“Can we still eat it?”
“If it’s a type of mold that’s toxic, then no. You can’t even feed it to pigs or goats.”
I grabbed another ear and started peeling back its wilted brown sheath. It was moldy too. We sampled ears out of every bag we’d harvested. They were all moldy, although some of them only had a light dusting of mold, while others were almost uniformly black with it.
I held out one of the least moldy ears. “You sure we can’t eat this? What happens if we do?”
“I don’t know,” Darla said.
“I’m going to try it—”
“That’s not—”
“I’ll cut a handful of kernels off this ear and boil them ’til they’re mush. If I don’t get sick, we’ll try a little more.” Darla was scowling at me. “It’s not safe.”
“We need the food.”
I left the greenhouse to hunt up a pot and start a cooking fire.
About a half hour later, I was crouched over a pan of boiling water and corn when Ed sidled up to me.
“Let me eat that,” Ed said.
“Did Darla put you up to this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied, “but I wouldn’t have agreed to do it if she wasn’t right.”
“She usually is.” I stuck a spoon in the pot and stirred it. “But not this time.”
“You’re both right,” Ed said. ”We need to find out if we can eat that corn. And that means someone needs to try it.”
“Exactly.”
“But not you. You’re running things around here—”
“Uncle Paul is—”
“Be serious, Alex. He looks to you whenever a real decision needs to be made. We all do. So you can’t afford to be laid up sick. I can.”
I didn’t like his argument at all. It seemed wrong somehow. I’d decided we needed to test the corn on a live volunteer; I should be the one to take the risk. But Ed was adamant. I took the pan off the fire, setting it on the snow behind me to cool. A couple of minutes later, I offered the pan and a spoon to Ed.
He ate all the corn I’d boiled—maybe thirty or forty kernels in total. He said it had an off taste, like wine spoiled by a bad cork. I had no idea what spoiled wine tasted like, so I had to take his word for it.
And then we waited, hoping and praying that Ed would be okay, that the only readily available food we had would prove to be edible, and that we wouldn’t all starve.
We had the answer to our prayers in less than an hour. Ed started vomiting so forcefully that I was surprised not to see his internal organs on the floor.
Chapter 26
I stayed up all night trying to take care of Ed. There wasn’t much I could do for him. I held an old stewpot for him to vomit in. After the first time, he brought up nothing but bile. But despite his empty stomach, he woke from his uneasy slumber about every thirty minutes, retching. I wiped the spittle off his lips and the sweat from his forehead.
A few hours before dawn, I took the stewpot outside to dump it out. There wasn’t much bile in the pot, but it was making the whole igloo smell sour. I scrubbed out the pot with a little snow and stumbled back through the double flap of fabric that served as our front—and only—door.
I tripped over Anna’s legs on the way back inside. She sat up and grabbed my arm.
“Sorry,” I whispered, “I didn’t mean to wake you up.” “It’s okay,” she said, “I was already awake.”
I tried to move away, to get back to Ed, but Anna didn’t let go of my arm.
“What are we going to do, Alex? What are we going to eat? I mean, I’m not hungry yet.”
Liar, I thought. We were all hungry. Always.
“But we need to eat something,” Anna said.
“Anna,” I whispered, putting as much confidence into my voice as I could, “we’ll figure it out. None of us is going to starve. I promise.”
“Okay.” Anna let her hand fall away from my arm. “Get some sleep if you can,” I said.
“You too.”
I crouched by Ed’s bedroll the rest of the night, wondering if I’d lied to Anna.
In the morning Ed was weak but at least not getting any worse. He had a low-grade fever, and he was still trying to turn his stomach inside out but less frequently than he had during the night.
Uncle Paul found me by Ed’s bedroll. A huge coughing fit racked Uncle Paul, and he knelt beside us. “You okay?” I asked.
When it subsided he said, “Yes. What’s the plan?”
I knew instantly what he was asking about: food. Hunger has a remarkable way of focusing your attention. “What do you think we should do?”
“Maybe spread out, try different fields. All the corn around the old farm was good two months ago. Maybe there’s some around here that hasn’t molded yet.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Get it organized, would you? I need to stay with Ed.”
“No, sir,” Uncle Paul replied, “you’re not getting off that easily. You’ve been running things—and doing okay at it, except maybe for letting us spend too much time building the greenhouse and not enough gathering food. I should have said something, but I got so damn caught up in the excitement of making it work, you know? I’ll keep watch over Ed today. You go out there and act confident and get them organized and find us some food.”
I started to protest—Ed needed care, and I was the one responsible for his sickness. Shouldn’t I be staying to watch out for him? But we all needed food. I felt like taffy on one of those stretching machines at the state fair, but the machine was spinning out of control, stretching me thinner and thinner until surely I would snap.
I reached across Ed to my own bedroll and picked up the semi-automatic rifle I had been carrying. The selector lever was on “safe”, but I still carefully kept the muzzle pointed straight up. I passed it to Uncle Paul. He was a maniac about gun safety If you made a mistake—pointing the gun at something you didn’t intend to kill, for example, even if the gun was unloaded, even if the safety was on, even if it was only an accidental wave of the hand holding the gun—then you would have to practice the motion you had screwed up a hundred times, passing the gun back and forth as you counted out loud.
“Fire once if you need help. If you fire more than once, everyone will come at a dead run.”
Uncle Paul nodded, took the gun from me, touched the safety lever, and checked the chamber. “Got it.”
I left the igloo to get a corn-digging expedition organized. Alyssa approached me as soon as I was outside. She leaned in close, whispering in my ear. “Thanks for the chunk of roasted goat. I gave half of it to Ben.”
That didn’t make any sense. “We’re out of goat meat.” “You put the last piece under my pillow.”
“It wasn’t me.” I called everyone together to get them organized for a day of scavenging.
I split us into three teams of two, sending each team to a different field. The plan was to dig up three ears of corn, check them for mold and then if they were moldy, move to a spot at least a hundred feet farther from the igloo and try again. Every team had a shovel, a garden hoe, and a gun. I gave the other assault rifle to Darla, our hunting rifle to Alyssa, and a revolver we’d taken from the Reds to Max. The shovels and hoes all had crude, improvised handles—the original handles had burned—but they were a lot better than digging with our hands.
We spent all day outside digging. Each of the three teams returned with the same cargo: twenty-four ears of moldy corn.
Chapter 27
The only good news? Ed had quit vomiting. I boiled a few leftover scraps of goat fat in water and held the bowl to his lips while he sipped the resulting broth. The rest of us went to bed hungry.
The next morning I called everyone together in the greenhouse. The tank in the greenhouse was warm! It had begun to thaw the frozen dirt around it, and the air in the greenhouse was noticeably warmer than in the igloo. It wasn’t yet warm enough for plants—I could still see my breath in the air—but the progress was hugely encouraging.
“We can’t keep putting all our eggs in one basket,” I said.
“I’d kill my brother for an egg,” Alyssa muttered.
“I do not have an egg,” Ben said.
“We’re all hungry,” Darla snapped.
“Let me finish, please,” I said as calmly as I could. “Maybe we’ll find corn that’s edible, or maybe we won’t, but whatever happens, we’ve only got another three or four days before the lack of food starts to seriously affect our ability to work.” There were nods all around. Max looked scared, but Anna was smiling, although I couldn’t imagine why.
“Darla said she learned about fire building in your old Boy Scout handbook, Max. Did you pack that?”
“Yeah . . .” Max said. “I’m not sure exactly where it is, though.”
“Find it. See if there’s anything in there that’ll help. Something we can eat.”
“I’m about hungry enough to eat paper,” Alyssa said.
Both Darla and I glared her to silence.
“Help Max out if you feel up to it, Ed,” I said.
“I’m okay today,” Ed said. “Little shaky is all.”
“We’ll send out two digging teams,” I said. “Alyssa and Ben, and Uncle Paul and Anna. One hole per field today. We’re looking for soybeans—maybe the mold won’t have affected them—or maybe we’ll get lucky and find some clean corn.”
“Got it,” Uncle Paul said, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a coughing fit.
“You sure you’re okay to go dig?”
“I’m fine.” He practically growled his answer.
“Darla and I are going to take half our seed stock and head into Warren to try to trade.”
“You be careful,” Uncle Paul said. “Whoever torched the old farm is probably still there.”
“I’ll be on the lookout for my fan club,” I said.
“I’ll bring him home safely,” Darla said.
Uncle Paul nodded.
“Okay,” I yelled with false enthusiasm, “let’s find some food!”
Nobody cheered.
Darla and I hid Bikezilla outside Warren and sneaked in, sticking to streets where most of the houses were abandoned. It was just as easy as the last time we’d done it, three weeks before. There were no sentries, no walls, no effort whatsoever at defense. The town was smothered in a blanket of denial even deeper than the snow.
Belinda was at the front desk of the clinic. “Good to see you,” she said. “We were talking about you this morning, wondering how you were getting on.”
“Good to see you too,” I said. “Is Doc McCarthy around?” “He’s with a patient.”
“Mind if we wait in one of the exam rooms? I don’t want anyone to know we’re here.”
“That’s fine.” Belinda led us to the last exam room along the hall.
Darla and I talked about food while we waited. What our favorite foods were before the eruption. A Mulligan’s deep-dish pizza for me, county fair roast turkey legs for Darla. Our favorite ice cream: Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream for me; Haagen-Dazs pineapple coconut for her. Our favorite vegetable: tempura fried green beans for me, anything made with a potato for her. And so on. There’s nothing as interesting as food when you’re starving.
When Dr. McCarthy came in, the first words out of his mouth were, “You look even thinner. You getting anything to eat?”
“No,” Darla replied.
I said, “We got the greenhouse—”
“Can we trust you to keep this secret?” Darla interrupted. Dr. McCarthy nodded. “Doctor-patient confidentiality and all that.”
“We got the greenhouse working. If the soil’s warm enough, we’ll plant tomorrow. But we’re out of food, and we’ve been on short rations for three weeks.”
“No rations at all yesterday,” Darla said.
“Town’s still got plenty of pork, and we wouldn’t have any at all if it weren’t for you. Let me try to talk some sense into Mayor Petty.”
“No,” I said, “it won’t help. If he shares food, it’s an admission that he owes me. I don’t think he wants to admit that to anyone, even himself.”
“What can I do?” Dr. McCarthy asked.
I passed him a bundle of seeds wrapped in part of an old T-shirt. “Take these. Tell Petty they’re yours, and try to trade for at least four hog carcasses. More if you can get them. That’s half our supply of wheat and kale seed.”
“All right.” Dr. McCarthy took the bundle and zipped it into one of the pockets of his coat.
“Do you mind going now? I want to get back to the homestead before dark.”
“I’ll do my best,” Dr. McCarthy said before he turned and left.
A few minutes after he left, someone knocked on the door of the exam room.
“Just me,” Belinda called from outside.
“Come on in.”
She opened the door and stepped in, carrying two small baggies of Froot Loops. “We’ve got two bags of these left. We don’t need them to treat scurvy anymore— everyone’s eating kale from the town’s greenhouses—so usually I give them to kids as a treat.”
“Save them for the kids,” I said.
“Thanks,” Darla said, reaching out to take the two baggies.
Belinda smiled. “I’d better get back to the front desk in case someone comes in.”
We ate the Froot Loops one at a time, savoring them. They practically exploded in my mouth, so sweet that they made me dizzy, a riot of brightly colored chemical flavor so radically different from our usual gray diet that they might have been food for panchromatic aliens.
We ate about a third of the Froot Loops and then put the rest away to share with the others. We didn’t resume the
conversation until the Froot Loops were packed away out of sight. Then, of course, we continued talking about food.
Nearly two hours passed before I heard a knock on the exam room door. I opened it and found myself face-to-face with Mom. She had a pillowcase over one shoulder, and over the other I could see Rebecca standing behind her.
Mom started forward, arrested herself mid-step when she saw Darla, and then recovered, holding her arms out toward me, asking for a hug. I stepped into her arms, patting her on her back.
Rebecca followed her through the door, and my forced smile metastasized into a real one. I disengaged from Mom and wrapped up Rebecca in an enthusiastic hug.
“There’s almost nothing left of you, Bro,” Rebecca said. “Going to start calling you Beanpole.”
“You feel a bit pudgy, Sis. Gonna start calling you Rotunda.”
“It’s not funny,” Mom said. “You’re dangerously thin— do you even weigh ninety pounds?”
I shrugged. I had no clue what I weighed. Mom moved as if to pick me up, but I backed away. “We’re doing okay. We’ve just got to get through this rough patch until our greenhouse starts producing.”