, to relieve the pain in her shoulders and neck, from arms pulled behind her back. But each twist only shifted the ache somewhere else.

  There was one other hostage under here with her, trussed up with tape and stuffed under the body of the truck, the pair of them head to foot like sardines. Lily thought it was Helen. Lily straightened her legs a bit, as gently as she could given the jolting. Her shoes had been taken away, and her bare toes touched hair. But Helen didn’t respond. Lily had taken these rides seven or eight or nine times, and she’d learned that each of the others, Helen, Gary, John and Piers, had their own way of dealing with the experience. Helen’s way was to just take whatever came. All that mattered to her was getting her baby back again at the end.

  The truck juddered to a halt, its engine idling. Lily heard rapid speech, a jabbering in the Spanish she knew a little and the Catalan she understood not at all. One of the voices was Jaume’s, the fat, sweating young man who grew nervous easily. He was probably negotiating their way through a toll barrier erected by some militia or other. Still the rain rattled on the truck walls and hissed on the tarmac, and spattered noisily on the clothes of the talking men.

  Lily heard Jaume clamber hastily back into the truck. Gunfire spat. A round thudded into the body of the truck. The driver hit the gas and the truck shot away, jolting her shoulders again.

  Wrenched around, the fleeing road surface just centimeters below, Lily wriggled like a fish in the silver tape, barely able to move, struggling against the pain and the rising panic. Helen didn’t make a sound.

  Lily was one of the longest held of the hostages.

  Spain had already been collapsing five years ago, when Lily had first come here on assignment to the American embassy. The country was riven by its own unique separatist and ethnic tensions, spanning hundreds of years from the legacy of the Muslim invasion of the eighth century to the toxic divisions of the twentieth-century Civil War. Now all this was exacerbated by an influx of migrants from a desiccating Africa. The tipping point into disintegration was a right-wing coup against the monarchic government.

  As the peacekeepers and aid charities labored, the great shapers of the global scene had moved in, aggressive corporations and financial institutions seeking profit in the remaking of a crumbling state, and on the other hand sponsors of grassroots anger stirring up revolt and terrorism. The splits fissured and overlapped, and Spain became a shattered, fractal state, a Lebanon of the west. By now, it seemed, even great cities like Barcelona had been taken over by armed factions.

  If you were in the middle of it, the kaleidoscope of conflict and fragile alliances was bewildering and fast-moving. Lily had in fact been taken by a fundamentalist Muslim group, all those years ago, when her Chinook had been shot down. Now she was held by Christian extremists. She had been passed from hand to hand over the years like a parcel in a children’s game. And still it went on. Here she was bundled up in tape and shoved under a truck, once again.

  After a few more minutes the truck stopped again. Doors banged. Lily heard Jaume and the other guards moving around the truck, talking rapidly and softly.

  Then she was grabbed by the ankles and hauled out from under the truck. She was dumped on her back on a hard, wet, lumpy surface—cobbles? It hurt. Rain battered down at her, soaking her belly through her T-shirt and her bare legs between the strips of tape. She could see nothing; she had no idea what was happening to Helen.

  Then she was picked up by rough hands at her feet and armpits. She was lifted like a child, turned upside down and thrown over a shoulder, and an arm clamped over her bare legs. She was carried at a half-run. Whoever it was must be strong, Lupo or Severo. But the running jolted her again, yanking at arms still bound tightly behind her back, and her head lolled. The rain beat down on her back. Her feet were cold. She felt old, older than her forty years, weak in the grip of the man’s strong youthfulness.

  She was brought into an enclosed space, out of the rain. The texture of sounds changed, the running footsteps echoing. Somewhere big, roomy, empty? The guard tripped over something, jerking Lily, and he cursed in Catalan. He hurried on. Down steps now, into another echoing space, a cellar maybe. The steps were solid, like stone. Her head brushed some kind of lintel; she was lucky not to get hurt.

  The guard, breathing hard, leaned forward and tipped her off. She braced, expecting to fall to the floor, but she clattered onto a chair, hard, wooden. A knife worked its way up her body, slitting the tape over her legs and torso, then behind her back to release her arms. She felt the blade’s hard tip, but she wasn’t cut. There was hot breath before her face, and she smelled the tang of cheap fatty food. It was Lupo, then; he liked his hamburgers.

  When her arms were free she longed to stretch, to massage the aches out of her muscles. But she knew the routine. She held up her right arm and extended her right leg. The shackles closed tightly over her wrist and ankle, the metal cold and constricting. She gave an experimental tug. A chain rattled, only a short length of it, firmly anchored.

  She was still blinded, her mouth still covered. But the guard moved away, and she heard the others elsewhere in the room, the guards’ muttering conversation, grunts from the manhandled captives. She lifted her hands and pulled the tape down, freeing her mouth, and gasped at the air. Then she fiddled until she found the strip ends and pulled the tape away from the rest of her head. She kept her eyes clamped tight closed in case the tape dragged at her eyelids. The back of her head stung, but her shaved scalp didn’t allow the tape much purchase. She dropped the bits of tape at her feet.

  She was exhausted, every muscle aching. She looked around.

  This wasn’t the usual basement. It was like a vault, stone-walled, grimy, very old, cut in two by a row of twelve arches. The only light came from a dry-cell electric lantern sitting on the floor. There were carvings on the walls, images of some wretched woman suffering torments, and she glimpsed sarcophagi. A crypt? There was a smell of damp. Lily saw water stains on the walls, and a slow seeping from beneath the arches, and dusty puddles on the floor.

  She was sitting on a hard, upright wooden chair, and was shackled to an antique-looking radiator. Three guards stood in the middle of the vault, Jaume and Lupo and Severo, their Armalites slung over their shoulders, smoking anxiously. Even in the dark Severo wore his sunglasses—in fact they were Lily’s USAF-issue sunglasses, taken from her on the day her Chinook was downed, when everythi
ng she possessed was stripped from her.

  And on more chairs, in a ring around the walls, sat the hostages in their T-shirts and shorts, their feet bare, strips of silver packing tape still clinging to them. Four of them besides herself: everybody was here, then; they were still together.

  Helen Gray sat cradling Grace, her baby, returned to her after the transfer, the focus of her whole world. Twenty-five years old, tall, she was very pale under her freckles, very English-looking, fragile. Gary Boyle, the even younger American research scientist, sat bewildered, as if stunned. His fear and distress were always beguiling to the guards’ bullying streak, and his arms and legs were purple from the bruises of his beatings.

  Piers sat slumped in his chair, a grimy towel over his face. Piers Michaelmas was the senior British military officer who had been Lily’s principal passenger in her Chinook. He had been working for a Western alliance trying to prop up the then-new military government. It was long months since he had retreated behind his towels and his blindfolds, and he rarely spoke.

  And John Foreshaw, American civil contractor, tested his shackles, as always edgy and impatient, at his most dangerous at moments of flux like this.

  They all looked so similar, Lily thought, male and female, British and American, military and civilian, young and not so young, in their grimy underwear, pasty pale from the lack of daylight, their eyes hollow, their scalps and faces shaved bare. But they were all white, and all British or American, the categories that made them valuable as hostages.

  There was nothing else here, none of the usual equipment of their long captivity, the foam mattresses and grimy blankets, the plastic bags they had to shit in, the old Coke bottles that held their drinking water and their piss: this time, nothing but themselves.

  It was John who spoke first. “So where the fuck are we now?”

  Jaume plucked his cigarette from his mouth and blew out a mouthful of barely inhaled smoke. Like the rest of these “Fathers of the Elect” he was no more than twenty, twenty-one years old, only half the age of John, Piers, Lily. “La Seu,” Jaume said.

  “Where? What did you say? Why can’t you fuckers talk straight?” Once John had been fat; now his jowls hung from his cheeks and under his chin, as if emptied out.

  Gary Boyle spoke up. “La Seu. That’s the cathedral. Dedicated to Saint Eulalia. A thirteen-year-old martyr. I came here as a tourist, when I was a kid . . .” He glanced around. “My God. This is the crypt. We’re chained up in a cathedral crypt!”

  “It’s just another shithole, is what it is,” John said. “There’s water pouring down the walls. We’ll fucking drown, if we don’t die of pneumonia first.”

  “Holy place,” Jaume said easily, in his heavily accented English. “You with God here.” He started walking toward a shadowed staircase, followed by the others.

  John called after them, “Hey! Where are you going? Where are our mattresses? There’s no food here. Not even a bag to shit in.”

  “God provide,” said Jaume. “Has looked after saint since ninth century, will look after you.”

  John started dragging at his chains; they rattled noisily in the enclosed space. “You’re leaving us here to die, is that it?”

  Lily instantly wondered if he might be right. There was nothing to suggest they were here for a long stay. She tried out the thought, the idea of dying. She wasn’t afraid, she found. She had been in the arbitrary care of frightened, ignorant young men for five years; even without the cruel games and the mock executions, she had grown used to the idea that her life could be terminated on a whim at any second. But she didn’t want to die stuck in this hole in the ground. She felt a deep, intense longing to see the sky.

  The guards continued to retreat up the stairs, and John yanked at his chains. “You fucking kids, you grab a handful of hostages and you think you can control the whole world.”

  “John, take it easy,” Lily said.

  John was raging now, his face purple. “You’re fucking cowards is what you are. You can’t even finish the job properly, you’re not men enough for that—”

  Severo turned and fired his Armalite. The burst was loud in the enclosed space. John’s body shuddered as the bullets hit. One shot got him in the face, which imploded in a bloody mess.

  Gary screamed, “John. Oh God, oh God!”

  “No coward,” said Severo, cigarette in mouth. He followed the others up the stairs and out of Lily’s sight.

  John was splayed over his chair. Blood pooled thickly on the floor. Helen hunched down over her baby, grasping her close, rocking, as if nothing else existed in the world. Piers turned his hooded head away, his body slumped.

  Gary was crying, hunched over, weeping with shock. Chained up meters away from him, Lily couldn’t reach him.

  John had been an asshole in some ways, but Lily had known him for four years. Now he was gone, gone in an instant—killed before their eyes. Worse than that, discarded. Of no value to their captors, not anymore. And the implication was, neither were the rest of them.

  “It’s over,” Helen said. It was the first time she had spoken since they had been brought here. She held her baby on her chest, her chin resting on Grace’s head. “I’m right, aren’t I?” Her accent was crisp northern English, her vowels flat. She had been a language teacher.

  “You don’t know that,” Lily insisted. “Maybe some other group is late for the handover, that’s all.”

  “They killed John,” Gary said heavily.

  Helen said, “And that bloody lantern is going out. Look at it! Bastards couldn’t even give us a fresh battery. We’re going to be left in the dark, with a stinking corpse. Left to die.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Gary whimpered. And Lily heard him groan softly; she knew that meant his bladder had released.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Lily snapped. “Let’s get out of these chains.” She tugged experimentally. The radiator was bolted massively to a stone wall. “Look around before the light goes. There must be something down here, something we can use—”

  “How about bolt cutters?”

  2

  The new voice was a man’s, English, coming from the stairs. They all leaned over to look. Even Piers turned his hooded face. Torchlight flashed. Lily raised her unchained hand to shield her eyes. She made out two, three, four people coming down the crypt stair. “Who’s there? Who are you ¿Como se llama usted? ¿Me puede ayudar, por favor? Me llamo—”

  “You’re Lily Brooke. Yes? USAF captain, serial number—”

  “Tell me who you are.”

  He lifted his torch to illuminate his face. He was black, maybe forty; tall, square, he wore what looked like battle dress with a purple beret, and a shoulder-flash logo: the Earth cradled in a cupped hand. “My name is George Camden.”

  “You’re English. Military?”

  “A private security force. I work for AxysCorp.” He tapped his shoulder logo. “I’ve come to get you out of here. You’re safe now.” He smiled.

  Nothing changed inside Lily; there was no feeling of relief. She couldn’t believe it. She remained tense, wary, waiting for the trap to spring.

  “AxysCorp,” Gary said. “Who John worked for.”

  Camden shone his torch. “You’re Gary Boyle, of NASA? Yes, John Foreshaw works for us. We’re operating in conjunction with the coalition peacekeepers, the government forces. But at AxysCorp we look after our own.” He flashed his torch around. Piers flinched from the light. “So where’s John?”

  “You just missed him,” Helen said bitterly.

  “Missed him?” Camden’s torch found John. “Oh. Damn it.”

  Lily lifted her shackled arm. “You said something about bolt cutters?”

  Camden waved forward his men. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Released, they were helped up the crypt stairs.

  The cathedral’s interior was a sandstone cavern, looted and burned. They stumbled out through a massive door called the Portal of San Ivo, and onto the street. The cathedral was a squ
at Gothic pile, the labor of centuries. Its carefully worked face had been cratered by shellfire. The rain fell, hard and steady, and the water stood in spreading puddles on the street, making every surface glisten.

  A small helicopter stood by, resting on its rails in the rubble-strewn wreck of some building. When the hostages emerged, a couple more AxysCorp operatives who stood by the bird came running. Lily, a pilot five years out of the game, didn’t recognize the model; it bore the bold cradled-world logo of AxysCorp.

  As the AxysCorp people got themselves organized, the four hostages stood together, Helen cradling her baby, Gary blinking in the light with a grin like a kid at Christmas. Unbearably, Piers Michaelmas still wouldn’t remove the dirty towel that hid his face. Lily peered up longingly. At least she had got to see the sky again. But the cloud was solid, and the rain quickly soaked her bare scalp and thin clothes. It was July; at least it was warm. But, surrounded by the men in their dull green battle dress, she felt oddly diminished, all but naked in her T-shirt and shorts.

  An AxysCorp man with a Red Cross flash on his arm took a quick look at the four of them, and then, with apologies, lifted Helen’s baby from her arms. “Just for a bit—just until we’re out of here. I’ve a cradle for her. She’ll be safer that way.” Helen protested, but could do nothing about it as he walked away with the baby, jiggling her in his arms. Lily thought she could feel the bond between mother and daughter stretch like steel under tension.

  George Camden murmured to Lily, “I’m surprised she’s so close to the child. It was the product of a rape—”

  “She’s Helen’s,” Lily shot back. “The father doesn’t matter. Said’s gone anyhow. His comrades chased him out.”

  “We know about him,” Camden said gently. “Look, it’s all right, take it easy. You really are safe now.”