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The smell of decaying flesh is rank: it's hard to keep from gagging. She lifts a fold of her top-to-toe, clamps it over her nose. With the other hand she pokes at the dead boar with her stick: maggots boil forth. They're like giant grey rice.
Just think of them as land shrimp, says the voice of Zeb. Same body plan. "You're up to this," she tells herself. She has to set down the rifle and the mop handle in order to do the next part. She scoops up the twirling white maggots with the spoon and transfers them to the plastic snap-on. She drops some; her hands are shaking. There's a buzzing in her head like tiny drills, or is it only the flies? She makes herself slow down.
Thunder in the distance.
She turns her back on the forest, heads back across the meadow. She doesn't run.
Surely the trees have moved closer.
60
REN
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
One day we were drinking champagne and I said, "Let's do our nails, they're a wreck." I thought maybe it would cheer us up. Amanda laughed and said, "Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague," but we did our nails anyway. Amanda's were an orangey-pink shade called Satsuma Parfait, mine were Slick Raspberry. We were like two kids with fingerpaints, having a party. I love the smell of nail polish. I know it's toxic, but it smells so clean. Crisp, like starched linen. It did make us feel better.
After
that we had some more champagne, and I had another party idea, so I went upstairs. There was only one room with a person in it -- Starlite, in our old bedroom. I felt terrible about her, but I'd stuffed sheets all around the door so no more smell could get out, and I hoped the microbes would get on with the job so she could be transformed into something else really fast. I took the Biofilm Bodysuits and costumes from Savona's empty room and Crimson Petal's, and brought them downstairs in a giant armful, and we started trying them on.
The Biofilms needed to be sprayed with water and lubricant skin-food -- they were dried out -- but once we'd done that they slid on as usual, and you could feel the pleasant suction as their layers of living cells bonded with your skin, and then the warm, tickly feeling as they started to breathe. Nothing in but oxygen, nothing out but your natural excretions, said the labels. The face unit even did your nostrils for you. A lot of the Scales customers would have preferred membrane and bristle work if it was completely safe, but at least with the Biofilms they could relax, because they knew they weren't planking a fester.
"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?"
