Flood (21 page)

Lily patted her hand. “Nathan will listen.”

“Yes. And maybe that counts for more than anything else.”

The plane bumped to a landing and braked hard, the tires throwing up sprays of water from a soaked runway.

30

A
n AxysCorp chopper was waiting for them at the Newburgh airstrip, with a heavyset company guard already on board.

The pilot brought them back down the Hudson valley, and they descended at last over Manhattan, heading for Central Park. They peered curiously out through the chopper’s blister hull at an island encroached on all its flanks by the rising rivers. The city’s great buildings were an orderly forest of concrete and steel and glass, but you could see gaps in the forest, sprawls of rubble where buildings had fallen, often taking others down with them. Yet the city lived; away from the directly flooded areas traffic still moved, even glistening mustard-colored beetles that must be yellow cabs, and boats prowled busily along the drowned streets, drawing long wakes behind them.

Despite the rumors of the approaching Atlantic storm, the sky was clear and blue, the sun still high; it was a brilliant winter’s day. The city shone in the sunlight, millions of windows glittering like so many sequins, and even the water that ponded around the feet of the buildings looked blue and pretty. It was like a postcard view of Venice as it once was.

The chopper brought them down onto a helipad in Central Park, on the Great Lawn just south of the reservoir. The pilot said this was as far south on the island as it was safe to land right now. The three of them clambered out, Thandie, Gary and Lily, followed by the pilot and the AxysCorp guard.

While the pilot unloaded their shoulder packs, Lily walked to the edge of the helipad. When she stepped on the green grass the ground gave under her feet, marshy, full of water. She looked around, shielding her eyes. It was years since she had come to Manhattan, to Central Park, and then it had been as a tourist. Glancing around you wouldn’t think that anything had changed; here she was in this remarkable green space in the heart of the world’s greatest city, whose buildings shouldered above the tree line in every direction. But looking south she could see grubby tents and lean-tos and threads of smoke from fires. People living in Central Park, then. And there was a smell of rot and sewage, a stink she had become too familiar with in London.

The pilot called her back to the group. She was a beefy woman who might have been thirty. She said now, in a broad Bronx accent, dryly humorous, “So welcome to New York. Here’s your orientation guide.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Thandie snapped.

“Mr. Lammockson’s standing orders, so please listen up. You might notice a few changes since your last visit. The city isn’t in as bad a shape as you might think. It’s still working. But transport ain’t what it used to be. We can’t fly you any further downtown than this. And the subways flooded on day one.”

New York’s subways had been built after the sewers that drained them, and so had to run
under
the sewers. Even in normal times there had been an heroic, unending operation to pump water from the tunnels up into the sewers and out to the Hudson. When the flooding came the tunnels had filled up fast, and when the power to the pumps failed, there was nothing to be done to save the subways.

“So,” Thandie said,“how are we supposed to get to the Empire State Building?” That was where they were due to meet Piers Michaelmas, some twenty-five blocks below Central Park South: a typically imaginative choice of landmark by Piers, Lily thought dryly.

“You walk, or take a yellow cab or rickshaw, or in the flooded areas flag a water cab. Pick the cabs that are licensed by the city. If you’re not sure, ask a cop. You have GPS?”

Thandie lifted her arm; a GPS map, updated hourly with flood data, was projected on a patch on her sleeve.

“Use your common sense,” the guard said.“Stay out of wrecked buildings. Don’t drink anything that doesn’t come out of a sealed bottle. Don’t go swimming. Don’t talk to anybody that doesn’t look like he’s washed for a couple of days. If the smell gets too bad, use your face masks. There is said to be cholera in the Lower East Side, so watch for that, you’ll see the police tapes keeping you out. I say goodbye here, I gotta take this chopper home. But you’ll have John here with you at all times.”

The guard, John, nodded, and took a step back. Lily suspected he would be tailing them all the way to Freedom Tower, whether they liked it or not.

The pilot said, “So that’s that. Any questions?”

Gary pointed to the clusters of tents, the fires. “What about those guys?”

“Refugees from downtown. The city ships them out, mostly to the big camps they’ve set up around West Point where they can be processed appropriately. But there are always more. Central Park serves as a big holding tank. Kind of a shantytown.”

“That was what used to be here, before the city bought the land and established the park,” Gary murmured.“Back in the 1850s. Pig farms and rubbish tips. Most of what’s around us now is landscaped.”

“What goes around comes around, hey buddy? Anyhow I’d keep away,” the pilot said. “Any other questions?”

They said their goodbyes, the chopper lifted into an empty sky, and the three of them hefted their packs and set off south across the park.

The ground was marshy, and they stuck to the paths. Lily didn’t look back, but she was sure the wordless guard was following discreetly.

They found that much of the lower section of the park, softball fields and playgrounds, was now occupied by a row of emergency power generators, fed by a fleet of tankers and guarded by police. Here was the beating heart of Lower Manhattan, Lily thought—and a ripe target for terrorists, if any of them had the energy left to strike.

Once out of the park, they cut down Seventh Avenue. The Stars and Stripes hung from many of the buildings, from jutting flagpoles and in windows, bright and brave in the sunlight. There wasn’t much traffic around. There were as many bicycle-rickshaws as yellow cabs. A lot of the police were on horseback—but many of the “cops” Lily saw weren’t NYPD but Homeland Security officers, or agents of private security contractors. There were other signs of the emergency of the kind Lily had got used to in London: trash cans overflowing, and big plastic water tanks every block or two, each with a short queue of people waiting by its taps.

There weren’t so many pedestrians either, and those few were bundled up against the cold and wore waterproof trousers and rubber boots. But people still worked here. A few well-dressed types yacked into their cellphones, or into midair, constantly talking regardless of the ferociously high tariffs on the surviving networks. Despite the flood New York remained a financial hub. Indeed since the waters had invaded, the city itself had become a frontier for capitalism, like other disaster zones. Massive investment was being mobilized in flood defenses and relief programs and the great translocation to the new model cities to the north, and there were substantial profits to be made by those who fed off the flow of public money.

Rich or poor, everybody carried a whistle around her neck. Lily had seen in London how water just knee-high could knock you off your feet in a moment. Rubber boots were advisable too. The sidewalks were all damp, the tarmac running with what looked like river water, dense and foul, and sometimes you saw it bubbling up out of the drains. In places the sidewalk had collapsed altogether, where a broken sewer or subway tunnel had washed away its footing, and you had to walk around the mess. But people just plodded through all this, surviving, getting on with their lives, here as in London and elsewhere.

And, under the blue winter sky, many of the shops were open. The food stores and drug stores and restaurants and even the bars bore notices that biometric ID and ration cards had to be produced by all customers. Lily couldn’t tell how current the fashions were in the clothes stores. A lot of stuff on display, in fact, looked like AxysCorp gear, Nathan’s famous lines of durables, sensible coveralls and all-weather coats and boots and hats, good for ten years or more. Nathan Lammockson was still selling to the world, still making money. But some of the other stores were piled high with random heaps of goods, from toys to cellphones to coffee percolators to Angels. Lily had learned from Nathan that this was another symptom of the global economic dislocation. Firms kept on trying to function as long as they could, until their suppliers and markets were disrupted or disappeared altogether, and when they failed they dumped their stock in fire sales.

Some newspaper dispensers worked. Out of curiosity Lily paid ten dollars for a copy of the
NewYork Post
. The edition was thin and printed smudgily on coarse, many-times-recycled paper. The headline was the final cancellation of the soccer World Cup in England scheduled for the summer, for which the US team had been among the favorites.

At the 45th Street junction Thandie consulted the map on her wrist. “This way.” Abruptly she turned right, heading west.

They followed, but Gary protested, “The Empire State is south and east of here.”

Thandie just kept walking, following her map.

Lily knew roughly where she was heading. This was the Garment District, the hub of the city’s fashion industry, where, back on Seventh, the likes of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein were commemorated with granite plaques embedded in the sidewalk. She’d walked here once with Amanda, who cared a lot more about clothes than she ever had. Now it seemed largely abandoned.

They came to a place where a couple of fire appliances were working. Firemen were pumping out a gushing drain. They sent the water through thick yellow hoses along 45th, running west, parallel to Thandie’s path. The appliances’ engines roared, and the men didn’t look up as the walkers passed.

Beyond Eighth there were no more pedestrians. And at the intersection with Ninth, Thandie, consulting her map, stopped and looked up. Here was the water, covering the sidewalk.

It was a strange urban shore of the kind Lily had seen in London. The water, murky gray-brown stuff slick with oil, lapped around the feet of the buildings and the hulks of long-abandoned cars. Those hoses from the fire appliances ran underwater here, and there was bubbling and turbulence as they dumped the noxious stuff they had pumped out of the drains. In the buildings themselves there were lights in some of the upper-story windows, but most windows were smashed, and pigeons roosted, their guano staining the brown brickwork.

“This is a major transgression,” Thandie said, pointing. “Runs south as far as 19th Street, covering Clinton and Chelsea, and to the north of here for a dozen blocks or so. The waterfront developments are abandoned. The GPS flood mapping is very good, it has this shoreline to within a few meters. I used to go skating at Chelsea Piers,” she said, suddenly surprisingly wistful. She stepped forward until she was paddling ankle-deep in the murky water. She dug in her pack and produced a knife, folded it out, and prized something loose from a wall. She brought it back to show Lily and Gary. It was a mussel, about the size of a postage stamp, and a smaller clam.
“Mytilaster lineatus,”
she said. “And this little clam is
Cardium edule
.”

“So what?” Lily asked.

“Ocean creatures. You see them, their shells, in the sediment record. Among the first species to colonize when the sea overwhelms the land. Just as it’s doing here.” She dropped the shells back in the water.

They stayed for a moment at the edge of the water. It lapped, grimy, full of floating rubbish, plastic bags and fast food trays and aluminum cans and condoms, the detritus of a time that already seemed remote. And the water approached Lily’s booted toes a little more with each small wave, like a tide coming in.

“Let’s get on with it,” Thandie said. She turned and led them back along the street.

31

B
ack on Seventh, which was relatively busy with bundled-up shoppers, it was as if the river incursion just a couple of blocks away wasn’t happening, as if the three of them had walked through some kind of portal from a parallel world of sinking and submergence.

They headed to Times Square, making for Broadway. The square’s giant billboards were dead, great black windows into emptiness—all save a couple of small panels shining red and white with Coke advertising, which must somehow have got around the city’s power restrictions, unless the display was for morale purposes. The square was eerie, a huge empty space, the traffic sparse and few people around. But music echoed out of loudspeakers suspended from posts, Ella Fitzgerald singing “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

At the intersection with 34th Street they passed Macy’s. The store was open, but blankets and towels hung drying out of the upper-story windows. A giant billboard proclaimed that the world’s largest department store was proud to host displaced New Yorkers in a time of crisis.

Piers Michaelmas was waiting for them, as promised, at the foot of the Empire State Building. He was in his British army uniform. He looked relaxed, his arms folded. “I knew you’d be late,” he said, eyeing Thandie. “Been skimming stones, have we?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lily embraced him briefly.“You’re looking good, Piers. You’ve got to be the only man in NewYork in his dress uniform. How are you keeping your cuffs clean? My God, you’re even wearing polished shoes.”

“Oh, I always step carefully. One must look the part if one is attending meetings at the UN on behalf of HMG.”

Thandie glanced at her GPS map.“You’re working at the UN building? But there’s a flood from the UN Plaza to the river.”

“So there is, the whole area is a lagoon. You have to take a boat. But the upper floors are habitable; the organization is still working, though most of its functions are being mirrored in Geneva. There is a sense that one shouldn’t give up, you know. My father ran a small firm of quantity surveyors. Once he was blasted out of his premises, in Manchester, by an IRA bomb. The next morning he set up shop in a pub at the bottom of the road, and hung a sign outside the door saying ‘Business as usual.’”