By David Castlewitz

“Wrangler” first appeared in Encounters, September 2013

Being a skinner was nearly as low as a crewman got, but Pickles Cane had expected to start at the bottom when the crew chief bought him. Although Babes Bullock didn’t.  Babes was born into the crew. With his hammer and chisel, Babes was a knocker, which was one rung up the ladder. Pickles was his teammate.

            “You see them?” Babes had asked after the plug-pullers disabled two cornered trucks. “Humans. With the trucks. You see them? I did.”

            Pickles shrugged that first time. Over the next few weeks, working with Babes, he had to listen to more of these tales. The crew chief, an old wrangler with a withered arm, used his good left one to slap some sense into Babes, and one of the women from the Mom’s Circle that raised him tried to intervene and get Babes to stop babbling about humans conspiring with trucks, but Bullock wouldn’t stop and the rest of the crew laughed at him. By extension, because Pickles was his partner, they ridiculed Pickles as well.

            “Seen any people with the wheelies?” they’d ask.

            “Bet you couldn’t count ‘em. More than five, huh?” others shouted.

            Pickles didn’t care what they thought of Babes. He just didn’t want the crew tarring him with that same brush. “I’m a good skinner,” Pickles told the elderly chief one night.

            The chief punched him. “You’re good when I say you are!”

            “I want a new partner,” Pickles shouted, and dodged the next blow.

            “Straighten Babes out,” the old wrangler told him. “He’s one of us. You ain’t. Not yet.”

            Pickles stalked off. Why was it only Babes saw humans with the trucks? Though he looked every time they raided a herd, Pickles never saw anything but semi-tractors, pickups, jeeps and other smart wheelies.

            “I only saw them once,” Babes finally admitted after a tiring raid and hours spent stripping several disabled trucks. Rods, bearings, gears, belts, the all-important batteries: everything was taken, even the metal panels that the crew called “skin.” It was all valuable. It could all be sold in one of the nearby cities where non-intelligent trucks and cars were manufactured.

            Someday, Pickles knew when he looked at the vast herds roaming the plains, there’d be no self-aware trucks to raid and strip. What would the crew do then? What job would he get? How would he live in that kind of world? These were questions that sent tears streaming down his lean face. Once, when he asked a crewmen about that bleak future he was beaten with a strip of rubber until he was a blubbering muddle in the dirt.

            “Nobody talks about that, kid!” the wrangler chief told him. “Especially not some 14 year old. You got sold to us to work and that’s all you gotta know.”

            Dilapidated buses, armored carriers and old trailers ringed Bug City, protecting it from the occasional truck rampage. Pickles had never witnessed a wild herd roaring across the plains, some trucks moving in straight lines and others furiously zigzagging like they did to escape motorbike-mounted cutoff men.

            “Mechs,” he’d been told by a wrangler who readily used the derogatory term when speaking of the smart trucks, “ain’t stupid. Ain’t no mech philosophers around, none I hear of anyway, but mechs are smart. There’s some reason they go crazy, but we ain’t knowin’ it.”

            Like a lot of what Pickles learned during his first year with the crew, his Skinner Days as he called them, the wrangler’s sentiments didn’t make sense. Everyone knew the sun made the trucks crazy. It burned them because they were out on the open prairie, without shade, their electric motors always humming, their solar panels absorbing energy. When their batteries were full and their overflow capacitors could no longer handle the load, they rampaged. At least, that’s what Pickles had been told by his father.

            At the Bug City gate, the crew registered their buggies and bikes with the Chamber of Commerce and left behind two men as guards. Their vehicles were too precious not to be cared for and kept safe. Without the bikes, pursuers and plug-pullers couldn’t work. Without the buggies there’d be no means of transporting their booty, which Pickles watch being off-loaded before the vehicles were rolled into a pen.

            “You’re all haulers now, so get at it,” the chief shouted, pushing and punching his crewmen. Even some of his wives were drafted into helping cart their salvage into Bug City. Most everyone, Pickles noticed, picked up their assigned bag or hefted their wheel-barrow cheerfully. They even sang as they marched past through the gate and into the wide avenue where welders and craftsman, shoemakers and bakers, loan sharks and gambling den owners awaited them.

            “You get this,” the paymaster told Pickles as he poured several pennies into a tiny mountain of coins on the table where the crew lined up for their share of the profits after the goods were sold.

            All coppers, Pickles noticed, and glanced at Babes, who stood counting his steel coins, smiling and bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

            “Let’s buy new cords,” Pickles suggested, pointing at Babes’ worn shoes.

            Babes lifted one foot and studied his tire-rubber sandals. “Glue’s good. Tape’s good.” He pointed with a glance and a gesture of his head at a nearby tin-roofed building. “Now we go enjoy ourselves.”

            “Can’t buy much with this,” Pickles said. He easily held all the pennies he’d earned in one hand. Two coins would buy a shoe, which he thought he badly needed because the cords of rubber that stretched across his right instep had pulled out of the corrugated sole. He was constantly having to stop to slip his foot back in place when they ran to the disabled trucks.

            “You can get two, maybe three beers, I bet.”

            “But I need shoes. One at least.”

            “You don’t tape it right. I’ll show you better.”

            “You said you’d do that last week.”

            “Didn’t I?”

            Pickles shook his head.

            “You thirsty for something more than rusty water?” Babes asked, his cherubic white face beaming.

            “Will you help me fix my shoe?” Pickles asked.

            “Yeah. I’ll help ya get it all mended up.” Babes leaned close to Pickles, tossed an arm across his thin shoulders and steered him to the tavern, one of several in the intersection leading from the auction block where the wrangling crew’s elders took care of business.

            Two beers were all that Pickles could buy. One for himself and one for Babes, who insisted it was traditional for partners to treat one another. And when those beers had been consumed, Babes slid off his barstool and began wandering among the tables where men from other crews as well as crewmates sang and drank and told their tales of pursuit and capture.

            “You drinkin’ or watchin’ or whatin’?” the bartender asked Pickles.

            Pickles lifted his empty glass of beer and grinned.

            “You drank it. Order another or get off the stool.”

            Pickles moved away from the bar and several boys rushed in to take the small space he’d previously occupied. They, too, spent their pennies. Catching up to Babes, he listened to another crazy story about humans wandering in among the wild trucks of the plains, tending to them in some unknown way, sleeping in their cabs or helping repair damaged vehicles.

            “He your friend?” a man asked Pickles, moving him off to a far corner of the tavern as expertly as a motorbike separated a truck from the herd. “If he’s your friend, then you best tell him to shut up.”

            “He’s my partner,” Pickles whispered up at the man.

            “Same thing.” A coarse sounding sigh sent waves of sour breath cascading into Pickles’ face. “Not all of them is that drunk that they want to hear those tales.”

            “Nothing I can do about it,” Pickles protested.

            “Tell him to shut up. That’s all you need to do.”

            Pickles backed away from the stranger and pushed his way through the crowd, stopping to stand on his toes to look over the heads to find Babes. He finally spotted his partner’s curly head of hair bobbing up and down.

            “You need to stop telling these stories,” Pickles said.

            “Says who? You?”

            “Somebody warned me.”

            “They gots to know about it,” Babes said. “They gots to know, all of them.”

            “But nobody believes you! Nobody else every sees these people. I never seen them.”

            ‘They’re out there. You’re not looking. And the crew? They see them. They just don’t admit it.”

            “We should get out of here, Babes. You’re pissing people off.”

            “Somebody just bought me a beer,” Babes said, triumphantly showing off a plastic cup of yellow liquid topped with white foam. “Which you can’t.”

            Later, when Babes finally came out of the tavern, Pickles helped him to the rendezvous where they’d sleep inside the city walls. The older crewmen, flush with bank notes some of them, staggered to the encampment throughout the night. They sang and wrestled one another, fought over common wives, vomited and fell down drunk in a profusion of delight. Pickles didn’t sleep steadily, awakened by the noise every few minutes, disturbed by the shrill voice of a Mom’s Circle mom berating the younger men and women cavorting in the dirt.

            They feasted on meat and eggs and bread the next morning, all paid for by the common fund. It was a breakfast Pickles hadn’t enjoyed since his father sold him the previous year. Growing up, he enjoyed sumptuous morning feasts once or twice a week. Like his brothers and sisters, he assumed his father was a rich man who cared about him. The siblings who disappeared were either ungrateful brats seeking more and better or simply too old and too grown up to remain at home. New siblings, some babies brought by their mothers who then stayed with dad, arrived on a regular basis. It was a happy home, Pickles remembered, with lots of toys, a minimum of required chores, and dozens of brothers and sisters for playmates.

            Assembled after breakfast, the crew marched out of Bug City and applied to the Chamber of Commerce to reclaim their vehicles. After paying sales tax, a storage fee, and the damages toll to cover any incidentals caused by brawls or ensuing complaints from city wives, the crew chief ordered everyone to form up in their assigned positions for the march back to the open plain.

            Motorbikes in the lead, scouts in their fast, two-person buggies made of old pipe, salvaged wheels and refurbished motors on the wings, with breakers and skinners and separators in neat ranks and files making up the middle of the procession, while the transport buggies brought up the rear.

Pickles saw a few new faces. There were new boys, new girls, and some men with leathery skin and lined or scarred faces. Several familiar men and women were missing. “Aren’t we missing some folks?” he asked Babes.

“Probably stayin’ back to take up the city life. Crumbles the plug-puller told me he’s not going out this time.”

“You can do that? Stay back?”

“After twenty years. Sure. You get too old after that anyway.”

Pickles smiled, filled now with a new ambition. He’d put in his twenty years and find a town like Bug City where he’d retire. Maybe he’d become a middleman dealing in wares brought in by crews like his own. Or open a tavern. Or perhaps he’d learn how to gamble and take up that profession in his old age.

A section chief slapped Pickles across the side of his head and shouted, “You’re lookin’ crazy. Sharpen up and stop smilin’.”

“Move out,” the crew chief shouted, and his words were repeated by his assitants. Motorbikes rumbled to life. Buggies sputtered and began moving forward.

“Stop!”

Pickles froze. He looked back over his shoulder. An armored jeep on treads clattered through the city’s open gate. Guards on the roof wielded rifles and out-riders on the running boards carried pistols in their belts, clubs in their hands. Behind the jeep came a motorbike with a sidecar in which sat a jump-suited man, his hand holding a round black hat firm on his head, his long silvery hair whipping his shoulders.

“What’s up?” the crew chief asked, walking towards the sidecar where it had come to a stop. The guards fanned out on either side of the man in the jump suit. “President Ticks,” the crew chief said, nodding respectfully and doffing his peaked cap.

“You got a kid named Babes?” Ticks asked.

“He’s one of my kids. Whatcha want with one of mine?”

“You got the kid? I want to see him. And his buddy. Pickles. I want both of them now.”

Pickles shuddered. He felt himself being pushed out of formation. Then a hand tightened its grip on his wrist and he was taken to the city president. Babes joined him.

“You the boys that saw the humans?” President Ticks asked. He scratched at his cheek stubbles.

“We saw them,” Babes said.

“Not me,” Pickles protested. “I never – “ A guard punched him in the stomach and he dropped to his knees, doubling over and retching.

“Where?” Ticks demanded. “When?”

Babes pointed in the general direction of the plains. “Out there, sir.”

“I know it’s out there, kid,” Ticks fumed. “Where exactly?”

Pickles looked around at the surround crewmen, the chief and his subalterns. A couple gazed up at the clouds. The chief’s face was grim and stern, pale lips pressed tight together, his small eyes looking out straight head on either side of his lopsided nose. Why didn’t they speak up?

Slowly, Pickles rose to his feet. He averted his eyes from the guard who had hit him and watched Babes’ smiling face. The boy beamed and bounced up and down, quickly answering the questions put to him, pointing with delight at the unseen herds in the distance.

“Here’s what you’re gonna do for me,” Ticks said, walking around Babes, hands held behind his back. The president shot a glance at the crew chief. “Got it?” he asked.

The crew chief nodded.

Got what? Pickles wondered, looking to the chief for an answer.

“You find those people and get them. Free them.” Ticks gripped Babes’ rounded chin. He squeezed and the boy’s smile vanished. His laughing eyes dimmed. “This one,” Ticks continued, “stays. You – “ He stepped close to Pickles. “Find the people.”

“Me?” Pickles asked without thinking.

“Find them,” Ticks said. “Or your buddy dies. That’s the deal.”

“I never saw them,” Pickles said.

“Find them.”

Ticks signaled to his guards and Babes was taken to the armored jeep. He joked with the men dragging him away, but Pickles saw the fear in the boy’s wide gray eyes, the tears that were about to erupt.

A woman in the Mom’s Circle broke free of two others who were holding her back. One hand reaching out to Babes and the other clutching an infant, she screamed incoherently and fell whimpering, warding off those who came to help her with slaps and gnashing teeth. The jeep holding Babes returned to Bug City, followed by the other bikes and President Ticks in his sidecar.

 “Idiot,” the crew chief said, spitting. Pickles agreed. Babes was an idiot for telling those stories in the tavern. The chief turned to Pickles and shook his head. “Idiot.”

“Me?”

“For letting him talk like that. Yeah. You’re an idiot, kid.”

“What – I – “ Pickles felt himself shaking. He was scared. The chief glared at him, as did the assistants. “I never saw any people out there.”

“It doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t. We gots to go find them now.”

“I don’t know where to look!”

“You better remember what Babes told you. I’m not losing him because you’re an idiot.”

The Leaders Circle was a forbidden place that Pickles never ventured near. The large tent was set up every night when they camped, and the motorbikes were positioned around it, with guards carrying clubs and the two rifles the crew owned. The chief’s wives camped in a separate tent. The Mom’s Circle nearby overflowed with toddlers and babies and six-year-olds who sometimes wandered too close to the chief and his assistants.

That first night out after leaving Bug City, Pickles thought he was in trouble when told to report to the Leaders. He didn’t expect to be treated to dinner – roasted meat and huge loaves of bread with jam, a jumble of assorted greens and mugs of ice water. He didn’t expect to be kept at the large tent overnight, where he was watched by Crumbles the plug-pullers’ chief.

Each night, the chiefs took turns asking questions. Where were we when Babes first talked about the people mingling with the herd of trucks? What did you see, Pickles was asked over and over again.

“I saw nothing. Nothing,” he repeated. At first, he didn’t know where they’d been when Babes and he were paired, because it was from the very start that his partner began chattering on and on about the humans helping the trucks.

“You farm kids,” the chief told him.

“He never showed them to me,” Pickles explained, and prepared to receive a kick in the butt, a slap across the face or a punch in the gut.

Crumbles stayed the chief’s hand. “He ain’t gonna remember nothing doing that all the time.”

“These kids,” the chief said, spitting. “Don’t know anything. Don’t even know where they been, what they saw. Farm kids.” He spat again.

Later, Crumbles took Pickles aside and drew a map in the tent’s floor. Fluid drained from the man’s bleary eyes, from the edges of his mouth, from the sores around his ears where some insects had taken up residence.

“This is where we are,” Crumbles said. “This is the town where we got you.” He tapped a part of the map to indicate Hubs, the town where Pickles was raised. “And we went this way afterwards.” He drew a line that zigzagged and curved and extended to the top of the map and then down to the bottom and across the depression in the soil that indicated where they were now and to a stone Crumbles had placed to represent Bug City.

Pickles touched the top of the map. “What’s beyond here?”

“See?” the chief interjected, startling Pickles, who began to look up and behind himself at the old wrangler standing at his back. “They never knows nothing.”

“He’s gotta learn,” Crumbles said. “And he can.”

“Good thing you ain’t chief. You’d be having schools for these farm kids.” With a grunt, the chief wandered away.

“The sea. It’s off that way.” Crumbles used a pointed finger to make wavy lines in the soil.

“I think it was here that Babes began talking,” Pickles said.

“North? Sounds right.” Crumbles studied his map. “Kip’s Place is here.” He set down a stone. “That’s another city. We ain’t been there yet.” Crumbles smiled, his small teeth making him look like an ogre but his weepy eyes casting him as a harmless old man. “You need to keep listening. Listen and you’ll learn. Understand?”

The next day the chief pointed the crew north and sent out scouts to scour the area. In a few days reports came in that scouts from another crew had been spotted. “Could mean war,” Crumbles said.

Clubs and pointed steel rods were distributed to the men and women. At camp that night the guards were doubled. But the next day a representative of the other crew came in with the scouts. That night, the foreign crewman was a guest at dinner with the Leader’s Circle. Relegated to a corner of the tent where attendants and favorite wives ate, Pickles listened closely to the crew leaders’ conversation.

“Bandits been spotted,” the foreigner explained, his voice scratchy. He sat hunched over the communal plate, his huge hairy hands swiftly dipping in bowl of peppered meat. “Good, good,” he mumbled in an aside to a serving girl.

“How big?” the chief asked.

Pickles wondered if the foreigner had even the slightest fear sitting surrounded by the chief’s guards and assistants, some of whom were armed with clubs. Stripped and searched before dinner, the foreign crew representative had joked as they probed his clothing and his body. His good humor prevailed through dinner as well.

“How big?” he asked in reply. “Two hundred men and women, not counting the kids they might have. They’re preying on smaller crews. So we’re putting together a posse, small crews, large crews. Teach them bandits to crew up.”

“Can’t,” the chief said.

“We need you.”

“We’re on a mission. President Ticks has one of my boys.”

“One of your boys? Why?” the representative’s long face showed his astonishment, his eyes widening. Pickles thought he saw his big ears twitch.

“Kids saw humans.”

“And Ticks wants you to get ‘em?” Now the stranger nodded several times. Pickles leaned forward to hear more. “Story his, Ticks lost his entire family when his wife went to visit her brother in Kip’s Place several years ago. Wife was a one-and-only, so she was special. Two daughters. A son.”

“Killed?”

“Missing according to the caravan master. They got rampaged.”

“So he thinks these people are – “ The crew chief stroked his pointed chin and turned his gaze on his close assistants. “Make sense to any of you?” he asked.

They shrugged. Crumbles seemed to consider the issue, a thoughtful expression on his watery face. But then he, too, shrugged.

“I understand why you can’t hook up with us, mister. But if we don’t stop those bandits they could be pecking your butt pretty soon. Don’t look to me like you’re all that big.”

The chief bristled. “Big enough.”

“That you be. That you be.”

“Here,” Crumbles said, handing Pickles a ball of rags. “Wrap your feet so they don’t make no noise. We’re going on a creep.”

Pickles couldn’t keep the look of no comprehension from invading his thin face and he braced for a punch or a kick, but Crumbles grinned, the spittle dripping from his mouth as he explained himself. A herd had been found huddled close together on the other side of a sharp rise. A fast walk would get them there before dark and then, in the middle of the night, during the trucks’ quiet time, they’d freely walk into the midst of the herd to inspect it.

“If they’re so quiet at night, recharging like you said,” Pickles began as he hurried to keep up with Crumbles, “then why don’t we just round ‘em up, cut ‘em out, at night?”

“You farm kids,” Crumbles complained, and Pickles blushed. It was times like these when he missed Babes, who would explain without criticism, reveal the tiny secrets of the crew that Pickles didn’t yet understand. Like, water boys who carried no water. Or why farm kids were bought in the first place. And, most importantly, what kid farms were for.

They reached the top of the rise and lay prone on their stomachs. In the dip on the other side, between two stands of tall grass and prairie flowers, the trucks stood in quiescence. They didn’t go after them at night, Crumbles finally explained, because they wouldn’t be able to see properly for one thing and, for another, the trucks might decide to stampede just as the crew went to work. During the day, the wild herd always bolted for safety, as they’d been originally programmed. That meant, a few could be cut off from the rest, cornered, stopped, and then easily unplugged from their power source.

“What you want to look for,” Crumbles explained as they crept close to the herd, “are signs of people. Old food. Containers of any sort. Refuse. Anything that don’t belong to mechs.”

They past a jeep, which purred. A small panel truck emblazoned with a green cross inside a circle rumbled to life and then fell silent, its body shaking. Huge tractor-trailers encircled a wide area where small vehicles processed the day’s information, conveyed their findings to a central station that no longer existed. Made for planetary exploration, mining, and even terra-forming, the smart trucks had been left to rust and waste away more than a century earlier, before natural disaster and economic collapsed changed the landscape of the world and the fortunes of their builders into an unrecognizable morass of despair and grim survival.

“I can hardly see,” Pickles commented.

“That’s why we don’t hit them at night.”

“How can I see any – ?”

“Just feel around. Look for campfires, burnt embers. Mechs don’t build fires. People do.”

Pickles used his feet to kick at stones and odd pieces of refuse on the ground. Parts of a truck perhaps? On his hands and knees he felt for containers or old food or human waste. He crawled, stood and walked, crawled again. No moon above, and with clouds covering the stars, the night was dark and unrelenting.

“That’s it! Get outa here now!” Crumbles screamed when a beam of light raked them. A jeep came to life, its motor whining. Other cars woke up, like behemoths awakened from slumber.

“What is that?” Pickles asked, but there was no time for answers. More beams of light worked over them, caught them, targeted them as they ran. Purring sleepers turned into roaring demons.

“Run, kid, run,” Crumbles shouted, pushing Pickles out across the perimeter, past the guardian trucks and up the slope to the top of the rise, over it and down again. Behind them, the vehicles sounded their horns and revved their motors.

“What was that light?” Pickles asked.

“Lamps. They had lamps.”

“Where did they get the oil? How did they light them?”

“This is why you get kicked in the butt, kid. They use electrics, that’s what. Electrics. You never heard of electrics?”

Pickles shrugged. He hadn’t. But he decided not to say anything more. Crumbles looked angry, his usual good nature obviously torn by the sudden danger. “I gots to get back and changed my pants,” Crumbles muttered. “And don’t you say nothing, kid.”

Crew business continued while they hunted for the herd where humans mingled with the trucks. Sitting in a corner of the tent, Pickles overheard the chief discussing their needs, saying, “We got to beef-up the populace.”

Curses and spitting for emphasis enveloped the leaders’ circle. With bandits in the area, now was not the time to peel off half-a-dozen men to look for new recruits or buy farm kids who’d need training and conditioning before they’d be useful.

“We lost a dozen in Bug City,” Crumbles offered. “Gained a dozen, too.”

Others chimed in. Their were calls for mergers with smaller crews. Someone suggested they raid the bandits themselves and cart off a few moms and their babes. The chief pointed out how close they were to Hubs and at the sound of that city’s name Pickles became alert. Maybe he’d get to see it once more. Perhaps he’d go to the house where he’d been raised. He’d see his father and his siblings and tell them about his adventures.

“Farm kids take too long to get right with the program,” someone said with a grunt and a pointing finger at Pickles huddling along in a corner.

“They’re cheap, they’re healthy, and they ain’t all stupid,” the chief said. Pickles hugged himself, his eyes tearing. He wasn’t stupid, he wanted to tell them.

“You gotta give kids time,” Crumbles said. “Partner ‘em with the right person.”

His words brought a smattering of laughter mixed with curses and complaints. Later, after the crew leaders ended their conference and slinked off to sleep, Pickles tried to asked Crumbles to explain about the farms, which he now realized was what his father’s house was to the crew.

“Get to sleep, kid. I told ya, listen up and learn.”

And don’t ask, Pickles thought.

Trekking north, a few of the crew members began to complain they were losing the sight of the wild herds. They needed to refill their coffers, but so far they hadn’t. They spat at Pickles when they passed him. Motorbikes sometimes spun their wheels to kick up the dirt when he neared them. Moms pointed at laughed at him. Even Crumbles seemed annoyed most times.

“It’s in our blood to hunt,” Pickles was told one night by the crew chief. “And we ain’t been hunting since leaving Bug City because you let Babes shoot his mouth off.”

“I didn’t let him,” Pickles defended himself, and immediately regretted his words when the chief punched him in the chest.

“He’s your partner. He’s your breaker and you’re his skinner. Get to learn that, kid. Will ya?”

Pickles slinked off and tried to find Crumbles. Instead, he found a Mom, but she refused to talk him, saying, “I don’t coddle no one. Get past the age of ten and you gots to be done with coddling.”

In the daytime, Pickles sometimes got to ride in the crew chief’s buggy, up front, at the head of the procession. Scouts came in from the flanks to make their reports and if they’d found traces of a herd the chief ordered the column to veer in that direction.

Sometimes, he spent the daylight hours walking with Crumbles, talking about the herds, and Pickles realized Crumbles was looking for clues to what Babes had seen and where he’d seen it.

“Blue,” Pickles said one day. “The truck was blue.” The thought came as a flash, accompanied by the vision of a gleaming blue tractor-trailer truck, its cowl covered with solar panels and antennae on its front fenders waving in the breeze. That’s what he most remembered from the day when Babes first claimed he’d seen people with the trucks, running to jump onto the bed of a pickup when the herd began to stampede towards safety.

“Blue? Red? So what?” the chief complained that night after Crumbles reported what he’d learned.

“Get over here,” the chief called, waving Pickles out of his accustomed corner of the tent. “Tell me what you saw,” he ordered.

Pickles held his hands behind his back, his scrawny legs quivering, his eyes tearing and his body tensing for the inevitable kick or slap. Slowly, trying his best to be coherent, he repeated what he’d told Crumbles.

“And you just today remembered all this?” the chief demanded.

Pickles nodded. “It came back to me.”

“He’s making it up,” someone said.

“No,” Pickles said, then stiffened his back and waited for the chief’s reaction. But instead of a hand coming towards him he saw the elderly leader nod thoughtfully, turn to Crumbles and confer in whispers with him for a moment.

“He could’ve told us sooner,” the chief said.

“Memory’s like that,” Crumbles said. “Stuff comes back to you the more you think.”

“Guess so,” the chief said, shaking his head and then dismissing Pickles with a wave of his hand. Thankfully, Pickles slouched back to the safety of his corner. Listening closely, he heard orders given for the scouts to look for Big Blue’s Herd.

They know, Pickles thought. The herd’s actually got a name.

“It gets cold up these parts,” Crumbles said. A breeze ruffled his tangled hair. Some of the crewmen wore scarves tied over their heads. Other had caps with flaps to cover their ears. Most covered their bare feet with rags to add warmth. Pickles, like Crunbles, still had only his knee length shift belted at his middle.

“Can’t I get one of those?” Pickles asked, indicating a passing Mom wrapped in a voluminous blanket.

Crumbles laughed. “You ain’t got no babe to protect.” He tapped Pickles on the back of his bare head, but it was a playful tap, not a slap or a punch. Up front, a scout roared to a stop at the crew leader’s buggy and the procession jostled to a halt. A blue flag was raised by the signaler and Crumbles ran forward to confer with the chief. Other subalterns joined him.

“Blue’s been spotted,” Crumbles said when he returned to Pickles. “We’re riding up front with the boss.”

“Why’s this herd for a name?” Pickles ventured, chancing he might get an answer to his question.

“It’s an old herd. Been around. That big blue truck you say you saw? He’s a wily one. Most likely, if there’s a rampage reported, it’s Big Blue’s doing.” Crumbles pressed a hand on Pickles’ shoulder and steered him to the front of the slow moving procession. “He don’t like people none, that Blue.”

That night, they camped on the prairie with twice the usual number of guards, and with oil lamps equipped with polished tin reflectors pointing their light out into the night. A sliver of moon clung to the sky, amid pinpoints of light which grew in profusion and intensity as the night darkened. In the leaders’ tent, the crew chief discussed their plans for the next day. From what Pickles overheard and understood, they’d attack the herd on its flanks and send a contingent down the middle to look for and grab any people that were there.

“The kid goes with me,” Crumbles said. “He’s done his best. He’s been trying.”

“Trying? Or lying?” someone asked, and the others laughed.

When the snickering and side comments subsided Crumbles said, “I want him kept safe.”

“What else would he be?” the chief said. “I ain’t wasting all we invested in him already.”

A smile spread across Pickle’s thin face. He sighed with relief.

Big Blue stood on a hill overlooking the rolling plains where the herd of trucks sat quietly absorbing the sun, most likely communing with the useless satellites still orbiting the Earth, Pickles learned from what Crumbles and the others were saying. That’s why they roamed. Orders came in to proceed to one location and then another. They came in gargled hunks of data transmitted out of order. It was informational chaos, but it motivated the trucks and kept them moving from town to town.

Pickles wondered why they sometimes rampaged. Especially, why did they attack caravans? What was in the jumble of messages that sent them clattering across the empty prairie with such purposefulness? He hoped his continued listening, his careful attention to the details, to the nuances of speech, would provide the answer.

“You’re with me,” Crumbles said, pulling Pickles along by the wrist. He indicated a sidecar that had just been attached to his motorbike. Pickles got in, his hands gripping the sides, his back pressed against the foam cushioned seat. Crumbles sat astride the saddle, looking left and then right. Other bikes came to life and roared off towards the herd’s far flanks. On the hill, Big Blue nudged slightly forward, then slightly back, and then to its right.

Crumbles lurched ahead and Pickles tensed his grip to keep from bouncing out of the shallow sidecar as they careened across some scattered boulders and then down the hill towards the slope leading up to where Big Blue stood like a bull moose on the watch. From the crest of the knoll Pickles saw the trucks grouped by type, arranged in tight circles, sitting in the sun. Jeeps with jeeps. Large panel trucks in a large unmoving oval ring inside a perfect circle of pick-ups. Tractor trailers like Big Blue surrounded the other groups in a wavering loop. Cheering and screaming, the flankers poured down at the herd and suddenly the trucks began to move, the outer circle breaking off into three long streams of vehicles.

A small group of dune buggies rearranged itself from a loose circle into a tight know of two ranks and two files. Like a wall, Pickles realized, and screamed when Crumbles pointed the bike directly at this obstruction. With the sidecar rising up off the ground, the motorbike’s wheels tossed dirt and rocks at the buggies when Crumbles leaned far to his right and veered away from disaster.

Big Blue rumbled down the side of the hill. The three lines of tractor-trailers slowed, allowing Blue to take the lead position. And then, like the arms of some multi-limbed monster, several trucks broke away, heading for the hilltop and, Pickles realized, the crew’s encampment.

Crumbles stopped his bike. They’d reached the center of the herd, which now spewed dirt into loose clouds that clung to the air as they wheeled away. Pickles tapped the back of the bike, leaned halfway out of the sidecar and grabbed at Crumbles sleeve.

“They’re rampaging,” he shouted.

“I know,” Crumbles replied. So calm? Pickles wondered. “We expected they would.”

“The camp – “

“It’s ready. Our job is to find the people.” Crumbles put the bike into gear and lurched ahead. They rode slowly forward and then zigzagged and circled first one part of the field and then another. Pickles didn’t see any humans. Out of the corner of his eye he watched bikers isolate a panel truck and heard Crumbles complain that they weren’t here to hunt. But then he said, in an understanding tone of voice, “Old habits. Don’t die easy.” And he laughed.

A plug-puller jumped from a buggy, landed on the roof of the cornered truck, which couldn’t move because it was penned it by the circling bikes. Responding to its program, Pickles assumed. Why else didn’t the larger vehicle simply barrel its way out of the trap?

In a moment, the panel truck was dead, its power train unplugged from its control box, and the motorbikes and accompanying buggies moved on to find other targets. Out of the corner of his eye, Pickles saw a red shirt moving. He yelled at Crumbles to stop, but his voice was just one more roar amid all the others and Crumbles continued in his slow moving circles designed to give them a chance to survey the field.

Looking back over his shoulder, Pickles saw the panel truck come to life. The red shirted figure was in its cab, arm out the window, fist pumping the air.

“I saw a boy,” Pickles insisted when he and Crumbles reported to the crew chief. “He plugged a panel truck, got in, and escaped.”

The chief looked to Crumbles, who shrugged, his watery eyes adding to the drained look of exhaustion prevalent on his face. Many of the crew were sprawled on the ground, spent from the afternoon’s pursuit. Only a couple of dune buggies had been taken. Larger vehicles, including a huge black SUV, had been disabled but lost. The trucks that had broken off from the herd and rampaged against the crew had been successfully diverted, but none of them had been stopped. One, though surrounded, continued on course and ran over one of the bikes, killing its driver.

“If you saw someone, why didn’t you tell Crumbles?” the chief snapped.

“I kept yelling.”

“Don’t blame it on me,” Crumbles said, wheezing, pointing a crooked finger at Pickles.

“I’m not blaming anyone,” Pickles said.

“I think you’re making it up,” the chief growled. “Save yourself from a beating. Not going to happen. Big Blue ain’t the truck you saw when Babes started talkin’ about those people, is it?”

“It was. Yes. It is,” Pickles cried, fighting to keep from whimpering. “I’m telling ya, Boss!”

The chief raised his head. He narrowed his dark eyes and glared at Pickles. He took a step towards the boy, fists clenched at his sides. Then a soft smile formed on his puffy, whisker-studded face. Broken teeth showed along his lower lip. “So you finally learned to call me boss. Good for you.”

“There’s something over here,” someone yelled from the field where the herd had been gathered. Pickles followed Crumbles in the race to what had been found. The crew chief and his subalterns and a few curious crewmen followed at a walk.

A burnt circle lay in the coarse ground. Tiny bones and fur from a rabbit littered the area, along with a tin cup and plate.

“People,” someone said.

“You saw something,” the chief admitted, turning to Pickles. “Red shirt?”

“A boy.”

“We’re in pursuit!” the chief yelled, and the crewmen nearest cheered. Crumbles put his arm around one of the Moms and hugged her. She was crying, the baby in her arms fast asleep even through the commotion.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Pickles asked, tentatively leaving his corner of the tent to join the Leaders Circle. Eyes turned to him. Crumbles nodded assent, as did the chief, who sat picking meat off a bone. Scores of field mice had been caught by the crew’s children that afternoon and everyone had been given a share of the feast.

Pickles crouched next to Crumbles. “We go in at night. We find the people, disable a truck, an SUV or some other large vehicle – “

“And attack them in the morning?” the chief asked.

Pickles nodded. “When the herd flees, we’ve got the people in the disabled truck, safe and sound.”

Crumbles shook his head. “Not if they spot us at night. There’s a moon now. Not dark enough to hide in.”

“Do they see or do they just sense movement?” Pickles asked.

“What’s the difference?” the chief rejoined.

“We crawl on our bellies,” Pickles suggested.

“You go crawling all over the place,” someone else said.

“I will,” Pickles said, “if that’s what it takes.”

The chief laughed and Crumbles grinned, saying, “Spoken like a true crewman.”

There was no discernible campfire, but the smell of cooked meat clung in the air. Crumbles insisted it came from their camp, but Pickles pointed out that the faint breeze was blowing from the other direction, blowing across the site where the herd stood.

“Could be,” Crumbles admitted.

Slowly, on their bellies, they crawled towards the herd and the surrounding tractor-trailers. Four other crewmen had volunteered to join them. Once they got past the outer ring they’d split up into pairs and scour the area for signs of humans. A burning campfire. A pit for waste. Anything. There were people living with this herd and they would find and rescue them.

“Jonno,” the bearded man said.

Crewmen herded two more people, both children, to the small camp inside a ring of somnolent pickups and SUVs. Pickles counted four men like Jonno, six women and four children, including a red-shirted boy.

“You,” Pickles said to the boy. “Why did you plug up that panel truck we disabled?”

The boy’s ruddy face was streaked with grease and charcoal. A woman leaned against him, her long tangled hair hiding her face. Jonno spoke up. “He can’t talk.”

“Just what are you people doing here?” Crumbles asked, consternation and confusion dueling in his moist eyes.

“Me and my kids,” the tangled-haired woman whispered, “got taken when they attacked our caravan.”

“You related to that President Ticks?” Crumbles asked.

She nodded. Moving the hair away from her face and now looking from Crumbles to the other crewmen, Pickles saw an emaciated wreck. Her jawbone threatened to push through her skin. Her cheekbones were high and sharp. Her arms were like sticks, as were her boney legs.

One of the other boys stepped out in front of her. “We ain’t going back, mister.”

Jonno turned to him. “It may be time.” Then, to Crumbles. “I never intended to stay with these mechs so long. I just had no way back. None of us did.”

Others nodded their agreement. “They make us do repairs,” someone explained. Another said, “They came after two who tried to escape. Ran them down.”
            The people nodded.

“Don’t you get enough to eat?” Pickles asked, stepping towards the skinny woman shielding the red-shirted boy. He looked at Jonno. The bearded man was robust and fit. The other three men were as well. Most likely, they took the bulk of the best food for themselves, leaving the six women to fight over scraps and leftovers.

“Everybody get into this pickup. Lie down in the bed. Get in the cab. Come morning, we’ll escape.”

“I don’t want to,” a boy said.

“What’s your name?”

“Ticks. Bartel Ticks.”

The raggedy woman hissed at him. “Don’t be stupid, Bartel. This ain’t no life.”

“I like it,” Bartel said, smiling. He looked fit like Jonno.

“Why don’t you help these women get their fair share of the food?” Pickles asked.

“Who’re you?” Bartel asked, stepping up to Pickles, looming over him. “Some crew’s bastard?” He looked at the other crewmen. “Weren’t for your kind we wouldn’t have these troubles.”

“Weren’t for us?” Crumbles asked. “What’s that mean?” He raised his hand, but Jonno stepped towards him and Crumbles retreated. “Get in the truck. You, lady, we’re taking back to Ticks. He wants you, though I don’t know why.”

“And me,” one of the girls suddenly shouted, springing forward.

“My daughter,” the emaciated mother explained. “Had two. One died.”

“Anyone else don’t want to live?” Crumbles asked.

“You’re fools to go back to that life,” Bartel said, and stomped off.

The remaining people piled into the bed of a pickup, which a crewman expertly disabled by pulling its connectors. Sitting inside the cab, Pickles watched the horizon for signs of morning. At Crumbles order, Bartel was tackled before he got too far away and put under guard underneath the pickup.

“Don’t know if you can warn ‘em or what, but I ain’t takin’ chances,” Crumbles explained. He whipped off his belt and used it to bind Bartel’s arms behind his back. Pickles offered up the rags he’d used to cover his feet and mute his footsteps so the boy could be hobbled as well.

“I don’t wanna go back,” Bartel complained. Now and then, throughout the night, he’d whimper or hiss. “This is the future. But you’re too stupid to know it. These herds, the smart ones, are what’ll save the Earth. They’ll bring back civilization if we let them, if we help them.”

Pickles shut his ears to the sounds of nonsense and managed to sleep through the cacophony of wails and cries coming from beneath him. In the morning, as planned, the crew attacked.

Outside the safety of their vehicles, the trucks rumbled past, churning up the ground, hurling pebbles and dirt into the air. Peering through the side window, Pickles saw Bartel roll out from under the pickup. He hopped towards the passing trucks, screaming. When one came too close, the spew of earth and rock slammed him backwards. Blood gushed from his face. He fell, got to his knees. Tears streamed down his face.

Shouting and protests erupted in the pickups crowded bed. The raggedy woman sprawled on the ground, got up and limped towards Bartel, arms outstretched. Crumbles and two other crewmen started after her, but fell back when a line of trucks rushed past. The red-shirted boy ran to the woman, clung to her waist, pulled her down to the ground.

“Momma,” one of the girls screamed.

Pickles pushed open the door and jumped to the group. He sprayed himself flat as possible against the side of the pickup when a panel truck rumbled past. Then he sprang for the woman and helped her up where she lay.

“Help him,” she cried, her skeletal face a mask of agony, her tiny eyes red with blood. Pickles grabbed at Bartel.

“Stop fighting me,” Pickles barked, and loosened the strap holding his arms behind his back. He was pushed and then punched for his effort. Turning to the woman, he took her by the hand and, avoiding an oncoming truck, side-stepped and stumbled back to safety, where Crumbles took charge and brought the bedraggled mother to safety in the pickup’s cab.

Pickles climbed onto the running board, and then vaulted into the bed. Bartel, holding the red-shirted mute by the hand, ran for a black SUV, which stopped to wait for them. They jumped onto its running board and held onto the handles bolted to its side as the SUV spun its wheels, its engine roaring, and quickly vanished into the midst of the escaping herd.

Although Jonno claimed that he and the other three men had always tried to help the women and children, Tick’s wife told her husband the truth. As Pickles had suspected, the men kept the choicest meats for themselves, leaving the women and children the dregs of the soup, the greens they managed to find when scouring the sparse plants growing amid the prairie flowers.

“I oughta starve you like you starved my Flower,” Ticks scowled at Jonno.  Pickles could see that Jonno’s hands were trembling even though his gaze was steady.

“What about my boy?” the crew chief asked. “Babes.”

The crew stood milling around outside the city gate where Ticks and his guards had driven to greet them. Not having much salvage to sell there was no reason to admit them to Bug City.

“You didn’t rescue my Bartel,” Ticks said. “You don’t get back the boy until I get back mine.”

“He didn’t want to be rescued,” his wife said.

“You should’ve dragged him here,” Ticks bellowed, directing his anger at Crumbles and the crew chief. Then he turned on Pickles. “That was your responsibility!”

Pickles blanched and started to step back, but then glared at the town president and said, “I got your wife and daughter back for you. That was my responsibility.”

“Bartel couldn’t be saved,” Flower whispered. She struggled to Ticks and put her skinny arms around his body, her boney hands unable to meet and complete the gesture. Ticks shook his head, a veil of sadness falling over his tired gray eyes. A signal to his guards resulted in Babes being brought through the gate in a cage mounted on a wheeled cart pulled by several prisoners.

 Babes clutched the bars, his curly haired head one massive grin. When the cage door was unlocked, he sprang from the cart and immediately fell to his knees. One of the Moms ran to him, as did Crumbles and the three hugged one another, and the Mom, crying, covered Babe’s cherubic face with kisses.

Jonno was put in the cage, though he tried to fight off the guards and escape. The other three men were quickly executed at the same time. One protested and tried to claim he’d helped Flower and the others, but an enraged Ticks turned on the man and clubbed him to death with an iron pipe borrowed from a guard.

Flower, Pickles noticed, glared at her husband while he beat the man and then afterwards when he calmed himself by pacing around the corpse. Finally, Ticks threw the pipe at the dead man and started walking to the city gate.

“Bartel’s right,” Flower said, pushing herself to her knees and then, with her daughter’s help, rising to her feet. Two guards sprang forward to help her. A sedan was brought over and she and her daughter took their seats and were lifted onto the shoulders of the prisoners who’d wheeled in Babes.

“Right about what?” Pickles shouted. Everyone’s eyes turned on him. He ignored their looks of annoyance, the ignorance and confusion he saw in their faces. He ignored the guards who frowned. He even disregarded Crumbles’ warning glance and the surprised look on the crew chief’s wizened face. He stepped towards the divan and the woman sitting mounted atop the prisoners.

“Thank you for helping us,” Flower said. “Boys like you and my Bartel may be our salvation yet.” Her bloodless lips stretched themselves into a thin smile.

Behind him, Babes babbled to Crumbles and then to the crew chief. “Told ya there’s people out there. Told ya. Told ya.”

Pickles narrowed his eyes, watching Babes leap from one crewman to another. He didn’t expect to hear a thank you or any such related sentiment from his partner. But he was surprised by what he did hear.

“I was getting’ ready to make my escape,” Babes claimed, turning to the crew chief. “Another day or two and I’d’ve been escaped out of there, with another fifteen or twenty prisoners joining up with me. I’d a bringin’ 20 of them to the crew for ya, Boss.”

The crew chief slapped Babes face. “That’s for not escaping sooner. We could use 20 new guys.” And then he turned on Pickles and kicked him in the butt. “And that’s for rescuing those people so fast our Babes didn’t get a chance to make his escape with all those prisoners.”

                                                The End