Year of the Flood: Novel (31 page)

59

TOBY. SAINT ANIL AGARWAL

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

Here comes famine, thinks Toby. Saint Euell, pray for me and for all who starve in the midst of plenty. Help me to find that plenty. Send animal protein quickly.

In the meadow the dead boar is entering the afterlife. Gases are rising from it, fluids are seeping away. The vultures have been at it; the crows are hanging around on the perimeter like runts at a street fight, grabbing what they can. Whatever’s going on out there, maggots are a part of it.

When in extreme need, Adam One used to say, begin at the bottom of the food chain. Those without central nervous systems must surely suffer less.

Toby gathers the necessary items — her pink top-to-toe, her sunhat, her sunglasses, a water bottle, a pair of surgical gloves. The binoculars, the rifle. Her mop-handle cane, for balance. She finds a plastic snap-top and punches some holes in the lid, adds a spoon, and stows everything in a plastic gift bag with the winky-eye AnooYoo Spa logo on it. A packsack would be better, it would leave her hands free. There used to be some packsacks around here — the ladies took them on strolls, with picnic sandwiches in them — but she can’t remember where she put them.

There’s still some AnooYoo All-Natural SolarNix in stock. It’s stale-dated and smells rancid, but she spreads it on her face anyway, then sprays her ankles and wrists with SuperD in case of mosquitoes. She has a good long drink of water, then visits the violet biolet: if panic arises, at least she won’t piss herself. Nothing worse than sprinting in a wet top-to-toe. She hangs the binoculars around her neck, then goes up to the roof for a last double-check. No ears in the meadow, no snouts. No furry golden tails.

“Quit stalling,” she tells herself. She has to leave immediately so she can get back before the afternoon rainstorm. Stupid to get struck by lightning. Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no matter how much you’ve been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It’s the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it’s the universal protest against Time. Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

A question — Toby says to herself very firmly — that I will not ask myself just now.

She puts on the surgical gloves and slings the AnooYoo bag over her shoulder, and lets herself out. She goes first to the ruined garden, where she salvages one onion and two radishes, and spoons a layer of damp earth into the plastic snap-top. Then she crosses the parking lot and walks past the silent fountains.

It’s been a long time since she’s been this far away from the Spa buildings. Now she’s in the meadow: it’s a big space. The light is dazzling, even though she has the broad hat and the sunglasses on.

Don’t panic, she tells herself. This is how mice feel when they venture onto the open floor, but you aren’t a mouse. The weeds catch at her top-to-toe and tangle her feet as if to hold her back and keep her with them. There are little thorns in them somewhere, little claws and traps. It’s like pushing through a giant piece of knitting: knitting done with barbed wire.

What’s this? A shoe.

Not to think about shoes. Not to think about the mouldering handbag she’s just glimpsed nearby. Stylish. Red fleather. A tatter of the past that hasn’t yet been drawn down into the earth. She doesn’t want to step on any of these remnants, but it’s hard to see down through the nets and meshes of the ensnaring weeds.

She moves forward. Her legs are tingling, the way flesh does when it knows it’s about to be touched. Does she really think a hand will come up from among the clover and sow thistles and grab her by the ankle?

“No,” she says out loud. She stops to calm her heart, and to reconnoiter. The wide brim of the hat impedes her view: she swivels her whole body like an owl’s head — to left, to right, behind, then to the front again. All around her is a sweet scent — the tall clover’s in bloom, the Queen Anne’s lace, the lavender and marjoram and lemon balm, self-seeded. The field hums with pollinators: bumblebees, shining wasps, iridescent beetles. The sound is lulling. Stay here. Sink down. Go to sleep.

Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It’s a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We’re no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can’t drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.

Ahead of her in the middle distance is the line of dark trees that marks the edge of the forest. She feels it drawing her, luring her in, as the depths of the ocean and the mountain heights are said to lure people, higher and higher or deeper and deeper, until they vanish into a state of rapture that is not human.

See yourself as a predator sees you, Zeb once taught. She places herself behind the trees, looking out through the filigree of leaves and branches. There’s an enormous wild savannah, and in the middle of it a small soft pink figure, like an embryo or an alien, with big dark eyes — alone, unprotected, vulnerable. Behind this figure is its dwelling, an absurd box made of straw that only looks like bricks. So easy to blow down.

The smell of fear comes to her, from herself.

She lifts the binoculars. The leaves are moving a little, but only in the breeze. Walk forward slowly, she tells herself. Remember what you came to do.

After what seems a long time she reaches the dead boar. A horde of glittering green and bronze flies dithers in the air above it. At her approach the vultures lift their red, featherless heads, their boiled-looking necks. She waves her mop handle at them and they scrabble away, hissing with indignation. Some of them spiral upwards, keeping an eye on her; others flap towards the trees and settle their dust-rag feathers, waiting.

There are fronds scattered about, on top of the boar’s carcass and beside it. Fern fronds. Such ferns don’t grow in the meadow. Some are old and dry and brown, some quite fresh. Also flowers. Are those rose petals, from the roses by the driveway? She’d heard of something like this; no, she read it as a child, in a kid’s book about elephants. The elephants would stand around their dead ones, sombrely, as if meditating. Then they’d scatter branches and earth.

But pigs? Usually they’d just eat a dead pig, the same way they’d eat anything else. But they haven’t been eating this one.

Could the pigs have been having a funeral? Could they be bringing memorial bouquets? She finds this idea truly frightening.

But why not? says the kindly voice of Adam One. We believe the Animals have Souls. Why then would they not have funerals?

“You’re mad,” she says out loud.

The smell of decaying flesh is rank: it’s hard to keep from gagging. She lifts a fold of her top-to-toe, clamps it over her nose. With the other hand she pokes at the dead boar with her stick: maggots boil forth. They’re like giant grey rice.

Just think of them as land shrimp, says the voice of Zeb. Same body plan. “You’re up to this,” she tells herself. She has to set down the rifle and the mop handle in order to do the next part. She scoops up the twirling white maggots with the spoon and transfers them to the plastic snap-on. She drops some; her hands are shaking. There’s a buzzing in her head like tiny drills, or is it only the flies? She makes herself slow down.

Thunder in the distance.

She turns her back on the forest, heads back across the meadow. She doesn’t run.

Surely the trees have moved closer.

60

REN

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

One day we were drinking champagne and I said, “Let’s do our nails, they’re a wreck.” I thought maybe it would cheer us up. Amanda laughed and said, “Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague,” but we did our nails anyway. Amanda’s were an orangey-pink shade called Satsuma Parfait, mine were Slick Raspberry. We were like two kids with fingerpaints, having a party. I love the smell of nail polish. I know it’s toxic, but it smells so clean. Crisp, like starched linen. It did make us feel better.

After that we had some more champagne, and I had another party idea, so I went upstairs. There was only one room with a person in it — Starlite, in our old bedroom. I felt terrible about her, but I’d stuffed sheets all around the door so no more smell could get out, and I hoped the microbes would get on with the job so she could be transformed into something else really fast. I took the Biofilm Bodysuits and costumes from Savona’s empty room and Crimson Petal’s, and brought them downstairs in a giant armful, and we started trying them on.

The Biofilms needed to be sprayed with water and lubricant skin-food — they were dried out — but once we’d done that they slid on as usual, and you could feel the pleasant suction as their layers of living cells bonded with your skin, and then the warm, tickly feeling as they started to breathe. Nothing in but oxygen, nothing out but your natural excretions, said the labels. The face unit even did your nostrils for you. A lot of the Scales customers would have preferred membrane and bristle work if it was completely safe, but at least with the Biofilms they could relax, because they knew they weren’t planking a fester.

“This feels great,” said Amanda. “It sort of gives you a massage.”

“Recommended for the complexion,” I said, and we laughed some more. Then Amanda put on a flamingo outfit with pink feathers and I put on a peagret one, and we turned on the music and the coloured spotlights and got up on the stage and danced. Amanda was still a great dancer, she could really shake those feathers. But I was better than her by then, because of all the training I’d had, and the trapeze work; and she knew it. And that pleased me.

That was stupid of us, the whole dancing event: we’d cranked the music up really loud, and it was going right out through the open door, and if there was anyone in the neighbourhood they’d be sure to hear it. But I wasn’t thinking about that. “Ren, you’re not the only person on the planet,” Toby used to say when I was little. It was a way of telling us to have consideration. But now I really did think I was the only person on the planet. Or me and Amanda. So there we were in our flamingo-pink and peagret-blue costumes and our fresh nail polish, dancing on the Scales stage together with the music turned up, whump whump babadedump, bam bam kabam, singing along as if we didn’t have a care in the world.

Then the number came to the end, and we heard clapping. We stood there as if frozen. I felt a chill shoot through me: I had a flash of Crimson Petal hanging from the trapeze rope with a bottle shoved up her, and I couldn’t breathe.

Three guys had come in — they must have snuck in very carefully — and there they were. “Don’t run,” said Amanda to me in a quiet voice. Then she said, “You alive or dead?” She smiled. “Because if you’re alive, maybe you’d like a drink?”

“Nice dancing,” said the tallest one. “How come you didn’t get this bug?”

“Maybe we did.” said Amanda. “Maybe we’re contagious and we just don’t know it yet. Now I’m turning down the stage lights so we can see you.”

“Anyone else here?” said the tallest one. “Like, any guys?”

“None that I know of,” said Amanda. She’d dimmed the lights. “Take off your face,” she said to me. She meant the green sequins, the Biofilm. She went down the steps from the stage. “There’s some Scotch left, or we could make you a coffee.” She was peeling off her own Biofilm headpiece, and I knew what she was thinking: Make direct eye contact, like Zeb taught us. Don’t turn away, they’re more likely to swarm you from behind. And the less we looked like sparkly birds rather than people, the less likely we’d be mangled.

Now I could see the three of them better. A tall one, a shorter one, another tall one. They were in camouflage suits, very dirty ones, and they looked as if they’d been out in the sun too much. The sun, the rain, the wind.

Then all of a sudden I knew. “Shackie?” I said. “Shackie! Amanda, it’s Shackie and Croze!”

The tall one turned his face towards me. “Who the fuck are you?” he said. Not angry, just kind of stunned.

“It’s Ren,” I said. “Is that little Oates?” I started to cry.

All five of us moved towards each another like a slow-motion football huddle on TV, and then we were hugging each other. Just hugging and hugging, and holding on.

There was some orange-coloured juice in the freezer, so Amanda mixed up mimosas with the champagne that was left. We opened some salted soynuts, and microwaved a pack of faux fish, and all five of us sat at the bar. The three boys — I still thought of them as boys — practically inhaled the food. Amanda made them drink some water, but not too fast. They weren’t starving — they’d been breaking into supermarkettes and even into houses, living off what they could glean, and they’d even snared a couple of rabbits and broiled the chunks, the way we’d done it back at the Gardeners in Saint Euell Week. Still, they were thin.

Then we told one another about where we’d all been when the Waterless Flood hit. I told about the Sticky Zone, and Amanda told about the cow bones in Wisconsin. Dumb luck for both of us, I said — that we hadn’t been with other people when the thing got going. Though Adam One used to say no luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.

Shackie and Croze and Oates nearly hadn’t made it. They’d been shut up in the Painball Arena. Red Team, said Oates, showing me his thumb tattoo; he seemed proud of it. “They put us in there because of what we’d been doing,” said Shackie. “With MaddAddam.”

“Mad Adam?” I said. “Like Zeb, at the Gardeners?”

“More than Zeb. It was a bunch of us — him and us, and some others,” said Shackie. “Top scientists — gene-splicers who’d bailed out of the Corps and gone underground because they hated what the Corps were doing. Rebecca and Katuro were in it — they helped distribute the product.”

“We had a website,” said Croze. “We could share our info that way, in the hidden chatroom.”

“Product?” said Amanda. “You were pushing superweed? Cool!” She laughed.

“No way. We were doing bioform resistance,” said Croze importantly. “The splicers put the bioforms together and Shackie and me and Rebecca and Katuro had top identities — insurance and real estate, stuff like that you could travel with. So we’d take the bioforms to the locations and let them loose.”

“We’d plant them,” said Oates. “Like, you know, time bombs.”

“Some of those suckers were really cool,” said Shackie. “The microbes that ate the asphalt, the mice that attacked cars …”

“Zeb figured if you could destroy the infrastructure,” said Croze, “then the planet could repair itself. Before it was too late and everything went extinct.”

“So this plague, was it a MaddAddam thing?” said Amanda.

“No way,” said Shackie. “Zeb didn’t believe in killing people, not as such. He just wanted them to stop wasting everything and fucking up.”

“He wanted to make them think,” said Oates. “Though some of those mice got out of control. They got confused. Attacked shoes. There were foot injuries.”

“Where is he now?” I asked. It would be so comforting if Zeb was there: he’d know what we should do next.

Shackie said, “We only talked to him online. He flew solo.”

“CorpSeCorps nabbed our MaddAddam splicers, though,” said Croze. “Tracked us down. I figure some creep in our chatroom was a plant.”

“They shot them?” Amanda asked. “The scientists?”

“Don’t know,” said Shackie, “but they didn’t end up with us in Painball.”

“We were only in there a couple of days,” said Oates. “In Painball.”

“Three of us, three of them. The Gold team — they were beyond vicious. One of them — remember Blanco, from the Sewage Lagoon? Rip off your head and eat it? Lost some weight, but it was him all right,” said Croze.

“You’re joking,” said Amanda. She looked — not frightened exactly. But concerned.

“Tossed in for trashing Scales — killed some people, sounded proud of it. Said Painball was like home to him, he’d done it so much.”

“Did he know who you were?” said Amanda.

“Definitely,” said Shackie. “Yelled at us. Said it was payback time for that brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop — he’d slit us like fish.”

“What brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop?” I said.

“You’d gone by then,” said Amanda. “How did you get out?”

“Walked,” said Shackie. “We were figuring out how to kill the other team before they killed us — they gave you three days to plan, before the Start gong — but all of a sudden there were no guards. They were just gone.”

“I’m really tired,” said Oates. “I need to sleep.” He put his head down on the bar.

“Guards were still there, it turned out,” said Shackie. “In the gatehouse. Only they were kind of melted.”

“So we went online,” said Croze, “The news was still working. Big disaster coverage, so we figured we shouldn’t go out and mingle. We locked ourselves into one of the guardhouses — they had some food in there.”

“Problem was, the Golds were in the guardhouse on the other side of the gate. We kept thinking they’d whack us when we were sleeping.”

“We took turns staying awake, but it was too much strain, just waiting. So we forced them out,” said Croze. “Shackie went through a window at night and cut their water lines.”

“Fuck!” said Amanda with admiration. “Really?”

“So they had to leave,” said Oates. “No water.”

“Then we ran out of food and we had to leave too,” said Shackie. “We thought maybe they’d be waiting for us, but they weren’t.” He shrugged. “End of story.”

“Why did you come here?” I said. “To Scales.”

Shackie grinned. “This place had a reputation,” he said.

“A legend,” said Croze. “Even though we didn’t think there’d be any girls still left in it. We could at least see it.”

“Something to do before you die,” said Oates. He yawned.

“Come on, Oatie,” said Amanda. “Let’s put you to bed.”

We took them upstairs and ran each of them through a Sticky Zone shower, and they came out a lot cleaner than when they went in. We gave them towels and they dried off, and then we tucked them into beds, one in each room.

It was me who took care of Oates — gave him his towel and soap, and showed him the bed where he could sleep. I hadn’t seen him for such a long time. When I left the Gardeners he was just a little kid. A little brat — always getting into trouble. That’s how I remembered him. But cute, even then.

“You’ve grown a lot,” I said. He was almost as tall as Shackie. His blond hair was all damp, like a dog that’s been swimming.

“I always thought you were the best,” he said. “I had a huge crush on you when I was eight.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Can I kiss you?” he said. “I don’t mean in a sexy way.”

“Okay,” I said. And he did, he gave me the sweetest kiss, beside my nose.

“You’re so pretty,” he said. “Please keep your bird suit on.” He touched my feathers, the ones on my bum. Then he gave this shy little grin. It reminded me of Jimmy, the way he was at first, and I could feel my heart lurch. But I tiptoed out of the room.

“We could lock them in,” I whispered to Amanda out in the hallway.

“Why would we do that?” said Amanda.

“They’ve been in Painball.”

“So?”

“So, all Painball guys are unhinged. You don’t know what they’ll do, they just go crazy. Plus, they might have the germ. The plague thing.”

“We hugged them,” said Amanda. “We’ve already got every germ they’ve got. Anyway, they’re old Gardener.”

“Which means?” I said.

“Which means they’re our friends.”

“They weren’t exactly our friends back then. Not always.”

“Relax,” said Amanda. “Those guys and me did lots of stuff together. Why would they hurt us?”

“I don’t want to be a time-share meat-hole,” I said.

“That’s pretty crude,” said Amanda. “It’s not them you should be afraid of, it’s the three Painball guys who were in there with them. Blanco’s not a joke. They must be out there somewhere. I’m putting my real clothes back on.” She was already peeling off her flamingo suit, pulling on her khaki.

“We should lock the front door,” I said.

“The lock’s broken,” said Amanda.

Then we heard voices coming along the street. They were singing and yelling, the way men did at Scales when they’re more than drunk. Stinking drunk, smashing-up drunk. We heard the crash of glass.

We ran into the bedrooms and woke up our guys. They put on their clothes very fast, and we took them to the second-floor window that overlooked the street. Shackie listened, then peered cautiously out. “Oh shit,” he said.

“Is there another door in this place?” Croze whispered. His face was white, despite his sunburn. “We need to get out. Right now.”

We went down the back stairs and slipped out the trash door, into the yard where the garboil dumpsters were, and the bins for empty bottles. We could hear the Gold Teamers bashing around inside the Scales building, demolishing whatever hadn’t been demolished already. There was a giant smash: they must have pulled down the shelving behind the bar.

We squeezed through the gap in the fence and ran across the vacant lot to the far corner and down the alleyway there. They couldn’t possibly see us, yet I felt as if they could — as if their eyes could pierce through brick, like TV mutants.

Blocks away, we slowed to a walk. “Maybe they won’t figure it out,” I say. “That we were there.”

“They’ll know,” said Amanda. “The dirty plates. The wet towels. The beds. You can tell when a bed’s just been slept in.”

“They’ll come after us,” said Croze. “No question.”