Sunrise

Ed’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “Well . . . thanks.”

As soon as we got back to the cafe, we packed up and moved on. We didn’t go far that day, though. I called a halt on Business 20 on the east side of Freeport to search a gas station we came upon. It was a wreck, shelves thrown over, glass and plastic detritus everywhere. It took us hours to search it, and we found very little that we could use. Every scrap of food was long since gone. The wire map rack was crushed and empty. There were no phone books. I cursed the Internet in the most inventive terms I knew—by killing the telephone book and map business, it hadn’t done us any favors.

Darla did find an “Emergency Auto Toolkit,” which she shoved into my pack, nearly doubling its weight. By the time we finished, it was almost dark. We shoved the shelving out of the center of the gas station and set up camp right there. I reviewed the watch plan with everyone who was scheduled for sentry duty, spread my bedroll, and lay down.

When I finally slept, I dreamed of gnawing teeth and burning bones.

Chapter 49

Two days later, on the outskirts of Rockford, we reached a gas station that had partially collapsed under the weight of the snow and ash. We weren’t quite halfway to Chicago yet. We spent most of the afternoon shifting beams and metal roof panels, unburying the sales counter. It had been looted before it collapsed—the broken cigarette displays were all empty. There was no food of any kind. But when we heaved aside a section of countertop, we exposed a book three years out of date: a combination Yellow and White Pages for Rockford.

Darla and I stayed up half the night studying

the book by the light of an oil lamp. It was a mother lode of information. There were maps in the front—not superdetailed, but better than what we had, which was nothing. We combed through the Rockford Yellow Pages section, noting places we needed to visit. There were several snowmobile dealers listed. Two of them, on the north side of Rockford, were close together and looked promising: Loves Park Motorsports and Bergstrom Skegs. Almost a dozen bicycle shops were listed; we marked three near the snowmobile dealers to check first. Darla hoped to scavenge enough parts to create a fleet of jumbo Bikezillas—we would need them to haul our gleanings back to Speranta.

Rockford was also home to four or five electrical and plumbing supply distributors. Darla yelped in delight when she saw some place called Grainger Industrial Supply listed. I had no idea what it was, but anything that made Darla as happy as Grainger had to be heaven on earth for budding engineers.

Then we turned our attention to food. Even if our trip was completely successful, we wouldn’t get the new greenhouses all built and producing for months. We needed to bring back some kind of food to bridge the gap until then. Grocery stores and restaurants had been emptied out within days of the eruption. To find supplies in the quantities we needed, we’d have to be creative, think of things the ordinary looter wouldn’t.

I thought about Rebecca finding pet food in otherwise thoroughly picked-over houses. Unfortunately there didn’t appear to be a distributor or manufacturer of pet food anywhere in Rockford. I added a PetSmart and a PETCO to our list of locations to visit, though.

Next I looked up food distributors. Rockford had something called GFS Foodservice, but no grocery wholesalers I could find.

There was no Yellow Pages section for food manufacturing. On a whim, I looked up Pepsi in the White Pages. There was a bottling plant nearby in Loves Park. Maybe they’d have bulk supplies of sugar or something? Heck, I’d even drink high-fructose corn syrup straight if it’d keep us alive for a couple of months.

That got us started on a game—naming food brands and looking them up in the White Pages. It worked too— it turned out that, along with the Pepsi bottler, the Rockford area boasted a Kraft Foods factory. I lost myself for a moment in a pleasant daydream about ripping into a pallet of macaroni and cheese.

“One of these places is going to have food left,” I told Darla confidently. “We’re going to find everything we need right here. We won’t have to go to Chicago.” I wasn’t looking forward to visiting Chicago. After seeing the mess in small towns across Illinois, the thought of what almost ten million starving people might have done terrified me.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “There must have been lots of people working at all those plants. Wouldn’t they already have snagged the food?”

My sudden burst of hope died in my chest. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. But maybe we’ll get lucky anyway.”

In the morning our first order of business was visiting the snowmobile dealers. We were going to need some way to transport all the other supplies we hoped to find. A truck might have seemed the obvious choice, but that would come with its own problems. Gas, despite our luck in finding a half-tank’s worth in Freeport, was nearly impossible to come by. And a lot of the remaining gasoline was stale—okay for starting fires, but no good for ru

My heart sank when we reached our first stop, Loves Park Motorsports. The windows were smashed and the showroom empty. Not a single motorcycle or snowmobile remained. Darla checked the repair bays in back and reported another strikeout. Whoever had taken the snowmobiles had loaded up on spare parts too.

I poked around the sales counter at the front of the store. Advertising circulars were spread around the Formica counter and had cascaded onto the floor nearby. I picked one up; the back was a huge ad for their a

“Why couldn’t the volcano have erupted in September after the snowmobiles arrived?” I asked, showing the circular to Darla.

She shrugged and started to leave the showroom. Then she stopped, turned back to me, and snatched the circular out of my hand. “So if you’re getting ready for a huge truckload sale, do you wait until the last minute to get your stock in?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, let’s say you don’t wait ’til the last minute. Where do you keep all those snowmobiles?”

“It’s a truckload sale . . .”

We rushed around to the back of the store. There were three semitrailers parked in the back lot. All three were padlocked, which I took as a great sign. What’s the point to putting a padlock on an empty truck?

Darla took the ratchet from the toolkit in my backpack and beat on the padlock for a while. She didn’t even dent it. Ed had disappeared into the shop. He came back with a long tube—something you would use to build a motorcycle frame, maybe—and a coil of wire. Darla understood immediately. She wrapped the wire through the hasp of the padlock and around the tube a few dozen times. Then all three of us could pull on the tube, creating massive leverage.

The padlock didn’t break, but the hasp it was co

Chapter 50

I left half our force with Darla—four to stand guard and ten to help her construct her fleet of Bikezillas— and took the rest to visit the bicycle and ski shops we had found listed in the Rockford Yellow Pages. We struck out at the first three places we visited—they had been cleaned out completely. Finally we found what we needed at the Rockford Bicycle Company. The dirt bikes had all been taken, probably because their big, knobby tires would work okay in the snow and ice. But there were still dozens of high-end racing bikes and ten-speeds with frames, forks, and gears that would work fine as the core of new Bikezillas.