by Mike Mullin
“I’m glad you’re here and eating well, Mom. I’m glad Rebecca’s with you. But other than the food situation, we’re safer than you are. There’s food here, practically undefended—”
“That’s not true,” Mom said. “There’s at least a dozen armed men stationed around the meat locker at all times. More around the town’s greenhouses.”
“So they’re defending the food, but not their own citizens,” Darla said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Mom said through gritted teeth.
“I can’t have this argument right now.” I picked up the pillowcase of food Mom had brought and slung it over my shoulder.
“Alex,” Mom grabbed my arm, “we need to put this family back together.”
“You’re welcome to join us any time you want at the new homestead—although if you don’t start treating Darla better, that may change.” I yanked open the exam room door and strode through. A muffled sob from Mom escaped behind me. I did not look back.
Chapter 28
“Crap!” I yelled as soon as we had left the clinic. “I need to teach Rebecca the way to the homestead in case they need to bug out.”
“I’ll go get her,” Darla offered.
I felt like a total wimp, but I let her go back in there and face my crazy mother alone. I was hungry, sore, and tired, but mostly I was afraid that if I saw my mother again, I’d say or do something I’d regret. I waited in the icy air outside the clinic.
When Darla got back, she had Rebecca in tow. “Mom told me not to come,” Rebecca said.
“But here you are,” I said.
“Well, she told me not to go poking around in abandoned houses either.”
“Glad you did,” Darla said.
“Be careful,” I said. “I’m not too popular around here. I’m afraid someone might take their frustrations with me out on you.”
“I keep a low profile,” Rebecca replied.
We slunk out of town, avoiding as much as possible every place we might be seen. Once we got back to Bikezilla, we traversed the route to the homestead twice, pointing out landmarks to Rebecca, who was riding in the load bed. Doing the whole route twice for Rebecca meant we had to travel back and forth a total of five times— almost twenty-five miles of biking. By the time we got back to the homestead for the third time, it was dark, and I was hungry enough to try the cat food. It wasn’t bad— crunchy, like corn nuts.
Max was outside, cooking something over a stew pot. It smelled like paint thinner.
“Success?” I asked skeptically as Darla and I got off Bikezilla.
“Maybe,” Max replied. “The Boy Scout Handbook said you can eat almost any kind of pine bark in an emergency. There’s a stand of dead pine trees on the hill at the far side of the creek. I cut a bunch of bark and tried some—it was tough and tasted like something pooped out of a petrochemical plant.”
“That’s . . . encouraging,” Darla said.
“Thought I’d boil some—see if that helped. Want to try it?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. Heck, I’d been eating cat food on the way here. Could pine bark be any worse?
It was. Pale, fibrous, and a little bit slimy, it tasted like turpentine. Cat food was a vastly superior gastronomic experience. I must have made a face, because Max said, “Well, the book said it didn’t taste very good.”
Darla grabbed the fork from me and stabbed a piece. “Beats not eating,” she said. Then she put the piece of bark in her mouth. “Or not.”
The corn-digging crews had come back empty-handed again—or rather, everything they brought back was moldy. Still, we ate well. Slices of ham with sides of boiled pine bark and dry cat food. Nobody had had anything to eat in two days, so we needed to start recovering our strength. I figured I’d start rationing the food again in the morning.
We slept in the greenhouse that night, nestled up against the tank. I was fully warm for the first time in weeks.
We planted the next day, filling the greenhouse with neat rows of kale and wheat, drawing warm water from a spigot Darla had installed on the side of the tank to water our plantings.
The tank had to be kept full, or the heating elements might burn out. So when we finished planting and watering, we hauled more than a hundred buckets of snow, dumping them through a hatch at the top of the tank, where the snow melted almost instantly in the warm water. Working by torchlight, we finished well after dark.
The next morning I assigned Max and Ed, who was fully recovered now, to harvest more pine bark. It tasted horrible, but none of us got sick, and everyone seemed quite a bit more cheerful now that we were getting regular meals again. I sent Ben and Alyssa out to keep looking for a soybean field or corn that had escaped the mold.
“What’s next?” I asked Darla. “Build the longhouse?” “I don’t know. Maybe another greenhouse first?” she said. “I’d like to have some redundancy—if we only have one greenhouse and it fails, we’re screwed.”
“So start raiding more of the empty farmhouses around here for glass?”
“Yes, but there’s another problem. I don’t know if the wind turbine can support another greenhouse.”
“I tried to figure it out,” Uncle Paul said, “but there are too many variables. If I had a working computer and a copy of ETAP, it’d be a cinch. But . . .” He shrugged.
“And even if one turbine will produce enough juice to heat two or more greenhouses,” Darla said, “we still have the redundancy problem. If our wind turbine goes down, everything dies, and we’re trying to dog paddle up brown floater creek.”
“So let’s fire up another turbine,” I said.
“We need a butt-load of wire for that,” Darla said. “Most houses only have forty or fifty feet of eight-gauge—” “We’ve got tons of the wire that we took out of the old farm.”
“Most of it’s not heavy enough,” Uncle Paul said. “We need eight-gauge or larger.”
“So where are we going to get that?” I asked. “Remember those huge spools of wire we saw in the warehouse in Stockton?” Darla asked.
I didn’t like where this conversation was going at all. “Yeah. . . .”
“That’s what we need,” Darla said.
“Red isn’t going to just give us that wire.”
“No,” Darla said, “we’re going to have to take it.”
Chapter 29
Three nights later, Darla and I were crouched outside Stockton’s wall of cars. Uncle Paul had objected strenuously, but finally I had overruled him—and been completely shocked when he accepted my decision. His chronic cough would have made it far too dangerous for him to come. We might have found an electrical supply house in Dubuque, and there were dozens of them in Chicago, but going to either of those places would be a multiday trek over unfamiliar ground.
We hid Bikezilla more than a mile from town and approached on foot. We spent more than half the night just observing the guards. There were two-man patrols outside the wall circumnavigating the city, but more than ten minutes separated each patrol. The guards stationed at regular intervals atop the wall were a bigger problem. They were more than five hundred feet apart, but we would have to be very quiet to slip between them.
A guard was stationed right on top of the place where I’d crossed the wall before. We found a spot where two subcompact cars were jammed together about halfway between the fixed sentries and waited for the next patrol to pass.
After the patrol walked by, I counted off two minutes in my head. We had five, maybe six minutes before the next patrol got close enough to catch us. Darla and I scuttled silently to the wall.
I jammed my right boot into the crack where the two cars nestled against each other and reached upward. I couldn’t get a grip on anything. I took off my gloves, tucked them into a pocket, and tried again. This time I could cling to the molding around the cars’ windows, digging my fingernails between the rubber gasket and the metal. It was so cold that my fingers burned, as if I had plunged them into a fire. I knew I would get frostbite if I
didn’t get over the wall fast.
I raised my left boot, jamming it into the crack above my right. I slid my hands upward along the windows and pulled my right boot free, slowly ascending the crack one short step at a time.
When I got close enough, I reached out for the rear bumper of the car on my right. The rifle on my back shifted, banging into the car’s hood with a resounding clang.
I froze. The night was inky black—if I didn’t move, the sentries might not see me. Would they investigate the clang? Or assume the next sentry along the wall had dropped something?
I counted off the seconds. Thirty. Sixty. A bead of sweat rolled along the bridge of my nose. I was poised to jump down and run if I were spotted. Ninety. One hundred twenty. The next patrol would be along in two or three minutes. My fingers had quit burning—lost all feeling, in fact. I had to move now—get off the wall or over it. I pulled myself up, slipped over the top of the cars, and dropped into the snow on the inside. I pulled my gloves on with a quiet sigh of relief and then froze, listening. No alarm was raised.
About five minutes later—after the next patrol had passed—Darla dropped into the snow alongside me. She had left her rifle behind.
Silently we slunk through the dark streets of Stockton until we reached the warehouse. There were two guards sitting by a small fire near the front door. The two semis loaded with pork that I had allowed Stockton to keep were there, parked across from the warehouse, so their metal backs were clearly visible from the guards’ fire. One of the semitrailers was standing open and empty. The other was chained and padlocked.
Was Stockton running out of food, or had they moved some of it somewhere else? And what would Red do if they did run out? I hoped I could convince my mother and sister to move out to the homestead before then.
I shook off my gloomy thoughts and led the way to the back of the building. A few bushes—what had once passed for landscaping—had died against the back of the warehouse. They were mostly buried by the snow. Darla crept up between two of the bushes, running her gloved fingers along a seam in the corrugated metal exterior of the building.
“With a crowbar and a hacksaw, I think we could break in here,” she whispered.
I couldn’t see the seam well at all—it was too dark. “We’ll come back,” I said.
We retraced our steps, brushing snow across our path, trying to disguise our tracks. Getting out was much easi-er—there were good holds on the undersides of the cars. We climbed together, stopping at the top to check for the patrols, and then dropped into the snow outside Stockton. Darla retrieved her rifle from the snowbank where she had hidden it, and we began the trek home.
We returned to Stockton the next night. Darla had a large wrecking bar; a small, flat pry bar; a hacksaw; and an extra hacksaw blade. She had wrapped each item in cloth secured by duct tape to keep it all from clanking. We left our rifles behind, but I brought along a revolver we had acquired during our attack on Stockton more than eight months before.
Getting across the wall was easier the second time. We already knew what to expect from the guards. Less than half an hour after we had reached Stockton, we were huddled at the metal seam in the back wall of the warehouse.
We dug a hole in the snow with our hands, trying to access the base of the wall. When we had exposed the whole seam, Darla jammed the flat pry bar between the corrugated metal panels near the base, forcing it deeper into the seam by striking the curved end of the pry bar with her palm. That made the seam open enough that I could slip the extra hacksaw blade between the metal panels and saw at the rivets holding the panels together.
Every noise we made sounded like a scream in the silent night: the thump, thump of Darla beating on the pry bar and driving it deeper, the scritch-scritch of the hacksaw blade worrying at the rivet. We stopped every now and then, listening, wondering if we’d be discovered.
When the bottom rivet gave way, the seam opened considerably. I reversed the hacksaw blade and started working my way upward, one rivet at a time.
I cut six of them before we could bend the panel enough to slip through. It was springy and wouldn’t stay bent, so Darla held it open for me while I wormed through. Then I turned and forced it open with my feet, holding it for her.
There was no light whatsoever inside the warehouse. I extracted a flint and steel and tinder from my pack. I couldn’t see much in the brief flashes the sparks made from the flint, but after a moment, one of the sparks caught in the shredded cottonwood bark I was using for tinder. I used the burning bark to light a candle I’d brought along. We never used candles back at the homestead—we were down to two stubs plus the one I held in my hands—but hauling an oil lamp on this commando raid had seemed impractical.
The warehouse was like a giant candy store to Darla. Actually, better. If there’d been a candy store right next door, I’m pretty sure Darla would have ignored it, preferring to ogle the racks of supplies. Nearly everything we needed was here: pumps, wire, piping, plastic sheeting, water heaters, and more.
Darla found the type of wire we needed on an indus-trial-size spool resting on its end on a pallet. She unwrapped two huge coils of wire, walking around and around the spool to do it and cutting the wire with a bolt cutter that was conveniently laid on a nearby shelf.
When she settled the first coil over my shoulder like a life ring, I staggered under the weight. It had to be more than a hundred pounds of wire. I thought I could get across the wall carrying it. Maybe. She put an even bigger coil across her own shoulders.
I noticed that she carefully placed the bolt cutter back in exactly the same position she had found it in. The spool of wire didn’t look depleted at all, despite the burdens weighing us down.
On the way out, I passed a shelf that held boxes of nails—thousands of large framing nails, perfect for our building projects. I remembered the hours of mind-numbing work pulling and straightening nails for reuse. I grabbed two boxes.
Darla held out a hand in a “stop” gesture. She took the two boxes of nails and put them back where I had found them. Then she grabbed two boxes from the back of the shelf, where it wouldn’t be as obvious they were missing, and stowed them in my backpack. She hoisted an armload of some kind of circular leather belts designed to transfer power on an old-fashioned machine. I pointed at some similar rubber belts—surely those would work better for whatever she had in mind, but she shook her head. She passed me the belts, and I stuffed them into her backpack.
To get back through the seam at the rear of the warehouse, I had to take off the roll of wire and push it through first. Once we were both outside, we worked on disguising the spot where we’d entered the warehouse. We brushed snow over our tracks, and I broke off a huge chunk of the nearest dead bush, planting it in the snow directly in front of the spot we’d broken open.
Getting over the car wall was difficult enough carrying nothing. With a backpack loaded with nails and a huge coil of wire, it was almost impossible—well, for me, anyway. I watched as Darla flowed to the top of the wall seemingly effortlessly, marveling at her strength. She stopped at the top, motionless, waiting for the sentries to pass. When she gestured for me to follow, I huffed and puffed my way up, slipping once and nearly tumbling backward off the exhaust pipe I was clinging to. Jumping down on the other side was no fun either—my collar of wire left a huge bruise across my neck and shoulder, and the nails jingled alarmingly in my backpack. But either no one heard or we were long gone by the time they got to the spot where we had crossed the wall.
The next day, Darla and Uncle Paul worked on bringing another wind turbine online. Max and Anna went to the nearby stand of pine trees to harvest more bark. It may have tasted terrible, but it was helping to keep us alive. Alyssa and Ben went to search for edible soybeans or corn, while Ed and I took the truck to drag another big metal tank to the wind farm to serve as the core of the heating system for the second greenhouse. every abandoned farm nearby had tanks they had used for storing liquids—pesticides, fertilizer, or fuel,
according to Darla. The trick was finding a farm with old tanks; the new ones were mostly made out of plastic, and we needed metal for its heat conductivity. I was still concerned about pesticide residue, but Darla insisted there was nothing to worry about.
When Ed and I finished procuring the tank, we started disassembling another farmhouse, collecting glass, pipes, wire, and lumber to build the second greenhouse.
I wanted to start our new living quarters—the longhouse, as we were calling it—but Darla had a point. With only one greenhouse, any failure could cripple our homestead. With two, we had a chance to survive a disaster.
For a few weeks, we teetered on the edge of starvation. Pine bark was filling but not very caloric. We had eaten all the food Dr. McCarthy and Rebecca had given us—even the cans of dog food. (If I ever have to eat pet food again, I hope it’s dry cat food. Alpo is absolutely disgusting.) And I found out why Darla had taken the leather belts. Cut into small pieces and boiled, they were edible. Sort of.
Just when I thought I would have to go back to Warren to beg for more food, Alyssa and Ben got lucky. Along the top of a high ridge about a mile east of our camp, they found a field with corn that hadn’t yet molded. I sent half our group to dig corn but told Alyssa and Ben to keep prospecting for soybeans. Two days later they returned to camp again triumphant, carrying a bag stuffed with fuzzy seedpods containing soybeans. I wasn’t sure how to process or cook them, but Darla knew. Our food situation got better.
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.”
