The Year of the Flood

As Ren and Toby continue through the meadow, they see nature restoring itself: butterflies float all around, vines spread quickly, and fish populate the stream. Next to the stream they see signs of digging, and Toby assumes one of the Gardeners must have been here because they were taught not to drink directly from a stream, but to make a hole beside it to filter the water.

Toby fills their water bottle with water from the hole, and they move away from the meadow and toward the trees, hoping to hide from the sun. Soon they run into Oates’s body; he is hanging from a tree, his throat is cut, and there is wound in his back, which suggests that whoever killed him stole his kidneys.

Seeing Oates, Ren sobs uncontrollably and refuses to keep going. Toby grabs Ren’s shoulder and shakes her to restore her senses. Toby promises Ren that they will cut Oates down and bury him later, but now they have to hurry to reach the gatehouse before the afternoon thunderstorm.

Although after seeing Oates, Toby is terrified and devastated, but she can’t show her feelings to Ren and so continues leading them to the gatehouse. They reach it just as the storm breaks, and they shelter themselves in the reception area. By the gate, they come across four legs of what used to be a lavender Mo’Hair sheep; Toby takes them to make soup.

The gatehouse seems empty, but when Toby shines her flashlight through the inner room, she notices a person lying in the corner, pretending to be asleep. The room is filled with papers and other flammables, and since Toby is desperate to make a fire so they can eat, she heads in. Before entering the room, Toby looks for the biggest rock she can find, and afterward hands Ren her rifle, instructing her to shoot if anyone but Toby comes out of the inner room.

When Toby goes in, the person lying in the corner begins to talk, and Toby realizes that it’s Blanco. He is injured in the leg after she shot at him, and the other two Painballers left him to die. Toby pretends that she wants to help him; Blanco, despite his severe condition, is as aggressive as ever and calls her a “skinny bitch.” Toby can smell that his body is decaying, so under the pretense of getting him some water, she mixes some powdered amanitas, which the Gardeners called the white Death Angel, and poppy into his drink.

As Toby returns to give Blanco the concoction, he shoves himself across the floor with his sharp knife out. He was hoping to grab Toby by the ankles when she returned, but Toby rolls the bottle toward him and watches until he finishes the drink. Afterward, Ren and Toby settle for the night on the roof, and Toby contemplates whether she committed murder or an act of mercy.

Toby wakes up before sunrise and scans the territory around them. She notices that nature is regenerating, and to her “everything looks so fresh, as if newly created” (460). To the east, Toby notices eight pigs and assumes they are the same ones she’s encountered before, “the grudge-bearing pigs, the funeral-holding pigs” (460). At first she waves at them to go away, but they just stare at her, so she grabs her rifle and aims at them; only then they run away, “almost like they know what a rifle is” (460).

Before leaving the gatehouse, Toby checks on Blanco; he is cold, and she covers him with a blanket and drags him onto the flower bed outside. Although his knife is very sharp and would make a good tool, she leaves it near his body because of its bad karma.

Toby and Ren reach some picnic-table clearings in Heritage Park, where kudzu is already taking over everything. They pass the place where they buried Pilar, and Toby silently asks her mentor for some words of wisdom. Then they see a flock of Mo’Hair sheep and a man in a white bedsheet, with a belt around his waist. He has a staff and a spraygun, and for a moment Toby thinks that he’s one of the Painballers, but then Ren sees that it’s Croze and runs toward him.

After a warm welcome from Ren, Croze explains that he and some other people now live in the cobb house, where the Gardeners used to have their Tree of Life Exchange. He takes Ren and Toby there, and they meet other MaddAddam members who have survived. To make a connection, Toby tells them that she is familiar with their work because she was a participant in the playroom under the codename Inaccessible Rail. After hearing this, the MaddAddam members become friendlier toward her because Zeb always told them that the person under this codename was “solid” (466).

Ivory Bill, one of the MaddAddam survivors, informs Croze that while he was gone, the two Painballers came by with an offer: They wanted to exchange Amanda for spraygun cells. After the MaddAddam members refused to trade with them, they left. Hearing this, Ren insists that they go look for Amanda. She tries to convince everyone they will need her to “rebuild human race” (467) because “she’s so good at everything” (467).

Afterward, Croze gives Ren a tour, showing her their garden, their violet porta-biolets, and a solar battery they are trying to fix. Croze explains that they cannot really grow anything in their garden because of pig attacks. He mentions that Zeb considers them “superpigs, because they’re spliced with human brain tissue” (468). Realizing that Zeb is alive makes Ren dizzy, and Croze puts his arm around her to calm her down.

As Ren and Croze wander aside, Toby tells Ivory Bill about Blanco and his death from “an infected bullet wound” (470). While they talk, Rebecca approaches and welcomes Toby warmly. As they have coffee made of toasted dandelion roots, and some cold pork that Rebecca justifies as “needs must when the devil drives” (470), the two women exchange their stories of survival. Rebecca describes her work secretly distributing the bioforms and how she, Zeb, and Katuro hid in the Wellness Clinic when the Flood hit. Rebecca adds that at the moment Zeb and Shackie are out looking for Adam One, which gives Toby hope that maybe Zeb looked for her as well.

They are interrupted by the barking of dogs and rush outside, where a pack of about 15 wild dogs is bounding toward the house. The MaddAddams shoot at them with sprayguns, killing seven dogs. Ivory Bill explains that the dogs are “Watson-Crick splices [...] that’ll tear out your throat” (471).

After Lotis Blue and White Sedge ensure the dogs are dead, Toby, Rebecca, and two other MaddAddam women skin and butcher the dead animals. As they cut up the meat and put it into a pot, Toby feels a mixture of sickness and hunger.

Croze offers Ren his bed, which is just a platform with a Mo’Hair fleece, and Ren falls asleep. When the afternoon thunderstorm wakes her up, she finds Croze curled around her. He shares their plans for the near future: to kill the two Painballers, to tame the pigs, and then to go to the beach and fish. He tells her more about the MaddAddams, and how after working with Zeb, they ended up as brain slaves because of a MaddAddam codenamed Crake. His story makes Ren realize that they must have been working on the same project Glenn mentioned when he came to Scales: building “some kind of perfectly beautiful human gene splice that could live forever” (474). Croze also adds that the MaddAddam scientists are the ones who, under death threats from CorpSeCorps, developed the BlyssPluss pill, and that the pandemic started because Crake ordered them to put the virus in the pill. Croze adds that the perfect people Crake created are living by the shore; “they don’t need clothes, they eat leaves, they purr like cats” (475). Croze also mentions that Crake had a friend who “told a lot of stupid jokes and drank too much” (476), who Ren realizes must be Jimmy. She wonders if he’s still alive.

When they return to the yard, Zeb, Shackie, and Katuro are back, and Ren is surprised to see Toby smiling and happy. Ren wants Zeb to be proud of her for surviving, but he only tells her that she grew up. The men brought some food from the Compounds. They report seeing signs of the Gardeners in the Buenavista, but they must have moved on.

After a dinner of nettle soup and Mo’Hair-milk cheese, Zeb announces that their main task is to find Adam One and other Gardeners, so they will go to Sinkhole the next morning to check the Edencliff Rooftop. Ren insists that they look for Amanda, too, but Zeb doesn’t want her to go alone, so Toby volunteers to go with her, armed with her rifle. Early the next morning, Toby and Ren take some food and tools and set out to look for Amanda.