The Scavengers (21 page)

Now I step outside and into the Clear Zone.

In the bleak morning light all the mystery is gone. Rather than a wondrous bubble, I see an endless wall, stretching high into the sky. It was painted white once, but now it is streaked and dusty, and ringed with BarbaZap. What looked like white space before us last night is just plain old gravel, a wasteland with not a weed or plant to be seen. The banks of lights are still burning, but up facing real sunlight they appear thin and weak. I can see a dome, but it sticks up like a tiny little bump. There’s no way it covers the whole giant place. I remember Toad telling me not to believe everything I read.

I put one foot on the gravel. It crunches beneath my boot, and I stop. Nothing dramatic happens, so I take another step. The noise of the cornvoy trucks seems to be off to my left somewhere, so I angle that way, figuring they are going to a gate of some sort. Inside I admit my stomach feels like it’s full of cold tadpoles, but what else is there to do but keep going? I straighten up and try to walk like I cross this patch every day, but with every step I expect the ground to explode beneath me.

Moving at a diagonal, I am nearly halfway across the Zone when I hear a soft buzzing noise. Seconds later a tiny object with four propellers hovers above me. I can see what looks like a glass eye. Now I hear engines and see a cloud of dust coming my way. I freeze. My heart is pounding. Toad told me once that anytime a cowboy-book cowboy rode a new trail, he’d stop to look back every now and then so he could recognize the landmarks if he had to return. I spin on my heel and look back to the building where Toby is sleeping and burn the image into my brain.

And now I turn to face what is coming.

They stop about a hundred yards away and holler for me to put my hands up. I think,
This really is like the cowboy books
, and raise my arms. About twenty people in uniforms spill out of the vehicles, fan out in a semicircle with weapons drawn, and slowly walk toward me. I stand stone-still.

“You are in the Clear Zone,” says one of the security men. He has more stripes on his sleeve than the others. His face is obscured by a mirrored visor.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I say. When you don’t feel brave, you gotta act brave.

If my smart-mouth comment makes him mad, I can’t tell, because the only thing I see in his visor is a tiny version of me standing in a field of gravel. We stand there a moment, then I hear him speak. “Paddy wagon: advance!”

“Paddy wagon?”
I can’t help myself. “Paddy wagon? Like for taking someone to jail in an old detective book? That term’s even older than
station
wagon. Surely you could come up with something more menacing.”

Nobody so much as twitches. Apparently they aren’t into comedy. A long vehicle with what looks like a square box on the back separates itself from the other vehicles and drives forward. When it pulls even with the security men, they begin walking beside it until they’re ten feet away.

“Place your hands on your head and turn around,” says Mr. More-Stripes. I do, and immediately someone grabs each of my wrists and lowers them behind my waist. I hear two
ziiipp!
sounds and my hands are tied behind my back. I wiggle my wrists. Tight. Then Mr. More-Stripes turns me back to face him—or, actually, to face myself in his visor.

“You have violated the Clear Zone and will be repatriated.”

“Well, aren’t you handy with the fancy words,” I say. “Nope, you’re going to take me inside the Bubble.”

“Negatory,” says Mr. More-Stripes.

I giggle. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But really,
negatory
?

“You got a boss?” I ask.

Silence.

“Someone I can give a message?”

More silence.

“Well, since you’re all wearing uniforms, I assume you have a boss. You tell your boss I have something you want.”

Silence. Realizing I haven’t been perfectly clear, I point at the Bubble.

“Something
they
want.”

The man takes me by the arm and pushes me toward the van.

“You ever hear the story about the man who tied his Security Chip to a red balloon?”

Everyone freezes. Then they all turn to look at me.

“That guy is my dad.”

They stand there like mirror-faced statues.

“I know where he is.”

Mr. Paddy-Wagon-Negatory walks away a short distance, then speaks quietly into his helmet radio. After a brief moment, he returns.

“Come with us,” he says.

“Kinda seems like the only choice,” I say, and climb into the van.

46

IT’S ANOTHER DREAM, AND THIS ONE IS SO MUCH BETTER BECAUSE
instead of a stinky solar bear with yellow eyes and big teeth, I see Ma, and instead of assuming the armadillo position and rolling away, I’m running toward her with my arms open, but then the dream is turning because she keeps wavering in and out of sight like a human mirage, and then there’s nothing around her but whiteness, and in the dream I worry that I’m just losing her again, so I holler out:

“MA!”

“I’m here, Maggie. Right here.”

And she is. Ma, in the flesh, slowly coming back into focus. And now I know I’m not dreaming, because my head feels like someone shot it out of a Whomper-Zooka. I grab it in both hands and squeeze, trying to stop the throbbing, then quickly let go when I remember the stitches.

Except the stitches aren’t there. I feel around again, carefully.

No stitches. Only a shaved spot on my scalp and a little scar-like ridge where the cut was.

I must have been out for a long . . .

“Maggie.”

It really is Ma.

I stumble to my feet and stagger across the room to her arms. We fold each other into a powerful hug and just stay that way, as if somehow we can gather up everything we’ve lost and crush it back into our souls.

I remember being pulled from the paddy wagon. I remember walking down a long hallway into a room with people waiting. I remember bright lights and clean floors. I remember . . . that’s the last I remember. Now here I am, with a raging headache, hugging Ma.

Ma feels stouter than I recall. Less like a bony bird. She’s no Arlinda Hopper, but her arms are strong around me. She’s been eating well, then. I stand back and hold her by the shoulders, like I am the grown-up here, and we stand face-to-face. Her cheeks are a good color. Her hair is shiny and full and swept up into a knot. Her face is clear and she looks well rested. But her eyes . . . her eyes are a swimming mix of love and sadness.

“Oh, Maggie,” she says.

She reaches up and takes both my hands in hers and leads me to a corner of the room, where we sit facing each other on two hard white cubes. Everything in here is white: the floor, the ceiling, and three walls of the room. The entire fourth wall is a mirror.

“Oh, Maggie,” says Ma again, taking my hands in hers.

“Ma . . . ,” I start to say, but my voice cracks and fails me. It is so good to see her. So good to hear her voice. I don’t want to sit there on my cube, I want to crawl right up into her lap and have her hold me in her arms, rock me like she did when I was tiny.

I am
so sick
of always being strong.

I look at us in the giant mirror. Here I am, nearly as tall as Ma, my face all dirt and streaks from woodsmoke and the days on the trail and my hair all ratted, my legs laced into tall leather boots, my arms deep brown from all the time in the sun, the strip of solar bear hide stitched to my shirt. . . . If I jump into her arms now it’s gonna look like some nice lady being attacked by a GreyDevil reject.

Ma puts me back at arm’s length, looks me up and down from head to toe, and speaks. “You look . . . you look . . .” I can see Ma trying to find the right way to put it. I can imagine what is in her head. How she is trying to look through the image of what it is before her now and see the girl she last saw three months ago. I am taller now, and stronger.

“You look like a woman, Maggie.”

“Oh, Ma . . .” I shuffle my feet.

“A strong, powerful woman.”

“Yah, who smells
strongly
and
powerfully
like she sleeps in the back corner of a solar bear cave and rinses her hair with possum guts.”

“Maggie, that’s not what I mean, and you know it.” The sharpness in her voice makes me feel like a little girl again, and I guess I had it coming. I straighten up on my cube.

“Ma, I came to take you back.”

47

THE SECOND I SAY I’M HERE TO TAKE HER BACK, MA’S EYES SHOOT
to the mirror-wall, and then back to me. “Oh, Maggie, no . . . no . . . I’m afraid it isn’t possible.”

“What do you mean, Ma?”

“I . . . I . . .” She’s looking at the mirror again.

“Ma! Have they hurt you?”

“Oh, no, Maggie. Quite the opposite. I have been treated very well. I have a room of my own, Maggie. A room with a window. Books on a shelf, and Earl Grey tea whenever I wish, and I never was happy OutBubble, and I . . . and . . . and . . .” She is speaking rapidly. Too rapidly, as if she’s trying to head me off, keep me from going down some dangerous road. All the while she is still clutching at my hands, squeezing and unsqueezing them as if somehow this will keep her distracted from the trouble surrounding us. “And now that you’re here, you should stay. You’re . . . you’re all I have.”

“But what about our family, Ma?”

“We have no more family, Maggie!” Ma says this so sharply and squeezes my hand so tightly that I cry out and jump back, but she clings to my hands even tighter, and her fingers are clutching at mine.

“Maggie, your father abandoned us! And Henry . . . Henry . . .” She is sobbing now, terrible sobs, sobs that shake her whole body. I have called Henry “Dookie” so long it takes me a second to realize she is referring to my little snot flicker of a brother.

“Dad didn’t abandon us, Ma! There were things . . . things he couldn’t . . .” I keep looking at that mirror. I don’t know yet how much I should say.

“No, Maggie, no. Your father
abandoned
us. That night, before the attack, we had a terrible fight about him being gone all the time. He took his pack and said he was heading for the northern territories and I’d never see him again. For all I know he’s . . . he’s
dead
.”

I know this can’t be true. Ma and Dad got grumpy with each other, but I never once heard Dad raise his voice against Ma. And Ma
knew
what Dad was doing those nights when he was out wandering. Suddenly, I realize: someone
is
listening and Ma is trying to protect Dad by throwing them off his trail.

“Ma, he was . . .”

“Oh, Maggie, there is so much you don’t know.”

“But, Ma, I . . .”

“And after losing Henry . . . oh, Maggie, when I saw them beat Henry and drop him lifeless to the ground . . .”

“But, Ma, they didn’t kill Doo . . .
Henry
. Henry’s alive! I gave him a noogie just last week!”

Ma’s eyes fly open, and her sobbing stops. “But I saw them . . . with their clubs . . . he fell . . . I knew . . .”

She tells me the story now, how she was up late worrying about Dad and trying to keep her mind occupied reading
Little House on the Prairie
by candlelight and worrying about Dad yet again when the attackers came screeching around the shack, how she knew immediately they weren’t GreyDevils because their voices weren’t right and at that hour any real GreyDevil would be at the bonfires drinking PartsWash. And then she knew for sure when they broke through the door because despite their rags and dirty faces, they moved like healthy men and their breath didn’t smell like spoiled turpentine, their yellow eyes were
too
yellow, and then if there was any doubt remaining, they were all wearing headlamps and carrying weapons. She says the lights were blinding as two of the invaders grabbed and held her while the others smashed the chicken coop and tore up the house and stomped the Falcon and went into the root cellar looking for Dad. The men kept threatening Ma and demanding to know where Dad was, and she kept telling them she didn’t know, which was true. Dookie kept running in circles, hollering “
Shibby-shibby-shibby . . .
” Then he grabbed Ma and tried to pull her away from the men. One of them raised a club and hit Dookie in the head and he crumpled to the ground. She tried to go to Dookie, but the men grabbed her tightly and hustled her away. The last thing she saw, she says, was Dookie’s little body lying on the ground, lit by the flash of a headlamp. Then she was dragged off into the night.

“Ma . . . Dookie . . .
Henry
 . . . he survived! I found him in the roots of the Shelter Tree. Where he used to hide out and wait to scare me. He must have come to long enough to crawl in there.”

“He’s alive?” says Ma, as if she didn’t hear me the first time.

“Alive, Ma. And he needs you.” I leave it at that. I don’t tell her about the seizure.

She is quiet now, squeezing her eyes against tears that sneak out anyway.

“They will never let me go.”

I shoot a glance at the mirror. Wondering who’s back there.

“They want your father.”

“I know, Ma. That’s why I’m here.”

The light in the room changes, and as if someone has thrown a switch—as someone has—the mirrored wall becomes a window.

And behind the window are two men.

48

THE TWO MEN ARE SEPARATED BY A WALL, ALTHOUGH THERE IS A
window in the wall that allows them to see each other. The first man is a skinny fellow with skin so pale and limp it reminds me of wilted lettuce. He is standing in a clean white room the same as ours.

The second man is big. Big as Tilapia Tom, plus a fat hog’s worth of blubber. His face is creased and oily, like a greased prune with eyeballs. His hair is thick and black. He’s wearing a suit and a tie. They’re tight around his neck and belly. He’s sitting behind a massive wooden desk that looks as if it was built just so he could pound his fist on it. Everything around him is a cluttered mess. There are shelves and cubbies on every wall, and every available surface is crammed with cast iron toys and tin soldiers and miniature steam engines and wooden-handled oddments and a hundred other things I don’t recognize, every single one of them old. The walls are covered with rusty advertising signs and yellowed circus posters and framed postcards and a blinking neon sign that says “BEER.”