After we drop off Toby, it’s a quiet ride and I have time to think. Dad had left me two more clues I had yet to use. They weren’t that difficult, and I had figured them both out easily.
When everything is in place, invite the Authorities to visit.
When I was memorizing that line, it hit me: I’ve had this whole thing backward. I’ve been twisting my brain into knots figuring how to sneak Dad into the Bubble without the Authorities snatching him, when what I really need to do is make the Bubble come to me. They still have all the power, but at least my boots will be on home turf.
And so the day after all of the pencil cases are in place, I sit with Toad and Arlinda and lay out the rest of the plan. Then I hike up to Skullduggery Ridge, stand on the hood of the Falcon, and knowing full well there is a GreyDevil with fake eyes out there somewhere, holler, “I’m ready to give up my dad.”
Nothing happens, but I know someone is listening.
“Knock on Toad Hopper’s gate one week from now. And leave your yellow eyes at home.”
How do you prepare to deal with someone who has all the power? We know if they want to they could crush us. Evaporate us. The only thing we have on our side is their uncertainty. And Dad’s secret, I guess. Maybe the best we can hope to do is go down swinging, or at least telling them the truth to their faces. Like a frog swallowed by a stork, we can’t escape, but we can maybe scratch their throats on the way down.
One week later I am helping Toad clean the chicken coop after lunch when a helicopter clears Skullduggery Ridge, passes above us twice, then settles in a cloud of dust just outside the gate. We walk to the gate to wait for the knock. When it comes, five men, four of them armed and uniformed, one in a suit, are waiting. Mr. Suit says, “I’m here to arrange the details.”
“The exchange happens here,” I say. Mr. Suit starts to argue.
“They want him, they come and get him. And they bring Ma.”
He starts to speak one more time, and I cut him off again.
“And we only deal with the Fat Man and Lettuce Face.”
“Who . . . ?” says the man, genuinely confused.
“Figure it out,” I say. “We can’t stop them bringing guards and soldiers and whatever else, but if those two aren’t here, no Dad.”
The man looks around nervously. GreyDevils have begun appearing. It’s their time of day, and hearing the helicopter they think there might be corn about. The guards quietly thumb the buttons on their weapons, and the gunsights glow hot red.
“And if you’re concerned about your safety, we can do the exchange inside the BarbaZap gate,” I say. “But no one inside other than two pilots for that whirlybird, the Fat Man and Lettuce Face, and my ma.”
More and more GreyDevils are appearing. They’re getting worked up way more quickly than when they come after us on the Scary Pruner. The guards raise their weapons.
“Noon,” I say. “Three days from today.”
And that’s that. Walking in a tight knot, the man and his guards scuttle quickly to the helicopter. Just as they reach the stairs, a GreyDevil moans and stumbles toward them. Two of the guards raise their weapons. There is a deadened whup! sound, the GreyDevil’s chest caves in like it was kicked by an invisible boot, and down he goes. That was no rubber bullet, I think, and then I feel a chill as I think, Coulda been Dad. As more GreyDevils break into a mad shuffle toward them, the five men run up the steps, the hatch seals behind them, the blades spin, the dust boils, and they are in the air and sailing back over the ridge. A cluster of GreyDevils stands in the spot where the helicopter launched. Their heads are tipped back, and they are moaning toward the sky.
“What’s up with the GreyDevils?” I ask Toad.
“The URCorn,” says Toad. “They can smell it in the Bubblers. Comes out in their sweat. They’d eat ’em alive to get at it.”
I look at Toad, my eyes wide. “But if that’s true, how did Dad . . .” And then my eyes go even wider. All those times I teased Dad about eating garlic and how it made him smell—he was doing it on purpose, to hide the scent of the URCorn and protect himself from GreyDevils!
“Garlic! Toad! Dad needs—”
Toad grins, and then he nods. “A dozen of Arlinda’s best cloves. In the bag with his corn.”
Three days. It’s gonna feel like forever. Dad is out there alone, and the Bubble Authorities won’t stop looking for him. But at least I can relax about one thing: he smells like garlic, not URCorn.
55
ON THE MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY, I CLIMB SKULLDUGGERY RIDGE and raise the dinner flag. Upside down.
When it is time, I will be ready. Just invite me to an upside down dinner for lunch.
I look out across the valley. Dad’s out there somewhere. Watching this hill.
I hope.
What if he doesn’t see the flag? What if right this moment some Bubble Authorities goon has him in his sights? What if he’s just now waking up beside some bonfire, in a heap of GreyDevils?
I hike back down to Hoot Holler, and we wait.
When they arrive, it’s quite a show. I climb up on the tilapia tank ladder so I can see over the fence. The military vehicles come first, big-wheeled trucks and vans and transports that arrange themselves around the giant BarbaZap gate that guards the entrance to the Sustainability Reserve, where the new planting of URCorn is several feet tall, and tiny ears of corn are already starting to form. Then comes a large helicopter escorted by four smaller helicopters. The small helicopters hover while the large helicopter lowers itself within the Sustainability Reserve, then the choppers retreat to four separate corners of the sky. The helicopter rotors stop, the hatch goes up, and the steps slide down.
And out steps Ma. My heart leaps, and I get a lump in my throat.
And right behind Ma, Lettuce Face, in a pair of baggy coveralls that make him look even skinnier.
And behind him, fat and sweaty as ever and wearing his regular old squeezy suit, the Fat Man.
Dad is still nowhere to be seen.
Toad and I step out of the gate together. Arlinda is right behind us, holding Dookie tightly by the hand. All morning Dookie has been walking in circles, saying “Shibby-shibby-shibby” over and over. I tried to calm him down but nothing worked. And he’s right. It’s shaping up to be a shibby-shibby-shibby kind of day.
When Dookie sees Ma, he says, plain as day, “MA!” and jerks against Arlinda’s hand. It’s all she can do to hold him. I can’t blame him. I want to run to her too.
Ma moves toward the BarbaZap gate, Lettuce Face and the Fat Man on either side of her, each gripping one of her arms. Ten feet from the entrance, they stop.
“WHERE’S YER OLD MAN?!?” hollers the Fat Man.
“Oh, he’ll be . . . ,” I start to say, but my voice cracks, because I have no idea where he is and suddenly I’m realizing how real this is, and how crushing it will be if he doesn’t show. I clear my throat to try again when a voice behind me completes the sentence I could not.
“. . . here.”
I turn, and there he is. Dad, looking surprisingly healthy as he moves around me so we are standing side by side.
I expected to be nervous standing there with Dad, but I’m not. I have been preparing for this moment a long, long time, and I’m glad it has come. It’s better to be doing than waiting. I peek back at Toad and Arlinda. They too stand shoulder to shoulder, and when Toad catches my eye he winks.
“AWRIGHT, let’s GO here!” It’s the Fat Man, hollering at me.
“Keep your cool there, ButterButt,” I say. I figure if he’s gonna talk big, I’m gonna talk big, too. If this whole thing goes terribly wrong I want to go out in a way people will remember. “We’re gonna do this my way.”
“Gettin’ ordered around by a blankety-blank girl!” he grumbles.
“Get used to it, GreaseTrap,” I say. “Ma—you all right?”
“Yes, Maggie,” says Ma, but her voice is terribly soft.
Down the road I see a few GreyDevils appearing. Perh
aps with all the commotion they think the cornvoys have returned. The soldiers encircling us are beginning to look over their shoulders.
“Okay, here’s how it’s gonna work,” I say.
“You didn’t really think we were gonna play by your silly, frilly little rules, did yuh?” says the Fat Man. “Thanks for findin’ yer old man. We’ll take him now.”
For the first time, I feel uncertainty. It’s one thing to talk tough about trading in your Dad, it’s another thing to do it.
“I’m not going in,” says Dad.
“Oh, yer goin’ in,” says the Fat Man.
“Dad . . . what about Ma?” I say. “The trade?”
“You don’t want me,” says Dad to the Fat Man, ignoring me. “You want your—my—our—secret.”
The Fat Man just stands there glaring. Lettuce Face stomps his foot like a tiny dancer.
Dad continues. “You’re terrified it’ll get out.”
“QUIET!” thunders the Fat Man. “If that were true, we’d have snuffed you the minute you stepped through that gate.”
“I knew that was a possibility,” says Dad. “But I was willing to gamble that you need me alive until you’re dead sure the secret is safe . . . and it’s not.”
Now the Fat Man’s fat face is turning purple.
“Nah, you’ll keep me alive because my daughter, Ford Falcon, has set the dead man’s switch.”
“That’s right, GreaseGuts,” I say. When Dad said “my daughter,” I felt a rush of pride. Then, quietly, under my breath and out of the corner of my mouth, I say, “What the heebie-jeebies is a dead man’s switch?”
Dad answers in a clear, firm voice, so everyone can hear him, even over the sound of the approaching GreyDevils. “A dead man’s switch is something automatically set in motion upon the death or incapacitation of someone . . . in this case, if anything happens to me, it triggers something that will make these two fellows very uncomfortable indeed.”
I look at Dad again. He is standing up straight. I have never seen him look more in command. Now he speaks to the Fat Man and Lettuce Face again, and this time the slightest taunting tone has crept into his voice.
“You never did find the four vials, did you?”
The Fat Man’s face turns an even darker purple, and Lettuce Face’s face goes even paler, beyond wilted lettuce to anemic lizard belly.
The GreyDevils are beginning to swarm. “It’s all those Corn-Eaters,” says Toad. I’ve never heard him use the term before, but I can figure what he means: all those soldiers are from the Bubble, meaning they’ve had Activax, and with this many of them gathered and nervous and sweating, the GreyDevils can smell the URCorn coming from their pores. At this point the soldiers have stopped paying attention to us completely and have turned their eyes and their weapons toward the shuffling mob.
“You’re out of cards, Lard-O,” I say. Actually I’m not sure exactly what cards we have—but it seems like the thing to say. “Time to turn over my ma. Let’s get this done before we’re neck deep in GreyDevils.”
I can see the Fat Man would like nothing better than to feed me to the GreyDevils, but he nods toward the security guard in charge of the BarbaZap gate, and when the man presses a button, the big gate slowly swings open.
“We’re still takin’ yer old man!” screeches Lettuce Face.
“We’ll see,” I say. “First, we get Ma.”
And then, as Ma steps forward, everything comes undone.
56
AFTER ALL OF OUR EXPERIENCE ON THE SCARY PRUNER, TOAD AND I knew the GreyDevils were getting set to swarm, but when they see the BarbaZap gate begin to slide open, they go bonkers in a way we’ve never witnessed. It is like unlocking the door to a five-hundred-acre free buffet.
The soldiers start firing almost immediately and it’s horrible, the whup of the bullets hitting the moaning GreyDevils, but there are so many of them they just keep coming, and I can actually feel the earth vibrating as they tromp forward in their slow-motion stampede. The security guards, seeing the GreyDevils inbound, have thrown the switch that reverses the gate. It’s beginning to roll closed.
Dookie yanks his hand free from Arlinda. He is jumping up and down and trembling and spinning in circles, and saying “shibby-shibby-shibby . . .” over and over.
“Dookie!” I holler, trying to grab him by the shoulders. “It’s okay!”
For just a moment, he freezes, as if I’ve gotten through to him. Then he ducks under my arms and takes off running.
Straight toward Ma.
Straight toward the closing gate.
The BarbaZap! I think.
“Henry!” hollers Dad, and we both run after him. He has a head start, though—we’re not going to get to him in time.
Suddenly, Dookie stops in his tracks, looks straight up at the sky, and falls twitching and shaking to the ground.
A seizure! And he is lying directly in the path of the closing gate, a moving wall of BarbaZap snapping with deadly electricity. I am running as hard as I can and keeping right up with Dad, but even as we run I can see the killer gate slowly but surely closing in on Dookie’s outstretched hand.
“DOOKIE!” I scream, knowing that the second the steel touches his fingers he’ll be electrocuted.
I hear a sound behind me like an avalanche of stones, and even as I run I turn to look and I see Toad’s silo, his Leaning Tower of Pisa, teetering and now tipping like a giant sequoia. After another season of nonstop cornvoy trucks, the rumble of the soldiers’ gunfire and the vibrations of the hundreds of GreyDevils have been just enough to finally topple it. As it sweeps toward the earth it throws a dark shadow across the narrow Cornvoy Road, and the topmost section smashes earthward straight through the BarbaZap fence. Wires screech and howl as the steel rips and twists, then with an earthshaking thud the entire length of the concrete silo hits the dirt. An angry buzzing, snapping sound erupts, sparks fly high into the sky, and the gate stalls, millimeters from Dookie’s hand. The falling silo has shorted out the electricity.
“Snooky holer-tables!” hollers Toad, pumping his fist when he sees the damage the silo has done, all those years after the government bulldozers bumped it. “That fight is fit!”
And then out of the smoke and pulverized concrete dust I see the GreyDevils come pouring toward us.
They have overrun the soldiers and are coming for the open gate, where Dookie is lying. I reach his side and drop to my knees. He is blinking at me in that quiet, goofy way he always does when he’s coming out of a seizure.
“Henry! Henry!” It’s Ma, trying to get to Dookie, but the Fat Man is holding her back, trying to drag her to the helicopter.
I look over my shoulder and see the GreyDevils stumbling toward us in a dirty gray wave, their desperate eyes fixed on the gap in the gate, looking right past us to the rows and rows of URCorn, their cracked and crusty fingers reaching out and grasping before them. Their voices swirl and moan in a tornado of sound. There is no way we can get back to Toad and Arlinda.
“The helicopter!” yells Dad, picking up Dookie.
Now the Fat Man is dragging Ma to the chopper. She is fighting him and reaching toward us, but he is jerking her backward mercilessly. Lettuce Face has already leaped into the chopper and is yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” at the pilot.
We catch Ma and the Fat Man right at the door of the chopper. The Fat Man whirls and snarls at us, one arm wrapped around Ma’s neck.
“Get back!” he growls.
“Dead man’s trigger!” my father hollers. “It’s locked and loaded!”
The Fat Man turns as pale as Lettuce Face.
The GreyDevils are pouring through the gate.
“Nowhere to go but up!” hollers Dad.
“I . . . ,” says the Fat Man, then he curses and lurches up the stairs, dragging Ma with him but making no effort to stop us. Dad lifts Dookie into the helicopter, I climb in behind them, the engine roars in tune with the GreyDevils, and then we are lifting up, up, and away. Toad and Arlinda stare up a
t us until we can see them no more and the fields of URCorn tighten into rectangles of brilliant green and then we are roaring through white sky, back to the Bubble and who knows what.
But hey, I think, as I look around: it’s the whole family . . . back together again.
57
WE SPEND THE NIGHT IN EMPTY ROOMS WITH SIMPLE BEDS. I PULL my mattress off the rack and sleep on the floor. Dookie sleeps beside me. Ma and Dad are in another room. The last thing I hear is the low murmur of them talking.
The next day we are moved to the square room with three white walls and one mirror wall. Dad has his arm around Ma while she holds Dookie and hums his favorite old songs. Ma’s still terribly upset about his seizure. I forgot that she didn’t know about those. I explain how it’s been since the night of the attack.
As happy as we are to be reunited, you’d think we’d all be chattering like mad, but mostly we seem to be lost in our own thoughts. How do you go from having pie together on Toad and Arlinda’s porch to escaping a horde of GreyDevils in a helicopter and everything that happened in between and then just pick up where you left off? Being thrown back together in this way, we don’t really know how to begin. Plus, it’s not like we are sitting around our own kitchen table.
I look at us in the mirror. Ma, Dad, and Dookie, and me off to one side. It’s like a family portrait, only instead of smiling we’re just waiting to see what happens next.
We don’t wait long. The mirror changes to a window, and the Fat Man and Lettuce Face appear.
“Well, well,” says Lettuce Face. “Isn’t this nice. A family reeeeuuuunion.”
I dream of the day I can stick a Whomper-Zooka up this dude’s snoot.
“You’ll be turning us loose any minute,” I say.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” says Lettuce Face. “We have your mother, and—although I could really do without you—we have you . . . and your odd little brother.”
The Scavengers Page 20
