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?”

“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.

“Guards were still there, it turned out,” said Shackie. “In the gatehouse. Only they were kind of melted.”

“So we went online,” said Croze, “The news was still working. Big disaster coverage, so we figured we shouldn’t go out and mingle. We locked ourselves into one of the guardhouses — they had some food in there.”

“Problem was, the Golds were in the guardhouse on the other side of the gate. We kept thinking they’d whack us when we were sleeping.”

“We took turns staying awake, but it was too much strain, just waiting. So we forced them out,” said Croze. “Shackie went through a window at night and cut their water lines.”

“Fuck!” said Amanda with admiration. “Really?”

“So they had to leave,” said Oates. “No water.”

“Then we ran out of food and we had to leave too,” said Shackie. “We thought maybe they’d be waiting for us, but they weren’t.” He shrugged. “End of story.”

“Why did you come here?” I said. “To Scales.”

Shackie grinned. “This place had a reputation,” he said.

“A legend,” said Croze. “Even though we didn’t think there’d be any girls still left in it. We could at least see it.”

“Something to do before you die,” said Oates. He yawned.

“Come on, Oatie,” said Amanda. “Let’s put you to bed.”

We took them upstairs and ran each of them through a Sticky Zone shower, and they came out a lot cleaner than when they went in. We gave them towels and they dried off, and then we tucked them into beds, one in each room.

It was me who took care of Oates — gave him his towel and soap, and showed him the bed where he could sleep. I hadn’t seen him for such a long time. When I left the Gardeners he was just a little kid. A little brat — always getting into trouble. That’s how I remembered him. But cute, even then.

“You’ve grown a lot,” I said. He was almost as tall as Shackie. His blond hair was all damp, like a dog that’s been swimming.

“I always thought you were the best,” he said. “I had a huge crush on you when I was eight.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Can I kiss you?” he said. “I don’t mean in a sexy way.”

“Okay,” I said. And he did, he gave me the sweetest kiss, beside my nose.

“You’re so pretty,” he said. “Please keep your bird suit on.” He touched my feathers, the ones on my bum. Then he gave this shy little grin. It reminded me of Jimmy, the way he was at first, and I could feel my heart lurch. But I tiptoed out of the room.

“We could lock them in,” I whispered to Amanda out in the hallway.

“Why would we do that?” said Amanda.

“They’ve been in Painball.”

“So?”

“So, all Painball guys are unhinged. You don’t know what they’ll do, they just go crazy. Plus, they might have the germ. The plague thing.”

“We hugged them,” said Amanda. “We’ve already got every germ they’ve got. Anyway, they’re old Gardener.”

“Which means?” I said.

“Which means they’re our friends.”

“They weren’t exactly our friends back then. Not always.”

“Relax,” said Amanda. “Those guys and me did lots of stuff together. Why would they hurt us?”

“I don’t want to be a time-share meat-hole,” I said.

“That’s pretty crude,” said Amanda. “It’s not them you should be afraid of, it’s the three Painball guys who were in there with them. Blanco’s not a joke. They must be out there somewhere. I’m putting my real clothes back on.” She was already peeling off her flamingo suit, pulling on her khaki.

“We should lock the front door,” I said.

“The lock’s broken,” said Amanda.

Then we heard voices coming along the street. They were singing and yelling, the way men did at Scales when they’re more than drunk. Stinking drunk, smashing-up drunk. We heard the crash of glass.

We ran into the bedrooms and woke up our guys. They put on their clothes very fast, and we took them to the second-floor window that overlooked the street. Shackie listened, then peered cautiously out. “Oh shit,” he said.

“Is there another door in this place?” Croze whispered. His face was white, despite his sunburn. “We need to get out. Right now.”

We went down the back stairs and slipped out the trash door, into the yard where the garboil dumpsters were, and the bins for empty bottles. We could hear the Gold Teamers bashing around inside the Scales building, demolishing whatever hadn’t been demolished already. There was a giant smash: they must have pulled down the shelving behind the bar.

We squeezed through the gap in the fence and ran across the vacant lot to the far corner and down the alleyway there. They couldn’t possibly see us, yet I felt as if they could — as if their eyes could pierce through brick, like TV mutants.

Blocks away, we slowed to a walk. “Maybe they won’t figure it out,” I say. “That we were there.”

“They’ll know,” said Amanda. “The dirty plates. The wet towels. The beds. You can tell when a bed’s just been slept in.”

“They’ll come after us,” said Croze. “No question.”