Flood (42 page)

“How about we sail?” Grace stood and pointed, east along the shore of the strait.

A boat, a battered-looking cruiser with a gleaming mast, lay on the water, tied up loosely to a dying tree.

63

T
hey were hailed from the boat. “How many are you?”

Gary glanced at Domingo.“American accent. Florida maybe?”

“Could be.”

Gary cupped his hands and shouted back, “Three of us here. Others in the forest.”

There was a pause. Then,“I got you covered from here. And some of my boys are above you, they have you from the back. Got that?”

“Got it.”

It was always this way, at best, when you encountered strangers. A show of strength, a posturing of weapons and warriors that might or might not exist. On a bad day you’d get shot at before you realized there was anybody there.

“So what do you want?”

Domingo answered now. “Passage.” He pointed. “Across the canal zone to Darien.”

Gary called, “We just want to pass through. We’re heading for Peru.”

“Peru, huh.”

“Yes. We’ve no intention of staying here.”

There was a longer pause. Then Gary saw a rowboat being let down into the water, lowered on ropes from capstans. “I’ll come talk it over. Remember, I got you covered. This is my country, and I know it a damn sight better than you do.”

Gary spread his hands. “We’re no threat.”

Two men clambered down a rope ladder into the boat, one moving a bit more stiffly than the other. They rowed briskly across the few hundred meters to the shore. Gary, Grace and Domingo walked down the slope and along the littoral to meet the boat as it came in. It ran aground in a place that, Gary could see, had been cleared of tree stumps and rotting lumber to be made suitable for landings.

The two men in the boat looked alike, both black, heavyset, square-faced; they wore tough-looking denim jeans and jackets and battered, salt-faded caps. The older man had a face twisted into a wrinkled glare. The other, younger, more nervous, had an open expression, wide eyes. Father and son, Gary guessed. The father seemed to be unarmed, but the son bore some kind of automatic weapon, and he stood back, out of reach of the newcomers. He kept the muzzle pointed at the ground.

Gary stepped forward, hand outstretched. “The name’s Gary Boyle.”

The older man took his hand and shook. “Sam Moore. My boy Tom.”

The boy nodded.

Domingo cautiously fingered the straps of his backpack. “May I? I have gifts.”

Moore glared harder, and the boy waved the automatic around. But they let Domingo take off his pack. He drew out two cans of Diet Coke, the walkers’ standard gift for Americans. “A token of friendship,” he said.

Moore was still wary, but he took a can, and passed the other to his son. “Shit, haven’t seen this stuff in years. How old is it?”

Gary said, “They’re still manufacturing it in Denver.”

“No kidding.” Moore popped the can, listened to the hiss of the carbonation. “Needs to be cold, really.” He took a deep slug of the soda.

The boy fumbled with the tab, spilled some of the soda on his face when he tried to drink out of the can, and then pulled a sour expression.

Moore had drained his can.“Shit, that’s good.” He crushed the can in one hand and tossed it in the water. “So much for saving the planet! You guys remember that stuff? Gifts, huh. So, Gary Boyle, who are you and what do you want?”

Gary said they were a scouting party for a band of travelers.“The rest are back in the forest.”

“You’re on foot.”

“Yes, aside from barrows and carts and the like.”

“You folks come far?”

Gary glanced at Grace. “Depends where you start from. I’d call it from Lincoln, Nebraska. We’ve been walking south since then.”

Moore whistled. “All the way to Peru, right? Down the spine of the Americas.”

“That’s the idea.”

“When I was a young man I once drove down the Pan-American Highway, from Laredo, Texas, down through Central and South America, all the way to Paraguay. Hell of a trip. And the only stretch we had to hike was back there.” He pointed his thumb back across the strait. “The Darien Gap, eighty kilometers of jungle. Was then, is now. But I knew the country, grew up here. On the other side we hired a car and drove on into Colombia.”

“The Highway is mostly flooded now,” Domingo said.“We have had to trail through higher ground. It wasn’t easy.”

Gary asked, “What about you? You say you grew up here?”

“Yeah. My grandfather was a canal zone shipping agent. I was born and raised here, and worked on the canal myself. But we moved to Florida in twenty aught aught when sovereignty over the canal passed back to Panama. But I came back on contract, and things weren’t so bad as everybody thought they were going to get with the locals in charge, and eventually I settled again.” He turned. “Tom, go get these folks some water.”

Tom looked doubtfully at the newcomers. But he went back to the boat, his automatic held loosely in one hand, and returned with a clutch of canteens suspended by neck straps which he passed to Gary. Gary shared them out, and gratefully sipped clean-tasting water.

“And you stayed here when the flood came,” Grace said.

“Nowhere else to go. This is home, for me and my family. When the sea started rising over the lower locks, and the canal got screwed up, the Panamanians just abandoned the place. Could have been kept working long after that, but once it was given up, without maintenance, it didn’t take long to fall apart.”

He pointed over his shoulder, to the Darien area. “Big dam up there called Madden, bottled up the river Chagres and created the old Alajuela Lake. When the Madden dam failed it was a real torrent that came down the valley and poured into Gatun.” He gestured at a landscape now drowned. “Gatun flooded its locks, undermining them, and eventually broke its own dam on the Atlantic side. Then river Chagres came curling down through the wreckage, and found its old path back to the sea, on the Pacific side.

“But then the sea rose up further, and covered everything over. Now you’d never know it was ever there. Damn shame. But we always had to work hard to stop the jungle from taking it back. The canal was a wound in the Earth that was always trying to heal, my daddy used to say.”

“And now you make a living off your boat?”

“We fish. Me and my family, my boys.” His eyes narrowed, still suspicious. “There are a whole lot of us, all around this shoreline. Boats and rafts and houses on the coast. We look out for each other.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“So what is it you want? Passage to the other side of the strait?”

“That’s about the size of it, if you can do it. There are a lot of us, however.”

Again that suspicious frown. “How many?”

“A thousand.”

Moore’s mouth gaped. “A
thousand
. Are you kidding me?”

“There used to be a lot more.”

Walker City had still been tens of thousands strong when they started their long walk south from Lincoln, though many had followed Thandie Jones’s footsteps to Denver, and others had gone to try to find refuge in Utah. As they had walked south, more had split off when they had found somewhere permanent to stay, often following spur roads off the route of the Pan-American Highway. On the other hand others had joined the marching community, people displaced or simply unhappy, seeking a kind of order among this exodus of Okies.

Many had been born, many had died. Slowly, over the years, the numbers had dwindled. But there were still a thousand of them, a mobile township still run out of the mayor’s office with its guards and doctors and daily rotas, all following Gary’s vision of Project City, an enclave at the roof of the world where there would be room for them all.

Moore said,“Can’t be easy lodging all those people in the damn rainforest. Well, a thousand’s more than can fit in my little boat.”

“You can manage,” Domingo said.“Fifty, even a hundred at a time. It isn’t so far. You can run a ferry service.”

Moore’s suspicion was replaced by calculation. “Well, hell, I suppose I could. But why would I want to?”

Gary kept his voice pleasant, his expression relaxed.“We don’t expect charity. We’ll pay.”

“What with? Diet Coke?” Moore laughed.

“Yes,” said Gary frankly.“We have other goods. Otherwise we’ll work. There are a thousand of us; we have skills, tools.” He looked around.“We could transform this place for you. Make it future-proof. You need to think about what’s to come. I used to be a climatologist, I know what I’m talking about. We can give you a better chance of surviving the sea-level rise.” He glanced uphill. “Such as by building wharves further up, a hundred meters, two. Ready for when the sea reaches that altitude.”

Moore seemed uncertain, and that was a look Gary was familiar with; even now people didn’t wish to believe in the flooding.“You think that’s going to happen, it’s going to get that far?”

“Oh, yes. And you need to plan for it, right? Let us help you.”

Moore eyed him, calculating again. He stepped closer, so his son couldn’t hear. “Tell you what I got a need for. Women. Wives for my boys. You understand?” He cast a sideways glance at Grace. “A couple of my boys are too young yet, but maybe you got some little girls you can leave here to ripen, so to speak. Take ’em off your hands. Or failing that”—he tilted his hand back and forth—“a little action. We are kind of isolated up here. You see what I’m saying?”

Gary said evenly, “We don’t run brothels. And we don’t sell people.”

“Seems to me I got the boat you need.”

“And it seems to me,” Domingo said, smiling broadly, “that we are a thousand strong, and you are a handful. You could kill the three of us, you could kill ten times our number, and you would still lose your lives.
And
your boat.”

Moore stepped back. “So is that the game? You said you were no threat.”

“So we lied,” Domingo said.

Gary said firmly,“We’re not bandits. We want to trade or work, Sam. We think of ourselves as Okies.”

“Had a great-great-uncle was an Okie in the Depression.”

“Yes. It’s not dishonorable. But the bottom line is—”

“We have no choice but to go on,” Grace said unexpectedly. “We have to cross this strait.”

Moore looked at her. “And that means I have to do business with you.”

“You’ll get a good deal,” Gary said. “But, yes, you have to do business with us.”

“Sorry, man,” said Domingo. “Hey, it could be worse.”

Moore seemed to accept the reality. “All right. Come back here tomorrow, talk terms and work out some kind of schedule. There’s more you need to know, as well.”

“Like what?”

Moore gestured at Darien. “Tough country there. Always was. Now you got indigenous types, and paramilitaries, and a bunch of Marxists from that Commie group that mounted the coup in Colombia. You don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.”

“I hear what you say. Any help you can give us we’ll pay for.”

“Fine. Tomorrow.” Moore and his boy turned and went back to their rowboat.

Gary blew out his cheeks. “I hate this horse-trading, Domingo.”

“You’re good at it, man. Hey, nobody got shot today. That’s a result!”

Gary looked down at the strait, the single boat moored to its drowned tree. “No more Panama. You know, some geologists used to say that the formation of the isthmus was the single most important geological event since the end of the dinosaurs. It changed the pattern of ocean currents, globally. Instead of the old equatorial flows, water exchanging between Atlantic and Pacific, now you had great interpolar streams. Ice caps formed, and the Ice Ages began. Without the cooler climate forcing us out of the trees and onto the savannah, no humanity, probably. All because of a sliver of land. But now it’s drowned again, and everything’s going to change.”

But Grace looked at him blankly.

And Domingo couldn’t care less about global ocean currents. He grumbled, “I hope they take the girls and leave the Diet Cokes. I myself like Diet Coke, and don’t want it all given away! Is it a sin to wish for that?”

They climbed back toward the line of trees, and the relative cool of the forest.

64

L
ater on the day of Lily’s last visit to the Nazca raft, Nathan Lammockson held what he called an “equator-crossing party” at Chosica, in a lounge of his still-unfinished ship. Lily was drained after the jaunt to Nazca. But it wasn’t the sort of event you could get out of, if you were as close to Nathan as she was.

Nathan played host beneath a huge animated wall-map of the world, which showed the rising sea and the continents drowning, over and over. Lily, as smart in a trouser suit as she was capable of getting, stood uncomfortably with a glass of fruit punch in her hand. Juan Villegas looked the part in a dapper lounge suit, as did Amanda at his side. Slim and elegant in her brittle way, Amanda was still beautiful in her mid-fifties. Age suited her, in fact, Lily sometimes thought; she looked
good
with the wrinkles in her brow, the lines that framed her eyes, the stretched flesh at her neck, even if she did color her hair.

Nathan had a string quartet playing soothing classical pieces. The players had been filtered out of the refugee streams, their skills detected and tested for by Nathan’s efficient personnel department. You could find any skill you wanted in the crowds washing up from the lowlands, if you were patient.

And through the unglazed portholes that lined this unfinished lounge you could glimpse Chosica and its sprawling shantytown of workers, a grim contrast to the glittering atmosphere aboard the ship. Lily was all too aware about the muttering over Nathan’s grandiose folly. In the 1930s the original
Queen Mary
had absorbed the industrial output of sixty British towns, and was built in a shipyard with decades’ experience. Nathan had had to build not just his ship but the shipbuilding industry around it too, and he had sucked Peru’s technological resources dry to do it.

Given the atmosphere, it really wasn’t much of a party.

Lily plucked up the courage to say something about this to Nathan. “We’re so tired, Nathan. Dog-tired. The endless pressure of events, you know?”