We raided abandoned farmhouses instead. I spent the afternoons on my back in crawlspaces or craning my neck upward in basements to pull staples and liberate lengths of the heavy wire Darla needed for her project. We raided the ranger station in Apple River Canyon State Park, cutting the water heater free with a hacksaw and dragging it out to Bikezilla’s load bed.
The barn began to look like an appliance repair shop, with dozens of water heaters and stoves arranged in neat rows, some in pieces, some intact. A corner held an enormous stack of heavy-gauge wire in various lengths, each piece coiled neatly and labeled.
We used the truck to drag a huge metal tank originally used for storing pesticides from a nearby farm. We left it hitched to the back of the truck sitting outside the workshop Darla and Uncle Paul had built in the barn. Darla cut a hatch in the tank, and she and Uncle Paul started assembling a contraption inside. Darla swore it was a simple water-heating system, but the tangled mess of tubes and wire I saw in there looked as complicated to me as the guts of the space shuttle.
The GEEKs couldn’t help Darla much with the project. There was only room for one person inside the tank, and Uncle Paul hovered at the hatch, talking to her in a strange language full of volts, amps, ohms, and resistances. I worried about exposure to the pesticide residue in the tank, but when I raised the issue, Darla scoffed at me. “We’ll freeze to death a heck of a lot faster than those pesticides will kill me.” I figured she was right and dropped the issue, although I couldn’t get it out of my mind completely. I lay awake that night in bed for more than an hour. Darla claimed modern pesticides were remarkably safe. I was sure she was right, but what if that tank had stored something else? Something older?
When I finally did sleep, I dreamed that Darla had grown huge and stretched out like a cross between the Na’vi from Avatar and Mr. Bendy. She tried to kiss me, but her body bent double, folding over mine so that instead of kissing my lips, she was smooching my Achilles tendon, my head pressed to her stomach, which had somehow molded to fit my face so precisely that it was suffocating me.
I woke with a start. The bell—the one that signaled an attack—was ringing wildly.
Chapter 20
I pulled on my coat and boots, grabbed my go-bag— actually a full-size backpack with frame. I slung the pack over my shoulders and hit the door of the bedroom less than thirty seconds after I’d woken up. Darla was on my heels.
Who was on watch? I wondered as I ran into the hall. Max, I thought. The pull-down staircase to the attic was open, and Max was nowhere in sight. If we were supposed to run, then he should have been in the hall ready to go with us. I charged up the staircase, anxious to find out what was going on.
Max was on the lookout platform, but I didn’t need to ask him why he’d rung the bell. Flames were licking up the outside of the barn, illuminating everything with a flickering red glow. The greenhouses were burning too—wispy blue flames flitted across their skins, turning the irreplaceable plastic into pools of slag.
I started to ask what had happened, changed my mind, and asked a more important question. “Anyone out there?”
“I’m only half finished with my scan,” Max said in a soft voice. “But I haven’t seen anyone. Could the fire have started itself somehow?”
“I don’t see how. Keep looking.”
Darla crowded her way onto the platform. The fire on the barn leapt further up its walls, and a gust of wind carried a blast of heat and choking smoke across us. “My welder!” Darla vaulted off the platform, sliding down the steep, icy roof.
I grabbed for her but missed. “Are you crazy?” Darla was sliding toward the front of the house where the peak of a small porch roof came within five or six feet of the main roof’s gutter. If she missed the porch roof, she would fall more than twenty feet.
Uncle Paul poked his head out from the hatch.
“Get a fire brigade organized,” I told him, then turned to Max. “Stay here. Keep scanning.”
Darla flew off the edge of the roof. If I tried to go through the hatch and down the stairs, it’d take forever— I’d have to push past Uncle Paul and whoever else was coming up.
I hurled myself off the platform, following Darla.
Chapter 21
I flew down the roof headlong, my outstretched gloves throwing stinging particles of snow and ice into my face. I dug my hands in, trying to slow my descent, but all too soon I had reached the edge of the roof. I tried to grab the gutter as I went over, but I was going too fast and couldn’t hold on. Someone was screaming—me, I realized, as my side slammed into the top of the porch roof. A sharp pain spiked through my hip and shoulder, but I didn’t hear anything snapping or crunching, which meant—I hoped—I hadn’t broken any bones.
I rolled sideways, sliding off the ridge of the porch roof in an uncontrolled tumble. Suddenly I was in the air again, still turning as I plummeted into a snowbank beside the concrete steps.
I slowly pushed myself free of the snow, spitting bits of ice and blinking to clear my eyes. Darla was already up, about twenty feet ahead of me, running pell-mell toward the burning barn. My leg and hip hurt as I put weight on them, forcing myself to a run, trying to catch up with Darla, my pack bouncing against my back.
“Wait!” I yelled. “We’ve got to get the panel van out. Our pork!” We hadn’t bothered to move the pork out of the panel van—it made a handy freezer, parked in the barn next to Uncle Paul’s old tractor. If it burned up, we would starve.
Darla didn’t even slow down. “My welder first! Before it explodes!”
I redoubled my efforts to catch up with her. Running into a burning barn to grab tanks of explosive welding gasses did not seem like the best idea Darla had ever had. So of course, that was exactly what she did.
She hurled open the side door of the barn and ducked inside, into the workshop area. The barn was choked with thick smoke. My eyes stung as I followed her inside. The heat was oppressive, overwhelming, and suddenly I remembered charging back into Darla’s barn after Target had set it afire, trying to save our backpacks almost a year and a half ago.
Darla disconnected a hose from a tank. A split second later, there was a pop and flash above us, as whatever gas escaped from the tank ignited near the exposed wooden ceiling. In seconds the entire ceiling was ablaze. Darla passed the first tank to me—it was so hot that it singed my hand, even through my gloves. I ran for the door, carrying the tank, Darla close behind me with the second tank.
The doorframe was afire now too. I plunged through the curtain of fire, running another dozen steps or so on pure momentum before I dropped the tank into the snow at my feet. The snow sizzled and melted around the tank. Only then did I notice that my coveralls were on fire. I dropped into the snow next to the tank and did the stop, drop, and roll I had learned in elementary school.
Darla was already running back toward the burning barn. “Stop!” I yelled.
“I’ve gotta get the welder. Go for the truck!”
I forced myself upright and sprinted to the vehicle door. The top part of the wooden sliding door was alight. I grabbed it near the base and started trying to wrench it open. I slid it back three or four feet—enough to see the nose of the panel van inside. I thought I saw a flicker of movement behind the front windshield but dismissed it as a quirk of the dancing flame and shadow.
But then the van’s headlights popped on, and its engine roared to life. I was still crouched at the base of the door, straining to open it.
The van accelerated. It was aimed directly at my head.
Chapter 22
I lunged backward, trying to get out of the path of the van. There was a mighty crack as the van hit the inside of the rolling barn doors, sending bits of flaming wood flying everywhere. Half the barn door spun free. It struck the side of my head. Everything went black.
* * *
“Alex! Alex! Alex!” Darla was standing over me. “Quit yelling, would you?” I mumbled.
“Are you okay?” She pulled off my ski mask,
looking for blood. My head felt like it was burning up from the inside. “We’ve got to get farther away from the barn. Can you walk?”
I reached up took her hand, and levered myself upright with her help. The barn was fully engulfed in roaring flames. Uncle Paul and Ed were kneeling in the snow with rifles butted against their shoulders, firing at the panel van. It slid through the curve from our driveway onto Canyon Park Road and raced north. If Uncle Paul or Ed had hit the van at all, they hadn’t done any damage to it.
“We need to follow them,” I said. “Get our pork back.” “Sure you’re up to it?”
I stumbled toward the pickup truck instead of answering. It was parked beside the burning barn, close enough that I couldn’t even approach the passenger door. I slid across from the driver’s side instead, letting Darla take the wheel. Uncle Paul and Ed climbed into the bed behind the driver’s side.
As soon as she put it in gear, there were two loud pops from the passenger side. The right side of the truck suddenly dropped a few inches. I ducked—the noises sounded vaguely like gunfire. My head swam.
“Christ and the Michelin man!” Darla yelled. “The fire melted our tires.”
The wheels spun, hampered by the weight of the still-attached metal pesticide tank and the popped tires, and slowly the truck inched forward. Darla got it going pretty fast down the driveway, fighting to hold the wheel steady When she tried to make the turn onto Canyon Park Road, the truck slid sideways instead of turning, burying itself in the snow berm. The tank we were towing slammed into the bank of snow just after we did, throwing up a huge spray of ice.
Darla jiggered the truck back and forth, trying to get going again. The panel van was almost out of sight. She leapt out the door, disconnected the chains attaching the tank to the truck, and tried again. We were completely stuck. We climbed out of the truck and ran for Bikezilla, which we’d left parked by the side door of the farmhouse, but by the time we were mounted up, the panel van was long gone.
I tried to dismount the bike seat, caught my foot on the bar, and fell into the snow beside us.
Uncle Paul knelt to help me up. “You okay?”
“No,” I replied. “I mean, short term, I’m okay. But long term, we’re all screwed. Get everyone together in the living room, would you?”
“I’ll be right there,” Darla said. “I’ve got to move the welder and gas tanks farther from the barn. It’s going to collapse.”
“I’ll help,” Ed said and left with Darla.
Uncle Paul helped me into the living room and then went upstairs to find everyone else.
Max was one of the first ones downstairs. “What happened?” I asked him.
“Nobody woke me. For some reason I woke on my own and went to check if it was time for my shift or not. Nobody was on the platform, and the barn was already burning.”
“Who was supposed to be on watch?”
“Your mom,” Max said in a low voice.
Anna had come into the room while we were talking. “Your mom’s been missing a lot of watches. Max and I didn’t want to tell you—give you something else to worry about. I guess we should have said something.”
“You think?” My fists were balled—all that bullshit about Darla and now this? “I’m moving to Delaware,” I muttered.
“Delaware?” Anna asked.
“Only state where you’re allowed to divorce your parents,” Max said.
“And you know this how?” Anna asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re damn lucky they didn’t torch the house. Then we’d all be eating smoke right now. Go back up on watch,” I told Max. “I don’t think they’ll come back, but why take chances? I’ll fill you in later.”
Max got up but stopped beside me on his way out. “I’m sorry.”
I grabbed his arm and clasped it, bringing my face close to his. “It’s not your fault—”
“I wish I’d woken up earlier.”
“I trusted Mom. You should have told me she was missing her shifts.”
“I know,” Max said quietly. “But you two’d been fighting anyway. Anna and I talked about it—we didn’t want to make things worse.”
“Next time someone isn’t pulling their weight, tell me.
Our lives could depend on it.”
“I will,” Max said. He left to return to the watch platform atop the house.
Everyone except Max gathered in the living room, their go-bags still on their backs. I threw three logs on the fire and blew on it until flames licked up, bathing the room in dancing firelight. When I turned away from the fire, my eyes caught Mom’s. She didn’t look away. Her face was calm, placid even, motionless except for the shifty, red shadows cast by the fire.
I was so angry I wondered if I would spontaneously combust. “How could you?” I yelled.
“How could I what?” Mom replied calmly.
“The watch! I trusted you!”
“What are you talking about?” Rebecca said, incipient panic lifting her voice at least an octave above normal. “The watches! The barn! The greenhouses—”
“Alex,” Uncle Paul said in a low, urgent voice, “take a deep breath. You’re scaring your sister.”
“You’re even freaking me out a little,” Ed said.
Darla took hold of my hand, her concern plain in her eyes. “What happened exactly?”
I swallowed back another yell, closed my eyes, and sucked in a lungful of cold air that tasted vaguely of smoke. I held the breath for maybe ten seconds and then let it whoosh out. I found I was calm enough to explain our situation. I finished my recap of the disastrous night with an overview of the food we had left: “The front quarter of one hog, about five pounds of kale plus any we can salvage from the greenhouses, some wheat we were saving for seed, about ten pounds of flour, and a bit of cornmeal. Maybe enough food for a week or ten days.”
“We’ve got kale seeds,” Uncle Paul said. “We can trade for more pork.”
“Not many people left in Warren willing to trade with us,” Darla said.
“Maybe I could talk Dr. McCarthy into being a straw man for us.”
“What?” Rebecca asked.
“Being a middleman,” Uncle Paul said.
“Good idea,” I said. “That might work.”