Flood (34 page)

But now John was distracted; his head tipped sideways against the arm of the aid worker. She too was looking away, at something much more remarkable than another hungry child.

This camp had been here for several years—but this year was different. This year there was flooding across a swathe of Africa, from the Sahel to the Horn, from Senegal, Mauritania, Mali and Burkina Faso in the west, to Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia in the east, some of the continent’s poorest countries. There was already little food to spare, and now the floods were making it impossible for the local subsistence farmers to plant for this year’s harvest, the cassava, millet and groundnuts. The flooded roads hindered any attempts at relief. And as the rising water contaminated springs and wells, the numbers of cases of diarrhea and malaria were increasing fast.

John had no memory of the last great flooding episode in this part of Africa, back in 2007, caused by a La Nina event in the Pacific. In 2007 the waters had eventually subsided. These new floodwaters were still rising.

And John stared at the family who had just walked into the camp. They were dressed smartly, the two children in robust AxysCorp dungarees, the woman in a loose dress, though they were all dusty from their long trek. The man actually wore a business suit, so rapid had the family’s flight been from the drowning city of Kitgum.

They found an empty space in the dirt and sat down. The woman inspected her bleeding feet, and tended to her children.

The man in the suit looked up at the aid workers. He held out his cupped hands. “
S’il vous plait?
Please?”

52

April 2025

G
ary waited for Thandie Jones at the quarantine fence around Cadillac City. He spotted her behind the last gate, having her papers, prints and retinas checked over one more time by Lone Elk’s Seminole guards.

He hadn’t seen her for five years. She must have been forty now. Tall, lean, wiry, her dark hair scraped short close to her scalp, she wore a tough-looking, much-patched AxysCorp-durable blue coverall. Her only luggage was a small canvas backpack. For a week she had been stuck in Cadillac City’s quarantine processing, and she looked as if she had run out of patience.

At last, grudgingly, the Seminole guard unlocked the gate. When she saw Gary waiting for her Thandie grinned and broke into a few running steps. “So this is where you’ve been rotting away.”

“Good to see you too.” When they embraced, she smelled of the antiseptic of the quarantine facility, but under that there was a deeper, earthy, coppery scent—a mélange, he thought fancifully, of all the places she had been, across Eurasia and Africa and Australia, North and South America, a witness to a flooding world.

He let her go, and they turned and walked into the tent city, heading for Gary’s home.

“So,” he said. “Welcome to Cadillac City.”

“Yeah, some welcome.”

Gary shrugged. “Sorry about that. Lone Elk’s rules.”

“Lone Elk? Oh, the local big guy. We live in a world owned by strong men now, don’t we?”

“There are a lot worse than Lone Elk, from what I hear.”

“This really is a city.”

“Yep. Although the famous Cadillac Ranch is actually a couple of kilometers thataway”—he pointed east—“all those cars stuck in the ground . . . Administratively we’re a suburb of Amarillo.”

Gary led her through the heart of the tent city, along a street of beaten earth between canvas walls. She glanced around, her gaze sharp, analytical.

It was the late afternoon of a spring day here on the Panhandle, and the landscape beyond the fence was flat and empty as it always had been, broken only by scattered pumpjacks and farmhouses, and the lights of more distant towns. But within the confines of the fence, with its barbed wire and watchtowers and patrolling Seminole guards, the weathered tents crowded in, with the big marquees of the communal facilities looming over the rest. At one gate a convoy of trucks had drawn up, laden with lumber mined from the drowned lowland plains. Wood was always in desperately short supply.

It was after the end of the school day, but it wasn’t early enough for most adults to have made it back from work. Inside the tents electric lamps were glowing, and there were cooking smells, rice and beans and soya, the tinny voices of radios and TV sets. Voices murmured, in Spanish and English. There were plenty of Texans, but with a sampling from all across the drowned eastern US, from the southern twang of Alabama and Georgia and Florida, to even a few clipped Bostonians and earthy New Yorkers.

Today Gary saw all this through Thandie’s eyes, and, as he often did in her presence, he felt oddly defensive. He knew her basic opinion of him, that he should be out in the world doing what she had been doing—science—rather than hide away in a place like this.

He found himself saying, “Lone Elk runs things by the book. He’s kept this place functioning for years now, keeping us all alive.”

“Paradise on Earth,” Thandie said dryly.

“No,” he replied sharply. “We’ve had our problems . . .”

In the course of the great dislocation that had affected the eastern US, the aid money released by the federal government was generally siphoned away by consultancies and multinationals to advance grand Green Zone projects, designed to create industry and wealth that would someday, in theory, trickle down to the rest of society. But in the interim, unless you were super-wealthy, the choices were generally FEMA-villes, where at least you got a roof over your head and maybe basic amenities such as sewage, or a shantytown around some Green Zone where you didn’t even get that. Such places didn’t legally exist at all, being “temporary” in nature, even though some of them had persisted for years.

Lone Elk had had the ability, wealth and connections to reverse some of that policy, in this one place. He diverted money and resources into Cadillac City, and he was using the skills of the refugees themselves to build a place you could survive in—and indeed the act of rebuilding itself was a kind of therapy.

“Believe me, we appreciate Lone Elk for fighting in our corner.”

“Well, he’s right about the quarantine,” Thandie said. “I’ve seen the plagues myself. You’ve got cholera and typhoid all over, and more exotic stuff: Sars,West Nile virus, Lyme disease, Ebola, even bubonic plague—and new diseases nobody has a name for, jumping across species boundaries. At least here in the US there is still an infrastructure capable of churning out the antibiotics and the trained staff to handle them. The great fear is of a major pandemic, an influenza outbreak, say. We’d fall like blades of grass.”

“Some say it’s bioterrorism.”

She shrugged. “There might be some of that. I don’t believe it’s significant. It’s surely a product of the huge mixing-up of the world because of the flood. On a fundamental level the biosphere is suffering, whole ecosystems collapsing. The equilibrium of the microbial world itself has been disrupted.”

They stopped by Gary’s tent. It was a boxy thing fixed to the ground by guy ropes and pitons that hadn’t been moved for years. A lamp burned inside. “Home sweet home,” he said. He felt he needed to prepare her. “Listen, Thandie. Lone Elk’s coming here to meet you in an hour. He wants to hear your report in private before he decides how to respond to it in a more public forum.”

“Fair enough.” She patted her shoulder strap.“I had time to work on the material in the quarantine tank.”

“I don’t know him as well as Michael does, actually. It was through Michael you were invited here. Oh, we get briefings on the flood’s progress and the global situation from the government agencies in Denver, but the government has its own agenda, which is generally to persuade people to sit tight unless it’s absolutely imperative. Everybody knows it’s best to take what the government says with a pinch of salt.”

“And Lone Elk thinks a storm might be coming.”

“That’s the judgment he needs to make.”

“Look, I’m ready for him. Don’t fret, it’s going to be fine. Though there won’t be too many laughs. So you going to let me in? I’m longing to meet Grace.”

At the center of the tent, the roof was high enough for them to stand up straight. A single electric lamp augmented the daylight glow through the walls—Cadillac City had a mains supply—and there was a smell of coffee. The drink itself was foul, but Michael liked to keep a pot heating to drive out any worse scents.

Michael Thurley sat on his favored fold-up seat, watching a government news broadcast on a handheld screen. Grace was curled up on a couple of spread-out sleeping bags, drinking soda from a tin mug, and working through a homework assignment on a handheld of her own. They both got up when Thandie came into the tent. Gary saw how Thandie’s eyes widened as Grace stood up. Ten years old, she was as tall as any of the adults, tall as her mother had been.

Clean-shaven, Michael wore dark trousers, leather shoes, and a white shirt open at the neck with a loosened tie. “Thandie Jones.” He shook her hand. “It’s good to meet you in person at last.”

“You got that right.”

Gary asked, “By the way, how’s Elena?”

“Still a moody Russian. Last time I saw her was at Gujarat.”

Michael asked, “Gujarat?”

“Where the waters of the Bay of Bengal, having invaded Bangladesh and northern India, broke through to the Arabian Sea. Leaving India an island, you see, yet another landmark hydrological event. I can’t wait to get back to her.”

“I’m sure. Would you like a drink? We have water, recycled and filtered, and what passes for coffee. Or maybe you’d like some of Grace’s cola, manufactured right here in the city.”

“Cadillac City Cola.” Thandie grinned at Grace, trying to include her, but Grace looked away. “I tried some of that in the tank. Did you know they’re still manufacturing Coke and Pepsi and stuff in Denver? God bless America. Thanks, I’ll stick to water.”

“Well, our recycled urine does have more fizz than that stuff. Look, let me take your pack, sit down . . .”

While he fussed,Thandie approached Grace, who submitted to a pat on the shoulder. “Wow, you’re grown.”

“So you knew my mom.” Grace’s accent was complicated, basically American, with a strong flavoring of the Texan she’d picked up in the camp, but laced with Michael’s British correctness. And underlying it all was a more lilting intonation, a relic of her time with the Saudis.

“I only met her online. I’m very sorry about what happened.”

“I don’t remember her.” Grace looked at Gary. “I’ve got my assignment to do. Can I go to Karen’s?”

Michael frowned, bringing a mug of water for Thandie. “That shows poor manners. Do you have to run out straightaway?”

Thandie smiled and backed out of Grace’s way. “You go, girl. We’re going to be talking business here anyway. Get your homework done.”

“Thanks,” Grace said. She clutched her handheld to her chest and hurried out, pulling the flap door closed behind her.

The adults sat on lightweight fold-out seats. Thandie sipped her water, and Gary accepted a cup of coffee from Michael. Thandie glanced around the tent, at the Seminole rug that lay over the thick groundsheet, the plastic trunks and cupboards, the bedding rolls, the small kitchen area with their electric stove and grill, and the little crucifix that Michael always hung from the central pole, a symbol of his tentatively rediscovered Catholicism.

“So, welcome to our yurt,” Michael said in his dry English way, watching her.

“I’ve seen a lot worse than this.”

“I bet you have. Of course it helps that we haven’t had to move for so many years. One puts down roots.”

Thandie grinned. “And here you are in your shirt and tie, going off to work every day, it looks like.”

“Lone Elk likes a bit of formality. He is running a city here. Though he doesn’t insist on jackets, thankfully. I’ve worked my way up into quite a senior position, in what amounts to a mayor’s office.”

“Senior?”

He smiled.“Only Seminole above me. That counts for senior around here.”

“And I’m a lowly technician,” Gary said.“Mostly I work on the lumber collections, and the recycling programs. But I get to use my skills. I run a weather service for the city, of a sort.”

Thandie watched him. Gary felt faintly embarrassed. Maybe he had come across as too earnest.

Thandie sipped her water. “Anyhow I’m glad I got to meet Grace.”

Michael said, “Of course it’s been difficult for her. Until the age of five she was brought up by her father’s family, or a branch of it. An extremely wealthy family too. She had nannies, maids. They spoiled her to death. And then Gary and I took her in. I suppose we are something of an odd couple.”

“I’ll say,” Thandie said. “But I’m impressed.”

“Impressed?”

She looked at Gary.“You know, Boyle, before I came I never got why you stayed here. There’s so much science to be done out there. But now I see it. You stayed for Grace.”

Gary nodded, his feelings of defensiveness fading. “I was there at the moment she was born, in that cellar. There’s nowhere else I want to be but with her. Nothing else I want to do but see her grow up.”

“You made the right choice, pal.”

A gruff throat was cleared outside. In this tent city it was a signal that had come to serve in place of a door knocker.

Gary stood up. “We got company.”

53

L
one Elk arrived alone, though Gary suspected he would have a guard or two in the gathering shadows outside. Thandie stood to shake his hand.

The Seminole was shorter than you might expect, Gary supposed. He wore a straightforward shirt and trousers of tough artificial fabric. He was aged about sixty, his skin dark but not weathered, his black hair cut short and peppered with gray. He looked more like a Hispanic businessman than a tribal leader.

Michael served fresh coffee for them all. Lone Elk sipped his, probably out of politeness; the elders were used to better stuff than this. He and Thandie made small talk for a while. Thandie spoke of her background, sketched her career before the flooding began, and outlined what she had done since, her global eyewitness sampling. They were sizing each other up, Gary saw.