The Scavengers (13 page)

I’ve chewed all the flavor out of the wintergreen leaf. I ball it up on my tongue and—
ptooey
—spit the cud into the bushes. Bending to pluck another one, I hear a twig snap behind me and freeze in a crouch. Listening intently for any other sound, I realize I’m in the same area where we ran into the solar bear.
Coulda used a “shibby-shibby,”
I think while slowly dropping one hand to my ToothClub and fishing in my pack for a pepper-bomb with the other. Still in a crouch, I look for any motion, listen for any sound. Nothing. Just my own heart, thudding in my ears.

But I
know
I heard something. And I could tell by the
snap!
that the twig was too thick to be crunched by a squirrel or a rabbit. Something’s behind me, and it’s big.

In one smooth motion, I draw my ToothClub and whirl.

The eyes are staring at me through the leaves from about twenty feet away. The pupils are dark, almost black, and the whites are not white but yellow—as a matter of fact, these eyes are
really
yellow—and even before I make out the rest of the figure in the brush, I think,
GreyDevil!
And sure enough, when the eyes blink and the figure turns to run crashing through the brush, I see the pale, sooty skin, the knotty, matted hair, and the trailing tattered rags of clothes.

I don’t chase. Toad has always taught me: if trouble is running away, you let it run. Instead I stand there, listening and looking for other GreyDevils, but soon the silence settles and the normal forest sounds resume, and it’s clear it was the only one.

It’s odd to see a GreyDevil this far up the ridge, and it’s odd to see one out and about this early in the day. They don’t tend to stray too far from their fires or the roadways. Maybe they’re getting hungrier.

And it
ran
. I’ve never seen a GreyDevil
run
.

24

TOAD AND I SPEND THE MORNING TEARING APART OLD CARS AND
farm equipment. It’s hard, tough, loud work. Lots of banging and ripping and hacking. Certain things have special value: big hunks of sheet metal, heavy shafts (like the axles we took to Freda on our last trip), and copper wire. Toad says in the old days he would have just cut everything apart with a blowtorch, but these days we work with tin snips and bolt cutters and a pry bar with a blade that looks like a giant can opener.

We’re having one of those spitty cold days that seem to come out of nowhere these days. A cold wind is blowing, swirling together a mix of light rain and sleet. My hands are numb and I’m shivering. But I love working with Toad. Whether we’re cleaning fish or pulling copper wire from a pile of old vacuum cleaners, Toad just keeps talking. Stories, jokes, silly words, history, it all just rolls out of him. If you didn’t know Toad, you might think he was just an odd old man who talks funny, but even with all the nutty talk, he has a way of teaching me things without making me feel like I’m getting a lesson—which of course is the best way of learning. And even though his favorite book is written by Daniel Beard—the man who thought girls should stick to “pretty store bows”—the main thing I like about Toad is that he doesn’t talk to me like I’m a girl. He just talks to me.

The weather keeps worsening. Arlinda sticks her head out the door.

“Even a chicken knows enough to come in out of the rain, you knuckleheads!”

Toad and I stow our tools in the shed and head inside. The kitchen is warm and filled with the smell of fresh biscuits. Arlinda puts one on my plate. It looks like a fluffy white cloud that has been browned around the edges. I split it, and a puff of steam rises to the tip of my cold nose. I drizzle a spoonful of honey on both halves and let the honey melt in before I take a bite. Arlinda puts out three mugs of fresh-brewed chamomile-and-clover tea, and as the sleet hits
tickety-tick
against the windowpanes, I can’t imagine a cozier place to be.

Up on the ridge, I know Ma and Dookie are cozy too. Ma will have a fire going in the shack stove, and Dookie will be playing with his whirligigs. If Dookie gets too stir-crazy, Ma will hold him and hum the songs she hummed when he was a baby. Sometimes that’s the only thing that can settle Dookie down.

And Dad . . . I hope he’s in there with them and not on one of his mysterious walkabouts. Surely he wouldn’t go out in this weather.

While the honey soaks into my biscuit and the tea cools, I pull an old newspaper from a stack by the door. “GOV’T UNVEILS BUBBLE CITIES, ALL INVITED,” reads the headline. Beneath that, a smaller headline reads, “Declaration Day Set.” The “invited” part was true. I knew that from talking to Toad and Arlinda. No one was forced to go UnderBubble. But basically the invitation boiled down to this: UnderBubble or OutBubble, you choose by Declaration Day. And if you choose OutBubble, yer on yer own. For good. No do-overs.

The article was illustrated with a picture of a beautiful shining city under a clear bubble. The bubble was filled with happy people doing happy things—there was volleyball, just like in the brochure, but also people having picnics and having sack races and playing catch. Everybody looked happy and healthy.
Really
healthy.

“Toad?” I ask. “Did you have any doubts on Declaration Day? Did you ever think of going UnderBubble?”

Toad snorts like a grumpy hog. “Ot-nay or-fay a sit-splecond!”

“We saw it coming for a long time,” says Arlinda. “And knew we wanted no part of it.”

“The tolipicians!” says Toad. “After they got done yam-slammering, I wouldn’t have gone in their blankety-blank bubble if they’d have sent me an enraged invitation and a magic flying welcome mat to float in on.”

“And when they cut a deal with CornVivia, well, that sealed it for us,” said Arlinda.

There is a photo of two politicians smiling with their arms around a fat man in a business suit. The caption says the politicians had “set aside their differences for the good of the country” and were thanking companies like CornVivia for joining together with the government “in a Patriotic Partnering that will allow every citizen of this great nation an opportunity to live life free of hunger, want, or danger.”

“Yah,” says Toad, pointing at the photo, “when politicians agree to set aside their differences, you know you’re in for it.”

Toad and Arlinda have told me before how it turned out. Most people had already gone from feisty to fearful and were happy to head for the nearest Bubbling Centers. You could say all the trouble brought people together. That sounds like a good thing, I suppose. But most of those people were giving up everything they owned—and most of what they said they believed in—in return for safety. Arlinda and Toad say the roads were jammed in the months leading up to Declaration Day. People in little vans and big trucks and everything in between—when it came down to it they wanted a guarantee that everything would be all right.

We sit at the kitchen table for a long while. Outside, the wind just keeps blowing harder and the air gets colder. The sleet snaps against the windowpanes. Toad keeps stoking the stove, and Arlinda keeps cooking, so it’s hard to imagine leaving. Even after the biscuits, my stomach is growling like a grumpy solar bear. I look at the pans bubbling on the stove, then I peek out the window toward the ridge. The sleet has stopped, but the wind is still blowing a thin rain.

“It’s nasty out there,” says Arlinda. “You might as well stay the night.”

I start to say no, then a spatter of sleet hits the window and I catch a whiff of biscuits. “Okay,” I say, “but first I have to call my parents.”

I step out to the back porch and whistle three long and three short. Then I light Toad’s semaphore lantern and wait. Soon a flickering light appears beside the flagpole.

Staying here tonight
, I flash. After Toad taught me, I wrote out the Morse code alphabet for Ma. She learned it in half the time it took me.

O-K
, winks the light from Skullduggery Ridge. Then a gap and a final set of flashes:
Love, Mom.

I smile. Then I smile again, and flash one word:
Smile
.

Later, when I am curling into my blankets in the barn, I think of how sometimes I feel trapped between being a GreyDevil-fighting scavenger and just a girl who wants to cuddle in her mother’s arms. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been born before all this Bubble silliness. Before solar bears and giant corn I can’t eat, when you could just drive to town without a Whomper-Zooka. I think of my few hazy memories of those other times . . . of flickering televisions, of my own room, and dolls, and Dad and the red balloon floating away. . . . When I finally drift off to sleep, I dream of a GreyDevil battle that swirls on and on and on. Toby and I fight and never fall, but they just keep coming, and I wonder why Dad isn’t there to help. Somewhere in the midst of it all, I dream I hear a whistle: three long, three short.

25

I WAKE TO A GRAY DAWN. THE WIND HAS STOPPED, BUT A COLD
rain still drizzles down. The hike up the holler will be miserable, but I know when I get to the shack Ma will have tea water on the boil. We’ll sit beside the window to read poems and listen to the rain trickling down the plastic. There won’t be quite enough light, so we’ll light a candle and lean together with our hands wrapped around the tea mugs to catch the warmth in our palms. Ma says sometimes there’s nothing better than reading a good book in bad weather.

The thought of this cozy scene keeps me going through the long, soggy climb. At the crest of Skullduggery Ridge, I pause for a moment to look down through the rain at the coop, the shack, the garden patch, the root cellar, the Ford Falcon down below. . . .

Something isn’t right.

I look again. The shack door is gaping open, hung from a single broken hinge. The chicken coop is knocked sideways. The garden is trampled, the hoop houses smashed and tattered. The cellar door is kicked in.

I drop my pack and run to the shack.

Just outside the door I stop and call out. Softly, so if there are still attackers nearby—GreyDevils or whomever they might be—they won’t hear me.

“Ma?”

Nothing.

“Dad? Dookie?”

Now it seems even quieter than before I spoke.

Lurching forward, I kick aside the kindling that used to be the door.

“MA!”

I’m hollering now, completely forgetting that I may be in danger. There is no answer, and in the half-light I see no one. I sweep the lumped-up blanket off the bed, flip the upended table. No one.

I run to the coop. Nothing. A few feathers in the straw, some broken eggs, and silence.

I run around crazily, hollering and checking behind and beneath every object and surface. Everything in sight is tipped, bent, or broken. Someone has stomped across the roof of the Falcon, and muddy water has pooled in the dents. A giant spiderweb of cracks crisscrosses the front windshield. I peer though a side window, afraid of what I’ll find, but see nothing.

I run the perimeter of our little homestead. I claw through the salvage piles, kick over the compost bins, even dig my hands into the chicken manure pile in a desperate attempt to find anyone or anything. I find nothing but a single chicken, huddled wetly beneath a tree.

Finally I come to a stop, so ragged and out of breath I have lost the ability to be frantic. I stand with my chest heaving and empty hands dangling. Foolishly, I have left my weapons on the ground in my pack, but there is no one to strike. This is not a problem that can be solved with a ToothClub or a SpitStick.

The root cellar!
I think.
I haven’t checked the root cellar!
And now I’m running again, up to where I dropped my pack. I scrabble around inside and bring out my jacklight. Pulling aside what remains of the door, I raise the jacklight. Everything is a mess. The shelves have been ripped from the walls. I can smell tomatoes and sauerkraut and applesauce. The ham that was hanging from the rafter is on the floor and torn to shreds. There are rutabagas and carrots and sand everywhere.

But no sign of any person—or thing.

I go back up the stairs. As I walk back around to the front of the shack I hear a crunch beneath my feet and look down. There on the ground is the old window Dad had promised to put up in Ma’s reading room. All the little wooden dividers are smashed. Dad was so excited the day he found that window. I don’t know if he ever would have gotten around to building the reading room, but when I saw how happy he was to show Ma the frame, or how carefully he wrapped each new pane in deerskin to protect it, I knew he meant it with all his heart. Ten paces from the ruined window I find a flat piece of tin. The day Dad pulled that from Goldmine Gully he said he would nail it on the roof above Ma’s reading window so she could listen to the raindrops drumming while she read on days like today. Now the tin is bent and stomped and twisted, and something red is snagged on one of the sharp corners. I lift the tin, and there is Dookie’s red rubber ball, torn and flat.

It doesn’t even feel like me walking as I trudge to the Shelter Tree, place my back against it, and slide to the ground.

I am so wet, so cold, so tired. So lonely for my family. So lonely for my days as Maggie, when I had no responsibility for those around me. I lay my head against the root, and I cry.

I cry quietly, but I cry hard.

26

IT IS A LONG TIME BEFORE I CAN GET MY BREATHING RIGHT, BEFORE
I can take a breath that isn’t a gulping hiccup. I steady myself, and, cradled in the exposed roots of the giant tree, I try to gather my thoughts.

Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump
.

The root. I can feel a faint thumping in the root against my back.

Tha-thump
.

Faint.

Tha-thump
.

Steady.

Tha-thump
.

Like a heartbeat.

A heartbeat? In the wooden root of a tree? For a moment I am too frightened to move. Is it a GreyDevil? A solar bear that crawled in to get out of the rain? Is it one of the attackers who ripped apart my home and stole my family?