We clutched two slippery blue-pink wrists and two slippery ankles and hauled our heavy dead friend across the grass and dumped him at the base of the fort. We didn't have the strength to push his dripping cold meat up onto the first level of the fort and try to revive him. We looked into each others' eyes to agree he was dead. It felt wrong to say it with words.
The mosquito net and curtains had trapped him, sucking his legs like a ghost dragging him down. Each leg had netting twisted around it and there were stones caught in the other end. Perhaps if he'd been tangled down there without having his skull battered by rocks the size of rugby balls, rocks launched by the force of the river pouring in, he could have held his breath for two minutes, long enough for us to dive in and cut him free with a sharpened tin can. But Kane's head was battered then flopped around like his neck was made of string. Once the river knocked his head against the rocks, his mouth and nostrils no longer had a brain to tell them not to let the water into his lungs.
On his back in the bark chips, Kane dripped a shadowy angel-shape around his body. There was a huge dent above his eye like his skull was a dropped eggshell. Water was trickling out of his ears and mouth and the hole above his eye.
Wordlessly, unapologetically, I left his body and jumped into the pool. It continued to slush up onto the grass and leak into the bare area where we'd peeled the grass off. Much of the money was still in $10,000 stacks. I gathered eight of those. Then was the challenging part: snatching $100 at a time from the water. Just 999 notes left to collect.
'GET IN HERE,' I screamed at my friends after I'd gone underwater a couple of times, 'HELP ME.' Esther couldn't enter the water, so she stayed with Kane's body, rubbing his hand, as if a spark of warmth could revive him. Eli and Chan stripped naked and tried to cover their cocks and balls from each other and hopped into the water, awfully cold, insulting, nipping their skin as if it were electrified, although we didn't stop to pity ourselves.
I liked going to the bottom of the pool. I liked the pressure of the water squeezing my skull. I liked it because it felt like punishment. All that money wasn't free. We deserved to hurt.
We waddled back to the fort, dripping. Eli and Chan and I put our money down. We divided it up without talking.
We buried Kane in a shallow part of his own trench and heaped rocks on him before scooping milky river mud onto his body. That was all Kane's project was good for, now. Not fresh water, baths, cleansing, relief – just graves. Failed lives. A wasted year.
We went gathering. We didn't hesitate. Our bodies told us to eat.
Eli looked around and couldn't find anything to eat. He appeared pained, clutching his ribs. 'Might find something out east,' he suggested. Elijah Joshua, Youth Pastor, had never told a lie in his life. Trying to hold onto hope was hurting him.
'Go east, dude,' we told Eli, knowing he wouldn't return if he entered Adam's camp, 'Bring back something awesome.'
One voice was shouting over Eli: hunger. We weren't in control. We listened to our bodies.
I moved in a daze with a body that felt like it was naked in a blizzard. Every dandelion, every bug, every cookie under some little girl's bed was a piece of warmth. It took an hour to find enough food for each meal that would keep me from death. I roamed through Lollipoppa's, keening my ears in case there was any sound of children shrieking. I hopped a fence and landed on the grave of some dog called Fearless and winced, waiting for the owners to come charging out onto their deck. I swore I could feel human breath on my spine. I cornered a rabbit so fat and fluffy it could only have belonged to a five year old child and I twisted its head so hard that the head came off in my hands. I boiled the head and the body til the fur was easy to pick off. Then I shoved a stick through each and licked the meat off the tiny bones.
There was marrow in its itty bitty little femurs. I snapped those open and sucked the goo out.
I lumbered from one feed to the next like a zombie. A batch of mushrooms was growing in the soccer field in the primary school. I encountered Watson hunched over and filling a book bag with them.
'Mushroom soup or mushroom pie?'
I pretended to laugh, got on my knees, legs sizzling with lactic acid. I tossed mushrooms in a garbage bag I'd been using and re-using since day one, washing the blood and feathers and leaves out of it twice a day. There seemed to be only five garbage bags in our universe. There was few of everything in our universe.
'I spotted tracks, just so you know,' Watson said. 'I'll warrant Omar's been here. Someone or something bestial.'
'Bestial?'
'Of or like an animal or beast. It's an adjective.'
'And you just knew that in your head?! Dude, who do you work for, like honestly? You can tell me if it's Adam. Or the Mechs. I��m too weak to fight.'
'I work for science,' he said. 'What the Community of Equals is achieving – or struggling to achieve – is far more interesting to me than the so-called King Adam's project.'
'You reckon?'
'Tyrants have shown up in history all too often. Very yawn. Utopian cooperatives, on the other hand? You could be on to something remarkable, Ms Shepherd. Adam Turing is… not original.'
I saw a skink scurrying across the hopscotch grid, mashed it with my palm, held it up to the afternoon sun. It left its tail in my fingers, dropped into the grass and escaped. The tail was a pathetic one inch, a twitching little sliver, a piece of cold reptile meat like a fat matchstick.
Five calories, maybe. I tossed it into the cauldron of acid in my stomach.
'Time to check my traps,' Watson said.
'Traps? What traps? Show me.'
Watson flapped the corner of the poncho he was wearing, made from a quilt, and led me towards the sandpit and giant plastic checkers set where the little kids of this school would have played if their parents hadn't been chased away by bank-bots. There was a cluster of small hills. I could almost hear the squawk and call, the joyous laughter, the chirp of children, their giggles and cries. Then the ghosts evaporated and I was left staring at twenty jam jars leaning against a fence.
'So that's a hole, or a tunnel or whatev – oh! You've got one! Two!'
Watson crouched and tilted each of the jars a few gentle degrees back toward him so they were standing upright. In three there were snuffling rats; in another six, he'd caught mice. I reached in and seized the tail of a rat. I'd grown used to handling the horrid things. I hadn't been bitten in a month. 'This one's a fatty,' I said, dangling it. I opened my mouth and pretended to dip it between my teeth.
'I promise you they're perfectly edible cooked,' he said, taking each rodent out, pinching its neck until the mouse or rat was dead, and putting the rodents in a shoebox.
'You mean they're like one percent less disgusting. Watson, what's the first thing you're gonna pig out on when you get out of here? You a Burger King man or McDonalds man?'
'Neither.'
'Subway or something? Pizza Hut?'
'I like it here,' he said quickly, eyes darting around to check for danger. 'It's safe in here. Your friends – I'd wager they appreciate the safety aspects, too. Alternative educational options for Kane; a place to discover her own identity for Maeve. Gainful employment for Anya.'
I snorted and waved my arms. 'Am I the only one seeing we're in a deserted school in a deserted land, half of our friends are dead and there's a schizo psycho tyrant – and you feel safe?'
Watson put his shoebox on the ground and held the lid down with one foot. 'Everything's controlled in here, Eden. Outside, we have little control. Petrol's controlled, food's controlled. Defence, security, trade – all of it.'
'Reminds me of someone I know.'
'Took years of practice at Monopoly to get him where he is.'
A laugh escaped me like a sneeze. The unusual sound startled a sparrow. 'You reckon he's been, like, wanting this?'
Watson didn't answer. I thought about it as we strolled. Just before we returned to the Playground, he said, 'They'll try and take her, Eden. They'll see the baby as Adam's property.'
How did you know? Whose side are you really on?
'The Mechs – couldn't they … stop… a bad guy taking someone's baby? If – if someone had a baby?'
We tossed our rats onto the tree stump we were using that week to skin and gut animals we'd killed. Watson showed me how to use one knife to pin a rat's head into the wood before slitting its belly, putting fingers into its guts and peeling its fur and skin away. Eventually Watson said, 'Birth and death within the controlled environment, they're both equally interesting, from a scientific point of view. The mechs just want something interesting to happen.'
'What, and a person giving birth in a fishbowl is interesting, is it?'
'A threatened mammal gives birth in captivity, Eden. You'd watch that, wouldn't you?'