Sunrise

“Maybe.”

“Be real. We’re ranging all over this area scavenging stuff. And we’re going to continue to expand. We need a huge food surplus, in case something goes wrong.”

“Yeah. I guess someone will notice eventually.” Max shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably.

“And what happens if Red or someone like him finds us?” “Nothing good.”

“That’s why the walls of the longhouse are so thick—why we built the sniper’s nest, and why we’ll be building more of them. But still, if Red finds us, we don’t stand a chance. He’s got a standing army of something like 150 men.”

“What’re we going to do?”

“We need allies. Or a much bigger population. A military of our own. See where I’m going with this?”

“Yeah. I’ve got it.”

I backed off the hatch to let him open it. “And Max, please don’t do anything stupid. I’ve got enough on my plate, okay?”

“I won’t.”

I reached out my good hand to shake but thought better of it and pulled him into a rough hug.

The biggest problem that we hadn’t solved to my satisfaction was water. We’d started out melting snow, but after a couple of months, we had used up all the nearby snow. With a dozen people and four greenhouses, we needed hundreds of gallons every day. The easiest way to get it was from the well at one of the abandoned farmhouses, but that meant someone had to haul it back. Two of us, on a rotating schedule, spent all day dragging a sled loaded with water bottles back and forth nearly a mile each way from a demolished farmhouse to our greenhouses. It was an incredible waste of manpower.

Darla had come up with two possible solutions. We could bury a pipe below the frost line and bring the water to us with a powerful pump. For that to work, we would need a lot of pipe and electrical wire that we didn’t have. We also weren’t sure how deep the frost line would become if this unending winter continued. The other— and better—possibility was to drill our own well. For that, we needed drilling equipment that we didn’t have and neither Darla nor Uncle Paul knew how to use.

I put Max in charge of solving the water problem and asked Ed to help and keep an eye on him. Some responsibility might help settle Max down—at least I hoped so.

To prepare, I helped Max and Ed make ghillie suits using the technique Rita Mae, the librarian in Worthington, had taught me. The suits had to blend in with the snow, so we made them by sewing strips cut from an old white sheet onto coats and coverall pants.

As I worked, I thought about Rita Mae and Worthington, Darla’s hometown. I hoped Rita Mae was okay. I hadn’t spent much time with her, but she had always listened to me and treated me well, despite the fact that I had been a stranger to Worthington and a teenager.

When we finished, the suits made Max and Ed look like shaggy white Yetis—completely covered in strips of cloth sewn to their ski masks, coats, backpacks, and coverall pants. When they dropped flat and lay motionless in the snow, they were very difficult to spot, even though I knew where to look. I liked the effect so much that I insisted on making two more suits—one for me and one for Darla, just in case.

When we finished the suits, Max and Ed started visiting nearby towns to the east. Mostly they were looking for old phone books. A Yellow Pages that listed all the well-drilling companies in northwest Illinois would be perfect. That’d at least give us a lead on where to find the equipment.

They visited Gratiot, Apple River, Lena, and Winslow. They were all empty, burned, and dead quiet. Every scrap of edible food had long since been looted and eaten. Almost everything flammable was gone: furniture had been broken for firewood, books torn up as kindling. If there were any Yellow Pages around in the first place, they were long gone.

One morning Max and Ed had just returned from an overnight trek to Cadiz and Browntown and were reporting on the towns’ conditions—depressingly similar to the other towns they had explored—when Max stopped talking midsentence.

“You hear that?” Max said after a brief pause.

“What?” Ed said, but I had heard it too. We rushed to the door of the longhouse. Outside, the noise was clearer: the distant, echoing pop of gunfire. Were we under attack? And by whom?

Chapter 42

Our lookout was supposed to hit the panic button in the sniper nest if anyone unknown approached. Why hadn’t anyone heard the alarm? Who was on duty in the sniper’s nest? Charlotte, I thought—Zik’s daughter. She was new, but she’d been completely reliable up until now. I sca

“Sir!” Ed said and took off at a run.

I turned to Max. “Find everyone. Get them into the longhouse, fast.”

“Got it.”

I ran toward the greenhouse we had under construction, looking for Darla. As soon as I rounded the corner of the longhouse, I saw her, already on her way to me. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Want to go find out?”

“Not really. But I guess we’d better.”

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 sca

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.