The Scavengers (22 page)

And then, on the front corner of his desk, beside a stack of papers, I spot something that drops my jawbone to my toenails.

Porky Pig.

My
Porky Pig. The one I dug up in Goldmine Gully. I recognize it by the rust spot right where its belly button should be.

The Fat Man—that’s the name I decide to give him—must have seen my eyes bulge, because he chuckles evilly and picks up the statue.

“Nice, isn’t it?” he says, waggling the little pig at me. His voice is coming through a speaker hidden in the ceiling.

I am trying to scowl at him and look tough, but he can pretty easily see that I am shocked and perplexed.

“I like old things,” says the Fat Man, using a corner of his shirtsleeve to polish Porky’s cap. “This little guy here, he reminds me of the old days, when I was a little boy, eating macaroni and cheese and watching cartoons on TV. Things were so simple then.”

He looks at the statue and sighs. “I miss the old days . . . so I collect them. Well, I have
people
collect them for me.

“These things,” he continues, waving his hand at all the objects surrounding him, “they tell me stories.”

“Whatever,” I said, trying to be cool again.

“They take me on adventures,” he says.

I roll my eyes, even though I’m suddenly remembering how I felt when I held Porky that day under the Shelter Tree. Like I was being transported somewhere else also.

“And Porky here, Porky told me the best story of all.”

“Sounds like you should get out more,” I say. The Fat Man doesn’t even blink. There is something about him that is familiar.

“This pig told me how to find your father.”

It’s all I can do to keep my mouth from dropping open again.

“I have been hunting for your father for a long,
long
time. Ever since he pulled the red balloon trick, as a matter of fact. He’s a sneaky one.”

Then he adds, “And a smart one.”

For the first time since I don’t remember when, I feel a little bit proud of my dad.

“Tough, too. Tearing that tracker out of his face. That took some guts.” Then he looks at Ma. “Of course he had some help . . .”

Ma lowers her eyes.

“Yes, your father was quite a man,” says the Fat Man. “And he was—
is
—quite a valuable man. The fact is, by running away, he
stole
from us.”

“Couldn’t have happened to nicer people,” I say. I’m still trying to figure out why he looks familiar.

The Fat Man ignores me. “We had no choice but to pursue him. We knew he had to be out there. We had agents in the field, and eyes in the sky, but it’s a gigantic country, and that balloon trick and new car had given him a head start. A week passed before we found the car. Half of that week it had rained, so there were no tracks or scent remaining.

“Pretty much it was a clean getaway.”

The Fat Man cradles Porky in his hands, as gently as if he were holding a kitten. “Weeks became months, months became years. But we kept looking. We knew he needed URCorn. And we knew that sooner or later, that would lead us to him.”

“And then one day one of my OutBubble collectors brought me this talking pig.”

“That pig doesn’t talk, you grease chomper,” I say.

“Maggie!” says Ma, but I’m not gonna sit here all polite, no matter how much everything he is saying has knocked me sideways. I’m not gonna sit here like I’m one of Daniel Beard’s pretty-store-bought-bow girls. I need to be Ford Falcon.

“It’s just a dumb piggy bank. Look at the slot.”

“Oh, I know about the slot,” says the Fat Man, ignoring my attitude. He places Porky in the center of his desk now and sits straighter in his chair, like a professor about to deliver a lecture. Waving his hand at the objects surrounding him, he says, “Before any one of these items can be brought UnderBubble, they have to be Steri-Scanned, to make sure we don’t admit any unexpected contaminants. Some of us UnderBubble are germophobic weaklings.” At this he rolls his eyes and points his thumb at the wall on the other side of which the man with skin like wilted lettuce is standing.

“HEY!” says Lettuce Face, with a flouncy little huff.

The Fat Man chuckles. “And when we put Porky here through the Steri-Scan, well, we got a surprise: the sensors discovered traces of an organic substance not usually found on the inside of piggy banks—human blood.”

I recall the stab of pain when I reached for the pig and sliced my finger on the glass. I remember wiping my blood from the pig but not wanting to scrub it too hard. I remember my blood seeping into the cracks and the coin slot.

“Naturally, the Steri-Scan includes a DNA analysis and database cross-check. Imagine my surprise when it came back as a relative match to the man we’d been hunting for so long—your father.”

Once again, I find myself trying to keep my chin off the ground.

“We knew the scientist we were hunting had children—and the blood on this pig came from one of them. We could then assume wherever the child was—alive or dead, it was blood after all—the father would be nearby. The collector who brought me the pig was quite happy to tell me where he obtained it. I then sent some of my people to visit the proprietor, and after a brief conversation he quite willingly told us about the young girl who brought in the pig.”

Mad Mike!
He sold me out!

“After that, it was just a matter of waiting until the next time you came to town in that ridiculous wagon with that ridiculous old man. Our undercover people then followed you back, cased your place, and identified your father.”

I think of the GreyDevil I saw the night I was hiking down to Toad and Arlinda’s. No wonder it was so far up the ridge. Those too-yellow eyes, and the way it ran instead of shuffled. Just as Dad and I suspected, it wasn’t a real GreyDevil. It was a spy.

“Pretty smart,” I say, grudgingly. “But not too smart, because instead of capturing the escaped scientist, your goons beat up my little brother and kidnapped my mom.”

“IDIOTS!” roars the Fat Man, slamming his fist against the desk so powerfully that Porky gives a little hop. “Undertrained governmental laze-abouts!” He pokes his thumb in the direction of Lettuce Face. “Dinglefritz over here was in such a rush to make the capture that he gave the go-ahead before we confirmed that your father was actually in the shack that night.”

“But-but-but . . . !” Lettuce Face is dancing in frustration. “We couldn’t wait! Euro-Cornsortium . . . Pharmo-Fos . . . the Anti-Gen Collective . . . if they ever get the secret . . . we
could not wait
!”

“SHUT IT!” explodes the Fat Man.

And in that instant I remember the photograph from the newspaper article about the Bubbling. The one with the two politicians shaking hands with the
fat man
in the business suit. That’s him! Older and a hundred pounds heavier, but it’s him. And Lettuce Face must be one of the politicians.

I’ll say this for Lettuce Face: he may look creepy, but he looks like he has aged better than the Fat Man.

49

INSTEAD OF SHUTTING IT, LETTUCE FACE CHANGES THE SUBJECT.

“So . . . ,” he says, shifting his gaze from me to Ma. “This is your
mommy
.” He’s as slimy as a snail’s belly.

Just the way he says “mommy” makes me want to drive my fist through that glass and into his nose, his nose that looks as thin as a slice of cucumber. Two minutes I’ve known this creep and already I dream of how his proboscis will feel when it folds over beneath my knuckles.

When that mirror wall first flipped, Ma jumped like she’d been sitting on an electric wire. Even now she is darting her eyes back and forth from the skinny man to me, her face tight with fear. As for me, I just glare right back at him. Give him my best Ford Falcon stare, like my gaze could melt the glass.

“My ma, yeah,” I say, standing up and squaring my shoulders. I’m trying to look tough, and in some ways I am, but it suddenly occurs to me that knowing how to spear a solar bear or run a Whomper-Zooka won’t do me much good in this place.

“You
miss
your mommy?” Mr. Lettuce Face is wearing what looks like an exercise suit made of blue tissue paper. His skin is so pale I swear I can see watery pink blood pulsing beneath it. His eyes are transparently blue, and his hair looks like a patch of thin weeds. When he talks he hitches his hips to one side, cupping his elbow in one palm and using the fingers of his other hand to tap his chin between smart-aleck comments.

I take two steps toward the window. “I’m here to take her home.”

Lettuce Face scrunches up his face and makes a high, vibrating sound.

“E-e-e-e-e-e H-e-e-e-e-e
 . . .
”
It sounds like he’s having a sneezy little asthma attack or gagging on a warbler. Then I realize this is just his way of giggling.

“Get to it,” growls the Fat Man from the other side of the divider. Lettuce Face is still giggling. “NOW!” says the Fat Man.

Lettuce Face stops giggling and addresses me again.

“We would loooooove to reunite you with your mother permanently.”

He is actually rubbing his veiny hands together when he says this.

“But?” I know there’s a catch and I’m not giving him the satisfaction of hope.

“But we need something first.”

“Well, good luck with that. I can offer you exactly one stinking dead solar bear, but yer gonna have to fetch it yourself.”

The way Lettuce Face pinches his lips together, you’d think some of that solar bear stink made its way into his carefully sealed cubicle.

“The price for your mother is . . . E-e-e-e-h-e-e . . . it’s . . . e-e-e . . .”

“WE WANT YER OLD MAN!” bellows the Fat Man.

“You give me Ma first,” I say. “Then we’ll talk.”

“You want yer ma back, you bring in yer old man!”

“You heard what Ma said. He’s gone. I have no idea . . .”

“LIAR!” screams Lettuce Face. Then he giggles. He really is full-time creepy. “You are correct. After the attack, he did disappear again. But you were kind enough to capture him for us . . .
again
, thank you very much. And you kept him in the pig shed.”

“I . . . you . . . how?” I hate myself for letting them know I’m flabbergasted, but this time I can’t help it: my mouth has fallen into full flytrap mode.

Lettuce Face changes the subject. “You know, you had a
na-a-asty
cut on your head when you came in here.” He acts like he cares, but there’s a sneer in there.

“Yah, well you shoulda seen the solar bear,” I say.

“Oh, I’m sure it was all very entertaining,” says Lettuce Face, “but when you grabbed your head earlier, what did you notice?”

I feel around up there with my fingers again, then, grudgingly, say, “Um, it’s pretty much healed.”

“Yes, yes,” said Lettuce Face, like some simpering night nurse. “Yes, our surgeons are magnificent. They removed the amateur embroidery, cleaned up the wound properly, probably saved you from a nasty brain infection—assuming there’s a brain in there—and then applied some CellGen, a terrific CornVivia product that generates new skin cells in under twenty-four hours.”

I put my hand up to the shaved spot again. Nothing but that little ridge, and even that feels smoother than when I first checked it.

“Personally, I wish they would have shaved off all of that nasty hair, but then we were interested in keeping you alive, not clean.” He studies me through the glass a moment and then scrunches his celery-stick nose again.

“TELL HER,” bellows the Fat Man. I get the feeling that if it wasn’t for the wall separating them, Mr. Lettuce Face would be Mr. Limp Neck.

“While we were fixing your head, we gave you a little something for the pain.”

That explains why I don’t remember anything between the paddy wagon and waking up to see Ma.

Lettuce Face chuckles again. It’s like a lizard giggling. “It made you woozy. You talked a lot of useless gibberish.”

“Sorry,” I say. “That’s kinda your department.”

“Oh, you’re a rude one,” says Lettuce Face, but he’s still lizard giggling. “But among all the nonsense you kept saying you hoped a Toad would feed the pigs. And then you’d wink at us.”

Oops.

“Of course we now know of your neighbors Toad and Arlinda Hopper. And that they have a shed where they keep pigs . . . and—sometimes—your father.”

“Well, if you’re so sure you figured it out, why didn’t you just go get him?”

“Ah. We tried. Sadly, he had pre-skedaddled. In the report, I was told our representatives visited with the Hoppers. We learned that your father had convinced Mr. Hopper to release him from the pig shed but gave no indication of where he was headed. Clearly your father anticipated that we might get the secret out of you. We do have operatives on the case, but they are currently at the disadvantage.”

My heart sinks. The URCorn from Arlinda’s pie sales won’t last long. What if he winds up back drinking PartsWash and passed out beside some bonfire? Or worse, in the hands of an undercover GreyDevil who will drag him straight back to the Bubble? They know he needs URCorn. Surely they’ll be staking out the local fires.

“If you’re hunting him, why should I hunt him? You’ve got helicopters and eyes in the sky and who knows what else . . .”

“The more the merrier!
E-e-e-H-e-e!
Yes, my dear, we are searching. And we do have the upper hand. But once again he has a head start. And from the moment he removed his Security Chip and flew it on that balloon, your father has proven adept at the hiding game. You know him. His habits. His tendencies. Your odds are better than ours. Plus,
you want your mommy back
.”

If looks could melt glass, Lettuce Face would be dancing a hotfoot.

“And,” says Lettuce Face, “we will release her to you in return for only one thing: your old man.”

There is a moment of complete silence. Then Lettuce Face speaks again.

“Well, you decide. It’s up to you. Of course, if we find him first . . .”

My heart sinks. If they find him first, I will never see him again. Worse, I’d lose any power I had to make them return Ma. I might never see
her
again.