Flood by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

had sworn off men entirely. A base commander had hit on her, and when she didn’t come over he threatened to put her on sentry duty: a pilot qualified on three different birds, stuck on the wire. The guy was later drummed out of the service for “command rape,” in the jargon. But the damage to Lily’s capacity for relationships was permanent. She’d never meant to end up alone at age forty, but that was the way it worked out.
    The handheld flashed up a new projection by the BBC, showing how the storm might curve into the Thames estuary later in the day.
    And then the news channel cut away to a breaking story from Sydney, Australia. Picture-postcard images of the landmarks, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, were interspersed with scenes of rising waters in Darling Harbour and Sydney Cove and Farm Cove. The water was already splashing over the bank walls around the Opera House and spilling onto the curving cobbled pedestrian footway. For now it was a novelty; tourists filmed the incident with their phones and leapt back squealing from the water, an adventure that made their holiday memorable. But in the Royal Botanic Gardens to the south of the Opera House water was gushing from broken drains and ponding over the grass. And out of town at Bondi, would-be surfers looked down on a beach entirely hidden by breaking waves.
    Lily found it hard to take in this news, as if it was crowded out by the images she’d seen of Britain. Flooding in Sydney? How was that possible?
    Gary looked thoughtful, puzzled.
    Another headline flashed for their attention. The Test match at the Oval, between England and India, had been abandoned for another day.
    The car arrived.

8

    C ity Airport was east of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs. They endured another slow jerking ride, driving north of the river along the A13. They peered out at the towers around Canary Wharf, glimpsed through the rain. By the time they reached the airport, according to the news on Gary’s handheld, people had died in the flooding at King’s Lynn and Hunstanton, around the Wash, and the storm had pushed down the east coast as far as Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.
    The airport was small, the runways sheeted by rainwater and battered by winds, but planes were taking off and landing, leaping up like salmon from alarmingly short runs.
    The AxysCorp chopper was the same lightweight new model that had picked them up from Barcelona. They boarded quickly and the chopper soared into the air. The pilot seemed to have total confidence in his machine, despite the buffeting wind. Lily felt confident, too, now that she was in the bird, more so than in a car squeezing its way through the crammed and troubled streets of London, for here she was in her element.
    East London opened up beneath her. The Thames was a band of ugly gray. The neat line of the Thames Barrier, just a kilometer from the airport, was stitched across the water, its steel cowls shining in the rain. Gary pointed out that the Barrier was closed, the massive yellow rocking beams lifted beside each pier, and foam was thrown up as white-crested waves slammed against the raised gates.
    The bird rose higher, dipped its nose, and soared east down the Thames estuary and over lorry parks and storage sites and defunct factories, the gray-brown industrial zone that surrounded London. Lily was struck by how heavily developed the flood plain was, with new housing estates and shopping precincts in Barking, Woolwich and Thamesmead sparkling in the rain like architects’ models. She made out the soaring bridge at Dartford where the M25 orbital motorway crossed the river, the last crossing before the sea. Streams of cars and freight from the docks at Tilbury and Grays queued at the toll gates for the bridge and the tunnels. A little further east both riverbanks were more or less walled with glass, huge retail developments summoned into existence by the motorway.
    Further east yet, as the estuary slowly widened, she saw the