In a way, she was right. So many people mouthed these words and then ignored their meaning, ignored the hard work and sacrifice the vow required. In that sense, we were already more married than many couples and had been for more than two and a half years.
But in another way, she was wrong. There was something wonderful about saying the words here, in front of our whole community. In front of God, maybe. I had never been much of a believer, but in that moment, it wasn’t difficult to feel that something holy was taking place, that we were being watched and blessed from above.
Max fumbled the ring, and it rolled around on the floor for a moment. I had visions of it falling through one of the cracks in the floorboards. We had built the long-house fast and loose—there were plenty of ring-size cracks in the floor. But Max stopped the ring by the simple expedient of stomping on it. He plucked it off the floor and handed it to me, his face burning redder than the candles.
“With this ring, I thee wed,” I said as I slipped it onto Darla’s finger. She slipped my ring onto my right hand—I would wear it there forever. Darla had offered to make me a ring holder for my hook, so I could wear it on the traditional side, but I had said no. I wanted the ring against my skin, where I could feel it, reminding me of this day and of this promise.
Then Reverend Evans spoke the words I had been waiting through the whole service to hear. “You may kiss the bride.”
I kissed Darla gently like the first time we’d kissed on an old couch in an abandoned house east of Worthington, Iowa, more than two and a half years ago. When our lips parted, Darla whispered, “Did I ever tell you that you’re a five-star kisser?”
“No,” I said. “There aren’t enough stars in the sky to describe how it feels to be kissed by you.”
Darla smiled and turned to the crowd, holding my hand aloft. “Let’s party!” she shouted.
Everyone quickly cleared out the middle of the long-house. We didn’t hold a procession—there was nowhere to proceed to anyway. I turned to snuff the candles; we might need them if our electricity failed.
The violinist was joined by a banjo player, and Max set up a scavenged drum kit. It was a strange trio, but the banjo player knew a bunch of square-dancing songs, so he led and Max and the violinist just followed along.
Flasks and bottles appeared as if by magic, people sharing their long-hoarded personal stock to celebrate. Nearly everyone offered me a drink, but I turned them all down. I didn’t love the taste of alcohol, and there was no way I wanted to be drunk on my wedding night. Darla drank until her cheeks were flushed, and her smile grew a little brighter than usual.
We did as many of the usual reception rituals as we could. Darla tossed a plastic bouquet over her head, and Alyssa snagged it out of the air. She carried it back to where the band was set up and leaned over to smooch Max. He was so surprised, he dropped his drumsticks.
I went over and pounded Max on the back by way of congratulating him. He stood up and leaned close, whispering, “Someone left a necklace under Alyssa’s pillow three nights ago. She thinks I did it.”
“You didn’t?” I said.
“No.”
“I wonder who’s giving her stuff? Whoever it is has been remarkably secretive—it’s been going on for what, a year now?”
“A year and a half,” Max said.
“You’d better tell her it’s not you, before she finds out some other way.”
“I guess you’re right.” Max shrugged, and I went to rejoin Darla.
We didn’t have a traditional cake, but someone had made a dense, fudgy concoction from supplies we’d gotten from the Wallers. Darla and I cut the ersatz cake and smeared it all over each other’s faces. I held her tightly and cleaned off her face with my tongue, while Rebecca looked on in disgust. I thought I was being eminently sensible, though—no sense letting all those calories go to waste, right?
Eventually the party wound down, and people started retiring to their bedrolls at the edges of the longhouse. I told the band to pack up so those who wished to could sleep. Darla and I stayed up a while longer, talking with the remaining revelers, some of whom were well and truly smashed. My feet ached and my head spun, more from exhaustion than the tiny bit of alcohol I had consumed.
“You want to go to bed?” I whispered to Darla.
“Thought you’d never ask,” she replied with a wicked grin.
Usually we all slept out in the middle of the longhouse floor. There was no privacy whatsoever. A room that can sleep ninety-eight people comfortably can’t really be cut up into ninety-eight bedrooms, and we didn’t have the time or manpower to build partition walls anyway. Greenhouses took priority. For tonight, though, someone had erected a temporary screen made of plywood panels around one corner of the room. I lifted Darla into my arms and carried her into our makeshift bedroom to the catcalls and cheers of the partiers.
Someone had strewn plastic roses all over our bedroll. I laid Darla down atop them, and she immediately started rolling, digging around and tossing the roses aside. I brushed the faux roses off my side of the bedroll, kicked my shoes off, and lay down beside her.
Darla attacked me—that’s the only way I can put it. She rolled on top of me and kissed me with a fire and passion and intensity that left me breathless and bruised. Her hand was everywhere, and she was in far too much of a hurry to bother undressing. Instead she shifted bits of clothing and undergarments, and things were going much too fast, but I wanted nothing more than to lie back and enjoy it, to let her do whatever she wanted with me.
But I couldn’t. I pushed her off me, rolling her onto her back beside me.
“What the hell?” she said, loud enough that I was afraid people on the other side of the screen would hear.
“We can’t,” I whispered. “I mean, I want to, and we can do anything you want to except that, but . . .”
“But what?” Darla said, still talking way too loudly for my comfort.
“You already know what,” I said. We had tried to buy condoms during our visit to the Wallers. There weren’t any to be had at any price. They had a small stock of Triphasil—a birth control pill—but it would have cost us a small fortune in kale. We had opted to buy more antivi-rals and antibiotics instead.
“I don’t care, Alex. I want children. Lots of them. You know that. There’s no reason not to start now.”
“There’s every reason not to start now!” Now I was the one talking too loudly. “You could easily—”
“That tired old argument? Animals have babies without veterinarians every day. Women had babies back when medical ‘science’ consisted of balancing the humors in the body with leeches. I won’t magically self-destruct just because I get preggers.”
“Animals die in childbirth, Darla—you know that better than I do. And women used to die at a far higher rate than I—”
“At what rate?” Darla was flat-out yelling now. “One percent? Two percent? Ten percent? I don’t care. I will take that risk. I want to take that risk.”
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t take that risk. I can’t lose you, Darla.”
She was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was softer. “I think we should take that risk. A baby would be important to our community. Important to Speranta. It would bring real meaning to the name Hope.” “You don’t have a baby just to give hope to other people. And if we added another grave—your grave—to the rows outside, it would kill me. Might kill Speranta too.” Darla made a scoffing noise.
“You underestimate yourself. Without you, we’d have no Bikezillas, no greenhouses, no wind turbines—”
“I couldn’t have figured out the electronics without your uncle.”
“You would have, eventually. You’re the heart of this community.”
“No, you’re the heart. I’m the brains.”
“On every subject but this one, I agree with you,” I said. Darla scowled at me for a too-long moment. Then she forcefully smoothed down the skirts of her wedding dress so that they covered her long, muscular legs. She reached up to switch off the lamp. Then she rolled over, ignoring me. And that was how I ruined our wedding night.
Chapter 61
More people filtered into Speranta over the following weeks and months. The wedding had been in April, and by mid-June, Charlotte’s census had passed four hundred. People were crowded into the two long-houses we had finished.
I worried that the extra refugees would be a burden, a weight that would sink the precariously floating SS Speranta, but I was wrong. Charlotte had a positive genius for finding skills we needed among the newcomers. We got a guy who had paid his way through college by working in his dad’s well-drilling company. With his help, we were finally able to get a well drilled inside Speranta, ending the constant, mile-long water treks to the nearest farmhouse.
Charlotte practically bounced off the walls with joy when a woman showed up who had sold irrigation equipment in her old life. I didn’t see what the big deal was until we hooked her up with a plumber, and they designed and built an automatic watering system for one of the greenhouses. The new system increased production and freed up a massive amount of labor for building more irrigation systems and greenhouses.
We built greenhouses at a furious pace, managing to stay so far ahead of our population, we were able to store surplus food, begin paying down our debt to the Wallers, and buy more supplies from them. After the third such shipment, the Wallers’ leader, Dean, relented on the hostage deal and allowed Ed and our other people to move back to Speranta. More than thirty Wallers accompanied Ed—they had grown tired of hiding in the warehouse and wanted to help build greenhouses. I welcomed each of them with a hug, and Charlotte welcomed them with a twenty-minute quiz.
One of the newcomers had been a hard-core organic gardener in her previous life. She convinced us to dig up our old latrine pits and compost our fecal matter instead of burying it. Dr. McCarthy argued with her about it for a while, but eventually she won him over by promising to properly monitor the temperature of our compost piles. I wasn’t sure what good that would do, but it satisfied Dr. McCarthy, which was good enough for me. We also had to start peeing into a five-gallon pail fitted with a toilet seat instead of into the latrine. Evidently, human urine diluted properly is a fabulous fertilizer. Who knew? The productivity of our greenhouses climbed further.
Another newcomer, Ranaan Kendall, had served in the second Iraq war. He was young—maybe in his late twenties—but he had a ridged and grooved face, pitted from childhood acne too much sun and sand, or both. He worked with Ben to improve our military readiness. They set up flags so our snipers could account for windage, and they developed a system of arm signals so we could communicate without wasting precious ammo.
Zik left every few weeks. He was gone for days at a time, looking for his daughter, Emily. I’d quit worrying about revealing our location and had relaxed all the early rules about leaving Speranta. The secret was obviously out. I would have to rely on our numbers, defensive plans, and Ben’s military genius to carry us through an attack. After each trip, Zik was surly and withdrawn for days—he hadn’t been able to find any trace of his daughter. She would have been sixteen by then—if she was still alive.
I desperately wanted to know what was going on in the world. We had gotten enough refugees from neighboring states to know that Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky were as bad off as Illinois. Iowa was worse, far worse. There had been some kind of collapse in the government back east almost a year ago, and FEMA and Black Lake had mostly disappeared. Food distribution had ended in the camps and cities; collapse, starvation, and cannibalism inevitably followed.
I’d been trying to get a shortwave radio. I wanted news from back east, to know if there was still a government in operation. It was best to act as if we were completely on our own, though I couldn’t help but hope that some kind of functioning government was left.
One of the newcomers had been a licensed shortwave operator, but he’d left his equipment at home, halfway between Iowa City and Des Moines. I stared at the spot on a map for a while, thinking of mounting an expedition to retrieve it, but his transceiver was too far. And there was no guarantee that his shortwave set would still be there and in working condition.
We caught a break when Grant Clark trudged into Speranta. He had survived in the postapocalyptic world by traveling and trading information and supplies for food and clothing. He was the same gleaner who had sold a camp roster to Rita Mae, the librarian in Worthington, nearly two years earlier—the roster that had enabled me to find my parents. He said he had a working shortwave setup hidden in an abandoned town not far away, but he didn’t want to trade it to me. He powered it on batteries scavenged from cars and sold the information gleaned from the shortwave chatter. I finally convinced him to part with it in return for a custom-made, one-man Bikezilla loaded with two hundred pounds of kale and the promise that he could make Speranta his home base and listen in on the shortwave anytime he wanted.
There was depressingly little chatter on the shortwave bands. Nothing at all from back east. All the government bands that had been full of transmissions only two years ago were dead and silent now. The religious broadcaster who I had asked for help when I was in the FEMA camp in Maquoketa was off the air. Even the strange stations that read lists of numbers were gone. We did make contact with a few isolated communities—a group in Georgia, another in Mexico, and one in the mountains of northern California. They were barely hanging on; there was nothing we could do for each other except share tips on compost piles and greenhouse construction. When conditions were good, we caught snippets of transmissions in Chinese, Spanish, or languages nobody recognized. I hoped the reason we didn’t reach more communities was the difficulty in powering a radio transceiver. The possibility that everyone else was dead was too horrible to contemplate.
I asked Ben to monitor the shortwave, clicking through the bands and transmitting occasionally. He didn’t want to do it at first—it wasn’t a military shortwave set and therefore not interesting to Ben. We talked for nearly an hour about the importance of military intelligence, discussing all the things we might learn from monitoring the shortwave, before he finally agreed to monitor it. Once I convinced him to take the job on, he was amazing at it. He would sit at the set for hours on end, patiently listening and transmitting in impeccable shortwave code. I didn’t know a CQ from a QRA from an XYZPDQ, but Ben took the time to study the manual Grant had brought with the transceiver and learn all the terms, using them perfectly.