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.
Rampart
~
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 Nothing of use, apart from a tube of sunblock - no good for cuts - some out-of-date antibiotic ointment, which he smears on the wound, and the dregs of a bottle of shaving lotion that smells like fake lemons.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.
There. Not too heavy. Now to break out.