by Mike Mullin
“When Mayor Petty led that disastrous march on Warren, I asked him to put out scouts to flank our advance.” Mayor Petty was shaking his head in denial. “My friend Ben Fredericks told you—told all of us in a public meeting—that the attack was doomed, that we should attack at a time and in a direction the Reds didn’t expect. I realize that since Ben and his sister, Alyssa, are even newer to Warren than I am, it may be hard to listen to them. But these are hard times, times that call for a leader willing to hear good advice even from unusual sources.” Many people were nodding now. “But Mayor Petty ignored Ben’s advice.
“I listened. I organized and led the attack that invaded Stockton and gave us the bargaining power to reclaim our food. Everyone in this room has a full stomach because of that attack. Because of me.”
Someone in the audience yelled, “We wouldn’t have lost the food in the first place except for you!”
“Probably true,” I replied. “But anyone you elect—me, Mayor Petty, or the second coming of Abraham Lincoln— would make mistakes. The difference is this: I acknowledge and fix mine.
“Let me remind you: Ben predicted that our attack on Warren would fail. He also planned the attack that reclaimed our food. And now he says we need a wall. Without air power, artillery, or tanks, walled cities will rule the land. We can either build our own or be overrun.
“We’d all freeze to death if not for the wood we burn for heat. And that wood is not an inexhaustible resource. We’re going to run out. Darla and my uncle have a plan for using the wind farm to our east to provide a sustainable power source. We need resources to test and implement that plan. Resources Mayor Petty has refused to provide.
“I don’t want to be your mayor.” Darla winced again. “But I want to live!” I practically shouted the word. “I want a place where Darla and I can get married, have kids, grow old together, and die together. I’m going to create that place. Small groups won’t be viable in the future. A decent way of life demands manpower and womanpower and division of labor. It demands a group large enough to defend itself. If the only way I can create that is to lead it, then that’s what I’ll do. That’s why I’m running for mayor.
“I liked that story Mayor Petty told about the sunrise and the Humvees and the coffee, the chocolate, and the fresh fruit. But it’s just that. A story. There’s no help coming. Ever. We must, we must survive on our own resources with what we can make and raise with our own hands.
“So I ask you for your vote. If you vote for me, we’ll start preparing for the long term. We’ll build a wall. We’ll develop a sustainable way to stay warm. If I’m wrong, we will have wasted some time and effort, sure. But if I’m right about the future, then a vote for me is a vote for survival itself. Thank you.”
As I sat down, a scattering of polite applause echoed hollowly in the church. It was quickly extinguished, as if the clappers were embarrassed or maybe afraid to be seen supporting me.
I lost the election. It wasn’t even close. So much for my political career—doomed from the start.
“Did you even use three words of the speech you practiced?” Darla asked as we pedaled back to Uncle Paul’s farm.
“Nope. Just two,” I replied. “‘Thank’ and ‘you.’”
Chapter 18
“Did you even use three words of the speech you practiced?” Darla asked as we pedaled back to Uncle Paul’s farm.
“Nope. Just two,” I replied. “‘Thank’ and ‘you.’”
“Christ on a broomstick,” Darla muttered.
I bore down on the pedals in silence for a while. We were moving so fast that the wind fell like a lash across my eyes. Uncle Paul was curled in a blanket on the load bed. He either ignored the conversation or couldn’t hear it. “I just . . . when he brought out Sawyer, it threw me off my stride. Everything I planned to say flew out of my head. I guess I had nothing left in me but the truth. . . . I’m sorry.”
Darla swiveled in her seat to look at me. “I’m glad you’re not some kind of goddamn politician, Alex. If—no, since—they won’t listen to the truth, those fools in Warren deserve what they get.”
“No, they don’t. Nobody deserves what’s coming. Nobody deserved any of this.”
“Maybe the few who actually paid attention to you don’t deserve this. But the rest? Pfft.” She waved one gloved hand in the cold air.
“They all listened. Most of them just didn’t like what I was saying.”
We had to slow to make the turn onto Canyon Park Road. When we were back up to speed, Darla said, “We’ll figure it out. Some other way of defending ourselves.” “Like what?”
“Let me talk to Ben about my ideas. Work out a solid plan.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t ready to think about other options anyway. We had spent months of effort on the election. I needed to mope some more before I could move on to plan B—whatever it was.
“What you said in that church, in front of all those people, about us, about wanting a place we could raise a family and grow old together. It . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . I was mad at you for screwing up the speech, and suddenly all that anger turned to fire.”
“Fire? Like you were even madder?”
“I’m not saying this right. I want that future. I will kill for it. I will drag all those people in Warren kicking and screaming into something resembling sense if I have to, even though I don’t care about most of them.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel the same way.”
We pulled to a stop beside the house and dismounted Bikezilla. I took Darla in my arms, and she crushed me against her body. The world around us was frozen, quiet, and still, as if the last point of warmth in the universe burned between her chest and mine.
Chapter 19
Little changed except that Darla and I didn’t have to ride to Warren every afternoon to campaign. Instead, Uncle Paul and Darla often took Bikezilla out to the wind farm east of Warren. They broke into three of the windmills, climbing inside the turbine towers to study their workings and refine the plan for converting one to produce heat.
I spent part of my time with Ben working on a plan to survive if the farm were attacked again. We built a platform atop the roof of the farmhouse, accessible from a hatch we cut in the attic. I created a watch schedule—there were ten of us, so to cover the entire day and night, each watch had to be two hours and twenty-four minutes long. With one of us constantly on watch, the workload for everyone else increased. We were always tired; tempers grew shorter as the workdays grew even longer.
Darla helped me rig a rope from the platform to a bell hung in the second floor hallway so that whoever was on watch could wake us without leaving their post. We practiced endlessly; if more than six hostiles showed up, we’d run rather than trying to fight. Everyone had a go-bag of food and crucial supplies. After weeks of practice and drills, we got to the point where we could be out the back door and away from the farmhouse less than two minutes after the bell rang, even starting from a deep sleep. Actually it took longer during the day, because we were spread out all over the farm doing chores.
Ben studied the approaches to the farm, and we did our best to block the problematic ones. For example, behind the barn there was a huge blind spot, a wedge of land that wasn’t visible from the observation platform. So we spent almost a week moving snow into that area, creating a huge pile of loose snow and ice that made it difficult to walk in the places invisible to our lookout. In other places—atop the low hills around the farm, for example—we packed down the snow, creating areas that were easy to traverse and visible from the observation post.
One afternoon, Anna was on watch on the platform. I joined her, checking the sightlines, making sure that a new pile of snow Ben and I had moved that morning would funnel attackers into a spot where we could see—or shoot—them easily.
Alyssa came, opening the hatch from the attic to the platform and clomping up the stairs. The platform was not really big enough for three—we were packed on it shoulder to shoulder.
Alyssa flung her arms around me and gave me a huge, smacking kiss on the cheek.
“What . . . what’s that about?” I spluttered, trying to remove her arms without knocking either of us off the platform.
“I love them!” Alyssa was practically gushing enthusiasm. Anna had turned beet red.
“Love what?” I asked.
“The earrings you left under my pillow.” She tossed her head so her earrings bobbed. I hadn’t noticed them before, but they were lovely—gold filigree hummingbirds with tiny ruby eyes.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“They’re even better than the square of chocolate you left for me last week. It was a little stale.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that either.”
“You don’t need to be coy,” she said. She pressed herself up against me, and I turned my head, dodging another kiss.
Alyssa left, and I turned back to Anna. “Not a word to Darla,” I warned.
She nodded, her lips pressed together, her face still flaming red.
When Darla and Uncle Paul returned to the farm after a day of studying wind turbines east of Warren, I met them outside. “I need to talk to you,” I told Darla as she dismounted Bikezilla II.
“I’m freaking freezing,” Darla said.
“It’ll just take a second.” I waited for Uncle Paul to get inside and then turned back to Darla. “Alyssa thinks I’ve been leaving her gifts.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t.”
“Figured,” Darla said. “So who has?”
“I don’t know. But Alyssa was all huggy when she was trying to thank me. She didn’t believe it wasn’t me.”
Darla didn’t reply.
“You okay?”
“If I turn flenser, I’m eating Alyssa first,” Darla said. “She would be delicious,” I said.
“Hey! Don’t be coveting the meat of another woman.” “Yeah, but I don’t think you’d taste nearly as nice. Too tough and stringy.”
Darla glared at me. “Stringy?”
“It’s okay. I like my women tough.”
“Your women?” Darla’s glare had turned positively murderous.
“Woman, I mean, woman.”
Darla smiled and gave me a quick kiss.
“Seriously,” I said. “Are we okay?”
“Yes. I trust you, Alex. You’ve never given me any reason not to.”
I held the door for Darla, and we went inside.
After more than a month spent studying the wind turbines, Darla had a new list of electrical supplies she needed: eight-gauge wire, electric stoves, electric water heaters, and more. They were mostly things that could be scavenged from homes. We biked to Warren with two sacks of kale to try to trade.
Nobody would talk to us. Doors were slammed in our faces. Shotguns poked out windows as we approached. Oh, a few were friendly enough, like Nylce, but we already had taken everything we could use from her house. We asked Mayor Petty for permission to scavenge from abandoned houses in town, and he smiled sadistically as he said no.
We raided abandoned farmhouses instead. I spent the afternoons on my back in crawlspaces or craning my neck upward in basements to pull staples and liberate lengths of the heavy wire Darla needed for her project. We raided the ranger station in Apple River Canyon State Park, cutting the water heater free with a hacksaw and dragging it out to Bikezilla’s load bed.
The barn began to look like an appliance repair shop, with dozens of water heaters and stoves arranged in neat rows, some in pieces, some intact. A corner held an enormous stack of heavy-gauge wire in various lengths, each piece coiled neatly and labeled.
We used the truck to drag a huge metal tank originally used for storing pesticides from a nearby farm. We left it hitched to the back of the truck sitting outside the workshop Darla and Uncle Paul had built in the barn. Darla cut a hatch in the tank, and she and Uncle Paul started assembling a contraption inside. Darla swore it was a simple water-heating system, but the tangled mess of tubes and wire I saw in there looked as complicated to me as the guts of the space shuttle.
The GEEKs couldn’t help Darla much with the project. There was only room for one person inside the tank, and Uncle Paul hovered at the hatch, talking to her in a strange language full of volts, amps, ohms, and resistances. I worried about exposure to the pesticide residue in the tank, but when I raised the issue, Darla scoffed at me. “We’ll freeze to death a heck of a lot faster than those pesticides will kill me.” I figured she was right and dropped the issue, although I couldn’t get it out of my mind completely. I lay awake that night in bed for more than an hour. Darla claimed modern pesticides were remarkably safe. I was sure she was right, but what if that tank had stored something else? Something older?
When I finally did sleep, I dreamed that Darla had grown huge and stretched out like a cross between the Na’vi from Avatar and Mr. Bendy. She tried to kiss me, but her body bent double, folding over mine so that instead of kissing my lips, she was smooching my Achilles tendon, my head pressed to her stomach, which had somehow molded to fit my face so precisely that it was suffocating me.
I woke with a start. The bell—the one that signaled an attack—was ringing wildly.
Chapter 20
I pulled on my coat and boots, grabbed my go-bag— actually a full-size backpack with frame. I slung the pack over my shoulders and hit the door of the bedroom less than thirty seconds after I’d woken up. Darla was on my heels.
Who was on watch? I wondered as I ran into the hall. Max, I thought. The pull-down staircase to the attic was open, and Max was nowhere in sight. If we were supposed to run, then he should have been in the hall ready to go with us. I charged up the staircase, anxious to find out what was going on.
Max was on the lookout platform, but I didn’t need to ask him why he’d rung the bell. Flames were licking up the outside of the barn, illuminating everything with a flickering red glow. The greenhouses were burning too—wispy blue flames flitted across their skins, turning the irreplaceable plastic into pools of slag.
I started to ask what had happened, changed my mind, and asked a more important question. “Anyone out there?”
“I’m only half finished with my scan,” Max said in a soft voice. “But I haven’t seen anyone. Could the fire have started itself somehow?”
“I don’t see how. Keep looking.”
Darla crowded her way onto the platform. The fire on the barn leapt further up its walls, and a gust of wind carried a blast of heat and choking smoke across us. “My welder!” Darla vaulted off the platform, sliding down the steep, icy roof.
I grabbed for her but missed. “Are you crazy?” Darla was sliding toward the front of the house where the peak of a small porch roof came within five or six feet of the main roof’s gutter. If she missed the porch roof, she would fall more than twenty feet.
Uncle Paul poked his head out from the hatch.
“Get a fire brigade organized,” I told him, then turned to Max. “Stay here. Keep scanning.”
Darla flew off the edge of the roof. If I tried to go through the hatch and down the stairs, it’d take forever— I’d have to push past Uncle Paul and whoever else was coming up.
I hurled myself off the platform, following Darla.
Chapter 21
I flew down the roof headlong, my outstretched gloves throwing stinging particles of snow and ice into my face. I dug my hands in, trying to slow my descent, but all too soon I had reached the edge of the roof. I tried to grab the gutter as I went over, but I was going too fast and couldn’t hold on. Someone was screaming—me, I realized, as my side slammed into the top of the porch roof. A sharp pain spiked through my hip and shoulder, but I didn’t hear anything snapping or crunching, which meant—I hoped—I hadn’t broken any bones.
I rolled sideways, sliding off the ridge of the porch roof in an uncontrolled tumble. Suddenly I was in the air again, still turning as I plummete
d into a snowbank beside the concrete steps.
I slowly pushed myself free of the snow, spitting bits of ice and blinking to clear my eyes. Darla was already up, about twenty feet ahead of me, running pell-mell toward the burning barn. My leg and hip hurt as I put weight on them, forcing myself to a run, trying to catch up with Darla, my pack bouncing against my back.
“Wait!” I yelled. “We’ve got to get the panel van out. Our pork!” We hadn’t bothered to move the pork out of the panel van—it made a handy freezer, parked in the barn next to Uncle Paul’s old tractor. If it burned up, we would starve.
Darla didn’t even slow down. “My welder first! Before it explodes!”
I redoubled my efforts to catch up with her. Running into a burning barn to grab tanks of explosive welding gasses did not seem like the best idea Darla had ever had. So of course, that was exactly what she did.
She hurled open the side door of the barn and ducked inside, into the workshop area. The barn was choked with thick smoke. My eyes stung as I followed her inside. The heat was oppressive, overwhelming, and suddenly I remembered charging back into Darla’s barn after Target had set it afire, trying to save our backpacks almost a year and a half ago.
Darla disconnected a hose from a tank. A split second later, there was a pop and flash above us, as whatever gas escaped from the tank ignited near the exposed wooden ceiling. In seconds the entire ceiling was ablaze. Darla passed the first tank to me—it was so hot that it singed my hand, even through my gloves. I ran for the door, carrying the tank, Darla close behind me with the second tank.
The doorframe was afire now too. I plunged through the curtain of fire, running another dozen steps or so on pure momentum before I dropped the tank into the snow at my feet. The snow sizzled and melted around the tank. Only then did I notice that my coveralls were on fire. I dropped into the snow next to the tank and did the stop, drop, and roll I had learned in elementary school.