Dogs barking, off in the woods. They stop to listen. “If those things come over wagging their tails, you need to shoot them,” says Jimmy. “Wolvogs; they’re vicious.”
“Ammunition’s rationed,” says Rhino. “Until we find more.”
“They won’t attack us now,” says Katuro. “Too many people. Plus two Pigoons.”
“We must’ve killed most of them by now,” says Shackleton.
They pass a burnt-out jeep, then an incinerated solarcar. Then a crashed pink mini-van with the AnooYoo logo on it: kissy lips, winky eye.
“Don’t look inside,” says Zeb, who has already looked. “Not pretty.”
And now there’s the Spa building up ahead, solid pink, still standing: no one has burned it down.
The main force of the Pigoons is milling around outside, probably finishing off the organic kitchen garden, one-time source of garnishes for the clients’ diet salads. Toby remembers the hours she’d spent alone in that garden after the Flood, hoping to raise enough edible plant life so she could keep going. It’s all churned earth by now.
At least she left the door unlocked.
Shadow, mildew. Her old self, bodiless, wandering the mirrorless halls. She’d put towels over the glass to blot out her own reflection.
“Come in,” she says to everyone. “Make yourselves at home.”
Fortress AnooYoo
The Crakers are entranced by the AnooYoo Spa. They walk carefully along the hallways, bending to touch the smooth, polished floor. They lift the pink towels that Toby had hung over the mirrors, glimpse the people in there, look behind the mirrors; then, when they realize the people are themselves, they touch their hair and smile to make their reflections smile too. They sit on the beds in the bedrooms, gingerly, then stand up again. In the gymnasium the children bounce on the trampolines, giggling. They sniff at the pink soap in the washrooms. There is still a lot of pink soap.
“Is this the Egg?” they ask. Or the younger ones do. They have a faint memory of a similar place, with high walls and smooth floors. “Is this the Egg where we were made?” “No, the Egg is not the same.” “The Egg is far. It is more far than this.” “The Egg has Crake in it, the Egg has Oryx. They are not here.” “Can we go to the Egg?” “We do not want to go to the Egg now, it is dark.” “Does the Egg have the pink things in it, like this? The flower-smelling things we can eat?” “That is not a plant, that is a soap. We do not eat a soap,” and so on.
At least they aren’t singing, thinks Toby. They haven’t sung much on the way here either. They’ve been looking and listening. They seem to know there is danger.
Fortunately there haven’t been any leaks in the roof. Toby is happy about that: it means the beds, despite being slightly musty, are still sleepable. As de facto hostess, she assigns rooms. For herself she picks a Couples room. The Spa contained three of those, in the unlikely event that a husband and wife or equivalent would check in together, to undergo joint facials and cleansings and tweaks and polishes. But this offering was not popular, or not among heterosexual couples – usually women liked to have such adjustments done in private so they could emerge like butterflies from a perfumed cocoon and astound the multitudes with their ravishing beauty. Toby used to run this place, so she knows. She knows, also, about the disappointment felt by these women, when, despite the large amounts of money they’d spent, they did not look very much better.
In the closet she stashes her belongings, such as they are. Her well-worn binoculars: she hasn’t had much use for them at the cobb house because there were few vistas there, but they’ll be essential now. Her rifle, and the ammunition. She left a cache of bullets here at the Spa, so she can top up her supply now. Once that’s gone the rifle will be of no use, unless she can learn to make gunpowder.
She places her toothbrush in the ensuite bathroom. She needn’t have bothered bringing the one from the cobb house: there are a lot of toothbrushes at the Spa, all pink; and, in the supply room, a whole shelf of AnooYoo’s guest mini-toothpastes, two kinds: Cherry Blossom Organic, biodegradable with anti-plaque micro-organisms; and Kiss-in-the-Dark Chromatic Sparkle Enhancer.
The second one claims to make your entire mouth glow in the dark. Toby never tried it out, but some women swore by it. She wonders how Zeb would react if he were to be confronted with a disembodied glowing mouth. Tonight will not be the night to find out, however: she’ll be on sentry duty, up on the rooftop, and a light-up mouth would make an excellent target for a sniper.