Prologue

Charlie has been failing to fall asleep for nearly two hours when she is startled by the percussive sounds of plastic falling: stained cups and tooth-worn cutlery toppling off crooked, makeshift shelves into the living space next to her single bed. A guttural creak follows, a lifesaving levee irreversibly fracturing somewhere. Then a huge rush of water and the instant, visceral flush of pure adrenaline panic.

She scrambles through the darkness for the emergency sump pump, already too late; its backup battery is fully submerged. Precious seconds wasted - the third-hand pump would never have been a match for the inundation now forcing its way through every unsealed crevice of her one-room flat.

Her haz suit hangs from a nail on the wall. She reaches for it, steadies her only chair, climbs on top, and awkwardly pulls it on, making as little contact with the toxic inflow beneath her as possible. An emergency alarm starts to sound; that’s when she first registers the screams coming from outside.

Shit, she thinks, Mum and Dad!

From within the relative safety of her suit - boots and respirator now in place - she wades gracelessly through the rushing water and tries in vain to push the front door open into the street. She takes three big, laboured steps backwards and charges it with her shoulder.

Again.

And again.

And again.

She struggles for breath through the respirator as pain sears through her whole right side, but the door still won’t budge. In the now thigh-deep water, she can’t run at it fast enough to break the seal.

Above her gas hotplate, Charlie eyes a small rectangular window - the only one she has - leading out to the alley. A quick mental calculation tells her that she and the bulky haz suit can’t both fit through, so she reluctantly shimmies out of it, peeling the wet, moulded plastic from her stinging skin. This leaves her in just a dirty sleeping T-shirt and cotton shorts, with only a respirator and waterproof boots to protect her from the onslaught.

She tucks her comm unit and govID into her right boot and hoists her increasingly waterlogged body onto the counter, silently pleading with it to hold her weight. The wooden window frame, swollen with moisture, barely budges as she fumbles to prise it open, nearly losing her balance in the process. Below her, the deluge continues to rise. Finally, after hammering the frame twice with her elbow, the window bursts open, immediately amplifying the chaos outside.

Charlie pulls her upper body onto the window ledge, turns and heaves her legs through, one by one, swearing as she catches her left thigh on the latch and starts to bleed. She lands hard with a splash in the alley and begins to half-run, half-swim towards her parents’ home a few blocks away.

“Hey, you! Yeah, you! Please, you’ve got to help me!” a young woman yells from across the street. She is sitting on the plywood roof of a flat just like Charlie’s - they’re all the same around here, really - in her underwear, shaking with shock and cold, her legs curled underneath her. “Please! I’m trapped! I’m going to die up here if you don’t help me, PLEASE!”

Before Charlie can decide her next move, the flimsy roof splits, and the woman releases a sound of blind terror before disappearing into the flat below, where her screaming abruptly stops. Charlie looks on in impotent horror as the whole structure yields and simply washes away in splintered pieces. She tries to convince herself that she would’ve done something to help the woman, but she knows that is a lie.

Her boots full of water, each step towards her parents’ home is ever-deeper quicksand. Despite the frigid air, her skin burns hot with the contamination that now saturates every pore, the weeping wound on her leg fighting to be her mind’s singular focus. With the neighbourhood’s limited power knocked out, the night around her feels complete.

At the next corner, she finds a man weeping, holding the lifeless body of a child. Between heaving sobs, he tries over and over to breathe life into the boy, but even in the darkness, Charlie can see that the child is past saving. As she wades on, aware that she has witnessed something much too private, she can hear the man beseeching, “Come on, Kilo. Don’t mess around. We’ve gotta go now, buddy. Please!”

As her parents’ home comes into view, Charlie nearly doubles over with nausea and panic, her hands shaking. The screaming she can hear now is her own, she realises, as she battles her way towards the absence where their front wall used to be.

“MUM! DAD! Hang on, I’m coming,” she shrieks desperately into the darkness.

The sirens are ever-present, with heli drones starting to light up what is left of the street with searchlight beams from above. As one passes overhead and illuminates the flat, she sees the outlines of her parents and feels a wave of relief.

They’re here. They stayed and waited for me to come, just like I told them I always would.

But when she approaches, the sickness returns, an insistent poison seeping out from its source deep in her gut, as the full scene comes into view. Her parents, hand in hand, lying in what is left of their bed. Both of them unnaturally still, bloated and blue.