Since we now had a good way to haul bulk supplies, I took my team in search of food. I wanted to check out the GFS warehouse we had found listed in the Yellow Pages. We found it—but it turned out to be a retail outlet store, not a true warehouse. It had been cleaned out completely.
Next we trekked to the Kraft Foods plant. It turned out to be a place where they made chewing gum, of all the useless things. Why, oh why, couldn’t it have been a macaroni-and-cheese plant? I could probably live for years on a diet of macaroni and cheese, and kale.
The Pepsi bottler had been looted. There was plenty of diet soda left, but nothing else. The soda was useless, of course. We had all been on the world’s most horrible diet in the two and a half years since the volcano erupted. If there was any high-fructose corn syrup left in the big stainless steel tanks at the bottling plant, I couldn’t figure out how to get at it.
The PetSmart and PETCO were cleaned out too. Even the rawhide dog toys were gone—boiled down as desperation food, I figured. I thought about how hungry people must have been to eat dog toys. I could relate; I still remembered the hard knots of boiled leather belts sliding down my throat when I had been so close to starvation during our first months on the homestead.
The next day we checked retail grocery stores, even though I knew it would probably be hopeless. At the fifth one—a half-collapsed WalMart—I finally found something interesting. There was no food, of course; even the pallets in the back room had been cleared out. But amid the torn and discarded shrink-wrap, I found routing tags. All the grocery pallets had come from the same place, a distribution center in someplace called Sterling, Illinois. How much stuff would be stored in a WalMart distribution center? And how far was it from Rockford? I quizzed the guys with me until I found someone who knew— Sterling was a tiny town about an hour’s drive south of Warren.
When we rejoined Darla’s group that night, I talked to the rest of the team. Trig had worked in a WalMart. He had never been in one of their distribution centers, but he said they were huge—over a million square feet—and would have everything stocked in a WalMart supercenter, from food to camping supplies to pharmaceuticals to firearms and ammo. It was obvious where we had to go next.
Chapter 51
We spent another two weeks in Rockford. Darla and her team switched to building four-person bikes with even bigger load beds—they built seven to go with the first two-person bike so all thirty of us could ride back to Speranta. In the meantime my team continued scavenging to fill the huge list of supplies we needed for the new greenhouses and longhouses.
Darla came with us to Grainger Industrial Supply on the last day to help select and load supplies. When Darla asked for the grand tour of Grainger, I begged off. I had seen the whole place already
“Where’re you going?” Darla asked.
“I’ll take a quick walk. My head hurts a little,” I lied.
“You shouldn’t be wandering around by yourself,” Darla said.
“Ed,” I called, “come take a walk with me, would you?”
“Yessir.”
As soon as we were out of Darla’s sight, I broke into a jog. “Got a ways to go,” I told Ed. “Mind a run?”
As Ed ran past me, he said, “I will run you into the ground, sir.”
I laughed and picked up the pace. The place I needed to visit was about two miles away. We had passed it several times during our scavenging trips, but there had always been too many people around—word might have gotten back to Darla.
Ed and I reached it in about twenty minutes, moving at a fast jog: J. Kamin Jewelers. The glass entry door and windows at the front of the building had been broken out and some of the stock looted. That probably happened in the days immediately after Yellowstone erupted. Nobody would bother looting a jewelry store now—a cup of rice was worth more than a cup of diamonds these days.
One row of display cases had been turned on their sides. Ed and I flipped them upright, and I rooted pig-like in the glass shards on the floor for a while, tossing aside bracelets, earrings, and loose diamonds. I found a couple of antique, wind-up watches and took those, though that wasn’t what I was after. Finally I hit pay dirt: a velvet tray of engagement rings that had landed upside-down under the fallen display case. They were dazzling in their variety, with diamonds in more shapes and sizes than I had known existed: square, round, pear-shaped, even diamond-shaped diamonds. A couple of the rings featured emeralds or rubies along with the diamonds. I took them all; I had no idea what sort of ring Darla might prefer.
“Might need a couple of these too, Chief,” Ed said. He was holding another velvet tray, this one full of plain gold wedding bands.
“You think she’ll say yes?” I said.
Ed smiled. “I’d bet your life on it.”
“That’s about what it feels like.” My palms were sweating despite the diamond-sharp air in the store.
“Scared to death, aren’t you?” Ed patted my shoulder gently.
It didn’t make any sense; I’d faced down prison escapees and cannibals. I knew Darla wanted to get married. Why should I be so afraid?
“I remember what it felt like when I popped the question to Mandy. Never so terrified in my life. Or so happy to hear the word yes . . . damn, I miss her.” Ed bit his lip and turned away
I wasn’t sure what to do. Ed didn’t seem like the kind of guy you hugged. I awkwardly patted him on the shoulder. “We’d better go before Darla starts wondering where we got to.”
“You’re doing the right thing, you know? I’d trade my soul in this world and the next for another day with Mandy You got the chance for something like that, you grab it with both hands and hold on, even if the whole world is dying around you. Maybe especially then.”
“I know, Ed. I love her.”
Ed turned to face me. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled him into a rough hug, and we slapped each other on the back. We left the store together, my arm around his shoulders, but in some sense we were facing in totally opposite directions. Ed’s tears honored his past, his lost life with Mandy. I felt fiercely alive, sad for Ed, but also full of wild joy for the future. My future with Darla.
Chapter 52
On the fleet of Bikezillas, the return trip to Speranta took only three days. We would have made it in two except that one of the bikes broke down and we had to stop for repairs.
As we pedaled up to the longhouse, my niece Anna burst from the doors, her wild, long blond hair escaping from her stocking cap and trailing in the wind as she ran toward us. I climbed down from my seat and opened my arms to give her a hug. Instead of hugging me back, she stopped, allowed me to hug her for a moment, and then pulled back.
“Dad’s really sick. It’s way worse than before,” she said. “And Dr. McCarthy’s got it too.”
I followed her into the longhouse and almost got run over by Belinda, who was on her way out. “Alex,” she said, “we need azithromycin, doxycycline, cefaclor, or vancomycin. I’ve been trying to convince Evans to send out an expedition to find them, but he won’t—”
“Wait, what? I left Uncle Paul in charge. What’s Evans got to do with anything?”
“He’s . . . your uncle’s taken a bad turn for the worse. Pneumonia with sputum-producing cough, 104 fever, chills, chest pain . . . Jim’s got it too. They’re both in bad shape.” The fact that she’d referred to Dr. McCarthy by his first name emphasized just how worried she was. Everyone knew she and McCarthy had a steamier relationship than they let on—it was impossible to keep a secret like that when you’re living in a one-room longhouse. But Belinda stubbornly stuck to calling him “Dr. McCarthy” as if the formality would prevent us from catching on. “But why is Evans—?”
“We’ve lost a lot of people, Alex. Evans just kind of started organizing things.”
“Lost?” A cold finger of fear wrapped itself around my heart and squeezed.
“Who?”
“Zik’s wife, Mary, and eighteen of the newcomers. The bodies are outside, frozen—I’ve been bugging Evans to organize a burial detail, but . . .” Belinda shrugged.
“Okay. I need a list. Everything you need. Make sure to put every kind of medicine that might help on the list so that if one thing isn’t available, I can look for a substitute.”
Belinda pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and held it out toward me.
“No. Keep it until morning. Go over it. Read it to Dr. McCarthy, if he feels up to it. Make sure it’s thorough, ’cause I have no clue what to look for.”
“Maybe I should come with you.”
“I’ve got a lead on a warehouse where there might be medical supplies.” Nearly every WalMart had a pharmacy— the drugs had to come from somewhere. “It’ll take me a minimum of four days to get there and back. You’ve got to stay and care for your patients.”
Belinda made me put on an improvised cloth mask and led me into one of the greenhouses, where nearly three dozen people were on bedrolls—segregated from the still-healthy folks in the longhouse. A faint scent of sweat and feces grew stronger as we approached. Raspy coughs and wheezes filled the air. Dr. McCarthy lay on his side; a trickle of blood-flecked spittle flowed slowly from the corner of his mouth to the pillow.
Belinda wiped his mouth with a rag. “You up to going over the medication order, Jim?”
“Sure thing, hon.” His voice was a terrible thing: low, raspy, and diseased. “Glad you’re back, Alex.”
I seized his hand, clutching it. “I’m going to go get the medicines you need, Doc. Just hold on until I get back, okay?”
“No problem,” he wheezed. “I’ll bury you all, right along with the rest of my patients. I must be the world’s worst doctor.”
“You’re the best doctor in the town of Speranta by a long shot.”
Dr. McCarthy started to laugh, but that turned into a long coughing fit. “I’m the only doctor in Speranta.”
Belinda started quizzing the doctor on medicines, and I turned to Uncle Paul on the bedroll behind me. He looked terrible. His eyes were sunken and black, his skin pallid and sweaty, his voice weak.
“Alex,” he whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I asked. “Impersonating a zombie when it’s not Halloween?”
He choked out a laugh. “No, for—” A coughing fit overwhelmed him.
“Just rest and get better, okay? I’ll go get medicine tomorrow. First thing.”
I left his bedside, thinking about the trip to the distribution center in Sterling. There were several possibilities. The distribution center might already have been completely looted. That possibility didn’t bear thinking on. The best but most unlikely case was that it was abandoned but still full of supplies. More likely, it might have collapsed under the weight of the ash and snow. If that was the case, I would need a lot of manpower to unbury the supplies we needed.
A fourth option occurred to me then—what if there were still people alive in Sterling, surviving on the gleanings from a million-plus square foot warehouse? If that was the case, I needed to bring something to trade. What would people who had been living on canned food for two and a half years want most? That was easy: fresh food.
I made my way across the room to our food storage area. We had put a bunch of old metal cabinets against the wall in the coldest corner of the longhouse. It was like a refrigerator, but it didn’t drain any electricity. I figured I would package up almost all of our stored kale and get it ready to take on my expedition tomorrow.
One of the newcomers, a guy a year or two younger than I, was standing guard at the “refrigerators.” “Hey, Deke,” I said, reaching for the cabinet.
He laid his hand flat against the cabinet door, holding it closed. “Director Evans says nobody but him’s to distribute food.”
“It’s me, Deke.”
“Director Evans says especially not you.”
Wait, what? I briefly contemplated kicking his legs out from under him. That would get his hand off the cabinet door. But it wasn’t his fault. “You know who built the room you’re standing in, right?”
“You did, sir. But Director Evans—”
“I know, I know. Where is he, anyway?”
“Out in the new greenhouse.”
I found him supervising a group of people lifting one of the rafters that would support the greenhouse’s glass roof. His idea of supervision was calling out directions. When I was running things, I made it a point to put my shoulder under the heaviest part of the beam.
“Welcome back,” he called out when he saw me, his face lit by a smile that looked genuine enough.
“We need to talk.” I pulled him aside. When we were out of earshot of the work crew, I said, “Why’s Deke got orders not to let me into the food supply?”
“We’ve got fifty-six hungry people here. Eighty-six now that you folks are back. It only seemed sensible to post a—”
“I’m not debating the need for a guard. What I want to know is why he was given specific orders not to let me into the food stores.”
“Just a misunderstanding,” Evans said smoothly. “I’ll get it straightened out. Your uncle got sicker right after you left. Someone had to step in. And the refugees look up to me—I fed a lot of them, or at least their children, in the camp in Galena.”
I didn’t buy the misunderstanding explanation. “How’d you wind up as a refugee anyway? Last time I saw you, you were in tight with Black Lake.” To be fair to Evans, I supposed he had no choice but to kiss up to the FEMA subcontractors who ran Camp Galena; they wouldn’t have allowed him to help feed the refugees otherwise.
“Not as tight as you thought, I guess. I used all my resources acquiring food for the refugees’ children. I had hoped FEMA would see that I got home. But when Black Lake pulled up stakes and abandoned the Galena camp, they left me behind. I’m just as homeless as you are.”
I was suddenly furious. “I am not homeless. This is my home.” I whirled and stalked away. I was afraid I would punch him the next time he opened his mouth.
I went to find Ben. He, Max, and Alyssa were loading up a Bikezilla with empty jugs, preparing to haul water from the farmhouse well almost a mile away. I hopped on the fourth bike seat and rode there with them. We really needed to dig a well closer to the longhouse.