Year of the Flood: Novel (34 page)

65

TOBY. SAINT MAHATMA GANDHI DAY

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

In the morning Ren feels cooler. Her pulse is stronger, and she can even hold the cup of warm water in her own two trembling hands. Toby’s put mint in it this morning, as well as the honey and salt.

Once Ren has gone to sleep again, Toby hauls the dirty sheets and towels up to the roof to wash them. She’s brought her binoculars, and while the sheets and towels are soaking she scans the Spa grounds.

Pigs far away, over in the southwest corner of the meadow. Two Mo’Hairs, a blue one and a silver one, grazing quietly together. No liobams. Dogs barking somewhere. Vultures flapping around the pig funeral site.

“Get away from there, you archeologists,” says Toby. She’s feeling light-headed, almost giddy — in the mood to tell herself jokes. Three huge pink butterflies circle her head, alight on the damp sheets. Maybe they think they’ve found the biggest pink butterfly of all. Maybe it’s a love affair. Now they have their thin tongues unrolled, licking. Not love, then: salt.

Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?

Dear Adam One, thinks Toby. He must be dead. And Zeb — dead also, despite wishful thinking. Though maybe not; because if I’m alive — more to the point, if Ren’s alive — then anyone at all could be alive too.

She stopped listening on her wind-up radio months ago because the silence was so discouraging. But just because she’s heard no one doesn’t mean no one’s there. Which had been among Adam One’s hypothetical proofs for the existence of God.

Toby washes Ren’s infected leg, applies more honey. Ren eats a little, drinks a little. More mushroom elixir, more Willow. After much rummaging, Toby locates a Spa first-aid kit; there’s a tube of antibiotic cream, but it’s stale-dated. No thermometer. Who ordered this crap? she thinks. Oh yes. I did.

Anyway maggots are better.

In the afternoon she lifts the maggots from the plastic snap-top, rinses them in tepid water. Then she transfers them to a sheet of gauze from the first-aid kit, applies another sheet over the top, and tapes the maggot-filled envelope over the wound. It won’t take long for the maggots to eat through the gauze: they know what they like.

“This will tickle,” she tells Ren. “But they’ll make you better. Try not to move your leg.”

“What are they?” says Ren.

“They’re your friends,” says Toby. “But you don’t need to look.”

Her homicidal impulse of the night before is gone: she will not drag dead Ren out into the meadow for the pigs and vultures. Now she’d like to cure her, cherish her, for isn’t it miraculous that Ren is here? That she’s come through the Waterless Flood with only minor damage? Or fairly minor. Just to have a second person on the premises — even a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time — just this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house.

I’ve been the ghost, thinks Toby.

66

TOBY. SAINT HENRI FABRE, SAINT ANNA ATKINS, SAINT TIM FLANNERY, SAINT ICHIDA-SAN, SAINT DAVID SUZUKI, SAINT PETER MATTHIESSEN

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

It takes the maggots three days to clean the wound. Toby watches them carefully: if they run out of dead tissue, they’ll start in on living flesh.

By the second morning Ren’s fever has gone, though Toby continues the mushroom drops just to make sure. Ren’s eating more now. Toby helps her up the stairs to the roof and sits her down on the imitationwood bench, in the early morning light. The maggots are photophobic: light drives them into the deepest corners of the wound, which is where they need to be.

No movement out there in the meadow. No sounds from the forest.

Toby tries asking Ren where she’s been ever since the Flood hit, and how she escaped it, and how she got here, why she’d been dressed in those blue feathers; but she only tries once because Ren starts crying. All she’ll say is, “I’ve lost Amanda!”

“Never mind,” says Toby. “We’ll find her.”

On the fourth morning Toby removes the maggot plaster: the wound is clean, and healing. “Now to get your muscles back in shape,” she tells Ren.

Ren starts walking, up and down the stairs, along the corridors. She’s gained a little weight: Toby’s been feeding her the last few jars of AnooYoo Lemon Meringue Facial, which has a lot of sugar in it and nothing toxic that Toby can think of. She leads Ren through some exercises from Zeb’s old Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes — the
satsuma,
the
unagi.
Centred like a Fruit, sinuous like an Eel. She needs the refresher herself; she’s out of practice.

After a few days Ren tells her story, or a little of her story. It comes out in short clumps of words punctuated by long periods of staring into space. She tells about being locked in at Scales, and how Amanda came all the way from the Wisconsin desert and figured out the door code. Then Shackie and Croze and Oates appeared from nowhere, just like magic, and she was so happy — they’d been saved by being in Painball when the plague broke out. But then three horrible men from the Painball Gold Team came to Scales, and she and Amanda and the boys ran away. She’d said they should come to AnooYoo because Toby might be there, and they’d almost made it — they were walking along through the trees, and then blackout. She can’t get any farther than that.

“What did they look like?” says Toby. “Did they have any …” She wants to say “distinguishing marks,” but Ren shakes her head, meaning that that subject is closed. “I have to find Amanda,” she says, wiping away tears. “I really have to. They’ll kill her.”

“Here, blow your nose,” says Toby, handing her a pink washcloth. “Amanda’s very clever.” It’s best to talk as if Amanda is still alive. “She’s very resourceful. She’ll be all right.” She’s about to say that women are in short supply and therefore Amanda will surely be preserved and rationed, but she thinks better of it.

“You don’t understand,” says Ren, crying harder. “There’s three of them, they’re Painball — they’re not really human. I have to find her.”

“We’ll look,” Toby says, to be soothing. “But we don’t know where they — where she’s gone.”

“Where would you go?” says Ren. “If you were them?”

“Maybe east,” says Toby. “To the sea. Where they could fish.”

“We can go there.”

“When you’re strong enough,” says Toby. They have to move somewhere else anyway: the food supply’s shrinking fast.

“I’m strong enough now,” says Ren.

Toby scours the garden, unearths one more lone onion. She digs up three burdocks from the near edge of the meadow, and some Queen Anne’s lace — the spindly white proto-carrot roots. “Do you think you could eat a rabbit?” she asks Ren. “If I cut it up very small and make it into soup?”

“I guess so,” said Ren. “I’ll try.”

Toby’s almost ready for the switch to full-blown carnivore herself. There’s the sound of the rifle shot to worry about, but if there are still Painballers lurking in the forest they already know she has a gun. No harm in reminding them.

There are often green rabbits near the swimming pool. Toby shoots at one of them from the rooftop, but she can’t seem to hit it. Is conscience twisting her aim? Maybe she needs a bigger target, a deer or a dog. She hasn’t sen the pigs lately, or any of the sheep. Just as she was getting all set to eat them, they’re gone.

She locates the packsacks on a laundry-room shelf. She hasn’t been down there since the pumps stopped working, and the air’s thick with mildew. Luckily the packsacks aren’t cotton but impenetrable synthetic. She takes them up to the roof, sponges them off, leaves them in the hot sun to dry.

She lays out her available supplies on the kitchen counter. Don’t carry so much weight that you burn more calories than you can eat, says the voice of Zeb. Tools are more important than food. Your best tool is your brain.

The rifle, of course. Ammunition. Trowel, for digging roots. Matches. Barbecue lighter, which won’t last long but it might as well be used up. Pocket knife with scissors and tweezers. Rope. Two sheets of plastic, handy in rain. Windup flashlight. Gauze bandages. Duct tape. Plastic snap-top containers. Cloth bags for wild edibles. Cooking pot. The Kelly kettle. Toilet paper — a luxury item, but she can’t resist. Two medium-sized Zizzy Froots from a Spa minibar, raspberry flavour: junk food, but food, since it has calories in it. The bottles can be used later, for water.

Spoons, metal, two; cups, plastic, two. The remaining sunblock. The last SuperD bug spray. Binoculars: heavy but necessary. The mop handle. Sugar. Salt. The last of the honey. The last Joltbars. The last soybits.

The syrup of Poppy. The dried mushrooms. The Death Angels.

The day before they leave, she cuts her hair short. It’s a shorn look — it reminds her of Joan of Arc on a bad day — but she doesn’t want a hair handle growing out of her head, all the better to grab you by and slash your throat. She cuts Ren’s hair as well. They’ll be cooler that way, she tells her.

“We should bury the hair,” says Ren. She wants it out of sight for some reason Toby can’t fathom.

“Why don’t we put it on the roof?” says Toby. “That way the birds can make nests out of it.” She doesn’t intend to waste her body’s calories digging a hair burial site.

“Oh. Okay,” says Ren. This idea seems to please her.

67

TOBY. SAINT CHICO MENDES, MARTYR

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

They leave the Spa building just before dawn. They’re dressed in pink cotton exercise outfits, the loose pants and the T-shirt top with the kissy mouth and the winky eye on the front. Pink canvas sport shoes, of the kind the ladies wore to do their rope skipping and weight training. Broad pink hats. They smell of SuperD, and of rancid SolarNix. In their packsacks are their pink top-to-toes, for when the sun gets too high. If only everything weren’t so pink, thinks Toby — like baby clothes or girly birthday parties. Not an adventurous colour. Terrible choice for camouflage.

She knows the situation is grave, as the news used to say — of course it is. But nonetheless she feels cheerful, almost giggly. As if she’s a little drunk. As if they’re just going on a picnic. It must be a surge of adrenalin.

The eastern horizon is brightening; mist rises from the trees. Dew shimmers on the lumirose bushes, mirroring the faint eerie light of their flowers. The sweetness of the damp meadow breathes all around them. The birds are beginning to stir and chirp; the vultures on the bare branches are spreading their wings to dry. A peagret flaps towards them from the south, sails over the meadow, then swoops in for a landing on the edge of the green-scummed swimming pool.

It occurs to Toby that she may never see this vista again. Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering,
Mine! Mine!
Did she enjoy her enforced stay in the AnooYoo Spa? No. But it’s her home territory now: she’s left her skin flakes all over it. A mouse would understand: it’s her nest.
Farewell
is the song Time sings, Adam One used to say.

Somewhere dogs are barking. She’s heard them at intervals over the past months, but today they sound closer. She doesn’t much like this. With nobody to feed them, any dogs left by now are sure to have turned wild.

She’d climbed up to the rooftop before they left, scanned the fields. No pigs, no Mo’Hairs, no liobams. Or none in plain view. How little I’ve ever been able to see, she thinks. The meadow, the driveway, the swimming pool, the garden. The edge of the forest. She’d like to avoid going in there, among the trees. Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.

Look, she thinks at the forest, with its hidden pigs and liobams. And Painballers too, for all she knows. Don’t push me. I may be pink, but I’ve got a rifle. Bullets too. Longer range than a spraygun. So back off, assholes.

The Spa grounds and its woodland perimeter are separated from the surrounding Heritage Park by a chain-link fence topped with electrified barbed wire, though the electricity won’t be functional now. Four gates, east, west, north, and south, with winding driveways connecting them. It’s Toby’s plan to spend the night at the eastern gatehouse. That’s not too far for Ren to walk: she’s still not strong enough for heroic trekking. The next morning they can begin to make their way gradually towards the sea.

Ren still believes they’ll find Amanda. They’ll find her, and Toby will shoot the Gold Painballers with her rifle, and then Shackleton and Crozier and Oates will reappear from wherever they’ve been hiding. Ren’s not yet free of the effects of her illness. She wants Toby to fix and cure everything, as if she herself were still a child; as if Toby were still Eve Six, with magic adult powers.

They pass the crashed pink minivan and, around a curve in the road, two other vehicles — a solarcar, a jeep-sized garboil guzzler. Judging from the blackened wreckage, both must have burned. There’s a rusty, sweetish odour mixed in with the charred smell.

“Don’t look inside,” Toby tells Ren as they walk past.

“It’s okay,” Ren says. “I saw a lot of stuff like that in the pleebs, when we were coming here from Scales.”

Farther along there’s a dog — a spaniel, recently dead. Something’s torn it open; there’s a scribble of entrails, a buzzing of flies, but no vultures yet. Whatever it was will surely return to its kill: predators don’t waste. Toby eyes the roadside bushes: the vines are growing almost audibly, shutting out sight. What a lot of kudzu. “We should walk faster,” she says.

But Ren can’t walk faster. She’s tired, her packsack’s too heavy. “I think I’m getting a blister,” she says. They stop under a tree for a drink of Zizzy Froot. Toby can’t shake the feeling that something’s crouched up in the branches, waiting to leap on them. Can liobams climb? She forces herself to slow down, to breathe deeply, to take her time.

“Let’s see your blister,” she says to Ren. It’s not a blister yet. She tears a strip off her top-to-toe, winds it around Ren’s foot. The sun’s at ten. They put on their top-to-toes and Toby smears their faces with more SolarNix, then sprays them again with SuperD.

Ren begins to limp before they’ve reached the next curve in the road.

“We’ll cut across the meadow,” says Toby. “It’s shorter that way.”