Oryx and Crake

They have something in mind, all right. He turns, heads back towards the gatehouse, quickens his pace. They’re far enough away so he can run if he has to. He looks over his shoulder: they’re trotting now. He speeds up, breaks into a jog. Then he spots another group through the gateway up ahead, eight or nine of them, coming towards him across No Man’s Land. They’re almost at the main gate, cutting him off in that direction. It’s as if they’ve had it pla

He reaches the gatehouse, goes through the doorway, pulls the door shut. It doesn’t latch. The electronic lock is nonfunctional, of course.

“Of course!” he shouts. They’ll be able to lever it open, pry with their trotters or snouts. They were always escape artists, the pigoons: if they’d had fingers they’d have ruled the world. He runs through the next doorway into the reception area, slams the door behind him. That lock’s kaput as well, oh naturally. He shoves the desk he’s just slept on up against the door, looks out through the bulletproof window: here they come. They’ve nosed the door open, they’re in the first room now, twenty or thirty of them, boars and sows but the boars foremost, crowding in, grunting eagerly, snuffling at his footprints. Now one of them spots him through the window. More grunting: now they’re all looking up at him. What they see is his head, attached to what they know is a delicious meat pie just waiting to be opened up. The two biggest ones, two boars, with—yes—sharp tusks, move side by side to the door, bumping it with their shoulders. Team players, the pigoons. There’s a lot of muscle out there.

If they can’t push through the door they’ll wait him out. They’ll take it in relays, some grazing outside, others watching. They can keep it up forever, they’ll starve him out. They can smell him in there, smell his flesh.

Now he remembers to check for the land crab, but it’s gone. It must have backed all the way into its burrow. That’s what he needs, a burrow of his own. A burrow, a shell, some pincers.

“So,” he says out loud. “What next?”

Honey, you’re fucked.

Radio

After an interval of blankness during which nothing at all occurs to him, Snowman gets up out of the chair. He can’t remember having sat down in it but he must have done. His guts are cramping, he must be really scared, though he doesn’t feel it; he’s quite calm. The door is moving in time to the pushing and thumping from the other side; it won’t be long before the pigoons break through. He takes the flashlight out of his plastic bag, turns it on, goes back to the i

Two of the doors don’t move when he tries them; they must be locked somehow, or blocked on the other side. The third one opens easily. There, like sudden hope, is a flight of stairs. Steep stairs. Pigoons, it occurs to him, have short legs and fat stomachs. The opposite of himself.

He scrambles up the stairs so fast he trips on his flowered sheet. From behind him comes an excited grunting and squealing, and then a crash as the desk topples over.

He emerges into a bright oblong space. What is it? The watchtower. Of course. He ought to have known that. There’s a watchtower on either side of the main gate, and other towers all the way around the rampart wall. Inside the towers are the searchlights, the monitor videocams, the loudspeakers, the controls for locking the gates, the tear-gas nozzles, the long-range sprayguns. Yes, here are the screens, here are the controls: find the target, zero in on it, push the button. You never needed to see the actual results, the splatter and fizzle, not in the flesh. During the period of chaos the guards probably fired on the crowd from up here while they still could, and while there was still a crowd.

None of this high-tech stuff is working now, of course. He looks for manually operated backups—it would be fine to be able to mow down the pigoons from above—but no, there’s nothing.

Beside the wall of dead screens there’s a little window: from it he has a bird’s-eye view of the pigoons, the group of them that’s posted outside the checkpoint cubicle door. They look at ease. If they were guys, they’d be having a smoke and shooting the shit. Alert, though; on the lookout. He pulls back: he doesn’t want them to see him, see that he’s up here.

Not that they don’t know already. They must have figured out by now that he went up the stairs. But do they also know they’ve got him trapped? Because there’s no way out of here that he can see.

He’s in no immediate danger—they can’t climb the stairs or they’d have done it by now. There’s time to explore and regroup. Regroup, what an idea. There’s only one of him.

The guards must have taken catnaps up here, turn and turn about: there’s a couple of standard-issue cots in a side room. Nobody in them, no bodies. Maybe the guards tried to get out of RejoovenEsense, just like everyone else. Maybe they too had hoped they could outrun contagion.

One of the beds is made, the other not. A digital voice-operated alarm clock is still flashing beside the unmade bed. “What’s the time?” he asks it, but he gets no answer. He’ll have to reprogram the thing, set it to his own voice.

The guys were well equipped: twin entertainment centres, with the screens, the players, the headphones attached. Clothes hanging on hooks, the standard off-duty tropicals; a used towel on the floor, ditto a sock. A dozen downloaded printouts on one of the night tables. A ski

The guys must have left in a hurry. Maybe it’s them downstairs, the ones in the biosuits. That would make sense. Nobody seems to have come up here though, after the two of them left; or if they did, there’d been nothing they’d wanted to take.

In one of the night-table drawers there’s a pack of cigarettes, only a couple gone. Snowman taps one out—damp, but right now he’d smoke pocket fluff—and looks around for a way to light it. He has matches in his garbage bag, but where is it? He must’ve dropped it on the stairs in his rush to get up here. He goes back to the stairwell, looks down. There’s the bag all right, four stairs from the bottom. He starts cautiously downward. As he’s stretching out his hand, something lunges. He jumps up out of reach, watches while the pigoon slithers back down, then launches itself again. Its eyes gleam in the half-light; he has the impression it’s gri

They were waiting for him, using the garbage bag as bait. They must have been able to tell there was something in it he’d want, that he’d come down to get. Cu

Off the nap room is a small bathroom, with a real toilet in it. Just in time: fear has homogenized his bowels. He takes a dump—there’s paper, a small mercy, no need for leaves—and is about to flush when he reasons that the tank at the back must be full of water, and it’s water he may need. He lifts the tank top: sure enough, it’s full, a mini-oasis. The water is a reddish colour but it smells okay, so he sticks his head down and drinks like a dog. After all that adrenalin, he’s parched.

Now he feels better. No need to panic, no need to panic yet. In the kitchenette he finds matches and lights the cigarette. After a couple of drags he feels dizzy, but still it’s wonderful.