Flood

67

July 2035

“My name is Gary Boyle.”

“Sorry, buddy. You’re not on any list I got.”

“I know Nathan Lammockson. He helped me-I was a hostage in Barcelona-he sprung us out, vowed to support us…”

But this coca-chewing guard, his face hidden by his immense sunglasses, looked too young to have heard of Gary, or even Barcelona.

And the fence he and his companions defended was a good three meters tall, concrete panels topped by barbed wire and studded by machine gun towers. It stretched from horizon to glass-clear Andean horizon. This was the boundary of Project City, of Lammockson’s empire. And it was sealed shut against Gary Boyle.

They were alone in a vast empty landscape, Walker City’s advance party led by Gary and Grace and Domingo, the AxysCorp guards who had come out from behind their fence to deal with them, and a handful of locals, young Andean men, standing idly by in colorful wool ponchos, watching. Gary, dizzy with the altitude, felt desperate. His phone had been dead for months. If the guards wouldn’t let him pass, he had no way to contact Lily.

“I’m Gary Boyle! I know Lily Brooke! And this is Grace, Grace Gray! We walked down two continents to get here. The walk consumed my life. I’m forty-three years old. My whole damn life. But now we’re here, now we need help.” He felt absurdly like crying.

“Look, guy, you can see how we’re fixed.” Gary wondered how he had managed to pick up a Brooklyn accent, since he couldn’t have been more than five years old when New York drowned. “We ain’t got room for no more. We ain’t got room for you. Just because you can throw a few names around makes no difference to that. Mr. Lammockson is famous all over the world, anybody can say they know him, right?” He leaned closer to Gary. “And let me tell you something else. Even supposing you and your lady friend here are buddies of Mr. Lammockson, even supposing you could prove it, there’s still no way you would be allowed in with your army of bums.”

“If you’d just take a message to Lily Brooke-”

“No.” The guard started shouting now, exerting his authority. “I’m not some runner for you. You take a message. You take a message back to your “mayor.” You tell her that if you don’t shift your thousand asses, they’ll be shifted for you.” He looked Gary up and down, contemptuously staring through his sunglasses. “You been warned. You got forty-eight hours. You got that straight?” And he turned and walked back to the gate in the wall, held open for him by more AxysCorp goons.

Suddenly Gary was exhausted. The world yellowed. He bent, felt the blood pound in his ears, retched.

Grace rubbed his back. Domingo squatted down beside him.

“Well, you tried,” Grace said.

“This damn altitude,” Gary said.“I can’t think straight.” He sat on the grassy ground, and gazed up at the wall that excluded him.

“Nobody’s going to blame you, my friend,” Domingo said.

“Nathan’s breaking his promise to me,” Gary said. “And that means I’m breaking my promise to you all, the mayor, the thousand people who walked all this way with me.”

Grace looked at the blank wall, her expression empty. “It makes no difference,” she said. “If we keep walking. Not to me. I spent my life walking. I don’t believe I ever thought it would end.”

“But listen,” Domingo said more urgently, leaning close to Gary. “Never mind broken promises. You heard what the fool with the gun said. Suppose there were a way to get in, to make contact with this Lily, or Lammockson. If we persist we might find a way. Suppose they allowed you in-you, and Grace, a handful of others. Suppose it was as the guard said. If they let you in, but you had to leave the others behind-”

It was just the kind of deal Nathan Lammockson might ask him to make, Gary thought. But he had made his choice long ago, when, even as times became so hard, he found he was unable to abandon Walker City. “No. It’s all of us, or none.”

Grace shrugged. “Then I guess it’s none of us. We’re a thousand strong, but we’re no army.”

“But armies do exist in this world.”

Gary turned, still sitting. He saw woolen trousers, boots, a figure standing over him. One of the locals, a Quechua, had spoken to him. Gary tried to stand, but staggered, and Grace had to help him.

The Quechua must have been in his thirties. Not tall, but a strong face-no, arrogant more than strong. He wore a woolen tunic, brightly dyed. Huge golden studs stretched his earlobes. Behind him were more young men, similarly dressed, watching cautiously. They wore ponchos though the day was warm, and Gary wondered if they carried concealed weapons.

“So who are you?”

“My name is Ollantay.” He smiled. “The name means nothing to you. That’s fine. But your name means something to me, Gary Boyle.” He turned to Grace. “And you are Helen Gray’s girl, yes?”

Reflexively, Domingo stood between Ollantay and Grace. “You know about us? How? Are you from Project City, from Lammockson’s people?”

“Quite the opposite. I’ve never met Nathan Lammockson. But I have met your fellow hostages, Piers Michaelmas, Lily Brooke.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Kristie Caistor is my wife.”

Gary gaped at him.“Kristie-” Lily’s niece, whom he had last seen as a kid in London-who must now, he reminded himself, be in her thirties herself.

Domingo said, “And what was it you said about armies?”

Ollantay’s eyes narrowed. “You have been excluded by Lammockson. So have we, we Quechua. And we have been exploited by him for a generation now, as he huddles in his palaces, and builds his absurd mountain-stranded boat. Here, on a land that used to be ours, we suffer the final spasm of western colonialism. But times are changing. A final battle approaches, a final reckoning, before the sea closes over us all.”

Gary was bewildered by this exotic young man, and his head spun with his mentions of Lily and Kristie. “What the hell are you talking about? What boat?”

Ollantay gestured at the fence. “There is no room for barriers like this, not any more. Now is the time to right wrongs. It will not be vengeance. Simply justice.”

Domingo looked him up and down. “And how are you going to fight this battle, mountain boy? Will you ride llamas and throw spears?”

Ollantay faced him, and Gary sensed the silent conflict between them, a contest for dominance. “Not spears,” Ollantay said at last. “I will tell you one thing, one fact to take back to your footsore mayor. We have Kalashnikov rifles. AK47s. They were extracted from a saved cache in Lima, our drowned capital. We used Lammockson’s own salvage submarines to achieve this, right under his nose. We have the guns, and the ammunition. That is how we will fight our battle. Perhaps we could win without you, though we are not numerically strong. But you, who have come walking out of nowhere, are an opportunity for us. With you we will overwhelm Lammockson and his AxysCorp guards and his Project City, his technological Utopia.”

“We didn’t come here for this,” Gary said.

Domingo, determined now, said, “No, but this is what we’ve found, Gary. Before, we always walked away when we came to a crisis. But this is the end of the journey. You always knew it would come to this, some day, when the land ran out, and people crowded together tighter and tighter, like goats on a mountain summit. You heard what that guard said. If we’re driven away from here there’s nowhere else to go. It is the crunch for us. Fight or die.”

“I won’t take this back to the mayor.”

“But I will,” Domingo said.“In fact it’s not your choice.” He glanced at Ollantay. “Are you ready to come with us now?”

Ollantay smiled. “I have been waiting for this all my life.”

Gary looked at Grace. Her expression was closed up, unreadable.

And suddenly he was retching, his head pounding, the altitude beating him again. He leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, while Grace rubbed his back.