Free After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling [Editors] Page B

There’s whirlpools and sinkholes that’d suck you down hundreds of meters
     into the old drowned underground system, and there’s lagoons where buildings have
     crashed across and the water dams up and spreads around, and there’s narrows where
     the river jist roars along. But the last bit, where it runs into the Thames, is tidal.
     Coupla times a day, it heaves itself up and over a quarter mile or so of mud banks
     and ruins, and you can take a boat on it then, if you’re careful.
    Which is what I’ll tell Morris if he finds out where we are. Which I hope he don’t.
     Which he shouldn’t, seeing as my cell’s switched off so he can’t call up with some
     little job he wants doing, and we’ve got all day, but it’s took longer than I thought,
     weaving through the channels and the shallows. Some of them rocks is sharp. I’ve seen
     rusted metal rods poking out of blocks of concrete what would rip holes in the dinghy,
     and then Morris would kill me. He really might. If we didn’t drown first, a’course.
    Billy’s sitting in the front and I can tell he’s not spotted it yet, the place we’re
     headed for—two sharp towers and a dome rising up behind the spoil heaps. I betted
     him I’d see it first, but this might be the last thing Billy and me do together for
     a long time, and now I kinda want him to win. So I don’t say nothing, and at last
     he turns his head—and then he points, and he says, “Charlie, look! Look! ” He beams at me, and I grin back at him like a dog, coz this is intense. We’ve wanted
     to do this forever. Years. We’ve always wanted to go and visit Nelson.
    I open the throttle and the dinghy scoots in over the shallows. The tide’s so high
     that when we finally touch ground on a tilted shore of red bricks and shattered concrete,
     we’re hardly a stone’s throw below Sint Paul’s. We jump out, drag the dinghy clear
     of the water—and we stare.
    Sint Paul’s is a cathedral—that’s what it’s called, “Sint Paul’s cathedral.” That’s
     a kind of palace. Morris says it’s jist a big church, but it don’t look like a church
     to me. Hundreds a years ago, Morris says, before the world warmed up and the Flood
     began, important people useta get married in there, and then when they died, they
     useta get buried; but I reckon they musta lived there too, in between. Be a waste
     of space otherwise. It hangs over us like a cliff. Seagulls go drifting from its ledges.
     The doorway at the top of the steps is dark as a sea cave. Billy blinks, his mouth
     ajar. “Is this where Nelson lives?”
    “Lived,” I say, but I know Billy don’t make no difference between lives and lived , and now we’re here neither do I: it’s Nelson’s palace, that’s what counts, where
     he lived an’ where he’s buried, so I say, “Yeah. This is it. Nelson’s house. Let’s
     go and find him!”

    But first I look around. I’m armed with one of Morris’s little handguns, what he calls
     his pocket darlings—coz I don’t want no trouble, not with Billy along. The boat’s
     got DK , for Damned Krew scrawled on it in red and black, and no one wants to mess with the Krew on the west
     side of the Fleet, but here on the east side is out of our territory and the between-tides
     zone is teknikly no-man’s land, which means anyone can roam here but they hafta be
     mad or desperate first, like Hairies and outcasts and refugees from drowned countries,
     though I don’t know why refugees seemta wanta get into London when most of us spend our lives dreaming of getting out .
    I look around and I see the flat gray river spreading away for miles with a far-off
     cluster of boats riding on it like fleas, and closer in I see the mud banks and the
     channels winding out between them, and then with a jab of fright I see a dark figure
     shambling away along the tide edge, headed for a heap of rubble where a mob of seagulls
     is scritching and quarreling over something to eat.
    It’s a Hairy.