Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)(20)
Zeb grunted, took the beer, twisted off the top. “Need to take a leak,” he said. In the can he poured the beer down the hole. Top seemed to be sealed on, but you could fake those things, you could fake just about anything. He didn’t want to swill or munch any item that had been in Chuck’s hands.
The Puffers were always complex while taking off: the helicopter blades and the helium/hydrogen blimp provided lift, but the trick was to get high enough before you started the wings flapping, and to cut the heli-blades at exactly the right time, or the whole thing could tip and spiral.
But there was no problem that day. The flight was standard, threading the valleys through and around the Pelly Mountains, pausing to bombard the landscape a few times with bear yummies; then over to the high-altitude Barrens with the Mackenzies all around, postcard snow on the tops, with a couple more drops; then crossing the remains of the Old Canol Trail, still marked by the occasional World War Two telephone pole.
The ’thopter responded well. It stopped flapping and started hovering right over the dump spots, the hatch opened as it was supposed to, and the biotrash tumbled out. At the last feeding station, two bears – one mostly white, one mostly brown – were already cantering towards their personal garbage dump as the ’thopter approached; Zeb could see their fur rippling like a shag rug being shaken. Being that close was always a bit of a thrill.
Zeb turned the ’thopter and headed southwest, back towards Whitehorse. Then he handed over to Chuck because the clock said it was Zeb’s turn to catch some zizz. He lay back and blew up the neck pillow and closed his eyes, but he didn’t allow himself to drift off because Chuck had been far too alert during the entire flight. You don’t get that geared up over a non-event.
They were about two-thirds of the way to the first narrow mountain valley when Chuck made his move. Through his almost-closed eyes, Zeb saw the one hand moving stealthily over towards his thigh, holding a thread of glitter. He sat up fast and whacked Chuck across the windpipe. Not hard enough, though, because although Chuck gasped – not a gasp, hard to describe it – although he made that sound and dropped whatever he’d been holding, he grabbed at Zeb’s neck with both hands and Zeb whacked him again, and of course nobody was flying the controls at that point, and in the thrashing around something must’ve been hit by a leg or a hand or an elbow, and that’s when the ’thopter folded two of its four wings and tipped sideways and went down.
And Zeb found himself sitting under a tree, staring at the tree trunk. Astonishing, how clear the frilly edges were, of the lichen; light grey with a tinge of green, and an edge that was darker, so intricate …
Stand up, he ordered himself. You need to get moving. But his body didn’t hear.
Supplies
A long time later – it seemed like a long time, he felt as if he was wading through transparent sludge – Zeb rolled to one side, put his hands on the ground, pushed himself to his feet beside the spindly kind of spruce. Then he threw up. He hadn’t noticed feeling sick right before: he just suddenly puked.
“A lot of animals will do that,” he says. “Under stress. Means you don’t have to put the energy into digesting. Lightens the load.”
“Were you cold?” says Toby.
Zeb’s teeth were chattering, he was shivering. He took Chuck’s down vest, added it to his own. It wasn’t ripped much. He checked the pockets, found Chuck’s cellphone, mashed it with a rock to destroy any GPS and eavesdropping functions. It started ringing just before he did the mashing; it took everything not to answer it and pretend he was Chuck. Maybe he should’ve answered, though, and said that Zeb was dead. He might’ve learned something. A couple of minutes later his own phone rang; he waited until it stopped, then mashed it as well.
Chuck had a few more toys, though nothing Zeb didn’t have himself. Pocketknife, bear spray, bug spray, folded-up tinfoil space-age survival blanket, those things. By great good luck the bear gun they always carried with them in case of groundings and attacks had been tossed out along with Chuck. Bear guns were the exception to the new no-guns rules because even the dickwad CorpSeCorps bureaucrats knew you needed a bear gun up there. The Corps didn’t like Bearlift, but they didn’t try to shut it down either, though they could have done that with one finger. It served a function for them, sounded a note of hope, distracted folks from the real action, which was bulldozing the planet flat and grabbing anything of value. They had no objection to the standard Bearlift ad, with a smiling green furf*cker telling everyone what a sterling lot of good Bearlift was doing, and please send more cash or you’ll be guilty of bearicide. The Corps even put some of the cash in themselves. “That was back when they were still massaging their trust-me images,” says Zeb. “Once they got a hammerlock on power, they didn’t have to bother so much.”
Zeb almost stopped shivering when he saw the bear gun. He could’ve hugged it: at least now he might have half a chance. He didn’t find the needle, though, the one Chuck was going to stick into him; too bad about that, he would’ve liked to have known what was in it. Knockout potion, most likely. Freeze-frame his waking self, then fly him to some seedy rendezvous where the brainscrapers hired by who-knows-who would be waiting to strip-mine his neural data, suck out everything he’d ever hacked and everyone he’d ever hacked for, then leave him a pithed and shrivelled husk, staggering around with induced amnesia in a far-distant ravaged swamp until the local inhabitants stole his trousers and recycled his organs for the transplant biz.