Surviving Minimized: A Novel

by Andrea White

  “Part of your problem, Zert,” his father said, “is that you hold yourself apart. If you tried harder to be part of the group, you wouldn’t be so unhappy.”

  Zert sighed. “You used to get mad at me for being a follower. I can’t do anything right.”

  His father began cracking his knuckles. “I’m sorry. I know it’s hard for you here. It’s just that the village votes on us on next Saturday. That’s only a week from now, and I’m worried.”

  “I know, I know,” Zert said. He gazed out the door of the hut. The setting sun lit the mountain’s peak into a reddish flame. The sky was the color of strong lemonade. Or here, in a land with no lemons, it was the color of … well, itself.

  “If we mind our manners, act enthusiastic, and do everything we can, we’ll convince them to let us stay in Paradise,” his father said.

  Zert sighed. “I’m going to the trickle, Dad.”

  “Think about what I said,” his father called after him.

  His father might be able to be hopeful. But Zert couldn’t be. They were going to get kicked out soon, and they wouldn’t be able to eat his father’s misshapen boots.

  Zert hiked to a sandy spot next to the trickle. He spotted Beth, John, Millicent, and Rudolpho sitting on the overturned turtle shell under the lily pad.

  Turtle Shell Resort.

  John held part of a half-eaten cricket leg to his mouth.

  Millicent held up a cookie. “Hi, Zert, come on up.”

  “Nah, I’ll stay down here,” Zert said. He tried to skip a pebble over the trickle, but it sank midway. Can’t even skip a pebble. But none of the kids seemed to notice.

  Beth popped a cookie into her mouth. Her mother made delicious cricket cookies.

  “Zert told me that he used to keep a pet rat,” John said.

  Beth frowned. Her hair was pressed to her head where her cowboy hat had been, and the sun glinted off the medals hanging around her neck. “He’s a liar. No one would want a rat for a pet.”

  “I’m not scared of rats,” Zert said firmly. There was so much he couldn’t do and didn’t know. But here in Rosieland, he was the rat expert.

  Beth cast a sideways glance at John before facing Zert. “My dad and I found the rats’ nest. It’s by the abandoned cabin. Who wants to play Rat Attack after dinner tonight?”

  “I don’t like that game, Beth,” Millicent said.

  “I double dog dare you. Come with us, Zert,” John said.

  That’s how Cribbie had caught Superpox. Eckle had dared Cribbie and him to wage a trash war. He should say no. It was stupid to take a dare.

  “Are you in or are you a scaredy dog?” Beth asked Zert.

  He winced at the mangled BIG-world phrase. “I’m in,” he heard himself promise.

  “You’re bait,” Beth said.

  “Are you sure, Zert? I don’t think …,” Millicent said. She gazed at him, her green eyes round.

  Maybe he didn’t want to do this. But it was too late.

  “We’ll set up camp by their nest,” Beth interrupted. “While Zert keeps the fire going, the rest of us will hide behind the rock. When they come out of the nest, we’ll yell, ‘Rat Attack.’” She nodded at Zert. “You run away, and we’ll …” To demonstrate, she picked up her bow, aimed an arrow at a gnat buzzing by a nearby twig, and let the arrow fly. The arrow grazed the gnat’s delicate wings.

  Zert wiped the sweat off his brow. What had he gotten himself into?

  Next to the fire, Zert couldn’t see the rats’ nest, but he sensed an animal’s presence. Beth had said that the nest was behind a ramshackle cabin about a meter from him. Its bark roof was collapsed in places, and it looked so flimsy that a hard wind could blow it away.

  “Start the fire. The rats will come out and investigate the smoke. But don’t worry. They won’t bother you so long as the fire’s going,” Beth had said when the kids left.

  A raindrop fatter than his toe splashed the fire, and the flames sizzled and smoked. He hunched over the small flames to protect them.

  That afternoon, when the sun still blazed on the horizon, Beth’s game had seemed troubling but sane. The darkness had changed everything. Now, the moons’ rays—the pearly color of Okar’s teeth—shone down on him.

  Okar was usually friendly and playful. He used to hang by his tail to impress Zert, and some days the rat would run to greet him.

  But the next-to-the-last day at his home, his pet hadn’t given any warning. The rat had just opened his mouth and bitten him. As the sharp pain had run up Zert’s hand, Okar had shot him a cold-blooded stare.

  Zert drew his rat cloak tighter around his shoulders and threw his last twig on the dying fire. He had burned through his supply of wood. Yet still, the rats hadn’t come.

  There were no watches in this backward world, but he was certain that at least thirty minutes had passed.

  A sudden shower doused the remaining flames.

  Zert fanned the coals but only managed to create a cloud of smoke. He needed more twigs, but if he left the fire untended, the kids might conclude he had “doodled out.”

  He couldn’t stay here without a fire.

  Unless he wanted to put up with some “scaredy dog” jeers, he would have to try to retrieve some more wood.

  No need to carry his bow and quiver. In case the rats charged, he’d shout stop. No matter his size, he was the human here. They’re only rats. Only some Okars. Besides, these weren’t even ypersteroid rats like Okar had been. Normal rats were more timid, weren’t they?

  A breeze blew and engulfed him in smoke. His eyes stung, and he coughed. Act now before the fire goes out.

  Instead of his bow, he picked up a smoking twig. It had grown chilly since the sun had gone down, and the air turned even colder as he moved away from the coals. He was creeping toward the abandoned cabin when a gray shape emerged from the night.

  A rat, more than twice his height, stood before him, motionless except for its writhing tail and quivering whiskers. Its eyes were backlit, as Zert’s communicator had been. They were a supernatural red.

  This rat was sizing up its prey. This rat wants to kill me. He tried to scream, “Stop, you rat! I’m the human here!” But only air came out.

  Zert hurled his torch at the rat’s face and ran toward the trail. He smelled burnt fur and heard the rattle of claws and the slap of a tail on the rocks as the animal fell back in confusion.

  For the moment.

  I’d rather be a coward than a snack for a rat. He raced past the smoldering campfire and the abandoned cabin and had crested the rise when he heard voices.

  “I told you,” Beth said. “He’s bolted.” The voice came from behind a rock on the far side of the abandoned cabin.

  “How long?” John asked.

  “He made it for thirty-five minutes,” someone answered.

  They tricked me. Beth and the others had never intended to attack the rats. This was just another test.

  “You won, Millicent,” Beth said. “You got the closest. You said thirty-eight minutes.”

  Millicent had been in on the trick too.

  “Thirty-five minutes is a lot, Beth,” Millicent said. “I’d like to see you sit by that fire for thirty-five minutes in the dark, thinking a rat might attack you. He doesn’t know there are no rats around here.”

  This was just another stupid test, not meant to be dangerous. But he had seen a rat. A granddaddy of a rat.

  Zert reached the rock the kids were using for a hiding place. “A rat did try to attack me,” he yelled.

  Beth’s head popped out. Moonlight flowed down on the rat mask that she was holding. No doubt she had planned to scare him with it. “Sure it did. In your mind,” she said. “The nest my dad and I tracked was on the other side of the trickle.”

  “This rat was real!” Zert yelled.

  “Zert’s not a liar,” Millicent said to Beth.

  “He is a liar. He said he had a rat for a pet,” Beth said.

  “I’m not lying. I could have been k
illed!” Zert yelled as he hurried past, not waiting for a reply.

  “Zert’s going home to play with his pet rat,” a voice he recognized as Rudolpho’s said in a sing-song voice. Rudolpho just wanted to impress John and Beth, but still the boy’s taunt stung.

  “Zert, it was just a game,” Millicent called after him.

  “A game?” Zert said, turning around to face these heartless kids. He’d never play with them again. Not even Millicent. He hated everyone. Including himself. Hadn’t he promised himself after he escaped Superpox that he’d never risk his life for something stupid again?

  “Abbot didn’t like it either,” Beth said. She was standing on the moonlit trail with the bow slung over her shoulder. She held the rat mask in her hands. Despite the cold, she wasn’t wearing any shoes, but she did have a muffler wrapped around her neck.

  Zert stopped walking. “So you tricked Abbot with this phony game too?”

  Millicent stuck her hands into her fur pants pockets and looked down at the ground. “He bombarded us with trash the next night,” she said.

  “My dad didn’t like him anyway,” Beth said.

  Zert decided that when they got kicked out, he and his dad would go look for Abbot. They’d form a colony of minimized people with whoever else wanted to join. They’d all get along. It would be a true Paradise, not like this sucky one.

  “It’s not OK to try to kill people just because you don’t like them,” Zert yelled back to them as the wind kicked up suddenly.

  A roar was drawing closer.

  He looked up at the sky glittering with stars and spotted a lifter flying low. He dove for a rock to hide behind.

  The lifter was the same kind he had seen before. “The First Lifter Microscope” was written on its glass belly. But at night, its interior was all lit up, and he could see faces pressed against the glass floor.

  Wide lips and tall foreheads. Noses as big as zoink pins. And something else so disturbing he just gawked. A bright red “NW” shone on the side of the lifter.

  NW—the logo for his uncle’s adventure show.

  32

  SNUG AS A BUG ON A RAT-FUR RUG

  Zert made a beeline over to the fire to warm his cold face and hands as the twig door swung closed behind him.

  In the candlelight, his father was sewing rat fur onto a pair of boots.

  His father looked up at him and grinned. “You’ll be snug as a bug when you wear these.”

  As snug as a bug. Please. The boots looked as if they might hold up for a day or two on the trail. But it didn’t matter whether his father figured out how to make boots or not. They were going to get kicked out. And if the Rosie kids kept it up, Zert might not survive till Decision Day anyway.

  His father eyed Zert’s bow. “Shoot anything?”

  He had told his father that he was going to practice moonlight archery. “Are you kidding? I couldn’t hit the side of an AR theater,” he said, but his stomach felt tight. “Dad, I saw something really strange. A lifter flying really low.”

  “Yeah, I heard they occasionally do that,” his father said. “Ouch!” He stuck his finger in his mouth before picking up the needle again.

  “I saw the same kind once before. It’s a tour advertised as ‘The First Lifter Microscope,’” Zert said as he continued to try to warm himself by the fire. He’d sleep with his cloak on tonight.

  “Hmmm,” his father said. “You told me about that.”

  “This time, I spotted a New Worlds logo on the side of the lifter.” His chest and knees had warmed a bit, but his back still felt frozen.

  His father lifted his head and stared at him. His blue eyes looked black in the dimly lit hut.

  “Don’t you get it, Dad? Uncle Marin’s show. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  His father put his needle down. “No,” he said. “Uncle Marin told me that he had arranged for the producers of New Worlds to rescue us if there was a problem. All we had to do was to spell out ‘Help’ in mongo at the parking lot.” He paused. “I bet this lifter’s the signal for us to call for help if we need it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Zert demanded.

  “Lots of reasons.” His father paused. “I didn’t want you to think that things might not work out. When Uncle Marin didn’t make it,” his father said, staring off into space, “I didn’t know whether his producers would care about us.” He sighed. “Also, once I got here, I realized that there’s nothing anyone can do to help us anyway.”

  “So what should we do?” Zert said.

  “Ignore the lifters,” his father said, returning his attention to the worktable. “They’ll go away eventually.”

  “Dad, you stepped into that Mag Lev after me. Tell me the truth. Did you hear a third door close?” Zert said.

  His father cracked his knuckles.

  “You didn’t hear it, did you?” Zert said.

  His father shook his head. “But as I’ve been saying all along, we could be having bad thoughts about a dead man.”

  When Zert didn’t respond, his father picked up his needle and started sewing again. “I brought you back a wormdog. It’s on the desk.”

  The wormdog, on an acorn-bread bun with leaf relish, waited on the desk next to Zert’s short story, “The Adventures of Henry Popter.” Zert had written the story for school on recycled paper with a down-feather pen and blackberry ink. The assignment was due on Monday morning.

  “No thanks,” Zert said.

  “I thought you liked wormdogs,” his father said.

  “I’m not hungry.” As he stared at the fire—the closest thing to a holo-imagetube in Rosieland—he listened to the chorus of insects. After only a couple of weeks here, he was able to make out the crackle of the crickets, the buzz of the mosquitoes, and the hum of the gnats.

  The sounds at home hadn’t fit together as well: Their greeting for the door was a recording of the yelp of a woman surprised by a roach, the squeak of an ypersteroid rat, and the whoosh of a g-pipe vacuum.

  He could also remember the blare of the radiation meter when the radiation grew dangerously high. The plop of a Wing sandal when it hit a moving sidewalk. The sizzle of a zoink ball when it passed through the hoop.

  The sound of that Mag Lev door closing. Once. Then twice. But not a third time.

  The next morning, a worm slid into its muddy hole on the bank of the trickle. He needed to catch a slew of these if they were going to have enough to eat on the trail.

  “No, you don’t,” Zert warned the worm, although he wasn’t sure whether worms had ears.

  He grabbed its tail with both hands and yanked with all his might—worm fishing, the Rosies called this activity.

  His father had tried to keep a worm from diving into its hole on their first day, but that worm had slithered away. This worm twisted and writhed at his feet. It might have been just a weak worm, but for the moment, he felt like a strong Rosie.

  Zert knelt over the worm and sliced its body into bite-sized bits with his knife. But then the pieces started wriggling away on the sandy bank, and he had to chase after them. When he collected them, he stuffed the slices into his pockets. He’d smoke some to make wormdogs, then he’d grind the rest into bug mash.

  Zert removed the shoulder strap for his acorn canteen and knelt next to the trickle. As he submerged the acorn and waited for it to fill, he stared down at the baby minnows playing hide-and-go-seek in the rocks.

  If only his herd wasn’t waiting for water, he’d try to catch a few. His beetles only ate plants, but the roach that he caught yesterday would eat anything.

  As he waited for the canteen, he stared down at ants the size of his feet marching along the banks. The ants had huge butts and antennae that looked as though two arms were sticking out of their dinosaur-shaped heads. One ant was eating, and its big jaw slid sideways. Black goo foamed out of its mouth and dripped to the ground, since the insect had no chin.

  “You’ve got the worst table manners I’ve ever seen,” Zert said to the ant.
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  A group of gnats with black heads, shiny green bodies, and see-through wings swarmed around an abandoned snail shell. Dining on escargot?

  Nearby, a sandy-colored flea with a nose so long that it almost touched the ground hopped along on a mission. Flea-geolocating? Or could he be moving to a new flea city? Or searching for a girl flea to love?

  A fly with four red eyes landed on a log. The bug started beating its wings, which looked the color of plain rain and the shape of the stained-glass windows he’d seen in church. He had just compared fly wings to stained-glass windows. Was he losing his mind?

  At his feet, he noticed the poop of an animal. The droppings looked like black peanuts. Probably a rat’s.

  Rat Attack. He was lucky to be alive.

  No wonder Abbot had retaliated the next night and doused those Rosie kids in trash. They deserved it.

  Zert capped the acorn canteen and stood up. He had already caused enough trouble for his father with one trash war. He wasn’t going to start another one here. Besides, if he had learned anything, it was that breaking rules wasn’t a good way to earn respect.

  A centipede trudged by. Two black eyes stared out from underneath what looked like the horns of a longhorn cow. Were these antennae? Mary Kay Casey used a dried baby centipede for a comb. It made sense, since a centipede had so many feet. But how many was it? Thirty? Twenty-five? He bet even little Dawn Nelson knew the answer.

  Zert took off the rope that he used to hold up his pants. He looped the end and threw it. When he caught the centipede, he rolled the insect onto its back. Its orange feet pedaled the air, as if the bug didn’t know that it had stopped walking.

  He started counting the centipede’s legs. One, he didn’t need Millicent’s help. Two, not Beth’s, either. Three, not John’s. Four, not even Artica’s. Five, certainly not Uncle Marin’s. He’d never spell out “Help” in garbage on the parking lot.

  He never wanted to see that broken exclamation point ever again.