Tinfellow’s Crew
A fire hose was open in the sky above the small town of Duncan, Missouri, and Mark Thompson was under it, in his car, on a road that if the local weather forecaster was right, would be underwater by this time tomorrow.
Mark wasn’t particularly worried about his house – it was perched on a rise and would likely be alright, but if the roads were flooded much of the town would be inaccessibly, and Mark had realized this was probably his last change to do laundry. Sometimes, even in he worst recorded storm in Quoin County history, you just got to do your laundry.
And so Mark was driving in weather any sane man would be out of, pulling through a three-inch puddle into the laundromat parking lot. There were two other cars there, and inside were a couple of other diehards, waiting for the spin cycles to end so they could get home before there'd be any ponds they'd have to drive through. It was a full hour and a half job, but soon Mark was unloading his clothes from the dryer, until something caught hie eye - or rather, didn't. One of his favorite Scooby Doo socks was missing. He had only seen one of the pair go by as he had pulled the clothes into his plastic bin. He searched through both of his loads and realized that about half of all of this socks seemed to be missing. A quick retracing of his steps at the laundromat didn't turn up any stray socks. This was unbelievable. Had one of the other customers taken them? There was only one other person still there, and he hadn't seen anyone else go near his machines – the space was so large and empty. Like all people of Earth since the subjects of socks and laundry had coincided in the great time stream of human civilization, he had lost a couple of socks here and there in the wash, but not half, all in one go. This was ridiculous. He was gonna complain to the management.
Meanwhile, not twenty yards away, Pop Shropmoore was having a different problem. The burrows had been flooded early in the storm and he had had to evacuate the entire colony to Raider's Outpost. Night was upon them, temperatures were plummeting, and somehow he had to keep everybody warm. The gnarled old veteran stumped over on his cane, approaching the leapway, a hole through which hot air was rushing into the passageway among the pipes. Many of his people huddled there, as close as they dared to the blast of hot air, but he continued past them, to where a tall raider was standing by the leapway, dressed head to toe in gray hotsuit, holding the leapway open with a pair of long tongs as others similarly garbed rushed past him, whooping wildly as they jumped into the clothes barrel.
“Cordin,” Pop yelled, gesturing to him, “Cordin, me lad.” Cordin Tinfellow handed over the tongs to one of the other raiders and greeted his King-As-It-Were.
“Yes, Cordin, your ear now,” Pop continued. “You're doing grand, and the boys, too, but I've been down along the pipeways, and we're going't need another dozen I counted for all the families.”
Cordin pulled his mask off to wipe the sweat from his brow. He was not yet old but no longer young, his braided beard still a mighty blue, though the lines of care and hard work had set early in his face.
“Aye, Pop,” he replied. “Me boys are pulling a strong plenty for all the families. This is the last clothes barrel running, methinks, but I see a dozen coming out of here, the blithe souls warrant, o’course.”
There was a whooping cry from behind, as two of his raiders scrambled out of the leapway, a giant sock held aloft over their heads. One lost his balance in the action and they tumbled forward, almost knocking over the one who was holding the leapway open with the tongs.
Pop cried out, “Oi, watch yer way! I pledge, your boys are getting soft with their fancy suits and gizmos. In my day, we pulled socks-”
“With your bare hands, I know, Pop,” Cordin finished for him, spitting on the ground in the fashion that was mostly polite. “And I recall you never pulled over seventy socks in a single day, as ya’ve tasked me do, an’ I’m doin’.”
This was true enough, and so Pop Shropmoore said nothing. Cordin Tinfellow respected his King-As-It-Were, as well he might, but there had long been some contention between them, though these days it was mostly only over the name of the raiding party. In his youth Cordin had been a member of Pop's Sock Raiders, but the King-As-It-Were had retired from this duty not less than fifteen years earlier, and Cordin was the one running all raiding operations. It was Cordin who had invented the hotsuits and the tongs, and made improvements to the leapways. There was more than one among the raiders who called themselves Tinfellow's Crew.
There were still three raiding teams inside the clothes barrel when the second to last sock needed was carried through the leapway. It looked like they'd make it, and handsomely at that. But as Pop watched two exhausted, presumably grinning (and rascally) raiders wrestle their haul into the pipeways from the clothes barrel, he felt something was wrong, something deep within him that was terribly amiss.
“Halt,” he cried out, stumping over. “That's a right sock!”
The two young raiders looked it over and realized in horror their mistake. The sock had a distinctive colored heel marking it unmistakably a right sock. No further order was needed; they hauled it back to the leapway and tossed it in. No emergency was more important than the sacred brownie code: Left Socks Only!
Later that evening, Mark Thompson was at home, shopping for socks on Amazon while the weatherman on the radio talked about the fields that had just flooded. And back at Raider's Outpost, where the raiding party that might have been Pop's Sock Raiders and might have been Tinfellow's Crew had completed their work, three members of the Sylphadin family had bedded down among the pipes, snuggled together in a green and turquoise sock with the big brown face of Scooby Doo and his goofy, lopsided grin.
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