Flood

62

“I am confident,” Domingo Prado said. Moving ahead of Gary, with Grace bringing up the rear, he pushed through the green shade of the Panamanian forest. He had his machete in his hand, and his revolver tucked into the band of his pants under the pack on his back.

Domingo was around forty-five, a bit older than Gary. He was a big man but lithe, and he took the downward slope of the ground in long easy strides. Well, Gary thought, after so many years on the road they were all lithe at best, skinny to the point of skeletal at worst. But though it was still morning, only ten a.m., Domingo had already sweated through the back of his shirt and the brim of his battered straw hat, and even through his canvas pack. He sweated as he had when Gary had first met him, hundreds of kilometers to the north and years back in time.

“Tell me why you’re confident,” Grace called ahead.

“Because I know this country. Panama, the canal zone. I used to be a ranger in the Chagres national park, which is on the Colombian side of the canal, east of Alajuela Lake. You will see. Once we get over there I will guide you well. I know it like the back of my hand.”

“Sure,” Gary said. “Like you knew Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras and Nicaragua-”

“Hey,” Domingo said, and he turned to grin at Gary. His face was so dark in the green-shadowed light his expression was barely visible.“Have I ever let you down?”

“Every fucking day, pal,” Gary said ruefully.

There was some truth in that, and some untruth too. As they had trekked south through the Americas the Okies had quickly learned that they needed guides. You couldn’t rely on the precious old maps the mayor carried in her locked trunk; even the GPS data that came down from an increasingly patchy satellite network wasn’t sufficient, for the world was changing constantly as the sea bit away at the lower land.

And then there was the politics, such as it was. As they had headed south they had soon passed far beyond the remit of the two more-or-less functioning governments in what was left of the US, the rump of the federal government still holed up in Denver and its deadly rival, the Mormon administration in Utah. Law was enforced locally or not at all. In some places you could work in return for land to set up camp in, food and clean water. In other places bandit communities did nothing but prey on passing refugees-although the walking city, still a thousand strong, was generally numerous enough to deter any but the most determined raiders. The world was a constantly changing quilt of opportunities and threats. So you needed local knowledge, somebody who knew the ground.

Domingo Prado had attached himself to Walker City at the Mexican border. There were worse than Domingo. He really did have some travelers’ knowledge of Central America. He made plenty of mistakes, mostly through his habit of bluffing rather than admitting his lack of knowledge. But at least they were honest mistakes, Gary always thought. He never spoke much of his own background, how he had lost whatever home he may once have had, if he had had a family, a wife, kids. There were plenty of people like him in the world, dislocated, survivors of a drowned past. All he wanted in return for his guiding was food, and the chance to travel, a bit of adventure.

Anyhow, stuck in this forest, he had no choice but to trust Domingo, and they pressed on.

Something scurried through the undergrowth, startling Gary-a possum maybe. And a bird flapped overhead, a flash of color, crying. He had no idea what these creatures were. This was the Panama isthmus, a place where two continents had collided only three million years before, and where biotas separated since the breakup of supercontinents had mashed together. The Great American Interchange, they called it. The result, here at the bridge between worlds, was exotic and unfamiliar to Gary. The rainforest was like a cathedral, he thought, the green canopy like stained glass, the filtered light shining on trees slim as Gothic columns. Most of the time he just had to concentrate on where he put his feet. But it was beautiful, all beautiful.

And he heard a subtler rustling, somewhere behind him. Parties of the mayor’s guards, out to shadow them. You never traveled alone.

Then, quite suddenly, they broke out of the jungle. And Gary realized that Domingo might, today, have made the mother of all his mistakes. For they faced open water.

The slope fell away until it reached the water, only ten or twenty meters below their position. You could see how the jungle had been flooded; the green carpet, broken and patchy, cloaked the slope even as it descended into the water, and some surviving trees pushed above the surface. And beyond that the water stretched away before them, gray and calm, until more green-clad hills rose, far to the northeast, kilometers away.

In the open air the sun was intense. They retreated to a scrap of shade, and wiped their brows, loosened their shirts, pulled sweat-soaked cloth away from their flesh.

“Shit,” Domingo said. He squatted down on his haunches, swatting at flies with his hat.

Grace asked, “So what is this?”

“The canal zone,” Domingo said. He gestured. “We are looking northeast, roughly. Yes? Just here the isthmus”-a word he could barely pronounce-“takes a detour. It connects North and South America, but here it curls to the northeast for a couple of hundred kilometers. So you have the Atlantic to our west, over there, and the Pacific to the east. This whole area was transformed by the engineering of the canal-which was more than a mere canal. It was a kind of liquid bridge, with locks to lift up the ships on either side. The Gatun Lake was right here, formed by damming on the Atlantic side.”

Gary glanced down the slope. “This isn’t Gatun Lake. Best case it’s some kind of inland flood. Worst case the sea has broken through.”

“Either way we are in trouble,” Domingo said.

“Only one way to find out which,” Grace said. She stood, fixed her ancient baseball cap back on her head, and walked cautiously down the slope toward the water.

The sun was high, and cast dazzling highlights from the water. From Gary’s point of view Grace was silhouetted, the brilliant light around her body making her seem slimmer, even taller than she was. She wore her arms bare, and he could see her muscles, the wiry biceps. She was twenty years old now; a difficult teenager had grown into a strong woman. She could not be called beautiful, Gary always thought, not conventionally anyhow. She looked like an athlete, a worker. But he recognized beauty in her health and strength and poise, a kind of Cro-Magnon beauty fitting to the world she had grown up in-a world where she had been a refugee since she was five years old.

Watching her, Gary felt proud. He could never have saved her from the flood-he and Michael Thurley, poor Michael who had died far from home of the knife wounds that had been inflicted on him in Nebraska. But they had got her through to adulthood confident, competent, healthy, equipped for a dangerous world, sane. There were probably a lot worse fates for a young woman growing up in this dislocated age.

She reached the edge of the water. She crouched down, dipped her hand into the lapping water, and lifted a palmful of it to her mouth. She spat it out. “Salt,” she called.

“So that’s it,” Domingo said bitterly. “The most magnificent of all mankind’s engineering creations-gone! Drowned like a sandcastle on the beach.”

“And the isthmus is severed,” Gary said. “North and South America separated for the first time in three million years. Astonishing when you think about it.”

Domingo raised an eyebrow at that. “Our problem is,” he said more practically, “if we are ever to reach your friends in the Andes we must cross the water. But how?”

“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.