The Scavengers (15 page)

Yesterday when Toad and I finished scrapping and I came to get Dookie from the house, Arlinda met me at the door with my supper wrapped in a cloth. “Leave the boy down here tonight,” she said. I could see Dookie in the kitchen, playing spoons.

“No, I . . .”

“Leave him here. Toad and I are jerking fish tomorrow. Dookie can run the net.” Dookie dropped his spoons and stood up, grinning. He loves to dip the tilapia from the tank before Toad guts them and Arlinda preps the fillets for drying and smoking.

“But I should . . .”

“You need the time alone,” said Arlinda. “We’ll see you day after tomorrow, when you come to help Toad load the
Pruner
.”

I started to step back off the porch, then stopped.

“Go,” said Arlinda.

I sleep so hard in the Falcon that the parrots and Hatchet’s crowing don’t wake me until the sun has climbed high into the sky. I get up, let out the chickens, and then crawl right back into Falcon and sleep until noon. I eat some fish jerky, drink some water, and sleep some more. Now I’m awake again and the sun has crossed the ridge into late afternoon. I can hear the rumble of cornvoy trucks in the distance. Harvest is in full swing now.

I make some tea, pull
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
from the glove box, where I’ve been keeping it since the shack was ransacked, and sit on the hood of the Falcon. For a long time I just hold the book in my lap and stare out across the distance. Sometimes the grand view makes my heart soar; other times it makes me feel hopelessly small. Today as I stare out over the world I am feeling the weight of Emily’s words on my lap, and how she scratched them out, one by one, all alone at her desk. I used to think it was weird how Emily never wanted to leave her room. How she got to where she would only peek out from behind her door. I understand that now. This old station wagon is my Emily room.

In one of her poems Emily wrote “
To fight aloud is very
brave, / But gallanter, I know, / Who charge within the bosom, /
The cavalry of woe.
” I guess the Whomper-Zooka would be “fighting aloud.” But what I am facing now—losing my parents and facing my own
cavalry of woe
—that’s much harder. Toad can teach me how to fight GreyDevils, but when it comes to fighting the sadness in my bosom—my
heart
—I need Emily. I think Emily is telling me we are more than one part, and we have to balance all those parts. And there is a part of my soul or heart, or whatever it is that makes us
us
, that Emily wrote down for me all those years ago. It was like she was writing notes to me.

I remember Ma saying that sometimes she felt the only person who ever would have understood her heart was Emily. I remember asking her if she wasn’t worried that Emily was too gloomy. If Emily’s sad poems might drag Ma down and actually make things worse. “No,” said Ma. “No, sometimes you just want to know someone knows. Knows the trouble you feel. Knows the thing the people closest round you can’t seem to understand.”

She paused for a moment and looked out over the countryside.

“Someone,” she said, “who knows your lonely. Not someone who knows
you are
lonely. Someone who knows
your
lonely.”

Now I whisper that to myself.
“Someone who knows your lonely.”
Sometimes I feel like Emily knows my lonely so well that I don’t even have to read her poems. Just holding the book is enough. The words speak softly to me from between the covers.

I open the book to a poem called “The Mystery of Pain.” Emily writes about how when we are in pain we cannot even remember what it was like before we had the pain. I think about how lost I have felt since Dad and Ma disappeared, and how it’s hard to even remember the happy times.

Now I start reading Emily’s poems one after the other. As fast as my eyes can scan. Page after page. “Weak tea, Maggie,” I hear Ma saying, and I know she wouldn’t approve, but the poems sweep everything away. I’m not even reading them, I’m swimming through them and not stopping to come up for air.

And then I close the book and sleep again. I sleep all night long, even forgetting to put in the chickens. When I finally wake they are clucking beside the Falcon. I open one eye, shake my head, and peek out. The sun tells me it is nearly noon.

I feel like I slept for one hundred years.

And then I hear the whistle.

Three long, three short.

It’s coming from Hoot Holler. Toad.

Again: Three long, three short. Quicker this time. More urgent.

I run for the flagpole.

30

THROUGH THE BINOCULARS I SEE CHAOS. A CORNVOY TRUCK HAS
run off the road between Toad’s barn and the Sustainability Reserve and lies on its side beside the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which—amazingly enough—is still standing. The front of the truck has knocked a section of Toad’s security fence flat and the silver trailer has split open, spilling URCorn across the road in a beautiful yellow fan. As I watch, the trucker crawls out of the cab and runs for the safety of another truck. And closing in from all directions, looking like scarecrows on the march, I see hordes of GreyDevils.

I take off at a dead run. I’ll still never get there before the GreyDevils do. I can only hope Toad can hold them at bay until I arrive.

But all that URCorn! They’ll be in a frenzy.
And Dookie’s down there!
I think, and run even faster. Already my lungs are aching and my mouth tastes like metal. I keep pounding downhill, my pack jouncing on my back, my ToothClub in my hand. Whenever the trail passes through a place where Hoot Holler is visible, I see the snaky lines of GreyDevils have become thicker. Now I hear a
pop-pop-pop
. That means the first of the GreyDevils have arrived and the Sustainability Security crews are firing at them. Sure enough, at the next clearing I can see the Sustainability Security crews standing in a semicircle around the crashed truck and firing their weapons, and there are dead GreyDevils on the road and other injured ones crawling here and there. So the crews are using real bullets. But the GreyDevils are showing up in clots now, and just like when they attack the
Scary Pruner
there will be a point when there get to be so many that the Sustainability Security crews will be hopelessly outnumbered. Sure enough, soon the
pop-pop-pop
sounds stop, and at the next clearing I can see the Security crew has jumped into its vehicle and is retreating behind the giant BarbaZap gate, which immediately begins to roll closed behind them.

Now I’m encountering GreyDevils myself. We’re all moving in the same direction, but they’re so focused on getting to the URCorn they don’t even notice me. They just shuffle-run, their lungs making horrible cheesy-wheezy sounds. Actually, right now my lungs don’t feel much better.

HA-WHOMP!

Toad! The Whomper-Zooka! Just as I break into Hoot Holler, the Security crews are closing the electric gates of the Sustainability Reserve, using the last rounds from their weapons to knock down the GreyDevils who think it’s their chance to get into those fields of giant corn. Mostly they’re all swarming the capsized truck, but as the gate slides the last two feet, it traps a pair of GreyDevils. First it fries them, then it crunches them. The Security crew just watches as they sizzle.

The first GreyDevils to reach the spill have thrown themselves headfirst into the kernels, shoveling handfuls into their faces or biting mouthfuls like hungry hounds swimming through a pool full of dog food.

“TOAD!” I holler, banging at the gate just down from where the truck has crashed through the fence.

“FULLY OCCUPIED, FORD FALCON!” Toad hollers back. I hear another
HA-WHOMP!
and immediately realize: Toad is too busy fighting to get the gate, and Arlinda is probably in the house guarding Dookie.

The only way in is through the breach in the fence.

Which is currently clogged with slobbering GreyDevils.

31

THIS ISN’T ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN YOU THINK THINGS OVER. I
draw my ToothClub, raise it high, and rush forward. At first the going is pretty easy because I’m going with the GreyDevil flow, but as I get closer to the gap in the fence and the mountain of spilled URCorn, the jostling and bumping begins. “Outta my way, snot suckers!” I holler, and start smacking heads. An elbow whacks me in the ribs, making me go
whooofffh!
A heel smashes down on my steel-toed boot, making me happy I am wearing steel-toed boots.

Now things are really getting clogged up. I high kick the GreyDevil ahead of me. He pitches headfirst to the dirt and I dive into the opening where he used to be, but immediately I am jammed shoulder to shoulder with more creepy crawlers. The stench of their unwashed rags and bodies makes me retch, but I think of Toad and Arlinda and Dookie, lower my head, and barge forward another three feet. I holster my ToothClub because I don’t even have room to swing it now, and even when I punch and kick the bodies around me there is no response. They’re so obsessed with getting to the URCorn that it’s like I’m not even there. I’m just being carried forward by a greasy, grimy tide of GreyDevils.

And then everything stops.

I can’t move, and I’m being squeezed tight, so tight I have to work to make my breath go in and out. My arms are pinned to my sides, and now I admit I’m freaking out a little. I struggle, but it’s no use. And I can hear a sound . . . a wet, smacky, grindy,
odd
sound. Now I realize—it’s the sound of GreyDevils chewing and gnawing and slobbering and smacking as they gobble the kernels of URCorn. The GreyDevils beside me must hear it too, because suddenly I feel something wet and warm run down the back of my neck. GreyDevil drool!

“This is NOT HAPPENING!” I holler, although it’s hard to holler when you’re trying not to hurl. I kick, elbow, and claw with every ounce of energy I can summon. The tiniest gap opens before me and I shoot both arms up, grab a GreyDevil by its greasy shoulders, and by scrabbling up its back with my knees, basically do a pull-up until I am high enough up its back to get a knee over its shoulder. I grab its horrible head in both my hands, lever myself up so I’m standing on its shoulders, and launch myself into a forward dive. As I take flight, I can see I’m headed for a pile of GreyDevils who are burrowing into the URCorn. I belly flop onto the pile with a thump, then climb and claw and crawl like mad, doing whatever it takes to keep moving over the giant squirming glob of GreyDevils gorging themselves on crazy corn.

When I get near the peak of the pile I reach out to the torn steel where the trailer has split open. Grabbing the lip with both hands, I do a chin-up myself, then kick one leg over and hoist myself atop the trailer, only to see Toad about to pull the striker on the Whomper-Zooka.

“FOLD YOUR HIRE!” I holler.

Toad’s eyes widen, then his face breaks into a big grin.

“FORD FALCON!”

Even in all the craziness, Toad’s smile warms my heart in a way it hasn’t felt in months, and for just a split second I imagine how heroic I must look standing astride the tanker, rising above all odds to come to the rescue of my friends and family. After months of frustration and futility and worry I have something to
do
. As awful as this situation is, at least I can
fight it
.

Flap-flap-WHACK!

Oh, for the love of cock-eyed nuts.

Hatchet.

I rip him from my hair and throw him into the pile of GreyDevils, where he belongs. As I jump from the tanker into the compound, he’s already pecking furiously at a GreyDevil’s earlobe. I dive behind Toad and he lets loose another Whomper-Zooka blast.

“We gotta keep ’em out!” says Toad. “That corn’s holdin ’em for now! Once it’s gobbled, they’ll be roarin’ all over the place, hauling everything off to the Juice Cruisers!”

“Dookie!” I holler. “Where’s Dookie?”

“In the house,” Toad says. I look over my shoulder and there’s Arlinda on the porch, cradling a Mini-Zooka Toad made especially for her.

I can stop worrying about Dookie, then.

32

FOR HALF A SECOND I CONSIDER MAKING A DASH FOR MY ARMOR,
but then a stray GreyDevil lurches my way and I realize there is no time for that. I clobber the GreyDevil a good one with the ToothClub and it staggers back toward the tipped-over truck. While Toad reloads the Whomper-Zooka I stand guard before him, whacking at GreyDevils and thinking we’re in for a long night.

And then rising from behind Skullduggery Ridge, I hear a distant moaning sound. I swivel my head around, half expecting to see an army of ravenous GreyDevils come over the ridge, but instead I see a gigantic helicopter rising over the horizon and coming straight for Toad’s place. As it draws closer, I can see the national flag and the CornVivia logo on its side.

When it gets directly above the crashed cornvoy truck, the helicopter hovers high in the sky. I’m expecting a thunderous roar, but the two big propellers at either end just make that low moaning sound. A small hatch opens in the belly and a long, long tube snakes downward toward the ground. The tube is about as big around as my waist, and the end is covered with a spiky steel grate. Someone in the helicopter must be controlling it, because now it’s twisting and, like an elephant’s trunk, nosing its way into the pile of GreyDevils. Suddenly the air is filled with a sizzling
Zap-snap-zap!
Sparks fly from the nozzle spikes and the GreyDevils howl and scatter. URCorn begins whooshing up the tube.

“Toad!” I holler. “It’s a giant vacuum cleaner!”

One of the GreyDevils gets too close and in an instant is sucked up tight against the grate that keeps it from being inhaled by the tube. The hose retracts, raising the GreyDevil about ten feet in the air. Then someone in the helicopter flips a switch, the whooshing stops, and the GreyDevil drops to earth. Immediately, the nozzle roars to life and starts sucking corn again.

The helicopter keeps vacuuming corn and zapping GreyDevils, and it is really something to see, but it also means that the GreyDevils are being scattered and some of them are winding up on our side of the fence.