The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam 2)

Mist rising.

Oodle-oodle-ooo. Oodle-oodle-oo. Chirrup, twareep. Aw aw aw. Ey ey ey. Hoom hoom baroom.

Mourning dove, robin, crow, bluejay, bullfrog. Toby says their names, but these names mean nothing to them. Soon her own language will be gone out of her head and this will be all that's left in there. Ooodle-oodle-oo, hoom hoom. The ceaseless repetition, the song with no beginning and no end. No questions, no answers, not in so many words. Not in any words at all. Or is it all one huge Word?

Where has this notion come from, out of nowhere and into her head?

Tobeee!

So much like someone calling her. But it's only birdsong.

She's up on the roof, cooking her daily portion of land shrimp in the cool of the morning. Don't scorn the lowly table of Saint Euell, says the voice of Adam One. The Lord provides, and sometimes what He provides is land shrimp, says Zeb. Rich in lipids, a good source of protein. How do you think bears get so fat?

Best to cook outside, because of the smoke and heat. She's using her Saint Euell -- inspired hobo stove, made of a bulk-sized body-butter can: hole in the bottom for dry sticks and the draft, hole on the side for smoke. The maximum heat for the minimum fuel. No more than needed. The land shrimp sizzle on the top.

Suddenly there's a racket of crows: they're excited about something. Not alarm calls, so not an owl. More like astonishment: Aw Aw! Look! Look! Look at that!

Toby scrapes the crispy land shrimp off the top of her tin can onto her plate -- to waste food is to waste Life, says Adam One -- then douses the fire with her pot of rainwater and hits the rooftop, flat on her belly. Lifts the binoculars. The crows are flying around above the treetops, a flock of them. Six or seven. Aw! Aw! Look! Look! Look!

Two men come out from among the trees. They aren't singing, and they aren't naked and blue: they have clothes on.

There are still people, Toby thinks. Alive. Maybe one of them is Zeb, come in search of her: he must have guessed she'd still be here, still be holed up, still holding out. She blinks: are these tears? She wants to rush downstairs and out into the open, hold out her arms in welcome, laugh with happiness. But caution restrains her, and she crouches down behind the air-conditioning exhaust unit and peers through the rooftop railings.

It could be a trick of the senses. Is she seeing things again?

The men are in camouflage gear. The one in front has a weapon of some kind -- a spraygun, perhaps. Surely not Zeb: wrong shape. Neither of them is. There's another person with them -- man or woman? Tall, in a khaki outfit. Head hanging down; hard to tell which. Hands held together in front, as if in prayer. One of the men has this person by the arm or elbow. Pushing or pulling.

Then another man emerges from the shadows. He's leading a huge bird on a leash -- no, on a rope -- a bird with blue-green iridescent plumes like a peagret. But this bird has the head of a woman.

I must be hallucinating again, thinks Toby. Because no matter what the gene splicers could do, they couldn't do this. The men and the bird-woman look real and solid enough, but then, hallucinations do.

One of them has a burden slung over his shoulder. At first she thinks it's a sack, but no, it's a haunch of something. It has fur. Golden fur. Is it a liobam? A shiver of horror runs through her: sacrilege! They've killed an Animal on the Peaceable Kingdom list!

Think clearly, Toby orders herself. First of all, since when are you a fanatical Peaceable Kingdom Isaiahist? Second, if these men are real and not just runoff from an addled brain, they've been killing things. Killing and butchering large Creatures, in which case they have lethal weapons and they've started at the top of the food chain. They're a menace, they'll stop at nothing, and I ought to shoot them before they get as far as me. Then I can free the large bird or whatever it is, before they kill it as well.

Anyway, if they aren't real, it won't matter if I shoot them. They'll just dissolve like smoke.

Then the one leading the bird-woman looks up. He must have seen Toby, because he begins to shout, waving his free arm. Light glints from a knife. The other two men look, and then they all start trotting towards the Spa. The bird creature has to keep up with them because of the rope, and now Toby can see that the feathers are a costume of some kind. It's a woman. No wings. A noose around her neck.

Not a hallucination, then. Real. Real evil.

She centres the knife man in her scope and shoots at him. He staggers backwards and yells and stumbles. But she isn't fast enough, so although she squeezes off a couple more, she misses the other two.

Now the wounded man's up again, limping, and all of them are running back to the trees. The bird woman's running with them. Not that she has a choice, because of the rope. Then she falls down and vanishes into the weeds.

Behind the others, the green tree-leaves open, swallow. Gone now. All of them. She can't spot the place where the woman tumbled: the weeds are too tall. Should she go out and look for her? No. It could be a decoy. There'd be three against her one.

She watches for a long time. The crows must be following them -- the men, the one in khaki. Aw aw aw aw. A trail of sound, off into the distance.

Will they be back? They'll be back, thinks Toby. They know I'm in here, they'll guess I must have food in order to have stayed alive this long. Also I shot one of them: they'll want revenge, it's only human. They'll be vindictive, like the pigs. But they won't come soon, because they know I have a rifle. They'll have to plan.

63

TOBY. SAINT WEN BO DAY

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

No men. No pigs either. No liobams.