A year later, Verruca, clutching a tin of organic pseudo-gold paint, was heading back to her tent, shooing mechanical birds with a resignation that no one would witness.
She lived alone, minus Hilda and Cyborg, waiting for the all clear—virus wise.
She was nearly there.
The funnel was now dismantled, the ground was almost normal, acid-wise, and her kitchen—clear of dead rats—was, on a scale of one to ten, a promising three when it came to virus infestation. Hopefully she would still be alive when it was a zero, when the virus had died off, but she wasn’t holding her breath . . .
Her garden was now a shrine in the making.
The statue, care of some decent rope and Planet Hy Man’s best tug-of-war team, had been rolled off the quarry.
It took the better part of a day and was such hard wor
