Excerpt: New Hope City

I was a child in Manhattan when the floods came. It happened both more slowly and more quickly than anyone could have imagined.

Decades, my mom said. For decades they’d been warning about it, trying to stop it. But who could really believe that the world would come stumbling to its knees? Everyone knew it would happen, but nobody saw it coming.

I only remember the storms. Mom said there were days, weeks, in my early childhood in which the sun was shining and the earth and the air and the water were not actively trying to kill us. I guess I remember them. I have dreams of sunlight. Are they memories? Does sunlight really look like that? How could I know? How could I ever truly know.

I remember the giant falling. I remember the streets of Manhattan, knee-high with slick, foul-smelling, murky ocean water that burbled around the subway entrances, now become watery catacombs for the business commuters and homeless who didn’t manage to make it out. Cars and trash, furniture and human bodies clogged the streets and alley-ways, smashing through the neatly painted storefront windows, into the expansive public lobbies, through the ground floor heart, soul, structure, and function of our city. When Manhattan fell, she fell hard.

Mom was a physician and she stayed behind -- we stayed behind -- so that she could tend to those too sick or too injured or too old to evacuate. My mom was a hero, and the world was a better place with her in it.

Eventually, the water got to be too high, the damage too great, the wasted debris of the once great city too filthy, too dangerous for us to stay. The only people remaining belonged to death, or fed on those who did. We were hungry, and I was small and weak, and my mom wanted to protect me. Finally. We left for higher ground.

But society had collapsed by then. We were ‘collected’, captured by roving men who beat us into submission, used my mom as a sex slave instead of a doctor. We were sold off to different bands. My mom is dead. I’m not.

New Hope City sits on the horizon, all but swallowed whole in the swirl of the endless storm. Eliza and I will infiltrate in the morning.