by Mike Mullin
“New sheriff?” I whispered to Uncle Paul.
“Vaughn Frenchman died before you got here last year,” Uncle Paul replied. “Pneumonia.”
“Was high time to appoint a new sheriff. And Sam will be a fine replacement,” Mayor Petty said.
“Alex,” Mom said, “I talked to the mayor. It’s all worked out. We can all move here. You sign an apology statement, and everything’s forgiven. We’ll get one of the empty houses—more if we want—and a share of the town’s food.”
I was too whipsawed by the multiple conversations to respond at first. Instead, Rebecca said, “C-couldn’t you have told us where you were going? Told me? I thought you’d left us!”
“Oh, honey.” Mom held her arms wide for a hug. “I’m so sorry. I only wanted to take care of things. Take care of you. I should have told you where I was going. Will you forgive me?”
Rebecca sniffled loudly and then ran into Mom’s arms, clinging to her.
“Mom,” I said as calmly as I could, “we can’t move to Warren. It’s not safe here. There’s no wall.”
“We had an election over that issue, son,” Mayor Petty said. “And we settled it.”
“It’s safer here than on our own,” Mom said. “And there’s plenty of food. We can be a family again.”
“I’m sure Mayor Petty will loan us some food, given that our farm is part of Warren,” Uncle Paul said. “Help us get going at our new location.”
“Sorry, Paul. The new food distribution policy allows for sharing only with people inside the town limits for the duration of the emergency. Technically that means Mrs. Halprin’s family doesn’t qualify. But I’m willing to make an exception if he signs that apology.” Mayor Petty waved a piece of paper.
“I’m not moving to Warren,” I said.
“You won’t sign a simple apology just to stay with your mother? You’d rather move to the frozen wasteland around those windmills?”
“I wish you hadn’t told them where we’re going,” Darla said, her disgust plain in her voice.
“You stay out of this!” Mom said.
“Mom! It has nothing to do with the apology! I already apologized. I’ll sign the stupid paper—I don’t care about that.” I snatched the paper out of Mayor Petty’s hands and groped futilely for a pen. “What I want is a future. A safe, stable future. We can’t get that in Warren.”
“There’s food here,” Mom said. “That’s a future.”
“For a while,” I replied. Mayor Petty extracted a pen from the pocket of his jacket and held it out to me. I scribbled my name at the bottom of the page.
“You really should read that,” Darla said.
“What does it matter?” I didn’t care—about Warren, about Mayor Petty, or about what any of them thought of me. I was trying to convince myself I didn’t care about Mom either, but it wasn’t working.
Mayor Petty took the paper and pen from me as a slick smile creased his face. “The family reunion is touching and all, but I believe you wanted to report a theft?”
“That’s right,” Uncle Paul said. “Panel van we got from Stockton. You know the one.”
“Reds took it back?” Sheriff Moyers said.
“Tracks led here,” Uncle Paul replied.
“Maybe they drove it through here to make it look like someone here took it.”
“Could be,” Uncle Paul admitted.
“You know, if you had a wall, people couldn’t drive through town willy-nilly,” I said.
Both Mom and Mayor Petty shot me nasty looks.
“I’ll write up a report when I get back to the office,” Sheriff Moyers said.
“Could you canvas the town?” Darla asked. “Peek in every shed and garage large enough to hide a panel van?” “I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” Sheriff Moyers said.
“Need that food bad, Sam,” Uncle Paul said. “Might starve otherwise.”
“I heard you,” Moyers replied.
“Paul,” Mom said, “nobody here is starving. You and the kids are welcome here—you should move with me, maybe even talk some sense into my son if you can.”
“Might come to that,” Uncle Paul said. “But I figure we’ll try it Alex’s way first.” Mom tried to interrupt, but Uncle Paul kept talking. “Don’t care much what happens to me, but I’d like to see Max and Anna have a decent place to grow up. Looks to me like this winter’s going to outlast our supply of wood. But the wind’ll keep blowing, so rigging those turbines is worth a shot.”
We talked—argued, really—for more than an hour after that. But nothing changed. The only “investigation” Moyers and Petty would make into our missing food involved filing a report. Mom was determined to move to Warren with or without me. Uncle Paul and Darla were equally determined to move to the wind farm.
At one point Rebecca and Mom stepped into the hallway that led to the exam rooms. When they reemerged after about ten minutes, Rebecca pulled me into the hallway.
“Alex,” Rebecca said as soon as we were alone, “I’m staying with Mom. In Warren.”
Mom was abandoning me, and now Rebecca had decided to join her? I turned away, trying to hide my reaction. “Don’t look at me like that,” Rebecca said.
“I wasn’t looking at you at all,” I replied. “And like what, anyway?”
“Like I just strangled your new puppy on Christmas morning.”
“It’s just . . . what went wrong? Mom used to be . . . I didn’t always like her, but I always could rely on her.”
“She held us together,” Rebecca said.
“Exactly. If our family was a building, she was the steel frame that supported us all. Now she’s like the wrecking ball.”
“I think Dad was a bigger part of that structure than you ever gave him credit for. It’s . . . she’s . . . she needs us, Alex.”
“We can’t move here. It’s not safe or—”
“I know. I feel like I’ve been drifting along ever since the eruption, just doing what Mom and Dad, Uncle Paul, or you tell me to do. Maybe this is what I’m meant to do. To help Mom—maybe be a bridge connecting you and her. I need to do this. You understand?”
I nodded slowly. I thought I did understand. My decisions were at least partly selfish: I wanted to create a decent future for myself and Darla. But Rebecca understood that Mom needed her now and was willing to sacrifice safety to support our mother. It was strange that out of the half-dozen people in the clinic, the most mature was my fifteen-year-old sister.
“What if Warren gets attacked again?” I asked. “When you get settled, show me the route to the new homestead. I’ll memorize it; practice it—both during the day and at night. I’ll keep my go-bag ready and make sure Mom has one too. If another attack comes, we’ll run.”
I nodded again. For the second time that day, I struggled to fight back tears. Rebecca’s face was tight, determined, but I saw a quiver in her lower jaw. I held out my arms for a hug. She crashed into me, and I folded my arms over her shoulders.
“It’ll be okay,” I said, patting her back. “We’ll be close.”
“I know,” she said, “but I’ll still miss my annoying big brother.”
“And I’ll miss my whiny little sister.”
Bikezilla was lighter on the way back to the farm without Rebecca. It should have been easier to pedal. But it wasn’t.
Chapter 25
When we got back to the farm, we realized we had completely forgotten to look for truck tires. Darla needed to sort out the wreckage of the barn, so the next day, Max and I loaded a jack and tire iron onto Bikezilla and went in search of an F-series truck with good tires. We biked from farm to farm, peeking in garages. Often we had to dig through mounds of snow to find the vehicle hiding beneath.
It took three days of searching to find a truck with tires that would work. We visited dozens of farms, and not one was occupied. All of Uncle Paul’s neighbors had fled—or died. When we got new tires on our truck, we easily pulled free the pesticide tank-cum-water heater, dragging it back to the temp
orary outdoor workshop Darla had set up beside the ruins of the barn.
Everyone else was busy too, salvaging kale and wheat from our destroyed greenhouses, tools from the barn, and packing up everything we’d need from the house. Darla, Ben, and Uncle Paul conspired endlessly, drawing up huge lists of what to take. Strange stuff appeared on their lists—for example, I was assigned to remove the toilet seats from both toilets and pack them. Darla planned to dig a pit toilet inside our new longhouse and needed the seats for that project. We stripped wires and pipes from the walls and took the glass from the first-floor windows, which were boarded up as a security precaution anyway.
Alyssa was especially helpful to Anna, who had lost her best friend when Rebecca decided to move to Warren. Nearly all the day-to-day work of running the farm— cooking, cleaning, and chopping wood—fell to Alyssa, Anna, and Ed, while the rest of us were getting ready for the move.
Then we had to move everything to the site Darla and I had picked five miles east of Warren amid the wind farm. Low on gas, we decided to drive the truck there only once. But the truck—even packed so full that the mound of supplies overtopped the cab—couldn’t hold all the stuff we needed to move. So Max and I wound up serving as movers. We pedaled back and forth from the old farm to the new site. It was about seven miles by the direct route, but we pedaled two miles out of the way to avoid passing through Warren, so each trip took more than an hour and a half one way.
It took six days to move everything. We tried to stack the supplies neatly in the snow at the new homestead, but they inevitably seemed to spread everywhere. It began to look like a cross between a flea market and an old trailer park instead of a farm. By the end of that week, Max and I were so tired that we’d quit complaining about how tired we were—we simply didn’t have the strength anymore. We collapsed into our bedrolls every night, moaning as our kinked muscles screamed in protest. When the pain faded from unbearable to only debilitating, I would finally fall asleep.
Everyone else stayed at the new site, working. The first thing they built was a large, crude igloo. At first there were arguments over who got to sleep in the truck and who had to sleep in the igloo. But after two nights, the arguments ended: it was much warmer in the igloo.
On day two they started building the first greenhouse. The greenhouse was more important than the longhouse, more important than a well or an outhouse. We had less than three weeks’ worth of food, and even if everything worked perfectly, it would take at least four weeks for even the tiniest, edible kale sprouts to appear.
I asked myself every day if we were doing the right thing—if the short-term risk of starvation was worth the long-term security we’d get if we could make this plan work. Everyone was hungry and short-tempered. Uncle Paul said the work we were doing required a diet of eight or nine thousand calories per day, but we were rationing our food supply, getting two or three thousand calories a day at most. Uncle Paul developed a persistent cough; he didn’t have a fever, though, so we couldn’t convince him to go into town to see Dr. McCarthy. Everyone lost weight, going from rail thin to skeletal.
We decided to butcher the last two goats. They were dying anyway, because we didn’t have anything to feed them. Over the next week, we ate nearly every scrap of those goats: we cleaned the intestines and ate boiled tripe, fried the brains (which were delicious, like scrambled eggs but richer and fattier), and even cracked the bones and sucked out the marrow.
The greenhouse Darla designed would be about ten feet high at the north side and have a sloping, south-facing roof, so the wall on the south side would need to be only two feet high—barely tall enough to crawl into that section to tend our crops.
We built the greenhouse around the tank contraption Darla had been working on. She’d connected more than a dozen heating elements from electric water heaters inside the tank. The idea was that when the wind blew, the electricity from the wind turbine would heat the water. When it wasn’t windy, the water in the tank would serve as a heat reservoir, keeping our greenhouse warm until the next windy day. I mean, it was more complicated than that— Uncle Paul and Darla argued over circuit breakers, transformers, and resistance values in ohms—but that was the basic idea.
We had lost all our plastic in the fire, so the greenhouse roof had to be glass. Even with all the panes we’d salvaged from the old farmhouse, we didn’t have enough. So we started trekking to the nearest abandoned farmhouse to loot its windows. They turned out to be modern, double-paned glass—much better than the glass in Uncle Paul’s house, Darla said, but the glass was coated with some kind of UV inhibitor—great if you don’t want your curtains to fade, but not so good in a greenhouse that’s too cold to start with. So we spent hundreds of hours laboriously scraping the glass clean with razor blades.
We tore the farmhouse’s roof apart, salvaging the rafters to build the walls of our greenhouse. The amount of labor everything took was staggering. To get a nail, for example, you had to start by making a hammer. We had plenty of hammerheads, but all the shafts had burned with our barn. So you had to cut a shaft with a hatchet, clean out the remains of the old shaft from the hammerhead, fit the new one to the socket, jam it in there, then hammer wedges of wood into the socket from the other side to tighten up the fit.
Then, of course, you still had to pull the nail out of a rafter, set it on a flat rock, and beat it more or less straight so it could be reused. Now repeat that part of the process eighty-two bazillion times, and you have an idea of what many of my days were like.
By the time the greenhouse was finished, we were pretty much out of food. And we hadn’t even planted anything yet. Darla and Uncle Paul started working on connecting the heating system to the wind turbine, which involved figuring out how to refit a complex, formerly computer-controlled system for manual control. Even turning the turbine to shut it off in a wind too forceful for its design was complicated. To work on the turbine, they had to climb a ladder attached to the wall inside the tower. The base of the tower was pretty roomy, about twelve feet wide, but it narrowed at the top almost three hundred feet up. So working in there made me feel both acrophobic and claustrophobic. Since I was no help at all working on the turbine, I took everyone else out into the fields to dig for corn.
We started by clearing the snow from an area about ten feet square. Sounds easy, right? Not so much. The snow was more than four feet deep and heavy with ice. To clear a ten-by-ten area, we had to dig up and remove more than four hundred cubic feet of snow—that’s more than two full dump truck loads, Darla told me later.
The ash layer under the snow was surprisingly uneven—several feet thick at one side of our excavation, almost nonexistent at the other. Which was strange—in most places around Warren, the ash layer was a consistent thickness of only two or three inches.
As we dug into the ash, we figured out why. Someone had already harvested this field. The cornstalks were there, flattened by the weight of the ash and snow, but the ears were all gone. We moved across the road and tried again.
This time Max and I dug a small test hole only about two feet square. When we found ears of corn at the bottom, everyone joined in, widening the hole. By the end of the day, I felt more hopeful about our chances. We had more than twenty grocery sacks stuffed with corn ears.
There was more good news back at the greenhouse. As we approached, we could see the huge arms of the windmill turning slowly in the breeze. That meant heat!
I was a little disappointed when I got inside the greenhouse. It didn’t seem any warmer in there than it had that morning. I dropped the bags of corn I was carrying, peeled off my left glove, and held my hand against the metal wall of the tank. It was stone cold.
Darla flung her arms around me from behind. I knew it was her instantly—although I couldn’t have said exactly how.
“We got it working!” her voice practically frothed with excitement.
“It’s cold.”
“That tank holds almost four thousand gallons of water. It’s going t
o take days to come up to temperature.”
“Oh.” I’d been expecting instant heat.
“That means it will hold heat for days, so even when the wind isn’t blowing, we’ll stay toasty.”
“Cool. Want to shuck some corn?” I asked.
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Darla whispered in my ear, pulling me into an even tighter hug.
“Shucking corn? I don’t get how that’s dirty,” I said.
“Would you rather have me explain it now or show you later?” I couldn’t see Darla’s face, but her evil grin was easy enough to imagine.
“This is the Show-Me State, right?”
“That’s Missouri, silly.”
“Let’s move there.”
Darla released me from the backward hug, and we sat on the cold dirt in the greenhouse. I dumped a bag of corn out between us.
The first ear I shucked looked strange. Instead of light yellow kernels, they were grayish black. I rubbed at the ear. Some of the black stuff came off, as if it were dirt or dust or something, although it was too dark for dirt—pure black without a trace of brown.
“What’s this?” I asked Darla, holding the ear out between us.
She looked up from the ear she was shucking and let out a string of curses that I was fairly certain included an anatomically detailed description of what she’d called “shucking corn” a few minutes before.
“What’s wrong?”
“Smell it,” she said.
“Smell what?”
“The Iowa State Fair queen’s powdered ass. The ear of corn, of course.”
“Geez. Sorry.” I raised the ear cautiously to my nose. It smelled terrible—like old, wet cardboard.
“It’s some kind of mold. Normally you’d send it out and have it tested for mycotoxins. The corn was wet when the ash buried it. That’s why you harvest it dry, or dry it before you store it, so it can’t mold. I was hoping freezing would do the trick, and I guess it helped for a while.”
