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.”
Well, crap. At least she wasn’t pulling away from the hug.
“The kale at the lowest side of the greenhouse isn’t sprouting,” she said.
“I noticed that,” I said.
“It’s too cold over there, too far from the tank.”
I nodded. “What do we do?” If there was one thing I was certain of with Darla and a technical problem, it was that she wasn’t bringing me just the problem. She would have a solution in mind, and it would be something that required my help, or she would have already done it.
“I want some flexible tubing and a pump. We’ll bury the tubing out around the perimeter of the greenhouse and use the pump to circulate hot water through it.” “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”
“There was a full roll of flexible tubing in the warehouse in Stockton.”
“No! Absolutely not.” I let my arms drop from her sides. Darla, however, kept her hold on me. “And there were a couple of pumps that might work.”
“Can’t we raid one of the abandoned farmhouses around here? They have tubes, right?”
“They’re called pipes. And they’re not flexible. Yes, I might make that work—the pump would be a bigger problem, but maybe we could find a sump pump that I could make work.”
“Fine. Do that.”
“I’ll need connections and fittings. Solder and flux if I use copper pipe. The only place I’ve seen that stuff around here is at Furst Distributors in Stockton. So either way we need to go.”
“Forget it. If we keep going back, we’re going to get caught.”
“How? We’ve been over that wall twice now. It’s easy.” “How would I know? Bad luck is usually something you aren’t expecting. And anyway, it’s stealing.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “I mean, a little wire we can’t get anywhere else, I can live with. But we can’t keep looting their supplies.”
“Like Red cares? He steals all our food, and you’re going to get squeamish over a few plumbing and electrical parts he’s not even using and will probably never miss?” “What Red does is his business. What I do is mine. Theft is theft—”
“We need—”
“Maybe it’s excusable when it’s done to survive and no one is hurt by the loss of the goods. But we’ll survive without the flexible tubing or pump.”
“Maybe,” Darla said thoughtfully. “But if we’re going to get the first greenhouse producing as much as it should, build the second, and a longhouse? We’re going to need access to supplies. If not Stockton’s, then someone else’s.” “We’re not. Going. Back. To Stockton.” I lifted her hands from my shoulders and left the greenhouse. Darla could usually talk me into anything. But not this time.
Two nights later we were back in Stockton. Darla had sworn we would play it safe, she would do everything I asked her to, we would take our time getting back in, and blah, blah, blah. So I made us wait in the snow outside the wall for two hours, making sure the guards hadn’t changed their patterns. They hadn’t.
We slipped over the wall fast and easily, two black-clad ghosts flitting into the city. The seam at the back of the building was exactly as we had left it. We wormed our way inside where it was dark and quiet. Nothing had changed. The shelves of hardware were the same as we’d left them, except for a thicker layer of dust.
Chapter 30
Two nights later we were back in Stockton. Darla had sworn we would play it safe, she would do everything I asked her to, we would take our time getting back in, and blah, blah, blah. So I made us wait in the snow outside the wall for two hours, making sure the guards hadn’t changed their patterns. They hadn’t.
We slipped over the wall fast and easily, two black-clad ghosts flitting into the city. The seam at the back of the building was exactly as we had left it. We wormed our way inside where it was dark and quiet. Nothing had changed. The shelves of hardware were the same as we’d left them, except for a thicker layer of dust.
Darla cut two massive coils of black, flexible pipe that were designed to be used with irrigation equipment. The coils were much lighter than the collars of electrical wire. We took two pumps out of their boxes and stowed one in each of our backpacks. We closed up the empty boxes and left them on the shelf so it would look like nothing had changed—at least if no one ever opened the boxes.
It was difficult to make the panel at the back of the warehouse open wide enough to push through the huge coils of tubing. I put my feet against one side of the slit and grabbed the other side with both gloved hands, pushing with my legs and straining to make it open wide enough that Darla could get the rolls of tubing through. A rivet above the ones we had cut broke with an atrociously loud ping. Darla blew out the candle, and we froze in the darkness, waiting, listening, praying that no one would come investigate. No one came.
Working by feel now that the candle was extinguished, we finally got the tubing through and slipped out ourselves. I’d bent the panel so much that I couldn’t get it to reclose correctly. I worked on it for a while and then settled for camouflaging the hole with dead bushes and snow.
Once we were well away from the warehouse and its guards, I whispered to Darla, “I want to go downtown. Look for something.”
“You crazy?” she whispered back. “That’s where their troops are headquartered, where Red’s mansion is. You didn’t want to come creeping around the lion’s tail, and now you’re going to stick your head in his maw?”
“Yeah. You’re right, I guess.” I had wanted to check out the jewelry store I’d seen downtown—see if there were any engagement rings left, but no way was I going to tell her that.
We slipped back over the wall and returned to the homestead in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
It took more than two months to build the second greenhouse. The guts of the first one—the tank with its heating elements—were finished before we arrived at our new homestead, and we had all the glass and building materials salvaged from the old farmhouse. Now we were in the process of tearing down the three nearest abandoned farmhouses and taking the glass, lumber, pipe, and wire we needed.
The unmoldy corn and soy improved our diet immensely, and we quit eating pine bark. Two wind turbines turned out to be more than enough to heat both our greenhouses. In high wind we shut down the turbines so they wouldn’t be damaged. They weren’t designed to spin all that fast, Uncle Paul said. They were geared for slow and steady operation—that was more efficient and also safer for birds. Not that we’d seen any birds since the eruption. Those that weren’t killed by breathing in the ash had no doubt fled south to try to survive the volcanic winter. We also had to shut down the wind turbines if the wind blew steadily for several days. The greenhouses would overheat otherwise.
Chapter 31
It took more than two months to build the second greenhouse. The guts of the first one—the tank with its heating elements—were finished before we arrived at our new homestead, and we had all the glass and building materials salvaged from the old farmhouse. Now we were in the process of tearing down the three nearest abandoned farmhouses and taking the glass, lumber, pipe, and wire we needed.