The Scavengers

by Michael Perry

  And then I close the book and sleep again. I sleep all night long, even forgetting to put in the chickens. When I finally wake they are clucking beside the Falcon. I open one eye, shake my head, and peek out. The sun tells me it is nearly noon.

  I feel like I slept for one hundred years.

  And then I hear the whistle.

  Three long, three short.

  It’s coming from Hoot Holler. Toad.

  Again: Three long, three short. Quicker this time. More urgent.

  I run for the flagpole.

  30

  THROUGH THE BINOCULARS I SEE CHAOS. A CORNVOY TRUCK HAS run off the road between Toad’s barn and the Sustainability Reserve and lies on its side beside the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which—amazingly enough—is still standing. The front of the truck has knocked a section of Toad’s security fence flat and the silver trailer has split open, spilling URCorn across the road in a beautiful yellow fan. As I watch, the trucker crawls out of the cab and runs for the safety of another truck. And closing in from all directions, looking like scarecrows on the march, I see hordes of GreyDevils.

  I take off at a dead run. I’ll still never get there before the GreyDevils do. I can only hope Toad can hold them at bay until I arrive.

  But all that URCorn! They’ll be in a frenzy. And Dookie’s down there! I think, and run even faster. Already my lungs are aching and my mouth tastes like metal. I keep pounding downhill, my pack jouncing on my back, my ToothClub in my hand. Whenever the trail passes through a place where Hoot Holler is visible, I see the snaky lines of GreyDevils have become thicker. Now I hear a pop-pop-pop. That means the first of the GreyDevils have arrived and the Sustainability Security crews are firing at them. Sure enough, at the next clearing I can see the Sustainability Security crews standing in a semicircle around the crashed truck and firing their weapons, and there are dead GreyDevils on the road and other injured ones crawling here and there. So the crews are using real bullets. But the GreyDevils are showing up in clots now, and just like when they attack the Scary Pruner there will be a point when there get to be so many that the Sustainability Security crews will be hopelessly outnumbered. Sure enough, soon the pop-pop-pop sounds stop, and at the next clearing I can see the Security crew has jumped into its vehicle and is retreating behind the giant BarbaZap gate, which immediately begins to roll closed behind them.

  Now I’m encountering GreyDevils myself. We’re all moving in the same direction, but they’re so focused on getting to the URCorn they don’t even notice me. They just shuffle-run, their lungs making horrible cheesy-wheezy sounds. Actually, right now my lungs don’t feel much better.

  HA-WHOMP!

  Toad! The Whomper-Zooka! Just as I break into Hoot Holler, the Security crews are closing the electric gates of the Sustainability Reserve, using the last rounds from their weapons to knock down the GreyDevils who think it’s their chance to get into those fields of giant corn. Mostly they’re all swarming the capsized truck, but as the gate slides the last two feet, it traps a pair of GreyDevils. First it fries them, then it crunches them. The Security crew just watches as they sizzle.

  The first GreyDevils to reach the spill have thrown themselves headfirst into the kernels, shoveling handfuls into their faces or biting mouthfuls like hungry hounds swimming through a pool full of dog food.

  “TOAD!” I holler, banging at the gate just down from where the truck has crashed through the fence.

  “FULLY OCCUPIED, FORD FALCON!” Toad hollers back. I hear another HA-WHOMP! and immediately realize: Toad is too busy fighting to get the gate, and Arlinda is probably in the house guarding Dookie.

  The only way in is through the breach in the fence.

  Which is currently clogged with slobbering GreyDevils.

  31

  THIS ISN’T ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN YOU THINK THINGS OVER. I draw my ToothClub, raise it high, and rush forward. At first the going is pretty easy because I’m going with the GreyDevil flow, but as I get closer to the gap in the fence and the mountain of spilled URCorn, the jostling and bumping begins. “Outta my way, snot suckers!” I holler, and start smacking heads. An elbow whacks me in the ribs, making me go whooofffh! A heel smashes down on my steel-toed boot, making me happy I am wearing steel-toed boots.

  Now things are really getting clogged up. I high kick the GreyDevil ahead of me. He pitches headfirst to the dirt and I dive into the opening where he used to be, but immediately I am jammed shoulder to shoulder with more creepy crawlers. The stench of their unwashed rags and bodies makes me retch, but I think of Toad and Arlinda and Dookie, lower my head, and barge forward another three feet. I holster my ToothClub because I don’t even have room to swing it now, and even when I punch and kick the bodies around me there is no response. They’re so obsessed with getting to the URCorn that it’s like I’m not even there. I’m just being carried forward by a greasy, grimy tide of GreyDevils.

  And then everything stops.

  I can’t move, and I’m being squeezed tight, so tight I have to work to make my breath go in and out. My arms are pinned to my sides, and now I admit I’m freaking out a little. I struggle, but it’s no use. And I can hear a sound . . . a wet, smacky, grindy, odd sound. Now I realize—it’s the sound of GreyDevils chewing and gnawing and slobbering and smacking as they gobble the kernels of URCorn. The GreyDevils beside me must hear it too, because suddenly I feel something wet and warm run down the back of my neck. GreyDevil drool!

  “This is NOT HAPPENING!” I holler, although it’s hard to holler when you’re trying not to hurl. I kick, elbow, and claw with every ounce of energy I can summon. The tiniest gap opens before me and I shoot both arms up, grab a GreyDevil by its greasy shoulders, and by scrabbling up its back with my knees, basically do a pull-up until I am high enough up its back to get a knee over its shoulder. I grab its horrible head in both my hands, lever myself up so I’m standing on its shoulders, and launch myself into a forward dive. As I take flight, I can see I’m headed for a pile of GreyDevils who are burrowing into the URCorn. I belly flop onto the pile with a thump, then climb and claw and crawl like mad, doing whatever it takes to keep moving over the giant squirming glob of GreyDevils gorging themselves on crazy corn.

  When I get near the peak of the pile I reach out to the torn steel where the trailer has split open. Grabbing the lip with both hands, I do a chin-up myself, then kick one leg over and hoist myself atop the trailer, only to see Toad about to pull the striker on the Whomper-Zooka.

  “FOLD YOUR HIRE!” I holler.

  Toad’s eyes widen, then his face breaks into a big grin.

  “FORD FALCON!”

  Even in all the craziness, Toad’s smile warms my heart in a way it hasn’t felt in months, and for just a split second I imagine how heroic I must look standing astride the tanker, rising above all odds to come to the rescue of my friends and family. After months of frustration and futility and worry I have something to do. As awful as this situation is, at least I can fight it.

  Flap-flap-WHACK!

  Oh, for the love of cock-eyed nuts.

  Hatchet.

  I rip him from my hair and throw him into the pile of GreyDevils, where he belongs. As I jump from the tanker into the compound, he’s already pecking furiously at a GreyDevil’s earlobe. I dive behind Toad and he lets loose another Whomper-Zooka blast.

  “We gotta keep ’em out!” says Toad. “That corn’s holdin ’em for now! Once it’s gobbled, they’ll be roarin’ all over the place, hauling everything off to the Juice Cruisers!”

  “Dookie!” I holler. “Where’s Dookie?”

  “In the house,” Toad says. I look over my shoulder and there’s Arlinda on the porch, cradling a Mini-Zooka Toad made especially for her.

  I can stop worrying about Dookie, then.

  32

  FOR HALF A SECOND I CONSIDER MAKING A DASH FOR MY ARMOR, but then a stray GreyDevil lurches my way and I realize there is no time for that. I clobber the GreyDevil a good one with the ToothClub and it staggers back toward
the tipped-over truck. While Toad reloads the Whomper-Zooka I stand guard before him, whacking at GreyDevils and thinking we’re in for a long night.

  And then rising from behind Skullduggery Ridge, I hear a distant moaning sound. I swivel my head around, half expecting to see an army of ravenous GreyDevils come over the ridge, but instead I see a gigantic helicopter rising over the horizon and coming straight for Toad’s place. As it draws closer, I can see the national flag and the CornVivia logo on its side.

  When it gets directly above the crashed cornvoy truck, the helicopter hovers high in the sky. I’m expecting a thunderous roar, but the two big propellers at either end just make that low moaning sound. A small hatch opens in the belly and a long, long tube snakes downward toward the ground. The tube is about as big around as my waist, and the end is covered with a spiky steel grate. Someone in the helicopter must be controlling it, because now it’s twisting and, like an elephant’s trunk, nosing its way into the pile of GreyDevils. Suddenly the air is filled with a sizzling Zap-snap-zap! Sparks fly from the nozzle spikes and the GreyDevils howl and scatter. URCorn begins whooshing up the tube.

  “Toad!” I holler. “It’s a giant vacuum cleaner!”

  One of the GreyDevils gets too close and in an instant is sucked up tight against the grate that keeps it from being inhaled by the tube. The hose retracts, raising the GreyDevil about ten feet in the air. Then someone in the helicopter flips a switch, the whooshing stops, and the GreyDevil drops to earth. Immediately, the nozzle roars to life and starts sucking corn again.

  The helicopter keeps vacuuming corn and zapping GreyDevils, and it is really something to see, but it also means that the GreyDevils are being scattered and some of them are winding up on our side of the fence.

  “Whomp at will, Ford Falcon!” hollers Toad, reminding me that I needed to stop being a spectator. Over the next twenty minutes, while the helicopter crew sucks up corn out of every nook and cranny of that wrecked truck, I do my best to keep the GreyDevils at bay, shooting the Whomper-Zooka now and then, but mostly using my ToothClub and pepper-bombs. Monocle is helping too, chomping and gnawing and growling, his tail spinning happily—for him this is not a fight, it is like recess—while Hatchet flaps and pecks and scratches. I hear a whock! as yet another GreyDevil gets sucked against the end of the tube. The tube raises him kicking and flailing into the air and then just like a cat playing with a mouse, the hidden operator flicks the nozzle, flinging the GreyDevil right at us.

  The trouble is, the hose also flicks a scatter of URCorn our way, and as the nozzle sparks and zaps its way back into the truck, a mob of GreyDevils turns and comes charging, crazy to get the URCorn that just sprinkled down on us like yellow hailstones.

  I blast them with the Whomper-Zooka and it’s no better than blowing kisses. They just keep swarming. I lay into them with my ToothClub, and I hear Monocle yapping, and Hatchet cackling, and for the first time that I can remember, I’m truly scared. There are just so many of them, and they are so crazed. It’s terrifying to realize they aren’t after me personally. It’s simply that they are in a frenzy to get to something and they’ll go through me to get it. It’s like standing between a pen full of fat pigs and a pack of starving solar bears.

  Stepping backward, I catch my heel on a rock. I stumble, then fall on my butt. I struggle to rise, but the wave of charging bodies knocks me flat. GreyDevils close in all around me. I can’t see any one particular face, just shapes and ragged silhouettes blocking the sky. I’m trying to curl into what Toad calls “armadillo position”—knees and chin to chest, fingers clasped behind my neck—when suddenly something jerks at my collar and I feel myself being dragged backward.

  “Rise and retreat, Ford Falcon!” It’s Toad, pulling me to my feet. We run for the house, where Arlinda is holding the door open.

  Just as we reach the porch, I look back over my shoulder.

  And stop dead in my tracks.

  “Ford!” hollers Arlinda. “In the house! Now!”

  But I am already running back toward the GreyDevils. Or rather, toward one GreyDevil in particular. It is kneeling with its back to me, gobbling corn. It is wearing a tattered T-shirt. The shirt is stained and grimy, but I can see it was once blue.

  And across the shoulders I can see the image . . . of an old-fashioned door lock.

  That’s my father’s shirt.

  33

  THE GREYDEVIL IN THE BLUE T-SHIRT IS SNUFFLING IN THE SPILLED corn like a rabid pig. Stopping just behind it, I raise my ToothClub high. I am filled with rage. Seeing my father’s shirt on that creature, imagining how the shirt got there, what was done to my father in order to steal it, I want to smash and maim and make someone else suffer just a fraction of what my father must have suffered. Of what our family has suffered.

  “You can stop stuffing your piehole, skunk-monkey,” I say, cranking the ToothClub back like Toad taught me to do with Hatchet, “because I’m about to fetch you silly!”

  The GreyDevil freezes, then turns its head.

  I stop my swing halfway, and then I freeze too, staring at the face before me. It’s a typical GreyDevil face, all sooty-sweaty and pocked with sores and streaked with snot tracks. The lips are dripping with spit and little chunks of half-chewed URCorn. The cheeks are hollow and the eyes are sunken . . . but something about them is different. They are watery and sickly, but not as yellow as most GreyDevils’. And most GreyDevil eyes look as dead as a fish’s after three days on the beach, but deep inside this GreyDevil’s eyes I can see a tiny spark of light—of life.

  I look at the shirt again. The front. A key, and two words: “Bon Hiver.”

  Now the eyes again.

  My voice is so quiet it is nearly a whisper.

  “Dad?”

  If I am expecting the faint spark in those eyes to melt into love, I am dead wrong. Our eyes lock for a split second, then the GreyDev—Dad—makes a mournful half howl, staggers to his feet, and lurches toward the gap in the fence.

  I run after him and throw myself on his back. He totters and falls, and I cling to him as he struggles to rise and run again. He feels so bony and frail in my arms.

  “TOAD!” I scream, and Toad is on us in an instant. When he sees the face of the creature I am wrestling, his eyes widen, and in a ragged voice he says, “Snooky holer-tables!” Dad struggles terribly, but we hold him down until finally he goes still as a rag doll. We pull my father to his feet, Toad and I each gripping one of his arms.

  “Shig ped,” says Toad, and he says it so firmly I don’t think he’s spoonerizing, he’s just having trouble talking. I have never seen him so shaken.

  I’m shaken too, and don’t move. Now Toad’s eyes snap, and suddenly he is all strap iron and steel again, and above the swarm of GreyDevils and the hum of the helicopter his voice is like a whipcrack.

  “Now!”

  Dad starts struggling again, fighting us, kicking with his heels, trying to get away. When we get to the shed and push him through the door, Toad has to peel Dad’s fingers from the doorjamb so I can swing it shut without crushing them. The pigs squeal and scoot as we shove Dad through another door into the small feed storage room in the back. I slam the feed room door and Toad drops the bolt in place. The thick walls muffle the howling and moaning, but I can hear clawing and thuds against the door, and I feel sick.

  But there is no time to dally. Toad cracks the pig shed door and I can see GreyDevils milling around the yard, some of them holding pieces of iron stolen from our scrap pile. We burst out of the door and make a run for the house. As we hit the porch, Arlinda steps out between us and touches off her Mini-Zooka. When I turn, I see the helicopter is drawing its giant vacuum cleaner back into its belly now, and the GreyDevils are rushing back in to claw through the last kernels of URCorn remaining in the corners of the ruined truck. As the helicopter rises, flying up and away over the ridge, the GreyDevils in the yard are thinning out. Now that the URCorn has been vacuumed up, they’re all trying to figure out how to get through the
BarbaZap and into the Sustainability Reserves, and there are only a handful rummaging around in Toad’s junk piles. Between Toad’s Whomper-Zooka, my ToothClub and pepper-peas, Monocle’s joyful biting, and Hatchet’s bad attitude, it takes us about two hours to round up the last one and run it off. By then the cornvoy truck has been towed away. By the time we get done stringing barbwire back and forth across the hole in the fence, evening is coming on.

  I want so badly to look in on Dad, but when I reach for the pig shed door, Toad puts his hand against it.

  “But, Toad, I . . .”

  He shakes his head, and we walk to the house. In the kitchen Arlinda hugs me, then pours a mug of tea. When I pick it up my hand is shaky. I’ve never been so tired, but my eyes are wide, and I’m trembly inside, like I’ve seen a ghost.

  “There is a way to get your father back,” says Toad. “But it will take time. And what lies ahead is far worse than anything you saw tonight. You cannot help him right now. There is nothing for you to do right now but rest and gather your strength.”

  I can’t imagine what awful things have happened to make Dad this way, and I can’t imagine how we will ever get him back from the animal I left in the pig shed. But I also have new questions about Toad: if he knows how to get Dad back, he must know what has made him this way.

  “Toad . . . Dad . . . what . . . ?”

  “Tomorrow,” says Toad. “Now you must sleep.”

  “And Ma? Is she out there somewhere? In the same shape? Or worse?”

  “We don’t know,” says Toad.

  And then a small hand slips into mine. Dookie. And so I drink the tea, and then Dookie leads me into the room with Toad’s strange stuffed animals and he pats the blankets on the floor and like a tuckered child I lie down and I sleep.

  The next morning I wake to the smell of fresh-baked apple pies and the rumble of cornvoy trucks coming and going. I look out the window at the pig shed, then look back at Arlinda, packing pies into crates.