Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

She’ll have to resort to foraging. Go out into the meadow, the forest: find protein and lipids. The boar will be putrid by now, she can’t eat that. She could shoot a green rabbit, maybe; but no, it’s a fellow mammal and she isn’t up to that kind of slaughter. Ant larvae and eggs, or grubs of any kind, for starters.

Is that what the pigs want her to do? Go outside her defensive walls, into the open, so they can jump her, knock her down, then rip her open? Have a pig-style outdoor picnic. A pig-out. She has a fair idea of what that would look like. The Gardeners weren’t squeamish about describing the eating habits of God’s various Creatures: to flinch at these would be hypocritical. No one comes into the world clutching a knife and fork and a frying pan, Zeb was fond of saying. Or a table napkin. And if we eat pigs, why shouldn’t pigs eat us? If they find us lying around.

No point in trying to repair the garden. The pigs would just wait until there was something worth destroying, and then destroy it. Maybe she should build a rooftop garden, like the old Gardener ones: then she’d never have to go outside the main building. But she’d have to haul the soil up all those stairs, in pails. Then there’s the watering in the dry seasons and the drainage in the wet seasons: without the Gardeners’ elaborate systems the thing would be impossible.

There are the pigs, peering at her above the daisies. They have a festive air. Are they snorting in derision? Certainly there’s some grunting going on, and some juvenile squealing, as there used to be when the topless bars in the Sewage Lagoon closed at night.

“Assholes!” she screams at them. It makes her feel better to scream. At least she’s talking to someone other than herself.

The worst, said Amanda, was the thunderstorms – she thought she was dead a couple of times, the lightning came so close. But then she’d lifted a rubber mat from a mallway hardware store to crouch on, and she’d felt safer after that.

She’d avoided people as much as possible. She abandoned the solarcar in upstate New York because the highway was too jammed with scrap metal. There’d been some spectacular crashes: the drivers must have started dissolving right inside their cars. “Blood hand lotion,” she said. There’d been about a million vultures. Some people would have been freaked out by them, but not Amanda – she’d worked with them in her art. “That highway was the biggest Vulture Sculpture you could imagine,” she said. She wished she’d had a camera.

After ditching the solarcar she’d walked for a while and then lifted another solar, a bike this time – easier to get through the metal snarls. When in doubt she’d kept to the urban fringes, or else the woods. She’d had a couple of close calls because other people must’ve had the same idea – she’d almost tripped over a few bodies. Good thing she hadn’t actually touched them.

She’d seen some living people. A couple of them had seen her too, but by then everyone must have known this bug was ultra-catching, so they’d stayed far away from her. Some of them were in the last stages, wandering around like zombies; or they were already down, folded in on themselves like cloth.

She slept on top of garages whenever she could, or inside abandoned buildings, though never on the main floor. Otherwise, in trees: the ones with sturdy forks. Uncomfortable but you got used to it, and best to be above ground level because there’d been some strange animals around. Huge pigs, those lion/lamb splices, packs of wild dogs on the prowl – one pack had almost cornered her. Anyway you were safer from the zombie people, up in trees: you wouldn’t want a clot on legs to fall on top of you in the darkness.

What she was telling was gruesome, but we laughed a lot that night. I guess we should have been mourning and wailing, but I’d already done that, and anyway what good would it be? Adam One said we should always look on the positive side, and the positive side was that we were still alive.

We didn’t talk about anyone we knew.

I didn’t want to sleep in my Sticky Zone room because I’d been there long enough, and we couldn’t use my old room either because the husk of Starlite was still in it. Finally we chose one of the client facilities, the one with the giant bed and the green satin bedspread and the feather-work ceiling. That room looked elegant if you didn’t think too much about what it had been used for.

The last time I’d seen Jimmy had been in that room. But having Amanda there was like an eraser: it smudged that earlier memory. It made me safer.

We slept in the next morning. Then we got up and put on our green dressing gowns and went into the Scales kitchen where they used to make the bar snacks. We microwaved some frozen soybread out of the main freezer and had that for breakfast, with instant Happicuppa.

“Didn’t you think I must be dead?” I asked Amanda. “And so maybe you shouldn’t bother coming here?”

“I knew you weren’t dead,” said Amanda. “You get a feeling when someone’s dead. Someone you know really well. Don’t you think?”

I wasn’t sure about that. So I said, “Anyway, thanks.” Whenever you thanked Amanda for something she pretended not to hear; or else she’d say, “You’ll pay me back.” That’s what she said now. She wanted everything to be a trade, because giving things for nothing was too soft.

“What should we do now?” I said.

“Stay here,” said Amanda. “Until the food’s gone. Or if the solar shuts off and the stuff in the freezers begins to rot. That could get ugly.” “Then what?” I said. “Then we’ll go somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“We don’t need to worry about that now,” said Amanda.

Time got stretchy. We’d sleep as long as we wanted, then get up and have showers – we still had water because of the solar – and then eat something out of the freezers. Then we’d talk about things we’d done at the Gardeners – old stuff. We’d sleep some more when it got too hot. Later we’d go into the Sticky Zone rooms and turn on the air conditioning and watch DVDs of old movies. We didn’t feel like going outside the building.

In the evenings we’d have a few drinks – there were still some unbroken bottles behind the bar – and raid the expensive tinned foods Mordis kept for the high-roller clients and also for his best girls. Loyalty Snacks, he called them; he’d dish them out when you’d gone the extra mile, though you never knew in advance what that extra mile would be. That’s how I got to eat my first caviar. It was like salty bubbles.

There was no more caviar left at Scales for me and Amanda, though.

Here comes famine, thinks Toby. Saint Euell, pray for me and for all who starve in the midst of plenty. Help me to find that plenty. Send animal protein quickly.

In the meadow the dead boar is entering the afterlife. Gases are rising from it, fluids are seeping away. The vultures have been at it; the crows are hanging around on the perimeter like runts at a street fight, grabbing what they can. Whatever’s going on out there, maggots are a part of it.

When in extreme need, Adam One used to say, begin at the bottom of the food chain. Those without central nervous systems must surely suffer less.

Toby gathers the necessary items – her pink top-to-toe, her sunhat, her sunglasses, a water bottle, a pair of surgical gloves. The binoculars, the rifle. Her mop-handle cane, for balance. She finds a plastic snap-top and punches some holes in the lid, adds a spoon, and stows everything in a plastic gift bag with the winky-eye AnooYoo Spa logo on it. A packsack would be better, it would leave her hands free. There used to be some packsacks around here – the ladies took them on strolls, with picnic sandwiches in them – but she can’t remember where she put them.