Sunrise

I raised my left boot, jamming it into the crack above my right. I slid my hands upward along the windows and pulled my right boot free, slowly ascending the crack one short step at a time.

When I got close enough, I reached out for the rear bumper of the car on my right. The rifle on my back shifted, banging into the car’s hood with a resounding clang.

I froze. The night was inky black—if I didn’t move, the sentries might not see me. Would they investigate the clang? Or assume the next sentry along the wall had dropped something?

I counted off the seconds. Thirty. Sixty. A bead of sweat rolled along the bridge of my nose. I was poised to jump down and run if I were spotted. Ninety. One hundred twenty. The next patrol would be along in two or three minutes. My fingers had quit burning—lost all feeling, in fact. I had to move now—get off the wall or over it. I pulled myself up, slipped over the top of the cars, and dropped into the snow on the inside. I pulled my gloves on with a quiet sigh of relief and then froze, listening. No alarm was raised.

About five minutes later—after the next patrol had passed—Darla dropped into the snow alongside me. She had left her rifle behind.

Silently we slunk through the dark streets of Stockton until we reached the warehouse. There were two guards sitting by a small fire near the front door. The two semis loaded with pork that I had allowed Stockton to keep were there, parked across from the warehouse, so their metal backs were clearly visible from the guards’ fire. One of the semitrailers was standing open and empty. The other was chained and padlocked.

Was Stockton ru

I shook off my gloomy thoughts and led the way to the back of the building. A few bushes—what had once passed for landscaping—had died against the back of the warehouse. They were mostly buried by the snow. Darla crept up between two of the bushes, ru

“With a crowbar and a hacksaw, I think we could break in here,” she whispered.

I couldn’t see the seam well at all—it was too dark. “We’ll come back,” I said.

We retraced our steps, brushing snow across our path, trying to disguise our tracks. Getting out was much easi-er—there were good holds on the undersides of the cars. We climbed together, stopping at the top to check for the patrols, and then dropped into the snow outside Stockton. Darla retrieved her rifle from the snowbank where she had hidden it, and we began the trek home.

We returned to Stockton the next night. Darla had a large wrecking bar; a small, flat pry bar; a hacksaw; and an extra hacksaw blade. She had wrapped each item in cloth secured by duct tape to keep it all from clanking. We left our rifles behind, but I brought along a revolver we had acquired during our attack on Stockton more than eight months before.

Getting across the wall was easier the second time. We already knew what to expect from the guards. Less than half an hour after we had reached Stockton, we were huddled at the metal seam in the back wall of the warehouse.

We dug a hole in the snow with our hands, trying to access the base of the wall. When we had exposed the whole seam, Darla jammed the flat pry bar between the corrugated metal panels near the base, forcing it deeper into the seam by striking the curved end of the pry bar with her palm. That made the seam open enough that I could slip the extra hacksaw blade between the metal panels and saw at the rivets holding the panels together.

Every noise we made sounded like a scream in the silent night: the thump, thump of Darla beating on the pry bar and driving it deeper, the scritch-scritch of the hacksaw blade worrying at the rivet. We stopped every now and then, listening, wondering if we’d be discovered.

When the bottom rivet gave way, the seam opened considerably. I reversed the hacksaw blade and started working my way upward, one rivet at a time.

I cut six of them before we could bend the panel enough to slip through. It was springy and wouldn’t stay bent, so Darla held it open for me while I wormed through. Then I turned and forced it open with my feet, holding it for her.

There was no light whatsoever inside the warehouse. I extracted a flint and steel and tinder from my pack. I couldn’t see much in the brief flashes the sparks made from the flint, but after a moment, one of the sparks caught in the shredded cottonwood bark I was using for tinder. I used the burning bark to light a candle I’d brought along. We never used candles back at the homestead—we were down to two stubs plus the one I held in my hands—but hauling an oil lamp on this commando raid had seemed impractical.

The warehouse was like a giant candy store to Darla. Actually, better. If there’d been a candy store right next door, I’m pretty sure Darla would have ignored it, preferring to ogle the racks of supplies. Nearly everything we needed was here: pumps, wire, piping, plastic sheeting, water heaters, and more.

Darla found the type of wire we needed on an indus-trial-size spool resting on its end on a pallet. She unwrapped two huge coils of wire, walking around and around the spool to do it and cutting the wire with a bolt cutter that was conveniently laid on a nearby shelf.

When she settled the first coil over my shoulder like a life ring, I staggered under the weight. It had to be more than a hundred pounds of wire. I thought I could get across the wall carrying it. Maybe. She put an even bigger coil across her own shoulders.

I noticed that she carefully placed the bolt cutter back in exactly the same position she had found it in. The spool of wire didn’t look depleted at all, despite the burdens weighing us down.

On the way out, I passed a shelf that held boxes of nails—thousands of large framing nails, perfect for our building projects. I remembered the hours of mind-numbing work pulling and straightening nails for reuse. I grabbed two boxes.

Darla held out a hand in a “stop” gesture. She took the two boxes of nails and put them back where I had found them. Then she grabbed two boxes from the back of the shelf, where it wouldn’t be as obvious they were missing, and stowed them in my backpack. She hoisted an armload of some kind of circular leather belts designed to transfer power on an old-fashioned machine. I pointed at some similar rubber belts—surely those would work better for whatever she had in mind, but she shook her head. She passed me the belts, and I stuffed them into her backpack.

To get back through the seam at the rear of the warehouse, I had to take off the roll of wire and push it through first. Once we were both outside, we worked on disguising the spot where we’d entered the warehouse. We brushed snow over our tracks, and I broke off a huge chunk of the nearest dead bush, planting it in the snow directly in front of the spot we’d broken open.

Getting over the car wall was difficult enough carrying nothing. With a backpack loaded with nails and a huge coil of wire, it was almost impossible—well, for me, anyway. I watched as Darla flowed to the top of the wall seemingly effortlessly, marveling at her strength. She stopped at the top, motionless, waiting for the sentries to pass. When she gestured for me to follow, I huffed and puffed my way up, slipping once and nearly tumbling backward off the exhaust pipe I was clinging to. Jumping down on the other side was no fun either—my collar of wire left a huge bruise across my neck and shoulder, and the nails jingled alarmingly in my backpack. But either no one heard or we were long gone by the time they got to the spot where we had crossed the wall.