And then the sea surge began, tall waves washing in from the west, and the raft heaved. She saw ropes break, bits of the structure splitting and separating, and people scrambled to make hasty repairs. But the chopper swept north and the raft and the drowning town receded behind her.
The pilot found some smoother air, and his confidence seemed to lift. After a few minutes’ flying he pointed down. “Last chance to see,” he called back.
Lily glanced down. Some twenty-five kilometers from Nazca, flying north away from the storm system, they were passing over a plain that once must have been arid, desolate, but was now awash with gray sea water.
Juan leaned past her to see. “The Nazca lines. They were discovered from the air, you know. Have you seen them?”
“I let Nathan fly me around up here a couple of times.”
This was the pampa, once one of the world’s driest deserts. It had been an immense sketchbook for the ancient folk who had lived here, and their scribbles, made by lifting stones to reveal the lighter earth beneath, had been preserved by the intense aridity. But now, of the strange millennium-old geometric markings trampled in the high dirt, of the monkey and spider and flower and the elaborate birds, there was no sign, all of it erased by salty ocean water.
“Another of mankind’s treasures lost,” Juan said without emotion.
The chopper rose higher still. Looking back to the south and west, Lily could see the storm-lashed Pacific surging against the foothills of the Andes. But to the north and east too she saw ocean, calmer, steel-gray, an extension of the Atlantic that had pushed across the continent and was now lapping against the mountains. Pacific and Atlantic visible in a single glance. And all along the new shorelines, to east and west of the mountains, the rafts clustered, like ghosts of the towns beneath the water.
Juan Villegas leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
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 wir
y 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.
63
They were hailed from the boat. “How many are you?”
Gary glanced at Domingo. “American accent. Florida maybe?”
“Could be.”
Gary cupped his hands and shouted back, “Three of us here. Others in the forest.”
There was a pause. Then, “I got you covered from here. And some of my boys are above you, they have you from the back. Got that?”
“Got it.”
It was always this way, at best, when you encountered strangers. A show of strength, a posturing of weapons and warriors that might or might not exist. On a bad day you’d get shot at before you realized there was anybody there.
“So what do you want?”
Domingo answered now. “Passage.” He pointed. “Across the canal zone to Darien.”
Gary called, “We just want to pass through. We’re heading for Peru.”
“Peru, huh.”
“Yes. We’ve no intention of staying here.”
There was a longer pause. Then Gary saw a rowboat being let down into the water, lowered on ropes from capstans. “I’ll come talk it over. Remember, I got you covered. This is my country, and I know it a damn sight better than you do.”
Gary spread his hands. “We’re no threat.”
Two men clambered down a rope ladder into the boat, one moving a bit more stiffly than the other. They rowed briskly across the few hundred meters to the shore. Gary, Grace and Domingo walked down the slope and along the littoral to meet the boat as it came in. It ran aground in a place that, Gary could see, had been cleared of tree stumps and rotting lumber to be made suitable for landings.
The two men in the boat looked alike, both black, heavyset, square-faced; they wore tough-looking denim jeans and jackets and battered, salt-faded caps. The older man had a face twisted into a wrinkled glare. The other, younger, more nervous, had an open expression, wide eyes. Father and son, Gary guessed. The father seemed to be unarmed, but the son bore some kind of automatic weapon, and he stood back, out of reach of the newcomers. He kept the muzzle pointed at the ground.
Gary stepped forward, hand outstretched. “The name’s Gary Boyle.”
The older man took his hand and shook. “Sam Moore. My boy Tom.”
The boy nodded.
Domingo cautiously fingered the straps of his backpack. “May I? I have gifts.”
Moore glared harder, and the boy waved the automatic around. But they let Domingo take off his pack. He drew out two cans of Diet Coke, the walkers’ standard gift for Americans. “A token of friendship,” he said.
Moore was still wary, but he took a can, and passed the other to his son. “Shit, haven’t seen this stuff in years. How old is it?”
Gary said, “They’re still manufacturing it in Denver.”
“No kidding.” Moore popped the can, listened to the hiss of the carbonation. “Needs to be cold, really.” He took a deep slug of the soda.
The boy fumbled with the tab, spilled some of the soda on his face when he tried to drink out of the can, and then pulled a sour expression.
Moore had drained his can. “Shit, that’s good.” He crushed the can in one hand and tossed it in the water. “So much for saving the planet! You guys remember that stuff? Gifts, huh. So, Gary Boyle, who are you and what do you want?”
Gary said they were a scouting party for a band of travelers. “The rest are back in the forest.”
“You’re on foot.”
“Yes, aside from barrows and carts and the like.”
“You folks come far?”
Gary glanced at Grace. “Depends where you start from. I’d call it from Lincoln, Nebraska. We’ve been walking south since then.”
Moore whistled. “All the way to Peru, right? Down the spine of the Americas.”
“That’s the idea.”
“When I was a young man I once drove down the Pan-American Highway, from Laredo, Texas, down through Central and South America, all the way to Paraguay. Hell of a trip. And the only stretch we had to hike was back there.” He pointed his thumb back across the strait. “The Darien Gap, eighty kilometers of jungle. Was then, is now. But I knew the country, grew up here. On the other side we hired a car and drove on into Colombia.”
“The Highway is mostly flooded now,” Domingo said. “We have had to trail through higher ground. It wasn’t easy.”
Gary asked, “What about you? You say you grew up here?”
“Yeah. My grandfather was a canal zone shipping agent. I was born and raised here, and worked on the canal myself. But we moved to Florida in twenty aught aught when sovereignty over the canal passed back to Panama. But I came back on contract, and things weren’t so bad as everybody thought they were going to get with the locals in charge, and eventually I settled again.” He turned. “Tom, go get these folks some water.”
Tom looked doubtfully at the newcomers. But he went back to the boat, his automatic held loosely in one hand, and returned with a clutch of canteens suspended by neck straps which he passed to Gary. Gary shared them out, and gratefully sipped clean-tasting water.
“And you stayed here when the flood came,” Grace said.
“Nowhere else to go. This is home, for me and my family. When the sea started rising over the lower locks, and the canal got screwed up, the Panamanians just abandoned the place. Could have been kept working long after that, but once it was given up, without maintenance, it didn’t take long to fall apart.”
He pointed over his shoulder, to the Darien area. “Big dam up there called Madden, bottled up the river Chagres and created the old Alajuela Lake. When the Madden dam failed it was a real torrent that came down the valley and poured into Gatun.” He gestured at a landscape now drowned. “Gatun flooded its locks, undermining them, and eventually broke its own dam on the Atlantic side. Then river Chagres came curling down through the wreckage, and found its old path back to the sea, on the Pacific side.
“But then the sea rose up further, and covered everything over. Now you’d never know it was ever there. Damn shame. But we always had to work hard to stop the jungle from taking it back. The canal was a wound in the Earth that was always trying to heal, my daddy used to say.”
“And now you make a living off your boat?”
“We fish. Me and my family, my boys.” His eyes narrowed, still suspicious. “There are a whole lot of us, all around this shore
line. Boats and rafts and houses on the coast. We look out for each other.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“So what is it you want? Passage to the other side of the strait?”
“That’s about the size of it, if you can do it. There are a lot of us, however.”
Again that suspicious frown. “How many?”
“A thousand.”
Moore’s mouth gaped. “A thousand. Are you kidding me?”
“There used to be a lot more.”
Walker City had still been tens of thousands strong when they started their long walk south from Lincoln, though many had followed Thandie Jones’s footsteps to Denver, and others had gone to try to find refuge in Utah. As they had walked south, more had split off when they had found somewhere permanent to stay, often following spur roads off the route of the Pan-American Highway. On the other hand others had joined the marching community, people displaced or simply unhappy, seeking a kind of order among this exodus of Okies.
Many had been born, many had died. Slowly, over the years, the numbers had dwindled. But there were still a thousand of them, a mobile township still run out of the mayor’s office with its guards and doctors and daily rotas, all following Gary’s vision of Project City, an enclave at the roof of the world where there would be room for them all.
Moore said, “Can’t be easy lodging all those people in the damn rainforest. Well, a thousand’s more than can fit in my little boat.”
“You can manage,” Domingo said. “Fifty, even a hundred at a time. It isn’t so far. You can run a ferry service.”
Moore’s suspicion was replaced by calculation. “Well, hell, I suppose I could. But why would I want to?”
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