Character · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

Bea

Beatrice, Carl's ex-girlfriend, Donut's owner and handler, in the Bahamas, with her ex-boyfriend along, when the world ends. Never on the page in person; present in Carl's resentment and in every one of Donut's sentences that begins 'Miss Beatrice.'

Segment appearances

Arc

The measure

Bea in the party's talk: coffee pods and a week on the couch, an article about fights and proposals (ch. 13); ten false pregnancy scares that terrified Carl (ch. 15); a drawer of sex toys and 'that Brad fellow' (ch. 24); her parents' twenty-percent tithe (ch. 32); the pancake morning that ended in an emergency room (ch. 23). Watching Donut, once Bea's show cat, on Mongo, Carl thinks: 'She's not a pet anymore' (ch. 11).

New Queen Anne

The epilogue finds her alive: back from the Bahamas with Brad and four dentists, in an airport parking garage when the world went, a month in a tent under a bridge, crying herself to sleep, not working, singing to a half-feral orange stray she calls Ferdinand — her neighbour's Gravy Boat, who came to the window when Princess was in heat — with her face scratched raw: 'I'd take it all back and let you in.' She went back to the hole where the apartment was to look for her cat. Lexis and Odette's people take her in a bounty cube, — 'I don’t think she’s all there' — for 'a much better use' (epilogue).