People Park (46 page)

Whose nature? said Debbie.

Adine laughed thinly.

Hey, we should probably go, said Debbie. The water’s coming up.

Go? Go where?

Onto the roof?

And then?

And then, I don’t know, wait to be rescued.

By?

By whoever! Why does it matter?

Where will this whoever take us? To wherever, right?

Adine’s hair drooped, gone was its usual ecstatic frizz. The sunset highlighted the puckered flesh across her forehead and around her eyes, those scars from a lifetime ago, her half-buried life, preserved in wounds.

Debbie said, Are you worried about Sam?

A pause. A slow blink. A swift sharp dip of her chin.

You shouldn’t, I’m sure he’s fine. They got all the people off the Islet, I heard. And over on the mainland I’m sure they’ll reunite people with one another —

Who’s this
they
? The
NFLM
?

No, not just them. The rescue people. Other people. Everyone.

That’s this mysterious whoever, right?
They
is just whoever, to take us wherever. Well
they
might as well take us nowhere. We might as well stay.

Hey, no, come on. Debbie moved beside her. But Adine pointed her face at the setting sun, which lowered blithely, almost obstinately, into the swollen lake.

Come on, said Debbie again. We’ll find Sam on the other side.

Deb, can we just not, for a second? Can we just wait here? I’ll go, I’ll go. I’ll go when we have to. But for now can we stay, just for a minute? And watch the sun go down?

Okay.

Will you stay with me?

Yes.

Say it.

I’ll stay with you.

They stood together at the window and watched the last dim shreds of daylight wane. People Park was gone. Cinecity was gone. A few buildingtops resisted the water, boats whizzed among them collecting survivors, and Podesta Tower rose defiantly above it all, a fist holding aloft a single finger — exultant maybe, or a last act of dissent before the end.

The dipping sun striated the sky: a pink ribbon upon the lake, up to deeper reds, then blues, before everything dissolved in blackness.

They waited.

The colours drained.

Everything darkened.

The sun was a wound replicated in the lake — then a slice, then a nick. At last its final sliver and reflected double swallowed each other. But before darkness fell completely, a vein of green light flashed across the horizon, sudden and blazing, then instantly gone. Did you see that, said Debbie, and Adine said, Yeah, a comet or something, and they pressed close and peered hard at the skyline. But the miracle was over: a brilliant, ethereal shiver, vanished, and all it left behind was night.

WAVES SWILLED
into the tenement’s upper floors, Kellogg and Elsie-Anne were pushed to a corner of the roof of Laing Tower South. He held his daughter, she let herself be held, though her eyes fixed upon the
IFC
billboard ten blocks north, the top of a mainsail lifting from the shipwreck of the Golden Barrel Taverne. Walkie-talkie held high, Dack strode all over the roof, flipping through static to find a signal, while the lake came up and up and the crowd waited, hushed and helpless.

WATER CASCADED
into People Park in syrupy chutes. Crocker Pond topped its banks, gushed into the common, sending the empty
rowboat, floating there since midday, out with it. Screams were silenced as it bowled three people under, they came up spluttering and bloodied, the park’s basin filled rapidly, there was nowhere to go. Helpers in rubber dinghies and canoes and kayaks offered rescue at the hilltops. But how could anyone swim up waterfalls?

The only high ground was the gazebo, toward it the crowd moved through the churning current, Pearl among them. A girl struggled along beside her — and a sudden swell took her out at the knees in a flailing of limbs. The
Grammar
was swept away too, but Pearl kept going, reached the stage, climbed up.

A man was trying vainly to open, dislodge, or destroy Raven’s trunk. He hammered his fists on the lid, kicked its sides, the metal dented but the thing didn’t budge. Fug you, fug this, he screamed, a hopeless character with
HOPE
tattooed on his knuckles, then flung himself into the water and started swimming — where? Pearl took his place upon the ducktaped X. She tried the lid. No luck, shut tight.

Past everything, up the northern hillock, the Thunder Wheel
arced out of the flood. From its highest seat Griggs watched the
Institute swimteam coming for him, one Thundercloud to the next,
teeth gritted. They’d formed a human ladder, leapfrogging their way up. And now others were chasing them: a middle-aged
woman in workout attire reached the lowest student and savaged
him with a chop to the kidneys, he dropped into the water. Resurfacing he clambered after the woman, grabbed her by the ankles, her face smacked a rung as she fell, and when her body hit the water it didn’t come back up.

Meanwhile escapees fled to the mainland by the dozens. The haphazard armada included bodyboards and buoyed shopping carts and a group of fours in a racing shell (the coxswain’s chants —
S-troke!
S-troke!
— variously interpreted by his rowers), inflatable rafts with the Municipal Works logo on their helms, some brave swimmers plowed into the Narrows, frontcrawl devolved to breaststroke, then to doggypaddle.

Above it all the sky seemed indifferent, the night’s first stars perversely sublime in the face of the chaos below. For a moment Griggs allowed himself to enjoy the evening: up there things were vast and beautiful, perfect and serene — and shattered by newscopters training spotlights on scenes of drama: a heroic windsurfer rescue of an infant from the branches of a poplar, a half-dozen families trapped in a rooftop garden, with their own clothes they’d spelled out
HELP
and waited shivering and half-naked to be saved.

And still People Park filled with water, pouring down from the surrounding streets in torrents. From the gazebo Pearl watched Helpers lower ropes, but even the heartiest citizens couldn’t traverse the churning currents. Out on the common surfaced the girl who’d been knocked off her feet, slogging toward the gazebo. Pearl lay on her stomach, extended a hand, hauled her onto the stage. Before Pearl could ask if she was okay, the girl cried, You’re alive! and rushed into the arms of another girl who was weeping.

The water came in, the water came up. When it began to wash onto the gazebo people shrank to the middle of the stage, from the shadows they cursed the airborne newscasters. They’re just watching us drown, someone said, and someone else suggested, You think it’s just them watching us? and a third person said, Wouldn’t you?

Yet Pearl, sitting amid puddles by Raven’s trunk, felt a sudden calm.

Water swam warmly up to her hips, stroked her kneecap through the hole in her jeans. Some people threw themselves past her, screaming, Save yourself! and frontcrawled to the bottoms of the hills, rebuffed by whirlpools like mismatched magnets. Helpers up top threw down lifevests — not donned but shared, two people to each one.

The gazebo had become a trap, people climbed onto the roof only to find themselves marooned, while Pearl rubbed her knee and waited, as Griggs, watching the dozen-strong crowd scale the Wheel, waited: she for magic, he with the defenceless surrender of a web-trapped fly, and here come the spiders, scrambling and famished.

FROM AHEAD,
murmuring. The current tugged, the door slipped over the water, Sam didn’t need to paddle, it carried him along. The noise amplified, a hundred voices begging one another for quiet. Sam’s breath came easy. He was close, he knew it. With his ducktaped hand he held the remote ready. The door slid toward that rushing, shushing sound, a television on channel 0, the surf of static, a screen sparkling with a nonsense of nothing. This became rumbling, his ears filled with thunder. And Sam was lifted, he seemed to hover for a moment, everything stopped, a clear cool wind hit his face. And then the door angled down sharply and was falling. With his thumb he hit
POWER
, and held it, and the raft was gone and the water hurtled him down, and he was inside the roaring, and all he could see was white, and he fell and fell and at last Sam crashed grinning into —

THE YACHT POWERED
through the Zone,
The Know
calligraphied
on its hull, engines trailing yellow froth. Its single headlight illuminated
the hundreds of people stranded atop Laing Towers, they responded with cheers of joy and relief.

I
θ
a Lanye
θθ
, cried Dack, and a chant went up: Lan-
yess
, Lan-
yess
, Lan-
yess
!

Kellogg squeezed Elsie-Anne’s shoulders. There, Annie, you see? Just in time. We’ll be okay. They’ll take us to Mummy and Gibbles, don’t worry.

Edie Lanyess stood at the boat’s prow, hands on her hips, looking every part her mother’s daughter. She spoke in a matronly singsong: We’ve got room for everyone, don’t worry, just stay calm. We’re here! We’re going to get you all out safely!

This inspired a reprise of the Lan-
yess
chant.

Kellogg went to join the movement shipward, but was held back.

Elsie-Anne pointed in the direction of the
IFC
billboard, a ridge in the water swallowed even as they watched. There, she said.

Annie, he said, no, the boat’s here. They’re here to rescue us. We’re going to be okay.

But she wouldn’t look.

The first few people were helped onto the yacht’s deck. Boisterous cheers!

Annie, said Kellogg, look, everyone’s leaving, we have to go.

Plenty of room, called the girl, joined now by her mother, beaming, whose beauty, despite the chaos, remained undisturbed. Listen to Edie, whinnied Isa Lanyess, no need to push! Helpers too, Mr. Dack, easy now, there’s room for everyone.