A scavenger's life is not an easy one.

Lilijoy scrambled through the darkness over mounds of waste, a mixture of old organic refuse and compacted industrial tailings. The orange glow in the distance was the factory mine that extruded seemingly endless piles of the stuff as it slowly moved across the landscape, along with the organics from the small population that made the facility work.

Her eyes watered from the fumes, the damp rag over her mouth and nose all that kept her gag reflex in check. There were no pickings here, only a temporary safety from the Predators, a faint hope that no other creature could be as desperate as she was.

Entering the Piles was an invitation to skin lesions and a brutal hacking cough that might never leave. Lilijoy could remember when Attaboy was forced to spend the night in the Piles for breaking Mooster's rules, seeing bloody phlegm dripping between the fingers of the hands cupped over his mouth. Attaboy didn't last long after his night in the piles. Who would spend food on someone who could not contribute?

The last time Lilijoy had seen Attaboy, he was draped over the shoulders of Mooster's strongest Bro, Grabby, carried off at first light to the edge of the territory so that his body would not attract scavengers or those that preyed upon them.

Whether he had been put out of his misery at the time, Lilijoy really couldn't say.

Lilijoy found a small clearing among the mounds and froze to listen for any signs of pursuit. The night air carried the dull thrumming from the distant factory mine, and as she stilled her breath she began to hear a faint crackling from the piles all around. Nothing else disturbed the shards and blobs of compressed waste that littered this section of the Piles, long broken off fragments from what had once been large cylinders. They were extruded as the factory made its way across the region like a person constantly crapping as they crawled along the ground.

She felt foolish for allowing herself to be caught out this way.

Earlier in the day, just as she was to head back to Night's Safety, she had found a small patch of cattails growing in the brown water of a small ditch at the edge of the territory, the first living foods to be found in weeks. Her heart had leapt with joy as she imagined the look on Grabby's face as she delivered her tribute, ensuring better treatment from the Bros for another few weeks.

Maybe Mooster would even make her a Bro.

She wasn't big. Well really, she wasn't even close to big, about waist-high to Mooster and the other boosted Bro, Grabby. But the gang always needed good providers too.

With these thoughts running through her head, she had run onto the knee-deep muck and began to pillage the cattails, pulling up the stalks to reveal the luscious crunchy white parts of the base. She allowed herself a bite, ignoring the grit as she savored the living food, so much better than the sky pellets she ate most days.

The problems had arisen as she returned home. Arms laden with green, yellow and white, she couldn't run at her usual pace. She couldn't even see her feet, and after several stumbles, dropping and collecting the progressively dirty cattails, she had settled for a walking pace, anxiously eyeing the red and purple horizon as the diffuse oval of sunlight drifted downward.

Soon the Pilings came into view, reaching towards the invisibly distant factory mine. At this pace she would never make it before true dark, and sure enough, as the last purple tendrils of light left the haze above, she was still well short of the stand of hardened trees that marked the inner region.

She began to walk as fast as she could, swinging her hips fervently, but the dark betrayed her, and she fell face first into the rubble, losing her bundle yet again, and striking something hard with her right brow. As she sprawled, head ringing and feeling something drip down her face, she heard the first wailing. The high-pitched gurgling howl was soon answered by others. Predators. A quick taste test verified the blood running down her face and she knew that her luck had run out, and probably her life with it.

The next few moments were a blur. The cattails abandoned, she ran into the night in the direction of the factory mine’s faint orange. The wailings grew closer, changing to an excited bray as the predators caught the scent of her blood.

No one among the scavengers had seen a predator, though Attaboy had loved the tales told by Timout, the only member of the Bros who would talk to her and Attaboy. Timout would regale Attaboy and Lilijoy with stories of the blue-sky days, beyond living memory, when all the food was live food, before the Pilings were crapped upon the land.

According to Timout, Men and Predators once lived in peace, but the sky had yellowed, and the trees had hardened, and the live food had become poisonous and tough. The Predators had betrayed Men, stealing their boost and consuming them when they could. Attaboy’s favorite part had always been Timout’s description of the Predators. “They up to here,” he would say, holding his hand as high as he could reach above his head, “red eyes, teeth long as a finger, claws sharper than Pile shards!”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Then Timout would lower his hoarse voice, and as if imparting the gravest secret, would go on to say, “They runs on four legs, not two like people. They runs twice as fast as man, twice as far. No hands and arms to pick up sky pellets or find live food; they only eats men they run down, and each other when no mens about. Take care boys,” his voice dropping to a whisper. “You out of night’s safety, they run you down, drink blood and grind bones between jaws.”

Lilijoy huddled in the night, Timout’s words filling her mind with fear. As the silence drew on, she became aware of the fresh cuts on her feet, sliced by the sharp tailing fragments. Sweat ran down her back, tears ran down her face from the acrid fumes and fear. Her thighs were burning from her mad scramble and holding her desperate crouch.

Worse still was the stench and burning itch of the cloth over her nose and mouth. On days when the wind blew off the Piles, everyone knew to wrap their face with a damp cloth. Unfortunately for Lilijoy, the only damp cloth available in her panicked journey was her own lower wrap, conveniently already wet from her initial response to the wails of the Predators.

Ears straining, heart pounding, bleeding, sweating, crying and breathing her own urine, she exhaled gently, almost a sigh of relief. It seemed like the Predators were off her trail, perhaps unable to smell her abundant aromas through the burning stench of the Piles.

An enormous crash and cascade of tinkling shards interrupted the stillness, several stacks away, close to the Pile’s edge. A mad scramble of shards breaking and flying followed, punctuated by yelps of pain and growls. Lilijoy could only imagine that a Predator had found the Piles as inhospitable as she did.

The yelping was followed by a low whine, and the sound of more shards jangling under heavy feet as the Predator beat a hasty retreat out of the pile. From the sound of it, the thing could be as big as Mooster, too big to easily navigate through stacks of sharp edges and too heavy for the brittle piercing shards underfoot.

Lilijoy was not much in the habit of thinking about the future, or really thinking at all. Her meager existence in the Piles territory was one of reaction, exhaustion and near starvation. Nonetheless, she began to imagine a dawn that included her existence and perhaps even respect from Timout or even Grabby when she told the tale of her near death.

She only needed one more thing; a glance at the beasts themselves! Surely if she was careful and moved slowly, she could creep close enough to the edge to catch a glimpse of the legendary creatures.

It was what Attaboy would have done.

Legs trembling, snot running down her chin under the rag, she carefully stood and began to make her way to the edge of the piles, wincing as her broad feet encountered sharp edges and spikes from the weathered tailings. If Lilijoy was proud of anything about herself, it was her feet. Tough, and like her hands, much bigger than could be expected from her tiny, gaunt frame, they supported her when walking on the roughest stones, and even allowed her to walk over mud where others would founder. Even in the shards of the Piles, her feet could avoid cuts and punctures if she walked carefully, though they had not fared as well during her initial panic stricken run among the mounds.

Moving to a crouch and putting her hands down for support, she slowly crawled to the top of a mound overlooking the sloped edge of the Piles. The darkness was near absolute now, the faint glow of the factory mine shadowed by the piles, but perhaps she would see the glowing red eyes from her new-found safety.

She looked over the top, eyes straining in the black. On a bright day, Lilijoy’s eyes would sting and her head would hurt; she preferred the dark days, when the yellow sky would sink and brown. Unless there was dust. She hated dust with a passion; it irritated her eyes and nose, and for days after the dust came, she would be weak and unable to forage for sky pellets.

This dark challenged even Lilijoy’s sight. She had never experienced a night outside of Night’s Safety, the network of rooms and tunnels dug out of some ancient metal and concrete structure that had long ago sunk and filled with dirt. Every evening at last light, Mooster and Grabby would move a huge metal barrier over the entrance. Only Mooster and Grabby had ever been away from Night’s Safety, and they didn’t talk about their experiences. Not that Mooster talked anyway.

Whether they had ever seen a Predator was unknown to Lilijoy, but she knew that if she saw one and lived, she might earn respect from the Bros, and admiration from the rest of the group. The Bros loved to torment the less important members of the group, forcing them to find sky pellets, making them climb up and down the rough trunks of hardened trees for no reason, or dig holes in the hard, glassy ground until their fingers bled. Sometimes they would force them to run in circles for hours.

Only the Bros were allowed to keep the sky pellets; all others were allowed to eat the first one they found, and bring the rest back for the Bros. Attaboy had tried to keep some for himself in a little hidden stash in the grove of hardened trees, and that had led to his night in the piles and subsequent trip on Grabby’s broad shoulders to be discarded at the edge of the territory.

She struggled to resolve any kind of figure or outline through the darkness with no success. She thought she could hear a faint snuffling sound, nearly lost in the steady thrum of the factory mine, in the darkness to the right but her eyes strained to no avail.

She was about to give up and thought about trying to make her way to the hardened trees, for climbing was another talent of hers, with long fingers and toes that could grasp the trunks and haul her small body easily upward, when a diffuse pale yellow light began to make its way through the sky directly above, almost like a sickly, dim brother to the sun, hovering above the clouds and haze.

They’re not red at all... she thought, almost with a sense of betrayal, as she saw several dull green orbs of various sizes looking back up at her from the edge of the Piles.