A drowned land

It was a choppy day and the currents were stronger than usual, so much so that even in her diving gear and flippers Kiera had to keep her feet together and kick like a mermaid with all of her legs hips and core. She had dived down and found the remnants of a dirt road hidden in among the towering seaweed forest that was creeping unstoppably inward, conquering land that, not too long ago, had been above the waterline rather than thirty meters below it. The path led to a large house, of which the rooftop and collapsed remnants of a chimney stack were all that was visible above the reaching tendrils.

A gap in the roof where tiles had been swept away gave her access to the interior. The waters in the building were still, sheltered from the pull of the currents. The large attic space was filled with detritus where the cardboard storage boxes had disintegrated and left the stored children’s toys, old clothes, family heirlooms and such to float free and become trapped in the rafters like so much litter.

She found the hatch which led down into the main house and, after a little bit of coercion with a crowbar she kept tucked in her belt, prised it open and descended down into the upper floor of the house. A large staircase rose up from the murky depths to the landing, and a number of doors lined the hallway. She tried one of the doors, but the wood had absorbed so much water that it had swollen, and the hinges had all seized solid with rust. She contemplated trying to break it open but decided there wasn’t enough air in her tank to spare. She tried all the doors until coming across one that was ajar. It was still rusted into place but the slight opening gave her a point in which she could jam her crowbar. After a bit of furious tugging enough of the door snapped away for her to be able to swim through into what turned out to be the master bedroom.

The room looked almost untouched; the bed was still made and the carpet, although much worse for wear than it would have been dry, still had its circular patterns clear in the weaves. The wallpaper though peeling and disintegrating, was still visible where it was clinging onto the walls. A soupy mist in the water where the plastering on the ceiling and beneath the wallpaper had flaked away and dissolved into the still and silent water.

There wasn’t much of interest to her, the only curiosity that the room offered up was a small chest like box on top of the bedside drawers, beside a dull mirror that had greened with algae. She stuffed the box into a drybag clipped around her waist, and thrust her crowbar into the wall by a plug socket, by bracing her feet against the wall she was able to drag a few meters of thick electrical cabling out, but by then the plaster mist had thickened into such a dense fog that she could hardly see anything in the light of her head torch. She glanced to the air level meter on her air tank, the needle was starting to dip into the red, which made her decide that it was time to swim back for the surface.

Kiera breached the water and hauled herself up onto the boat, unclipping the large drybag around her waist and letting it drop with a clank onto the deck along with her oxygen tank and diving mask. She unzipped her wetsuit and lay back in relief, letting the warm sun dry her out as she recovered from the effort of swimming up laden with loot in such a heavy current.

Eventually she sat up, reached for a warped and dented plastic bottle of Fresh water. She gargled the first slug out of it, spitting out the sea residue in her mouth before draining half the bottle in one long pull. She tossed the bottle down with a relieved gasp and shuffled over to the drybag, opening it out to have a closer look at the small locked box. It needed a key to open it. However, it looked flimsy from its time beneath the waves, so she reached for the toolbox beneath the bench seat of her boat and dragged out a heavy ball peen hammer, which broke the rusted lock away after just four careful strikes.

The lid cracked open to reveal a collection of gold and silver rings, a pair of hoop earrings, and a delicate golden necklace with a heart shaped locket. She took out the last item and rubbed its smooth shining face with her rough calloused thumb.

It shined brightly despite having been submerged under thirty meters of seawater for over a year, which proved the purity of the gold: Anything that could be melted down and used in electrical components traded at a premium with the wandering traders sailing around these islands, that had once been called Britain, before the ice shelves had finally collapsed and melted, drowning a third of the planet and making forty percent of humanity either dead or destitute.

She smiled as the thought of the item’s value, but her smile faded as she sprung the locket open and saw the two pictures of a man and a woman staring at her. It was hard to make out any details beyond that, because the pictures had not been as resilient as their frame and tarnished in their time beneath the pressure of the waves. Kiera closed the locket back up and held it against her chest as she laid back, closing her eyes to the glare of the warm sun. When the seas rose those who hadn’t drowned, or adapted to life on the waves had joined the hordes heading inland to indulge in that most popular of human pastimes; fighting over what little scraps of land remained. She wondered which of the three groups had claimed the previous owners of the locket.

Memories flooded back to her of how things were before; she had lived in a similar house as a child, and could remember what it looked like; how warm it had been there when the sun came through the windows, the smell of furniture polish and fresh air on Saturdays when her mother and father would do the housework together. Inevitably the memory became poisoned as thoughts of what it might look like today crept in: She could imagine it now, thirty meters down, in the joyless silent dark far from the warmth of the sun, like the house she had just looted.

She sighed at the morbid thoughts and reminded herself that she was lucky to be both alive and surviving comfortably, far from the violence on the mainland. She stowed her findings away, unfurled the sail, and began the slow trip back.