The Year of the Flood

  Not that you'd want to go to one of those public dump bins anyway, thought Toby. All they did was poke at your tongue and give you a few germs and viruses you didn't already have, and send you home.

  Toby's father took out a second mortgage and poured the money into the doctors and the drugs and the hired nurses and the hospitals. But Toby's mother continued to wither away.

  Her father had to sell their white frame house then, for a much lower price than the one he'd first been offered. The day after the sale closed, the bulldozers flattened the place. Her father bought another house, a tiny split-level in a new subdivision -- the one nicknamed Big Box because it was flanked by a whole flotilla of megastores. He'd dug up his rifle from under the picket fencing, smuggled it to the new house, and buried it again, this time under the patio stones in the barren little backyard.

  Then he'd lost his thermal-window job because he'd taken too much time off due to his wife's illness. His solarcar had to be sold. Then the furniture disappeared, piece by piece; not that Toby's father could get much for it. People can smell desperation on you, he said to Toby. They take advantage.

  This conversation took place over the phone because Toby had made it to college despite the lack of family cash. She'd got a meagre scholarship from the Martha Graham Academy, which she was fleshing out by waiting tables in the student cafeteria. She wanted to come home and help out with her mother, who'd been shipped back from the hospital and was sleeping on the main-floor sofa because she couldn't climb stairs, but her father said no, Toby should stay at college, because there was nothing she could do.

  Finally even the tacky Big Box house had to be put up for sale. The sign was on the lawn when Toby came home for her mother's funeral. Her father by that time was a wreck; humiliation, pain, and failure had eaten away at him until there was almost nothing left.

  Her mother's funeral was short and dreary. After it, Toby sat with her father in the stripped-down kitchen. They drank a six-pack between them, Toby two, her father four. Then, after Toby had gone to bed, her father went into the empty garage and stuck the Ruger into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  Toby heard the shot. She knew at once what it was. She'd seen the rifle standing behind the door in the kitchen: he must have dug it up for a reason, but she hadn't allowed herself to imagine what that reason might be.

  She couldn't face what was in the garage. She lay in bed, skipping ahead in time. What to do? If she called the authorities -- even a doctor or an ambulance -- they'd find the bullet wound, and then they'd demand the rifle, and Toby would be in trouble as the daughter of an admitted lawbreaker -- one who'd owned a forbidden weapon. That would be the least of it. They might accuse her of murder.

  After what seemed hours, she forced herself to move. In the garage, she tried not to look too closely. She wrapped what was left of her father in a blanket, then in plastic heavy-duty garbage bags, sealed him with duct tape, and buried him under the patio stones. She felt terrible about it, but it was a thing he'd have understood. He'd been a practical man, but sentimental under that -- power tools in the shed, roses on birthdays. If he'd been nothing but practical he'd have marched into the hospital with the divorce papers, the way a lot of men did when something too debilitating and expensive struck their wives. Left her mother to be tossed out onto the street. Stayed solvent. Instead, he'd spent all their money.

  Toby wasn't much for standard religion: none of her family had been. They'd gone to the local church because the neighbours did and it would have been bad for business not to, but she'd heard her father say -- privately, and after a couple of drinks -- that there were too many crooks in the pulpit and too many dupes in the pews. Nevertheless, Toby had whispered a short prayer over the patio stones: Earth to earth. Then she'd brushed sand into the cracks.

  She'd wrapped up the rifle in its plastic again and buried it under the patio stones of the house next door, which seemed to be empty: windows dark, no car in evidence. Maybe they'd been foreclosed. She'd taken that chance, trespassing on the neighbours, because if her father's body settled and they dug up the yard, and she'd buried the rifle beside him, it would be found too, and she wanted it to stay where it was. "You never know," her father used to say, "when you might need it," and that was right: you never did know.

  It's possible a neighbour or two saw her digging around in the dark, but she didn't think they'd tell. They wouldn't want to draw the lightning down anywhere near their own possibly weapon-filled backyards.

  She hosed the blood off the garage floor, then took a shower. Then she went to bed. She lay in the darkness, wanting to cry, but all she felt was cold. Though it wasn't cold at all.

  She couldn't sell the house without revealing that she was the owner now because her father was dead, thus unleashing a whole dumpster-load of garbage onto her own head. Where, for instance, was the corpse, and how had it become one? So in the morning, after a sparse breakfast, she put the dishes in the sink and walked out of the house. She didn't even take a suitcase. What was there to pack?

  Most likely the CorpSeCorps wouldn't bother tracing her. There was nothing in it for them: one of the Corporation banks would get the house anyway. If her disappearance was of interest to anyone, such as maybe her college -- where was she, was she ill, had she been in an accident -- the CorpSeCorps would spread it about that she'd been last seen with a cruising pimp on the lookout for fresh recruits, which is what you'd expect in the case of a young woman like her -- a young woman in desperate financial straits, with no visible relations and no nest egg or trust fund or fallback. People would shake their heads -- a shame but what could you do, and at least she had something of marketable value, namely her young ass, and therefore she wouldn't starve to death, and nobody had to feel guilty. The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.

  As for her father, everyone would assume he'd changed his name and vanished into one of the seedier pleebs to avoid paying for her mother's funeral with money he didn't have. That sort of thing was happening all the time.

  7

  The period that followed was a bad time for Toby. Though she'd hidden the evidence and managed to disappear, there was still a chance the CorpSeCorps might come after her for her father's debts. She didn't have any money they could seize, but there were stories about female debtors being farmed out for sex. If she had to make her living on her back, she at least wanted to keep the proceeds.

  She'd burned her identity and didn't have the cash to buy a new one -- not even a cheap one, without the DNA infusion or the skin-colour change -- so she couldn't get a legitimate job: those were mostly controlled by the Corporations. But if you sank deep down -- down where names disappeared and no histories were true -- the CorpSeCorps wouldn't bother with you.

  She rented a tiny room -- she had enough money left from her cafeteria savings for that. A room of her own, which might save her few possessions from theft by some dubious roommate. It was on the top floor of a fire-trap commercial building in one of the worst pleebs -- Willow Acres was its name, though the locals called it the Sewage Lagoon because a lot of shit ended up in it. She shared the bathroom with six illegal Thai immigrants, who kept very quiet. It was said that the CorpSeCorps had decided that expelling illegals was too expensive, so they'd resorted to the method used by farmers who found a diseased cow in the herd: shoot, shovel, and shut up.

  On the floor below her there was an endangered-species luxury couture operation called Slink. They sold Halloween costumes over the counter to fool the animal-righter extremists and cured the skins in the backrooms. The fumes came up through the ventilation system: though Toby tried stuffing pillows into the vent, her cubicle stank of chemicals and rancid fat. Sometimes there was roaring and bleating as well -- they killed the animals on the premises because the customers didn't want goat dressed up as oryx or dyed wolf instead of wolverine. They wanted their bragging rights to be genuine.

  The skinned carcas
ses were sold on to a chain of gourmet restaurants called Rarity. The public dining rooms served steak and lamb and venison and buffalo, certified disease-free so it could be cooked rare -- that was what "Rarity" pretended to mean. But in the private banquet rooms -- key-club entry, bouncer-enforced -- you could eat endangered species. The profits were immense; one bottle of tiger-bone wine alone was worth a neckful of diamonds.

  Technically, the endangered trade was illegal -- there were high fines for it -- but it was very lucrative. People in the neighbourhood knew about it, but they had their own worries, and who could you tell, without risk? There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.

  Toby got a job as a furzooter: cheap day labour, no identity required. The furzooters put on fake-fur animal suits with cartoon heads and hung advertising signs around their necks, and worked the higher-end malls and the boutique retail streets. But it was hot and humid inside the furzoots, and the range of vision was limited. In the first week she suffered three attacks by fetishists who knocked her over, twisted the big head around so she was blinded, and rubbed their pelvises against her fur, making strange noises, of which the meows were the most recognizable. It wasn't rape -- no part of her actual body was touched -- but it was creepy. Also it was distasteful dressing up as bears and tigers and lions and the other endangered species she could hear being slaughtered on the floor below her. So she stopped doing that.

  Then she made a lump of quick cash by selling her hair. The hair market hadn't yet been decimated by the Mo'Hair sheep breeders -- that happened a few years later -- so there were still scalpers who'd buy from anyone, no questions asked. She'd had long hair then, and although it was medium brown -- not the best colour, they preferred blond -- it had fetched a decent sum.

  After the money from the hair was used up, she'd sold her eggs on the black market. Young women could get top dollar for donating their eggs to couples who hadn't been able pay the required bribe or else were so truly unsuitable that no official would sell them a parenthood licence anyway. But she could only pull the egg stunt twice because the second time the extraction needle had been infected. At that time the egg traders were still paying for treatment if anything went wrong; still, it took her a month to recover. When she tried a third time, they told her there were complications, so she could never donate any more eggs, or -- incidentally -- have any children herself.

  Toby hadn't known until then that she'd wanted any children. She'd had a boyfriend back at Martha Graham who used to talk about marriage and a family -- Stan was his name -- but Toby had said they were far too young and poor to consider it. She was studying Holistic Healing -- Lotions and Potions, the students called it -- and Stan was in Problematics and Quadruple-Entry Creative Asset Planning, at which he was doing well. His family wasn't rich or he wouldn't have been at a third-rate institution like Martha Graham, but he was ambitious, and fully intended to prosper. On their more tranquil evenings, Toby would rub her flower preparations and herbal extract projects on him, and after that there would be a round of crisp, botanical-remedy-flavoured sex, followed by a shower-off and some popcorn, without salt or fat.

  But once her family hit the downdraft, Toby knew she couldn't afford Stan. She also knew her days at college were numbered. So she'd cut off contact. She didn't even answer his reproachful text messages, because there was no future in it: he wanted a two-professionals marriage, and she was no longer in the running. Better to do the weeping sooner rather than later, she told herself.

  But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

  After getting that news, she'd blown her hoarded egg-donation money on a drug-fuelled holiday from reality. But waking up with various men she'd never seen before had lost its thrill very quickly, especially when she'd found they had a habit of pocketing her spare change. After the fourth or fifth time she knew she had to make a decision: did she want to live or did she want to die? If die, there were quicker ways. If live, she had to live differently.

  Through one of her single -- nighters-a man with the Sewage Lagoon equivalent of a kind soul -- she found a job at a pleebmob business. Pleebmob businesses didn't ask for identity and didn't need references: if you dipped into the till they'd simply cut your fingers off.

  Toby's new job was with a chain called SecretBurgers. The secret of SecretBurgers was that no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them: the counter girls wore T-shirts and baseball caps with the slogan SecretBurgers! Because Everyone Loves a Secret! The job paid rock-bottom wages, but you got two free SecretBurgers a day. Once she was with the Gardeners and had taken the Vegivows, Toby suppressed the memory of eating these burgers; but as Adam One used to say, hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience. The meat grinders weren't 100 per cent efficient; you might find a swatch of cat fur in your burger or a fragment of mouse tail. Was there a human fingernail, once?

  It was possible. The local pleebmobs paid the CorpSeCorpsMen to turn a blind eye. In return, the CorpSeCorps let the pleebmobs run the low-level kidnappings and assassinations, the skunkweed gro-ops, the crack labs and street-drug retailing, and the plank shops that were their stock-in-trade. They also ran corpse disposals, harvesting organs for transplant, then running the gutted carcasses through the SecretBurgers grinders. So went the worst rumours. During the glory days of SecretBurgers, there were very few bodies found in vacant lots.

  If there was a so-called reality TV expose, the CorpSeCorps would make a pretense at investigation. Then they'd list the case as Unsolved and discard it. They had an image to uphold among those citizens who still paid lip service to the old ideals: defenders of the peace, enforcers of public security, keeping the streets safe. It was a joke even then, but most people felt the CorpSeCorps were better than total anarchy. Even Toby felt that.

  The year before, SecretBurgers had gone too far. The CorpSeCorps had closed them down after one of their high-placed officials went slumming in the Sewage Lagoon and his shoes were discovered on the feet of a SecretBurgers meat-grinder operator. So for a while stray cats breathed easier at night. But a few months later the familiar grilling booths were sizzling again, because who could say no to a business with so few supply-side costs?

  8

  Toby was pleased to learn she'd got the SecretBurgers job: she could pay the rent, she wouldn't starve. But then she discovered the catch.

  The catch was the manager. His name was Blanco, though behind his back the SecretBurgers girls called him the Bloat. Rebecca Eckler, who worked Toby's shift, told her about him right away. "Stay off his radar," she said. "Maybe you'll be okay -- he's doing that girl Dora, and he mostly does just the one at a time, and you're kind of scrawny and he likes the curvy butts. But if he tells you to come to the office, look out. He's real jealous. He'll take a girl apart."

  "Has he asked you?" said Toby. "To the office?"

  "Praise the Lord and spit," said Rebecca. "I'm too black and ugly for him, plus he just likes the kittens, not the old cats. Maybe you should wrinkle yourself up, sweetheart. Knock out a few of your teeth."

  "You're not ugly," said Toby. Rebecca was in fact beautiful in a substantial way, with her brown skin and her red hair and her Egyptian nose.

  "I don't mean ugly like that," said Rebecca. "Ugly to deal with. Us Jelacks, we're two kinds of folks you don't want to mess with. He knows I'd get the Blackened Redfish onto him, and they're one mean gang. Plus maybe the Wolf Isaiahists. Way too much grief!"

  Toby had no such backups. She kept her head down when Blanco was around. She'd heard his story. According to Rebecca, he'd been a bouncer at Scales, the classiest club in the Lagoon. Bouncers had status; they strolled around in black suits and dark glasses, looking suave but tough, and they had women swarming all over them. But Blanco had blown it big time, said Rebecca. He'd ripped up a Scales girl -- not a smuggled illegal-alien temporary, they got ripped up all the time,
but one of the top talent, a star pole dancer. You couldn't have a guy like that around -- someone who'd mess up the works because he couldn't keep his cool -- so they'd fired him. Lucky for him he had friends in the CorpSeCorps or he'd have ended up minus some body parts in a carbon garboil dumpster. As it was, they'd stuck him in to run the Sewage Lagoon SecretBurgers outlet. It was a big comedown and he was bitter about it -- why should he suffer because of some slut? -- so he hated the job. But he figured the girls were his perks. He had two pals, ex-bouncers like himself, who acted as his bodyguards, and they got the leavings. Supposing there was anything left.

  Blanco was still bouncer-shaped -- oblong and hefty -- though running to fat: too much beer, said Rebecca. He'd kept the signature bouncer ponytail at the back of his balding head, and he sported a full set of arm tattoos: snakes twining his arms, bracelets of skulls around his wrists, veins and arteries on the backs of his hands so they looked flayed. Around his neck was a tattooed chain, with a lock on it shaped like a red heart, nestled into the chest hair he displayed in the V of his open shirt. According to rumour, that chain went right down his back, twined around an upside-down naked woman whose head was stuck in his ass.

  Toby kept her eye on Dora, who'd arrive at the grilling booth to take over when Toby's shift was done. She'd begun as a plump optimist, but over the weeks she'd been shrinking and sagging; on the white skin of her arms, the bruises bloomed and faded. "She wants to run away," Rebecca whispered, "but she's scared. Maybe you should get out of here yourself. He's been looking at you."