The crowd gasped as the contents came into view: a precarious jumble of frozen hog carcasses filled the truck from floor to ceiling.
Alyssa laughed and flung her arms around me. “That’s bringing home the bacon,” she said as she kissed my cheek.
Darla cleared her throat, glaring at me. What was up with that? I hadn’t done anything.
“We need to debrief, Lieutenant,” Ben said.
“Not now,” I said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
“Your recall will be clearer while the events are still—” Ben kept talking, but I quit listening. “Tomorrow,” I said firmly.
Uncle Paul clasped my arm. The skin around his eyes was nearly black: Emperor Palpatine in a younger body. “Alex . . . you did good. I’m sorry. I should have been there—”
“You were right where you needed to be. With Max and Anna. If things had gone bad in Stockton—”
“We should have a feast,” Uncle Paul said, “to mourn and celebrate. Roast some of this pork.”
“I’m dead on my feet. Would you take care of it?” “Sure thing.” He started talking about the details, and my attention wandered.
I looked around for Mom but didn’t see her anywhere. Maybe she was still in the bedroom, sorting pictures. Instead, I saw Lynn’s wife at the edge of the crowd. She craned her neck, looking back and forth, bewilderment and fear writ plainly on her face.
“I’ve got to go.”
I pushed through the crowd until I reached her, Darla on my heels. “Mrs. Manck?” I started, dreading what I had to say.
“Where’s Lynn?” she asked, her face twitching, lips curling down as if she already suspected the answer. “Is he okay?”
“He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
Her face was porcelain white. She stood rigid except for the tremors chasing across her cheeks. “No. No. You could be wrong. Maybe he’s only hurt.”
“We brought his body back.”
“He’s not . . . it could be someone else’s body.”
“I wish. I wish it were anyone else. Me. Or nobody.”
Mrs. Manck sagged. She looked as if she might faint. I stepped toward her, opening my arms to catch her, give her a hug, offer whatever insufficient comfort I could. Instead of embracing me, she lashed out.
I was totally unprepared for the violence of her blow. Her fist caught my jaw, rocking my head sideways with a snap I felt all the way down to the base of my spine. I raised my arms to block—too late, of course—and stepped back.
She didn’t move forward. Her hands fell to her sides, and her trembling grew more violent as if her fury had migrated inward from her fists.
Darla hadn’t moved. Now she opened her arms, just standing there. Tears streamed down Mrs. Manck’s face, and she fell forward into Darla’s arms.
I lowered my fists and stepped around their hug so I could see Darla’s face. She mouthed, “Go on, I’ve got this. I’ll find you later.”
I was relieved, but I also felt a little guilty. I’d led the attack on Stockton; its consequences, including Lynn’s death, were my responsibility. I should be the one dealing with the aftermath, not Darla. I walked on toward the house anyway.
Dr. McCarthy was working in the living room/makeshift hospital. Mom and Belinda were in there, helping him. All three of them looked utterly exhausted. I managed a tired wave in their direction and turned toward the stairs. “Alex, wait,” Dr. McCarthy called.
I took a couple more steps and sagged onto the staircase to wait.
It took Dr. McCarthy a moment to get to the foyer; the living room was packed so tightly with makeshift pallets that it was difficult to move around without kicking a patient. “Good. You heard me.”
“Yeah. I’m so tired I may fall asleep right here. What did you need?”
“I . . . I wanted to apologize. For what I said before you left. You were right. We needed that food. And you got it.” I turned my head away. “Tell that to Mrs. Manck.” “Lynn didn’t make it?”
I shook my head.
I felt Dr. McCarthy’s hand on my upper arm. “Maybe it’s kind of like medicine,” he said. “You fight to save everyone, do everything you can, but people die anyway.” I didn’t respond, and after a short silence, Dr. McCarthy went on. “I became a family practitioner in part so I could avoid that—the constant death—I never understood how ER docs or thoracic surgeons handled it. How they could live with all that death. But it found me anyway. And now I think I know. How surgeons deal with it. It becomes motivation. To keep struggling, to keep learning, to save whoever you can.”
“Maybe I’ll feel more like struggling after I’ve slept.” I stood, but Dr. McCarthy didn’t let go of my arm.
“You did the right thing. Even though I told you not to. I’m proud of you, Alex. I got to know your dad a bit after the eruption, before he went looking for you. I think he’d be proud too.” Dr. McCarthy dropped my arm and turned back toward the living room.
I trudged up the stairs, the tears I hadn’t been able to cry before flowing freely down my face. It was all I could do not to sob out loud.
I reached the empty bedroom still crying, pulled my frozen boots off my nearly frostbitten feet, and crawled into bed without even taking off my coat.
Eventually the tears subsided, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind ground over the events in Stockton: the guns aimed at me, Standish and Cliff as they died in Doctore s mansion, Lynn’s corpse laid out in dirty snow. My whole body was sore, and my eyes were swollen from crying. I was desperately tired, but my mind wouldn’t allow me to sleep. I laid there for an hour or more before Darla came into the room and slid into the bed alongside me. Then finally, nestled in her arms, I slept.
Chapter 12
The pork in the trucks was originally from Warren, but Mayor Petty was still mostly unconscious and in no shape to divide it up. I talked to Uncle Paul and Dr. McCarthy about it, and we agreed to send the seven semis of pork back to Warren with the refugees but to keep the panel van. It contained enough meat to feed Uncle Paul’s family—my family now— for years. I sent one of our remaining pickups to Warren and kept one—it’d be useful around the farm, at least until we ran out of gas.
It took three days to get people moved from the farm back to Warren. Most of them volunteered to
stay behind and help dismantle the ramshackle structures they’d been living in, but I could tell they were anxious to get home, so I told them not to bother.
We scavenged the useful bits of the lean-tos but broke most of them up for firewood. For a while that saved us from the increasingly long trek to find uncut timber. We needed a lot of it—Darla said more than a cord per week—to keep the fires burning in the living room and in the hypocausts, the system of small underground tunnels that kept our greenhouses warm.
Fortunately the greenhouses were in decent shape. Since people had been sleeping in them and all the kale had been harvested and eaten, we had to turn the dirt and replant. I hoped our new crop of kale would come in soon enough to stave off scurvy. I didn’t particularly look forward to pulling a bloody toothbrush out of my mouth every morning. All our ducks were gone, slaughtered over the past few weeks to feed the horde from Warren, but we still had a breeding pair of goats.
Dr. McCarthy didn’t move back to Warren right away. Several of his patients, Mayor Petty included, were too sick to move. So Belinda returned to Warren to staff the clinic, and our living room continued to serve as a rude hospital.
Uncle Paul moved into Max’s room with the rest of the guys, because he said he couldn’t sleep in the master bedroom. So Mom theoretically had the master bedroom to herself. She hardly ever slept there, though—or slept at all. She spent most of her time in the living room, helping
Dr. McCarthy care for the last of the patients, particularly Mayor Petty.
Ed hadn’t left either, even after almost everyone else had moved back to Warren. Finally I asked him about it while we were chopping wood. “You headed to Warren soon?”
Ed lowered his axe, leaning on the handle. “Well, uh . . .” “Well, what?” I held the hatchet I was using midswing, waiting for him to answer.
“Been meaning to ask you. Couldn’t find the right time. Or words. You know.”
“No.” I set my hatchet down. “I have no clue what you’re talking about, Ed.”
“Thought I’d stay here. If you don’t mind, that is.” Ed leaned over farther, putting more weight on the axe handle. “I mean, you know, figure I owe you—”
“You don’t owe me anything, Ed.”
“That’s not true. But even if it was, I’d want to hang around and help. Seems like, well, stuff happens around you.” “That’s a great reason to leave—not stay,” I said.
“But still . . .”
I thought about it a moment. “That’d be fine,” I said finally.
Ed straightened up and hefted his axe. “That’s set, then.” I picked my hatchet back up. “Hey, why’re you asking me? It’s Uncle Paul’s farm.”
Ed checked the swing of his axe. “You want me to ask him?”
“No, I will.”
“Thanks.”
And with that, we both returned to work.
I caught Uncle Paul later that day as he carried water into the kitchen. We stood at the sink, slopping water on our hands, trying to scrub off the grime of a day’s hard work.
“Ed wants to stay here,” I said.
Uncle Paul grunted.
“On the farm. With us.”
“Didn’t he used to be a flenser?”
“Yeah. And I used to be a high school student.”
Uncle Paul turned toward me, a sad smile creasing his cheeks. “Same thing, but with less cannibalism?”
I snorted. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“So what’d you tell Ed?”
“I told him he could stay, but I thought it should be your decision. It’s your place and all.”
Uncle Paul rubbed his hands on a dishrag in silence for a moment. Then he turned toward me, looking me dead in the eyes. “Max and Anna ate today because of decisions you made, Alex. You think Ed should stay, that’s good enough for me.”
Uncle Paul turned away, walking toward the kitchen table. I dried my hands in a surreal silence, not really feeling them. What exactly did this new responsibility mean?
Chapter 13
Ed and I trekked to Apple River Canyon State Park about every other day to cut wood. We couldn’t afford to let our woodpile get low in case something went wrong—say, some of us got sick—and we had to have enough wood on hand to keep all the fires burning until we could cut more.
We filled the toboggan we used for hauling wood faster than usual one morning and wound up back at the farm about an hour before lunchtime. As we were stacking wood near one of the greenhouses, I had the nagging feeling that something was missing.
“There’s no smoke,” I said.
“Whatcha mean?” Ed asked.
“The hypocaust vent. There’s usually smoke coming from it.”
“Huh. I’ll check on the fire.” Ed slid down into the hole that allowed access to the fire shelf, which was a small, stone-lined space where we kept a fire burning continuously. Smoke and heat from the fire rose along the sloping shelf and was funneled into tunnels under the greenhouses to warm the soil. I could see the door to the shelf from my vantage point above him—it was partly open to allow fresh air to enter, which was as it should be. Ed slid the door fully open and peered inside. “Fire’s burned out.”
“Nobody fed it this morning?”
“Guess not. I’ll get it going.”
I left Ed and jogged to the house. The cooking fire outside the kitchen was lit. Uncle Paul was there, roasting a large pork shoulder on a spit—our lunch.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Out in the greenhouses,” Uncle Paul said.
“No, I was just there.”
Uncle Paul shrugged, and I entered the house through the kitchen door. Darla was in there, cutting up the rest of the hog carcass that had supplied the shoulder. She didn’t know where everyone else was either. Avoiding her bloody hands, I leaned in for a kiss and then moved on to the living room.
Mayor Petty was asleep, and Dr. McCarthy sat nearby, reading what looked like a twenty-pound medical book.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
He barely glanced up. “I think your mom went out to the barn.”
A strange sight awaited me at the barn. The doors were thrown wide, letting the weak, yellowish daylight inside. The straw had been brushed away and the dirt floor smoothed. Anna, Max, Rebecca, and Ben sat on the floor, scratching numbers in the dirt. It looked like they were doing some kind of . . . math lesson? My mom and Alyssa stood farther inside, nearly shrouded in darkness. I could hear them fine.
“Remember,” Mom was saying, “an average attention span is about seven minutes. Plan two activities in each fifteen-minute block. Seven minutes of direct instruction, eight of individual practice, workstations, or buddy practice. The point is to break it up. Match your instruction to your students’ attention spans.”
Alyssa was listening and nodding, soaking it all in. Nobody had noticed me.
“Do you realize,” I said loud enough to carry over my mother’s words, “that it’s almost lunchtime?”
Max jumped to his feet. “Oh, crap. I haven’t fed the goats yet.”
“You’re supposed to do that first thing,” I said.
“I know. Mom used to . . . never mind. That’s no excuse.” Max took a step toward the door of the barn and then stopped, looking back at Alyssa. “Um, Alyssa, um, I mean teacher, Mrs., I mean Miss Fredericks. May I be excused?” Max’s face was flushed, and Alyssa was failing to suppress a laugh. Alyssa said, “Yes, you may go.” At nearly the same time, my mom said, “School isn’t over until lunchtime.”
Max didn’t wait for them to sort it out. He was off like a shot, heading for the house, where we kept the goats stabled in the guest room so they didn’t freeze to death at night.
Rebecca and Anna were standing now. “We’re supposed to be watering the kale in Greenhouse Two,” Rebecca said.
“Go,” I said. “We’ll hold off on lunch until all the morning chores are done.” Rebecca and Anna each grabbed two empty five-gallon pails, carrying them out of the barn.
Ben was still sitting in the dirt, working math problems. Mom was glaring at me, her arms folded over her chest, and now Alyssa was frowning.
“What were you supposed to be doing this morning, Ben?” I asked.