“Uncle Paul? Dr. McCarthy?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“They’re doing better,” she said.
We reached the Bikezilla that held the medical supplies, and Belinda got too busy unloading everything to answer more questions. I assigned four guys to help her carry the supplies, then I gathered up Thelma and the other four Wallers—they needed to be interviewed and given job assignments by Charlotte.
I held the longhouse door for Thelma. She took one step inside and stopped dead.
“Move on in,” I said. “You’re letting out the warm air.”
She turned back toward me. “You’ve got generators running?”
“No. The electric lights all run off the wind turbine.”
“But the wind’s not blowing.”
“There’s a battery bank scavenged from a Prius in a shack behind the wind turbine. We put them out there so nobody’ll get hurt if they explode. The lights are running off battery power right now.” I put my good hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her inside so I could shut the door behind us.
“It’s warm in here,” Thelma said softly, as if she were in a place of worship rather than our living quarters.
It wasn’t, really. We didn’t heat the longhouse directly. But residual heat from the connected greenhouses was usually enough to keep the temperature in the longhouse in the fifties, which felt amazing after the subzero weather outside. I led Thelma through two sets of plastic drapes that separated the longhouse from one of the attached greenhouses. Thelma stared, jaw unhinged, at the neat, closely spaced rows of kale and wheat. In the greenhouse near the heating tank, it was so warm that I quickly started to sweat and had to strip off my coat, hat, and scarves.
“You’ll teach us . . . teach me . . . how to build all this?” Thelma asked.
“Well, I won’t—I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to do all this in a thousand years with a hundred monkeys helping me. But Darla and my uncle Paul will teach you. That’s part of the deal, right?”
“I want to learn everything.”
We found Charlotte in the kitchen area making some kind of soup for dinner.
“Heard we’re down to eighty-three,” I said.
“Three more died,” she said, giving me their names. They were all newcomers, nobody I knew well. “But we’re up to ninety-eight total residents, not down.”
“Wait, what?”
“Three families showed up together two days ago, not long after you left for Sterling. Evans gave them jobs and told me to add them to the census. Was that okay?”
“Yeah, fine. But how’d they find us?”
“I don’t know.”
I introduced Charlotte to Thelma and the four other Wallers. Charlotte had Thelma take over soup-making duties, so Charlotte could interview the others. They seemed to be doing fine, and I left them to check on the greenhouse we were building.
At dinner that night, I introduced myself to the newcomers and sat with them. They had heard a rumor that there was a new settlement east of Warren amid the windmills and that we had food. Then they had just wandered around the wind farm until they found us. I wondered how many more people would be showing up on our doorstep. We needed to get more greenhouses built ASAP.
For the next month, I spent my days working on the greenhouses. I couldn’t do the electrical work or welding, but after building the first four greenhouses, I knew enough to manage the structural part of them. We finished the fifth greenhouse and started building three more plus another longhouse. We planned to build four greenhouses around every longhouse. Those would require two windmills and a battery bank to power. Every windmill we powered up would include a sniper platform; that way, we would have interlocking fields of fire covering our whole settlement. All the longhouses would be built as defensive structures with walls thick enough to resist most small-arms fire.
I asked Ben to lay out an optimal settlement plan assuming we continued to grow. He presented me with plans for two hundred, five hundred, one thousand, and twenty thousand inhabitants. I hadn’t asked him for a plan for a city that size, and I hoped we wouldn’t grow to anything like that large. Managing a city of twenty thousand sounded like a nightmare. Ben also came up with a numbering scheme for everything. Each longhouse would have a number, and the associated greenhouses and turbine towers a letter. So Turbine Tower 2-A would be the first tower at the second longhouse, and so on.
At night I worked on the wedding. Darla did most of the planning, but she parceled out little tasks to me— figuring out whether we could bake a cake (no, we didn’t have baking powder or eggs), finding enough safety pins to hold preapocalyptic dresses and tuxes onto postapoca-lyptically thin bodies, and tracking down a wedding service to adapt. That last one was easy; nearly every abandoned farmhouse had a Bible, and one of them had a Lutheran Book of Worship with a wedding service too.
Belinda made great use of the medical supplies; only two more people died, and nearly everyone would be healthy enough to attend the wedding. Only one question gnawed at me: would Mom even come?
Chapter 56
I desperately wanted Mom to come to the wedding, but I was equally terrified to ask her. What if she said no? So I put off the trip to Warren. And put it off some more. I realized I was being terribly unfair to Rebecca—she loved Darla, and if she didn’t get to come to the wedding, she would probably skin me and make a winter coat out of my hide.
Three nights before the big day, I was on guard in one of the sniper nests. We had four of them built by then, and we staffed all of them 24/7. Our security procedures would make attacking Speranta with anything less than a tank suicidal. I routinely gave myself the worst shifts, the ones that started at 2:00 A.M. or 4:00 A.M., both because I figured that was when we were most likely to be attacked, and because I had noticed that people seemed more enthusiastic about heinous tasks when I was also willing to do them.
I was scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars, looking at darkness, darkness, and more darkness, when a knock sounded on the hatch under me. I just about jumped out of my skin.
Uncle Paul’s muffled voice said, “You’re lying on the hatch.”
“Actually I’m having a coronary on the hatch,” I said as I scooted aside and pulled it open.
“Sorry. Can’t wait until we get a telephone system installed.” Uncle Paul flopped on the floor, panting. “That’s a ridiculously long climb.”
“You’re working on telephones?” I let the hatch clang shut and went back to scanning the horizon while we talked.
“It’s on the list. After the wedding. Should be possible. We’ve got power, and we can scavenge the components.” “What about cell phones? Or some way to communicate with scouts? Ben wants me to set up a patrol schedule.” “Tougher. I don’t know much about cellular switching systems. Maybe radios would be easier. I’ll work on it,” Uncle Paul said. “Anyway, I didn’t come up here to talk about telephones.” He paused for a long while. Just as I was getting ready to break the silence, he said, “Does my sister-in-law or Rebecca know you’re getting married on Sunday?”
I cringed. I had been avoiding the topic, even with myself. I certainly didn’t want to talk about it with Uncle Paul. “I don’t know.”
“Well, has anyone gone to Warren to tell them?”
“Not that I know of.”
“They’re going to be pretty upset if they don’t get an invitation to your wedding.”
“Mom’ll be upset either way. Sometimes I think the only thing that would make her happy is an invitation to Darla’s funeral.”
“That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“Neither is the way she acts around Darla!”
“Maybe not. You know, the relationship with parents is never easy. It’s so fraught with emotion that neither the parents nor their children can think about it rationally.”
“I don’t really think of myself as a child anymore.” “You’re not. But becoming an adult doesn’t make it easier. Harder, really.”
I rolled to a new sniper port to continue my scan of the horizon. “I don’t get where I went wrong with Mom, why it’s all screwed up so badly.”
“Assigning blame isn’t going to help. If you can, think about it like a political problem. You’re getting damn good at those.”
I snorted, my eyes still glued to the horizon. “You liked the way I outmaneuvered Evans, huh?”
“He still doesn’t know what hit him. If the relationship with your mother were purely political, what would you do?”
“I’d take the offensive.” And that was when I knew exactly what to do.
Chapter 57
In the morning I went to Warren. I left Uncle Paul in charge of Speranta and Darla working on a wind turbine—I thought my mother might be more open to the news if she wasn’t staring at Darla as she heard it. Darla asked who was going with me, and I said I had talked to Uncle Paul, which was technically true, if a little deceptive. I had decided to go alone—on skis I would be fast and stealthy.
I breezed into Warren a little before lunch. There were still no sentries, no wall, not even so much as a barbed-wire fence. I skied right up to the back door of the house where Mom and Rebecca were living.
When I peeked in the window, I was greeted by a scream from Mom—she and Rebecca were sitting at a table right under the window, sewing by the light it let in. There was a huge pile of cloth scraps and old clothing on the table, which they were laboriously patching by hand.
I waved through the glass, and Mom sat back down heavily. Rebecca smiled and waved back before popping up to open the door. I knelt and started slowly untying the straps that held my boots to the skis—we had far more pairs of downhill skis than cross-country skis, so someone working under Darla’s direction had converted a bunch of downhill skis so they could be attached to the toes of modified hiking boots. They worked fine, but they were a real pain to put on and take off.
Before I had even the first ski detached, Rebecca was outside. “Oh. My. God. That hook is wicked, bro.” She reached out as if to touch it, and I moved my hook away. “Careful. The edge is razor sharp.”
She drew back her hand. “I’d heard about it from Dr. McCarthy, but whoa.”
“It wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had on a Thursday night,” I said.
“I always pictured you more as a Peter Pan type than Captain Hook.”
I wondered how long the Captain Hook comments would follow me. The rest of my life, probably. “Yeah, me too.”
“I kept meaning to come visit,” she said, “but it got crazy busy.”
“Same here.” I gave her the short version of recent events while I wrestled off the skis. Then we were inside. Mom stood in front of the door, hands wrapped around herself as if she were cold. Well, she probably was—it was freezing in there. I had gotten used to the longhouse, which was usually above fifty. Mom’s house was cold enough that I could see my breath in the air.
“Alex, your hand . . .” Mom said, still clutching herself. Go on the offensive, I reminded myself. “It’s fine, Mom.” I held my arms wide for a hug. “Good to see you.” She opened her own arms, wrapping herself around me, and for a moment it felt like everything was all right. “How’ve you been?” she asked. “I mean, other than . . .” “The hook’s not bad once you get used to it,” I said. “And everything else is going well. We’ve got enough food, finally. . . . you should come visit. Bring your mending. We’ve got an electric sewing machine hooked up you can use. Or we can get you new clothes pretty easily.” The Wallers had more clothing than both our settlements could use in a lifetime.
“You’ve got electricity?”
I kicked myself mentally. We could handle a few more refugees, but not the floods that might show up if word got around about how well-off we were. But I couldn’t rewind the conversation. “We only use it for sewing when the wind is blowing and the batteries are fully charged. Heating the greenhouses is the top priority. But yeah, nobody sews by hand in Speranta anymore.”
“Well, I’d love to see that and to use your sewing machine, but I’ve got new duties here as First Lady. And I’ll be principal of the new school when it opens next month. Maybe I can come see your little settlement in a few months when the school’s running well.”
First Lady? What did she mean by that? And little settlement? And how was it that Warren could mow down kids in the road a few months ago and now be opening a school? Focus, Alex, that’s not what you’re here for. “Could you make a short trip this weekend? It’s not far, only a couple hours on skis.”
“I really don’t have the time, honey.”
“I know! We could pick you up on a Bikezilla. You could sit in it and just ride there and back—make it a one-day trip.” It would be a hard day for whoever was pedaling the Bikezilla, but whatever.
Mom sat back down and picked up the jeans she was patching. “What’s so important about this weekend anyway?” I hesitated. There was no easy way to say it. “Darla and I are getting married on Sunday.”
“Absolutely not!” Mom snapped.
Chapter 58
“You could consider it, at least!” I said.
“No. You are not marrying that girl.” Mom held the needle as if she was going to stab it into the jeans. “I wasn’t asking for permission!”
“Good, because I forbid it.”
“Mom!” Rebecca said.
“Don’t ‘Mom’ me. That girl is bad for him.” “After all the time I spent trying to convince you to invite Alex, to let me go tell him?” Rebecca said. “You’re just going to shoot him down when he reaches out to you?”
Huh? “Tell me what?”
“Alex, I swear to God,” Rebecca said, “I’ve had bowel movements more observant than you are.”
I wasn’t sure whether to scream or cry—I felt like doing both. “What am I supposed to be observing?”
Mom was stitching away furiously, ignoring us both. “Her hands,” Rebecca said. “You’re supposed to notice her hands.”
I looked. They were the same hands Mom had always had—long fingers with angles a little too sharp to be elegant. “Her rings,” I whispered. They had been gold— yellow. Now they were platinum. And the diamond on her engagement ring was, like, twenty times the size of the one Dad had given her. “Why’s she got new rings?”
“She remarried, dumbass.” Rebecca whirled toward Mom. “I can’t believe your hypocrisy. You’re going to forbid Alex from marrying Darla, you’re not going to his wedding, and you didn’t even invite him to your own?”