by Andrea White
Only he never got a chance to grow up to be an old man.
And I might not either.
Shivering, he hurried down the steps of the turtle bath. At the Blue Line Club, an attendant rented towels. Of course, in this background country there was nothing to dry off with except … leaves.
Zert “leafed” off. As he pulled his dirty boxers back on, he wished that he had thought to pack an extra pair. He had no comb either, he realized, as he ran his fingers through his wet hair.
He was pulling on his outfit of a hundred pockets when the ground started shaking. He heard the sound of a tank.
The shaking ground made him feel as if he were in the middle of a war, standing in the path of an army. Something crashed toward him, something that would have been huge even if he had still been BIG. He froze, too scared to move.
The animal’s head burst out of the bushes first. It was as tall as a skyscraper. Its neck was thicker than a hyperloop, its coat shaggy, its horns spiked and powerful. The animal’s face was too far away for him to even see it.
For an instant, the buffalo stood still in the yellow light.
Zert’s heart was pounding. The animal could grind him into the dirt. It could gore him with one flick of its horns. But he was so small, and the buffalo was so big. He and that buffalo lived in two different worlds. He withdrew underneath the shelter of the turtle shell and watched.
The buffalo trotted toward him. This animal wasn’t some designer animal, despite its strange-looking lumpy head and the saddlebags of fur on its sides. There used to be millions and millions of buffaloes all over this country, and then the cowboys killed them all. Now, he was in one of the few places where they had returned and were allowed to roam free.
The buffalo paused close to his hiding place. Its deep-black hoof was several times his height. Thick black hair covered its ankle.
Zert sucked in a deep breath to stifle a laugh. The animal smelled like leather shoes. The hoof raised up. If it were to drop down on the turtle shell where he hid, it would crush him.
Suddenly, Zert was engulfed in a horrible smell, and he staggered backward. Plump brown bullets splatted onto the ground outside the shell.
Smell warfare.
Zert could hear the buffalo trotting away. Holding his nose and covering his mouth, he ran out from under the shell to try to catch one last glimpse of the animal. At the edge of the clearing, the creature stopped and tossed its big head. Its eyes—two brown moons—turned to stare right at him.
Zert started to use his communicator to take a photo of the animal, and then he remembered. The buffalo snorted, as if he and Zert shared the joke. Then it galloped into the bushes and its furry tail disappeared.
I’m an explorer of this New World, Zert thought. And I’ve seen my first buffalo. But it means nothing if there’s no one I can tell.
He squeezed his naked wrist where his communicator used to be and stared at the steam rising from the pile of buffalo poop.
24
MUNGO JUMBO
Once upon a time in a far-off land, Chinese had been his worst subject in school. If only my life were a fairy tale, Zert thought. Fairy tales have happy endings. But his face stared back at him from the shiny top of his can-desk at PeopleColor Schoolhouse. He could see his feather pen and his blackberry inkwell. This was not some bizarro dream.
Even though he’d washed in the turtle bath that morning, his outfit smelled like campfire smoke. The smoke had overtaken the scent of miniature wolf. Chub, I hope you’re alive.
“Before we continue our unit on insect agriculture, I’d like someone to tell Zert about our first settler,” Casey said. Her gaze landed on Beth. “Beth, why don’t you?”
Millicent broke in, protesting, “I’m sure Zert’s heard about Millard R. Dix.” As usual, her cheeks looked flushed and her green eyes flashed with excitement.
Of course. Cribbie and he had often talked about Millard R. Dix. The Rosie hero was as famous as George Washington or President Honestloyalkind. NOT.
Millicent turned to Zert. He was sitting between Beth and Millicent in the second row. “Millard R. Dix is my namesake,” she said.
“You’re named after Millard Dix. He’s not named after you,” John protested.
The kid needed braces. What would the Rosies use to make them? A soda can?
“Zert, you know who Millard R. Dix is, don’t you?” Beth asked in a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding tone.
Zert considered lying for a moment. But then he admitted, “No.”
The class tittered.
“Millard R. Dix …,” Beth began. Her tone was flat, bored, as if she were talking to a kindergartner. “We call him MD … was the first person to volunteer to test the minimizer function. His wife, Ethel, wanted to try it too. MD shrank first. As an experiment, he was minimized in Doctor Rosario’s office. When Ethel Dix saw how small her husband was, she refused to shrink.”
Uncle Marin hadn’t just lost his nerve. He had never planned to leave his new girlfriend. He was probably kissing Glade’s red, red lips right now. But why? His dad was right. You needed your family. Why would Uncle Marin betray them?
“Can I tell him the rest of the story, Beth?” When Beth shrugged, Millicent jumped in. “Doctor Rosario didn’t want MD to travel to the park alone, you see, Zert, but MD wanted to make sure that if another war or Nuclear Mistake happened, people had a new way to live and another place to go. Neither Doctor Rosario nor Ethel Dix could talk him out of it.”
Milliard R. Dix needed to see a shrink! Stifling a laugh, Zert looked around at the faces of his classmates: Beth’s bored eyes, Millicent’s eager expression. He had a great joke, and not a single kid would get it.
“Doctor Rosario took him to Rocky Mountain National Park,” Millicent explained. “He made arrangements to meet MD in the parking lot in two months’ time. But from the beginning, MD had bad luck. The weather was unusually cold, and it rained a lot. And on one particularly wet day, he slipped on the banks of the stream and lost his backpack. After that, all he had to eat was a stick of jerky. The history books tell us that MD scoured the parking lot for food, but he found only a few crumbs of mongo.”
Casey interrupted, “Millicent, tell Zert what ‘mongo’ is.”
“I don’t remember exactly, Casey,” Millicent said. “I think MD found a few crumbs of pickle chips and Choco Bombs.”
Smiling, Casey said, “I mean the definition.”
“Oh. It’s salvageable trash,” Millicent said to Zert.
Zert nodded. The fact that the Rosies had a special word for garbage made sense. Almost everything in Paradise was made from trash.
Casey nodded at Millicent. “Go on.”
“Since snow covered the ground at the time,” Millicent said, “MD holed up under a log. He was starving. He didn’t know if he would survive long enough to be able to meet Doctor Rosario later on. MD was afraid that if he died, the doctor would call off the whole project.
“One day, as MD was staring at the frozen ground, hungry for a meal, he noticed that the snow-covered log he used for shelter was infested with roaches. He caught a roach and cooked it for dinner.” Millicent paused for a breath, then finished with, “The rest is history.”
Instead of pilgrims eating the first turkey with the Native Americans, Zert imagined shrinkmeister MD biting into a roasted roach, stuffed with soy oyster dressing, a tiny apple in its mouth. This version of the classic tale was so bizarro that it was interesting.
“Roaches are an excellent source of protein,” Millicent said.
Zert swallowed his smile.
“Zert,” Casey said, “before he died of old age a few years ago, Millard R. Dix wrote a book. It’s called A Second Chance. It lays out our mission.”
Mission Thumb. Zert couldn’t keep his smile away this time. Dr. Brown. Then Don G. Now Mary Kay Casey. These Rosies took themselves seriously.
Casey frowned at him as if she guessed his thoughts. “Zert, the BIG world has many problems. We are try
ing to create a self-sustaining world to show them the way, if things were to fall apart.”
But BIGS would never shrink.
Or would they?
He and his father did.
“Now, class,” Casey said, “get out your tablets. You have a test on Friday on the advantages of micro livestock. Dawn, how many cubic feet of land space do insects need to produce a pound of food for BIGS?”
“Only two cubic feet,” Dawn said. With short, light-brown hair and dark eyes, her oval face reminded him of an acorn.
An acorn. What was happening to him? BIG Zert wouldn’t have had this thought.
“Compare that with cows, John,” Casey said.
“Cows need two acres of land to produce one pound of beef,” John said.
“If we contrast the life cycle of a grasshopper with the life cycle of a cow?” Casey went on.
Geez. A grasshopper’s lifestyle.
Zert dipped his pen in the inkwell in the corner of the desk and dragged his pen across the page of recycled paper. A quill pen wasn’t easy to write with. His handwriting came out bumpy and uneven on the rough paper. He wrote: “Bugs stink.”
He lifted the quill pen off the page, noticing that something was causing his hand to shake. His feet were quivering. The bottle was jiggling.
Beth and Millicent dropped onto their knees on the floor. Dawn crawled underneath her desk. The entire room seemed to be shaking.
Zert wobbled up. “What is it? A bomb?” he yelled to his teacher, noticing the beginning of a loud noise.
Mary Kay Casey’s mouth was opening and closing, but he couldn’t hear her words. A roar was building in the background.
Casey motioned for him to lie down on the floor.
Zert shook his head. If terrorists were dropping bombs, this PeopleColor schoolhouse with its plastic walls was the last place he wanted to be. He began crawling toward the lip of the bottle as the noise grew louder and louder. It was slow going as he slid from side to side in the room. Finally, he managed to pull himself out of the lip and gazed upward.
A lifter was overhead, flying low, right above the tree line. It was gray, and Zert had never seen the model before. There was an advertisement written on its belly between its retractable wheels: “The First Lifter Microscope.”
Zert gasped. Already there were developments in the BIG world that he knew nothing about.
The lifter passed overhead, and he clutched a thick vine to keep from being carried away by the wind. It was so intense, he struggled to hold on. And if the vine gave way, he was lost.
Until this moment, he had never thought he would owe his life to a vine.
When the wind finally died down, he looked up to see his teacher’s worried face peering at him from the lip of the schoolhouse.
Zert released the trailing plant and started for the door.
“Zert, it doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, a lifter will pass overhead,” Casey said. “The school is staked into the ground to withstand the high winds. It’s the safest place you can possibly be.”
“I thought it was …”
“I don’t care what you thought,” Casey interrupted. “In the future, you will obey me. With that high wind, you could have been”—she put her hands on her hips and glared at him—“in Timbuktu by now.”
“Yes, Casey,” Zert promised, his hands still white from clutching the vine.
“There are many dangers here that you can’t even appreciate yet,” Casey said. She leaned in closer to him until her pigtails brushed his shoulders. “You must listen to me. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Zert said again. Through the plastic walls, he could see Beth mouthing at him, “Coward.” His new teacher already hated him too.
What happened next was so unexpected that, for an instant, he forgot the cold feeling of loneliness that had filled his stomach ever since he had seen those Mag Lev machines lining Dr. Brown’s walls.
His teacher reached for him and hugged him.
As she held him tight, he started shaking.
“I know,” Casey whispered. “I know.”
25
A CAMEL COMES A’ CALLING
“Race you to the community center.” “What’s your chore today?” “Are you ready for the rodeo?” the kids were calling to each other as Zert turned to find the Hat.
He and Cribbie used to give directions like: “It’s on the same side of the street as the water factory.” Or “It’s a block from the tele-school broadcasting station.” Now he lived in a place where the landmarks were rocks.
When he rounded the bend, he found Millicent squatting in the middle of the path. She held a cricket, about her size, on a rope. No, a string.
The insect’s long body rested on powerful-looking hinged legs and arms skinny to the point of looking malnourished. When BIG Zert had looked at a bug, he had only seen an impression of colors and a blur of wings, but here in Rosieland, he was able to see this insect’s face. The cricket had coffee-colored eyes that hung like jewels above its trapdoor mouth. With its green-and-yellow cheeks flanking a flat, noseless face, the cricket was so homely that it looked sweet.
Millicent stood up. Bits of string bulged out of a front pocket of her overalls, a couple of hooks poked out of another, and a third was stuffed with bark. “I was waiting for you. How was your first day of school?” she asked.
“A little tough,” Zert said.
Millicent turned red slightly, then said, “I can imagine.” His bad day hadn’t been her fault.
“What are you doing with the cricket?” he asked.
“We raise them,” Millicent said. “My dad has the biggest bug ranch in the valley.”
He was reaching for the cricket to pet it when a “halla-halla hoop” pierced his ears. Then, everything was still.
“What was that?” Zert asked.
“It’s a gifting,” Millicent said. She tied the cricket to a shrub. “Come on.” She ducked into the shrubbery. He tried to follow but lost her in a tangle of leaves, underbrush, and roots.
“Millicent!” Zert called. Smiling, she popped out from nowhere. “What’s going on?” he asked as he bumped into her.
“They’re divvying up a rat,” Millicent said. “Hurry!”
“Why are you running?” Zert asked as he started jogging after her.
Millicent called over her shoulder, “This is exciting news. Rats are great.”
“Because?” Zert said.
“The meat, of course,” Millicent said as they passed by a yellow sunflower on a hairy stem as tall as a holostatue of liberty. It was surrounded by jagged green stalks that ended in spears. “And it’s my mom’s turn for a rat drumstick. She uses the bones to make dishes.”
Rat fat could be used to make candles. Rats’ teeth were for … well, knives. Zert was surprised to realize the possibilities.
He ran hard into something and fell backward, as if he had been shoved. He tried to get up, but something that seemed like an older lady’s white hair net held him back. It stuck to his skin and clothes. He fought and struggled to pull free, but it was useless.
“Millicent, help!” he shouted after her. She was too far ahead, and his words were carried away on a gust of wind.
He was trapped, food for some spider … if they ate meat. He couldn’t remember what they ate. Would they eat his eyes first? No, that’s what Millicent said about the rats.
Don’t panic.
Zert was getting more entangled and knew he needed to force himself to stop thrashing around. He had to get out of here. He gathered his strength and gave one last mighty yank to free himself.
Millicent popped out of a green hedge, her eyes huge. “Stay still!” she shouted as she ran over.
Zert froze. Was there a spider? He bet he was about to get bitten.
“My dad will kill you if you bust a hole in his pen.” Millicent began plucking at the string and pulling it off his shoes. “You’ve collided with the fence for one of his spare corrals. In the spring, thi
s corral is loaded with hoppers and crickets.”
She unwound a string from Zert’s hand. “It took about twenty spiders to make this much webbing.”
The spiders would have been as big as he was. “Wh—Where are they?” he asked, looking around.
“You mean the wild spiders? We don’t have to worry too much about them.” She lowered her voice and added, “Except at night.”
Zert shuddered. Spiders could be the Or Else of this place. What if he and his father wandered into a hoard of spiders when they had to leave? The insects would catch them in their webs and eat them for dinner.
“There. You’re free,” Millicent said. “I forgot you don’t know anything.” She pointed at the ground. “Now, stay on the snail-slime trail so you don’t ruin another corral.”
A shimmering path cut through the weeds. It was silver, studded with shining specs of pink. “You get snails to mark your trails for you?” Zert asked.
But Millicent was already running again.
Zert jogged after her, dodging a caravan of doodlebugs and stumbling on the uneven ground. He was out of breath by the time he reached a clearing full of Rosies. Round baskets that looked like wasp nests lined the space. Wormy things poked their heads out of the baskets. Bug babies.
“A fine rat,” Zert heard someone say.
“To help during the wet season,” another person chimed in.
“And we can make our gift to the tenderfeet,” someone else added.
An old shoebox with a sign that said “Butcher Shop” stood in the center of the clearing. The shoebox was shellacked with a shiny paint. Some carcasses—skinned caterpillars?—dangled from the ceiling of the front porch.
The dead rat was propped up on a stick in front of the hut. A man, maybe the butcher, stood next to the rat. Dried blood covered him from his bald head to his feet, except for his white teeth, which flashed as he grinned.
A few Rosies lined up in front of the rat. Don G. was first in line. Millicent took a place at the end. Even his father was there, talking to one of the Rosies in the line.
The butcher handed Don G. a purple triangle, almost too big for him to hold in both hands.
