The Year of the Flood

SAINT DIAN, MARTYR

YEAR TWENTY-FOUR.

OF PERSECUTION.

SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.

Dear Friends, dear Faithful Companions:

Our Edencliff Rooftop Garden blooms now only in our memories. On this Earthly plane it is now a desolation – a swamp or a desert, depending on rainfall. How changed is our situation from our former green and salad days! How shrunk, how dwindled are our numbers! We are driven from one refuge to another, we are hounded and pursued. Some former Friends have renounced our creeds, others have borne false witness against us. Yet others have tried extremism and violence, and have been murderously spraygunned in the course of raids carried out against them. We remember in this connection our dear former Child, Bernice. Let us put Light around her.

Some have been mutilated and tossed into vacant lots to sow panic among us. Yet others have disappeared, snatched from their places of refuge, to vanish into the prisons of the Exfernal Powers, denied trial, forbidden even to know the names of their accusers. Their minds may already have been destroyed by drugs and torture, their bodies melted into garboil. Because of unjust Laws, we cannot learn the whereabouts of these, our fellow Gardeners. We can only hope that they will die in unwavering Faith.

Today is Saint Dian’s Day, consecrated to interspecies empathy. On this day we invoke Saint Jerome of Lions, and Saint Robert Burns of Mice, and Saint Christopher Smart of Cats; also Saint Farley Mowat of Wolves, and the Ikhwan al-Safa and their Letter of the Animals. But especially Saint Dian Fossey, who gave her life while defending the Gorillas from ruthless exploitation. She laboured for a Peaceable Kingdom, in which all Life would be respected; yet malignant forces combined to destroy both her and her gentle Primate companions. Her murder was horrific; and equally horrific were the malicious rumours spread about her, both during her lifetime and after it. For the Exfernal Powers kill both in deed and in word.

Saint Dian embodies an ideal we hold dear: loving care for all other Creatures. She believed that these deserve the same tenderness we would show to beloved friends and kinfolk, and in this she is a revered model for us. She is buried among her Gorilla Friends, on the mountain she tried to protect.

Like many martyrs, Saint Dian did not live to see the fulfilment of her labours. At least she has been spared the knowledge that the Species for which she gave her life is no more. Like so many others, it has been wiped from the face of God’s Planet.

What is it about our own Species that leaves us so vulnerable to the impulse to violence? Why are we so addicted to the shedding of blood? Whenever we are tempted to become puffed up, and to see ourselves as superior to all other Animals, we should reflect on our own brutal history.

Take comfort in the thought that this history will soon be swept away by the Waterless Flood. Nothing will remain of the Exfernal World but decaying wood and rusting metal implements; and over these the Kudzu and other vines will climb; and Birds and Animals will nest in them, as we are told in the Human Words of God: “They shall be left together unto the Fowls of the mountains, and to the Beasts of the Earth; and the Fowls shall summer upon them, and all the Beasts of the Earth shall winter upon them.” For all works of Man will be as words written on water.

As we crouch together in this dim cellar, speaking softly behind darkened windows, worried lest we have been infiltrated, or that listening devices or cyborg insects are nearby, or the vindictive functionaries of the CorpSeCorps may even now be speeding towards us, we have more need than ever of our resolve. We pray that the Spirit of Saint Dian may inspire us, and help us to stand firm in the moment of trial. Fear not, says that Spirit, even if the worst shall come: for we shelter in the wings of a yet greater Spirit.

An hour before dawn, we must move out of this hiding place, singly and in twos or threes. Be silent then, my Friends; be invisible; merge with your own shadows. And with Grace we will prevail.

We cannot sing, for fear of being overheard, but:

Let us whisper.

TODAY WE PRAISE OUR SAINT DIAN

From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

55

You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say. And I didn’t want to create the world out there: the world of the dead and dying. So I sang some old Gardener hymns, especially the happy ones. Or I danced. Or I played the songs on my Sea/H/Ear Candy, though I couldn’t help thinking that now there’d be no more new music.

Say the Names, Adam One would tell us. And we’d chant these lists of Creatures: Diplodocus, Pterosaurus, Octopus, and Brontosaurus; Trilobite, Nautilus, Ichthyosaurus, Platypus. Mastodon, Dodo, Great Auk, Komodo. I could see all the names, as clear as pages. Adam One said that saying the names was a way of keeping those animals alive. So I said them.

I said other names too. Adam One, Nuala, Zeb. Shackie, Croze, and Oates. And Glenn – I just couldn’t picture anyone so smart being dead.

And Jimmy, despite what he’d done.

And Amanda.

I said those names over and over, in order to keep them alive.

Then I thought about what Mordis had whispered, at the end. Your name, he’d said. It must have been important.

I counted the food I had left. Four weeks’ worth, three weeks, two. I marked off the time with my eyebrow pencil. If I ate less, I could make it last longer. But if Amanda didn’t come soon, I’d be dead. I couldn’t really imagine it.

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don’t know, and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it’s knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it’s an essential part of us, like water.

I said, in that case is God knitted in as well? And he said maybe so, but it hadn’t done us any good.

His explanation of God was a lot different from the Gardeners’ explanation. He said “God is a Spirit” was meaningless because you couldn’t measure a Spirit. Also he’d say Use your meat computer when he meant Use your mind. I found that idea repulsive: I hated the idea of my head being full of meat.

I kept thinking I could hear people walking around in the building, but when I scanned the rooms I couldn’t see anyone moving. At least the solar was still working.

I counted the food again. Five days left, and that was stretching it.

56

I first spotted Amanda as a shadow on the videoscreen. She came into the Snakepit carefully, hugging the wall: the lights were still on, so she wasn’t groping in the dark. The music was still blaring and thumping, and once she’d looked around to make sure the place was empty she went over behind the stage and switched it off.

“Ren?” I heard her say.

Then she went offscreen. After a pause the videocam mike in the hallway picked up her soft footsteps, and then I could see her. And she could see me. I was crying so much with relief I couldn’t speak.

“Hi,” she said. “There’s a dead guy right outside the door. He’s gross. I’ll be back.” Mordis was who she meant – he’d never been taken away. She told me later that she got him onto a shower curtain and dragged him down the hall and bundled him into an elevator, what was left of him. The rats had been having a party, she said, not just at Scales but anywhere even close to urban. She’d put on the gloves of someone’s Biofilm Bodysuit before touching him – even though she was daring, Amanda didn’t take stupid risks.

After a while she was back on my screen. “So,” she said. “Here I am. Stop crying, Ren.”

“I thought you’d never get here,” I managed to say.

“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “Now. How does the door open?”

“I don’t have the code,” I said. I explained about Mordis – how he was the only one who’d known the Sticky Zone numbers.

“He never told you?”

“He said why would we need to know the codes? He changed them every day – he didn’t want them leaking out because crazies might get in. He just wanted to protect us.” I was trying hard not to panic: there was Amanda, outside the door, but what if she couldn’t do anything?

“Any clue?” she said.

“He did say something about my name,” I said. “Just before he – before they – Maybe that’s what he meant.”

Amanda tried. “Nope,” she said. “Well then. Maybe it’s your birthday. Month and day? Year?”

I could hear her punching in numbers, swearing gently to herself. After what seemed a long time, I heard the clunk of the lock. The door swung open, and there she was, right in front of me.

“Oh, Amanda,” I said. She was sunburned, tattered, and grimy, but she was real. I reached out my arms to her, but she stepped back and away.

“It was a simple A equals One code,” she said. “It was your name, after all. Brenda, only backwards. Don’t touch me, I might have germs. I need to shower.”

While Amanda was taking her shower in my Sticky Zone bathroom I propped the door open with a chair because I didn’t want it to swing shut and lock both of us inside. The air outside my room smelled awful compared with the filtered air I’d been breathing: rotting meat, and also smoke and burnt chemicals, because there’d been fires and nobody to put them out. It was lucky that Scales hadn’t caught fire and burned down with me inside it.

After Amanda had taken a shower I took one too, so I’d be as clean as her. Then we put on the green Scales dressing gowns Mordis kept for his best girls and sat around eating Joltbars from the minifridge and microwaving ChickieNobs, and drinking some beers we’d found downstairs, and telling each other the stories of why it was that we were still alive.

57

Toby wakes up suddenly, her blood rushing in her head: katoush, katoush, katoush. She knows at once that something in her space has changed. Someone’s sharing her oxygen.

Breathe, she tells herself. Move as if swimming. Don’t smell like fear.

She lifts the pink sheet off her damp body as slowly as she can, sits up, looks carefully around. Nothing large, not in this cubicle: there isn’t room. Then she sees it. It’s only a bee. A honeybee, walking along the sill.

A bee in the house means a visitor, said Pilar; and if the bee dies, the visit will not be good. I mustn’t kill it, Toby thinks. She folds it carefully in a pink washcloth. “Send a message,” she says to it. “Tell those in the Spirit world: ‘Please send help soon.’” Superstition, she knows that; yet she feels oddly encouraged. Though maybe the bee is one of the transgenics they let loose after the virus wiped out the natural bees; or it may even be a cyborg spy, wandering around with no one left to control it. In which case it will make a very poor messenger.

She slips the washcloth into the pocket of her top-to-toe: she’ll take the bee up to the roof, release it there, watch it set off on its errand to the dead. But in slinging the rifle over her shoulder by the strap she must have crushed the pocket, because when she unwraps the bee it looks less than alive. She shakes the cloth over the railing, hoping the bee will fly. It moves through the air, but more like a seed than an insect: the visit will not be a good one.

She walks to the garden side of the roof, looks over. Sure enough, the bad visit has already occurred: the pigs have been back. They’ve dug under the fence, then gone on a rampage. Surely it was less like a feeding frenzy than a deliberate act of revenge. The earth is furrowed and trampled: anything they haven’t eaten they’ve bulldozed.

If she were a cryer, she’d cry. She lifts her binoculars, scans the meadow. At first she doesn’t see them, but then she spots two pinkish-grey heads – no, three – no, five – lifting above the weedy flowers. Beady eyes, one per pig: they’re looking at her sideways. They’ve been watching for her: it’s as if they want to witness her dismay. Moreover, they’re out of range: if she shoots at them she’ll waste the bullets. She wouldn’t put it past them to have figured that out.

“You fucking pigs!” she yells at them, “Fuck-pigs! Pig-faces!” Of course, for them none of these names would be insults.

What now? Her supply of dried greens is tiny, her goji berries and chia are almost gone, her plant protein is finished. She was counting on the garden for all of that. Worst of all, she’s out of fats: she’s already eaten the last of the Shea and Avocado Body Butter. There’s fat in Joltbars – she still has some of those – but not enough to last for long. Without lipids your body eats your fat and then your muscles, and the brain is pure fat and the heart is a muscle. You become a feedback loop, and then you fall over.

She’ll have to resort to foraging. Go out into the meadow, the forest: find protein and lipids. The boar will be putrid by now, she can’t eat that. She could shoot a green rabbit, maybe; but no, it’s a fellow mammal and she isn’t up to that kind of slaughter. Ant larvae and eggs, or grubs of any kind, for starters.

Is that what the pigs want her to do? Go outside her defensive walls, into the open, so they can jump her, knock her down, then rip her open? Have a pig-style outdoor picnic. A pig-out. She has a fair idea of what that would look like. The Gardeners weren’t squeamish about describing the eating habits of God’s various Creatures: to flinch at these would be hypocritical. No one comes into the world clutching a knife and fork and a frying pan, Zeb was fond of saying. Or a table napkin. And if we eat pigs, why shouldn’t pigs eat us? If they find us lying around.

No point in trying to repair the garden. The pigs would just wait until there was something worth destroying, and then destroy it. Maybe she should build a rooftop garden, like the old Gardener ones: then she’d never have to go outside the main building. But she’d have to haul the soil up all those stairs, in pails. Then there’s the watering in the dry seasons and the drainage in the wet seasons: without the Gardeners’ elaborate systems the thing would be impossible.

There are the pigs, peering at her above the daisies. They have a festive air. Are they snorting in derision? Certainly there’s some grunting going on, and some juvenile squealing, as there used to be when the topless bars in the Sewage Lagoon closed at night.

“Assholes!” she screams at them. It makes her feel better to scream. At least she’s talking to someone other than herself.

58

The worst, said Amanda, was the thunderstorms – she thought she was dead a couple of times, the lightning came so close. But then she’d lifted a rubber mat from a mallway hardware store to crouch on, and she’d felt safer after that.

She’d avoided people as much as possible. She abandoned the solarcar in upstate New York because the highway was too jammed with scrap metal. There’d been some spectacular crashes: the drivers must have started dissolving right inside their cars. “Blood hand lotion,” she said. There’d been about a million vultures. Some people would have been freaked out by them, but not Amanda – she’d worked with them in her art. “That highway was the biggest Vulture Sculpture you could imagine,” she said. She wished she’d had a camera.

After ditching the solarcar she’d walked for a while and then lifted another solar, a bike this time – easier to get through the metal snarls. When in doubt she’d kept to the urban fringes, or else the woods. She’d had a couple of close calls because other people must’ve had the same idea – she’d almost tripped over a few bodies. Good thing she hadn’t actually touched them.

She’d seen some living people. A couple of them had seen her too, but by then everyone must have known this bug was ultra-catching, so they’d stayed far away from her. Some of them were in the last stages, wandering around like zombies; or they were already down, folded in on themselves like cloth.

She slept on top of garages whenever she could, or inside abandoned buildings, though never on the main floor. Otherwise, in trees: the ones with sturdy forks. Uncomfortable but you got used to it, and best to be above ground level because there’d been some strange animals around. Huge pigs, those lion/lamb splices, packs of wild dogs on the prowl – one pack had almost cornered her. Anyway you were safer from the zombie people, up in trees: you wouldn’t want a clot on legs to fall on top of you in the darkness.

What she was telling was gruesome, but we laughed a lot that night. I guess we should have been mourning and wailing, but I’d already done that, and anyway what good would it be? Adam One said we should always look on the positive side, and the positive side was that we were still alive.

We didn’t talk about anyone we knew.

I didn’t want to sleep in my Sticky Zone room because I’d been there long enough, and we couldn’t use my old room either because the husk of Starlite was still in it. Finally we chose one of the client facilities, the one with the giant bed and the green satin bedspread and the feather-work ceiling. That room looked elegant if you didn’t think too much about what it had been used for.

The last time I’d seen Jimmy had been in that room. But having Amanda there was like an eraser: it smudged that earlier memory. It made me safer.

We slept in the next morning. Then we got up and put on our green dressing gowns and went into the Scales kitchen where they used to make the bar snacks. We microwaved some frozen soybread out of the main freezer and had that for breakfast, with instant Happicuppa.

“Didn’t you think I must be dead?” I asked Amanda. “And so maybe you shouldn’t bother coming here?”

“I knew you weren’t dead,” said Amanda. “You get a feeling when someone’s dead. Someone you know really well. Don’t you think?”

I wasn’t sure about that. So I said, “Anyway, thanks.” Whenever you thanked Amanda for something she pretended not to hear; or else she’d say, “You’ll pay me back.” That’s what she said now. She wanted everything to be a trade, because giving things for nothing was too soft.

“What should we do now?” I said.

“Stay here,” said Amanda. “Until the food’s gone. Or if the solar shuts off and the stuff in the freezers begins to rot. That could get ugly.” “Then what?” I said. “Then we’ll go somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“We don’t need to worry about that now,” said Amanda.

Time got stretchy. We’d sleep as long as we wanted, then get up and have showers – we still had water because of the solar – and then eat something out of the freezers. Then we’d talk about things we’d done at the Gardeners – old stuff. We’d sleep some more when it got too hot. Later we’d go into the Sticky Zone rooms and turn on the air conditioning and watch DVDs of old movies. We didn’t feel like going outside the building.

In the evenings we’d have a few drinks – there were still some unbroken bottles behind the bar – and raid the expensive tinned foods Mordis kept for the high-roller clients and also for his best girls. Loyalty Snacks, he called them; he’d dish them out when you’d gone the extra mile, though you never knew in advance what that extra mile would be. That’s how I got to eat my first caviar. It was like salty bubbles.

There was no more caviar left at Scales for me and Amanda, though.

59

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

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.”

61

We turned corners and went up alleyways to mix up our tracks. Tracks were a problem – there was a layer of ashy mud – but Shackie said the rain would wash away our marks, and anyway the Gold Team weren’t dogs, they wouldn’t be able to smell us.

It had to be them: the three Painballers who’d smashed up Scales, that first night of the Flood. The ones who’d killed Mordis. They’d seen me on the intercom. That’s why they’d come back to Scales – to open up the Sticky Zone like an oyster in order to get at me. They would have found tools. It might have taken a while, but they’d have done it in the end.

That thought gave me a very cold feeling, but I didn’t tell the others about it. They had enough to worry about anyway.

There was a lot of trash cluttering the streets – burnt things, broken things. Not only cars and trucks. Glass – a lot of that. Shackie said we had to be careful which buildings we went into: they’d been right near one when it collapsed. We should stay away from the tall ones because the fires could have eaten away at them, and if the glass windows fell on you, goodbye head. It would be safer in a forest than in a city now. Which was the reverse of what people used to think.

It was the small normal things that bothered me the most. Somebody’s old diary, with the words melting off the pages. The hats. The shoes – they were worse than the hats, and it was worse if there were two shoes the same. The kids’ toys. The strollers minus the babies.

The whole place was like a doll’s house that had been turned upside down and stepped on. Out of one shop there was a trail of bright T-shirts, like huge cloth footprints, going all along the sidewalk. Someone must have smashed in through the window and robbed the place, though why did they think a bundle of T-shirts was going to do them any good? There was a furniture store spewing chair arms and legs and leather cushions onto the sidewalk, and an eyeglasses place with high-fashion frames, gold and silver – nobody had bothered to take those. A pharmacy – they’d trashed it completely, looking for party drugs. There were a lot of empty BlyssPluss containers. I’d thought it was just at the testing stage, but that place must have been selling it black market.

There were bundles of rag and bone. “Ex-people,” said Croze. They were dried out and picked over, but I didn’t like the eyeholes. And the teeth – mouths look a lot worse without lips. And the hair was so stringy and detachable. Hair takes years to decay; we learned that in Composting, at the Gardeners.

We hadn’t had any time to grab food from Scales, so we went into a supermarkette. There was junk all over the floor, but we found a couple of Zizzy Froots and some Joltbars, and in another place there was a solar-freezer that was still running. It had soybeans and berries – we ate those right away – and frozen SecretBurger patties, six to a box.

“How’re we going to cook them?” asked Oates.

“Lighters,” said Shackie. “See?” On the counter there was a rack of lighters in the shape of frogs. Shackie tried one: the flame shot out of its mouth, and it said Ribbit.

“Take a handful,” said Amanda.

By this time we were near the Sinkhole, so we headed for the old Wellness Clinic because it was a place we knew. I hoped there’d be some Gardeners left inside it, but it was empty. We had a picnic in our old classroom: we made a fire out of broken desks, though not a big fire because we didn’t want to send any smoke signals to the Gold Painballers, but we had to open the windows because we were coughing too much. We broiled the SecretBurgers and ate them, and half of the soybeans – we didn’t bother cooking those – and drank the Zizzy Froots. Oates kept making the frog lighter say Ribbit until Amanda told him to stop because he was wasting fuel.

The adrenalin of running away had worn off by then. It was sad to be back in the place where we’d been children: even if we hadn’t liked it all the time, I felt so homesick for it now.

I guess this is what the rest of my life will be like, I thought. Running away, scrounging for leftovers, crouching on floors, getting dirtier and dirtier. I wished I had some real clothes, because I was still in my peagret outfit. I wanted to go back to the T-shirt place to see if there was anything left inside the store that wasn’t damp and mouldy, but Shackie said it was too dangerous.

I thought maybe we should have sex: it would have been a kind and generous thing to do. But everyone was too tired, and also we were shy with one another. It was the surroundings – though the Gardeners weren’t there in their bodies, they were there in Spirit, and it was hard to do anything they’d have disapproved of if they’d seen us doing it when we were ten.

We went to sleep in a pile, on top of one another, like puppies.

The next morning when we woke up there was a huge pig standing in the doorway, staring in at us and sniffing the air with its wet, sluggy-looking nose. It must have come in the door and all the way down the hall. It turned and went away when it saw us looking at it. Maybe it smelled the burger patties being cooked, said Shackie. He said it was an enhanced splice – MaddAddam had known about those – and that it had human brain tissue in it.

“Oh yeah,” said Amanda, “and it’s doing advanced physics. You’re bullshitting us.”

“Truth,” said Shackie, a little sulky.

“Too bad we don’t have a spraygun,” said Croze. “Long time since I had bacon.”

“None of that language,” I said in a Toby voice, and we all laughed.

Before we left the Wellness Clinic we went into the Vinegar Room, for a last look at it. The big barrels were still there, though someone had taken an axe to them. There was a smell of vinegar, and also a toilet smell: people had been using a corner of the room for that, and not long ago either. The little closet door where they used to keep the vinegar bottles was standing open. There weren’t any bottles; but there were some shelves. They were at a strange angle, and Amanda went over and took an edge and pulled, and the shelves swung out.

“Look,” she said. “There’s a whole other room in here!”

We went in. There was a table that took up most of the room, and some chairs. But the most interesting thing was a futon, like our old Gardener ones, and a bunch of empty food containers – soydines, chickenpeas, dried gojiberries. Over in one corner was a dead laptop.

“Somebody else made it through,” said Shackie.

“Not a Gardener,” I said. “Not with a laptop.”

“Zeb had a laptop,” said Croze. “But he’d stopped being a Gardener.”

We left the Wellness Clinic without any clear plan. It was me who said we should go to the AnooYoo Spa: there might be food in the Ararat that Toby put together in the storeroom; she’d told me the doorcode. Also there could still be something growing in the garden. I even wondered if maybe Toby was hiding out there, but I didn’t want to get any hopes up, so I didn’t say that.

We thought we were being really careful. We couldn’t see anybody anywhere. We went into the Heritage Park and headed towards the Spa’s west gatehouse, staying on the forest pathway, under the trees – we felt less visible that way.

We were going single file. Shackie was at the front of the line, then Croze, then Amanda, then me; Oates was at the very back. Then I had a cold feeling, and I looked behind me, and Oates wasn’t there. I said, “Shackie!”

And then Amanda lurched sideways, right off the path.

Then there was a dark patch like going through brambles – everything painful and tangled. There were bodies on the ground, and one of them was mine, and that must have been when I got hit.

When I woke up again, Shackie and Croze and Oates weren’t there. But Amanda was.

I don’t want to think about what happened next.

It was worse for Amanda than for me.