The MaddAddam Trilogy (95 page)

She untwists herself from the damp morning sheet and stretches her arms, feeling for sprains and tightness. She’s almost too tired to get up. Too tired, too discouraged, too angry with herself over last night’s fireside fiasco. What will she tell Zeb when he gets back? Supposing he does get back. Zeb is resourceful, but he’s not invulnerable.

She can only hope that he’s been more successful with his quest than she has been with hers. There’s a chance that some of the God’s Gardeners have survived because if anyone would know how to wait out the pandemic that killed almost everyone else, it would be them. During all the years that she spent with them, first as their guest, then as an apprentice, and finally as a high-ranking Eve, they’d planned for catastrophe. They’d built hidden places of refuge and stocked them with supplies: honey, dried soybeans and mushrooms, rose hips, elderberry compote, preserves of various kinds. Seeds to plant in the new, cleansed world they believed would come. Perhaps they’d waited the plague out in one of these refuges – one of their sheltering Ararats, where they hoped they’d be safe while riding out what they termed the Waterless Flood. God had promised after the Noah incident that he’d never use the water method again, but considering the wickedness of the world he was bound to do something: that was their reasoning. But where will Zeb look for them, out there among the ruins of the city? Where to even begin?

Visualize your strongest desire
, the Gardeners used to say,
and it will manifest;
which doesn’t always work, or not as intended. Her strongest desire is to have Zeb come back safe, but if he does, she’ll have to face up once again to the fact that she’s neutral territory as far as he’s concerned. Nothing emotional, no sexiness there, no frills. A trusted comrade and foot soldier: reliable Toby, so competent. That’s about it.

And she’ll have to admit her failure to him.
I was a cretin. It was Saint Julian’s, I couldn’t kill them. They got away. They took a spraygun
. She won’t snivel, she won’t cry, she won’t give excuses. He won’t say much, but he’ll be disappointed in her.

Don’t be too harsh on yourself, Adam One used to say in his patient blue-eyed way. We all make mistakes. True, she replies to him now, but some mistakes are more lethal than others. If Zeb gets killed by one of the Painballers, it will be her fault.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
. She feels like whacking her head against the cobb-house wall.

She can only hope the Painballers were spooked enough to run very far away. But will they stay away? They’ll need food. They might scavenge some quasi-food in the deserted houses and shops from whatever hasn’t mouldered or been eaten by rats or looted months ago. They may even blast a few animals – a rakunk, a green rabbit, a liobam – but after they use up their cellpack ammunition, they’ll need more.

And they know the MaddAddam cobb house will have some. Sooner or later they’ll be tempted to attack at the weakest link: they’ll grab a Craker child and offer to swap, as they tried to swap Amanda earlier. It will be sprayguns and cellpacks they’ll want, with a young woman or two thrown in – Ren or Lotis Blue or White Sedge or Swift Fox – not Amanda, they’ve already expended her. Or a Craker female in heat, why not? It would be a novelty for them, a woman with a bright blue abdomen; not the best conversationalists, those Crakers, but the Painballers won’t care about that. They’ll demand Toby’s rifle too.

The Crakers would think it was just a matter of sharing.
They want the stick thing? It would make them happy? Why are you not giving it to them, Oh Toby?
How to explain that you can’t hand over a murder weapon to a murderer? The Crakers wouldn’t understand murder because they’re so trusting. They’d never imagine that anyone would rape them –
What is rape?
Or slit their throats –
Oh Toby, why?
Or slash them open and eat their kidneys –
But Oryx would not allow it!

Suppose the Crakers hadn’t untied those knots. What had she intended to do? Would she have marched the Painballers back to the cobb house, then kept them penned up until Zeb got back and took over and did the necessary thing?

He’d have held some sort of perfunctory discussion. Then there would have been a double hanging. Or maybe he’d have skipped the preliminaries and just hit them with a shovel, saying, Why dirty a rope? The end result would be the same as if she’d snuffed the two of them immediately, right then and there at the campfire.

Enough of such dour stocktaking. It’s morning. She has to cut out these daydreams in which Zeb performs decisive leadership acts that she ought to have performed herself. She needs to get up, go outside, join the others. Repair what can’t be repaired, mend what can’t be mended, shoot what needs to be shot. Hold the fort.

She swings her legs off the bed, sets her feet on the floor, stands. Her muscles hurt, her skin feels like sandpaper, but it’s not so bad once you’re up.

She chooses a bedsheet – lavender with blue dots – from the selection on her shelf. There’s a pile of sheets in every cubicle, like towels in a hotel of old. Her pink top-to-toe from the AnooYoo Spa is in rags and may be infected with whatever it is Jimmy might have: she’ll need to burn it. When she gets the time she’ll sew a few of the sheets together, with arms and a hood, but meanwhile she drapes the lavender sheet around herself toga-style.

There’s no shortage of bedsheets. The MaddAddamites have gleaned enough of them from the city’s deserted buildings to last a while, and they also have a stash of pants and T-shirts for heavy work. But the sheets are cooler and one-size-fits-all, so they’re the MaddAddamite attire of choice. When the bedsheets are used up they’ll have to think of something else, but that won’t happen for years. Decades. If they live that long.

A mirror is what she needs. Hard to know how much of a wreck she is without one. Maybe she’ll be able to get mirrors onto the next gleaning list. Those, and toothbrushes.

She slings her knapsack with her health-care items over one shoulder: the maggots, the honey, the mushroom elixir, the Willow and Poppy. She’ll tend to Jimmy first thing, supposing he’s still alive. But only after she’s had some breakfast: she can’t face the day, much less Jimmy’s festering foot, on an empty stomach. Then she picks up her rifle and steps out into the full glare of morning.

Although it’s still early, the sun’s already burning white. She hoists
one end of her bedsheet over her head for protection, checks out the cobb-house yard. The red-headed Mo’Hair, still at large, is eyeing the vegetables through the kitchen-garden fence while chewing on some kudzu. Its friends in the Mo’Hair pen are bleating at it: silver Mo’Hairs, blue ones, green ones and pink ones, brunettes and blondes: the full range of colours.
Hair Today, Mo’Hair Tomorrow
went the ad when the creatures had first been launched.

Toby’s present-day hair is a Mo’Hair transplant: she didn’t use to be so raven-hued. Maybe that was why the Mo’Hair had come into her cubicle to lick her on the leg. It wasn’t the salt, it was the faint smell of lanolin. It thought she was a relative.

Just so long as I don’t get jumped by one of the rams, she thinks. She’ll have to watch herself for signs of sheepishness. Rebecca must be up by now, dealing with breakfast issues over at the cooking shack; maybe she’s got some floral-scented shampoo tucked away in her supply room.

Over near the garden, Ren and Lotis Blue are sitting in the shade, deep in conversation. Amanda is sitting with them, staring off into the distance. Fallow state, the Gardeners would say. They used that diagnosis for a wide range of conditions, from depression to post-traumatic stress to being permanently stoned. The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe. Toby really hopes this is true of Amanda. She’d been such a lively child in Toby’s class at the Gardener school, back there on the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. When was that? Ten, fifteen years ago? Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

Ivory Bill and Manatee and Tamaraw are fortifying the boundary fence. In daylight it looks flimsy, permeable. Onto the skeleton of the old ornamental ironwork paling they’ve attached an assortment of materials: lengths of wire fencing interwoven with duct tape, a mixture of poles, a row of pointed sticks with their ends set in the ground and the points facing out. Manatee is adding more sticks; Ivory Bill and Tamaraw are on the other side of the fence, with shovels. They appear to be filling in a hole.

“Morning,” says Toby.

“Take a look at this,” says Manatee. “Something was trying to tunnel under. Last night. Sentries didn’t see them, they were chasing those pigs off at the front.”

“Any tracks?” said Toby.

“We think it was maybe more of those pigs,” Tamaraw says. “Smart – distracting attention, then trying a sneaky dig. Anyway, they didn’t get in.”

Beyond the boundary fence there’s a semicircle of male Crakers, evenly spaced, facing outward, peeing in unison. A man in a striped bedsheet who looks like Crozier – in fact, it is Crozier – is standing with them, joining in the group pee-in.

What next? Is Crozier going native? Will he shed his clothes, take up a cappella singing, grow a huge penis that turns blue in season? If the first two items were the price of entry for the third, he’d do it in a shot. Soon every single human male among the MaddAddamites will be yearning for one of those. And once that starts, how long before the rivalries and wars break out, with clubs and sticks and stones, and then …

Get a grip, Toby, she tells herself. Don’t borrow trouble. You really, really, really need some coffee. Any kind of coffee. Dandelion root. Happicuppa. Black mud, if that’s all there is.

And if there were any booze, she’d drink that too.

A long dining room table has been set up beside the cooking shack. There’s a shade sail deployed above it, gleaned from some deserted backyard. All the patios must be derelict now, the swimming pools cracked and empty or clogged with weeds, the broken kitchen windows invaded by the probing green snoutlets of vines. Inside the houses, nests in the corners made from chewed-up carpets, wriggling and squeaking with hairless baby rats. Termites mining through the rafters. Bats hawking for moths in the stairwells.

“Once the tree roots get in,” Adam One had been fond of saying to the Gardener inner circle, “once they really take hold, no human-built
structure stands a chance. They’ll tear a paved road apart in a year. They’ll block the drainage culverts, and once the pumping systems fail, the foundations will be eaten away, and no force on earth will be able to stop that kind of water, and then, when the generating stations catch fire or short out, not to mention the nuclear …”

“Then you can kiss your morning toast goodbye,” Zeb had once added to this litany. He’d just blown in from one of his mysterious courier missions; he looked battered, and his black pleather jacket was ripped. Urban Bloodshed Limitation was one of the subjects he taught the Gardener kids, but he didn’t always practise it. “Yeah, yeah, we know, we’re doomed. Any hope of some elderberry pie around here? I’m starving.” Zeb did not always show a proper reverence towards Adam One.

Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been – long ago, briefly – a queasy form of popular entertainment. There had even been online
TV
shows about it: computer-generated landscape pictures with deer grazing in Times Square, serves-us-right finger-wagging, earnest experts lecturing about all the wrong turns taken by the human race.

There was only so much of that people could stand, judging from the ratings, which spiked and then plummeted as viewers voted with their thumbs, switching from imminent wipeout to real-time contests about hotdog-swallowing if they liked nostalgia, or to sassy-best-girlfriends comedies if they liked stuffed animals, or to Mixed Martial Arts Felony Fights if they liked bitten-off ears, or to Nitee-Nite live-streamed suicides or HottTotts kiddy porn or Hedsoff real-time executions if they were truly jaded. All of it so much more palatable than the truth.

“You know I’ve always sought the truth,” said Adam One that time, in the aggrieved tone he sometimes adopted with Zeb. He didn’t use this tone with anyone else.

“Yeah, right, I do know that,” said Zeb. “Seek and ye shall find, eventually. And you found. You’re right, I don’t dispute that. Sorry. Chewing with my mind full. Stuff comes out my mouth.” And that tone said, This is the way I am. You know that. Suck it up.

If only Zeb were here, thinks Toby. She has a quick flash of him disappearing under a cascade of glass shards and chunks of cement as another burnt-out high-rise crashes down, or howling as a chasm opens under his feet and he plummets into an underground torrent no longer controlled by pumps and sewers, or humming carelessly as from behind him appears an arm, a hand, a face, a rock, a knife …

But it’s too early in the morning to think like that. Also it’s no use. So she tries to stop.

Around the table is a collection of random chairs: kitchen, plastic, upholstered, swivel. On the tablecloth – a rosebud-and-bluebird motif – are plates and glasses, some already used, and cups, and cutlery. It’s like a surrealist painting from the twentieth century: every object ultra-solid, crisp, hard-edged, except that none of them should be here.