Sunrise

“Need that food bad, Sam,” Uncle Paul said. “Might starve otherwise.”

“I heard you,” Moyers replied.

“Paul,” Mom said, “nobody here is starving. You and the kids are welcome here—you should move with me, maybe even talk some sense into my son if you can.”

“Might come to that,” Uncle Paul said. “But I figure we’ll try it Alex’s way first.” Mom tried to interrupt, but Uncle Paul kept talking. “Don’t care much what happens to me, but I’d like to see Max and A

We talked—argued, really—for more than an hour after that. But nothing changed. The only “investigation” Moyers and Petty would make into our missing food involved filing a report. Mom was determined to move to Warren with or without me. Uncle Paul and Darla were equally determined to move to the wind farm.

At one point Rebecca and Mom stepped into the hallway that led to the exam rooms. When they reemerged after about ten minutes, Rebecca pulled me into the hallway.

“Alex,” Rebecca said as soon as we were alone, “I’m staying with Mom. In Warren.”

Mom was abandoning me, and now Rebecca had decided to join her? I turned away, trying to hide my reaction. “Don’t look at me like that,” Rebecca said.

“I wasn’t looking at you at all,” I replied. “And like what, anyway?”

“Like I just strangled your new puppy on Christmas morning.”

“It’s just . . . what went wrong? Mom used to be . . . I didn’t always like her, but I always could rely on her.”

“She held us together,” Rebecca said.

“Exactly. If our family was a building, she was the steel frame that supported us all. Now she’s like the wrecking ball.”

“I think Dad was a bigger part of that structure than you ever gave him credit for. It’s . . . she’s . . . she needs us, Alex.”

“We can’t move here. It’s not safe or—”

“I know. I feel like I’ve been drifting along ever since the eruption, just doing what Mom and Dad, Uncle Paul, or you tell me to do. Maybe this is what I’m meant to do. To help Mom—maybe be a bridge co

I nodded slowly. I thought I did understand. My decisions were at least partly selfish: I wanted to create a decent future for myself and Darla. But Rebecca understood that Mom needed her now and was willing to sacrifice safety to support our mother. It was strange that out of the half-dozen people in the clinic, the most mature was my fifteen-year-old sister.

“What if Warren gets attacked again?” I asked. “When you get settled, show me the route to the new homestead. I’ll memorize it; practice it—both during the day and at night. I’ll keep my go-bag ready and make sure Mom has one too. If another attack comes, we’ll run.”

I nodded again. For the second time that day, I struggled to fight back tears. Rebecca’s face was tight, determined, but I saw a quiver in her lower jaw. I held out my arms for a hug. She crashed into me, and I folded my arms over her shoulders.

“It’ll be okay,” I said, patting her back. “We’ll be close.”

“I know,” she said, “but I’ll still miss my a

“And I’ll miss my whiny little sister.”

Bikezilla was lighter on the way back to the farm without Rebecca. It should have been easier to pedal. But it wasn’t.

Chapter 25

When we got back to the farm, we realized we had completely forgotten to look for truck tires. Darla needed to sort out the wreckage of the barn, so the next day, Max and I loaded a jack and tire iron onto Bikezilla and went in search of an F-series truck with good tires. We biked from farm to farm, peeking in garages. Often we had to dig through mounds of snow to find the vehicle hiding beneath.

It took three days of searching to find a truck with tires that would work. We visited dozens of farms, and not one was occupied. All of Uncle Paul’s neighbors had fled—or died. When we got new tires on our truck, we easily pulled free the pesticide tank-cum-water heater, dragging it back to the temporary outdoor workshop Darla had set up beside the ruins of the barn.

Everyone else was busy too, salvaging kale and wheat from our destroyed greenhouses, tools from the barn, and packing up everything we’d need from the house. Darla, Ben, and Uncle Paul conspired endlessly, drawing up huge lists of what to take. Strange stuff appeared on their lists—for example, I was assigned to remove the toilet seats from both toilets and pack them. Darla pla

Alyssa was especially helpful to A

Then we had to move everything to the site Darla and I had picked five miles east of Warren amid the wind farm. Low on gas, we decided to drive the truck there only once. But the truck—even packed so full that the mound of supplies overtopped the cab—couldn’t hold all the stuff we needed to move. So Max and I wound up serving as movers. We pedaled back and forth from the old farm to the new site. It was about seven miles by the direct route, but we pedaled two miles out of the way to avoid passing through Warren, so each trip took more than an hour and a half one way.

It took six days to move everything. We tried to stack the supplies neatly in the snow at the new homestead, but they inevitably seemed to spread everywhere. It began to look like a cross between a flea market and an old trailer park instead of a farm. By the end of that week, Max and I were so tired that we’d quit complaining about how tired we were—we simply didn’t have the strength anymore. We collapsed into our bedrolls every night, moaning as our kinked muscles screamed in protest. When the pain faded from unbearable to only debilitating, I would finally fall asleep.

Everyone else stayed at the new site, working. The first thing they built was a large, crude igloo. At first there were arguments over who got to sleep in the truck and who had to sleep in the igloo. But after two nights, the arguments ended: it was much warmer in the igloo.

On day two they started building the first greenhouse. The greenhouse was more important than the longhouse, more important than a well or an outhouse. We had less than three weeks’ worth of food, and even if everything worked perfectly, it would take at least four weeks for even the tiniest, edible kale sprouts to appear.

I asked myself every day if we were doing the right thing—if the short-term risk of starvation was worth the long-term security we’d get if we could make this plan work. Everyone was hungry and short-tempered. Uncle Paul said the work we were doing required a diet of eight or nine thousand calories per day, but we were rationing our food supply, getting two or three thousand calories a day at most. Uncle Paul developed a persistent cough; he didn’t have a fever, though, so we couldn’t convince him to go into town to see Dr. McCarthy. Everyone lost weight, going from rail thin to skeletal.

We decided to butcher the last two goats. They were dying anyway, because we didn’t have anything to feed them. Over the next week, we ate nearly every scrap of those goats: we cleaned the intestines and ate boiled tripe, fried the brains (which were delicious, like scrambled eggs but richer and fattier), and even cracked the bones and sucked out the marrow.

The greenhouse Darla designed would be about ten feet high at the north side and have a sloping, south-facing roof, so the wall on the south side would need to be only two feet high—barely tall enough to crawl into that section to tend our crops.