Sunrise

“What’s with the questions?” Rebecca asked. “Stockton’s out of food again,” I said.

“Do I even want to know how you know this?” “Probably not,” I said. “You’ve got to be ready to run.” “You’ll have a good place to run to,” Darla said. “Once we build our sniper perch and finish camouflaging our site with snow and ice, it’ll be about as defensible as any place with eight people can be.”

“You think we’ll be attacked?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes,” I said flatly. “You’ve got food. Stockton doesn’t. And if Red finds out where we are—that we’ve got producing greenhouses—he’ll attack us too.”

“Hope you’re wrong.”

“Yeah, me too. If there’s any way you can leak the info to Mayor Petty without letting him know where you got it . . . he might trust a rumor more than something I told him.”

“I’ll tell Mom I heard it from Nylce or something. She’ll tell Bob.” She said the mayor’s name with disgust. “Good. And tell Mom . . . tell her I miss her.”

“Okay. I will. She misses you too, you know.”

“She could move out to the homestead anytime she wants,” I said.

“I know.” I started to turn away, but Rebecca grabbed my arm, holding it in a surprisingly powerful grip. “It’s going to be okay, Alex. I know it is.”

As I pedaled away from Warren, I thought about her last words. I couldn’t escape my worries, couldn’t shake the inexorable feeling that we had it too good, that something horrible lurked just over the horizon.

Chapter 32

When we finished the structure of the longhouse, we piled snow around and atop it. We also covered the walls of both greenhouses with snow. From downslope the homestead looked like three unusual hillocks of snow butted up against the wind turbine. Once you got closer, the glass roofs of the greenhouses made it obvious that the snow mounds weren’t natural, but there was nothing we could do about that.

When the longhouse was finished, we crushed the igloo and moved into our new digs. That night, we held a celebration. Darla had hooked up an electric range we had taken from one of the farmhouses, and she installed overhead lighting in the longhouse. If the wind was blowing, we could cook without building a fire. It seemed like the acme of luxury after almost two years squatting beside a campfire to cook anything. Darla had asked me to find some electric or hybrid cars—she and Uncle Paul thought they could convert their batteries to allow us to store electricity when the wind wasn’t blow-ing—but I hadn’t gotten around to looking for them yet.

I cooked kale greens in soybean oil. Darla made tortillas from the first wheat harvested from our greenhouse, and A

Our next project was the sniper nest near the top of the windmill tower adjacent to the longhouse. I flatly refused to get involved. Just looking up into that tower made my knees shake. Darla pla

As we worked on improving the homestead, we all waited for the inevitable attack on Warren, waited for Rebecca to come up the hill toward us, maybe with a flood of refugees trailing in her wake. But no attack came. Darla finished the sniper’s perch, and we started to do sentry duty up there. I hated being on sentry duty. Not the cold; that wasn’t anything new. Or the boredom; I was used to that. It was the climb to and from the sniper’s nest. Two hundred and eighty-four ladder rungs. Once I was up, it wasn’t so bad. The platform Darla built filled the turbine tower—you had to enter through a hatch in the floor. There was no way to fall out—the slits in the tower wall were barely big enough for binoculars or the barrel of a rifle.

There were two panic buttons mounted on the floor: one that would ring an alarm only in the longhouse and another that would sound a Klaxon audible from miles away. They only worked when the wind was blowing, of course. Any other time, we’d use our old system of rifle shots to sound the warning.

As soon as the sniper’s nest was finished, Darla and Uncle Paul built an electric grinder for our wheat. Then they started working on building a battery backup for our electrical power. They found a Chevy Volt with a good battery and hauled the battery—all 435 pounds of it—to the homestead. They started testing it out in the snow about a hundred yards downslope from the greenhouses. Uncle Paul said the battery could explode from overcharging, which sounded crazy to me, but he was the electrical engineer.

The rest of us started building a third greenhouse. Usually only two or three of us were available to work on it—we still had to cook, clean, wash clothes, dig corn and soybeans, and one person always had to be on guard duty in the sniper’s nest. At the rate we progressed on the third greenhouse, I was afraid it would take six months or more to finish. Nonetheless, it was important to build another. We were eating okay, but we weren’t building up a stockpile of food. I wanted to squirrel away a few thousand pounds of flour and dried kale leaves in case something went wrong.

My eighteenth birthday came and went. I remembered it for once, but it was a day like any other—we worked on building the third greenhouse during the day and held a subdued celebration at di

Uncle Paul and Darla did indeed blow up the battery from the Volt and then the high voltage battery pack from a Prius, but on the third try—with a battery pack from another Prius—they figured out how to add a circuit to prevent the batteries from overcharging. We had lights that we could turn on anytime we wanted! When Uncle Paul and Darla demonstrated the system, I raised my water cup in a toast, “Here’s to reentering the 1890s!” Alyssa laughed. Darla glared at me.

I sidled over to Darla. “Sorry,” I said in a low voice, “it’s great. Brilliant. I honestly never believed I’d see a working light switch again.”

“You don’t have to be a suck up,” Darla said.

“That’s not true.”

“Why do you say that?”

I leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “Because you’re the only person in the world who wants to have sex with me?”

“That’s not true either.” Darla shot a murderous glare at Alyssa.

I intentionally misunderstood. “What? We’ve known each other two years, and you’re already bored with this?” I swept both hands down my scrawny, half-starved body and had to stifle a laugh.

Darla just rolled her eyes.

“I mean, I was going to let myself go after we got married, but now I guess I can quit working out any—” Darla stifled my speech with a long, intense kiss. Everyone else in the room was doing their best to ignore us. Living in a one-room longhouse takes some getting used to. “Wow,” I said, coming up for air, “that was—”

“Be serious for a moment, okay?”

I nodded, letting the grin fade from my face.

“Your uncle and I want to work on lights for the greenhouses next instead of helping to build the third greenhouse.”

“Won’t the light be visible for miles?”

“We’ll shield all the light fixtures and only leave them on during the day. Might boost production a lot.”

I nodded. It made sense—none of the greenhouses, even the ones at the old farm, had produced as well as they could. There just wasn’t enough light in the dim, yellowish sky. “We’ve got plenty of light fixtures and bulbs—we can scavenge more from any of the farmhouses around here.” “Good. But we also need more flexible tubing and another pump. To heat the edges of the greenhouse.” “And so you want to make another trip to the warehouse.”