Sunrise

by Mike Mullin

It took about five minutes to gather everyone in the longhouse. Darla and I used the time to change from our work coveralls into the ghillie suits. Then we strapped makeshift snowshoes to our boots. We had found plenty of bicycles during our scavenging, but no snowmobiles, so she still hadn’t been able to replace Bikezilla. These snow-shoes were a poor substitute.

  “Stay inside the longhouse,” I told the group once they were all assembled. “Ed and Charlotte are up top. Darla and I are going to try to find out what’s going on. We’ll be back as soon as we can, but before dark, no matter what. Uncle Paul’s in charge.”

  “Okay,” Uncle Paul said. He started to add something, but a coughing fit interrupted him. The cough seemed to be getting worse.

  I threw on the backpack with my emergency supplies, held the door for Darla, and followed her outside. We set off, heading toward the sound of the gunfire. It seemed to be coming roughly from Warren. We moved slowly, constantly scanning the horizon ahead of us, stopping and listening. The shots tapered off and, after about ten more minutes, ceased completely.

  When we got close enough to see the outskirts of Warren, we stopped. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. “It sounded like the shots were coming from here,” Darla said.

  “Maybe they were. Or maybe they were coming from the other side of town.”

  “If there was a battle in town, people might still have their fingers on their triggers.”

  “Let’s go around.”

  We skirted Warren, keeping the outermost buildings barely in view. At the far side of Warren, as we came up behind Elmwood Cemetery, we started to hear low moans and the occasional scream. There were no more gunshots, though. We crept closer, using gravestones and tree stumps for cover. The moans were coming from the road—we couldn’t see who was making the noises because of the high snow berms flanking the roadbed. We inched closer, slinking up the side of the snow berm, cautiously raising our heads just high enough to see over.

  The road had been transformed into an abattoir. Hundreds of people lay along it as far as I could see in either direction. Many of them were dead. Blood ran at the edges of the road like rainwater, flowing toward Warren in an accusatory river.

  Red. It had to be Red.

  Chapter 43

  Darla looked away, releasing a sigh that sounded like she was in physical pain.

  I looked closer. There were knots of people who appeared to be uninjured, moving among the wounded and trying to help. All of them were dressed in ragged clothing, so filthy it was a nearly uniform shade of gray. Both the injured and the ambulatory were gaunt and starved. They could have been extras in a Holocaust movie.

  At the end of the road nearest Warren, two figures worked frantically over a prone form: Dr. McCarthy and Belinda, I thought. Beyond them, I could see a line of men stretched across the road, guns held upright against their shoulders. No one else appeared to be armed. I rethought my first assumption—there was no sign of Red or any of his disciplined, black-clad troops.

  “Come on.” I tugged on Darla’s sleeve and ducked back behind the snow berm as we worked our way toward Dr. McCarthy. Strange, I thought, that there would be another battle in almost exactly the same location where we were ambushed by the Reds holding Warren eighteen months before. The same place where my Aunt Caroline and Mayor Petty had been shot. Wind and snow had resculpted the surface of the cemetery, hiding all evidence of the earlier fight. From this side of the embankment, the cemetery seemed almost peaceful, its gravestones mostly buried, their tops dusted with snow. But I couldn’t undo the carnage on the road alongside us; the moans of the dying prevented a moment’s solace.

  We reached the edge of the cemetery and climbed back to the top of the snow berm. Dr. McCarthy was below us and a little bit to the left. His hands flew over a young man’s body, trying to affix a makeshift tourniquet to his arm. The guy’s wrist had been completely smashed by a high-caliber bullet—the hand appeared to be attached by nothing more than ripped skin and gristle.

  Farther to our left, there was a gap of about a hundred yards, followed by the line of men carrying rifles that I’d seen earlier, maybe thirty or forty of them in all. I recognized all of them—they were residents of Warren. Some of them shifted from foot to foot; a couple of them sat in the road or leaned against the snowbank; and others, including Sheriff Moyers, seemed to be a little green around the edges as if they were fighting the urge to vomit.

  I wondered where my mom was. None of the victims looked familiar, and none of the armed Warrenites were women, so I hoped that meant she was safe inside the village.

  “This wasn’t a fight,” Darla whispered, “it was a massacre.”

  “Dr. McCarthy needs help,” I said.

  “Alex, wait.” Darla grabbed my arm. “Go slowly. You remember that you’re not the most popular guy in Warren, right?”

  “Yeah.” I needed to get down to the road fast. To do something. To help. People were dying down there. But Darla had a point.

  I raised my head a little higher, ready to quickly duck back below the lip of the snow berm if any of the men went for their rifles. “Sam!” I yelled. “Sheriff Moyers!”

  He turned toward me, holding his rifle low. I raised my hand and hook to about the level of my shoulders and called out again. “You going to shoot me if I help Doc McCarthy?”

  Sam shrugged and yelled back, “Suit yourself.”

  That wasn’t really an answer, but I guessed it would have to do. I clambered over the berm and slid down to the road. Some of the riflemen eyed me uneasily, but none of them leveled their guns. “Strange outfit you’re wearing,” Sam said, “and what’s up with the hook?” I ignored him.

  The person closest to me was bleeding from wounds in his thigh and side. I needed bandages. I looked toward Belinda—she was cutting a strip from her patient’s own T-shirt. Right, we had no bandages.

  I unzipped the guy’s coat and cut four huge strips of cloth from his shirt using the blade on my hook. I packed one strip of cloth into the wound on his thigh, then wrapped another around it, cinching it tight. That stopped the bleeding, at least. The wound on his side took longer to treat.

  Darla had followed me down and started bandaging another victim. Dr. McCarthy brushed by me on his way to yet another patient.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Little busy right now,” he said without stopping.

  I glanced at Belinda. “Why aren’t Sheriff Moyers’ men helping?”

  She made a face like she had just bitten into a maggoty apple, but didn’t reply.

  We worked for hours. My hand and hook dripped with other people’s blood; it caked my arms, legs, and chest. The air reeked of slaughter and terror. Darla and I looked like extras from a gory zombie movie. Our ghillie suits were ruined—they would blend in nowhere but a slaughterhouse. Some of the ambulatory victims were helping; otherwise we would never have finished. Still, many of the injured bled out before anyone could reach them.

  I recognized one of the survivors: Reverend Evans, who had been the director of the Baptist relief workers, the yellow coats at the Galena, Illinois, FEMA camp. He had been leading a mostly ineffective effort to keep the kids at the FEMA camp fed. What was he doing here?

  I stumbled through the bodies, looking for anyone still alive to treat, looking for more life amid the silent dead. Dr. McCarthy grabbed my arm. “Stop. We need to get the survivors into some kind of shelter before nightfall. They’re going to freeze to death.”

  “Start taking them to the clinic?” I asked.

  Dr. McCarthy’s face spasmed and turned fire-engine red. He looked like he’d swallowed a frog and was trying desperately to spit it back out. When he finally did speak, his words were clipped and angry. “That’s what Sheriff Moyers is here for. So the refugees can’t get into Warren. Mayor Petty won’t allow them into town.”

  “Moyers and his men massacred these people, didn’t they?”

  Dr. McCarthy was so angry he couldn’t speak. Instead, he gave a curt
nod.

  “Darla, I need you.”

  She looked up from the patient she was talking to. “Alex, I don’t think—”

  “You, you, and you.” I started pointing at random ambulatory people until I had seven of them picked out. “Follow Darla back to our homestead.” I turned back to Darla. “I need every blanket we’ve got plus two poles per blanket to make stretchers. Have everyone except Uncle Paul and the three youngest girls come back with you. Oh, and bring every oil lamp we’ve got. We’re not going to finish this before nightfall.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Darla whispered.

  I shrugged. “No.”

  “I could get back faster on my own. They’re going to be up to their hips in snow.”

  “We need a trail around Warren anyway. Better to break it before we’re all carrying stretchers. And you’ll need the help to carry everything back here.”

  “Okay.” She leaned in for a quick kiss. “Even though I don’t understand you. We were doing fine on our own.” “It was never going to last. Get going.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Instead of saluting, she slapped my butt.

  I organized the grisly work of sorting the dead, the dying, and those who might survive. I talked to Dr. McCarthy, Belinda, and the few dozen people left who could walk, explaining my plan. Then I started helping to move corpses.

  I approached a young woman bent over an even younger man who lay in the road, clearly dead—half of his skull was missing. “May I move him?” I asked her as gently as I could.

  She turned her tear-washed face up to me. “W-w-will you bury him? Properly? B-B-Brock was a Christian. He wanted me to get baptized. He’d want a funeral.”

  Crap! I knew I had been forgetting something. “We’ll need pickaxes to dig the graves. We can bury them in the snow for now. We’ll come back when we can with the right tools and give them a proper burial, a real funeral. I promise.” I felt like an idiot. I wasn’t sure how we were going to

  feed the living, let alone bury the dead. The solution to that problem was obvious—I know I wouldn’t mind if someone ate my corpse, but the thought of eating someone else’s made me more than a little queasy. I had been fighting with flensers off and on for almost two and a half years—I couldn’t stomach the thought of becoming one, even due to the direst necessity.

  It was as if she could read my mind. “I don’t think Brock would mind if you had to eat him. You could bury his bones still, right?”

  “I don’t think we’ll need to go that far. If we cover him in snow, we can come back and bury him later.” Or eat him, if things get bad enough, I thought but didn’t say.

  The woman got up and helped me drag Brock across the snow berm. On the other side, the snow was softer, making it easier to bury the body. As we covered Brock’s corpse, I learned the woman’s name. “Francine, not Franny,” she said, which struck me as strange. Who worries about trivialities like nicknames during the aftermath of a massacre? She said it automatically, like it was a habit, a verbal tic that transcended the horror of the situation.

  Without thinking about it, I asked her, “What happened?” Then I wished I could bite the words back out of the air. Surely she wouldn’t want to talk about it.

  But I was wrong. She seemed to need to talk, and as we moved the next corpse, burying it in the snow beside Brock, she told me the whole story.

  All the people in the road—dead and living—were from the Galena FEMA camp, where Darla and I had been held prisoner for eleven days, more than two years earlier. Three days ago the guards, who worked for a FEMA subcontractor named Black Lake, had disappeared—just torn down their tents, packed their vehicles so full they were nearly bursting, and left. Francine had heard a rumor that they had lost contact with the government on the East Coast. Some refugees said the guards had left to try to reestablish contact. Some said the guards were all moving to a huge hoard of wheat stored on barges on the Mississippi. I figured the second version was more likely to be true—at least I knew the part about the wheat barges was true. Darla and I had found the barges before we’d been captured by Black Lake, and later we’d told the guards about them when we were trapped in the Galena camp.

  When the guards left, some of the refugees fled immediately—a group of them fastened a makeshift rope to the chain-link fence and ripped down a whole section of it. Other refugees stayed for a few days, but it quickly became clear that no more food would be forthcoming, and the guards hadn’t left any behind.

  Three or four hundred refugees were already clustered on the road outside Warren when Francine had arrived. They were arguing with a row of guards Mayor Petty had sent to block the road. Some of the refugees only wanted to pass through Warren. Some of them wanted to stay. All of them needed food. A fight broke out, and then someone fired a shot, and within seconds the massacre had begun.

  The shooting only lasted about twenty minutes, Francine thought. It ended when Dr. McCarthy and

  Belinda charged through Sheriff Moyers’ line of riflemen and started bandaging wounds even as bullets continued to stab bloody exclamation points and periods into the lives around them.

  Sheriff Moyers had called a cease-fire. Even he could see that shooting the town’s only doctor was a very bad idea.

  Brock had been Francine’s fiance. They’d gotten engaged just before the volcano erupted, but they had been waiting to get married until they could find a Catholic priest to baptize Francine and officiate their wedding. Now they’d never be married.

  Listening to Francine’s story brought a quiet sense of despair bubbling up in my gut. I had always believed that the human race would survive the massive volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, would surmount this disaster, just as we had surmounted so many lesser disasters before. But amid the carnage in the road outside Warren, I wondered: did we deserve to survive?

  Chapter 44

  Darla wasn’t back by nightfall with the transportation supplies. Sheriff Moyers lit two oil lamps. He and his men huddled uneasily in the light, watching us. After a few minutes, Dr. McCarthy rose from the side of the patient he was trying to treat in the dark, marched up to Sheriff Moyers, and took both the lanterns. To his credit, the sheriff didn’t fight—he just sent one of his men to get two more lanterns from the town behind them.

  I assigned two people to hold the lanterns for Dr. McCarthy and Belinda. I worked mostly in the dark, dragging corpses across the berm and interring them in the snow by feel.

  Darla returned several hours after dark with the blankets and poles we needed to make improvised stretchers. She had more lanterns and able-bodied help too. As Max’s lantern illuminated a woman who was missing most of one leg, he turned deathly pale and staggered to the edge of the road, vomiting on the blood-soaked ice.

  On snowshoes we could make the trek from our homestead to Warren in about two hours. Without snowshoes, carrying a stretcher, it took more than twice that long. I felt a stab of relief when one of our patients died—one fewer person to carry—and then hated myself for feeling that way.

  Darla had scrounged enough supplies for fifteen stretchers. We had more than enough able-bodied people to carry the stretchers, so I paired off some of the less seriously wounded with helpers—anyone who could walk would have to. Even so, it took three trips to move everyone back to the homestead. We weren’t finished until after noon the next day.

  I was dead tired. My eyes felt sandy and my head spun when I moved too fast. Still, I couldn’t rest yet. I sought out Anna and Charlotte. They and Wyn hadn’t made the trek to the massacre site—they were too young to see it, I thought, although I realized now that I was wasting my time trying to protect them. The longhouse was packed with wounded: we’d brought the massacre back home.

  “Anna, I need to know exactly how much food we have. I haven’t updated my inventory since last week. Check the greenhouse records, figure out how much food we can expect to produce, and when we’ll run out, given all the new people here. Assume . . . I don’t know, ask Dr. M
cCarthy for a guess as to how many of the wounded will survive.”

  “But the food records are your job.”

  I was only planning to ask her to gather some information while I slept, but then it hit me: with this many people around, I would need a lot of help running the show.

  “Not anymore. It’s your job from now on. It’s really important.”

  “I know it is. But I can’t do—”

  “Alyssa says you’re really good at math.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And your handwriting is beautiful. But the most important thing is that I can trust you. You’ll do great. The records are on the clipboard by my bedroll.” I turned to Charlotte before Anna could protest further. “Charlotte, you’re in charge of the census. Count everyone and get a total number to Anna as fast as you can. Then go back and interview them all. I want to know how old they are, if they have family here, what they’re good at, what they did before the eruption, if they’re wounded, where and how badly—everything, okay?”

  Charlotte shifted nervously from foot to foot, but her voice sounded solid enough when she agreed to take on the project.

  “Wake me up at dinnertime with a report,” I told them. I picked my way through the wounded to my bunk, collapsed into it, and fell asleep almost instantly.

  Dinner was three small pancakes and a kale leaf. As we ate, Anna gave her report. “If we drop to survival rations— eight hundred calories a day for the women and a thousand for the men, then we’ll run out of food in about fifty-seven days.”

  “I expected it to be worse.”

  “It depends on the survival rate,” Anna said. “Charlotte looked into that for me.”

  “We’ve got the twelve original settlers,” Charlotte said, “forty-three uninjured newcomers, twenty-nine walking wounded, and thirty-three more seriously injured. One hundred seventeen total. Dr. McCarthy expects ten percent of the walking wounded to die, along with a third of the others, mostly from infections. So we’ll probably settle out at something like 103. I don’t have the detailed census done yet.”