Cobb House
Morning
Toby dreams that she's in her little single bed, at home. Her stuffed lion is on the pillow beside her, and her big shaggy bear that plays a tune. Her antique piggy bank is on her desk, and the tablet she uses for her homework, and her felt-tip crayons, and her daisy-skinned cellphone. From the kitchen comes the sound of her mother's voice, calling; her father, answering; the smell of eggs frying.
Inside this dream, she's dreaming of animals. One is a pig, though six-legged; another is cat-like, with compound eyes like a fly. There's a bear as well, but it has hooves. These animals are neither hostile nor friendly. Now the city outside is on fire, she can smell it; fear fills the air. Gone, gone, says a voice, like a bell tolling. One by one the animals come towards her and begin to lick her with their warm, raspy tongues.
At the edge of sleep, she gropes towards the retreating dream: the burning city, the messengers sent to warn her. That the world has been changed utterly; that the familiar is long dead; that everything she used to love has been swept away.
As Adam One used to say, The fate of Sodom is fast approaching. Suppress regret. Avoid the pillar of salt. Don't look back.
She wakes to find a Mo'Hair licking her leg: a red-head, its long human hair braided into pigtails, each with a string bow: some sentimentalist among the MaddAddamites has been at work. It must have got out of the pen where they're keeping them.
"Move it," she says to it, shoving it gently with her foot. It gives her a look of addled reproach - they're none too bright, the Mo'Hairs - and clatters out through the doorway. We could use some doors around here, she thinks.
The morning light is filtering in through the piece of cloth that's been hung over the window in a futile attempt to keep out the mosquitoes. If only they could find some screens! But they'd have to install window frames because the cobb house wasn't built to be lived in: it had been a parkette staging pavilion for fairs and parties, and they're squatting in it now because it's safe. It's away from the urban rubble - the deserted streets and random electrical fires and the buried rivers that are welling up now that the pumps have failed. No collapsing building can fall down on it, and as it's only one storey high, it's unlikely to fall down on itself.
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.
Breakfast
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.