Her arms.

He’s set the alarm on the voice-operated digital clock for an hour before dawn, guessing when that must be. “Rise and shine,” the clock says in a seductive female voice. “Rise and shine. Rise and shine.”

“Stop,” he says, and it stops.

“Do you want music?”

“No,” he says, because although he’s tempted to lie in bed and interact with the woman in the clock—it would be almost like a conversation—he has to get a move on today. How long has he been away from the shore, from the Crakers? He counts on his fingers: day one, the hike to RejoovenEsense, the twister; day two, trapped by the pigoons. This must be the third day then.

Outside the window there’s a mouse-grey light. He pisses into the kitchen sink, splashes water onto his face from the toilet tank. He shouldn’t have drunk that stuff yesterday without boiling it. He boils up a potful now—there’s still gas for the propane burner—and washes his foot, a little red around the cut but nothing to freak about, and makes himself a cup of instant coffee with lots of sugar and whitener. He chews up a Three-Fruit Joltbar, savouring the familiar taste of banana oil and sweetened varnish, and feels the energy surge.

Somewhere in all the running around yesterday he lost his water bottle, just as well considering what was in it. Bird dung, mosquito wrigglers, nematodes. He fills up an empty beer bottle with boiled water, then snaffles a standard-issue micro-fibre laundry bag from the bedroom, into which he packs the water, all the sugar he can find, and the half-dozen Joltbars. He rubs on sunblock and bags the rest of the tube, and puts on a lightweight khaki shirt. There’s a pair of sunglasses too, so he discards his old single-eyed ones. He deliberates over a pair of shorts, but they’re too big around the waist and wouldn’t protect the backs of his legs, so he hangs on to his flowered sheet, doubling it over, knotting it like a sarong. On second thought he takes it off and packs it into the laundry bag: it might snag on something while he’s in transit, he can put it back on later. He replaces his lost aspirin and candles, and throws in six small boxes of matches and a paring knife, and his authentic-replica Red Sox baseball cap. He wouldn’t want to have that fall off during the great escape.

There. Not too heavy. Now to break out.

He tries smashing the kitchen window—he could lower himself down onto the Compound rampart with the bedsheet he’s torn into strips and twisted—but no luck: the glass is attack-proof. The narrow window overlooking the gateway is out of the question, as even if he could get through it there’d be a sheer drop into a herd of slavering pigoons. There’s a small window in the bathroom, high up, but it too is on the pigoon side.

After three hours of painstaking labour and with the aid of—initially—a kitchen stepstool, a corkscrew, and a table knife, and—ultimately—a hammer and a battery-operated screwdriver he found at the back of the utility closet, he manages to disassemble the emergency air vent and dislodge the mechanism inside it. The vent leads up like a chimney, then there’s a bend to the side. He thinks he’s skinny enough to fit through—semi-starvation has its advantages—though if he gets stuck he’ll die an agonizing and also ludicrous death. Cooked in an air vent, very funny. He ties one end of his improvised rope to a leg of the kitchen table—happily it’s bolted to the floor—and winds the rest around his waist. He attaches his bag of supplies to the end of a second rope. Holding his breath, he squeezes in, torques his body, wriggles. Lucky he’s not a woman, the wide butt would foil him. No room to spare, but now his head’s in the outside air, then—with a twist—his shoulders. It’s an eight-foot drop to the rampart. He’ll have to go head first, hope the improvised rope will hold.

A last push, a wrench as he’s pulled up short, and he’s dangling askew. He grabs the rope, rights himself, unties the end around his waist, lowers himself hand over hand. Then he pulls the supply bag through. Nothing to it.

Damn and shit. He’s forgotten to bring the windup radio. Well, no going back.

The rampart is six feet wide, with a wall on either side. Every ten feet there’s a pair of slits, not opposite each other but staggered, meant for observation but useful too for the emplacement of last-ditch weaponry. The rampart is twenty feet high, twenty-seven counting the walls. It runs all the way around the Compound, punctuated at intervals by a watchtower like the one he’s just left.

The Compound is shaped like an oblong, and there are five other gates. He knows the plan, having studied it thoroughly during his days at Paradice, which is where he’s going now. He can see the dome, rising up through the trees, shining like half a moon. His plan is to get what he needs out of there, then circle around via the rampart—or, if conditions are right, he can cut across the Compound space on level ground—and make his way out by a side gate.

The sun is well up. He’d better hurry, or he’ll fry. He’d like to show himself to the pigoons, jeer at them, but he resists this impulse: they’d follow along beside the rampart, keep him from descending. So every time he reaches an observation slit he crouches, holding himself below the sightline.

At the third watchtower along he pauses. Over the top of the rampart wall he can see something white—greyish white and cloudlike—but it’s too low down to be a cloud. Also it’s the wrong shape. It’s thin, like a wavering pillar. It must be near the seashore, a few miles north of the Craker encampment. At first he thinks it’s mist, but mist doesn’t rise in an isolated stem like that, it doesn’t puff. No question now, it’s smoke.

The Crakers often have a fire going, but it’s never a large one, it wouldn’t make smoke like this. It could be a result of yesterday’s storm, a lightning-strike fire that was dampened by the rain and has begun smouldering again. Or it might be that the Crakers have disobeyed orders and have come looking for him, and have built a signal fire to guide him home. That’s unlikely—it isn’t how they think—but if so, they’re way off course.

He eats half a Joltbar, downs some water, continues along the rampart. He’s limping a little now, conscious of his foot, but he can’t stop and tend to it, he has to go as fast as he can. He needs that spraygun, and not just because of the wolvogs and the pigoons. From time to time he looks over his shoulder. The smoke is still there, just the one column of it. It hasn’t spread. It keeps on rising.

12

Pleebcrawl

Snowman limps along the rampart, towards the glassy white swell of the bubble-dome, which is receding from him like a mirage. Because of his foot he’s making poor time, and around eleven o’clock the concrete gets too hot for him to walk on. He’s got the sheet over his head, draped himself as much as possible, over his baseball cap and over the tropical shirt, but he could still burn, despite the sunblock and the two layers of cloth. He’s grateful for his new two-eyed sunglasses.

He hunches down in the shade of the next watchtower to wait out the noon, sucks water from a bottle. After the worst of the glare and heat is past, after the daily thunderstorm has come and gone, he’ll have maybe three hours to go. All things being equal, he can get there before nightfall.

Heat pours down, bounces up off the concrete. He relaxes into it, breathes it in, feels the sweat trickling down, like millipedes walking on him. His eyes waver shut, the old films whir and crackle through his head. “What the fuck did he need me for?” he says. “Why didn’t he leave me alone?”

No point thinking about it, not in this heat, with his brain turning to melted cheese. Not melted cheese: better to avoid food images. To putty, to glue, to hair product, in creme form, in a tube. He once used that. He can picture its exact position on the shelf, lined up next to his razor: he’d liked neatness, in a shelf. He has a sudden clear image of himself, freshly showered, running the creme hair product through his damp hair with his hands. In Paradice, waiting for Oryx.