The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam 2)

In the afternoon she lifts the maggots from the plastic snap-top, rinses them in tepid water. Then she transfers them to a sheet of gauze from the first-aid kit, applies another sheet over the top, and tapes the maggot-filled envelope over the wound. It won't take long for the maggots to eat through the gauze: they know what they like.

"This will tickle," she tells Ren. "But they'll make you better. Try not to move your leg."

"What are they?" says Ren.

"They're your friends," says Toby. "But you don't need to look."

Her homicidal impulse of the night before is gone: she will not drag dead Ren out into the meadow for the pigs and vultures. Now she'd like to cure her, cherish her, for isn't it miraculous that Ren is here? That she's come through the Waterless Flood with only minor damage? Or fairly minor. Just to have a second person on the premises -- even a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time -- just this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house.

I've been the ghost, thinks Toby.

66

TOBY. SAINT HENRI FABRE, SAINT A

NNA ATKINS, SAINT TIM FLANNERY, SAINT ICHIDA-SAN, SAINT DAVID SUZUKI, SAINT PETER MATTHIESSEN

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

It takes the maggots three days to clean the wound. Toby watches them carefully: if they run out of dead tissue, they'll start in on living flesh.

By the second morning Ren's fever has gone, though Toby continues the mushroom drops just to make sure. Ren's eating more now. Toby helps her up the stairs to the roof and sits her down on the imitationwood bench, in the early morning light. The maggots are photophobic: light drives them into the deepest corners of the wound, which is where they need to be.

No movement out there in the meadow. No sounds from the forest.

Toby tries asking Ren where she's been ever since the Flood hit, and how she escaped it, and how she got here, why she'd been dressed in those blue feathers; but she only tries once because Ren starts crying. All she'll say is, "I've lost Amanda!"

"Never mind," says Toby. "We'll find her."

On the fourth morning Toby removes the maggot plaster: the wound is clean, and healing. "Now to get your muscles back in shape," she tells Ren.

Ren starts walking, up and down the stairs, along the corridors. She's gained a little weight: Toby's been feeding her the last few jars of AnooYoo Lemon Meringue Facial, which has a lot of sugar in it and nothing toxic that Toby can think of. She leads Ren through some exercises from Zeb's old Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes -- the satsuma, the unagi. Centred like a Fruit, sinuous like an Eel. She needs the refresher herself; she's out of practice.

After a few days Ren tells her story, or a little of her story. It comes out in short clumps of words punctuated by long periods of staring into space. She tells about being locked in at Scales, and how Amanda came all the way from the Wisconsin desert and figured out the door code. Then Shackie and Croze and Oates appeared from nowhere, just like magic, and she was so happy -- they'd been saved by being in Painball when the plague broke out. But then three horrible men from the Painball Gold Team came to Scales, and she and Amanda and the boys ran away. She'd said they should come to AnooYoo because Toby might be there, and they'd almost made it -- they were walking along through the trees, and then blackout. She can't get any farther than that.

"What did they look like?" says Toby. "Did they have any ..." She wants to say "distinguishing marks," but Ren shakes her head, meaning that that subject is closed. "I have to find Amanda," she says, wiping away tears. "I really have to. They'll kill her."

"Here, blow your nose," says Toby, handing her a pink washcloth. "Amanda's very clever." It's best to talk as if Amanda is still alive. "She's very resourceful. She'll be all right." She's about to say that women are in short supply and therefore Amanda will surely be preserved and rationed, but she thinks better of it.

"You don't understand," says Ren, crying harder. "There's three of them, they're Painball -- they're not really human. I have to find her."

"We'll look," Toby says, to be soothing. "But we don't know where they -- where she's gone."

"Where would you go?" says Ren. "If you were them?"

"Maybe east," says Toby. "To the sea. Where they could fish."

"We can go there."

"When you're strong enough," says Toby. They have to move somewhere else anyway: the food supply's shrinking fast.

"I'm strong enough now," says Ren.

Toby scours the garden, unearths one more lone onion. She digs up three burdocks from the near edge of the meadow, and some Queen Anne's lace -- the spindly white proto-carrot roots. "Do you think you could eat a rabbit?" she asks Ren. "If I cut it up very small and make it into soup?"

"I guess so," said Ren. "I'll try."

Toby's almost ready for the switch to full-blown carnivore herself. There's the sound of the rifle shot to worry about, but if there are still Painballers lurking in the forest they already know she has a gun. No harm in reminding them.