And what if those xenobots evolved?
Chapter 1
Morocco
Joel Baxter gazed along the shoreline at the ancient city in the distance and allowed a slight smile to interrupt his gloomy mood. There, rising out of the early morning sea mist lay Astapor, the city of the Unsullied. Wonderful times. Season three of Game of Thrones and he’d had a cameo as one of Jorah Mormont’s followers. It had only been a few lines added at the last moment when the producers realized Baxter was filming nearby, but it had been fun and a darn sight better than Ed Sheeran’s car crash of a scene.
The cool Atlantic tickled his toes and brought him back to reality. He was on the Moroccan coast, looking at the city of Essaouira and waiting for the call to get back to the set. He looked left, his eyes tracing the horizon into the vastness of the ocean and his fear returned. His brother couldn’t be right, could he?
“Mr. Baxter?”
It was Maisie, the production assistant. He glanced over his shoulder to see her running toward him across the sand. She stopped twenty yards away. “They’re ready for you.”
He nodded, then hurried away from the endlessly lapping waves, turning his back on the sea. No, Buzz couldn’t be right. He was always predicting disaster, and it never happened.
Well, aside from that time in the old Lincoln. He’d been right about that.
But this time? No. Joel respected his older brother’s mind—you didn’t get to be a scientist on the…what was it called? It had Antarctic in the title, that was for sure. Anyway, Buzz had brains to spare, but he’d spent his entire life waiting for the shoe to drop, whereas Joel had picked that sneaker up and run with it. Which was why he was on this warm beach in Morocco about to film an intimate kiss with Anne Shakespeare while his brother was cleaning out chicken coups on his prepper farm in the mountains.
Joel picked his way up the beach toward the high-water mark, looking for the bush where he’d left his sandals. Finding them, he balanced on one leg while he fastened first one, then the other. He wondered whether he’d been right to indulge Buzz. His brother had come to him with the idea of building a farm up high in the Arkansas mountains. He’d said it would be somewhere for Joel to retire to, or to use as a retreat, but Joel wasn’t fooled. This was to be a safe place for Buzz in case one of his crazy “end of the world” theories actually happened. Perhaps he shouldn’t have indulged Buzz. At some point, he would have to face reality. The world wasn’t going to end. It never did.
And yet, Joel had tried his best to alter the shooting schedule so they wouldn’t be filming on the coast this week. Buzz had told him that if it was going to happen, it would be today, but the director (an upstart punk whose only qualification was a Puff Daddy music video) had refused and the producer had backed him up. So, here they were, on the coast. Exactly where Buzz said he shouldn’t be.
But at least Jodi was safe. Pat Reid could be a rain cloud on a sunny day, but he was reliable enough. Joel breathed out as he strode through the tussocky sand toward where the camera had been set up, his fake Roman sword slipping in and out of its fake leather scabbard as he went. Yeah, Jodi would be out at sea by now. With one last glance over his shoulder at the ocean, step by step Joel relaxed until a figure in black jeans, black tee and reversed baseball cap came scampering up to him.
“Joel, buddy! We’re all ready to go. Got your lines?”
“Yeah, B.J.” Joel said. Seven words. He reckoned he was up to that challenge.
He brightened as he followed the director between the lights to his mark beside his co-star. Anne Shakespeare was twenty years his junior, but he’d never let age difference (in either direction) get in the way. Oh, Meryl.
“Hey,” she said, her face widening into the trademark smile that was an enormous part of her appeal. Keira Knightley, Daisy Ridley and Anne Shakespeare: cast from the same mold.
Joel nodded casually. “Anne.”
“You ready for this?”
“Always.” He pulled a packet of Mentos out of his fanny pack, popped one in his mouth, and handed the pack to Maisie.
They chatted as the lighting director barked orders to his assistants, moving them back and forth with huge reflective disks until they were lit up as naturally as the polystyrene pillar behind them.
A makeup assistant patted powder onto Joel’s face as he closed his eyes and tried to relax, focusing on the sound of the wind and the distant rolling of the waves. And something else.
“What the f—” B.J. yelled, pulling the headphones from his ears. “I can hear people. We’re supposed to be out in the desert! Get me locations. Now!”
Joel’s guts tightened, and he spun around in the direction of the beach. Something was wrong with the ocean. He could see it. Either the beach had sunk or… Oh, sweet mother of God.
“We gotta get out of here!” he said, grabbing Anne’s arms as she waited with the familiar patience of actors everywhere.
“No, those aren’t your lines!”
Her eyes widened as he shook her. “I’m serious! Come with me if you don’t want to die.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Have you been on the mixers again? Hey, leave me alone! You’re freaking me out!”
He pulled her toward the trailers and trucks, but she wrenched her arm out of his grip.
He grabbed her again, heart thumping, nose flaring, salt burning the back of his throat. “Now you listen to me. We haven’t got time for this. Either come with me now or wait here for the sea to get you. My brother, he’s a scientist. He warned me.”
She stared at him, openmouthed. Then, as the wind changed direction bringing cries of terror on the breeze, they both looked along the coast to the city.
“Oh, my God. Look at the sea. LOOK AT THE SEA!!”
Above the city of the Unsullied rose a mountain of water.
Joel grabbed her hand and pulled her along. She didn’t resist and was soon running alongside him as they made it to the trailers.
People were emerging from vehicles. One shouted, “What’s going on?”
“Get out of here!” Joel cried without stopping. “Head for high ground.”
How high? Even Buzz didn’t know the answer to that, because they didn’t know for sure how much water was locked up in the Antarctic ice sheet.
“This one!” he said, gesturing at a black-painted pickup with Medina Movie Services written on the side. He jumped in and turned the key in the ignition as Anne jumped unceremoniously into the passenger seat.
He glanced in the mirror as people poured out of the trailers and gathered together. Perhaps he should have tried to rescue some of them. He’d known one or two for many years. Too late. They disappeared in a cloud of dust as he put his foot down.
Joel almost lost control of the unfamiliar truck as the tires slipped in the sand, but yanked the steering wheel to correct the spin, turning it away from the plush grass of the golf course that lay alongside the ruins of the sultan’s palace where they’d been filming.
“How did you know about the tsunami?”
He glanced across at Anne as she gripped the handle above the truck door. “My brother. He’s a scientist.”
“So, why hasn’t everyone been evacuated?”
Joel’s head hit the ceiling as the car jumped up onto the asphalt of the highway. He turned right because the other way led toward the city. He could see a mountain range in the distance. He’d be safe up there however high the sea rose, but could they make it in time?
Within seconds, they’d reached a small town, passing a single-story multi-colored building with “Jimi Hendrix. Cafe. Resto. 1969” hand-painted along the top. It looked like the sort of “art” Jodi brought home from kindergarten, but he was beyond it in moments, all curiosity lost in the drive to live. And they were heading in the wrong direction, on a road that ran parallel to the sea and not away from it.
He cursed under his breath, then pulled the steering wheel left. “Brace yourself,” he said. “We’re going off-road.”
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br /> The truck bounced into scrubland, following the whitewashed walls of a small hotel toward a group of olive trees, while Joel kept his eyes on the mountains beyond.
Then he looked in the rearview mirror. “Oh, my God.”
Beyond the browns and reds of the arid landscape, the blue of the sky had been replaced by what, at first glance, looked like angry storm clouds. But he knew what it truly was. A wall of water. The Earth’s vengeance on Homo sapiens. The great cleansing.
Anne cried out as she looked behind. “Come on! Faster!”
His foot was to the floor, and the pickup was bucking and rearing like an unbroken colt when, finally, they hit another stretch of asphalt that went in the right direction.
Joel kept glancing in the mirror, but he couldn’t guess how far behind them the water was. He might be able to do it if he stopped and got out, but that wasn’t happening.
The road snaked left and right, but it was heading toward the mountains. More and more vehicles appeared from side roads and joined it and, before long, they’d slowed to a crawl.
“What do we do?”
Joel looked around, and then he spotted it. “Up there!”
They got out of the car, the bright sun hitting them like a wall, and he took Anne’s hand, guiding her between the honking cars, trucks and donkey carts toward their sanctuary. It was the minaret of a tiny, half ruined mosque that served a small group of houses beside the road.
People ran seemingly at random, but still Joel pushed through them.
“Ma yhdth?” one man shouted at him. Joel couldn’t speak a word of Arabic, but he understood the meaning.
“Run!” he shouted, before glancing over his shoulder at the wall of water stretching left and right as far as he could see, as if it were rearing out of the dust, white horses dancing like leaping salmon.
He knew, as he saw the wave, that it was hopeless. But he had to do something.
They ran into the mosque, ignoring the shouts of men who, it seemed, were blissfully unaware of the impending stroke of doom. Looking up, he saw the minaret and headed for it.
He fumbled his way as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Now there was no mistaking the screams and cries of dismay coming from outside, mixed with calls of “Allahu akbar” as if exhorting God to stay his hand.
They climbed the dusty stone steps hand in hand. Joel’s lungs were fit to burst, but he forced his legs upward, pulling Anne along after him to the echoing accompaniment of their feet and labored breathing.
Finally, they burst onto the balcony as Joel collapsed to his feet. He looked over the lip of the guardrail at the ocean. Hope glimmered in his heart. The land was higher here, and they were over a hundred feet up a minaret.
He felt Anne’s arm around his shoulders as she kneeled alongside him, as if they were united in prayer. Oh, the irony. They watched people running like frightened ants, abandoning their cars on the highway and pouring into the desert. Behind them, the staircase echoed with the sounds of panicked footsteps.
He turned toward where he knew the city to be. Where the city had once been. Now it was water. It was as if a giant had turned on a faucet.
The incoming wave was now close enough for him to make out where it met the desert, scooping up people, buildings, vehicles and trees as if they were props from a stop-frame animation. Screams floated up from below as, with dreadful purpose, the ocean reached the outer wall of the mosque. For a few moments, the mosque stood like a sand castle as the water encircled it before it finally burst through and reached the foot of the minaret.
All hope left him then. He could see the wave continuing to rise like a gentle hill until it met the sky. Cries from inside the stairwell told him it was flooding. Panicking figures emerged onto the gallery, crying out in Arabic, imploring the nightmare to end.
Joel pulled Anne to him and instinctively kissed her. Beyond, the sea rose like a wall, soon to overwhelm the minaret which stood like a defiant finger.
They sobbed as water erupted from the stairwell, and he spoke his lines, “Today is a good day to die.”
And they held each other tight as the ocean took them.
#
Ed “Buzz” Baxter lowered his binoculars and wiped a tear from his eyes. He didn’t need any magnification to see what was happening. He stood beside the highway that snaked up the side of Mount Boon, gazing out over the flat lowlands of Arkansas.
The disaster had been worse than he could have imagined when he’d tried to get the science team to listen. It seemed as though the entire south polar ice cap had melted catastrophically, pouring trillions of gallons of fresh water into the sea in the space of a few hours.
He’d known that the procedure had gone wrong as soon as the first reports came in from Chile and Argentina of a tsunami sweeping inland. But as soon as the water had penetrated the cities, all telecommunications were destroyed and he couldn’t nail down the precise scale of things. Most of the world’s greatest cities were at or near sea level, so he knew that if he was right and the xenobots had evolved, many millions would die. But the question was whether it might, in fact, be billions.
By the time the wave reached Florida, he found himself praying that his plan to get Jodi offshore had worked. She was the one person in the world he loved. He knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself after causing the worst disaster to ever strike humanity, but he would survive if he could help her live.
The patchwork greens of the plains below were turning brown as the ocean flowed remorselessly inland. It was more mud than water, pushing ahead of it the scoured-out skin of half a continent. Among the inrushing wave he could see the petty trinkets of humanity: pylons, trucks, metal roofs and tree trunks like floating matchsticks from this distance. And he knew that hidden from sight were millions of corpses—animals and humans—but that, soon enough, they would be deposited on the hillside below him. He would be safe here; there wasn’t enough water in the world to submerge this mountain, but what consolation was that?
The sirens wailed, and the air was full of planes of all sizes as the rich abandoned their fellow humans to the water. There was nowhere to land on this mountain—even a helicopter would struggle to find a safe place to touch down, but there was dry land to the west.
He stood there as the afternoon waned into evening, praying that the water would stop, but it was practically dark before it stopped climbing the mountainside. He could wait no longer. He had to scurry back to his safe place and man the gate. The automated systems were sophisticated, but they still needed a human on the end of a shotgun if anyone penetrated the defenses.
Buzz sobbed as he climbed into the SUV and drove it away from the water and into the heart of the state park. His compound was hidden at the end of a road to nowhere. He would be safe there. And he’d also be alone. Alone to contemplate what he had done. What he had failed to prevent.
He said a silent prayer that his brother and niece had survived the deluge, and that they would come to him. Because without them, he would have nothing to live for. The world was changed, and billions had died.
And there was no one to blame but himself.
Chapter 2
Clearwater
“Hey, Ellie, que bolá.”
She sighed and waved at the old man in greasy jeans and an overhang so big it was a wonder he didn’t fall flat on his face. “How are you doing, papo? You might wanna change those pants if you want anyone to come for a trip on that pile of rusting junk.”
He bellowed with laughter. “Ah, I like a woman with spirit. If I was a few years younger…”
“…then you’d still be uglier than a gator with gum disease.”
She stopped beside the trip boat’s mooring, any chance of sneaking to her boat gone with the sea fog. “Got many bookings?”
Julio Cruz gave a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders. “Could be better. Chinese coach party at noon. Tom says a few bookings on the website.”
“The forecast is good,” she said. “You should pick
up some tourists.”
Cruz snorted. “The only forecast I believe is that one,” he said, gesturing at a pile of seaweed nailed to the jetty. Julio pulled a fresh batch every few days and swore by its accuracy. “You watch yourself out there, bonito. The kelp, she is not happy. You taking Brad Pitt out today?”
“You know I can’t tell you,” she responded, looking over her mirrored sunglasses at him.
“But you got crew?”
“Yeah, Carlos is supposed to be meeting me here. We’re out for three days.”
“He’s late? A good-for-nothing, that’s what he is. You take Tom. God knows I don’t need him today. You take Tom, he’s good crew. You know it.”
She did know it, and she had grace enough not to pretend she didn’t. She also knew what the old schemer was up to. Tom was his son, and Julio was trying to fix them up. If only he knew that ship had sailed a long time ago. But she’d learned to trust Julio’s reading of the sea and the weather, and if he thought it might turn, then she’d be much happier with Tom than Carlos. She gave a tiny nod and began marching away.
“I call Tom now,” she heard from over her shoulder, followed by the unmistakable electronic tones of a fifteen-year-old cell phone. “And I send Brad right along when he comes.”
Ellie smiled to herself. She was now glad she’d been ambushed by Julio and she felt the cloud she’d been languishing under lift a little. She strode along the boardwalk, navigating her way toward the outer jetty where her boat was tied up. She’d never spent three nights out at sea before, at least not as captain, and her spider sense had been tingling ever since she’d been commissioned.
But the money was good. Real good. Enough to pay off her arrears on the lease and maybe give her another chance to make the business work.
The sun warmed her back as she rounded the last corner and onto the pontoon. There she was. Kujira swayed slightly in the fresh ocean breeze, ropes tapping on the main mast, as beautiful a white elephant as it was possible to imagine.
Deluge | Book 1 | The Drowned Page 2