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 shoreline. 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?”
Gary kept his voice pleasant, his expression relaxed.“We don’t expect charity. We’ll pay.”
“What with? Diet Coke?” Moore laughed.
“Yes,” said Gary frankly.“We have other goods. Otherwise we’ll work. There are a thousand of us; we have skills, tools.” He looked around.“We could transform this place for you. Make it future-proof. You need to think about what’s to come. I used to be a climatologist, I know what I’m talking about. We can give you a better chance of surviving the sea-level rise.” He glanced uphill. “Such as by building wharves further up, a hundred meters, two. Ready for when the sea reaches that altitude.”
Moore seemed uncertain, and that was a look Gary was familiar with; even now people didn’t wish to believe in the flooding.“You think that’s going to happen, it’s going to get that far?”
“Oh, yes. And you need to plan for it, right? Let us help you.”
Moore eyed him, calculating again. He stepped closer, so his son couldn’t hear. “Tell you what I got a need for. Women. Wives for my boys. You understand?” He cast a sideways glance at Grace. “A couple of my boys are too young yet, but maybe you got some little girls you can leave here to ripen, so to speak. Take ’em off your hands. Or failing that”-he tilted his hand back and forth-“a little action. We are kind of isolated up here. You see what I’m saying?”
Gary said evenly, “We don’t run brothels. And we don’t sell people.”
“Seems to me I got the boat you need.”
“And it seems to me,” Domingo said, smiling broadly, “that we are a thousand strong, and you are a handful. You could kill the three of us, you could kill ten times our number, and you would still lose your lives. And your boat.”
Moore stepped back. “So is that the game? You said you were no threat.”
“So we lied,” Domingo said.
Gary said firmly,“We’re not bandits. We want to trade or work, Sam. We think of ourselves as Okies.”