61

We turned corners and went up alleyways to mix up our tracks. Tracks were a problem — there was a layer of ashy mud — but Shackie said the rain would wash away our marks, and anyway the Gold Team weren’t dogs, they wouldn’t be able to smell us.

It had to be them: the three Painballers who’d smashed up Scales, that first night of the Flood. The ones who’d killed Mordis. They’d seen me on the intercom. That’s why they’d come back to Scales — to open up the Sticky Zone like an oyster in order to get at me. They would have found tools. It might have taken a while, but they’d have done it in the end.

That thought gave me a very cold feeling, but I didn’t tell the others about it. They had enough to worry about anyway.

There was a lot of trash cluttering the streets — burnt things, broken things. Not only cars and trucks. Glass — a lot of that. Shackie said we had to be careful which buildings we went into: they’d been right near one when it collapsed. We should stay away from the tall ones because the fires could have eaten away at them, and if the glass windows fell on you, goodbye head. It would be safer in a forest than in a city now. Which was the reverse of what people used to think.

It was the small normal things that bothered me the most. Somebody’s old diary, with the words melting off the pages. The hats. The shoes — they were worse than the hats, and it was worse if there were two shoes the same. The kids’ toys. The strollers minus the babies.

The whole place was like a doll’s house that had been turned upside down and stepped on. Out of one shop there was a trail of bright T-shirts, like huge cloth footprints, going all along the sidewalk. Someone must have smashed in through the window and robbed the place, though why did they think a bundle of T-shirts was going to do them any good? There was a furniture store spewing chair arms and legs and leather cushions onto the sidewalk, and an eyeglasses place with high-fashion frames, gold and silver — nobody had bothered to take those. A pharmacy — they’d trashed it completely, looking for party drugs. There were a lot of empty BlyssPluss containers. I’d thought it was just at the testing stage, but that place must have been selling it black market.

There were bundles of rag and bone. “Ex-people,” said Croze. They were dried out and picked over, but I didn’t like the eyeholes. And the teeth — mouths look a lot worse without lips. And the hair was so stringy and detachable. Hair takes years to decay; we learned that in Composting, at the Gardeners.

We hadn’t had any time to grab food from Scales, so we went into a supermarkette. There was junk all over the floor, but we found a couple of Zizzy Froots and some Joltbars, and in another place there was a solar-freezer that was still running. It had soybeans and berries — we ate those right away — and frozen SecretBurger patties, six to a box.

“How’re we going to cook them?” asked Oates.

“Lighters,” said Shackie. “See?” On the counter there was a rack of lighters in the shape of frogs. Shackie tried one: the flame shot out of its mouth, and it said Ribbit.

“Take a handful,” said Amanda.

By this time we were near the Sinkhole, so we headed for the old Wellness Clinic because it was a place we knew. I hoped there’d be some Gardeners left inside it, but it was empty. We had a picnic in our old classroom: we made a fire out of broken desks, though not a big fire because we didn’t want to send any smoke signals to the Gold Painballers, but we had to open the windows because we were coughing too much. We broiled the SecretBurgers and ate them, and half of the soybeans — we didn’t bother cooking those — and drank the Zizzy Froots. Oates kept making the frog lighter say Ribbit until Amanda told him to stop because he was wasting fuel.

The adrenalin of running away had worn off by then. It was sad to be back in the place where we’d been children: even if we hadn’t liked it all the time, I felt so homesick for it now.

I guess this is what the rest of my life will be like, I thought. Running away, scrounging for leftovers, crouching on floors, getting dirtier and dirtier. I wished I had some real clothes, because I was still in my peagret outfit. I wanted to go back to the T-shirt place to see if there was anything left inside the store that wasn’t damp and mouldy, but Shackie said it was too dangerous.

I thought maybe we should have sex: it would have been a kind and generous thing to do. But everyone was too tired, and also we were shy with one another. It was the surroundings — though the Gardeners weren’t there in their bodies, they were there in Spirit, and it was hard to do anything they’d have disapproved of if they’d seen us doing it when we were ten.

We went to sleep in a pile, on top of one another, like puppies.

The next morning when we woke up there was a huge pig standing in the doorway, staring in at us and sniffing the air with its wet, sluggy-looking nose. It must have come in the door and all the way down the hall. It turned and went away when it saw us looking at it. Maybe it smelled the burger patties being cooked, said Shackie. He said it was an enhanced splice — MaddAddam had known about those — and that it had human brain tissue in it.

“Oh yeah,” said Amanda, “and it’s doing advanced physics. You’re bullshitting us.”

“Truth,” said Shackie, a little sulky.

“Too bad we don’t have a spraygun,” said Croze. “Long time since I had bacon.”

“None of that language,” I said in a Toby voice, and we all laughed.

Before we left the Wellness Clinic we went into the Vinegar Room, for a last look at it. The big barrels were still there, though someone had taken an axe to them. There was a smell of vinegar, and also a toilet smell: people had been using a corner of the room for that, and not long ago either. The little closet door where they used to keep the vinegar bottles was standing open. There weren’t any bottles; but there were some shelves. They were at a strange angle, and Amanda went over and took an edge and pulled, and the shelves swung out.

“Look,” she said. “There’s a whole other room in here!”

We went in. There was a table that took up most of the room, and some chairs. But the most interesting thing was a futon, like our old Gardener ones, and a bunch of empty food containers — soydines, chickenpeas, dried gojiberries. Over in one corner was a dead laptop.

“Somebody else made it through,” said Shackie.

“Not a Gardener,” I said. “Not with a laptop.”

“Zeb had a laptop,” said Croze. “But he’d stopped being a Gardener.”

We left the Wellness Clinic without any clear plan. It was me who said we should go to the AnooYoo Spa: there might be food in the Ararat that Toby put together in the storeroom; she’d told me the doorcode. Also there could still be something growing in the garden. I even wondered if maybe Toby was hiding out there, but I didn’t want to get any hopes up, so I didn’t say that.

We thought we were being really careful. We couldn’t see anybody anywhere. We went into the Heritage Park and headed towards the Spa’s west gatehouse, staying on the forest pathway, under the trees — we felt less visible that way.

We were going single file. Shackie was at the front of the line, then Croze, then Amanda, then me; Oates was at the very back. Then I had a cold feeling, and I looked behind me, and Oates wasn’t there. I said, “Shackie!”

And then Amanda lurched sideways, right off the path.

Then there was a dark patch like going through brambles — everything painful and tangled. There were bodies on the ground, and one of them was mine, and that must have been when I got hit.

When I woke up again, Shackie and Croze and Oates weren’t there. But Amanda was.

I don’t want to think about what happened next.

It was worse for Amanda than for me.