Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

“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.

There are often green rabbits near the swimming pool. Toby shoots at one of them from the rooftop, but she can’t seem to hit it. Is conscience twisting her aim? Maybe she needs a bigger target, a deer or a dog. She hasn’t sen the pigs lately, or any of the sheep. Just as she was getting all set to eat them, they’re gone.

She locates the packsacks on a laundry-room shelf. She hasn’t been down there since the pumps stopped working, and the air’s thick with mildew. Luckily the packsacks aren’t cotton but impenetrable synthetic. She takes them up to the roof, sponges them off, leaves them in the hot sun to dry.

She lays out her available supplies on the kitchen counter. Don’t carry so much weight that you burn more calories than you can eat, says the voice of Zeb. Tools are more important than food. Your best tool is your brain.

The rifle, of course. Ammunition. Trowel, for digging roots. Matches. Barbecue lighter, which won’t last long but it might as well be used up. Pocket knife with scissors and tweezers. Rope. Two sheets of plastic, handy in rain. Windup flashlight. Gauze bandages. Duct tape. Plastic snap-top containers. Cloth bags for wild edibles. Cooking pot. The Kelly kettle. Toilet paper – a luxury item, but she can’t resist. Two medium-sized Zizzy Froots from a Spa minibar, raspberry flavour: junk food, but food, since it has calories in it. The bottles can be used later, for water.

Spoons, metal, two; cups, plastic, two. The remaining sunblock. The last SuperD bug spray. Binoculars: heavy but necessary. The mop handle. Sugar. Salt. The last of the honey. The last Joltbars. The last soybits.

The syrup of Poppy. The dried mushrooms. The Death Angels.

The day before they leave, she cuts her hair short. It’s a shorn look – it reminds her of Joan of Arc on a bad day – but she doesn’t want a hair handle growing out of her head, all the better to grab you by and slash your throat. She cuts Ren’s hair as well. They’ll be cooler that way, she tells her.

“We should bury the hair,” says Ren. She wants it out of sight for some reason Toby can’t fathom.

“Why don’t we put it on the roof?” says Toby. “That way the birds can make nests out of it.” She doesn’t intend to waste her body’s calories digging a hair burial site.

“Oh. Okay,” says Ren. This idea seems to please her.

They leave the Spa building just before dawn. They’re dressed in pink cotton exercise outfits, the loose pants and the T-shirt top with the kissy mouth and the winky eye on the front. Pink canvas sport shoes, of the kind the ladies wore to do their rope skipping and weight training. Broad pink hats. They smell of SuperD, and of rancid SolarNix. In their packsacks are their pink top-to-toes, for when the sun gets too high. If only everything weren’t so pink, thinks Toby – like baby clothes or girly birthday parties. Not an adventurous colour. Terrible choice for camouflage.

She knows the situation is grave, as the news used to say – of course it is. But nonetheless she feels cheerful, almost giggly. As if she’s a little drunk. As if they’re just going on a picnic. It must be a surge of adrenalin.

The eastern horizon is brightening; mist rises from the trees. Dew shimmers on the lumirose bushes, mirroring the faint eerie light of their flowers. The sweetness of the damp meadow breathes all around them. The birds are beginning to stir and chirp; the vultures on the bare branches are spreading their wings to dry. A peagret flaps towards them from the south, sails over the meadow, then swoops in for a landing on the edge of the green-scummed swimming pool.

It occurs to Toby that she may never see this vista again. Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering, Mine! Mine! Did she enjoy her enforced stay in the AnooYoo Spa? No. But it’s her home territory now: she’s left her skin flakes all over it. A mouse would understand: it’s her nest. Farewell is the song Time sings, Adam One used to say.

Somewhere dogs are barking. She’s heard them at intervals over the past months, but today they sound closer. She doesn’t much like this. With nobody to feed them, any dogs left by now are sure to have turned wild.

She’d climbed up to the rooftop before they left, scanned the fields. No pigs, no Mo’Hairs, no liobams. Or none in plain view. How little I’ve ever been able to see, she thinks. The meadow, the driveway, the swimming pool, the garden. The edge of the forest. She’d like to avoid going in there, among the trees. Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.

Look, she thinks at the forest, with its hidden pigs and liobams. And Painballers too, for all she knows. Don’t push me. I may be pink, but I’ve got a rifle. Bullets too. Longer range than a spraygun. So back off, assholes.

The Spa grounds and its woodland perimeter are separated from the surrounding Heritage Park by a chain-link fence topped with electrified barbed wire, though the electricity won’t be functional now. Four gates, east, west, north, and south, with winding driveways connecting them. It’s Toby’s plan to spend the night at the eastern gatehouse. That’s not too far for Ren to walk: she’s still not strong enough for heroic trekking. The next morning they can begin to make their way gradually towards the sea.

Ren still believes they’ll find Amanda. They’ll find her, and Toby will shoot the Gold Painballers with her rifle, and then Shackleton and Crozier and Oates will reappear from wherever they’ve been hiding. Ren’s not yet free of the effects of her illness. She wants Toby to fix and cure everything, as if she herself were still a child; as if Toby were still Eve Six, with magic adult powers.

They pass the crashed pink minivan and, around a curve in the road, two other vehicles – a solarcar, a jeep-sized garboil guzzler. Judging from the blackened wreckage, both must have burned. There’s a rusty, sweetish odour mixed in with the charred smell.