Flood by Stephen Baxter Page A

had brought such glamorous developments to Canary Wharf and Greenwich had evidently passed this place by. But there were signs of redevelopment, industrial parks and commercial buildings and estates of flimsy-looking new housing that crowded out the older stock, what Piers’s mother would have called “two-up two-down.” None of it was being spared by the river water that pulsed along the streets, black and stinking of rot and sewage, lapping at front doors lined with sandbags and rolling over scraps of front gardens.
    No cars were moving. The streets were lined with parked vehicles, and a few were abandoned in the middle of the road, their electrics soaked. There was hardly anybody on the streets. Through open windows Piers heard the chatter of battery radios, but there were no lights, no TV sets glowing; maybe the power was already off. The residents seemed willing, for now, to accept the official advice to stay put. Inside the houses he saw homeowners wearily hauling TV sets and bits of furniture up the stairs. But some of the houses already had blankets hanging out of upstairs windows, a sign that rescue was needed, blankets soaked by the continuing rain and flapping in the breeze.
    He turned down a terraced street, and he heard rushing water. He looked back. A wave that must have been a half-meter high pushed down the narrow street toward him, black and oily and crusted with rubbish, plastic bins and milk bottles and bits of paper, and a dead bird, a rook, gruesomely spinning in the water.
    He turned off the road and through a garden gate, instinctively trying to get away from the water. He climbed a step to a sandbagged front door. But the water came lapping over his legs anyhow, reaching to his knees, the sudden drag making him stagger.
    The front door behind him opened. “Here, watch out for my gate.” An old woman, in purple cardigan and slacks, stood at the door with a crutchlike metal walking stick. The flood pushed over her heap of sandbags and spilled into her hall, and made her stumble back. “Ooh, oh my Lord.”
    “Here.” Piers hurried forward. He managed to catch her by the elbows before she fell. He set her right as the water pooled past them on into the house. “Are you all right?”
    “Oh, look at my carpets, what you want to go and do that for?”
    “I’m sorry,” Piers said.
    She looked up at him doubtfully. With a wisp of gray hair, she might have been eighty. She must once have been pretty.“I thought you was the nurse. You’re not the district nurse, are you?”
    “No.”
    “Today’s not my day. But I’ve packed my bag for the hospital.” She pointed to a small leather case that sat on a polished table in the hall.“It’s got all my bits. I’ve got my pills, and I put in my spare teeth, like Kevin said. But you aren’t Kevin, are you? My eyes aren’t so good.”
    “The nurse? No, I’m sorry. My name’s Piers.”
    “Piers! Well I never. My name’s Molly.”
    “Nice to meet you, Molly.”
    “You’re not a copper, are you? So what you doing standing in my drive, then?”
    “I’m a soldier.”
    “Oh,” she said, if that explained everything. “Well, help me on with my coat, dear.”
    He hesitated for one second. Then he stepped inside the house to get her case and her coat. The hall was cramped, the walls crowded with photographs and bits of embroidery in frames, and there was a smell of rarely washed woolens, rapidly being overwhelmed by a sewagelike river stink. He found a heavy overcoat on a rack, and held it up for her.
    “Got your car, have you?”
    “A car? No.”
    “An ambulance then. Well, how are you going to get me to the hospital?” She looked down at the filthy, steadily rising water.“I mean I can’t stay here, and I can’t walk with my knees.”
    “No, I don’t suppose so.” He glanced out at the street. A policeman in waders and a bright yellow jacket worked his way down the road, hammering on front doors. An evacuation order, and coming late