“Yes,” I said flatly. “If you have a problem with that, feel free to return to Warren. Now.”
“It’s fine, I’m sure,” Mayor Petty grumbled.
Then I got the biggest shock of that evening. My mother peeled off her coat. She was pregnant.
Chapter 67
“You’re, you’re, you’re—”
“Pregnant,” Mom said. “You’re going to have a little brother. Or sister.”
“Half—”
“Yes. Half brother. Or half sister.”
“I thought you were too old?”
“I’m only forty-one!”
“Oh.” What was happening? My mother had gotten remarried, decided to have children, and told me nothing of any of it. We had grown that far apart? To be fair, I had completely forgotten how old she was, but still. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Thank you,” Mom said. “I—I’m sorry we’ve struggled with each other lately.” She held her arms halfway up as if thinking about asking for a hug, but then she let them drop back to her sides.
“You don’t owe me an apology.” She did owe Darla an apology, but I didn’t see anything to be gained from starting up that argument.
Mom gave me a tired half shrug instead of answering.
“I’d better go help Charlotte.” I retreated to the kitchen area where Charlotte was interviewing newcomers and recording data for her census.
As the sun came up, our snipers reported seeing a huge column of smoke. I climbed Turbine Tower 1-A to get a look for myself. A hazy smudge was drifting across the sky toward us, from the northwest. I had no doubt what was causing it. Warren was ablaze.
It was almost noon by the time we got all the newcomers settled in Longhouse Five. I was dead on my feet. The only difference between me and a zombie at that point was that a zombie could easily have outthought and outrun me. But as long as Ed was out there in Red’s untender care, I couldn’t rest, wouldn’t rest well until we had rescued him or learned his fate. I called a council meeting.
Once everyone was seated around a table, I opened the meeting. “We’re going to attack Stockton and get Ed back.” Several people spoke up at once.
Darla: “You can’t—”
Uncle Paul: “No, we don’t—”
Ben: “There’s a high probability—”
“No!” I said, banging my fist on the table. “I wasn’t asking for an opinion. We are going to attack Stockton. Ed has put his life on the line for us over and over again. We’re not leaving him or our other people with Red one minute longer than we have to. Now here’s the subject of this meeting. How do we attack Stockton without getting slaughtered?” “We use subterfuge,” Ben said. “Any kind of direct attack on a walled enemy with similar numbers but superior firepower would be doomed to failure.”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked.
Ben’s plan involved shoveling shit. Literally. A lot of it. I, along with three other people, pedaled a Bikezilla from greenhouse to greenhouse, raiding the compost piles for our latest . . . deposits.
In the compost piles, we separated layers of feces with organic material—mostly wheat straw, sawdust, and wood chips—which helped the decomposition process somehow and kept the smell down to tolerable levels. Now we were picking the filler out with our shovels as we worked. We needed the pure . . . shit . . . for Ben’s crazy project. Three other teams were doing the same thing in other greenhouses. Ben wanted a—there’s really no other word for it—shitload of human feces.
By the time the bed of our Bikezilla was fully . . . loaded, you could smell us coming from a mile away. We pedaled up to the workshop we had built for Uncle Paul and Darla not far from Longhouse One.
They were outside working on an old, enclosed U-Haul trailer that was tipped on its side. Its wheels were gone, and in their place were two snowboards. Darla had a welding helmet on; she was attaching a strut to the underside of the trailer. Sparks flew from her torch.
Uncle Paul came to meet us, wrinkling his nose as he approached. “Good timing—we’ll be ready to load it in a half hour or so.”
“Thirty-minute break,” I told the guys working with me. I rubbed my hand and hook in the snow, trying to clean up, even though I knew I would get dirty again shortly. The rest of the shit-loaded Bikezillas showed up while we waited.
When the trailer was finished, we tipped it upright so it rested on the snowboards and started filling it. Six inches of feces, then a sprinkle of warm water from one of the greenhouse heating tanks. Then another layer of feces, and so on. We had to keep the inside of the trailer wet and warm to get the effect we needed. Darla and Uncle Paul watched for a few minutes, making sure we were doing it right, and then headed inside the workshop, saying they were going to work on the fuse. I figured they were just trying to escape the stench, but whatever.
We packed the trailer so full, we could barely get the door closed. Darla drilled a small hole in the top of the door with a rechargeable drill and then sealed it with candle wax. Then my team covered the whole trailer with a massive pile of wheat straw and put a tarp over that. We needed everything to stay toasty warm overnight. Ben wanted to let it sit and ripen for a couple of days, but Uncle Paul and Darla thought it would work okay tomorrow, and I didn’t want to wait any longer to leave than we had to.
I took a cold shower—we could have set up water heaters, but it would have significantly reduced the amount of energy we could devote to the greenhouses. I even splurged and used a tiny sliver of precious soap. My head spun, and I leaned against the flimsy shower wall rather than falling over. The moment my head hit my pillow, I was out.
In the morning I got a report from our scouts. Most of Warren had been burned. The area around the meatpacking plant was still intact, however. The Reds were loading pork into a pair of panel vans, trying to get it all moved to Stockton.
There was an abandoned farmhouse about a mile northeast of Warren that would work perfectly for our plan. It was close enough that the Reds’ scouts would see us, but far enough that it would take them some time to mobilize a force to confront us.
I took a dozen Bikezillas—forty-eight men and women, including Darla. Three of them were hitched together in a long line to pull the U-Haul. The rest of our forces—about 250 men and women under Uncle Paul’s command— headed for Warren on foot. They would wait just outside the city for our signal. If Ben’s plan worked, there would be almost no shooting. I hoped it would work—we had precious few bullets, and too many people had died already in this ridiculous war between Stockton and Warren.
We parked the U-Haul at an angle at one corner of the house and unhitched our Bikezillas from it. Then the ruse began.
We carried bags of flour, kale, and cases of pasta out the front door of the house and pretended to load them onto the U-Haul, as if we were clearing out a hidden cache of food. In reality we had brought all the food with us. One group carried it in through the back door, and another group carried it out through the front, pretending to load the food onto the U-Haul but actually passing it to the other group hidden behind the truck. They ran it around the corner of the house and returned through the back door, repeating the process.
We had hauled the same bags and boxes of food around and around in a circle for almost an hour before anything happened. A huge group of people emerged from Warren, moving toward us at a jog.
“Step it up to a run!” I called, and for a few minutes we pretended to be in a frenzy, as if we were trying to finish loading the U-Haul. When the Reds had closed about half the distance to us, I called out, “Scram!”
Everyone except me, Darla, and two others tossed the food onto the load beds of their Bikezillas, jumped on the seats, and pedaled off. Darla mounted the back bumper of the U-Haul. She had a long hank of rope in her hand. I grabbed the lit hurricane lamp that she had left hanging on the Bikezilla’s handlebars. Darla picked the wax off the hole she had drilled in the trailer’s door. A methane odor—like a giant fart—wafted out.
Darla jammed the end of the treated rope—a fuse— into the hole. “Time?” she asked. She meant until they reached us.
“Five minutes,” I guessed. Then the Reds broke into a charge. “Three!”
“Make up your mind!” I held the lamp up, and Darla dangled the other end of the fuse into its flame. The fuse caught, burning fiercely, and the four of us ran for our Bikezilla.
As we started to pull away, I looked back at the U-Haul. The Reds were less than two hundred yards away by then. And the fuse had burned out.
Chapter 68
“Turn back!” I yelled. I tried to wrench the handlebars around, but the front forks were ganged together—I couldn’t steer without Darla’s help or at least acquiescence. “Trust me!”
We swung around, heading straight back toward the U-Haul trailer. Some of the charging Reds lifted their guns. I heard a bullet spanging off metal nearby and, a split second later, the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. I grabbed the hurricane lamp in my right hand, leaving my hook around the handlebars. I lifted the lamp and hurled it. It smacked into the side of the U-Haul in a tinkle of breaking glass. Oil ran down the trailer’s wall, and suddenly it was afire. I had hit the side of the trailer, though, not the back. I wasn’t sure if that would be enough to light it.
We swerved wildly, racing away from the oncoming Reds, who were still shooting at us. Darla veered again, putting the house between us and most of the Reds. I kept my head low, trying to merge it with the handlebars, hoping to give our pursuers a more difficult target. My butt, though, was thrust in the air so I could stand on the pedals, slamming them down in a desperate attempt to coax more speed from the bike.
As we put more distance between ourselves and the Reds, the firing started to slacken and then ceased entirely. I risked a look back over my shoulder. A bunch of the Reds were crowded around the U-Haul. A couple of them were using their coats trying to beat out the flames licking up the U-Haul’s side. One of them reached for the handle that kept the rear door of the U-Haul closed. He turned the handle, pulled, and then vanished in a massive yellow-and-orange fireball. The sound and overpressure wave reached me an instant later, making the bike buck uncomfortably and my ears pop.
Three-quarters of the farmhouse had been blasted away. The roof and remaining wall toppled slowly toward the crater where the U-Haul had been, with a crackle and screech of breaking wood. The snow had melted instantly in a radius of at least fifty feet, revealing ash that looked dirty-gray by comparison to the surrounding snow. The Reds closest to the blast were gone, simply gone. Those farther away were scattered in a welter of limbs, some attached, some not.
The noise of the blast was the signal. Uncle Paul and his forces attacked.
Chapter 69
Most of the Reds ran. A few surrendered, throwing down their weapons and raising their hands. A few fought and died quickly under the combined fire of Uncle Paul’s people and mine. We used the Bikezillas like cavalry, wheeling to attack the Reds in the flanks as they ran. I searched for signs of Ed or the people who had been with him. I also looked for Red—I had a score to settle. My hook clanked against the handlebars as if in agreement. But I didn’t see either of them amid the chaos of fleeing Reds.
When the battle seemed well in hand, Darla and I steered our Bikezilla over to a group of prisoners who were being guarded by a detachment of Uncle Paul’s troops. I swung out of the bicycle seat and approached the closest prisoner, a tall, gaunt man who vaguely reminded me of Abraham Lincoln. “You took a group of our people prisoner two days ago,” I said.
He looked utterly terrified. He nodded, shaking too hard to speak. I noticed his eyes were fixed on the sharpened edge of my hook.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said as calmly as I could. “Where are those prisoners?”
“S-s-sent to Stockton. With a detachment. Yesterday.” “Thank you. Where’s Red?”
“D-d-don’t know. W-w-was with us.”
“Thank you.” I leapt back onto the Bikezilla, and we took off in search of Uncle Paul. When we found him, I didn’t even take the time to dismount. “Have ninety-six of your men join us—eight in each bike’s load bed. Ed’s in Stockton, we’re going after him. Keep harrying the Reds—keep them from reforming or reaching Stockton.” “Yes, sir,” he replied, turning to give the orders. Within half an hour, we were on the road to Stockton. I pushed the pace as hard as I could with Bikezillas loaded with passengers. As we flew down the road, I worried. Attacking a well-defended wall with fewer than 150 people would be suicidal. There was no chance the wall would be as lightly defended as the last time we attacked. Red was a lot of things—vicious, amoral, and scary as hell— but he wasn’t stupid. But I owed it to Ed to try.
The best plan I could come up with was to attack in a predictable place with a small force while a larger one circled around to come at them from the opposite side. If they overcommitted to defending the first attack, the strategy just might work.
A few miles outside of Stockton, I split our forces. Four Bikezillas, including mine, to make the diversionary attack; eight under Nylce’s command to circle around and make the real attack from the opposite side of the city I waited about an hour—enough time for the larger force to get in place—and then we saddled back up and rode directly for Stockton.
When I caught sight of the gate, my heart sank. There were at least a dozen guards. More people appeared as we approached, dozens of them, maybe hundreds—a throng atop the car wall. Attacking here wouldn’t be a diversion; it would be suicide. As we got close to rifle range, I raised a hand, ready to call a stop. Then I noticed something: nobody was aiming weapons at us.
They were cheering.
Chapter 70
I slowed our advance, letting our Bikezillas drift closer. The cheering swelled. When I got close enough to pick out individual faces, I saw Ed standing atop the log gate, waving. Wasn’t he supposed to be a prisoner? Other familiar faces surrounded him, including Eli who had sheltered me, Alyssa, and Ben more than two years earlier while I was looking for Darla and my parents.