The Deluge Page 3

  "No, but... oh, God, Dad, it'll be underwater. All your stuff!"

  He shrugged. "It's just stuff. People are more important."

  It was true. The loss of his music shop, less than a mile down the road, was small potatoes compared to all the people who had lost their lives. Even so, Steve couldn't help but feel a pang at the thought of what had become of his Motown concert posters from the sixties, the rare record sleeves that he'd lovingly framed and hung on the walls, and-oh, Jesushis genuine Jimi Hendrix guitar string, which he'd kept in a polythene zip bag in his little safe below the counter, and which he'd produced now and again for the delectation and awe of likeminded enthusiasts.

  Before he could dwell too deeply on his loss, however, there came a knock on the door.

  Astonished, Steve said, "Who the hell's that?"

  "Postman?" suggested Abby.

  "Mr. Marshall?" The voice was shrill, cracked with age and fear. "Mr. Marshall, are you there?"

  "It's Mrs. Beamish from across the hall," said Steve. "My God, I'd forgotten about them."

  He went into the narrow hallway, breaking into a trot at the renewed flurry of banging. "It's all right, Mrs. Beamish, I'm here," he cried.

  Mrs. Beamish was a small, stout woman in her seventies with a jowly face and a feathery busbee of coral-colored hair. "Oh, Mr. Marshall!" she exclaimed as he opened the door, and reached out to enclose his long-fingered hands in her gnarled, arthritic ones. "Whatever's happened? There are so many dead people!"

  "Yes, it is a bit grim, isn't it," Steve said. "Listen, Mrs. B, why don't you come in and have a cuppa? I've got Abby here from Scotland. She's staying over for a few days."

  "Oh, I can't leave George," Mrs. Beamish said, pulling away. "He's not well, you know. His heart...

  "I'll fetch George," Steve said. "Go on, make yourself comfortable."

  He escorted her into the lounge, then hurried along the hallway and onto the landing. It was the first time he had stepped out of the flat since the flood, and immediately he was struck by the echoing slap of water from below. The landing was dark-the only illumination came from the diffused daylight leaking from the flat's open door-and when Steve looked over the banister he saw nothing but blackness. Then his eyes adjusted and he realized that the darkness was moving, slivers of light darting and shimmering on its surface.

  Water, he thought. It's water. Ludicrously, it only now occurred to him that the building would be full of it. With everything else to contend with he simply hadn't considered that beneath his top-floor flat were dozens of others that had been transformed from cosy havens into watery tombs in the early hours of this morning.

  He thought of the people who must have n et their deaths when the wave struck. There was Nina and her cute-asbuttons daughters, Sapphire and Althea, two floors below; there was Pete Villiers, who made coffee and cleared tables at Starbucks but whose real ambition was to work in the music industry; there were the Lockwoods, who ran an online business selling surf gear and handmade jewellery, and who lavished total and unconditional love on their ten-year-old autistic son, Ben.

  All those lives, snuffed out, abruptly and irrevocably. The vast and terrible tragedy of it was suddenly almost too much to bear. Steve felt his mind struggling to shut down those avenues of thought, which threatened to overwhelm him. Telling himself he shouldn't-he mustn't-dwell, he crossed the landing to the partly open door that mirrored his.

  "Mr. Beamish," he called. "It's Steve, from across the hall."

  The voice that answered was a rusty croak. "In here, son."

  The old man was lying on the settee, a tartan blanket covering the lower half of his body. Like its occupant, the room was past its best. The pictures on the walls were faded by sunlight, the carpet was threadbare, the furniture lumpy and worn. Even the air seemed old, gray with cigarette smoke and the smell of musty confinement.

  "How you doin', Mr. B?" Steve asked. The Beamishes had lived here since the flats were built in 1971. They had chosen the top floor because, as George Beamish had once explained to Steve, "It makes you feel like a king, son, living here. After a hard day's graft you look out your window and see London, the best city in the world, spread out below you. Our ivory tower-that's what we've always called this place, Mabel and inc."

  Now George looked up, face wrinkled like an old turtle's. His clenched hands trembled as if he were rattling dice in them. His breath whistled in his throat. Beside him were boxes of pills, an inhaler, a glass ashtray heaped with cigarette butts, and a plastic cup with a drinking straw protruding from its domed lid.

  "I'm doing better than most of the poor sods out there," he said, gesturing towards the window. "It's a fucker of a do, this, Steve, ain't it?"

  "It is indeed," said Steve.

  George nodded and cheerfully croaked, "This'll be the end of me, you know, son."

  "Nah," said Steve. "Help's bound to arrive soon."

  "And if it don't?"

  Then we'll all be goners, Steve thought. "It will."

  He half carried George to his own flat and deposited him on the settee next to his wife before going back for the old man's paraphernalia. George had not been well even twelve years previous when Steve had moved into his flat. But at least George had still been working then-he had just celebrated his thirtieth anniversary with the London postal service. It was a year later when he had suffered his first heart attack and had to be rushed to King's College Hospital for an emergency bypass. He had been forced to give up work, and in the last decade had had two further heart attacks and four operations, one to remove a benign tumor from his lung. The old geezer took so many pills that, as he had remarked to Steve, "I sound like a baby's rattle whenever I turn over in bed." Despite his health problems, he still smoked fifty Regal a day. High tar, naturally.

  When Steve returned to his flat pushing George's wheelchair, which he had loaded with the old man's medication, he found Abby handing mugs of tea to the two pensioners.

  "We need to make a list of what to take with us when we go," she said. "Food and water and spare clothes and medicine. Stuff like that"

  "When we go?" Steve said. "Where do you think we're going to go to?"

  "I mean when we get rescued. The thing is, what if it isn't the army who rescues us? What if it's just someone in a boat?"

  Steve was about to say that the likelihood of them being rescued by a passing stranger was virtually nil, when he registered the light of hope and purpose in her eyes. And he realized she was right. Even if it would take a miracle to get them out of this, they still ought to be prepared for it.

  "Good idea," he said. "I've got a couple of rucksacks." "And I've thought of something else," Abby said. "We ought to paint `Help' on a bedsheet and hang it out the window. Then if anyone's passing they'll know we're here."

  "There's no flies on that girl of yours, is there, son?" George cackled, hands curled like bird talons around his steaming mug.

  Steve wished the old man had chosen a phrase that reminded him less of what fate might hold in store for them, but he forced himself to grin. "No, Mr. B," he said, "no flies at all."

  The dinner-party people were gone. But how could they be? They wouldn't have left her behind, would they? Maybe they had attempted to escape on the "raft" (in reality a leaky, splin-tered door from a barn or grain silo) that had miraculously delivered the little girl to them, soaking and terrified, yester-day afternoon. Maybe all seven of them had tried to get to Sue while she was sleeping and come to grief in the fast-flowing water.... No, she could see the "raft," still jutting from the section of roof onto which they had dragged it. Maybe they were all asleep then, out of sight. Maybe they'd seen the blue lightning and had taken shelter under what they could find-the dining table, the chairs-thinking a stoma was coming. Sue strode to the edge of her roof and stared across the watery divide, hoping to see a hunched shape, a stir of movement.

  "Hey!" she shouted. "Is anyone there?"

  No reply. Nothing but the thin hiss of the September win
d and the liquid mutter of the water.

  Shivering, she pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders and watched dawn breaking on the horizon. Fingers of salmon light stretched towards the strips of maroon cloud overhead. Any other time it would have been beautiful, but here and now Sue could only wonder how many more dawns she would see, how many days before she starved to death or died of hyperthermia.

  She ate breakfast-cheese and crackers, an apple, several sips of water-and thought about the blue lightning. It had been terrible and wondrous. A natural phenomenon or... or what?When she tried to figure out what had happened to her world, her mind shied away, like a horse spooked by a snake. She knew the flood defied logic, and yet she tried to convince herself that the Thames barrier had simply collapsed and that the resulting deluge had something to do with global warm-ing. It was a vague theory, but it would do for now. After all, it wasn't as if she needed to know how the disaster had happened. All she really needed to concentrate on was how she was going to survive.

  She wished the dinner-party people were still there. She had always regarded herself as pretty self-sufficient, but their sudden disappearance made Sue feel lonelier than she ever had in her life. Maybe, she thought, I'm the last person on earth. She knew it was a crazy idea, but the part of her mind given to wild fancies and childish fears picked at the notion like a scab. She tried to clamp her mind on the thought as if it were a buzzing fly she had caught in her fist. And then suddenly, astonishing even herself, she jumped up, ran to the edge of the roof and screamed, "Where are you? "ere the fuck have you gone?"

  Almost as suddenly as the rage had seized her it seeped away. Sue shuffled back to her little camp in the center of the roof and sank down with a groan. "For fuck's sake, Stark," she muttered, "pull yourself together." Once again she looked across the water at the next roof. The party people and the girl must have gone over the side. There was no other explanation. Why they had done so was a mystery, but that must be what they had done.

  Was it really only twenty-seven hours since the lights had gone out? Sue had finished her shift at 2 A.M., come home, cooked some scrambled eggs and was watching TV when everything went black. Not long before that the shaking and rumbling had started. Sue had been watching News 24 in the hope of finding out what was going on. But there'd been nothing. No reports of earth tremors, no news of an approaching wave. The flood had come suddenly and unexpectedly, seemingly catching everyone cold.

  The apartment block had filled up quickly, the water level rising by several inches a second. It had been sneaky too, not smashing into the building like a giant fist, but engulfing everything smoothly and rapidly, with a sound that was soothing, even gentle. It was almost as if the water wanted to catch its victims unawares, drown as many as possible before they even knew the deluge was upon them. Sue might have been drowned too if she hadn't decided to visit Stan, the caretaker, who lived in flat 1 on the ground floor.

  Stan was the landlord's brother-in-law, and he owned a portable radio that ran on batteries rather than electricity, and which he carried around with him when he was doing odd jobs so he could listen to the test match or football. He was often still awake when Sue came back from the night shift, and tonight had been no exception. As she had passed his door she had seen light leaking from beneath it, heard the murmur of his television. When the power went off and the soft rushing began, she decided to go and ask him if there was any news on the radio, anything that might give them some clue as to what was going on.

  She got two floors down in the dark, slowly feeling her way along the walls, when she felt her slippered foot sink ankledeep into cold water. She jerked her foot backwards with a small splash, and then, heart thumping, crouched down and gingerly stretched a hand out in front of her.

  The fact that there was water there at all was alarming, but more alarming still was her realization that it was swiftly rising. Within seconds water was brimming over the step she was standing on and she had to step smartly back onto the next one.

  Her mind actually reeled as she realized that if the water had risen this high so quickly, then most of the surrounding area, if not the city, must have been submerged. But that was impossible! An hour or so before, when she had arrived home, the streets had been dry.

  She scrambled back up the stairs in the dark, blundered her way to her flat. She hammered on doors as she went, yelling to wake the occupants of the flats that were still above water level. She didn't have time to wait for their responses, however. The water was rising too quickly. She could hear it, gurgling and hissing as it ascended the stairs like something alive.

  Her only thought was to get out of the building, and the only way she could do that was to go up. At least there she wouldn't be hampered by ceilings and walls. If the water rose higher than the building, then at least she would be out in the open with a slim but better chance of survival.

  First, though, she needed to be as prepared as she possibly could be. For a long time Sue had held a secret ambition to be part of an expedition in which she would be required to push herself to her limits, and to that end she had become an experienced camper, mountaineer and sailswoman in the last few years. Plus she worked out in the gym three times a week and read as much survivalist literature as she could lay her hands on. The only thing she hadn't done was put her theory and training into practice, but if this wasn't the ideal opportunity to do that, she didn't know what was.

  Moving around in her dark flat, the water just minutes behind her, she tried to clear her head. One of the main tenets of survival was not to panic. Another was to prepare yourself as thoroughly as possible in the time available, no matter how hopeless the situation might seem. All right, so in the next ten minutes Sue might be swept away and drowned in the water that was (impossibly) filling the building. But if she was going to die, then at least she would go with the knowledge that she had done all she could to prevent it.

  Right, she thought as she groped in the dark for her ruck sack and the ten essentials of survival. The list of recommended items varied from person to person, but the general consensus was this:

  One: A neap of the surrounding area. Well, that seemed pretty irrelevant for a start.

  Two: A compass. Ditto.

  Three:A torch. She already had a good one in her rucksack, together with spare batteries (she grimaced at her own incompetence in not thinking about that earlier; such fundamental errors could mean the difference between life and death).

  Four: Sunglasses. Ha ha. Next.

  Five: Food and water. Even as she was running the list in her head she was already making her way to the kitchen, the bean of the torch from her rucksack probing ahead of her. She filled the rucksack with tins and packets and a minimum of perishables, with plastic bottles of water, cutlery, a can opener, and a sharp knife.

  Six: Extra clothes. Underwear and socks, hard-wearing trousers that dried quickly (no denim), T-shirts, thermal tops, and rain gear. Plus a blanket and a sheet of plastic, and a good pair of boots which she'd wear rather than pack.

  Seven: Matches. Already in the rucksack. Good long kitchen matches. Three boxes.

  Eight: Firestarters. Already in the rucksack too.

  Nine: Pocket knife. Ditto.

  Ten: First aid kit. Ditto again.

  By the time she vacated her flat the water was seeping along her corridor like a dark, creeping fungus. She yelled again, but there was no answer from Bob Knott's flat across the corridor. Maybe he was staying at his boyfriend's. Sue hoped he was safe.

  She went up onto the roof. There was a biting wind (A sea-breeze, she thought), and in the darkness the stars were daz-zling. She turned in a slow circle, casting a cone of torchlight before her. Behind her-How far away? Fifty feet? A hundred?-there was another apartment block. And there were people on its roof, a half dozen of then, lit by the yellowish light of flickering candles in glass shades.

  At first Sue thought they had fled from the encroaching water just as she had. Then she noticed the table wit
h its white tablecloth, adorned not only with the glass-shaded candles, but also with several empty wine bottles. And she took in the makeshift awning erected above it, and the clothes the people were wearing-the men in tuxedos, the women in evening gowns. And she noted too their general air of garrulousness, of drunken bonhomie. And with a peculiar shock that was half horror, half amusement, she realized that this was not an exodus, but a dinner party. These people had come up to the roof to celebrate something-a birthday, an anniversary a new job, a promotion. Their presence here was not calculated, but merely serendipitous.

  Do they even realize what is happening below them? Sue wondered. They must have heard the rumbling and the rushing of water,felt the ground trembling beneath their feet. "Hey!" she shouted. "Hey!" But she couldn't make herself heard above the water and the raucous laughter of the party people. She waved her torch back and forth, to no avail. Eventually she turned away and sat down.

  Oh well, she thought, they would find out in due course. There wasn't much she could do anyway, and if this was the end, then she supposed it was better to go in a state of happy inebriation than to sit, hopeless and isolated as she was, waiting for the inevitable. She knew that one of the keys to survival was to keep your head clear and your wits about you at all tines. But as she listened to the water creeping up the sides of the building, Sue couldn't help but wish she was on the next roof, guzzling wine and laughing in the face of the apocalypse.

  Wednesday, 27" September

  My name is Abigail Louise Marshall. I am 13 years old. I was born in London, but now live in a town in Scotland called Castle Morton with my mum, Jackie, and my older brother, Dylan, who is 16.At the moment I'm in London, visiting my dad, Steve, cos it's half term. Back home in Castle Morton I go to St. Catherine's Girls' High School, and am in year 9. My best friends are Chloe Roeves and Martha Newman. My hobbies are horse-riding, swimming, reading, going to the cinema and anything to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'