by Mike Mullin
“What’s she got?”
“Maybe post-traumatic stress disorder? I’m not an expert. Maybe she’ll get better with time.”
“There’s nothing we can do?”
“Wait. Reassure her if you can. She was a big help with the hospital and Mayor Petty. I think she’ll pull through.” I slung my backpack off my shoulder and pulled out a large bag of kale. “For your patients. Anyone showing signs of scurvy?”
“Not yet, but they’ll be starting to present symptoms soon.”
“Don’t tell anyone he gave you that for free,” Darla said. “We’ve got a bunch more we’re going to try to trade.” Dr. McCarthy nodded.
“Who’s in charge now?” I asked.
“Bob Petty. Same as always.”
“What? Really? After the forked-up mess he made of retaking Warren?”
“Yes. Really. Soon as he was getting around okay in that wheelchair, he picked up where he left off. Seems more determined than ever to run things. Couple of people suggested holding elections, but nothing came of it.”
The mayor’s office was a three-room brick building across the railroad tracks from Warren’s tiny downtown. The front office was deserted, but I saw a bustle of activity in the conference room. Eight women sat around the table, laboriously copying a notice about food distribution. The mayor chatted with the women from his wheelchair at the head of the table.
The mayor looked up as I stepped into the room. “Alex, pleasant surprise. What brings you to Warren?”
“Glad to see you’re on your . . . feeling better, I mean.” I felt my face flush at my near-gaffe.
“Doc’s a miracle worker.”
“Yeah, he is. I’ve got a list of stuff we’d like to trade for. Our kale came in—we brought some to trade.” “Already? Our kale’s barely sprouting.”
“How long did it take them to plant?” Darla whispered scornfully.
Evidently Mayor Petty overheard her. “The town’s greenhouses were badly damaged during the occupation. Folks had to clean up their own homes too. And not everyone has as fine a green thumb as the Halprins. Your aunt could grow turnips in the tailings from a coal mine if she put her mind to it.”
“Not anymore,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” Mayor Petty replied in a similar tone. “Sorry. What were you looking to trade for, anyway? Got plenty of pork.” “Darla’s got a list.”
Darla pushed past me and handed the list to Mayor Petty. He slid a pair of reading glasses over his nose and peered down at the paper. “Believe Abe Miller, outside town, might still have a snowmobile. Don’t know if he’ll give it up or not, though. Should be plenty of bicycles around—city doesn’t own any, of course. I’ve got no idea where you’d find all this electrical stuff.”
“You should check your inventory,” Ben said.
“What inventory?”
“You must have taken an inventory of all supplies available in the town. It would be a basic survival preparation.” “Now, son, we don’t go messing with making lists of people’s private property. I don’t know what kind of big city you come from, but around here folks’ stuff is their own, and we don’t go making lists of it. Don’t tell them they can’t have Big Gulp sodas either. You want that stuff on your list, you’ll have to ask around, see if they want to trade.”
I groaned inwardly. Warren’s population had shrunk by almost eighty percent since the eruption, but that still left several hundred people. And what did soda have to do with anything, anyway?
“You are not sufficiently prepared for another attack,” Ben said. “You need to inventory all town supplies—pri-vate property or not. And you must begin building a wall immediately.”
“You want to build a wall, be my guest,” Mayor Petty said. “People around here are just struggling to survive. They don’t have the time or energy for a project like—” “If Stockton attacks again,” I said, “you’ll—”
“We beat them so bad they won’t be back for more.” Wait, what? I’d beaten the Reds and gotten Warren’s food back. Mayor Petty had gotten his ass kicked, his legs shot off, and my Aunt Caroline killed. While I was trying to think of an appropriate response, Darla spoke up. “What’re you going to do for heat when all the timber’s cut? We could use your help rounding up these supplies— we get them all, we might be able to rig a wind-powered heating system.”
“Got that covered. Going to eminent domain abandoned houses and grant salvage rights. Plenty of burnable wood in those.”
Darla said, “Even that—”
“Look,” Mayor Petty said, “I’d love to chew the fat all day, but we got ourselves a project here, getting ready to publicize the new food distribution rules. You’re welcome to trade with anyone who wants to or build yourself a wall if that’s what you feel like doing, but I’ve got real work to do.”
We wound up going house to house, knocking on doors and trying to trade our kale. We bought two bicycles fairly easily and then trekked a half mile out of town to buy what appeared to be the only remaining snowmobile in Warren. Lots of folks were willing to trade electric water heaters—they were useless without power, after all—but we could only fit two of them in the bed of the truck alongside the snowmobile.
I complained about Mayor Petty to Mom and Uncle Paul over the dinner table. “He’s doing the best he can,” Mom told me. “We’re all overwhelmed, and most of us still have two good legs.”
“I think Ben’s right,” Uncle Paul said. “He should be building a wall. And we should be living inside it and commuting to the farm. We can’t defend ourselves effectively here.”
“Maybe we could build an ice wall around the farm, like they had in Worthington,” Darla said.
“We do not have an adequate population on the farm to patrol or defend our own wall,” Ben said.
“If Warren gets attacked, everyone’s going to wind up right back here again,” I said.
Uncle Paul speared a slice of ham. “Nothing we can do about it.”
“What if he had an accident?” Max said.
“What?” I asked.
“Yeah, like the brakes on his wheelchair could sort of accidently fail, and then he could roll off a cliff.”
“So you’re going to sabotage his brakes, drive him somewhere there’s a cliff, and then push him off?” Anna asked. “Maaaaaybe,” Max replied.
“Maybe you’re an idiot,” Anna said.
“No, the mayor’s an idiot,” Max said.
“He’s a very nice man,” Mom said.
“Maybe the mayor is both nice and an idiot,” I said. “Either way, we’re not going to hurt him.”
“I was just joking,” Max said.
“Fine,” I said, even though I didn’t completely believe Max. I turned my attention to Uncle Paul. “There must be a way to get rid of him.”
“Don’t look at me,” Uncle Paul said.
“You could try protesting or something,” Anna said, “like those people who were always holding protest marches in Chicago.”
“Maybe,” Darla said. “But Warren’s a small town like Worthington. Nobody’s going to listen to outsiders.”
“I’ve lived near here almost all my life,” Uncle Paul said. “What we need to do,” I said, “is convince enough residents to complain, to make Mayor Petty change his mind and either build a wall or leave office.”
“Something must be done,” Ben said. “Warren’s strategic posture is completely unsustainable.”
“I’ll try,” I told Ben.
Darla released a sigh. “I’m going to get roped into helping you, aren’t I?”
“It’s up to you,” I said, “but I’d love your company.” “Are you sure this isn’t another case of Alex grabbing a lance and charging a windmill?” Darla asked.
It might be exactly that, I thought. “No. I’m not sure. But I think it’s worth trying.”
“I’d better come along, then. You might need some help if the windmill decides to fight back.”
Everyone was quiet for a
while, wrapped up in our own thoughts. I thought about trying to convince enough people to protest to force Mayor Petty to take action or step down. I had plenty of work to do without getting involved in Warren’s byzantine politics.
But then I remembered the bloody road in front of Elmwood Cemetery, Aunt Caroline falling as the bullets tore into her stomach, Anna’s face when she was forced to say goodbye to her mother forever. Anything I could do, any amount of work, was worth it if it could prevent something like that from happening again. We had to find a way to defend ourselves adequately, and I had to make it happen.
Chapter 16
We did farm work in the morning and early afternoon—watering, planting, harvesting, cutting wood. Darla invited the other girls—Rebecca, Anna, and Alyssa—to help her build Bikezilla II in the late afternoons. Rebecca and Anna were enthusiastic; Alyssa flatly refused. She had no interest whatsoever in anything mechanical or anything that might get her hands greasy. Or maybe she just didn’t want to spend more time around Darla than she had to.
Max, Ed, and I finished a woodcutting expedition to Apple River Canyon State Park early one afternoon, so I went out to the barn to say hi to Darla. She was holding a lit welding torch and gesturing at the flame with a metal rod, while Rebecca and Anna looked on.
“The oxygen and acetylene combine in the inner cone of flame. Right at the tip of that inner cone is the hottest part of the torch—that’s the part you want to use for welding.” Darla noticed me and released the lever on the welding torch. The flame went out with a pop, and the room darkened considerably.
“Need any help?” I asked.
“You’re not allowed,” Rebecca said.
“I’m not—”
“This is the Girls’ Excellence in Engineering Klub. We’re the GEEKs! No boys allowed.”
“Um—”
“Particularly not older brothers of club members,” Rebecca said.
“What about boyfriends of club members?” I asked Darla.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll make it up to you later.”
I shrugged and headed out of the barn. On the way out the door, I thought of something and turned back. “Maybe you should call it ‘Girls’ Excellence in Engineering and Science Education,’ so it would be the GEESE club.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Anna responded, “Maybe we’ll call it ‘Guys are Notably Dumb and Especially Ridiculous’—the GANDER club.”
I knew when I was beaten. I left the barn without another word.
I peeked in on the GEEKs now and then over the following days. They took two bicycles and the snowmobile completely apart. The idea was to weld the two bicycles together side by side, with the snowmobile track between them where their back wheels had been. The front wheels of each bike would be replaced with skis. I didn’t quite understand how it was going to work—the whole process seemed to involve a lot of welding and cursing. But I knew Darla would figure it out—there was no apparent limit to her genius with all things mechanical.
One day Darla surprised me by visiting me in the woodlot—the area outside the greenhouses where we sawed and split the logs we had hauled back to the farm, turning them into firewood. “Time to call it a day,” she said.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked—it was only midafternoon. “We can get in a couple more hours.”
“You don’t know?” Darla said. “Seriously? October 2nd?” Oh. I’d totally forgotten my own birthday—for the second year in a row. We had a subdued party, all ten of us. There was no birthday cake, only kale and pork like always. We lit a candle, and I blew it out almost immediately; we couldn’t afford to waste the wick. We did manage a pretty good rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” All in all, the best part of my seventeenth birthday was the kiss Darla gave me when it was over.
It took more than two weeks for the GEEKs to finish Bikezilla II. Then Darla and I started ducking out of afternoon chores completely to bike to Warren and knock on doors, asking folks to visit Mayor Petty and talk to him about building a wall.
I was worried when we started. I figured we’d get doors slammed in our faces, people yelling at us, maybe even running us off. And a lot of people did answer their doors with guns in their hands. Darla and I approached each house slowly, our hands in plain view, loudly calling out “hello” as we came. Most of the houses we checked were vacant.
But the people we did meet were universally friendly after they figured out who we were. Almost everyone invited us in, and some of them even offered us a snack: sometimes a bit of ham, sometimes dried kale chips. Their generosity was overwhelming. Only two months ago, we’d all been starving; now folks were sharing their food willingly—eagerly, even.
That wasn’t to say that they all agreed with us. Plenty of them liked Mayor Petty. They’d known him forever; he’d kissed their babies and shaken their grandparents’ hands.
On the third day of our campaign, we met a middle-aged woman living with her two teenage sons. Before I could even say hello, she spoke up, “Hell, yes, I’ll talk to Petty about a wall!”
Darla laughed. “Best sales job you’ve done yet.”
“I haven’t said anything yet!” I said.
“Exactly.”
The woman invited us in, and we spent a few minutes talking to her sons about the protest campaign. Word had gotten around about what we were doing. As we got up to leave, the woman said, “You hear Mayor Petty’s looking for you?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said.
“If he had built a wall and gate, he’d have found us the moment we came to town,” Darla said.
“He’s put out the word,” she said. “Wants to talk with you, I guess.”
“We’ll head down to his office now.”
Mayor Petty smiled just as brightly and shook our hands just as vigorously as he had the last time we’d met him. “Why’re you two stirring up trouble in my town?” “We need to prepare to defend our town. Prepare for the future,” I said. “I’d prefer it if you’d work with us.” “This is about that wall nonsense again? Nobody here wants to be drafted into some kind of work party to build a wall.”
“I bet you could convince them.”
“What I want is to convince you to drop this whole rigmarole. Dividing people against each other isn’t doing the town any favors.”
“I’m not dropping it,” I said.
“Nobody’s going to be forced to waste time building a wall while I’m mayor.”
“Then you should resign.”
“Not going to happen.”
“I’m not dropping it.”
“I’ll ban you from the city.”
I thought a moment before answering. “Good. Do that. The only way you’ll be able to keep me out is by building a wall.”
“Or by ordering you shot on sight.”
Darla and I spoke at once:
“You wouldn’t,” I said.
“If you shoot him, I will end you,” Darla said.
Mayor Petty glowered at us. “Don’t push me.”
“So Yellowstone is claiming another victim,” I said, “democracy in Warren.”
“We’ll hold proper elections when my term is up,” Mayor Petty said, “in two and a half years.”
The mention of elections sparked an idea. “So let the people—your constituents—decide. Hold a special vote on whether or not to build a wall.”
“And if I do?”
“We’ll go away. Win or lose, we’ll quit bothering you, quit trying to stir up public opinion.”
Mayor Petty was silent for a moment. A crafty look shadowed his eyes. “I’ll hold an election, all right. For mayor. You against me. You win, you run the show, build the wall, do whatever you damn well please. I win, you stay out on your uncle’s farm and out of my town.”
“I don’t want to be mayor,” I said. “I want a safe place we can move to, a walled town capable of defending itself.”
“You’re not so excited about wall building when you’re on the hot seat, huh? When
you’re the one who’d have to implement your crack-brained plan.”
I thought for a moment. I didn’t want to be mayor, didn’t want to run Warren, didn’t want to do anything but create a safe space for Darla, me, and my family. I certainly wasn’t qualified to be mayor, but could I be any worse than Petty? I would at least consult Ben on military matters, Uncle Paul and Darla on engineering questions, and Dr. McCarthy on medical issues. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
Mayor Petty smiled in a way that was more cruel than mirthful. “First Tuesday in January. Ten weeks from now. That suit?”
“Why not next Tuesday?” I said.
“’Cause that’s the way I want it. And I’m the mayor. Everyone who wants to vote’ll meet at St. Ann’s Church. Voting machines won’t work without electric, so we’ll use paper, pens, and an old-fashioned ballot box.”
“We’ll count the votes publicly,” Darla said, “immediately after voting closes. While everyone’s there watching. Won’t even need to lock the ballot box, that way.”
“Agreed.” Mayor Petty rubbed his hands together gleefully. “I’ll beat the pants off you. Wait. Don’t quote me on that. Don’t want anyone to get the idea I’m one of them pedophiles, do I?”
I couldn’t summon nearly as much enthusiasm as Mayor Petty. I shook his hand and left his office in a state of stunned disbelief.
After Mayor Petty agreed to the election, our daily routine didn’t change much. Darla and I worked on the farm every morning and biked to Warren every afternoon, to campaign instead of trying to convince people to protest. When they could spare the time—which was rarely—Uncle Paul, Alyssa, Max, Rebecca, and even Anna walked to Warren to help with the campaign. Mom came along occasionally, but she never campaigned. When I asked her what she did in town, she said she was “visiting” and evaded my questions about who she was visiting with. Ed worried that his past would be a liability and stayed behind on the farm. Ben had neither the skills nor inclination for politics.
Campaigning meant going door to door and talking with people, often while we helped them with their chores. There was no radio, no television, no flyers, and nobody had time to attend rallies, so the campaign had a decidedly low-tech feel. Darla kept meticulous notes on everyone we talked to. She said it wasn’t much different than keeping track of cows. She thought we’d win, but it would be close—within twenty votes.
