Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

Dad’s a sadist, Mom’s a creep ,

Close your eyes and go to sleep .

No, not sleep, even though he was so tired now. He needed to keep going. Forced march.

Idiotic, idiotic, idiotic, idiotic ,

Maybe I’m a really bad, a really bad, a bad psychotic .

There was a line of thicker green downhill that signalled a creek. He headed towards it, over the hillocks and the moss and the bare gravelly spots where pebbles had boiled to the surface during the deep frost of the winters. It wasn’t particularly cold on that day, it was in fact hot in the sun, but he was still shivering in fits, like a wet dog shaking. He hugged Chuck’s vest around himself, on top of his own.

When he was almost to the creek — it was more of a river, it had a swift current — he thought, What if it’s bugged? The vest. What if there’s a tiny transmitter sewn into it somewhere? They’ll think Chuck is alive and moving, though mysteriously not answering his phone. They’ll send someone to pick him up.

He took the vest off, waded across the creek to where the flow was the strongest, held the vest underwater. It puffed with trapped air, it wasn’t going to sink. He could put stones in the pockets; but better, he let it float away, away from him. He watched it sail downstream like some odd bloated jellyfish, thinking, That was possibly not very fucking bright. I am not focusing.

He scooped cold water into his mouth — Don’t drink too much, you’ll waterlog — wondering if he’d just swallowed a pisspotful of beaver fever. But surely there were no beavers up here. What could you catch from wolves? Rabies but not from drinking. Dissolved moose poop — would that have tiny worms in it that would suck and tunnel? Some kind of liver fluke?

Why are you standing in the water talking out loud? he asked. In plain view. Go along the creek valley, he ordered. Keep to the shrubbery, out of sight. He was counting in his head: how long would it take from the moment Chuck hadn’t answered his phone? Maybe two hours, if you factored in the what-went-wrong panic, the meeting they’d call, by remote or otherwise, the messaging, the wheel-spinning and buck-passing and veiled recriminations. All that crap.

Shoulder-high willows here, sheltered from the wind; grasses, bushes. Flies, blackflies, mosquitoes. Drove the caribou mad sometimes, it was said. You’d see them floating across the muskeg on their wide snow-shoe feet, running to nowhere. He used some of the bug spray: not too much, he needed to ration it. Worked his way west, towards where he remembered — he thought he remembered — that he would hit the remnants of the Canol Road. Nothing much left of that road now, but as he recalled from his overhead flights, there were a few buildings along here. An old bunkie, a shed or two.

He aimed for a leaning telegraph pole, an archaic wooden one. There was a tangle of wire beside it, and a caribou skeleton, the antlers snarled; farther on, an oil drum, then two oil drums, then a red truck, in almost pristine condition but no tires. Local hunters most likely took them, carted them away on their four-by-fours, back when they could afford the fuel to come in this far for game. They’d have had some use for tires like those. The truck was that rounded silhouette, streamlined, from the 1940s, which was when the road was built. Some bureauscheme to transport oil inland through a pipeline during World War Two, to keep it from being blown up by coastal submarines. They’d brought a whole bunch of soldiers up from the South to build the system, black guys, a lot of them. They’d never been in subzero cold and five-day blizzards and twenty-four-hour darkness; they must’ve thought they were in hell. Local legend had it a third of them went crazy. He could see going crazy here, even without the blizzards.

One foot sore now, must be a blister, but he couldn’t stop to look. He hopped along the crumbled ribbon of the road, shrubs taller and nearby, one eye on the sky, and there was the bunkie. Long low building, wood, no door, but still a roof on it.

Quick, into the shadow. Then he waited. It was so quiet.

Plates of junkyard metal, scraps of wood, rusted wire. Beds must have been over there. Armchair ripped apart. Radio shell, must have been once; the rounded breadloaf shape of that decade. A knob on it still. Spoon. Remains of a stove. Smell of tar. Sunlight through ceiling crack, sifting through dust. Wisps of long-gone desolation, bleached-out grief.

The waiting was worse than the walking. Parts of him throbbed: feet, heart. His breath was so raucous.

Then he wondered if he himself was bugged; if Chuck had done that, just in case — slipped a mini-transmitter into his back pocket when he wasn’t looking. If so, he was barbecue: they could be hearing him breathing right now. They’d even have heard him singing. They’d pinpoint him, shoot a mini-rocket at him, and poof.

Nothing to be done.

After — what? an hour? — he saw the ornodrone coming in low. Yes, from the northeast: Norman Wells. It went straight to the crash and made a couple of passes, transmitting visuals. Whoever was controlling it back at its base made a decision. It fired at the broken wing where Chuck lay concealed, couple of thuds. Then it blew up whatever was left of the ’thopter. It was as if Zeb could hear the voices: Nobody left alive. You sure? Couldn’t be. Both of them? Has to be. Anyway, made sure, scorched earth now .

He held his breath, but the drone didn’t follow the trail of the floating vest, and it ignored the derelict Canol bunkie; it merely turned and headed back to where it came from. They’d have wanted to get there first and mop up, then disappear fast before Bearlift Repair showed up.

Which it did, in its usual leisurely fashion. Get a move on, Zeb thought. I’m hungry. Repair hovered over the wreckage, Oh-my-Godding, no doubt, Poor-bastarding, Never-had-a-chancing. Then it, too, departed, back towards Whitehorse.

As the red twilight settled in and the mist gathered and the temperature fell, Zeb made a small fire on top of a slab of metal so he wouldn’t burn the place down, inside the building so the smoke would hit the ceiling and disperse. No telltale column. He got himself a little warmer that way. Then he did some cooking. Then he ate.

“Just like that?” says Toby. “Wasn’t it a little abrupt?”

“What?”

“Well, it was … I mean …”

“You mean it was meat? You pulling a vegetarian?”

“Don’t be wicked.”

“You wanted me to say a prayer? Thank you, God, for making Chuck such a fuckwit and having him provide for me in this unselfish though truly unintentional dumbass manner?”

“You’re making fun.”

“Then don’t go all old Gardener on me.”

“Hey! You’re old Gardener yourself! You were Adam One’s right-hand man, you were a pillar of …”

“Well, I wasn’t then. A fucking pillar. Anyway, that’s a whole other story.”

It wasn’t that easy, of course. Zeb cut small chunks and used a rusted-wire skewer, and also gave a lecture to himself — This is Nutrition, capital N! You think you’ll make it out of here without Nutrition? Nonetheless, there were some swallowing issues. Luckily he’d had a lot of practise in distancing himself from things that went into his mouth, most recently the grub at Bearlift — some of which probably was grub, a popular protein-enhancer in dried and ground form.

But his first tests of that nature had come earlier, one of the Rev’s instructive punishments being that those with potty-mouths should be forced to eat the contents of said potty. How not to smell, how not to taste, how not to think: it was like the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil blind, deaf, and mute monkeys who sat on the miniature oil drum on his mother’s dressing table with their paws clamped over their upper orifices, providing a role model for her that she was happy to follow. Have you been sick? What’s that on your chin? He said, You’re a dog, eat your own vomit. He pushed my head into the … Now, Zebulon, don’t make up stories. You know your father wouldn’t have done such a thing! He loves you!