The Elephant of Surprise (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that Dumpster!).
    "But what does this have to do with anything?" Min said, and it was all I could do not to scowl at her.
    "Well, we're not done yet," Wade said. "There's still one other thing I want to show you."
    He and Venus turned to lead us away, and Gunnar and I immediately followed. But Min didn't move from where she stood at that fence. I looked back at her.
    I could see the open skepticism on her face. Unlike me, she was still expecting someone to drop a burlap sack over her head. And I guess she did have a point: what reason did we really have to go blithely on following this strange Pied Piper and his spacey girlfriend?
    I stepped closer to her, even as Wade and Venus watched us from behind. "Let's just keep an open mind, okay?" When she didn't answer, I turned to Gunnar. "What do you want to do?"
    Sure enough, he said, "I wanna know where this is going," just like I knew he would.
    Finally, Min sighed, and we all stepped wordlessly into line behind Wade and Venus again.
    We walked through the woods for another fifteen minutes or so. Once again, we smelled our destination before we actually saw it, and this time it smelled a lot better: woodsmoke coming from somewhere within the trees ahead of us.
    A second later, we stepped out into a clearing. There was a cluster of tents—well, "tents" might be too strong a word. They were more like cardboard boxes and tarps arranged in such a way to provide cover from the rain. There was one actual tent, but it was dirty and frayed, with more duct tape than actual vinyl.
    In the center of the clearing, a little bonfire conjured up the smoke we'd smelled. A cluster of people, mostly old men in flannel, sat around the fire on logs and in lawn furniture that was as pathetic as the tents. Truthfully, there were quite a few empty beer cans and bottles scattered around the campfire too—and most were of at least the sixteen-ounce variety.
    "Wade!" said a man with almost no hair (or teeth).
    "Hey, Myron," Wade said. "How you doin'?" At the same time, he opened his backpack and started passing out the sandwiches he'd collected from the Dumpster
    "What is this place?" Gunnar said.
    "A homeless camp," Venus said, opening her pack too.
    Once again, Gunnar started taking pictures—no one seemed to mind, and a couple of the men mugged mercilessly.
    Meanwhile, Min and I watched as Wade and Venus walked around the camp—well, Wade walked and Venus sort of floated. They gave out food: more sandwiches, a big tub of shredded cheese, some salads in plastic containers, and half a bag of English muffins.
    Mostly, though, they just listened as the men talked to them, flirting with Venus and showing Wade things they'd collected in the woods.
    One old man took off his shirt—he was crazy skinny—and Wade bent down behind him to examine his back. Even from where I was fifteen feet across the clearing, I caught a blast of the man's terrible body odor. But Wade, who was a lot closer, didn't seem to notice. He took a good look at an injury on the man's shoulder blade—a scary black fungus of some kind—and then I heard Wade saying something about a free clinic.
    Truthfully, I was touched by his concern.
    But Min was still sort of scowling. And when Wade returned to us, she said, "First you show us the garbage dump. Now this. Why?"
    "Let's go somewhere where we can talk," he said, leading us off into the trees, like it would be rude to talk about anyone as if they were visual aids in a presentation, even homeless people.
    Out of earshot, he and Venus faced us.
    "You said you wanted to know what freeganism is," Wade said. "Well, freeganism is a movement that says there's something wrong with the world when we waste so much stuff, especially when there are so many people who have nothing. Think about it. All that stuff at the dump just gets thrown away every year"—he nodded at Gunnar—"fifteen hundred pounds of garbage." He gestured back toward the homeless camp. "Meanwhile, these people don't have