The Scavengers (20 page)

“Here,” he says, handing me a stick. “You might wanna chew on this.”

Then he starts sewing.

Even when the pain is making me squeeze my eyes shut so tight I feel like they’ll pop, I notice how gently his giant palm is cradling my head, and how tenderly his fingertips work around the wound. You’d never guess it from such a big lug. I wonder if maybe he’s that way because he didn’t have a ma, and he had to learn tenderness from his giant pa.

“Okay,” he says, as he knots the last stitch and ties a rag strip around my head. “That oughta do it.”

“Good enough,” I say, standing and squaring my shoulders. “Let’s eat some bear steaks!”

If we were back home, we’d spend the next day turning that bear into food and a rug and tallow candles and the best ToothClub ever, but out here we simply don’t have the tools or time. We weren’t hunting—we were fighting for our lives. Still, as a scavenger, I hate to let anything go to waste. So even though we just had stew, and even though we should put the fire out, we skin one of the bear’s haunches and Toby cuts two big steaks. We spear them with sticks and broil them over the flames. When we tear into the meat it is still a little bloody inside, but we are so famished from the fight and the butchering we just can’t wait. It’s strange, eating that steak, knowing that an hour ago it wasn’t clear who would be eating whom.

After Toby turns in, I snuff the jacklight and sit the rest of my watch. The solar bear fight has taken everything out of me, and it’s all I can do to stay awake. By the time I wake Toby and roll into my bag, I’m so tired it feels like the insides of my eyelids are vibrating. My head is pounding from the solar bear bite, but I fall straight to sleep, my mind spinning into a dream of fighting the bear. In the dream the bear comes at me again and again, but just as it closes me in its arms I see its eyes, and they are yellow, GreyDevil yellow, and then the bear becomes a big, laughing fat man, and even in my dream as I dive away I wonder why. But now I am an armadillo, curled up tight and rolling, rolling, rolling. . . .

44

THE PARROTS WAKE ME EARLY. TOBY IS USING THE FIRST LIGHT OF
day to stitch and repair his torn boots. For breakfast I eat two leftover strips of bear steak. Toby is still working, so I walk over to the body of the solar bear and skin out as big a chunk of hide as I can without rolling him over. Using the flat side of my knife blade, I scrape the underside of the hide clean, then, using my thumbs, work cooking salt into the skin. Before I roll the hide up and stow it in my pack, I cut off two little strips and use my sewing kit to stitch one strip to the front of my shirt, and the other to Toby’s shirt. Operating on Toad’s
Scary Pruner
theory, I’m wanting people to see that solar bear fur over our hearts and wonder how we came to have it. It might be the sort of thing that spares us a fight.

Finally I pull out my whetstone and spit on it. “
Knull dife, lort shife
,” I say, smiling as I run the blade back and forth.

We get a late start. Right away my head wound is pounding. When the trail takes us past a swamp, I stop to cut some willow whips and chew on them while I walk. Arlinda told Ma and me once that bull moose chew willow when their antlers hurt. They don’t taste like much, and maybe it’s my imagination, but it does help some.

For five more days, we hike, make camp, break camp, and hike again. There are no more solar bears. We just trudge, day after day. By the third day the trails become wider and more well-worn, and there are more and more open spaces between the trees. Here and there we see little tents and shacks and chicken coops and people looking up from hoop house gardens, and I realize how easy it is to think I’m the only one living the way I do. Sometimes the people wave, but mostly they just stand and watch us pass, like they’re worried we might turn into trouble. I notice I’m more on edge, too, studying the face of everyone we meet on the trail, moving to the side ahead of time, letting my hand rest on my ToothClub until they’ve passed. I’m used to being on guard against solar bears and GreyDevils, but I’m finding that strangers make me more nervous by far.

And we’re headed to a place where everyone is a stranger.

On the fifth day the trails become old roads. Now and then we meet someone with an oxcart, and once a team of spirited, trotting horses pulling a scrap wagon. Nobody is driving anything even remotely as amazing as the
Scary Pruner
. Usually the sight of Toby is enough to keep them moving with their eyes cast elsewhere. We see the ruins of buildings and what used to be small villages. Unlike Nobbern, these villages have almost no life to them. Nobbern may be ragged in a lot of places, but at least it’s got actual businesses and residents, and Magical Mercantile. There is nothing like that here. We see ragged, dirty people lurking in the buildings, but they just peek out at us. I keep looking for GreyDevils, but we haven’t seen one for two days now. I’ve puzzled on this some, but I suppose the answer is pretty simple: there aren’t any Sustainability Reserves in this part of the country, and they don’t want to travel far from that crazy corn.

I stop puzzling on GreyDevils and start puzzling on what I’m going to do when I get to the capital. Last night I spotted the faint glow of it against the distant sky. My heart jumped, and I felt a cold ball of fear in my stomach. I still don’t have a plan beyond walking right up and knocking on the door. And even if I did have a plan, it’s one thing to imagine it while sitting all alone in an old car on a faraway ridge. It’s a completely different thing to actually put that plan up against reality. What if they just grab me and no one hears from me again? What if they just ignore me? What if they don’t even have Ma? And for that matter, who exactly is “they”?

All I know is they want Dad, and I want Ma. I guess my plan amounts to putting one foot in front of the other.

I don’t have a better one.

On the sixth day we’re walking on the shoulder of a wider road, and instead of little villages we’re seeing acres of empty, tattered houses. They seem to go on forever, joined by cracked, weedy roads that wind all around and eventually come together. The sound of cornvoy trucks is louder, and sometimes if the land rises we can see them moving back and forth in the distance. And there is something odd: the more closely packed the abandoned buildings become, the fewer people we see.

We stop to eat lunch. For just a moment I lean back against my pack, close my eyes, and cross my arms over my chest to rest. My wrist brushes the patch of solar bear fur, and for an instant I don’t recognize what it is. It’s weird how just a few days and a few miles can make something seem like it never really happened. Or that it happened to someone else. I could almost believe I dreamed it, except that my head still feels like someone used it for a volleyball. I chew some more willow bark.

We study the map, then set out again. Last night there was a glow against the sky all night long. Today or tomorrow we will reach the capital. Now we’re seeing a few taller buildings, or what’s left of them. Many of the windows are broken out, and some of the bricks have begun to crumble. There are weeds growing on windowsills. Turkey vultures skulk on the rooflines and flop their wings to catch some sun. Just when I am wondering what they would find to eat around here, a grubby figure emerges from an alley ten feet away. It’s a small man wearing a shapeless poncho that appears to be made of close-cropped gray fur. The poncho is belted at the waist, and several wire snares hang from one belt loop. Two plastic buckets dangle from either end of a wooden bar he’s carrying across his shoulders. He looks surprised to see us, and for a minute it seems as though he might run. Then he smiles a gap-toothed smile.

“Want some rat?”

As he says it, he dips a shoulder so I can see into one of the buckets.
Ugh
. Yep. Rats.
Dead
rats.
Big
dead rats. Solar bears I can handle. Rats freak me out.

When he sees the look on my face he grins.

“Fresh caught!”

I look at Toby. He’s just standing there like Toby, although I see he’s quietly moved his fight-stick to the ready.

“I’ll even skin it for you,” says the little man, “but you’ll have to cook it yourself.”

“Yeeeah . . . ,” I say, backing up a step.

“And I get to keep the skin!” he interrupts, patting his hairy poncho. “I sew ’em together. Make these ponchos and sell ’em! Handcrafted! One of a kind! Shed the rain! Tough! Cozy!”

“I believe every word but
cozy
,” I say. Probably shouldn’t have, but I did. If it hurt his feelings, he didn’t show it.

“Nobody wants to eat a rat, nobody wants to wear a rat,” he says. “Until they’re starving and freezing.” His grin grows bigger, and he looks at me expectantly.

“Not starving,” I say. “Not cold.”

“Don’t see many people in this part of town,” the little man says. “Usually it’s just me and the rats.”

“Are you the city rat-catcher?”

“Me? I work for no one! ’Specially not the guvvermint. I’m a self-employed rat-repre
neur
!”

He fishes something out of the pocket of his poncho and holds it up. It looks like a shoestring with gangrene. “Try some rat jerky?”

I nearly barf on his boots.

Suddenly I see his face change. He backs up a step and points at my shirt.

“S-solar bear?”

“Yah,” I say, real breezy like. “
Fresh
solar bear.”

“W-wow . . . you . . .
you
?”

“Yah,” I say again. “Me.”

“And him?” The rat man points at Toby.

“He did assist, yes.”

“Does he talk?”

“Not really.”

“Who are you?”

“Ford,” I say. “Ford Falcon.” I say it real firm, so he’ll get the idea.

“Um, do they still
make
those?”

This is not the effect I had hoped for. I decide it is time to move on and start to step around him. He turns to watch us go.

“Um, no offense—I know you’re
Ford Falcon
and all—but do you know where you’re going?”

I just keep walking.

“You—you and your large, nontalking bodyguard—may be able to handle a solar bear, but I’m not sure you can handle what’s up there.” He points up the crumbled street to a long rise and a hill, where on the distant ruined horizon the old buildings stand tallest of all.

“Just beyond the rise,” he says. “The Clear Zone.”

Toby and I just look at him.

“Nobody crosses the Clear Zone.”

45

WE LEAVE THE RAT CATCHER AND WALK ON. IT IS TAKING US MUCH
longer than we expected to reach the buildings on the horizon, and daylight is fading. And yet, above the ridge, even as darkness falls, a great white glow is rising.

Bubble City.
The
Bubble City. The capital.

The buildings to either side of us are even taller now, but still cracked and empty and—because of the darkness behind us and the light ahead—filled with long, strange shadows. We are bone tired from the day, and my head is throbbing again. But now that the capital Bubble City is within reach we find ourselves determined to get there. To finally see this place we’ve only heard about. To see if anybody is playing volleyball and eating ice cream cones, like it showed in the brochure and the newspaper photos.

The higher we hike up the hill, the brighter the light grows, until finally it is just a blinding whiteness pouring between the tall buildings and down the street toward us.

And then there are no more buildings. Just space. White, white space. Away to the left, away to the right, and far ahead of us, only whiteness. What has only appeared as a dirty smudge against the night sky is now so pure I swear I feel it thrumming with electricity.

Toby comes to stand beside me. We shield our eyes, and now I can make out a few things—it isn’t one giant light but rather banks and banks of them, mounted on high poles and pointed outward, stretching either way for what seems to be miles. It’s hard to tell how far away the lights are, because the space between is acres and acres of flatness.

I can hear cornvoy trucks rumbling again.

“Um,” I say, “it might not be so wise to be standing right out here in the world’s biggest spotlight.” I duck into the doorway of the last building. Toby joins me.

“Rest. Wait till morning,” he says, using up four whole words.

I agree. Partly I am itching to go, and partly I realize I have no idea what is next and that I better sleep. I can’t imagine how I’ll get to sleep, but it would be dumb not to.

“I’ll take first watch,” says Toby. It’s not the way we’ve been doing it, but I’m too tired to argue. I undo my bedroll in a corner of what must have once been a lobby, curl up, and try not to think about rats.

In what seems to be ten minutes Toby is shaking my shoulder and it is morning.

I scold Toby for staying up all night. He just ignores me. He looks as tired as I’ve ever seen him. When he reaches for his pack, I say, “No way.”

He looks at me.

“You stayed up all night for me. You’re in no shape for anything. We don’t leave until you sleep.”

“I . . .”

“Sleep,” I say.

He unrolls his bag and is out in half a minute. When his breathing becomes deep and settled, I study his sleeping face for a moment. I think about his father, and what the two of them have been through together. I think about how Tilapia Tom will get along if Toby doesn’t return. What it would be like to lose your wife and your only child.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last three days. Toby’s job was to get me here. Arlinda was right to send him—if I had been alone when that solar bear attacked, right about now I’d be reincarnated solar bear poop. But from here on in, this is my battle. I have no right to drag Toby into it. I look at him one more time sound asleep on the floor, his fight-stick by his side. I have no idea what sort of trouble awaits me, but I don’t think it will be the kind that can be solved with a fight-stick. I take my finger and write a note on the dusty tiles: “Stay. If I’m not back in two days, go home. You did your job
.
”