The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page A

calmer. We’ll see how the little guy does. Right, Jimmy?”
    Jimmy’s father had been apologetic towards him lately, as if he’d punished Jimmy for something Jimmy hadn’t done and was sorry about it. He was saying
Right, Jimmy?
a bit too much.Jimmy didn’t like that – he didn’t like being the one handing out the good marks. There were a few other moves of his father’s he could do without as well – the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word
son
, in a slightly deeper voice. This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope. Jimmy had done enough faking himself so he could spot it in others, most of the time. He stroked the little rakunk and didn’t answer.
    “Who’s going to feed it and empty the litter box?” said Jimmy’s mother. “Because it won’t be me.” She didn’t say this angrily, but in a detached, matter-of-fact voice, as if she was a bystander, someone on the sidelines; as if Jimmy and the chore of taking care of him, and his unsatisfactory father, and the scufflings between her and him, and the increasingly heavy baggage of all their lives, had nothing to do with her. She didn’t seem to get angry any more, she didn’t go charging out of the house in her slippers. She had become slowed-down and deliberate.
    “Jimmy hasn’t asked you to. He’ll do it himself. Right, Jimmy?” said his father.
    “What are you going to call it?” said his mother. She didn’t really want to know, she was getting at Jimmy in some way. She didn’t like it when he warmed up to anything his father gave him. “Bandit, I suppose.”
    That was exactly the name Jimmy had been thinking of, because of the black mask. “No,” he said. “That’s boring. I’m calling him Killer.”
    “Good choice, son,” said his father.
    “Well, if Killer wets on the floor, be sure you clean it up,” said his mother.
    Jimmy took Killer up to his room, where it made a nest in his pillow. It did have a faint smell, strange but not unpleasant, leathery and sharp, like a bar of designer soap for men. He slept with his arm crooked around it, his nose next to its own small nose.
    ~   ~   ~
    It must have been a month or two after he got the rakunk that Jimmy’s father changed jobs. He was headhunted by NooSkins and hired at the second-in-command level – the Vice level, Jimmy’s mother called it. Ramona the lab tech from OrganInc made the move with him; she was part of the deal because she was an invaluable asset, said Jimmy’s father; she was his right-hand man. (“Joke,” he would say to Jimmy, to show that he knew Ramona wasn’t really a man. But Jimmy knew that anyway.) Jimmy was more or less glad he might still be seeing Ramona at lunch – at least she was someone familiar – even though his lunches with his father had become few in number and far between.
    NooSkins was a subsidiary of HelthWyzer, and so they moved into the HelthWyzer Compound. Their house this time was in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with an arched portico and a lot of glazed earth-tone tiles, and the indoor pool was bigger. Jimmy’s mother called it “this barn.” She complained about the tight security at the HelthWyzer gates – the guards were ruder, they were suspicious of everyone, they liked to strip search people, women especially. They got a kick out of it, she said.
    Jimmy’s father said she was making a big deal about nothing. Anyway, he said, there’d been an incident only a few weeks before they’d moved in – some fanatic, a woman, with a hostile bioform concealed in a hairspray bottle. Some vicious Ebola or Marburg splice, one of the fortified hemorrhagics. She’d nuked a guard who’d unwisely had his face mask off, contrary to orders but because of the heat. The woman had been spraygunned at once and neutralized in a vat of bleach, and the poor guard had been whisked into HotBioform and stuck into an