by Mike Mullin
Uncle Paul was messing with some wire nearby. When he saw me, he smiled and said, “I’m going to go get lunch. Want me to bring you guys something?”
“No,” I replied, “we’ll be along in a bit.” I flopped down alongside Darla as Uncle Paul left the greenhouse. Darla didn’t even look at me.
“I got you a gift,” I said.
Darla didn’t respond, so I pulled out the item Wyn had given me, a lucky rabbit’s foot, and held it in front of Darl’s head, where she couldn’t fail to see it.
“What the hell?” Darla said.
“Well, I thought, you know, the last time you were so . . . anyway, your rabbit, Jack, seemed to pop you out of it, so I thought—”
“You thought giving me a dead rabbit’s foot and reminding me of my mother and my dead rabbit would cheer me up?”
“Um . . . yeah?”
“Christ, Alex. That is the most idiotic, wrongheaded . . . and sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“So you don’t want the rabbit’s foot?”
“I didn’t say that.” Darla snatched the rabbit’s foot from my hand and tucked it into her pocket.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I stood and reached down with my good hand to help Darla up. I wrapped my good arm around her waist, and we leaned on each other, walking toward the greenhouse door. “We’re going to get through this.”
“I know. It’s just—every morning I wake up, and I’m sure I still have a hand. Even when I stare at that damn stump, I can feel my hand moving, my fingers flexing.”
“I know.”
“Red’s got to pay for this.”
“He will. Sooner or later, he will.”
Darla and I started working half days. We still needed far more sleep than normal; most of our energy was being spent on healing. Dr. McCarthy stopped by every two or three days for a while, checking our arms and feet, although it wasn’t really necessary—they were doing fine. Maybe the antibiotics had worked, or maybe the boiling tar had killed all the bacteria in our stumps. After about three weeks, the tar on our forearms started to flake off as new skin grew beneath it. The new skin was pink, shiny, and hairless—it looked like it belonged on a newborn piglet, not my arm. One thing you could say for Red—he was precise. He had chopped through our forearms in the exact same place, about an inch from the wrist.
As soon as we could, we started trying to learn how to do everything one-handed. Darla had a rougher time of it than I—she was trying to train her left hand to do jobs she’d used her dominant hand for before.
Some tasks were ridiculously challenging—climbing the ladder to the sniper’s nest, for example. I finally managed it by hooking my left elbow over each rung as I ascended. It was painfully slow, and by the time I reached the platform, I was shaky and sweating. I rested up there for nearly an hour before starting down the ladder—that was worse still.
It was even harder to relearn to shoot. Operating the bolt on the hunting rifle was a problem—the whole rifle would move instead of just the bolt. I had to move my left forearm to the top of the rifle, hold it down, rack the bolt, and then get back into a shooting position. Not exactly fast or efficient. And while I could line up one shot fine, I had no way to control the recoil. My rate of fire wasn’t even a quarter as good as it had been before I lost my hand.
The semi-automatic rifles were easier, but reloading was still a pain. I could either roll the rifle onto its back to give me something to push against when I needed to seat a new magazine, or I could cradle the rifle against my body
It didn’t really matter—I had never been much good with any kind of firearm. And I didn’t take myself or Darla off the watch rotation, despite the difficulty we had climbing the turbine tower. Hurt or not, it didn’t feel right to ask everyone else to do something I wouldn’t do.
Zik’s family pitched in with a mad fervor. They seemed determined to outwork everyone, as if they were terrified we’d kick them out if they didn’t. We finished the third greenhouse and started building a fourth.
All the tar gradually flaked off our stumps, as if it had been a scab, leaving behind a riotous mess of scar tissue, scabs, and new pink skin. Dr. McCarthy debrided the wound, cutting away some of the scabs, while Ed and Max held my arm still. It hurt so intensely that I nearly passed out. Then he stretched out the skin, stitching it up to protect the end of the bone. That hurt too, but not nearly so bad as the debriding.
Our arms healed faster after that. As soon as my arm quit hurting, it started to itch like ten thousand starving fleas were trapped under my skin. The itching was almost worse than the pain. Every now and then, I unwrapped all my coats and sleeves from the stump and plunged it into a snowbank. That stopped the itching—for a few minutes.
About a week later, the itching started to subside, and my thoughts turned to practical matters. A bionic hand was impossible, but could I fight with the stump? How could I make it more useful?
I went looking for Darla and found her standing on a stepladder, trying to string wire one-handed across the rafters in the shell of the greenhouse, cussing softly as she worked.
“You know what we need?” I said to her back.
She startled, hitting her head on a rafter. “Christ! Don’t sneak up on me!”
“We need hooks.”
She stepped off the ladder and turned to face me. “Do you want an eye patch too? Halloween was . . .” she stopped to think, “six weeks ago.”
I put my good arm around her waist. “If we had hooks instead of stumps, we could climb the ladder in the turbine tower way easier. We could make the hooks the right size to hold a rifle barrel, so we could shoot and reload faster.” What I meant, of course, was that she could build the hooks that size. I had no clue how to even start making a hook.
Darla started to get excited. “I could rig them on a leather cuff, run a strap back to our elbows to keep them on tight.”
“Might even be better than a stump in a fight.”
“Heck, yeah. I could even rig different attachments— how would you like a knife sprouting from the end of your stump?”
“Hmm. I’d probably be wearing the hook whenever I needed the knife. Could you sharpen the outer edge of the hook?”
“Sure. But I’m never going to make out with you again. Knowing our luck, you’d give me a mastectomy by mistake.”
“I’ll take it off,” I said, trying to suppress a giggle.
“I’m putting a ratchet and a socket for screwdriver bits on mine. That’s going to make some stuff so much easier.”
Darla started spending most of her time working on the hooks. That slowed down our greenhouse building some, but it also seemed to banish the last of her lingering funk, so I didn’t object. We were producing more food than we needed anyway.
It took Darla almost two months to finish the hooks. It was more of a job for a blacksmith than an amateur welder, she said. Several early prototypes broke. When she was finally done, my hook was a thing of beauty. A smoothly curved, C-shaped blade, sharpened to a razor’s edge on the outside and rounded off on the inside. Darla’s was ugly by comparison. She only sharpened the point of her hook because of the ungainly ratchet and driver bit attachments welded along its length.
I practiced endlessly, developing modifications of my taekwondo forms to take into account the deadly blade on the end of my left arm. I also spent hours upon hours of mind-numbingly boring practice with the guns—not firing them, just picking them up, aiming, and reloading. I had to be sure I could get the hook in exactly the right spot in the dark, when I was shivering from the cold, and when I was hopped up on adrenaline, which ruined my fine motor control. I got to the point where I could use the hook so well that it was almost as good as my lost hand, at least for shooting. It might be better than a hand in a fight, I mused. I could bring it to bear a lot faster than a belt knife or a gun. In close combat, the first unblocked strike can win the fight, so speed is critical.
; Max found me during one of my practice sessions. I was on watch in the sniper’s nest, so I made use of the time with a little drill. I would scan the horizon with the binoculars and pick out a landmark. Then I would close my eyes, spin two or three times, and try to pick up the unloaded rifle and get it aimed at the landmark without reopening my eyes. I was getting pretty good at it too.
I was in the middle of a drill when I heard a knock on the hatch. I stopped and snagged the eye with my hook, dragging the hatch open. Max poked his head up into the sniper’s nest. “What are you doing up here? Sounds like a herd of elephants stomping on the floor.”
“Just a drill,” I explained while he climbed up into the sniper’s nest, letting the hatch bang shut behind him.
“Cool,” Max said. “You can do that? Find a target with your eyes closed?”
“Usually. I’ve been practicing awhile,” I said. “What brings you up here, anyway? You’re not on watch until tonight, right?”
“Yeah. I wanted to talk to you. We’re almost ready to start the fifth greenhouse, and we have to wire up a new wind turbine.”
“Yeah . . .” Darla and I had gone over this with everyone already. Why was Max rehashing it?
“We’re going to need a ton of heavy-gauge wire. I’m going to go to Stockton and get it.”
“Wait, what? Are you nuts?” I held my hook-topped stump up between us and shook it at him. “Nobody’s going back to Stockton. Ever. Unless we come by a high-powered rifle, scope, and someone who knows how to use it, then I might mount an expedition to snipe Red—but from a hell of a long way off.”
“I could do it,” Max said. “I could get the wire we need.”
“I’m sure you could. Darla and I raided that place four times, no problem. But the fifth was a bloody bitch. Maybe you’d be fine. Maybe you’d get caught on your first raid. No, absolutely not. Your dad would forbid it too.”
“I’m fourteen and a half—almost as old as you were when the volcano erupted.”
“And we treat you that way. You work as hard as any of us. You stand watch like the rest of us. But—”
“But you don’t trust me to do the really important stuff.” Max reached down to open the hatch.
I stepped on the hatch cover, holding it closed and preventing him from leaving. “If that’s the case, I don’t trust myself either, ’cause I’m not going back to Stockton.” “Yeah, whatever.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Max said. “Can I leave now?”
“No. You know, the only person who’ll be impressed if you get a bunch of wire is Darla. You’re not trying to horn in on me, are you?”
“What? No! I would never—”
“I know. Darla wouldn’t be interested either. I mean, you’re a good-looking guy, but—”
“Alyssa doesn’t think so,” Max muttered.
So that was what this mood was about. Max reached for the hatch again, but I didn’t move. I thought about how to respond, until the break in the conversation got uncomfortably long. “Are you the one who’s been leaving Alyssa gifts?” “She thinks you’re leaving them,” Max said. “She got a gold-and-diamond bracelet last week.”
“Hmm. I hadn’t heard about that one. Where’s all this stuff coming from?”
“There’s lots of jewelry left in the farmhouses we’re taking apart for supplies.”
That made sense. Gold and gems were pretty much worthless. You couldn’t eat them or start a fire with them, after all. Most people wouldn’t bother bending over to pick up the Hope Diamond these days. “So you are the one leaving her gifts?”
“No,” Max said emphatically. “You’re not?”
“Are you nuts? Darla would skin me alive.”
“I wonder who’s doing it?” Max said. “I wish they’d quit. I don’t stand a chance with her.”
“That’s not true. Who’s the most important person in Alyssa’s life?”
“You are,” Max said instantly.
“Wrong. Guess again.”
“You ever seen her looking at you? Wish she’d look at me that way.”
“Be serious.”
“Ben. She cares about Ben.”
“Right. Maybe someday she’ll tell you what she did to protect Ben when the Peckerwoods had them both—she hasn’t told me much of it, but it wasn’t pretty. She’s as tough as any of us, as tough as Darla, but in a different way.”
“So what are you saying?”
“You follow Alyssa around like a puppy looking for its mother’s teats—you should be following Ben.”
“All Ben cares about is military stuff—he seems all right, but it gets boring.”
“What do you think we’re headed for anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it. We’re doing okay because nobody thinks to look for us out here. This is supposed to be an empty field with a bunch of wind turbines. As far as I know, only Dr. McCarthy and Rebecca know where we are. Will that last?”
“Maybe.”
“Be real. We’re ranging all over this area scavenging stuff. And we’re going to continue to expand. We need a huge food surplus, in case something goes wrong.”
“Yeah. I guess someone will notice eventually.” Max shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably.
“And what happens if Red or someone like him finds us?” “Nothing good.”
“That’s why the walls of the longhouse are so thick—why we built the sniper’s nest, and why we’ll be building more of them. But still, if Red finds us, we don’t stand a chance. He’s got a standing army of something like 150 men.”
“What’re we going to do?”
“We need allies. Or a much bigger population. A military of our own. See where I’m going with this?”
“Yeah. I’ve got it.”
I backed off the hatch to let him open it. “And Max, please don’t do anything stupid. I’ve got enough on my plate, okay?”
“I won’t.”
I reached out my good hand to shake but thought better of it and pulled him into a rough hug.
The biggest problem that we hadn’t solved to my satisfaction was water. We’d started out melting snow, but after a couple of months, we had used up all the nearby snow. With a dozen people and four greenhouses, we needed hundreds of gallons every day. The easiest way to get it was from the well at one of the abandoned farmhouses, but that meant someone had to haul it back. Two of us, on a rotating schedule, spent all day dragging a sled loaded with water bottles back and forth nearly a mile each way from a demolished farmhouse to our greenhouses. It was an incredible waste of manpower.
Darla had come up with two possible solutions. We could bury a pipe below the frost line and bring the water to us with a powerful pump. For that to work, we would need a lot of pipe and electrical wire that we didn’t have. We also weren’t sure how deep the frost line would become if this unending winter continued. The other— and better—possibility was to drill our own well. For that, we needed drilling equipment that we didn’t have and neither Darla nor Uncle Paul knew how to use.
I put Max in charge of solving the water problem and asked Ed to help and keep an eye on him. Some responsibility might help settle Max down—at least I hoped so.
To prepare, I helped Max and Ed make ghillie suits using the technique Rita Mae, the librarian in Worthington, had taught me. The suits had to blend in with the snow, so we made them by sewing strips cut from an old white sheet onto coats and coverall pants.
As I worked, I thought about Rita Mae and Worthington, Darla’s hometown. I hoped Rita Mae was okay. I hadn’t spent much time with her, but she had always listened to me and treated me well, despite the fact that I had been a stranger to Worthington and a teenager.
When we finished, the suits made Max and Ed look like shaggy white Yetis—completely covered in strips of cloth sewn to their ski masks, coats, backpacks, and coverall pants. When they dropped flat and lay motionless in the snow, they were very difficult to spot, even thou
gh I knew where to look. I liked the effect so much that I insisted on making two more suits—one for me and one for Darla, just in case.
When we finished the suits, Max and Ed started visiting nearby towns to the east. Mostly they were looking for old phone books. A Yellow Pages that listed all the well-drilling companies in northwest Illinois would be perfect. That’d at least give us a lead on where to find the equipment.
They visited Gratiot, Apple River, Lena, and Winslow. They were all empty, burned, and dead quiet. Every scrap of edible food had long since been looted and eaten. Almost everything flammable was gone: furniture had been broken for firewood, books torn up as kindling. If there were any Yellow Pages around in the first place, they were long gone.
One morning Max and Ed had just returned from an overnight trek to Cadiz and Browntown and were reporting on the towns’ conditions—depressingly similar to the other towns they had explored—when Max stopped talking midsentence.
“You hear that?” Max said after a brief pause.
“What?” Ed said, but I had heard it too. We rushed to the door of the longhouse. Outside, the noise was clearer: the distant, echoing pop of gunfire. Were we under attack? And by whom?
Chapter 42
Our lookout was supposed to hit the panic button in the sniper nest if anyone unknown approached. Why hadn’t anyone heard the alarm? Who was on duty in the sniper’s nest? Charlotte, I thought—Zik’s daughter. She was new, but she’d been completely reliable up until now. I scanned the horizon but couldn’t see the source of the gunfire. “Get up top, Ed. Find out why Charlotte hasn’t pushed the alarm. Stay up there. Have her spot while you shoot, if necessary.”
“Sir!” Ed said and took off at a run.
I turned to Max. “Find everyone. Get them into the longhouse, fast.”
“Got it.”
I ran toward the greenhouse we had under construction, looking for Darla. As soon as I rounded the corner of the longhouse, I saw her, already on her way to me. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Want to go find out?”
