The Year of the Flood

Lonely and desperate, Ren sings some old Gardener hymns and recites the names of her friends and animals, “just to keep them alive” (376). After counting the food she has left, she realizes that she has enough only for five days.

Ren thinks back to her conversations with Glenn, specifically when he told her people couldn’t say “I’ll be dead” (376) because using the pronoun “I” meant that they were still alive inside the sentence. So he considered the idea of the soul’s immortality to be a consequence of grammar. According to him, “God is a brain mutation” (377) because to understand God, people needed to understand grammar, and the basis for grammar was the Fox2P2 gene. Ren also remembers Glenn’s words that music is built into human nature, and “it would be very hard to amputate it because it’s an essential part of us, like water” (377). Glenn’s explanations of God were unlike what Ren used to hear from the Gardeners, so she hadn’t really believed him. Moreover, he used to say “use your meat computer” (377) when he meant “use your mind,” and Ren didn’t like to think of her brain as a chunk of meat.

Her thoughts are interrupted by some noises. She thinks she heard someone walking inside the building, but when she scans the room, she doesn’t see anything.

After receiving Ren’s text message to come to Scales and Tails, Amanda finally reaches her. She finds Mordis’s body near the Sticky Zone entrance and drags him away. Although Ren sees Amanda on the videoscreen, she can’t let her in the Sticky Zone because she doesn’t know the door code. Ren remembers Mordis’s last words and tells Amanda to try “Ren” as the door code. After a few unsuccessful attempts, Amanda punches in the name “Brenda” backward, and the door opens.

Since Amanda could be carrying the deadly germs, she takes a shower before hugging Ren. The girls then put on the green Scales dressing gowns and go downstairs in search of something to eat. There, they microwave ChickieNobs and open some beers as they exchange their stories of survival.

Toby wakes up feeling like there’s someone in the room. After looking around, she realizes that it’s just a bee, and she remembers Pilar’s words that “a bee in the house means a visitor [...] and if the bee dies, the visit will not be good” (382). So Toby gently wraps the bee in a washcloth and slips it into her pocket. But when Toby takes the bee to the roof to release it there, she accidentally crushes it. Anticipating an unwelcome visit, Toby looks over to the garden only to realize that the visit had already occurred: The pigs destroyed all her crops overnight. Toby is so mad she screams at them but to no avail.

Since without the garden she hardly has any food left, Toby doesn’t have much choice but to go to the forest in search of food. Repairing the garden is not an option because Toby is sure that the pigs will be back as soon as something grows there. For a few minutes Toby considers having a rooftop garden, but then she realizes it wouldn’t work without “the Gardeners’ elaborate systems” (384) that ensure watering and drainage. Toby screams at the pigs again, and it makes her feel better because “she’s talking to someone other than herself” (384).

Amanda shares with Ren what happened to her once the pandemic began to spread. At that time she was in Upstate New York, and although she had a solarcar, the highway was so jammed because some drivers “must have started dissolving right inside their cars” (386) that she decided to walk. She tried to stay close to cities, so she saw some people: some were still alive but afraid to approach her because of the bug, some were dying, “wandering around like zombies” (386), and some were already dead, “folded in on themselves like cloth” (386). During her journey, Amanda slept on top of garages or in trees, which kept her safe from the animals and “the zombie people” (386).

Although Amanda’s account is terrifying, she and Ren laugh a lot. Afterward, they go to the feather room and sleep on the green satin bedspread.

The next day, they talk about their plan, and Amanda suggests that they stay at Scales and Tails until they run out of food. In the meantime, they sleep for as long as they want and watch DVDs of old movies. In the evenings, they share drinks and go through the expensive tinned food that Mordis kept for high-profile visitors.

As Toby prepares to search for food, she puts on her pink top-to-toe and takes some necessary items: a pair of surgical gloves, her mop-handle cane, the binoculars, the rifle, and a plastic container with a spoon. Although Toby is terrified to go out, she puts everything she needs in a plastic bag and leaves the spa, planning to be back before the afternoon thunderstorms.

Making the destroyed garden her first destination, Toby fetches one onion and two radishes, and then spoons some earth into the plastic container. As Toby moves across the meadow, she is crippled by fear that someone or something might attack her, but she calms her nerves and forces herself to stay focused.

Toby reaches the dead boar, lying in the middle of the meadow. Before approaching the boar, Toby waves her mop handle at the vultures that are feeding off of its flesh, and they fly away. Toby notices some fronds scattered on top of the boar’s carcass; she wonders if pigs have been having a funeral for this boar and if the fronds are memorial bouquets.

Toby pokes at the dead boar, and many maggots appear. She is disgusted by this sight, but she hears Zeb’s voice telling her to “think of them as land shrimp” (393). Toby braces herself, scoops some maggots with the spoon, and puts them into the plastic container. Hearing thunder in the distance, Toby heads back to the spa.

Ren and Amanda open a bottle of champagne and paint their nails. Tipsy and excited, Ren goes up to Savona and Crimson Petal’s empty room and fetches their Biofilm Bodysuits. Amanda and Ren put them on and feel “the pleasant suction as the layers of living cells bonded with [their] skin” (395). Afterward, Ren puts on a peagret outfit, and Amanda puts on a flamingo one, and the two girls dance on the stage.

They turn up the music so loud that they don’t hear anything when three men enter the club. The girls notice them only when the men start clapping. Amanda tells Ren not to panic and offers the men a drink; all three are wearing a military uniform and look dirty and tired. Although Ren is terrified, when she looks closer, she realizes that the three men are Shackie, Croze, and Oates. The men immediately recognize Amanda and Ren, too, and all five of them hug.

After a drink and some food, the men share their story. They came to Scales and Tails after escaping from the Painball Arena; the CorpSeCorps put them there because of their involvement with MaddAddam. Before going to Painball, they were spreading bioform resistance, “the microbes that ate the asphalt, the mice that attacked cars” (399). They assured Ren and Amanda that Zeb, as their leader, had nothing to do with the plague, and that his plan was only to destroy the infrastructure so that “the planet could repair itself before it was too late” (399). But the CorpSeCorps tracked down MaddAddam’s scientists and gene-splicers, and while Zeb ran away, Shackie, Croze, and Oats were sent to the Painball Arena.

There they were Red Team, and Blanco and two other men were Gold Team. Blanco recognized them and promised revenge for that fight on the Edencliff Rooftop Garden, but the teams had three days to plan how to kill each other, and the plague hit during those days. Shackie, Croze, and Oats locked themselves in the guardhouse because the guards were “kind of melted” (400), but the Gold Team did the same; the two teams waited to see who’d run out of food sooner. Desperate, Shackie went out at night and cut the other team’s water lines, so Blanco’s team didn’t have another choice but to leave the Painball Arena in search for water. Eventually Shackie, Croze, and Oates ran out of food as well, so they had to leave as well.

After telling the story, the men are so tired that Amanda and Ren make them take a shower and put them to sleep. Once they are asleep, Ren suggests locking them in, because “all Painball guys are unhinged” (402), and she doesn’t want to become “a time-share meat-hole” (402). Amanda insists that they are old Gardeners, which means they are friends.

Shortly after, they hear drunk men’s voices and furniture crashing inside the club, and figure that the Gold Teamers have come after them. Amanda and Ren wake up Shackie, Croze, and Oates, and they all run away through the back door.

Ren is sure that the Gold Teamers are the three Painballers who smashed up Scales and Tails and killed Mordis on the first night of the flood. She assumes that they came back to the club because they remembered Ren was still locked there, and they had decided to get back at her.

As the five friends navigate the streets, Ren notices many signs of destruction and decay: ruined buildings, scattered bundles of rag, and bone. The surrounding area reminds her of a “doll’s house that had been turned down and stepped on” (404). Passing a ravaged pharmacy, they see a lot of empty BlyssPluss containers, and Ren assumes that the place was selling it black market since the pill was still in testing.

Because they left Scales and Tails in such a rush, they didn’t take any food with them, so they head to a local supermarkette in search of something edible. Having found some snacks and frozen SecretBurger patties, they continue to a Sewage Lagoon and end up at the old Wellness Clinic. The sight of their old classroom fills them with memories, but everyone is so tired that they fall asleep shortly after eating their scanty dinner.

In the morning, they see a huge pig standing in the doorway, and Shackie tells them that it’s a splice that has human brain tissue in it. After the pig goes away, they decide to check the old Vinegar Room, and Amanda finds the secret room behind it. It looks like someone has been hiding there because there are some empty food containers and a dead laptop, which suggests that this person was not a Gardener.

They leave the Wellness Clinic not knowing where to go. They walk in a single-file line, Shackie first, then Croze, Amanda, Ren, and Oates. On their way through Heritage Park, Ren turns and sees that Oates is gone, and then suddenly they are attacked by the three Painballers. Ren gets hit and passes out; when she wakes up, Shackie, Croze, and Oates are gone, and she and Amanda are taken away.