Pig City

By Jonathan Mary-Todd

To survive in this rough new world, Malik, Beckley, Emma, and Wendell try to avoid cities and stay on the move. But when a winter storm sets in, they decide to risk finding shelter rather than freeze. A friendly coalition in Des Moines, Iowa, welcomes the group into their community. But what's that stench?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lerner Publishing
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781467730693

Book preview

belonged

CHAPTER ONE

I

’d been lying under a blanket on top of overgrown grass when the first snowflakes touched my face. I sat up and shivered. All around me, flakes were coming down. Melting as soon as they landed. But enough were falling that the patch of sand a body’s-length away from me was dotted with white.

I turned to look behind me. Beckley. Wake up.

Beckley swept the stringy brown hair from her face, rubbed her eyes, and put on her pair of cracked glasses.

Oh dear, she said. Well, we’d better move fast today. It’ll only get tougher once the snow starts to stick.

Her sister, Emma, sat up next to her, wrapped in a patched-together sleeping bag. She trembled in the cold like a rabbit.

We should’ve broken the lock on that toolshed last night, Beckley murmured. It would’ve been worth it. Look at Emma, she’s freezing.

We? Wendell’s voice crept over from the other side of Emma. Malik and me always do that stuff, us boys!

"And I’ve caught our last dozen meals. That’s just you earning your keep, Wendy," Beckley replied.

Don’t call me that.

Wendell had walked with us for the last season or so. We spent a few moons moving east together. Lately we’d been in what Beckley said was probably the place people called Iowa. The land was flat, and it would go along without ending. Strong winds hit us most days while we walked over fallen stalks of wild corn. Most of them were half mush, no good for eating. Our hungry stretches had gotten longer, broken up sometimes by squirrel roasts.

Okay, now this next part’s important. Emma, are you listening? ‘At the moment you see a spark drift downward, touch the tinder’—that’s the husks, in our case—‘and blow softly onto the bundle.’

Beckley and her sister stood above a pile of dried corn husks we’d collected, trying to block out the wind. Emma struck the dull side of a blade from my pocketknife against a chunk of flint.

‘You should begin to see a wisp of smoke rise from the ti—’ um, husks, ‘as well as a glow that will grow larger as the fire spreads.’ Uhh . . . keep trying with the flint in the meantime.

Beckley read aloud from Gene Matterhorn’s Wilderness Survival Guidebook. She was the best reader in the group—the one who really liked to. We’d taken the guide, along with my pocketknife, some of the blankets, and most of our clothes from a place to the west of us. The Frontier Motel. The Frontier was where Beckley and I had spent most of our younger years. Emma was even born there.

My mother had stopped at the Frontier the same time Beckley and Emma’s parents did. People were worried, my mother said. Phones had stopped working. The Frontier was a place where people could stop and rest before they got where they were going. When everybody started to panic, people like our parents got off the road there.

They met with rumors of fighting in the east, disasters. Some people headed back out right away, searching for news. My mother stayed. Since I left the place, I’ve never met anyone who knew for sure what happened.

The Frontier was a safe place. Nothing else was around it but stretches of trees and a gravel road. After the world our parents were used to stopped working, they and some others started to build a life together.

Soon enough, my mom said, any fuel nearby was gone anyway. There was no driving somewhere else. Beckley’s dad told everybody after some trips beyond the motel’s woods that we should all keep to the Frontier. It wasn’t ’til the last of our parents passed that we set out. We weren’t looking for anything. It was just that we didn’t feel like we could stay.

• • •

Wendell talked with a mouth full of squirrel meat.

What’d you say this place is?

It’s called a golf course, Beckley said, tilting the remains of the squirrel above the morning fire.

"What’s that?"

It’s—a place where people played a game. Called golf.

What’s that? How do you know that?

At the place where we got the Matterhorn book, there were some other books, Beckley said. "One was called How to Improve Your Golf Swing. Or, I think the name was longer, but that was part of it."

What?

Beckley and Wendell both frowned. They made each other confused a few times a day.

There are supposed to be holes around, but I think the grass is covering them up, Beckley added.

Hm, Wendell said. For some reason, that seemed to