At sunrise the next day they set out from the cobb-house compound in the Tree of Life parkette. It’s an exodus, a move away from civilization, such as it is.
Two Pigoons have arrived as escorts; the rest will meet them at the AnooYoo Spa, says Blackbeard. He’s got Toby’s binoculars, which he’s figured out how to use. Every once in a while he steps off to the side, lifts the binocs, focuses. “Crows,” he announces. “Vultures.” The Craker women laugh gently. “Oh Blackbeard, but you knew that without the eye tube things,” they say. Then he laughs too.
Rhino and Katuro walk ahead with the Pigoons, followed by Crozier and the flock of Mo’Hairs. Some of them have bundles tied onto their backs, which is new for them, though they don’t seem to mind. With their human hair, curly and straight, and the lumpy packages on top of it, they look like avant-garde hats with legs.
Shackleton stays in the middle of the procession, with Ren, Amanda, and Swift Fox, who are surrounded in their turn by most of the Craker women, attracted by their pregnant state. The Crakers make cooing noises, they smile and laugh and pat and stroke. Swift Fox appears to find this annoying, but Amanda smiles.
The rest of the MaddAddamite group is behind them, and then the Craker men. Zeb brings up the rear.
Toby walks near the Craker women, rifle at the ready. It seems a long time since she came this way with Ren, searching for Amanda. Ren must be remembering those days as well: she drops behind to join Toby, slipping her arm through Toby’s free left arm. “Thank you for letting me in,” she says. “At the AnooYoo Spa. And for the maggots. I would have died if you hadn’t taken care of me. You saved my life.”
And you saved mine, thinks Toby. If Ren hadn’t stumbled along, what would she have done? Waited and waited, shut up inside the AnooYoo by herself, until she went bonkers or dried up of old age.
They stick to the road that leads through the Heritage Park, heading northwest. There’s Pilar’s elderberry bush, covered with butterflies and bees. One of the Mo’Hairs grabs a mouthful of it on the way past.
Now they’ve reached the eastern gatehouse – pink, Tex-Mex retro – and the high fence that encloses the AnooYoo grounds. “We came here,” Ren says. “That man was inside it. The Painballer, the worst one.”
“Yes,” says Toby. It was Blanco, her old enemy. He’d had gangrene, but he was bent on murder despite that.
“You killed him, didn’t you?” says Ren. She must have known at the time.
“Let’s say I helped him enter a different plane of being,” says Toby. That was the Gardener way of putting it. “He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation.” First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.
She’d dosed Blanco with Amanita and Poppy: a painless exit, and better than he deserved. Then she’d dragged him onto the ornamental planting ringed with whitewashed stones, as a gift for the wildlife. Was the dose of Amanita strong enough to poison anything that ate him? She hopes not: she wishes the vultures well.
The heavy wrought-iron gate is wide open. Toby had tied it shut when they’d left, but the rope has been chewed apart. The two Pigoons trot through first, snuffle around the walkway to the gatehouse, nose their way in. They come back out, then trot over to Blackbeard. Subdued grunting, eye-to-eye staring.
“They say the three men have been there. But they are not there now,” he says.
“Are they sure?” Toby asks. “There was a man in there earlier. A bad man. They don’t mean that one?”
“Oh no,” says Blackbeard. “They know about that one. He was dead, on the flowers. At first they wanted to eat him, but he had bad mushrooms in him. So they did not.”
Toby checks out the ornamental flowerbed. It used to say WELCOME TO ANOOYOO in petunias; now it’s a lush thicket of meadow weeds. Down among them, is that a boot? She has no desire to probe further.
She’d left Blanco’s knife there, with the body. It was a good one: sharp. But the MaddAddamites have other knives. She only hopes the Painballers haven’t retrieved it; but they, too, must have other knives.
Now they’re in the AnooYoo grounds proper. They keep to the main roadway, although there’s a forest path: Toby and Ren had taken it earlier, to stay in the shade. That was where they’d come upon Oates, slaughtered by the Painballers and minus his kidneys, strung up in a tree.
He must still be there, thinks Toby. They should find him, cut him down, give him a proper burial. His brothers, Shackleton and Crozier, will welcome that. A true composting, with his own tree planted on top of him. Restore him to the cool peace of rootlets, the calm dissolve of earth. But now is not the time.