Sunrise (19 page)

The unmoldy corn and soy improved our diet immensely, and we quit eating pine bark. Two wind turbines turned out to be more than enough to heat both our greenhouses. In high wind we shut down the turbines so they wouldn’t be damaged. They weren’t designed to spin all that fast, Uncle Paul said. They were geared for slow and steady operation—that was more efficient and also safer for birds. Not that we’d seen any birds since the eruption. Those that weren’t killed by breathing in the ash had no doubt fled south to try to survive the volcanic winter. We also had to shut down the wind turbines if the wind blew steadily for several days. The greenhouses would overheat otherwise.

Once we had two greenhouses and two turbines online—giving us some hope of surviving even if something failed—we started building the longhouse. It would be a simple, one-room structure, about forty feet long and twenty feet wide. We had saved exactly enough space for it between the two greenhouses, so it would be bordered on its two long sides by a greenhouse, and one of the short sides would butt directly against the base of the wind turbine. That way, residual heat from the greenhouses would warm our living quarters, and we could enter the turbine tower or either of the greenhouses without going outside.

We planned to build a sniper platform near the top of the turbine tower, but Darla and Ben wanted the longhouse to be a defensive structure too. So we built several test walls, varying thicknesses of wood, snow, galvanized roofing, and ice. Ben suggested building the longhouse out of reinforced concrete, but obviously that was completely impractical—we had no way to get rebar or make concrete.

Darla fired each of our guns at her test walls. None of them would stand up to short-range fire from the AR-l5s. The bullets blew through ice and snow as if they weren’t there and blasted splintered holes in any board in their path. A double layer of logs would usually stop them, but we didn’t have the time or materials to build a wall that heavy. We settled on an A-frame log structure with board walls and corrugated metal roofing, covered with three feet of snow and ice for insulation. That would stop pistol fire just fine.

It seemed to take forever to build the longhouse. We cut huge logs for the support beams, and all eight of us working together couldn’t drag them up the slope to our homestead. Darla and I returned to Stockton to steal aircraft wire and pulleys to construct a system for lifting and dragging logs.

Nothing had changed in Stockton except the semitrucks where Stocktonites stored their food. Both trucks were empty. “What is everyone here eating?” I whispered to Darla.

She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.

We slipped around to the back of the warehouse and wormed our way inside through the metal panels we had separated. Nothing had changed inside either, except that everything was coated in a thicker layer of dust. Darla put two heavy spools of aircraft wire in my backpack and followed them with more than a dozen metal pulleys. Then she loaded her backpack with nails, silicone caulk, plumber’s putty, brass plumbing joints, electrical nuts, circuit breakers, and electrical tape.

It was impossible to walk with a backpack full of metal pulleys without jingling a little. I was afraid we’d get caught. But no alarms were raised, so either no one heard us, or they attributed the noises to one of their own patrols.

The next day Darla used the material we had liberated to rig a pulley system so efficient that Anna could drag a massive tree trunk up the slope to the homestead by herself. While we worked, we worried over what we had seen in Stockton. The empty trucks terrified me. Were they out of food? If so, would Red attack Warren again? It was unlikely he would find us up on our isolated hill five miles east of Warren, but what about Rebecca and Mom?

That evening, Darla and I knocked off work early and snuck into Warren. We visited Nylce first, both to catch up and to find out where Mom and Rebecca were living. Evidently Mayor Petty had given them an empty house right next door to his and just down the street from the mayor’s office.

Mom wasn’t home, but we found Rebecca in the kitchen, sitting on the floor, washing clothes by the light of an oil lamp. I tapped on the back window.

She startled, groping quickly around the chair beside her and coming up with a small pistol. I waved and smiled, hoping she would recognize me before she shot me. She set the pistol back down, got up, and opened the back door.

“Just about nailed you,” she said.

“Good to see you too, Sis.” I walked through the doorway and stamped my feet on the rug. “Mom around?”

Rebecca gave me a quick hug. “No, she’s out with a friend.”

“Who?”

“You don’t want to know,” Rebecca said as she hugged Darla, who had come in behind me.

“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.” Rebecca rubbed her forehead as if she were getting a headache. “Mayor Petty. Or Bob, as she calls him.”

“Oh . . .” I fell into a chair.

“Told you, you didn’t want to know.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“It’s actually helping some. I don’t get the evil eye from the other Warrenites as much as I used to.”

“Well, that’s something. Look, I came to talk to you about . . . where’s your go-bag?”

“Right there.” She pointed at a backpack sitting on one of the unused chairs around the kitchen table.

“And Mom keeps hers close too?”

“No. We’ve had that fight—I’m not going to win it. There’s her bag.” Rebecca grabbed the strap of a bag on another chair and then let it slip from her hands.

I groaned inwardly—the point of a go-bag was to have it at hand at all times—wherever Mom was, she should have taken it with her.

“What’s with the questions?” Rebecca asked. “Stockton’s out of food again,” I said.

“Do I even want to know how you know this?” “Probably not,” I said. “You’ve got to be ready to run.” “You’ll have a good place to run to,” Darla said. “Once we build our sniper perch and finish camouflaging our site with snow and ice, it’ll be about as defensible as any place with eight people can be.”

“You think we’ll be attacked?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes,” I said flatly. “You’ve got food. Stockton doesn’t. And if Red finds out where we are—that we’ve got producing greenhouses—he’ll attack us too.”

“Hope you’re wrong.”

“Yeah, me too. If there’s any way you can leak the info to Mayor Petty without letting him know where you got it . . . he might trust a rumor more than something I told him.”

“I’ll tell Mom I heard it from Nylce or something. She’ll tell Bob.” She said the mayor’s name with disgust. “Good. And tell Mom . . . tell her I miss her.”

“Okay. I will. She misses you too, you know.”

“She could move out to the homestead anytime she wants,” I said.

“I know.” I started to turn away, but Rebecca grabbed my arm, holding it in a surprisingly powerful grip. “It’s going to be okay, Alex. I know it is.”

As I pedaled away from Warren, I thought about her last words. I couldn’t escape my worries, couldn’t shake the inexorable feeling that we had it too good, that something horrible lurked just over the horizon.

Chapter 32

When we finished the structure of the longhouse, we piled snow around and atop it. We also covered the walls of both greenhouses with snow. From downslope the homestead looked like three unusual hillocks of snow butted up against the wind turbine. Once you got closer, the glass roofs of the greenhouses made it obvious that the snow mounds weren’t natural, but there was nothing we could do about that.

When the longhouse was finished, we crushed the igloo and moved into our new digs. That night, we held a celebration. Darla had hooked up an electric range we had taken from one of the farmhouses, and she installed overhead lighting in the longhouse. If the wind was blowing, we could cook without building a fire. It seemed like the acme of luxury after almost two years squatting beside a campfire to cook anything. Darla had asked me to find some electric or hybrid cars—she and Uncle Paul thought they could convert their batteries to allow us to store electricity when the wind wasn’t blow-ing—but I hadn’t gotten around to looking for them yet.

I cooked kale greens in soybean oil. Darla made tortillas from the first wheat harvested from our greenhouse, and Anna made corn pone. There was a time when I would have turned my nose up at a meal like that, refused to eat it. But after surviving on pine bark and dog food, that meal was fabulous—a true feast.

Our next project was the sniper nest near the top of the windmill tower adjacent to the longhouse. I flatly refused to get involved. Just looking up into that tower made my knees shake. Darla planned to build a platform inside the tower near the top, cutting slits in the metal walls so the person on guard duty could look or shoot through. It would have a commanding view of the surrounding countryside since we were on a fairly high ridge to start with.

As we worked on improving the homestead, we all waited for the inevitable attack on Warren, waited for Rebecca to come up the hill toward us, maybe with a flood of refugees trailing in her wake. But no attack came. Darla finished the sniper’s perch, and we started to do sentry duty up there. I hated being on sentry duty. Not the cold; that wasn’t anything new. Or the boredom; I was used to that. It was the climb to and from the sniper’s nest. Two hundred and eighty-four ladder rungs. Once I was up, it wasn’t so bad. The platform Darla built filled the turbine tower—you had to enter through a hatch in the floor. There was no way to fall out—the slits in the tower wall were barely big enough for binoculars or the barrel of a rifle.

There were two panic buttons mounted on the floor: one that would ring an alarm only in the longhouse and another that would sound a Klaxon audible from miles away. They only worked when the wind was blowing, of course. Any other time, we’d use our old system of rifle shots to sound the warning.

As soon as the sniper’s nest was finished, Darla and Uncle Paul built an electric grinder for our wheat. Then they started working on building a battery backup for our electrical power. They found a Chevy Volt with a good battery and hauled the battery—all 435 pounds of it—to the homestead. They started testing it out in the snow about a hundred yards downslope from the greenhouses. Uncle Paul said the battery could explode from overcharging, which sounded crazy to me, but he was the electrical engineer.

The rest of us started building a third greenhouse. Usually only two or three of us were available to work on it—we still had to cook, clean, wash clothes, dig corn and soybeans, and one person always had to be on guard duty in the sniper’s nest. At the rate we progressed on the third greenhouse, I was afraid it would take six months or more to finish. Nonetheless, it was important to build another. We were eating okay, but we weren’t building up a stockpile of food. I wanted to squirrel away a few thousand pounds of flour and dried kale leaves in case something went wrong.

My eighteenth birthday came and went. I remembered it for once, but it was a day like any other—we worked on building the third greenhouse during the day and held a subdued celebration at dinnertime.

Uncle Paul and Darla did indeed blow up the battery from the Volt and then the high voltage battery pack from a Prius, but on the third try—with a battery pack from another Prius—they figured out how to add a circuit to prevent the batteries from overcharging. We had lights that we could turn on anytime we wanted! When Uncle Paul and Darla demonstrated the system, I raised my water cup in a toast, “Here’s to reentering the 1890s!” Alyssa laughed. Darla glared at me.

I sidled over to Darla. “Sorry,” I said in a low voice, “it’s great. Brilliant. I honestly never believed I’d see a working light switch again.”

“You don’t have to be a suck up,” Darla said.

“That’s not true.”

“Why do you say that?”

I leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “Because you’re the only person in the world who wants to have sex with me?”

“That’s not true either.” Darla shot a murderous glare at Alyssa.

I intentionally misunderstood. “What? We’ve known each other two years, and you’re already bored with this?” I swept both hands down my scrawny, half-starved body and had to stifle a laugh.

Darla just rolled her eyes.

“I mean, I was going to let myself go after we got married, but now I guess I can quit working out any—” Darla stifled my speech with a long, intense kiss. Everyone else in the room was doing their best to ignore us. Living in a one-room longhouse takes some getting used to. “Wow,” I said, coming up for air, “that was—”

“Be serious for a moment, okay?”

I nodded, letting the grin fade from my face.

“Your uncle and I want to work on lights for the greenhouses next instead of helping to build the third greenhouse.”

“Won’t the light be visible for miles?”

“We’ll shield all the light fixtures and only leave them on during the day. Might boost production a lot.”

I nodded. It made sense—none of the greenhouses, even the ones at the old farm, had produced as well as they could. There just wasn’t enough light in the dim, yellowish sky. “We’ve got plenty of light fixtures and bulbs—we can scavenge more from any of the farmhouses around here.” “Good. But we also need more flexible tubing and another pump. To heat the edges of the greenhouse.” “And so you want to make another trip to the warehouse.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not a good idea.”

“We’ll be fine.”

I was uneasy, but she had a point. We’d raided the warehouse four times with no trouble at all. “Okay. We’ll go next week. I need some caulk and nails too.”

“Thanks,” Darla said.

“But as soon as we finish these two projects, we’re going to spend some time exploring other towns. And find a source of supplies that isn’t in a town controlled by a knife-wielding psychopath.”

Chapter 33

We’d climbed Stockton’s wall often enough that we were getting good at it. Darla flowed up the outside of the wall like a black silk scarf caught by a fast breeze, dropping lightly to the ground on the other side. I followed—a little bit less efficiently and a lot less gracefully, but fast and silent all the same.