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 though 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?”
“Not really. But I guess we’d better.”
It took about five minutes to gather everyone in the longhouse. Darla and I used the time to change from our work coveralls into the ghillie suits. Then we strapped makeshift snowshoes to our boots. We had found plenty of bicycles during our scavenging, but no snowmobiles, so she still hadn’t been able to replace Bikezilla. These snow-shoes were a poor substitute.
“Stay inside the longhouse,” I told the group once they were all assembled. “Ed and Charlotte are up top. Darla and I are going to try to find out what’s going on. We’ll be back as soon as we can, but before dark, no matter what. Uncle Paul’s in charge.”
“Okay,” Uncle Paul said. He started to add something, but a coughing fit interrupted him. The cough seemed to be getting worse.
I threw on the backpack with my emergency supplies, held the door for Darla, and followed her outside. We set off, heading toward the sound of the gunfire. It seemed to be coming roughly from Warren. We moved slowly, constantly scanning the horizon ahead of us, stopping and listening. The shots tapered off and, after about ten more minutes, ceased completely.
When we got close enough to see the outskirts of Warren, we stopped. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. “It sounded like the shots were coming from here,” Darla said.
“Maybe they were. Or maybe they were coming from the other side of town.”
“If there was a battle in town, people might still have their fingers on their triggers.”
“Let’s go around.”
We skirted Warren, keeping the outermost buildings barely in view. At the far side of Warren, as we came up behind Elmwood Cemetery, we started to hear low moans and the occasional scream. There were no more gunshots, though. We crept closer, using gravestones and tree stumps for cover. The moans were coming from the road—we couldn’t see who was making the noises because of the high snow berms flanking the roadbed. We inched closer, slinking up the side of the snow berm, cautiously raising our heads just high enough to see over.
The road had been transformed into an abattoir. Hundreds of people lay along it as far as I could see in either direction. Many of them were dead. Blood ran at the edges of the road like rainwater, flowing toward Warren in an accusatory river.
Red. It had to be Red.
Chapter 43
Darla looked away, releasing a sigh that sounded like she was in physical pain.
I looked closer. There were knots of people who appeared to be uninjured, moving among the wounded and trying to help. All of them were dressed in ragged clothing, so filthy it was a nearly uniform shade of gray. Both the injured and the ambulatory were gaunt and starved. They could have been extras in a Holocaust movie.
At the end of the road nearest Warren, two figures worked frantically over a prone form: Dr. McCarthy and Belinda, I thought. Beyond them, I could see a line of men stretched across the road, guns held upright against their shoulders. No one else appeared to be armed. I rethought my first assumption—there was no sign of Red or any of his disciplined, black-clad troops.
“Come on.” I tugged on Darla’s sleeve and ducked back behind the snow berm as we worked our way toward Dr. McCarthy. Strange, I thought, that there would be another battle in almost exactly the same location where we were ambushed by the Reds holding Warren eighteen months before. The same place where my Aunt Caroline and Mayor Petty had been shot. Wind and snow had resculpted the surface of the cemetery, hiding all evidence of the earlier fight. From this side of the embankment, the cemetery seemed almost peaceful, its gravestones mostly buried, their tops dusted with snow. But I couldn’t undo the carnage on the road alongside us; the moans of the dying prevented a moment’s solace.