The Scavengers (16 page)

“Whomp at will, Ford Falcon!” hollers Toad, reminding me that I needed to stop being a spectator. Over the next twenty minutes, while the helicopter crew sucks up corn out of every nook and cranny of that wrecked truck, I do my best to keep the GreyDevils at bay, shooting the Whomper-Zooka now and then, but mostly using my ToothClub and pepper-bombs. Monocle is helping too, chomping and gnawing and growling, his tail spinning happily—for him this is not a fight, it is like recess—while Hatchet flaps and pecks and scratches. I hear a
whock!
as yet another GreyDevil gets sucked against the end of the tube. The tube raises him kicking and flailing into the air and then just like a cat playing with a mouse, the hidden operator flicks the nozzle, flinging the GreyDevil right at us.

The trouble is, the hose also flicks a scatter of URCorn our way, and as the nozzle sparks and zaps its way back into the truck, a mob of GreyDevils turns and comes charging, crazy to get the URCorn that just sprinkled down on us like yellow hailstones.

I blast them with the Whomper-Zooka and it’s no better than blowing kisses. They just keep swarming. I lay into them with my ToothClub, and I hear Monocle yapping, and Hatchet cackling, and for the first time that I can remember, I’m truly scared. There are just so many of them, and they are so crazed. It’s terrifying to realize they aren’t after me personally. It’s simply that they are in a frenzy to get to something and they’ll go through me to get it. It’s like standing between a pen full of fat pigs and a pack of starving solar bears.

Stepping backward, I catch my heel on a rock. I stumble, then fall on my butt. I struggle to rise, but the wave of charging bodies knocks me flat. GreyDevils close in all around me. I can’t see any one particular face, just shapes and ragged silhouettes blocking the sky. I’m trying to curl into what Toad calls “armadillo position”—knees and chin to chest, fingers clasped behind my neck—when suddenly something jerks at my collar and I feel myself being dragged backward.

“Rise and retreat, Ford Falcon!” It’s Toad, pulling me to my feet. We run for the house, where Arlinda is holding the door open.

Just as we reach the porch, I look back over my shoulder.

And stop dead in my tracks.

“Ford!” hollers Arlinda. “In the house! Now!”

But I am already running back toward the GreyDevils. Or rather, toward one GreyDevil in particular. It is kneeling with its back to me, gobbling corn. It is wearing a tattered T-shirt. The shirt is stained and grimy, but I can see it was once blue.

And across the shoulders I can see the image . . . of an old-fashioned door lock.

That’s my
father’s
shirt.

33

THE GREYDEVIL IN THE BLUE T-SHIRT IS SNUFFLING IN THE SPILLED
corn like a rabid pig. Stopping just behind it, I raise my ToothClub high. I am filled with rage. Seeing my father’s shirt on that
creature
, imagining how the shirt got there, what was done to my father in order to steal it, I want to smash and maim and make someone else suffer just a fraction of what my father must have suffered. Of what our
family
has suffered.

“You can stop stuffing your piehole, skunk-monkey,” I say, cranking the ToothClub back like Toad taught me to do with Hatchet, “because I’m about to
fetch
you silly!”

The GreyDevil freezes, then turns its head.

I stop my swing halfway, and then I freeze too, staring at the face before me. It’s a typical GreyDevil face, all sooty-sweaty and pocked with sores and streaked with snot tracks. The lips are dripping with spit and little chunks of half-chewed URCorn. The cheeks are hollow and the eyes are sunken . . . but something about them is different. They are watery and sickly, but not as yellow as most GreyDevils’. And most GreyDevil eyes look as dead as a fish’s after three days on the beach, but deep inside this GreyDevil’s eyes I can see a tiny spark of light—of
life
.

I look at the shirt again. The front. A key, and two words: “Bon Hiver
.
”

Now the eyes again.

My voice is so quiet it is nearly a whisper.

“Dad?”

If I am expecting the faint spark in those eyes to melt into love, I am dead wrong. Our eyes lock for a split second, then the GreyDev—
Dad
—makes a mournful half howl, staggers to his feet, and lurches toward the gap in the fence.

I run after him and throw myself on his back. He totters and falls, and I cling to him as he struggles to rise and run again. He feels so bony and frail in my arms.

“TOAD!” I scream, and Toad is on us in an instant. When he sees the face of the creature I am wrestling, his eyes widen, and in a ragged voice he says, “Snooky holer-tables!” Dad struggles terribly, but we hold him down until finally he goes still as a rag doll. We pull my father to his feet, Toad and I each gripping one of his arms.

“Shig ped,” says Toad, and he says it so firmly I don’t think he’s spoonerizing, he’s just having trouble talking. I have never seen him so shaken.

I’m shaken too, and don’t move. Now Toad’s eyes snap, and suddenly he is all strap iron and steel again, and above the swarm of GreyDevils and the hum of the helicopter his voice is like a whipcrack.

“Now!”

Dad starts struggling again, fighting us, kicking with his heels, trying to get away. When we get to the shed and push him through the door, Toad has to peel Dad’s fingers from the doorjamb so I can swing it shut without crushing them. The pigs squeal and scoot as we shove Dad through another door into the small feed storage room in the back. I slam the feed room door and Toad drops the bolt in place. The thick walls muffle the howling and moaning, but I can hear clawing and thuds against the door, and I feel sick.

But there is no time to dally. Toad cracks the pig shed door and I can see GreyDevils milling around the yard, some of them holding pieces of iron stolen from our scrap pile. We burst out of the door and make a run for the house. As we hit the porch, Arlinda steps out between us and touches off her Mini-Zooka. When I turn, I see the helicopter is drawing its giant vacuum cleaner back into its belly now, and the GreyDevils are rushing back in to claw through the last kernels of URCorn remaining in the corners of the ruined truck. As the helicopter rises, flying up and away over the ridge, the GreyDevils in the yard are thinning out. Now that the URCorn has been vacuumed up, they’re all trying to figure out how to get through the BarbaZap and into the Sustainability Reserves, and there are only a handful rummaging around in Toad’s junk piles. Between Toad’s Whomper-Zooka, my ToothClub and pepper-peas, Monocle’s joyful biting, and Hatchet’s bad attitude, it takes us about two hours to round up the last one and run it off. By then the cornvoy truck has been towed away. By the time we get done stringing barbwire back and forth across the hole in the fence, evening is coming on.

I want so badly to look in on Dad, but when I reach for the pig shed door, Toad puts his hand against it.

“But, Toad, I . . .”

He shakes his head, and we walk to the house. In the kitchen Arlinda hugs me, then pours a mug of tea. When I pick it up my hand is shaky. I’ve never been so tired, but my eyes are wide, and I’m trembly inside, like I’ve seen a ghost.

“There is a way to get your father back,” says Toad. “But it will take time. And what lies ahead is far worse than anything you saw tonight. You cannot help him right now. There is nothing for you to do right now but rest and gather your strength.”

I can’t imagine what awful things have happened to make Dad this way, and I can’t imagine how we will ever get him back from the animal I left in the pig shed. But I also have new questions about Toad: if he knows how to get Dad back, he must know what has made him this way.

“Toad . . . Dad . . . what . . . ?”

“Tomorrow,” says Toad. “Now you must sleep.”

“And Ma? Is she out there somewhere? In the same shape? Or worse?”

“We don’t know,” says Toad.

And then a small hand slips into mine. Dookie. And so I drink the tea, and then Dookie leads me into the room with Toad’s strange stuffed animals and he pats the blankets on the floor and like a tuckered child I lie down and I sleep.

The next morning I wake to the smell of fresh-baked apple pies and the rumble of cornvoy trucks coming and going. I look out the window at the pig shed, then look back at Arlinda, packing pies into crates.

“Those hungry truckers only show up twice a year,” she says, pointing out to where the cornvoy trucks are lined up waiting for their loads of corn. “Gotta make hay while the sun shines!”

34

TOAD SAID IT WOULD BE HORRIBLE, AND IT WAS. DAD WAS LIKE AN
animal. He
was
an animal. Whenever we stepped inside the pig shed I could hear him in the feed room, moaning hoarsely and pounding the walls. Scratching at the door so hard his fingernails ripped. There were times in the beginning when we had to tie him down. We had to give him water in a wooden bowl because when we gave him a glass he bit right through it and cut his lip.

Every time Toad or I went down, we carried slop buckets and gave the pigs some feed. Toad wouldn’t tell me why. He just said it was important to make it look like we were just going down there to feed pigs.

“Do you think someone is watching us?” I asked, and he nodded. Remembering how he snapped at me when I hesitated about dragging Dad into the shed, I realize now he knew we had to act fast when we were still surrounded by the swarm of GreyDevils and the distraction provided by the giant helicopter vacuum in the sky.

Every morning Arlinda ground up a small potion of herbs and grains, then boiled them into a porridge that we slipped beneath the door. Once I made the mistake of peeking through to see if Dad was eating the porridge, and when I saw the way he tore into it with his bare hands, nearly chomping his fingers as he stuffed the mash in his face, I couldn’t believe this was the same Dad who was joking with me about Hatchet the day I discovered Porky Pig in Goldmine Gully.

Finding Dad really messed me up about Ma. Of course I had been missing her terribly, but I had settled into the idea of not knowing. Now I had to wonder if she was out there somewhere, crazy on PartsWash and trading with Juice Cruisers to survive. What if she was in that crowd I climbed over at the URCorn spill? What if she was one of the GreyDevils shot by the Sustainability Security crews? I couldn’t believe I was thinking this, but it was almost easier to think of her being dead than being one of
them
.

Dookie had no idea Dad was in the pig shed, and we didn’t tell him. We were worried if Dookie saw Dad in this condition it would freak Dookie out forever. I told Arlinda it seemed wrong to keep a son from his father, but she said, “That is not the boy’s father . . . and won’t be for some time.” The next time I delivered his porridge and he backed into the corner and snarled like a wild dog, I realized she was right.

Then came the day I saw an ember of softer light in his eyes. That day Toad gave him a plastic cup of berry juice, and Dad drank it slowly, not like before when he frothed and chomped. Finally we could open the door and hand him his food and he wouldn’t run to the far corner and hiss like a mad cat, or try to claw his way past us to freedom.

But the healthier he got, the quieter he got. He went from looking me straight in the eyes like a crazy man to quietly turning his back and refusing to look at me at all.

“Time, Ford Falcon, time,” said Toad when I told him.

By the end of the first week Dad’s skin was less gray. The sores and the runny nose were clearing up. When we left him a washcloth and water he sometimes used it. We left clean clothes and after three more days he put them on.

Then one morning I take Dad his porridge, and after eating it quietly, he speaks.

“You shouldn’t have saved me, Maggie.” His voice is scratchy, weak, and croaky.

“Dad, you’re back . . . it will be okay now.”

“No,” he says. “No.”

“But, Dad . . .”

“You don’t understand, Maggie. I don’t
deserve
to be alive.”

I just look at him.

“Your mother,” he says.

“What about her?” I am afraid of what he will say next.

“It’s because of me . . .”

“What’s because of you?”

“It’s because of me . . . that . . . that she’s gone.”

I just sit there. Waiting.

“They . . . they were looking for me.”

“They? Who’s ‘they’?”

“The Bubble Authorities.”

I look at him, so confused I have no idea what to say.

“I carry secrets, Maggie. Terrible, terrible secrets.”

35

WE EACH SIT ON AN OVERTURNED SLOP BUCKET AND FACE EACH
other, knee to knee.

Dad takes a deep breath and lets it out.

“You know I met your mother when we were both in college,” he says. “Your mother was a word nerd, but I was a science geek. After we got married, your mother gave up school and went to work while I did research and piled up science degrees. I don’t think I wanted an education as much as I just wanted to live in the laboratory. It was my favorite place.”

I’m looking at him now, this man I’ve known only as my mostly bumbling dad with the lopsided smile—and most recently as a raving GreyDevil—and trying to imagine him as an eager young man looking through a microscope.

“One day some people from CornVivia visited the college. My instructors showed them my grades and my work, and they offered me a job.”

“You worked for CornVivia?” I wrinkle my nose like I just found a worm in the porridge.

“They promised to pay off all my tuition if I agreed to work in their laboratories for two years,” says Dad. His voice is scratchy and weak, and there is sweat on his brow, but he is looking me right in the eyes. “Your mother was working so hard. We had no money, and we owed so much on tuition I thought we’d never pay it off, and now here was someone offering to wipe it away. Besides, I
loved
working for CornVivia. I was given my own laboratory. I had all the latest tools and technology. At the end of my second year the company gave us a nice car, and offered us enough money to buy our first house if I would stay on.”