by Mike Mullin
“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.
“Ben’s assignment was changed by the Sister Unit,” Ben said.
“Is the Sister Unit in charge of the chore roster?” I asked.
“Ben always does what the Sister Unit asks of him,” Ben said.
“Almost always,” Alyssa said. “We were on fire duty.”
“The fires under the greenhouses are out!” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Alyssa said. “Will the kale be—”
“It’ll be fine,” I said, although I wasn’t totally sure about that. “Ed’s getting the fires relit, and the ground holds heat a long time. But what were you doing? Playing school?”
“We weren’t playing, Alex,” Mom said. “These kids need to be in school.”
“We need to eat,” I said. “School is a luxury we can’t afford right now.”
“Education is no kind of luxury,” Mom said. “Without it we’re only one generation removed from barbarism.” “Without food there won’t be another generation.” “Why do you have to fight me all the time?”
“That’s not the—”
“I’ll go help Ed with the fires,” Alyssa said, stepping toward the barn door.
“Wait,” I said.
“Well,” Mom said, “you seem to have ended all hope for any more learning taking place this morning.” She pivoted abruptly and marched off toward the house.
I stared, not sure whether to chase after her or not. “I’m sorry,” Alyssa said. “I just . . . Dr. McCarthy asked me this morning what I was planning to do before the volcano erupted. I always wanted to get a teaching degree, work with kids like Ben, may
be.”
“You’d be great at that.”
“Your mom was there, and she started telling me how she got her start teaching special ed.”
My mother was a special ed teacher? She’d never told me about that. She’d been a principal for as long as I could remember.
“And anyway,” Alyssa continued, “things kind of snowballed from there, and everyone was really enthusiastic about the idea, especially your mom. I figured we could teach practical classes too. I was going to ask you to run a taekwondo class, maybe have your uncle teach gun safety and marksmanship, stuff like that.”
“It’s a good idea, but—”
“I know. We should have waited until all the work was done. It doesn’t seem like there’ll ever be enough time to do everything we need and want to do.”
“Could you design lessons that could be taught while you do chores? It doesn’t take much brainpower to water the kale or wash clothing. I could change the duty rotations to give you time with each of your students and with Mom if you want.”
“That could work.” Alyssa turned toward Ben, who was still sitting on the floor, scratching columns of figures into the dirt. “Come on, let’s get our chores done.” He stood and brushed off his pants.
I started to leave, but Alyssa caught my arm, leaned in, and kissed my cheek.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“You’re sweet.” She left the barn, Ben trailing behind her, heading for the greenhouses.
I rubbed the spot she’d kissed, wondering what I’d done to make Alyssa think I was sweet. And why did my mother seem to disagree so adamantly?
Chapter 14
Dr. McCarthy and Mayor Petty were with us for almost a month. Petty clung to life stubbornly despite his amputated legs, despite the infections that raced through his body leaving him feverish and incoherent. When his condition improved enough, Belinda drove out in Dr. McCarthy’s old Studebaker, a folded wheelchair jammed into its backseat. A few days later, Petty, McCarthy, and Belinda moved back to town, and the farm settled into a routine of sorts.
We tore up all the carpet in the living room. It was too badly stained with blood, urine, and other unidentifiable fluids to be salvaged. The rough wood floor underneath wasn’t as comfortable, but it smelled a lot better.
Our kale crop came in blessedly fast, as if the soil in the greenhouses had stored up all that energy from going unplanted and now was pumping it into our crop. As soon as the first shoots were a few inches long, we started harvesting them, eating only one shoot per person per day to prevent scurvy.
Alyssa took all the most boring, repetitive jobs so she could practice teaching while she worked. She hung around Mom a lot, talking about her students: Anna, Rebecca, Max, and Ben. Ben was older than she, and the rest weren’t much younger, but they seemed to enjoy the classes. Darla never participated, and I was usually far too busy. Occasionally Alyssa organized evening classes that we all attended. The subjects ranged from taekwondo to fire safety, marksmanship, or greenhouse farming. Uncle Paul taught most of the evening seminars, although I led the taekwondo classes, of course.
Darla got steadily stronger, working longer and longer days beside me. There was—as always—no end to the work. Clothes had to be washed by hand, wood had to be cut, kale watered. Darla kept sleeping beside me too, abandoning the girls’ room where Alyssa, Rebecca, and Anna slept. Ben, Uncle Paul, Max, and Ed all slept in Max’s bedroom too, so it wasn’t like we could make out or anything. The greenhouses were better for that. They were warm—particularly in the middle of the day—heated by the hypocaust and what wan light filtered through the ash and sulfur dioxide still polluting the stratosphere.
Darla had started challenging me to arm wrestle every night after dinner. Before her enslavement to the Dirty White Boys, I would never have agreed to arm wrestle with Darla—getting my wrist slammed to the table did nothing good for my ego. But I found that I could beat her easily now. Still, she kept challenging me, night after night, and losing.
Finally, after almost two months on the farm, she beat me. The next night I won—barely—but then she beat me three nights running, winning easily the third time.
The night after that, she waited until everyone else had left the dinner table before she banged her elbow down, holding her hand up, ready to clinch mine. “Ready?”
“Not tonight.”
“Really? You beat me, what, fifty or sixty nights running, and after three losses, you’re calling it quits?”
“Four losses. And yes.”
“Weak.”
“My ego may be weak, not my arms. You’re just freakishly strong.”
“You’re calling me a freak? Now you’ve got to wrestle.”
I reached out and grabbed her wrist, twisting her arm and pulling her out of her seat toward me. I caught her by surprise, wrenching her arm around and pulling her into my lap. “I guess I like wrestling after all,” I said, laughing.
I released her arm and craned my neck over her shoulder. She turned her head, and we kissed. She wrapped her
newly freed arm around my shoulder, pulling me closer.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” she said when the kiss ended.
“Yeah?”
“We’re running out of wood.”
“Yeah,” I said, sighing heavily. I’d noticed the same thing—Apple River Canyon State Park was mostly stumps now.
“I want to try to get one of those wind turbines running,” Darla said.
“Wind turbines?”
“The big windmill things, east of Warren. There’re sixty or seventy of them. I’ve been talking to your uncle, and I think we might be able to do it—rig them to run under local control and use them to heat greenhouses. We’d need a lot of components—mostly parts from electric water heaters, some big metal tanks, insulation—oh, and tools. Some heavy gauge—”
“Okay, I get the picture.”
“I want to build another Bikezilla too.”
“So we need a couple of bicycles and a snowmobile. We’ve got enough kale to trade now. You ask Uncle Paul if we could take some to Warren to trade?”
“Yeah. He said to check with you.”
“What? Why?”
“I dunno. But we should go soon. The right time to deal with this is before we run out of wood completely.” “We’ll pick kale to trade in the morning. Head to Warren first thing.”
“Okay, good.” Darla kissed me again and slid off my lap. I didn’t mind. Somehow the talk of windmills, kale, and running out of wood had dampened my ardor. Why was Uncle Paul letting all of the farm’s problems fall into my lap? I wasn’t sure I wanted the responsibility: if I failed, we would all die.
Chapter 15
The next morning Ben found me in one of the greenhouses. Darla and I were picking kale, bagging it for trade.
“Lieutenant,” Ben said, “are you mounting an expedition to Warren today?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “We’re going to try to trade some kale for electrical parts Darla needs.”
“I request permission to accompany your expedition.”
“Sure, you can come along.” Then I hastily added, “If you bring Alyssa.”
Darla shot a sharp look my way, but I ignored
her. I didn’t think Ben would have any problem on a day trip to Warren, but if he did, I wanted Alyssa there too. She was the only one who could calm him on the rare occasions he melted down.
“When do we leave, sir?”
I’d told Ben to quit calling me “lieutenant” and “sir” about a million times. It didn’t help. “Meet us in the kitchen in about a half hour.”
Ben saluted and left the greenhouse.
The four of us piled into the captured pickup truck. Usually we walked the five miles to Warren—gas was nearly impossible to come by—but Darla had a huge shopping list of electrical components, tools, and parts. If the trip was successful, we’d need the carrying capacity of the truck.
As we approached Warren, Ben
spoke up. “Where is the wall?”
“What wall?” Alyssa asked.
“The wall that Warren needs to build. Since no one has air power, tanks, or heavy ordinance, a wall is an effective means of defending the town. They should have built one by now. In fact, we need to move to town—”
“Move to town? Why?” I asked.
Ben had kept talking. “—because the farm cannot be defended effectively.”
“But the greenhouses—”
“The postapocalyptic society will inevitably devolve into a feudal system. We will live in town in times of danger and travel to the greenhouses outside to farm, or move all food production inside the walls, or perhaps inside a larger fixed defense system of some sort.”
“If I can get the windmills running,” Darla said, “it might be easier to move the town to the windmills.”
“Why not run power lines to the town?” I asked.
Ben answered, “Your solution would leave the power source vulnerable. The windmills could be attacked—or the power lines cut—leaving the town completely at the mercy of a besieging army.”
As Darla turned the truck into the parking lot at Dr. McCarthy’s clinic, Ben added, “Whether we move to the windmills or not, the town must adopt a better defensive posture. We should not have been able to come this far unchallenged.”
“I’ll talk to them about it,” I said.
Dr. McCarthy and Belinda were at the counter in the clinic, reading by the light of an oil lamp. “Slow day?” I asked.
“Yes, thank God,” Dr. McCarthy replied. “Only three rooms occupied. Two cases of pneumonia and a reinfected wound. Hope you aren’t bringing me any business.”
“Nope. Everything’s okay out at the farm. Well, except for Mom.”
“What are her symptoms?”
“She’s not sick, really. Just hardly ever sleeps. Spends a lot of time compulsively sorting old pictures.”
“I’d prescribe an SSRI if I had any or refer her to a specialist in cognitive behavioral therapy, if there were any in Warren.”