The MaddAddam Trilogy (31 page)

He scrambles up the stairs so fast he trips on his flowered sheet. From behind him comes an excited grunting and squealing, and then a crash as the desk topples over.

He emerges into a bright oblong space. What is it? The watchtower. Of course. He ought to have known that. There’s a watchtower on either side of the main gate, and other towers all the way around the rampart wall. Inside the towers are the searchlights, the monitor videocams, the loudspeakers, the controls for locking the gates, the tear-gas nozzles, the long-range sprayguns. Yes, here are the screens, here are the controls: find the target, zero in on it, push the button. You never needed to see the actual results, the splatter and fizzle, not in the flesh. During the period of chaos the guards probably fired on the crowd from up here while they still could, and while there was still a crowd.

None of this high-tech stuff is working now, of course. He looks for manually operated backups – it would be fine to be able to mow down the pigoons from above – but no, there’s nothing.

Beside the wall of dead screens there’s a little window: from it he has a bird’s-eye view of the pigoons, the group of them that’s posted outside the checkpoint cubicle door. They look at ease. If they were guys, they’d be having a smoke and shooting the shit. Alert, though; on the lookout. He pulls back: he doesn’t want them to see him, see that he’s up here.

Not that they don’t know already. They must have figured out by now that he went up the stairs. But do they also know they’ve got him trapped? Because there’s no way out of here that he can see.

He’s in no immediate danger – they can’t climb the stairs or they’d have done it by now. There’s time to explore and regroup.
Regroup
, what an idea. There’s only one of him.

The guards must have taken catnaps up here, turn and turn about: there’s a couple of standard-issue cots in a side room. Nobody in them, no bodies. Maybe the guards tried to get out of RejoovenEsense, just like everyone else. Maybe they too had hoped they could outrun contagion.

One of the beds is made, the other not. A digital voice-operated alarm clock is still flashing beside the unmade bed. “What’s the time?” he asks it, but he gets no answer. He’ll have to reprogram the thing, set it to his own voice.

The guys were well equipped: twin entertainment centres, with the screens, the players, the headphones attached. Clothes hanging on hooks, the standard off-duty tropicals; a used towel on the floor, ditto a sock. A dozen downloaded printouts on one of the night tables. A skinny girl wearing nothing but high-heeled sandals and standing on her head; a blonde dangling from a hook in the ceiling in some kind of black-leather multiple-fracture truss, blindfolded but with her mouth sagging open in a hit-me-again drool; a big woman with huge breast implants and wet red lipstick, bending over and sticking out her pierced tongue. Same old stuff.

The guys must have left in a hurry. Maybe it’s them downstairs, the ones in the biosuits. That would make sense. Nobody seems to have come up here though, after the two of them left; or if they did, there’d been nothing they’d wanted to take.

In one of the night-table drawers there’s a pack of cigarettes, only a couple gone. Snowman taps one out – damp, but right now he’d smoke pocket fluff – and looks around for a way to light it. He has matches in his garbage bag, but where is it? He must’ve dropped it on the stairs in his rush to get up here. He goes back to the stairwell, looks down. There’s the bag all right, four stairs from the bottom. He starts cautiously downward. As he’s stretching out his hand, something lunges. He jumps up out of reach, watches while the pigoon slithers back down, then launches itself again. Its eyes gleam in the half-light; he has the impression it’s grinning.

They were waiting for him, using the garbage bag as bait. They must have been able to tell there was something in it he’d want, that he’d come down to get. Cunning, so cunning. His legs are shaking by the time he reaches the top level again.

Off the nap room is a small bathroom, with a real toilet in it. Just in time: fear has homogenized his bowels. He takes a dump – there’s paper, a small mercy, no need for leaves – and is about to flush when he reasons that the tank at the back must be full of water, and it’s water he may need. He lifts the tank top: sure enough, it’s full, a mini-oasis. The water is a reddish colour but it
smells okay, so he sticks his head down and drinks like a dog. After all that adrenalin, he’s parched.

Now he feels better. No need to panic, no need to panic yet. In the kitchenette he finds matches and lights the cigarette. After a couple of drags he feels dizzy, but still it’s wonderful.

“If you were ninety and you had the chance for one last fuck but you knew it would kill you, would you still do it?” Crake asked him once.

“You bet,” said Jimmy.

“Addict,” said Crake.

Snowman finds himself humming as he goes through the kitchen cupboards. Chocolate in squares, real chocolate. A jar of instant coffee, ditto coffee whitener, ditto sugar. Shrimp paste for spreading on crackers, ersatz but edible. Cheese food in a tube, ditto mayo. Noodle soup with vegetables, chicken flavour. Crackers in a plastic snap-top. A stash of Joltbars. What a bonanza.

He braces himself, then opens the refrigerator, betting on the fact that these guys wouldn’t have kept too much real food in there, so the stench won’t be too repulsive. Frozen meat gone bad in a melted freezer unit is the worst; he came across quite a lot of that in the early days of rummaging through the pleeblands.

There’s nothing too smelly; just a shrivelled apple, an orange covered with grey fur. Two bottles of beer, unopened – real beer! The bottles are brown, with thin retro necks.

He opens a beer, downs half of it. Warm, but who cares? Then he sits down at the table and eats the shrimp paste, the crackers, the cheese food and the mayo, finishing off with a spoonful of coffee powder mixed with whitener and sugar. He saves the noodle soup and the chocolate and the Joltbars for later.

In one of the cupboards there’s a windup radio. He can remember when those things started being doled out, in case of tornadoes or floods or anything else that might disrupt the electronics. His
parents had one when they were still his parents; he used to play with it on the sly. It had a handle that turned to recharge the batteries, it would run for half an hour.

This one looks undamaged, so he cranks the thing up. He doesn’t expect to hear anything, but expectation isn’t the same as desire.

White noise, more white noise, more white noise. He tries the AM bands, then the FM. Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space:
kkkkkkkk
. Then he tries the short-wave. He moves the dial slowly and carefully. Maybe there are other countries, distant countries, where the people may have escaped – New Zealand, Madagascar, Patagonia – places like that.

They wouldn’t have escaped though. Or most of them wouldn’t. Once it got started, the thing was airborne. Desire and fear were universal, between them they’d been the gravediggers.

Kkkkk. Kkkkk. Kkkkk
.

Oh, talk to me, he prays. Say something. Say anything.

Suddenly there’s an answer. It’s a voice, a human voice. Unfortunately it’s speaking some language that sounds like Russian.

Snowman can’t believe his ears. He’s not the only one then – someone else has made it through, someone of his own species. Someone who knows how to work a short-wave transmitter. And if one, then likely others. But this one isn’t much use to Snowman, he’s too far away.

Dickhead! He’s forgotten about the CB function. That was what they’d been told to use, in emergencies. If there’s anyone close by, the CB is what they’d be doing.

He turns the dial.
Receive
, is what he’ll try.

Kkkkkk
.

Then, faintly, a man’s voice: “Is anyone reading me? Anyone out there? Do you read me? Over.”

Snowman fumbles with the buttons. How to send? He’s forgotten. Where is the fucker?

“I’m here! I’m here!” he shouts.

Back to
Receive
. Nothing.

Already he’s having second thoughts. Was that too hasty of him? How does he know who’s at the other end? Quite possibly no one he’d care to have lunch with. Still, he feels buoyant, elated almost. There are more possibilities now.

Snowman’s been so entranced – by the excitement, the food, the voices on the radio – that he’s forgotten about the cut on his foot. Now it’s reminding him: there’s a jabbing sensation, like a thorn. He sits down at the kitchen table, pulls the foot up as high as he can to examine it. Looks like there’s a sliver of bourbon-bottle glass still in there. He picks and squeezes and wishes he had some tweezers, or longer fingernails. Finally he gets a grip on the tiny shard, then pulls. There’s pain but not much blood.

Once he’s got the glass piece out he washes the cut with a little of the beer, then hobbles into the bathroom and rummages in the medicine cabinet. Nothing of use, apart from a tube of sunblock – no good for cuts – some out-of-date antibiotic ointment, which he smears on the wound, and the dregs of a bottle of shaving lotion that smells like fake lemons. He pours that on too, because there must be alcohol in it. Maybe he should hunt for some drain cleaner or something, but he doesn’t want to go too far, fry the entire foot sole. He’ll just have to cross his fingers, wish for luck: an infected foot would slow him right down. He
shouldn’t have neglected the cut for so long, the floor downstairs must be percolating with germs.

In the evening he watches the sunset, through the narrow slit of the tower window. How glorious it must have been when all ten of the videocam screens were on and you could get the full panoramic view, turn up the colour brightness, enhance the red tones. Toke up, sit back, drift on cloud nine. As it is the screens turn their blind eyes towards him, so he has to make do with the real thing, just a slice of it, tangerine, then flamingo, then watered-down blood, then strawberry ice cream, off to the side of where the sun must be.

In the fading pink light the pigoons waiting for him down below look like miniature plastic figurines, bucolic replicas from a child’s playbox. They have the rosy tint of innocence, as many things do at a distance. It’s hard to imagine that they wish him ill.

Night falls. He lies down on one of the cots in the bedroom, the bed that’s made. Where I’m lying now, a dead man used to sleep, he thinks. He never saw it coming. He had no clue. Unlike Jimmy, who’d had clues, who ought to have seen but didn’t. If I’d killed Crake earlier, thinks Snowman, would it have made any difference?

The place is too hot and stuffy, though he’s managed to pry the emergency air vents open. He can’t get to sleep right away, so he lights one of the candles – it’s in a tin container with a lid, survival supplies, you’re supposed to be able to boil soup on those things – and smokes another cigarette. This time it doesn’t make him so dizzy. Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

He thumbs through the sex-site printouts. The women aren’t his type – too bulgy, too altered, too obvious. Too much leer
and mascara, too much cowlike tongue. Dismay is what he feels, not lust.

Revision: dismayed lust.

“How could you,” he murmurs to himself, not for the first time, as he couples in his head with a rent-a-slut decked out in a red Chinese silk halter and six-inch heels, a dragon tattooed on her bum.

Oh sweetie
.

In the small hot room he dreams; again, it’s his mother. No, he never dreams about his mother, only about her absence. He’s in the kitchen. Whuff, goes the wind in his ear, a door closing. On a hook her dressing gown is hanging, magenta, empty, frightening.

He wakes with his heart pounding. He remembers now that after she’d left he’d put it on, that dressing gown. It still smelled of her, of the jasmine-based perfume she used to wear. He’d looked at himself in the mirror, his boy’s head with its cool practised fish-eye stare topping a neck that led down into that swaddling of female-coloured fabric. How much he’d hated her at that moment. He could hardly breathe, he’d been suffocating with hatred, tears of hatred had been rolling down his cheeks. But he’d hugged his arms around himself all the same.

Her arms.

He’s set the alarm on the voice-operated digital clock for an hour before dawn, guessing when that must be. “Rise and shine,” the clock says in a seductive female voice. “Rise and shine. Rise and shine.”

“Stop,” he says, and it stops.

“Do you want music?”

“No,” he says, because although he’s tempted to lie in bed and interact with the woman in the clock – it would be almost like a conversation – he has to get a move on today. How long has he
been away from the shore, from the Crakers? He counts on his fingers: day one, the hike to RejoovenEsense, the twister; day two, trapped by the pigoons. This must be the third day then.

Outside the window there’s a mouse-grey light. He pisses into the kitchen sink, splashes water onto his face from the toilet tank. He shouldn’t have drunk that stuff yesterday without boiling it. He boils up a potful now – there’s still gas for the propane burner – and washes his foot, a little red around the cut but nothing to freak about, and makes himself a cup of instant coffee with lots of sugar and whitener. He chews up a Three-Fruit Joltbar, savouring the familiar taste of banana oil and sweetened varnish, and feels the energy surge.

Somewhere in all the running around yesterday he lost his water bottle, just as well considering what was in it. Bird dung, mosquito wrigglers, nematodes. He fills up an empty beer bottle with boiled water, then snaffles a standard-issue micro-fibre laundry bag from the bedroom, into which he packs the water, all the sugar he can find, and the half-dozen Joltbars. He rubs on sunblock and bags the rest of the tube, and puts on a lightweight khaki shirt. There’s a pair of sunglasses too, so he discards his old single-eyed ones. He deliberates over a pair of shorts, but they’re too big around the waist and wouldn’t protect the backs of his legs, so he hangs on to his flowered sheet, doubling it over, knotting it like a sarong. On second thought he takes it off and packs it into the laundry bag: it might snag on something while he’s in transit, he can put it back on later. He replaces his lost aspirin and candles, and throws in six small boxes of matches and a paring knife, and his authentic-replica Red Sox baseball cap. He wouldn’t want to have that fall off during the great escape.