Mom hugged me again, which only annoyed me. She hadn’t even acknowledged Darla yet. “I wish you’d move back to town. I couldn’t bear it if I lost you.”
“If things get bad enough, we will. I’m not going to let anyone starve to death.”
Dr. McCarthy entered the room, which was not designed to hold five people. Darla slid onto the counter, sitting with her legs dangling off the floor and freeing up some space for the rest of us. My heart fell when Dr. McCarthy pulled out the packet of seeds I’d given him from the pocket of his coat and handed them back to me.
“No luck,” he said. “Petty won’t trade. Says he doesn’t want people amassing private hoards of food.”
“Makes sense,” Darla said. “If he controls the food, he controls the people.”
“Claims the town has enough seed,” Dr. McCarthy said. “I know you didn’t want him to know the seeds were from you, but after he’d turned me down I told him, trying to convince him to at least loan you some food until you’re on your feet.”
“And he wouldn’t,” I said. I wasn’t the least bit surprised. “No.” Dr. McCarthy was frowning. “Sorry.”
“I was at the mayor’s office when they talked,” Mom said. “I tried to convince him to share.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll figure something else out.” Mom dropped the loaded pillowcase she’d been clutching on the exam table, making a loud thunk in the tiny room. “I gathered up all the food I had. And Dr. McCarthy and Belinda contributed some too.”
“What will you eat?” I protested.
“I’ll work something out with Bob.”
Since when had my mom started calling the mayor by his first name?
“Maybe we’ll tell him we were robbed,” Dr. McCarthy said, “or I’ll ask a few of my patients to help out. Or we’ll go hungry for a few days until the next food distribution. It’ll work out.”
I said, “We can’t—”
“Yes, we can,” Darla said firmly. “We can pay them back when the greenhouse starts producing.”
I nodded, seeing the sense of that, and looked into the bag. There was a ham, part of a pork shoulder, a cloth bag that might have held cornmeal, and a plastic bag stuffed with kale leaves. “Thanks,” I said.
“I wish I had more,” Mom said.
“I brought you something too,” Rebecca said. She held out a paper shopping bag with handles.
I glanced into the bag. It held a five-pound bag of dried cat food—Purina Naturals—and three cans of Alpo dog food. “Huh?”
Darla hopped off the counter, peered into the bag, and then looked at Rebecca, “Smart. I’m amazed that pretty face can hold your super brain in.” Darla held out her fist, and Rebecca bumped it.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I’ve been poking around some of the abandoned houses here,” Rebecca said.
“And,” Darla said, “I bet you found that all the ‘real’ food has been taken. But in a couple of places, they’d left the pet food behind.”
“Yeah,” Rebecca said.
“Perfectly good calories in this stuff,” Darla said as
Rebecca passed her the bag.
“Alex,” Mom said, “do you hear what she’s saying? You’re going to eat dog food instead of moving back here with your family? That doesn’t make any sense at all. What did I do, what did I say, that you hate me so much?” “I am living with my family, and I don’t hate you, Mom.” “Come back—”
“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.