I rousted everyone before dawn the next morning and threw them out of the longhouse. We would damn well never have any more barbaric spectacles while I led Speranta. I allowed only Uncle Paul, Ed, Darla, and, of course, Francine to stay.
“Do you want a blindfold?” I asked Francine.
“No. I’ll go with my eyes open,” she replied quietly. “And Captain . . . I don’t blame you for this.”
I turned away, biting the inside of my cheek, struggling not to cry.
When I had myself mostly under control, I helped her up onto the table. It wobbled a little as I stepped up beside her. I fitted the dangling noose around her neck, cinching it snug. “Do you have any last words?”
“I’m not as scared as I thought I’d be,” Francine said. “I’m going to see my Brock.”
I didn’t have to push her. She stepped off the edge of the table on her own. The noose dug into her neck. Her mouth opened, as if to scream, but no sound came out. Her legs thrashed and her face turned bright red, then deep purple. A line of pale spittle ran from one corner of her mouth.
My knees shook, and I almost fell trying to climb down off the table. Darla caught me. When Francine was completely still, I fell to my knees beside her hanging body, hugging her ankles and sobbing.
Chapter 74
Nylce’s expedition was back right on schedule, five days after they had left. She found me at the worksite where I was building yet another greenhouse. It didn’t seem possible that she had left before the lynching debacle. “We need to talk,” she said.
As soon as we were out of earshot of the rest of the work crew, I filled her in on the lynching. Then she started her report. “Our expedition was attacked by a group of Peckerwoods and Reds on the way home today We lost one Bikezilla with a full load of supplies. Ranaan Kendall is dead. We have three injured, one seriously Dr. McCarthy is operating now. We killed one of the attackers—the rest got away.” That hit me hard. Ranaan had survived the war in Iraq, only to die now? “I didn’t know Ranaan well—he have any family here?”
“A sister, Marcella. I checked with Charlotte. Marcella’s got cleaning duty in Longhouse Four today.”
“We’d better go tell her before she hears about it through the grapevine.” I sighed. I would rather do absolutely anything else with the next couple of hours instead of telling Marcella her brother was dead. But she deserved to hear it from me.
On our way, I asked Nylce, “How do you know it was Peckerwoods and Reds?”
“The guy we killed had Peckerwoods tattoos. And I saw Red.”
Crap. I had started to believe that he was dead, vaporized by the manure bomb. But there was no way Nylce could be mistaken. How many 5’4” redheaded knife fiends could there be in northern Illinois? “I’m thinking about reorganizing our military. Putting Ed in charge, with you as his second-in-command. We need a police force too.”
“I don’t know anything about running an army!” “People follow you. And I trust you. I’m going to suggest that Ed have you focus on protecting our convoys and scavenging operations—all the stuff that goes on outside of Speranta. Then Ed can focus on settlement defense. I’ll take Ben off shortwave duty and make him our chief planning officer or whatever. He’ll work for both of you. Have him plan convoy protection and devise some kind of an ambush to capture or kill Red.” The image of Francine hanging from the rafter flashed through my mind. But it only made me more determined to catch Red. He needed to die.
Nylce nodded. “That’d work okay.”
“I want Red’s head mounted on a pole in front of Longhouse One.”
“Gross,” Nylce said. “Are you serious?”
“About posting his head?” I said. “No, it was just a figure of speech. About killing him? Yes, I’m deadly serious.”
Ben was thrilled with his new assignment—he said he’d be an S5. I had no idea what he meant, but I didn’t really care what Ben called himself so long as he figured out how to catch Red.
That night after dinner, I took Alyssa aside. “I’ve moved Ben off radio duty,” I told her. “He’s going to work for Ed and Nylce full time as a planning officer.”
“He’ll love that,” Alyssa said.
“Yeah. But I need someone to take over communications. And I thought you’d be—”
“Um, no.”
“But you’d be—”
“No.”
“I really need someone I can rely—”
“Absolutely freaking not. No way. Am I not being clear here?”
I grabbed the edge of the table we were sitting at, squeezing it hard. “You’re being perfectly clear, but—” “Alex, I want to help out any way I can, but if I take on this head of communications job—”
“Chief communications officer,” I said.
“Whatever. If I take it on, I won’t have any time to teach my classes.”
What was she talking about? “Your classes?”
“It was your idea, back on the old farm—”
“I knew you were teaching at the old farm, but I had no idea you’d kept it up after the move.”
“I didn’t at first. But about six months ago, I got Charlotte to assign me to a workgroup made up of all the youngest kids. We plant, harvest, weed—whatever needs doing—and I teach while we work. You really had no idea?” “Um, no.”
“You probably should get a clue about what’s going on in your town, Mayor."
I didn’t think the sarcasm was completely fair. I spent most of my time leading the crews building new greenhouses. “Who’s going to take over communications from Ben?”
“Not me,” Alyssa said. “Why don’t you ask your sister?” Rebecca. Why hadn’t I thought of her? She was smart, hardworking, and better with people than I was. But I always seemed to overlook her.
I left Alyssa and found my sister, who was happy to have an official role. I put her in charge of the shortwave and the phone system, and I asked her to recruit and train enough help to start monitoring the shortwave 24/7. We had more than enough manpower for it now.
We made regular trips to the Wallers’ base in Sterling to trade for food and supplies for our greenhouse building spree. That left plenty of opportunity to try to sucker Red—we tried trailing a Bikezilla behind the convoy, staging a fake breakdown, and even abandoning one and observing it from a nearby ridge. None of the plans worked. Either Red was no longer scouting our convoys, or he had an uncanny ability to detect traps.
The reconciliation commission reported back, recommending that five of our prisoners be exiled and the rest allowed to join Speranta if they wished. I was reluctant to let any of them go—wouldn’t they rejoin Red and help him raid us? But what would I do with them otherwise? I couldn’t order them killed out of hand, even though they were all believed to have committed murders at Red’s behest. Ultimately I accepted the commission’s recommendations, although I had sketches made of all five of them first and warned them that if they were caught with Red or tried to return to Speranta, they would be killed. Two of the other prisoners chose to leave, but the vast majority decided to join Speranta. Charlotte interviewed them all and assigned them jobs.
The constitution committee reported back more than two months later. We needed a more sophisticated system than a typical city government since we didn’t have a state or federal government over us, but a full-blown national government would be overkill. So the committee recommended that we elect a mayor, a judge, and a seven-member legislative and advisory council with a division of power similar to that in the U.S. Constitution. Each branch of government would be elected and serve for up to two six-year terms. The first term for our legislature would be two years, and the judge would serve four years, so that future terms would be staggered, with an election for one of our branches every two years.
I recruited a former state highway patrolman, Chad Brickman, to be our chief of police. He had emigrated to Speranta with the Stocktonites.
Every longhouse would have both a political and military leader. The military leaders were appointed by newly promoted General Ed Bauman. The political leaders would be elected for two-year terms. By that time, we had eight longhouses in total, so a meeting of our whole government would involve seventeen people. The serving military could have no role in politics, exactly as it had been in pre-Yellowstone America.
Our constitution also affirmed our allegiance to the United States, should it ever be reconstituted, and adopted the Bill of Rights in its entirety. Pretty much the only change we made was to lower the age of suffrage to sixteen, a nod to how young Speranta was overall. The average age of all our inhabitants, Charlotte told me, was only a little over twenty.
I tried to have a ban on capital punishment added to our constitution. Uncle Paul supported me on that, but we lost the argument. Roughly eighty percent of Speranta’s population was pro-death penalty, even many who said they had been against it in the old world. I realized that I wasn’t entirely consistent, either. I wouldn’t hesitate to kill Red—but he had started a war with us, which made his case different to my way of thinking.
At the one-year anniversary of my election to mayor, we held another election. The new constitution was approved by over eighty percent of our electorate. A few weeks later, I stood for reelection. This time I was unopposed.
Isaac “Zik” Goldman was elected judge. Uncle Paul, Dr. McCarthy, and Nylce Myers ran for the council, mostly because I threatened them with never-ending latrine duty if they didn’t. They all won. Jim Evans and Bob Petty were elected too. Despite everything, they had enough support from their constituencies among the Warrenites and ex-FEMA camp refugees to come in sixth and seventh in the council voting. The other two council members were Lawrence Mason and Margaret Feldman, both of whom were originally from Stockton. Darla had flatly refused to run for any kind of office. I retaliated by appointing her vice mayor, which meant she would have to run the show in Speranta any time I was gone. That made her exactly as mad as I thought it would; she wanted to tinker and farm, not dabble in politics. Well, what she wanted most was to start a family, but I was still holding out against that idea.
It didn’t help my case when Mom had her baby. Her labor was only three hours and remarkably easy, according to Belinda. Darla redoubled her efforts to convince me to start a family I promised her we would—I wanted the same thing—but I simply couldn’t get the idea out of my head that she might die in childbirth. We faced far more likely deaths every day—a flenser raid, a fall from an underconstruction longhouse roof, any number of diseases— heck, even an infected hangnail could kill in this postvolca-nic world. But I could do something about those potential deaths. The thought that I would watch, helpless, while Darla died of a hemorrhage in childbirth had wormed its way into my brain like a parasite. I couldn’t dislodge it, even after my mother’s pregnancy went so smoothly.
Mom named my new half sister Sorrow, which seemed like a horrible name to saddle a child with. I hoped she would go by her middle name, Alexia. The names seemed like a rather pointed message to me, so I carefully avoided the topic on the rare occasions when Mom and I spoke. I spent almost all my free time with Darla, and Mom was still avoiding her.
When I did see Mom, it was usually because I’d gone looking for Rebecca, Alyssa, Anna, Charlotte, or Wyn. They were so taken with Alexia that they spent nearly all their free time helping Mom in Longhouse Five. When Darla was with me, I would sometimes catch her gazing longingly while Rebecca did some task that seemed utterly repulsive to me, like changing the rags that served as Alexia’s diapers. But whenever Darla had offered to help, Mom would claim she had to go elsewhere, so Darla eventually quit offering.
We started gradually mixing the former FEMA camp refugees, Warrenites, and Stocktonites. One of the former Warrenites needled an ex-Stockton guard so persistently that the Warrenite took a swing at him, starting a fistfight that resulted in two broken fingers, a broken jaw, and a blackened eye. Remembering Francine’s lynching, I was thankful nothing worse had happened. I was also thankful I could dump the whole mess in Zik’s lap—he was our judge, after all.
Zik convened a jury to hear the men out. The jury found them both guilty, and Zik sentenced them to spend two weeks with their hands tied together. He said they’d either get over their animosity, or they would kill each other. Zik also gave them manure duty for the whole two weeks. The hearing took less than an hour. Best of all, they were mad at Zik, not me. I started to truly appreciate the genius of divided government.
More people straggled in, generally starving and filthy. We welcomed them all, and our population grew past twelve hundred. I kept our greenhouse building program going flat-out, and our food production continued to grow even faster than our population. I ordered a cutback on kale planting, shifting to more beans and wheat, which stored better than kale. We squirreled away tons and tons of food—I wouldn’t relax until we had more than a year’s worth stored.
I sent an expedition to raid an old highway depot, hauling off tons of rock salt to use as seasoning and for preserving meat from our rapidly expanding herd of hogs, bred from the pigs Eli had brought us. We could freeze the meat, of course, but we couldn’t make bacon, ham, or even prosciutto without salt.
I woke one night to hear a whispered conversation taking place a few bedrolls over from mine. Someone had left a nightlight plugged in, and it cast just enough light that I could make out faces. Alyssa was sitting up in bed, one hand holding Anna’s wrist. Something glinted from Anna’s hand—a piece of gold jewelry, perhaps.
“You should have told me sooner,” Alyssa whispered. “I . . . I just couldn’t,” Anna said. She sounded utterly crushed.
“I like you. I like you a lot. Just not that way.”
“I know . . . It was silly of me to keep hoping. I knew you liked boys.” Anna’s sigh was louder than her words.
“I do. Although I’m not sure why. They’re all liars.” “Huh?”
“Max told me he’d been giving me gifts.”
Anna’s arms tensed so much, I could see her muscles swell even in the dim light.
“I swear to God I’ll strangle him in his sleep.”