The Scavengers Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my daughters

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  THE OLD CAR WAS SUNK TO THE BUMPERS WHEN I DISCOVERED IT, but my first thought was how good it would be to sleep in there and hear the rain drumming on steel rather than splattering against our tattered old tarp.

  I was Maggie back then. Maggie, the name my parents gave me. A nice name. But these weren’t nice times. We were tired and hungry, and the GreyDevil bonfires were burning brighter and the solar bear howls were getting closer, and every morning as I strapped my SpitStick across my back and set out to scavenge, I found myself thinking I needed a better name. A stronger name.

  I mean, the name Maggie was fine, it just seemed kinda underpowered.

  So when I scrubbed the moss from the side of that old car overlooking Goldmine Gully and saw the chrome letters—Ford Falcon—I climbed up on the hood and stood there with my steel-toed boots planted wide and I wedged my fists on my hips and I announced that Maggie was yesterday, and from this day forward I would answer only to Ford Falcon. Ford, because we had a lot of rivers to cross. Falcon, because, well, if you have a lot of rivers to cross, a pair of wings can’t hurt, and then once you get across the river it’s likely you will need sharp eyes and an even sharper beak.

  Yes. I know. I named myself after an old dead car. Worse yet, it’s not even a cool car. It’s a station wagon. Station wagons were how parents hauled kids around during the time between covered wagons and minivans. These days you won’t see a minivan unless it’s being pulled by a horse, and even horses are hard to come by.

  But if you see me you will know me because I wear a vest made from the hide of a beast that tried to kill me and lost. I skinned that beast myself, and also I skinned the lettering from that old dead car and stitched it to the vest across my shoulder blades using copper wire so that in polished chrome the world can read my name and know it: Ford Falcon.

  1

  “COCK-A-DOODLE . . . AAACK-KACK-KACK-KACK!”

  Way down in Hoot Holler, Hatchet the Rooster is ruling the roost. It’s tough to rule the roost when all of your cock-a-doodles sputter out like you’re gagging on a crossways caterpillar, but Hatchet’s ego is twice the size of his multicolored mop of a tail, and I guarantee you by the time that last kack! echoes off Skullduggery Ridge he’s already fluffing his feathers and strutting around like that’s exactly what he meant to say.

  “Cock-a-doodle . . . aaack-kack-kack-kack!”

  Hatchet belongs to our neighbors Toad and Arlinda Hopper. They live a half-hour hike away, down the western side of Skullduggery Ridge, but even though we can’t see their farm from here the crowing comes through loud and clear. That rooster has brass lungs. And once he gets started, he doesn’t stop. He’ll crow at noon, he’ll crow at the moon, he’ll crow any which way the wind blows. Most of all, he’ll crow whenever he feels the need to remind the world that he is a rooster, which is about every six minutes. That bird is as loopy as a ball of snarled yarn.

  “Cock-a-doodle . . . aaack-kack-kack-kack!”

  Guess I’m done sleeping. I crawl out of the station wagon and climb onto the hood. Dawn is still a ways off, but even as I pull my quilt tight around my shoulders birds are twittering in the darkness around me—that is, when they aren’t drowned out by all the cock-a-doodle-acking.

  On the horizon before me there are two faint gray smudges of light. One is the first hint of sunrise. The other is the glow from the lights of a Bubble City. I’ve never been to any of the Bubble Cities, but once when I was helping Toad tear apart a junk car I found a brochure under the backseat that said Your Bubble City! Inside, it had a lot of pictures of happy people laughing and playing volleyball and eating ice cream cones. The brochure unfolded like a map to show more happy people doing more happy things—swimming, dancing, walking through flowers, laughing on rides in an amusement park, jumping on trampolines (Toad had to explain to me what volleyball, amusement parks, and trampolines were)—and when it was all the way unfolded you could see a shiny bubble shimmering above all the people. I told Toad it looked pretty neat. He just shook his head and said something about not believing everything I read.

  As the gray horizon oozes over to pink, the glow of the Bubble City fades and the landscape takes shape, sloping sharply away to the east from the Falcon’s front bumper before rumpling itself into foothills that bump along for many miles into the invisible distance. I wonder sometimes what my life would be like if Dad and Ma had stayed UnderBubble, as everyone out here calls it. Instead, they chose OutBubble, and believe me, there is no volleyball or ice cream cones OutBubble. As the last of the glow disappears into sunlight, I wonder if there are girls my age waking beneath the Bubble, and what their day will be like compared to mine.

  Now the parrot flocks are squawking. This makes me grin, because it means Hatchet is getting some competition. Dad and Ma tell me there never used to be parrots here unless they were in cages. Now they swoop around all over the place. My parents say the world has changed a lot since they were children. Back then, people argued about whether the earth was warming up or cooling down. Well, the weather did get warmer—we don’t really have winter anymore—but mostly it just got weirder. The seasons are all skittery. Sun for a month, then sleet for a week. Snowdrifts on Tuesday, puddles on Wednesday. Our oak and pine forests got more jungly and leafy. The parrots moved in, and other newcomers followed. Wild hogs, alligators halfway up the Mississippi, sky-blocking flocks of turkey vultures, and, scariest of all, solar bears. Solar bears were created when government scientists tried to save polar bears from extinction by crossing them with grizzly bears and splicing in a dab of coyote DNA. The result wasn’t really a polar bear or a grizzly bear, but a four-legged experiment with white fur and caramel-colored stripes, big teeth and bad breath, and a howl like its tail is caught in a crack. One thing the scientists maybe hadn’t kept in mind is that bears can range hundreds of miles, so after the weather changed it wasn’t long before they m
igrated down into this area. There is a reason I never go anywhere without my hunting knife, my SpitStick, my ToothClub, and a sack of pepper-pea pellets. I made all of those weapons myself, and they’re on the car hood beside me this very minute. Well, except for the knife, which was given to me by Toad and I carry sheathed in my boot top.

  The sun is nearly up now. In the lower valleys I can see smeary patches of smoke drifting from the last of the GreyDevil bonfires. Nobody really knows where the GreyDevils come from, but we’d all be happier if they went back. Toad says they probably started out as humans like us, and that’s why we should try not to kill them, but they’re pale and dirty and instead of talking they moan and howl like sickly solar bears. Creepy. Every night they build big bonfires of whatever trash and wood they can find, and then gather around to get all hopped up on PartsWash.

  PartsWash is homemade hooch. It’s fermenty and disgusting and got its name because it smells like something a mechanic would use to strip grease from old engine parts. Plus, based on the way the GreyDevils look, if you drink it long enough, it’ll pretty much wash away your parts.

  PartsWash is brewed by gangs we call Juice Cruisers. The GreyDevils steal anything they can lay their hands on and trade it to the Juice Cruisers for PartsWash. Then the Juice Cruisers turn around and trade and sell the stolen things wherever there is a market, which is pretty much everywhere, because these days, here in OutBubble world, there’s a shortage of everything. I’ve never met a Juice Cruiser, and never hope to. Toad says they are outlaws who will leave you alone if you leave them alone.

  I don’t know exactly what the Juice Cruisers put in PartsWash, but it must be powerful because the GreyDevils will do pretty much anything to get more, which is why they’re dangerous—at least until evening, when they start drinking. The bonfires burn all night long until the PartsWash is gone or the last GreyDevil has collapsed. From up here, the countryside looks all soft and gentle and newborn. But those smoke smears remind me that this is not paradise.

  “Cock-a-doodle . . . aaack-kack-kack-kack!”

  Also, there is that rooster. No sound like that would ever be allowed in paradise.

  Uphill from where I am sitting, I hear a noise. I turn to look and see Ma step out of the shack with her pans, ready to cook breakfast.

  It’s time to begin the day.

  2

  WE ARE A FAMILY OF FOUR. THERE’S ME, OF COURSE. I’M AT THAT age where I’m not sure who I am, but then again, in the world we live in, there isn’t a lot of time to wonder. Mostly we are busy scavenging, scrounging, and surviving. It’s not like I have a lot of time to sit around thinking in cutesy, heart-dotted curlicue letters. I love my family, but I choose to live in an old car a hundred yards downhill from them. Maybe that tells you something.

  My first chore every morning is to let the chickens out and gather eggs for breakfast. The path takes me right past our outdoor oven, which is made from mud and stones. Ma is stoking the fire.

  “Mornin’, Ma.”

  “Good morning, Maggie.” Ma refuses to call me Ford Falcon. She also refuses to say “mornin’.” She is precise about these things. “When we drop our gerunds, we drop our standards,” she likes to say. Ma studied English and writing in college. To me, gerund sounds like the name of a teensy African antelope, but it really means the -ing sound at the end of a word. “Just because our life is rough around the edges doesn’t mean we have to be rough around the edges,” says Ma.

  I still like to say “mornin’.”

  The chicken coop is small, square, and solid. Before I open the “people” door, I drop a tiny drawbridge hatch and the chickens come clucking and blinking out into the daylight. I never get tired of watching them go flapping into freedom, fanning out to peck and scratch and turn their heads sideways to give a bug the beady eye before snapping it into their beaks. Our flock is all hens, no roosters. One Hatchet is rooster enough for miles around.

  Inside the coop, I wait a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, then reach into the nesting boxes one by one. The eggs are still warm, and I like the way each one feels in my palm. Solid and delicate at the same time. Some of the eggs are white, some of the eggs are brown, and some are pale green. They all look the same in the frying pan. I am placing the last egg in the basket when I hear a noise behind me. Just as I turn to check it out, a figure leaps from the darkest corner of the coop and into my face.

  “FLABBA-SHAMMY!”

  The eggs go everywhere. My heart is flopping like an electrocuted fish.

  “DOOKIE!” I yell, but the little creature has already scooted out the door and is running off to Ma, flapping his arms like chicken wings.

  Dookie. My little snot flicker of a brother. He drives me nuts. Always popping up here and there, scaring the bejeebers out of me. Grabbing one of the unbroken eggs, I sidearm it out the door and it smacks him—pop-shmush!—on the back of his head.

  “ZABBA-ZOO!” he hollers, and leaps into Ma’s arms.

  “MAGGIE!” Now it’s Ma hollering. She’s holding Dookie and he’s looking up at her with his sad pony eyes. Dookie has never been able to speak with his mouth, but he figured out how to talk with those eyes a long time ago.

  “Ma, he . . .”

  “Enough!” says Ma. Right about then she runs her hand through his hair and discovers the egg goop.

  “For shame! Both of you!” She sets Dookie down and now he’s looking at me and his eyes have changed from sad pony to sneaky weasel.

  While I gather up the remaining eggs, Ma goes back to cooking the bacon, and Dookie goes spinning off in circles, humming to himself.

  Dookie has never been right. I love him, but I love him the way you always love stinky little brothers: a little bit goes a long way. I know it bothers Ma that he can’t talk the way he should, but there’s nothing to be done, and he seems happy enough as long as he gets to drive his sister up a tree now and then. I hand Ma the surviving eggs. As she cracks them into the pan, I turn to get the dishes from the shack and meet the fourth member of our family—Dad—coming out the door. He blinks as he steps into the open, then rubs his eyes slowly. Dad was always an early riser, but lately he sleeps in more often. Sometimes when he comes out of the shack he looks like he didn’t sleep at all. Ma gives him a worried look she thinks I don’t see. Dad hugs her. Dookie leaps out of the bushes and hugs them both.

  “Mornin’, Dad,” I say.

  “Oh, mornin’,” says Dad, like he just noticed me.

  When the eggs are done, Ma serves Dookie first. He takes a mouthful, stands up, spins in a circle, then sits down and does the same thing again. This is not unusual. This is just your basic breakfast with Dookie. We’re used to it.

  Before Ma hands Dad his plate, she chops up a wild garlic plant and sprinkles it over the eggs. I wrinkle my nose. Dad eats garlic on everything. He says it helps him stay healthy. I say it just makes him smell funny. But by the time he’s halfway through his eggs, he does seem better.

  “You ready to hunt for gold?” he asks me, smiling in his lopsided way.

  3

  I ONCE LIVED IN A REGULAR HOUSE WITH REGULAR PEOPLE IN A REGULAR place. I remember cars and television screens and telephones and green grass and at least one birthday cake. Most of my memories from those days are gone or blurry. But one memory I carry as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I am standing in a field with my father. He is holding a red balloon. There is a white bandage on his cheek. He kneels down to hand me the balloon but he lets go too quickly and the string slips through my fingers. The balloon rises, sliding sideways across the sky, higher and higher until it is a colorless dot that I can’t see anyway because I am crying. Dad takes me into the house and blows up another red balloon, but when he lets go of this one it doesn’t float, it just drops to the floor with a soft bounce and sits there. I stomp on it and make it pop.

  And then I remember we got into a car that smelled brand-new and drove into the country. Dad said we were going camping, and I was excited but Ma was cr
ying. Dookie was just a little bundle in his car seat. We drove for almost a whole day. I remember the radio was on, and right when it was starting to get dark I heard a man on the radio talking about a red balloon, which made me grumpy again. And then right after that Dad stopped the car and said it was time to start the camping trip.

  It wasn’t a very good camping trip. Mostly I remember rain and walking. And walking. And walking. Day after day. I remember being cold and damp in the mornings and hot and hungry in the afternoons. I remember bug bites and scrapes and itching and blisters and the sound of howling solar bears. I remember Dad’s white bandage turning brown from dust and sweat. I remember eating cold beans from cans. And then one day I remember Dad telling me we would be camping for a very long time. I remember yelling at Dad and running to Ma, and both of us crying while she held me. I remember Dad standing there with a pack on his back and Dookie strapped on his front, and I remember Dad had tears in his eyes too. Dookie just blew bubbles through his drool.

  In the beginning, at least we had a tent. But one night in an awful storm a tree branch blew down, ripping through the tent and stabbing the ground right beside my head. The next day Dad found an old tarp snagged in the brush beside a flooded stream, and that became our shelter. By then we were out of canned food and scrounging for whatever we could find, like cattail roots and green apples, and Dad’s precious wild garlic. Sometimes Dad was able to kill a rabbit or a squirrel and we fried the meat over a fire. And we were always searching for water. I remember begging Dad to take us back home. He just very quietly said, We can’t do that, Maggie, and when I begged Ma, she said the same thing, even more quietly. When I asked why, they looked at each other and then Dad said someday I would understand. And so we stayed hidden in the woods, rolling up that tarp and moving every few days. The days became weeks. The weeks became months.

  Ma did everything she could to give me little moments of a normal life. We played games like tic-tac-toe and connect the dots. She sang songs to Dookie. She read to me from a book called Little House on the Prairie. Ma said no matter how we were living she couldn’t imagine her daughter being in a world without books, so she had slipped it in her pack at the last minute. We read that book over and over, until I had every chapter memorized. Every time I heard about the hardships little Laura Ingalls and her family went through it helped me a little bit with understanding ours. Ma said I should learn to read too, and she began teaching me the alphabet. We didn’t have a blackboard or pencils and paper, so she’d clear away the leaves and I’d draw letters in the dirt with a stick, or use a piece of charcoal on the smooth side of some birch bark. Other times she’d have me study tree branches and find Vs and Ws, or press an acorn cap into mud to show me the shape of an O. Then she had me pick out words in Little House on the Prairie, and then whole sentences. Pretty soon I could read the book on my own, although I still liked it best when Ma read to me.