Ashfall-3: Sunrise

by Mike Mullin

  It was easier not to worry as we watched the plants in our greenhouses sprout. Those tiny green shoots meant life and hope. When the largest kale plants hit two inches, I plucked one leaf from each of the best-looking plants and shared them with everyone. If pine bark had vitamin C, then it’d prevent scurvy, but I had no idea what its nutritional content was. I figured we had better add kale back into our diets as soon as possible.

  After dinner one night, Darla pulled me aside. She led me into the greenhouse. I hoped she wanted to make out. When we got through the double doors, I took her in my arms and gave her a kiss. She broke it off after only a few seconds. “We need to talk.”

  Well, crap. At least she wasn’t pulling away from the hug.

  “The kale at the lowest side of the greenhouse isn’t sprouting,” she said.

  “I noticed that,” I said.

  “It’s too cold over there, too far from the tank.”

  I nodded. “What do we do?” If there was one thing I was certain of with Darla and a technical problem, it was that she wasn’t bringing me just the problem. She would have a solution in mind, and it would be something that required my help, or she would have already done it.

  “I want some flexible tubing and a pump. We’ll bury the tubing out around the perimeter of the greenhouse and use the pump to circulate hot water through it.” “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”

  “There was a full roll of flexible tubing in the warehouse in Stockton.”

  “No! Absolutely not.” I let my arms drop from her sides. Darla, however, kept her hold on me. “And there were a couple of pumps that might work.”

  “Can’t we raid one of the abandoned farmhouses around here? They have tubes, right?”

  “They’re called pipes. And they’re not flexible. Yes, I might make that work—the pump would be a bigger problem, but maybe we could find a sump pump that I could make work.”

  “Fine. Do that.”

  “I’ll need connections and fittings. Solder and flux if I use copper pipe. The only place I’ve seen that stuff around here is at Furst Distributors in Stockton. So either way we need to go.”

  “Forget it. If we keep going back, we’re going to get caught.”

  “How? We’ve been over that wall twice now. It’s easy.” “How would I know? Bad luck is usually something you aren’t expecting. And anyway, it’s stealing.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “I mean, a little wire we can’t get anywhere else, I can live with. But we can’t keep looting their supplies.”

  “Like Red cares? He steals all our food, and you’re going to get squeamish over a few plumbing and electrical parts he’s not even using and will probably never miss?” “What Red does is his business. What I do is mine. Theft is theft—”

  “We need—”

  “Maybe it’s excusable when it’s done to survive and no one is hurt by the loss of the goods. But we’ll survive without the flexible tubing or pump.”

  “Maybe,” Darla said thoughtfully. “But if we’re going to get the first greenhouse producing as much as it should, build the second, and a longhouse? We’re going to need access to supplies. If not Stockton’s, then someone else’s.” “We’re not. Going. Back. To Stockton.” I lifted her hands from my shoulders and left the greenhouse. Darla could usually talk me into anything. But not this time.

  Two nights later we were back in Stockton. Darla had sworn we would play it safe, she would do everything I asked her to, we would take our time getting back in, and blah, blah, blah. So I made us wait in the snow outside the wall for two hours, making sure the guards hadn’t changed their patterns. They hadn’t.

  We slipped over the wall fast and easily, two black-clad ghosts flitting into the city. The seam at the back of the building was exactly as we had left it. We wormed our way inside where it was dark and quiet. Nothing had changed. The shelves of hardware were the same as we’d left them, except for a thicker layer of dust.

  Chapter 30

  Two nights later we were back in Stockton. Darla had sworn we would play it safe, she would do everything I asked her to, we would take our time getting back in, and blah, blah, blah. So I made us wait in the snow outside the wall for two hours, making sure the guards hadn’t changed their patterns. They hadn’t.

  We slipped over the wall fast and easily, two black-clad ghosts flitting into the city. The seam at the back of the building was exactly as we had left it. We wormed our way inside where it was dark and quiet. Nothing had changed. The shelves of hardware were the same as we’d left them, except for a thicker layer of dust.

  Darla cut two massive coils of black, flexible pipe that were designed to be used with irrigation equipment. The coils were much lighter than the collars of electrical wire. We took two pumps out of their boxes and stowed one in each of our backpacks. We closed up the empty boxes and left them on the shelf so it would look like nothing had changed—at least if no one ever opened the boxes.

  It was difficult to make the panel at the back of the warehouse open wide enough to push through the huge coils of tubing. I put my feet against one side of the slit and grabbed the other side with both gloved hands, pushing with my legs and straining to make it open wide enough that Darla could get the rolls of tubing through. A rivet above the ones we had cut broke with an atrociously loud ping. Darla blew out the candle, and we froze in the darkness, waiting, listening, praying that no one would come investigate. No one came.

  Working by feel now that the candle was extinguished, we finally got the tubing through and slipped out ourselves. I’d bent the panel so much that I couldn’t get it to reclose correctly. I worked on it for a while and then settled for camouflaging the hole with dead bushes and snow.

  Once we were well away from the warehouse and its guards, I whispered to Darla, “I want to go downtown. Look for something.”

  “You crazy?” she whispered back. “That’s where their troops are headquartered, where Red’s mansion is. You didn’t want to come creeping around the lion’s tail, and now you’re going to stick your head in his maw?”

  “Yeah. You’re right, I guess.” I had wanted to check out the jewelry store I’d seen downtown—see if there were any engagement rings left, but no way was I going to tell her that.

  We slipped back over the wall and returned to the homestead in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  It took more than two months to build the second greenhouse. The guts of the first one—the tank with its heating elements—were finished before we arrived at our new homestead, and we had all the glass and building materials salvaged from the old farmhouse. Now we were in the process of tearing down the three nearest abandoned farmhouses and taking the glass, lumber, pipe, and wire we needed.

  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.

  Chapter 31

  It took more than two months to build the second greenhouse. The guts of the first one—the tank with its heating elements—were finished before we arrived at our new homestead, and we had all the glass and building materials salvaged from the old farmhouse. Now we were in the process of tearing down the three nearest abandoned farmhouses and taking the glass, lumber, pipe, and wire we needed.

  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 t
o 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.