The Year of the Flood takes place during the same years as Oryx and Crake, but is set in the pleeblands outside Compound walls. The story follows the God’s Gardeners, a green religion founded by Adam One. Its leaders, the Adams and the Eves, teach the convergence of Nature and Scripture, the love of all creatures, the dangers of technology, the wickedness of the Corps, the avoidance of violence, and the tending of vegetables and bees on pleebland slum rooftops.
The story begins in the present, in Gardener Year Twenty-five – the year of the Waterless Flood, as the Gardeners call the plague. Toby, armed with an archaic rifle, is holed up in the AnooYoo Spa, watching for other survivors – especially Zeb, the streetwise ex-Gardener whom she secretly loves. Violating Gardener codes, she shoots one of the pigoons that have been attacking her kitchen garden. One day she sees a procession of naked people in the distance, headed by a ragged, bearded man. Knowing nothing about Snowman and the Crakers, she believes she is hallucinating.
Meanwhile, young Ren is locked inside the quarantine room of Scales and Tails, the strip club where she’s been working. Just before the plague, the club was wrecked by Painballers – dehumanized prisoners of the Corps who have ruthlessly eliminated the other combatants in the Painball arena. Ren knows she will starve to death unless her childhood friend, Amanda, can arrive to unlock the door.
Long before, Toby had been rescued from the abusive Painballer, Blanco, her boss at the unpleasant SecretBurgers stand, by the God’s Gardeners. She became an Eve, specializing in mushrooms, bees, and potions. Her teacher, old Pilar – who, like many Gardeners, is a bioscience refugee from the Corps – is secretly still in touch with informants there, including the adolescent Crake.
Ren was one of Toby’s Gardener pupils, along with Amanda, a tough but charismatic pleebrat. Ren’s mother, Lucerne, had run away from the HelthWyzer Compound with Zeb, but angered by his failure to commit, she fled the Gardeners and returned to HelthWyzer when Ren was thirteen. Teenaged Jimmy seduced Ren but then discarded her. Eventually she chose to earn her living by dancing at Scales and Tails, the best option available to her.
Disagreeing about tactics, Zeb and his supporters split from Adam One’s pacifist Gardeners to engage in active bioterrorist opposition to the Corps, using the MaddAddam chatroom as a rendezvous. The remaining Gardeners, forced into hiding by the CorpSeCorps, continued to prepare for the Waterless Flood.
In the present – Year Twenty-five – Amanda reaches Scales and manages to free Ren. As they celebrate, three of their Gardener friends – Shackleton, Crozier, and Oates – arrive, pursued by Blanco and two other Painballers. The five young people flee, but along the way Ren and Amanda are raped, Amanda is kidnapped, and Oates is murdered.
Ren struggles to the AnooYoo Spa, where Toby nurses her back to health. Then they set out to recover Amanda. After dodging feral pigoons and dealing with vicious Blanco, they find a group of survivors living in a parkette cobb house. Zeb is there, with his group of MaddAddamites; so are a few former Gardeners. They all believe that Adam One must have survived, and are searching for him.
Toby and Ren leave on a risky mission to recover Amanda from her Painballer captors. At the seashore they stumble upon an encampment of strange, partly blue people who have seen two human men and a woman. Guessing these must be Amanda and her Painball kidnappers, Toby and Ren discover them just as Snowman – infected and hallucinating – is about to shoot them with his Paradice spraygun.
The Year of the Flood ends with the Painballers tied to a tree while Ren tends to the battered Amanda and the feverish Snowman. As Toby observes the Gardener forgiveness feast of Saint Julian by serving soup to everyone, the blue-hued Children of Crake approach along the shore, singing their eerie music.
Egg
The Story of the Egg, and of Oryx and Crake, and how they made People and Animals; and of the Chaos; and of Snowman-the-Jimmy; and of the Smelly Bone and the coming of the Two Bad Men
In the beginning, you lived inside the Egg. That is where Crake made you.
Yes, good, kind Crake. Please stop singing or I can’t go on with the story.
The Egg was big and round and white, like half a bubble, and there were trees inside it with leaves and grass and berries. All the things you like to eat.
Yes, it rained inside the Egg.
No, there was not any thunder.
Because Crake did not want any thunder inside the Egg.
And all around the Egg was the chaos, with many, many people who were not like you.
Because they had an extra skin. That skin is called clothes. Yes, like mine.
And many of them were bad people who did cruel and hurtful things to one another, and also to the animals. Such as … We don’t need to talk about those things right now.
And Oryx was very sad about that, because the animals were her Children. And Crake was sad because Oryx was sad.
And the chaos was everywhere outside the Egg. But inside the Egg there was no chaos. It was peaceful there.