The Year of the Flood

Toby is cooking maggots for dinner on the spa roof when she hears someone call her name. She assumes it’s just birds and continues with her task, but a racket of crows makes her grab her binoculars and look into the distance. She notices two men come out of the woods, dressed in khaki uniforms. For a moment she thinks it’s Zeb coming to look for her, and her eyes well up with tears. But soon she realizes that it can’t be Zeb because one of the men has a spraygun. It’s the Painballers who seized Ren, Amanda, Shackie, Croze, and Oates, but Toby cannot recognize them from a distance. When she sees Blanco leading Ren on a rope, Toby thinks Ren’s a bird with the head of a woman and assumes that she is merely hallucinating. One of the men is carrying Amanda slung over his shoulder, and because of her costume, Toby thinks she’s a liobam. Toby assumes that they killed the animal, which means that they “started at the top of the food chain [...] and will stop at nothing” (420).

Toby decides to shoot at them before they kill the bird woman, but the man holding the rope notices her, and all of them run toward the spa. Toby sees that he is holding a knife and shoots at him, and although she injures him, she misses the other two men. The group withdraws to the woods, but Toby knows that they will be back to kill her and take her food.

Toby is washing herself with rainwater when she hears someone calling her name and asking for help. Although she thinks it’s a trap, she grabs her rifle and goes downstairs to open the door. Toby doesn’t see anyone, but she continues to hear pleading for help. Then Ren, “thin and beat up” (422), appears near the entrance. Toby doesn’t recognize her because she is covered in dried blood and still wearing the bird costume.

Figuring Ren is “some freak from a sex cruise” (422), Toby tells her to go away. Seeing Ren’s multiple scratches and a gash on her leg, Toby thinks she is a plague carrier, and so doesn’t want to approach her to avoid infection. Ren cries and says she’s not sick, but Toby remembers Adam One’s words about the days following the Waterless Flood: “They’ll be drowning. Don’t let them clutch you. Don’t let yourself be that last straw” (423).

Toby grips her rifle, thinking of ways to defend herself. But Nuala’s voice in her head tells her that she is “an uncharitable person” (423). Suddenly, Toby realizes that under all that dirt and dried blood, “it’s only little Ren” (424).

Toby carries Ren inside the building and hoists her onto a massage table in one of the treatment cubicles. One of Ren’s eyes is black and blue, and she has cuts on her face. Toby prepares a drink of hot water with honey and gives it to Ren, but she struggles to drink. Ren insists that she needs to go look for Amanda, and that’s how Toby learns that “Amanda’s in this story somewhere” (425).

Toby boils some water to clean away Ren’s costume; when she cuts away the outfit, she notices that the crotch has been torn away. Ren has multiple rope burns around her neck, and the wound on her leg is festering.

Feverish, Ren throws up the honey water. Toby puts some honey on her wound, since it has antibiotics properties, and gives Ren some willow, chamomile, and poppy tea so that she will sleep.

When Ren wakes up, Toby gives her 30 drops of a mushroom elixir she prepared from her collection of dried mushrooms. Ren is in such bad condition that Toby wonders if she will survive; she even considers giving Ren the powdered Death Angels to “put her out of her misery” (427). She also realizes that if Ren does recover, Toby’s food supply will be gone twice as fast.

Toby reprimands herself for these thoughts and imagines Adam One saying that “Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby” (427).

When the morning comes, Ren’s fever subsides, and Toby gives her some more honey water with some mint. Once Ren is asleep again, Toby goes to the roof to wash the dirty sheets and towels. When she scans the spa premises from the top and doesn’t notice anything unusual, her thoughts drift to Adam One and Zeb. Toby wonders if they are alive. She remembers Adam One’s words about some people surviving the Waterless Flood as one of the “hypothetical proofs of the existence of God” (429).

Once Toby returns inside, she gives Ren more water to drink and some food. Since she doesn’t have any antibiotics for wound, Toby applies maggot therapy. She wraps the maggots in a sheet of gauze, puts them on Ren’s wound, and tells her not to look.

Toby no longer has homicidal thoughts toward Ren and instead wants to cure and care for her. She finds it miraculous that Ren survived the Waterless Flood and feels that “just to have a second person on the premises—even a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time—just this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house” (430).

The maggots clean the wound completely in three days, and Ren starts to feel better. Toby takes Ren to the roof to get some light and tries asking what happened to her since the Waterless Flood hit. Her conversation attempt is unsuccessful because Ren starts crying and only repeats that she has lost Amanda.

After four days, Toby helps Ren get her muscles back in shape by doing some basic exercises, like walking up and down the stairs and repeating some moves from Zeb’s Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes.

A few more days pass, and Ren finally tells Toby some pieces of her story. She talks for short periods and then stares into space silently. Ren doesn’t remember what happened to her once the three Painballers attacked them in the woods; she repeats that she needs to find Amanda before they kill her. Toby assures her that Amanda is capable of taking care of herself. She wants to add that “women are in short supply and therefore Amanda will surely be preserved and rationed” (433) but decides against it.

Toby assumes the Painballers and Amanda went east, to the sea, to fish and thus have some food. She promises that they will go there once Ren is strong enough, but Ren doesn’t want to wait.

Toby packs all necessary tools in two packsacks, selecting only the most essential items, like a cooking pot and a pocket knife. She also packs the last of the honey and the Death Angels. Before leaving, she cuts her and Ren’s hair short; they leave it on the roof for the birds to make nests out of it.

As they leave the spa building at sunrise, Toby feels nostalgic about her time there. For lack of better clothes, both Toby and Ren are dressed in all pink, which is a “terrible choice for camouflage” (437).

The spa premises is separated from the rest of Heritage Park by a barbed-wire fence. There are four gates, and Toby plans to spend the night in the eastern gatehouse because it’s not very far away. They cannot walk too long on the first day because Ren is still weak, so they cover a bit of distance at a time.

After Toby’s treatment of her illness, Ren believes in Toby’s ability “to fix and cure everything” (439). She is sure that Toby will lead them to safety and that on their way, they will find Amanda and Shackie and Crozier and Oates.

They try to walk faster, but it’s already 10 in the morning, and the sun is fierce. After a while, Ren tells Toby that she can’t walk because she has a blister, and Toby tears a strip off her clothes and wraps it around Ren’s foot. After taking a short break, Toby decides to take a shortcut through the meadow.