Termination Shock

Anyway, it worked in the sense that they broke out of those woods a minute later at one end of the long straight earthen dam that she had spotted just before the crash. They could not see over it to the right, but obviously the lake must be on that side. Before them was an open grassy slope, unnaturally regular, angling down to a stream that (as she could see as more of the scene came into view) was fed by the spillway: a concrete and steel edifice, pierced by a row of gates, that was integrated into the grass-and-earth dam a couple of hundred meters distant. Saskia, or for that matter any Dutch person, could see at a glance how all this worked. It might have green stuff growing on it and birds—(Were those vultures!? Like in Westerns!?)—soaring above it, but that natural stuff was just a tegument, like paint on a house, allowed to cling to a structure that was in fact absolutely unnatural and engineered. Manholes and standing pipes erupted from little square islands of concrete: the visible bits of a huge buried infrastructure. Every surface that met her eye had been architected by some Texan engineer who was paid to do nothing, every day of his career, except think about what water did.

Ultimately, of course, it sought the sea. The reason that this little river had been allowed to remain in existence was that it gave excess water somewhere to go besides flooding the airport or the housing developments. Right now the gates of the spillway, off to their right, were all wide open and water was coming through them as if shot from fire hoses. The river was running fast, at some risk of spilling out of its banks. But had it done so it would have flooded an area that the engineers had carefully delimited with levees and embankments, isolating it from the slightly higher plateau of the airport. And for just the same reason, no one in the airport—none of the emergency vehicles holding on the other runway, none of the ground crew, none of the people butchering hogs and alligator around the crash site—had line of sight to them right now. The only thing Saskia could see peeking above the top of the airport’s protective berm was the uppermost part of the control tower, but soon enough that dropped from view and they were weirdly alone. There was an employee parking lot below the spillway complex, but no vehicles were parked there. Dam employees well knew the consequences of parking their cars in a floodplain.

Very near, the river plunged into woods. At the edge of those woods a boat had been hauled up onto formerly dry ground and made fast to a tree. Saskia identified it as a RHIB, or rigid hull inflatable boat. Its aft part, sporting a big outboard motor as well as a backup motor to one side, was awash and waggling in the flow. Rufus drove the truck as close as he could get without bogging down in the sodden ground, ten meters or so away, and they formed a line between it and the boat to transfer the luggage: Alastair in the back handing bags down to Fenna who tossed them down the line to Amelia, Saskia, and finally Rufus who made decisions about where to stow each item in the RHIB. There was not a lot of room, but there was not a lot of luggage. Two of the blue earthsuit bags made it in. Rufus locked two more inside the truck’s cab and parked it up on higher ground. Then he jogged down, hopped in, and started the outboard. Saskia handled the painter, untying it from the tree and clambering in over the prow as the river’s current took the boat. Amelia and Alastair grabbed her arms and made sure she was belly flopped into the middle before she was allowed to press herself up and assume a more queenly position on the prow. “Figurehead” was a mildly pejorative English word sometimes applied to modern royalty; now she was one.

They found themselves making excellent time down the Bosque. It was not a raging torrent but it was in full spate and they would have moved at a good clip even if Rufus hadn’t been running the outboard at high power. The river was narrow enough that the woods on either bank nearly arched together above to form a tunnel. Looking straight up they could see the sky, combed by branches, and lowering their gaze they could glimpse bits of houses constructed up on the banks. Those banks got higher, steeper, and rockier as they went, until they were sluicing down the bottom of a gorge: a surprise to Saskia who had assessed the landscape as flat shortly before crashing the jet into it. Then suddenly the stream cornered right and emptied into a much larger and calmer river. Saskia exchanged a look with Rufus, who nodded, confirming that they were now in the Arms of God.