Flood

16

Helen Gray was driven into central London. The jam was solid for kilometers.

On East Smithfield the AxysCorp driver muttered an apology and swung the car off the road. Helen, riding in the back, was thrown against her seatbelt, and then jarred as the passenger-side wheels jolted up onto the curb. Sirens were wailing. A police officer in a Day-Glo yellow coat worked his way down the road, gesturing at the drivers to clear the roadway. All the way up the road ahead, Helen saw, with the twin spires of Tower Bridge looming into the gray sky beyond, the traffic had squeezed itself off the road, parting as if for Moses. Even the enormous new bendy buses found a way to shove themselves out of the way.

The rain fell steadily, streaking Helen’s window. But she could see pedestrians pushing past, in waterproofs or just in City suits, under umbrellas or holding briefcases over their heads like shields, stepping through the murky, spreading puddles. Many of them had mobile phones clamped to their ears, or they spoke into the air, gesturing; even more glared at phones that stubbornly refused to find a signal. Talk, talk, talk; she imagined a mist of words rising up like steam from the soaked streets.

But the car was warm and dry, and so was Helen, isolated from the chaos outside, comfortable in her blue AxysCorp all-weather, ten-year-durable jumpsuit. The only sounds were the soft hum of the idling engine, the hammering of the rain on the roof. Nothing outside the car seemed real.

She still wasn’t moving. She tried to set aside her mounting tension. She had insisted on being brought back into London because she had a contact in the Foreign Office, a man called Michael Thurley who, nominally in charge of the case of her baby, had promised to meet her at the end of the working day and update her with progress. To Helen the whole jaunt out to Southend had turned out to be a distraction, irrelevant to her main purpose. Now she was determined to keep her appointment in Whitehall, whether London cooperated or not. But every time the car was brought to a halt like this, anxiety squeezed her. How bad was this flooding going to get? She had the sense of everything falling apart bit by bit.

The reason for the road clearance became apparent. With a blare of sirens and a flash of blue lights a fire engine came barreling down the road, heading the wrong way down the lane. The engine rushed past Helen, a wall of red-painted metal. It led a convoy of police cars and vans, ambulances and paramedic vehicles, even a few camouflage-green Army trucks. The heavy vehicles threw up spray in great fountains.

The AxysCorp driver was a solid-framed woman, aged maybe forty, her face square, her chin strong. She’d discarded her peaked cap some kilometers back to reveal close-cropped gray hair. “We’ve got it easy,” she said, listening to the murmur of her radio controller. “They’re using bulldozers to clear the North Circular and let the emergency vehicles through. What a mess, I hope they’re all insured.”

The last of the convoy, a couple of police motorcycles, roared past. “Right, they’re through,” said the driver. She dragged at the steering wheel, gunned the engine, and pulled the car out into the lane that the police had cleared. She was among the first to react, and she pushed the car hard past walls of stationary cars.

Just for a few minutes, before the traffic pulled back out onto the empty road, they made good progress. They overtook cars and yellow buses full of evacuated schoolkids, and ambulances and paramedic vehicles coming from the emptying hospitals. They hurried over the junction with Tower Bridge Approach. Then, with the brooding mass of the Tower itself to their left, they passed the big tube station with its open plaza. Helen saw thousands of people swarming up from the underground ticket halls, some of them looking shocked, many soaked even before they came out into the rain. Maybe the tube network was flooding, then. If so, she wondered where all these thousands spilling into the heart of the city were supposed to go.

On a bit further they went, down Byward Street and along Lower Thames Street, the traffic slowing and clogging all the time. There were roadworks everywhere, great pits dug into the surface; London was always in the process of being rebuilt, and today the holes and ditches brimmed with water. Helen glimpsed the river itself, high and raging, looking as dense as some molten metal, like mercury, not like mere water at all, rising high beneath the functional concrete arches of London Bridge.

The traffic congealed further as the driver maneuvered the car around the approaches to London Bridge. To her right Helen glimpsed the City’s spindly new skyscrapers, extraordinary sculptures of glass erected since her capture. Helicopters slid past their impassive faces. Still they kept moving, past Cannon Street and Southwark Bridge. But now their luck ran out, the road clogging like a furred-up artery. Worse, she could see pedestrians streaming over the spindly Millennium Bridge from the South Bank, adding to the congestion.

The driver shrugged.“I guess this is it. Sorry. You want I should turn around? The worst problems are going to be in the West End, up ahead. We could go north and-”

“No. I’ve got to get to Whitehall. There or the RAF Memorial on the Embankment. That’s where I said I’d meet my contact if I couldn’t get to Whitehall.”

The driver glanced at her, not unsympathetic. “Whitehall? Look, it’s not my place to give you advice. You’re the one who’s trying to find out about her kiddie, aren’t you?”

“That’s my business,” Helen snapped.

“It’s just that Whitehall’s practically on the river. If anywhere’s going to flood it will be there.” She showed Helen a kind of sat-nav screen, a bit more advanced than the technology Helen remembered. It showed flickering high-resolution map panels, Westminster and the West End, whole areas marked by a gray overlay.“Mr. Lammockson trained us up in flood scenarios. They’re probably evacuating the government buildings, if they haven’t already.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Helen said miserably.

“Are you sure? I can still get you out of here, you know.”

“I know. Thank you. I have to do this… What will you do now?”

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“Do you have family?”

The driver turned away. “Two boys. Their dad pissed off back to Greece with them five years ago. At least they won’t get flooded out there, hey. You see, we’re in the same boat, you and me. Although today I wish I had a bloody boat, ha-ha. You don’t know London, do you?”

Helen shrugged. “Only as a tourist.”

“Well, it’s not a good day to be sightseeing. Listen. If you get stuck, head for the Strand. Off Trafalgar Square. You can’t miss the Strand.”

“Why there?”

“Because that’s where the old shore used to be, the docks, before they concreted over the river. ‘Strand’ means ‘shore.’ And even if the river’s bursting its banks it’s not going to go higher than that, is it? Stands to reason.”

“I’ll remember. Thanks.”

“You take care.”

Helen lifted her hood over her head, and pulled it tight at her neck and around her face. She checked her coverall was zipped up. Then she braced herself and opened the door.