Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

“This feels great,” said Amanda. “It sort of gives you a massage.”

“Recommended for the complexion,” I said, and we laughed some more. Then Amanda put on a flamingo outfit with pink feathers and I put on a peagret one, and we turned on the music and the coloured spotlights and got up on the stage and danced. Amanda was still a great dancer, she could really shake those feathers. But I was better than her by then, because of all the training I’d had, and the trapeze work; and she knew it. And that pleased me.

That was stupid of us, the whole dancing event: we’d cranked the music up really loud, and it was going right out through the open door, and if there was anyone in the neighbourhood they’d be sure to hear it. But I wasn’t thinking about that. “Ren, you’re not the only person on the planet,” Toby used to say when I was little. It was a way of telling us to have consideration. But now I really did think I was the only person on the planet. Or me and Amanda. So there we were in our flamingo-pink and peagret-blue costumes and our fresh nail polish, dancing on the Scales stage together with the music turned up, whump whump babadedump, bam bam kabam, singing along as if we didn’t have a care in the world.

Then the number came to the end, and we heard clapping. We stood there as if frozen. I felt a chill shoot through me: I had a flash of Crimson Petal hanging from the trapeze rope with a bottle shoved up her, and I couldn’t breathe.

Three guys had come in – they must have snuck in very carefully – and there they were. “Don’t run,” said Amanda to me in a quiet voice. Then she said, “You alive or dead?” She smiled. “Because if you’re alive, maybe you’d like a drink?”

“Nice dancing,” said the tallest one. “How come you didn’t get this bug?”

“Maybe we did.” said Amanda. “Maybe we’re contagious and we just don’t know it yet. Now I’m turning down the stage lights so we can see you.”

“Anyone else here?” said the tallest one. “Like, any guys?”

“None that I know of,” said Amanda. She’d dimmed the lights. “Take off your face,” she said to me. She meant the green sequins, the Biofilm. She went down the steps from the stage. “There’s some Scotch left, or we could make you a coffee.” She was peeling off her own Biofilm headpiece, and I knew what she was thinking: Make direct eye contact, like Zeb taught us. Don’t turn away, they’re more likely to swarm you from behind. And the less we looked like sparkly birds rather than people, the less likely we’d be mangled.

Now I could see the three of them better. A tall one, a shorter one, another tall one. They were in camouflage suits, very dirty ones, and they looked as if they’d been out in the sun too much. The sun, the rain, the wind.

Then all of a sudden I knew. “Shackie?” I said. “Shackie! Amanda, it’s Shackie and Croze!”

The tall one turned his face towards me. “Who the fuck are you?” he said. Not angry, just kind of stunned.

“It’s Ren,” I said. “Is that little Oates?” I started to cry.

All five of us moved towards each another like a slow-motion football huddle on TV, and then we were hugging each other. Just hugging and hugging, and holding on.

There was some orange-coloured juice in the freezer, so Amanda mixed up mimosas with the champagne that was left. We opened some salted soynuts, and microwaved a pack of faux fish, and all five of us sat at the bar. The three boys – I still thought of them as boys – practically inhaled the food. Amanda made them drink some water, but not too fast. They weren’t starving – they’d been breaking into supermarkettes and even into houses, living off what they could glean, and they’d even snared a couple of rabbits and broiled the chunks, the way we’d done it back at the Gardeners in Saint Euell Week. Still, they were thin.

Then we told one another about where we’d all been when the Waterless Flood hit. I told about the Sticky Zone, and Amanda told about the cow bones in Wisconsin. Dumb luck for both of us, I said – that we hadn’t been with other people when the thing got going. Though Adam One used to say no luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.

Shackie and Croze and Oates nearly hadn’t made it. They’d been shut up in the Painball Arena. Red Team, said Oates, showing me his thumb tattoo; he seemed proud of it. “They put us in there because of what we’d been doing,” said Shackie. “With MaddAddam.”

“Mad Adam?” I said. “Like Zeb, at the Gardeners?”

“More than Zeb. It was a bunch of us – him and us, and some others,” said Shackie. “Top scientists – gene-splicers who’d bailed out of the Corps and gone underground because they hated what the Corps were doing. Rebecca and Katuro were in it – they helped distribute the product.”

“We had a website,” said Croze. “We could share our info that way, in the hidden chatroom.”

“Product?” said Amanda. “You were pushing superweed? Cool!” She laughed.

“No way. We were doing bioform resistance,” said Croze importantly. “The splicers put the bioforms together and Shackie and me and Rebecca and Katuro had top identities – insurance and real estate, stuff like that you could travel with. So we’d take the bioforms to the locations and let them loose.”

“We’d plant them,” said Oates. “Like, you know, time bombs.”

“Some of those suckers were really cool,” said Shackie. “The microbes that ate the asphalt, the mice that attacked cars…”

“Zeb figured if you could destroy the infrastructure,” said Croze, “then the planet could repair itself. Before it was too late and everything went extinct.”

“So this plague, was it a MaddAddam thing?” said Amanda.

“No way,” said Shackie. “Zeb didn’t believe in killing people, not as such. He just wanted them to stop wasting everything and fucking up.”

“He wanted to make them think,” said Oates. “Though some of those mice got out of control. They got confused. Attacked shoes. There were foot injuries.”

“Where is he now?” I asked. It would be so comforting if Zeb was there: he’d know what we should do next.

Shackie said, “We only talked to him online. He flew solo.”

“CorpSeCorps nabbed our MaddAddam splicers, though,” said Croze. “Tracked us down. I figure some creep in our chatroom was a plant.”

“They shot them?” Amanda asked. “The scientists?”

“Don’t know,” said Shackie, “but they didn’t end up with us in Painball.”

“We were only in there a couple of days,” said Oates. “In Painball.”

“Three of us, three of them. The Gold team – they were beyond vicious. One of them – remember Blanco, from the Sewage Lagoon? Rip off your head and eat it? Lost some weight, but it was him all right,” said Croze.

“You’re joking,” said Amanda. She looked – not frightened exactly. But concerned.

“Tossed in for trashing Scales – killed some people, sounded proud of it. Said Painball was like home to him, he’d done it so much.”

“Did he know who you were?” said Amanda.

“Definitely,” said Shackie. “Yelled at us. Said it was payback time for that brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop – he’d slit us like fish.”

“What brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop?” I said.

“You’d gone by then,” said Amanda. “How did you get out?”

“Walked,” said Shackie. “We were figuring out how to kill the other team before they killed us – they gave you three days to plan, before the Start gong – but all of a sudden there were no guards. They were just gone.”

“I’m really tired,” said Oates. “I need to sleep.” He put his head down on the bar.