Building the pyramid put meaning in life again. It didn't matter if shunting a heavy weight was something an ox could do. I'd still done more here than I had on the outside when I was free.
We brought one car to life, then moved another, and another. It felt impossible to get each one moving, then when they did move, our auras glowed with hope. We hardly argued. We got rewarded with foods we'd been dreaming about. Omar came and went, swinging down when he wanted, free as Tarzan, always bringing news of a new shoot or stem or tuber he'd discovered.
Hope didn't make the cars easy to roll, though. We all took turns shuddering on someone's lawn, exhausted, arms screaming, unable to continue, begging for death, until we got a sip of Coke or milkshake or a Milky Way chocolate bar. Watson did the minimum. 'I'm perfectly happy to observe,' he said. Esther wheeled up to him, lifted her leg with both hands and made it kick him. Everyone went speechless. It had to be the first time in her life Esther had kicked ANYone.
'You want more of this?!' she roared, 'Back to work.' Watson looked at us with puzzled eyes and a hollow mouth. We cracked up laughing so hard that we fell to the ground, foreheads rubbing against the grass.
'Bro,' Chan stammered, holding his guts, wiping tears out of his eyes, 'She'll do it again. Don't mess with her.'
Esther scowled at Chan, then she started laughing too, hauled a bucket of rubble onto her lap and followed us as we moved the next car.
After three days we had three sides of the fort lined with vehicles. The fourth side would be the hardest. We needed new boards for the vehicles' tyres to roll on because our existing ramps made of bedroom doors soon cracked and got pushed too far down into the soft earth.
We ravaged houses to get the bits we needed, putting our shoeprints on unblemished walls as we forced the doors out of their frames and dragged them away. Polished oak. Glistening pine. Cherrywood buffed bloody red. Warm mahogany. Cheap doors, posh doors, it didn't matter. Moneyland was a giant landfill to us. We took what we needed and left a mess.
We had a break in the reserve and sat around the cars we'd moved into the playground. Chan seemed scared of talking to me cause I was so impatient with him. There was no mateship to be found in cold, alien Watson, but Omar was a guy Chan could bump fists with and call 'bro.' They hugged and joshed each other and caught up on each other's news. Omar was the same shape as ever although he had warpaint on his cheeks now, like Rambo, and he wore a new bandana with a peacock feather stuffed into it. He said he'd found a colony of peacocks northeast, around the hedges and cornfields. All he had to do to catch them was herd them into the river and club them to death while they floundered in the mud.
'Piece of cake,' he told Chan as they carried doors across the grass, 'Native Americans used to do it to the bison, man, just herd them off a cliff, nyeeeeeerw, SPLAT, go in, take big legs of meat. Nature's pantry. Wholesale steak, baby.' Omar patted my belly and I slapped his hand. 'Speaking of which – you look you've eaten a herd of buffaloes, tubby.'
I didn't even answer. So I was pregnant. So Adam was the seed. So what. Time only went one way. I couldn't take it back. Everyone knew they'd get a slap if they criticized me.
Between intimidation visits from Anya, Omar entertained us with gross-out stories about what he'd been killing and eating. He claimed he'd been taking out a pack of dogs which scampered around the fields in the northeast, where we hardly ever went, hunting the dogs out one by one except this big female 'bitch' that had got away. He talked about spearing them and breaking their necks til we threw pebbles at Omar to shut him up. He was too excited, though. He told us he'd been roasting puppies and sucking their delicious crackly fat. He said he'd lured them with dog food he'd found in the vet clinic and he ate as much of the dog food as the dogs did. I told him I wanted to puke at the image of him choking puppies to death.
'Eating dogs is normal in like 1000 cultures round the world. You're just picky.'
I shoved Omar's shoulder. 'Don't hurt dogs, jackass! Pups haven't hurt anyone. Plus dogs are nice if you treat 'em right.'
'Promise me if you come across a puppy in this place you won't let it lick your hand,' he said, lifting a random door and tossing it into the base of the pyramid. 'They lick your hand, they get a taste for human flesh. Speaking of taste: got something real succulent for ya. Here. Have one.' Omar reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out three triangles. Chan, Watson and I each took one. Chan ate his before asking what it was. I broke mine open and sniffed it.
'Go on,' Omar said, 'It'll give you all-day lasting energy. You'll be able to round up a shitload of sheep, Shepherd.'
'Plus it'll make your hair shiny and lustrous,' Chan said, wiping the crumbs off his lips and high-fiving Omar.
'Are these – ?'
'Tux Wonderbix,' Omar said, winking at me and biting into a dog biscuit. 'Mm-mm. So salty. Heapsa protein, too.'
I pulled my arm back, prepared to hurl the salty brown triangle into the distance, then put it in my pocket.
Esther wheeled up to a car, threw a couple of kilos of books in, accepted a dog biscuit and wheeled away with one hand, nibbling the biscuit with the other. Books made great clean fill.
'Anyway, you guys,' Omar said, flexing his fingers til they cricked, 'We better get to work before WE'RE dog tucker.' He clapped, and I saw muscle flex in his arms. Muscle. None of us in the Community of Equals had any muscle left. We had ribs, and spines, cheekbones and eye sockets and teeth that stuck out.
We tossed various broken bits inside the cars to maximise the weight of each. If they were to be the base blocks of the pyramid they needed to be as heavy as possible, crammed with tonnes of stones and broken wing mirrors and pieces of firewood and old broken gas heaters.
I tried to hump a minibar fridge across the grass and into an SUV and Omar stopped me.
'Took humans a gazillion years to invent the fridge and you're just tossing it out?'
'It's just weight to me. Unless you got a power generator.'
'I made Adam promise he'll give me a cool bag. That's what you need, Ede. Bro, even cavemen refrigerated their meat so it didn't spoil. Don't tell me you guys haven't made it past caveman level. You've had forever.'
205 days. He was right. 205 sleeps. Seven months behind me. Two thirds of a year of sore stomachs, diarrhoea and morning sickness. A year of bad moods, anxiety, violent deaths, hatred, resentment. Stupid to think I once thought this year would be about deepening my friendships.
I could convince myself the year was ending soon. The baby in my stomach, pushing the top half of me backward, pressing constantly on my bladder so that I had to pee every 30 minutes, and drink far more and eat far more – that was a problem I couldn't see solving. I wasn't going to kill my baby, but to give birth in a subdivision without a clinic was unthinkable. The vet, I thought – maybe I would need some drugs from the vet clinic. I could have my baby all by myself in an attic doped up on horse tranquiliser.
I surprised myself by returning to the conversation.
'Can we get on with this? I'm hungry. We get fruit and nuts for lunch today, apparently.'
'There's more Tux too,' Omar grinned.
'We need to tip these cars on their sides and pour clean fill into them. Broken paving stones, rocks, dirt, wood – anything heavy. Pyramid's gotta have a solid base.'
Chan stroked the roof of a white Mercedes 2036 SUV with those invisible glass windows it's impossible to see unless they're scratched. 'I kinda wanna say a prayer for this girl. She's beautiful.'
'She's a meal ticket. That's all. Cause King Adam took your pwecious widdle petwol away.'
'Shut up,' Chan said. 'Ome, tell her she's wrong. You didn't find any petrol in anyone's garage?'
'Plenty of lawnmowers and chainsaws in people's garages. Siphon the gas out of each one, hey presto.'
Chan gave Omar a stunned look as if he'd just been shaken out of a dream. Chan dropped the bumper he'd been holding. 'That's genius! Weed wackers, line trimmers, all those petrol-powered things in the garden sheds King Adam has overlooked. Man, if we could just tip the gas out, pour it into a few buckets –
'She's coming,' I interrupted, 'Don't say anything about the plan.'
The Jeep approached and we tried to look busy, milling around the pyramid, tossing bits of bark and stones inside the vehicles. Anya marched up and threw us each a small brick of $10,000 and barked something about us not working hard enough. We all crammed our money-bricks inside our underwear and started fondling the vehicles, working out the best way to tip them. Each vehicle had half a tonne of clean fill in it already. If they tipped the wrong way, someone would get crushed.
I chose the Merc Chan loved so much to make an example of it. We had to rock it to get enough momentum to force it over. We stepped away as the vehicle collapsed onto a rock we'd shunted near the driver door. The rock acted as something Watson had explained was called a fulcrum. The vehicle hit the ground more softly than expected, BOOFT, and the fulcrum allowed us to rotate the vehicle with a scream of scraped metal then give it a final shunt so it rested snugly against the fort.
'We want a break now,' I told Anya, 'I have to pee.'
'I give you a break,' Anya said. 'How you like a break in your arm?'
Tipping vehicles and trying to keep my belly out of the way filled up my week, not that there was any difference between weekdays and weekends anymore. We worked Saturdays and Sundays. I'm pretty sure we worked Labour Day. My birthday passed. I ate a bag of jelly beans inside an overturned Volkswagen Beetle and had a cry and kissed my hand and stroked the kiss onto my tummy then got back to work. I shunted and upended and tipped on their sides the huge wheeled boxes of steel. My baby pushed on my bladder. I peed all the time and threw up some of my breakfasts and my ankles got all puffy. I worked as hard as the others. I scoffed the cashews and chewing gum and bottles of old ginger beer lobbed at us by Anya. We still ate fish and insects and broad beans when we could, but Anya's treats were what we all thought about, all the time. The days became predictable, my arms got used to the strain and my baby didn't complain as much. We made jokes about each other's teeth sticking out of skeletal faces. Esther laughed a little. Chan stared at the sky with hatred.
For days we pushed and steered and tipped and shunted vehicles onto four sides of the pyramid, a total of 12 Mercs and BMWs and Toyotas and Fords and Kia and even a Dodge. We continued ripping doors out of houses and carried chairs and tables and doors across the reserve until about 100 wooden structures came together to make scaffolding that raised us three metres off the ground.
We would drop rocks into every car, then that would be the base of the pyramid complete. The best source of rocks were Kane's canals. Everyone said the water was cursed. Better to drag the rocks from far across the country, like Stonehenge, Watson suggested.
Nah. It was we who were cursed. May as well take the plunge. Respecting the place where he died wouldn't bring Kane back, and we would be joining him if we didn't get the pyramid completed on schedule.
Our pyramid of garbage was surrounding and mounting the fort, burying it like a volcano. From up in the dark orange on top of the fort, the snout of which poked through the mound of cars, I was transfixed by my view of King Adam's compound. Through my binoculars app, my a big circular lens floating in the air, I saw that just outside the supermarket the manhole cover was sitting half a foot out of place – not more than six inches, but the cover had definitely been shifted. If that was me over there, operating the compound, I would have turned the sewer into a smokehouse. I'd have a fire down there burning 24/7. I'd smoke eels and cats and sparrows… but that wasn't me over there. What was he up to in the sewer, anyway?
I opened my mouth to mention it to my friends. They were playing Paper Scissors Rock, although Omar was trying to convince everyone to do krav maga with him, whatever the hell that was. Some days we played I Spy and Headbands and 20 Questions for hours. Omar was the only person who had fresh news. He busted out stories about chasing trout in the river, piling 20 ducklings into a pillowcase, bagging seagulls and mushrooms and cats. He said there were feral cats out there so big that they looked like dogs. And there were actual dogs he was tracking, too, dogs trotting through the night, trying to nab his dog biscuits while he slept and if you got attacked by one you were supposed to stick you finger up its butthole. All the funniest stories were true; the butthole thing we'd been told in Girl Guides.
'You've told that one before, dude. You're obsessed.'
'They're gonna sniff us out and I don't reckon they'll be friendly,' he continued, 'Uppercut them if you want. But I prefer the butthole option.'
We didn't know whether to guffaw or vomit. Omar even said he'd been catching puppies from this one dog King Adam kept at his compound that was always moping around, slobbering.
'Slobbering dog? You mean Anya?'
Omar chuckled at that. 'Food-dogs. I wouldn't eat that ho. Too full of hormones.'
I made him tell me about Adam's dog. He said it'd chased him one time when he took its last couple of pups. He cackled as he told the story of the dog wandering around with its aimless teets dragging near to the ground without pups to suckle it. He'd personally driven dogs nearly extinct in here, Omar said. He asked us if we wanted him to make us any dog cheese. We kicked Omar and pinched him. Omar's eyes said he was more alive than any of us and he didn't care.