Sunrise

“You should call it Maxville!” Max yelled. A few people chuckled. I glared at him. What was with him tonight? Had he found a stash of alcohol or happy pills?

“I’ve got a suggestion,” Ed said, which surprised me. Ed rarely said anything, particularly not when a group of people was listening.

“Go on,” I said.

“It’s a word my Romanian grandmother taught me: Speranta. It means hope.”

Speranta. I rolled the word around my head and lips a couple of times. I liked it. We spent about fifteen minutes taking other suggestions, but in the end, Speranta won by acclamation, and I called an end to the meeting.

Later that night, I lay on my bedroll thinking. We’d become a village named Speranta, for hope. Could I deliver on the promise of that name?

Chapter 45

We left for Chicago two days later. Almost everyone who was healthy enough to walk volunteered, though oddly, not Reverend Evans. I chose twenty-seven of them plus Darla, Ed, and me. Max desperately wanted to go, but I dodged that issue by telling him he had to have his father’s permission. All the arguments Max could muster met the stone wall of Uncle Paul’s refusal. I could hardly blame him—he had seen how Darla and I had returned from our last trek away from the relative safety of the homestead.

At the village meeting to see us off after breakfast, I a

We moved cross-country on improvised skis and snow-shoes. They were the only reason it had taken us two days to leave—it took that long to make crude snowshoes for everyone. I put four pairs of scouts out on skis—one pair to our front, one to each flank, and one covering our back trail. I told them to range three or four miles out and rejoin us if they had anything to report, or at the end of the day I desperately wished for some handheld radios and added them to the list of things we hoped to scavenge in Chicago.

It seemed as though the sky were brighter than it had been. It was a hard thing to judge since it changed so little each day, but as we walked, I noticed that I could always tell where the sun was in the sky, despite the fact that I could never see it. The clouds of ash and sulfur dioxide that hid the sky were thi

We hit the town of Lena, seven or eight miles from Speranta, on the afternoon of the first day. We’d scouted it before, looking for a phonebook or well-drilling equipment. I already knew it was abandoned and thoroughly looted. We pushed on another three or four miles before spending the night in an abandoned farmhouse the forward scouts had found.

We covered about ten miles the next day, reaching the outskirts of Freeport just before dusk. I had never been there, but it looked much bigger than Warren or Stockton. The scouts hadn’t seen anyone all day. The silence and stillness of the landscape seemed ominous—where had all the people gone?

We trudged up to a restaurant at the edge of town: Family Affair Cafe, according to the signpost out front. The restaurant itself was covered in a snowdrift so massive, it nearly engulfed the building. At the lee side of the cafe, a window had been smashed. I set up a guard rotation, and we built a small fire right there in the middle of the restaurant. With the snow covering most of the building and all of us packed tightly together, it was warm enough, and I slept well.

In the morning I sent out four pairs of scouts with instructions to explore for an hour and then report back. The rest of us spent the hour resting and repairing snowshoes.

The team I sent along our back trail found nothing, which was expected but still a relief. It was good to know nobody was following us. Another pair found the library in downtown Freeport, but the maps, phone books, and the useful parts of the nonfiction section—everything on agriculture and engineering—were gone.

The pair I had sent south had followed road signs to Highland Community College, but when they got there, they found it ringed by a huge wall built of frozen dirt. Sentries atop the wall had shot at them, and they had hightailed it back to our base in the cafe.

The final pair of scouts—Nylce and Francine—had followed West Avenue to a commercial district on the south side of town. When they returned, they were grim and ashen-faced. I could hardly believe what they told me. Instead of talking about it longer—which I couldn’t bear to do—I asked them to take me there.

We went as a party of six—me, Nylce, Francine, Ed, Darla, and another survivor of the Warren massacre, Trig Boling. He was a lanky nineteen-year-old with a slightly misshapen face, like it had been frozen while he was scowling in a particularly energetic way. But despite his appearance, Trig was unfailingly friendly and cheerful—I liked having him around.

We only had three guns, but everyone was carrying at least one knife. We stalked through the city in silence, dreading our destination. After about ten minutes, we passed the Freeport City Cemetery—only a few of its tallest monuments protruded above the snow, lonely sentinels standing watch over a buried age.

Most of the buildings on West Avenue had burned. The first two shopping centers we passed had collapsed. As we approached the third, I noticed that Francine was caressing the handle of her knife, rubbing it as if it were a knotted muscle. Nylce’s head flicked constantly from side to side as if she were afraid someone would sneak up on her in the few seconds since her last sidelong glance.

As we approached the Meadowlands Shopping Center, I saw a glint of firelight through the glass storefront of a J. C. Pe

Three men dressed in ragged, bloodstained clothing crouched in front of a greasy fire. Around them were scattered thousands of burnt and cracked bones. Behind them, the grisly bone pile nearly reached the high ceiling. I could identify femurs, ribs, hip bones, and skulls—all of them fragmentary, roasted and cracked for their marrow.

All the bones were human.

Chapter 46

I dropped down behind the car/snow mound we were using as cover. What would Ben do? There were six of us and only three of them, but we had only three guns. Focus on the mission, Ben would probably say. The mission was acquiring supplies for the greenhouse.

“Move out,” I whispered. “Back to base.”

Darla nodded and started backtracking, but Francine grabbed my arm. “You can’t just leave them here. They’ll keep killing people.”

“There are 105 people who’ll die if we don’t find supplies for building greenhouses,” I whispered.

“Killing a few flensers won’t help us find those supplies.” “Uh, Chief?” Ed said.

“What?” Obviously I needed to spend some more time working on turning this ragtag band of refugees into obedient soldiers.

“The flensers—they’re gone.”

I looked back at the J. C. Pe

“Two to our left, one to our right.”

“Getting help? Or going out the side doors of that store to circle around us?”

“Or maybe to follow us back to camp.”

That was a nasty thought. If they followed us, they could pick off our scouts two at a time as they came and went from the camp. I couldn’t allow that to happen.