We leave before dawn and climb Skullduggery Ridge using our jacklights. I grab a few things from the shack, and then Toby and I pause to rest our packs on the hood of the Falcon and stare off to where we’ll be heading. It is the deepest, darkest part of a starless morning. The last of the GreyDevil fires have gone out, and the glow from the nearest Bubble City is pushing up against the horizon like a dirty gray cotton ball. We stare at it silently for a moment, then set out on the trail, dropping slowly from the heights of Skullduggery Ridge to the valley below, the shadows cast by our jacklights shuddering and sweeping weirdly across the trail ahead.
The bird chatter and parrot calls grow louder as the sky lightens. We extinguish our jacklights and hike into dawn. I lead the way, making Toby follow. I am being prideful, I know. But this trip is my responsibility. It’s my mother we’re after. It’s my family I’m trying to save. This isn’t Toby’s problem; it’s my problem. In fact, I’m not sure why Toby even agreed to come along. Or why his father allowed it. Arlinda made the arrangements. Maybe they were just afraid to say no to her.
We stop frequently to check Toad’s maps. For now it looks like it doesn’t really matter if we take the fork to the left or the right, as long as we’re heading in the correct general direction, because eventually all trails lead to roads that lead to the capital.
The sun climbs, and soon it’s hot and humid. We’re walking through the rumpled foothills I can see from the hood of the Falcon. The trail rises and falls, winding through a forest that is jungly and green. Vines twine and dangle from the branches, and we pass through glades thick with fern. Some of the low spots open into marshes. The ground here is squishy, and the air smells salty-sweet. It is also filled with bugs—mostly nasty little gnats, mosquitoes that seem the size of horseflies, and—of course—horseflies. We rub our necks and forearms with a mix of vinegar and herbs Arlinda prepared, and that helps some, but they still buzz around our ears and zip in for a nip now and then.
We drink from our water flasks, forage a few snacks here and there, and once I find a patch of wild strawberries. But mostly we just walk. And walk.
When we finally stop, I squint up at the sun. It is near noon.
“Lunch?” says Toby. It’s the first thing he’s said all day.
“Yah,” I say.
We sit and eat jerked fish in silence. I think about Dad back in that pigpen and wonder what he’s doing now. I wonder if Arlinda is out trading her pies for URCorn, and if she will be able to get enough to keep Dad going until this is over. She can only make so many pies, and the truckers can only slip her a few kernels at a time. And when harvest ends, so will the cornvoys.
After eating, we walk another two hours, then choose a campsite hidden in the trees. Our plan is to have one person sleep from midafternoon to midnight and then take watch while the other sleeps until dawn. Toby unrolls a sleeping mat woven from dried canary grass. “You take first watch,” he says. I’m just about to tell him I don’t take orders from a boy when I realize he’s giving me the easiest watch. The one where you don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake until the parrots squawk. So I just say thanks.
I arrange a simple campsite, set a cooking fire, and make a stew with dried vegetables and smoked pork. Toby awakens, eats some stew, and goes straight back to sleep. I put out the fire so it won’t attract attention in the dark. Then, after a brief circuit of the camp, I place my back against a tree with my weapons at hand, and wait for night to come. Well, here we are, I think. On our way. With pretty much no plan, just this idea that I can somehow walk to the biggest Bubble City and make things happen.
Day turns to dusk, and dusk turns to dark. The moon is a sliver, but the sky is clear. Every now and then I catch a nose-stinging whiff from a GreyDevil bonfire. Some of the solar bear howling is closer than I would like. By the light of the fingernail moon I can see the lump that is Toby sleeping ten feet away, his fight-stick at his side, and I admit that makes me feel better.
I stay on watch until the stars have spun well past midnight. When I nudge Toby’s shoulder with my foot, he awakens without a startle. “Got it,” he says, and as he stands I roll into my blanket.
41
THE NEXT THING I KNOW THE PARROTS ARE SCREECHING AND IT IS day again. For a moment I am disoriented. Then I want to cuss the parrots. But I smile when I realize at least I don’t have to listen to Hatchet.
Then it’s another day of silent hiking. More trails, more bugs, more signs that other travelers have passed here—but not a single GreyDevil. Today is a tough slog. Yesterday we still had the fresh sense of adventure. But today, we just walk and walk and walk. When we finally stop to camp, Toby doesn’t say a word, just unrolls his mat and goes straight to sleep while I set a fire and make another stew. Later, when he wakes to eat, I wait until he’s seated, hand him his stew, then say, simply, “Thanks for walking with me.”
“Yep,” he says, stirring the stew.
“I don’t know why you’re doing it.”
“Arlinda told me to. . . .”
“But I still don’t know—”
He cuts in before I can finish. “Your ma. She was good to me.”
I realize he is looking me in the eyes for the first time in two days. Maybe for the first time since I’ve known him.
“I never met my ma, you know.”
It’s getting dark. The firelight flickers on his face as he turns back to the stew. I don’t say anything.
“I asked Pa about it once. I was tiny. He picked me up and held me tighter than he’d ever held me before. ‘Your mother was better than all of us,’ he said. I could feel his tears soaking through my hair.”
He’s staring into the fire now.
Then he takes a breath and continues. “That’s all he’ll ever say about her. Not another word. He just goes back to feeding his fish.”
The fire is dying down. We both gaze into the flickery licks of orange, lost in our own thoughts. Then I shake my head and look away—it’s dangerous to stare into a fire. If something—or someone—comes at you from the dark, they’ll be on you before your eyes adjust. It’s like being temporarily blind. I scoot forward and, using the heel of one boot, start kicking dirt over the coals.
The howl of the solar bear freezes us for just an instant, and then it is coming at me through the air, a dark blob against the starry, moon-slivered sky, its claw-studded paws and shiny-toothed jaws spread wide.
42
THE SOLAR BEAR KNOCKS ME FLAT BACKWARD, WHICH IS A GOOD thing because if it had attacked from behind I would have been crushed face-first into the fire.
I don’t stay flat backward. Even as I realize what’s happening I flip to my stomach and curl up armadillo tight, just like when the GreyDevils swarmed me in Toad’s yard. I hear the solar bear’s jaws snap and take a terrible clunk to the head as a fore-tooth rakes my skull. Immediately, I feel the warm blood flow. The bear’s breath is awful, like spoiled meat and rotten berries. A claw scrapes my back as the beast tries to turn me. I desperately want to unfold and run for it, but I know I’m vulnerable enough without exposing my belly and throat. Back when we were living on the run, I saw how solar bears could gut a wild hog, and I don’t feel even a little bit like being bacon.
The teeth are at my skull again and I’m bracing for the crunch when the bear gives a loud grunt and tumbles into the brush. I crack one eye open to see the dark lump of Toby and the animal rolling on the ground at the far edge of the fading firelight. Jumping to my feet and drawing my knife, I turn it blade up like Toad taught me, and start circling, but I can’t see well enough to safely make a stab. I kick a dead branch into the fire. The flames flare, and now I can see Toby clinging to the solar bear’s back, riding it like a rodeo bull. Toby’s split-second decision to plow into the bear probably saved my life, but it left him no time to draw his knife, so for the moment, it’s a wrestling match, with Toby using every trick his cage-fighting father ever taught him in a desperate attempt to stay just beyond t
he reach of tooth and claw.
Holding my knife with the cutting edge up, I stab at the air and holler as loud as I can.
“HEY, BEAR!”
The solar bear rears into the air, and Toby uses this momentum to grab it by both ears and pull it over backward. It works, and they hit the ground with a flop, the bear’s paws paddling the air. In an instant, Toby locks his ankles around the bear’s upper chest and snaps his arms into a choke hold around the bear’s neck. The animal writhes and roars, and rakes at Toby’s ankles with its hind legs. Toby’s leather boots can stand the clawing for a while, but not forever. And if the claws catch him higher up the leg they’ll strip the flesh from his bones.
I keep circling the two tumbling figures, desperate for an opening. Lunging for the bear’s belly, I get caught square in the chest with a back paw and flung backward. I scramble to my feet and swipe my blade across the bear’s rump. Hardly the best way to kill a bear, jabbing it in the butt. But that’s the target I was offered. Blood swells through the caramel-striped fur and the bear does stop tearing at Toby’s legs long enough to drop to all fours, whirl around, and face me. “Fight-stick!” hollers Toby, his voice muffled against the bear’s hide.
I don’t want to take my eyes off the bear, so I back toward Toby’s sleeping mat in a crouch, feeling behind me with my one free hand. My fingers touch the rough canvas of Toby’s pack, then the softer fabric of his bedroll. The pack has been kicked over, and everything is spilled. I feel a wooden shaft, but the instant my fingers close around it I realize it’s too small. It’s a pitch-stick. I drop it and pat the earth again, and now I find the fight-stick. I sheathe my knife (Toad has trained me well), grab the fight-stick in both hands, and raise it high above my head. With the bayonet attached it feels heavy and unbalanced. Toby and the bear are back to rassling. Realizing he’ll never choke the bear, Toby has given up his neck lock for a lower position. I think he’s just trying to keep the bear occupied—and himself alive—until I can stab it with the bayonet, but his ankles have come unlocked and he is slipping dangerously sideways. Suddenly the bear spins, and Toby is flung crashing into the brush. The bear is on him in an instant, and just as quickly I am on the bear, driving the bayonet deeply into its back. The bear howls and spins, swiping at me with one paw, and this time I am the one flung into the brush.
Snapping and flopping like a giant beached shark with fur, the bear turns itself into knots trying to reach the fight-stick. The branch I kicked in the fire is still burning and in the half-lit crazy shadows thrown by the flailing bear, I edge my way back to Toby’s pack and pick up the pitch-stick. Plunging it into the coals, I raise it flaring to the sky just in time to see the bear bite the fight-stick, pluck it from its flank, and flick it through the air. Then the animal turns and launches itself at me with a roar, its mouth a cavern of drool-covered stalactites and stalagmites. There is no time for my knife and no time to dodge. Instead I rush straight at the beast, thrusting the pitch-stick before me. Another gust of death breath hits my face, and then, even as its bloody forepaws close around me, I drive the flaming pitch-stick deep into the bear’s maw and down its throat. The bear rears up and its arms loosen. I drop to the ground and scuttle backward like a freaked-out crab stuck in reverse. The solar bear is pawing at the pitch-stick lodged in its throat when suddenly it throws its head back and gives out a strangled howl. Toby has leaped from the shadows and is driving the bayonetted fight-stick into the bear’s body again and again and again, until finally Toby is just standing there heaving for air and the bear is lying stone-still, a piece of the pitch-stick dangling from its mouth like a busted toothpick, a wisp of smoke curling from between its lips.
For a while there is only the sound of two people trying to catch their breath.
Then I hear a soft chuckle.
It’s Toby. In the firelight I can see his sweaty, dirty, bloody face scrunched up in a grin.
“Hey, BEAR?”
I roll my eyes, and then we’re both laughing. Even with the blood caking on my brow and the tattered, bloody strips of cloth hanging from Toby’s legs, we’re laughing and laughing, the relief spilling out of us and echoing in the dark forest all around.
43
WHILE I DIG THE FIRST AID KIT FROM MY PACK, TOBY STOKES THE fire. We need the safety of darkness, but we need to boil water to clean our wounds. Besides, we just had a howling solar bear fight to the death and the air is filled with the scent of fresh blood, so it’s kind of hard to worry about attracting attention. We do shield the flames as best we can with our packs, and dress the cuts and gouges by jacklight, using rag strips and Arlinda’s healing paste. We got off easy: the backs of Toby’s legs are gashed in a couple of places, but nothing deep enough to catch muscle or tendon. His tall boots took most of the abuse and will need stitching and patching. When Toby parts my hair and looks at my scalp wound, he says it’s about three inches long but he can’t see bone. It’s driving me nuts to think of the bear spit in there, so I clamp my teeth and tell him to scrub it good before he packs it with paste. He does, and it hurts so bad I pound my fist into my thigh. Then he threads a needle and drops it into the boiling water to sterilize it.
“Here,” he says, handing me a stick. “You might wanna chew on this.”
Then he starts sewing.
Even when the pain is making me squeeze my eyes shut so tight I feel like they’ll pop, I notice how gently his giant palm is cradling my head, and how tenderly his fingertips work around the wound. You’d never guess it from such a big lug. I wonder if maybe he’s that way because he didn’t have a ma, and he had to learn tenderness from his giant pa.
“Okay,” he says, as he knots the last stitch and ties a rag strip around my head. “That oughta do it.”
“Good enough,” I say, standing and squaring my shoulders. “Let’s eat some bear steaks!”
If we were back home, we’d spend the next day turning that bear into food and a rug and tallow candles and the best ToothClub ever, but out here we simply don’t have the tools or time. We weren’t hunting—we were fighting for our lives. Still, as a scavenger, I hate to let anything go to waste. So even though we just had stew, and even though we should put the fire out, we skin one of the bear’s haunches and Toby cuts two big steaks. We spear them with sticks and broil them over the flames. When we tear into the meat it is still a little bloody inside, but we are so famished from the fight and the butchering we just can’t wait. It’s strange, eating that steak, knowing that an hour ago it wasn’t clear who would be eating whom.
After Toby turns in, I snuff the jacklight and sit the rest of my watch. The solar bear fight has taken everything out of me, and it’s all I can do to stay awake. By the time I wake Toby and roll into my bag, I’m so tired it feels like the insides of my eyelids are vibrating. My head is pounding from the solar bear bite, but I fall straight to sleep, my mind spinning into a dream of fighting the bear. In the dream the bear comes at me again and again, but just as it closes me in its arms I see its eyes, and they are yellow, GreyDevil yellow, and then the bear becomes a big, laughing fat man, and even in my dream as I dive away I wonder why. But now I am an armadillo, curled up tight and rolling, rolling, rolling. . . .
44
THE PARROTS WAKE ME EARLY. TOBY IS USING THE FIRST LIGHT OF day to stitch and repair his torn boots. For breakfast I eat two leftover strips of bear steak. Toby is still working, so I walk over to the body of the solar bear and skin out as big a chunk of hide as I can without rolling him over. Using the flat side of my knife blade, I scrape the underside of the hide clean, then, using my thumbs, work cooking salt into the skin. Before I roll the hide up and stow it in my pack, I cut off two little strips and use my sewing kit to stitch one strip to the front of my shirt, and the other to Toby’s shirt. Operating on Toad’s Scary Pruner theory, I’m wanting people to see that solar bear fur over our hearts and wonder how we came to have it. It might be the sort of thing that spares us a fight.
Finally I pull out my whetstone and
spit on it. “Knull dife, lort shife,” I say, smiling as I run the blade back and forth.
We get a late start. Right away my head wound is pounding. When the trail takes us past a swamp, I stop to cut some willow whips and chew on them while I walk. Arlinda told Ma and me once that bull moose chew willow when their antlers hurt. They don’t taste like much, and maybe it’s my imagination, but it does help some.
For five more days, we hike, make camp, break camp, and hike again. There are no more solar bears. We just trudge, day after day. By the third day the trails become wider and more well-worn, and there are more and more open spaces between the trees. Here and there we see little tents and shacks and chicken coops and people looking up from hoop house gardens, and I realize how easy it is to think I’m the only one living the way I do. Sometimes the people wave, but mostly they just stand and watch us pass, like they’re worried we might turn into trouble. I notice I’m more on edge, too, studying the face of everyone we meet on the trail, moving to the side ahead of time, letting my hand rest on my ToothClub until they’ve passed. I’m used to being on guard against solar bears and GreyDevils, but I’m finding that strangers make me more nervous by far.
And we’re headed to a place where everyone is a stranger.
On the fifth day the trails become old roads. Now and then we meet someone with an oxcart, and once a team of spirited, trotting horses pulling a scrap wagon. Nobody is driving anything even remotely as amazing as the Scary Pruner. Usually the sight of Toby is enough to keep them moving with their eyes cast elsewhere. We see the ruins of buildings and what used to be small villages. Unlike Nobbern, these villages have almost no life to them. Nobbern may be ragged in a lot of places, but at least it’s got actual businesses and residents, and Magical Mercantile. There is nothing like that here. We see ragged, dirty people lurking in the buildings, but they just peek out at us. I keep looking for GreyDevils, but we haven’t seen one for two days now. I’ve puzzled on this some, but I suppose the answer is pretty simple: there aren’t any Sustainability Reserves in this part of the country, and they don’t want to travel far from that crazy corn.
The Scavengers Page 15