Sunrise

We cleaned out the bike shop completely, making dozens of trips to haul all the bikes back to our base at Loves Park Motorsports. We cleaned out the repair shop in the back too, taking all the spare parts and tools that were left. By the time we finished, it was dark. I set up the night sentries, and we bedded down right there in the empty showroom.

The next morning Darla handed me a huge list of supplies she wanted. The first thing on the list was skis— if we could get those, she could finish a couple of Bikezillas, which would make it much easier to haul supplies around.

As we headed to North Park Rental, the first place on our list, I wondered why we hadn’t seen any people. Where were they? Huge swathes of Rockford had burned, but there were sections that looked intact, almost normal except for the deep snow and the eerie, u

And where was the government? Two years ago, Illinois had been part of the Yellow Zone, and FEMA and its subcontractors had been out in force here, keeping people from the Red Zone west of the Mississippi from flooding east. Now, nothing.

Someone had been here. Nearly every place we visited had been picked over—looted, I guessed, although did it really count as looting now that whoever owned all these shops was gone and probably dead?

The cross-country ski section at North Park Rentals looked like a bomb had gone off in it—bits of plastic packaging and cardboard were strewn everywhere.

The other sections hadn’t been cleared out nearly as thoroughly; nobody had bothered with the snowboards or downhill skis. We hauled them back to the snowmobile shop by the armload.

We spent the afternoon hunting for other stuff on Darla’s list: bolts, wire, welding rods, and lumber to build the bikes’ load beds. We found a lot of the stuff at the Grainger Industrial Supply. Other materials came from a nearby Home Depot that had collapsed under the weight of the snow—which was actually fortunate. It was a ton of work to unbury anything, but the store hadn’t been looted nearly as thoroughly as those that were still standing.

We even unearthed a huge bin of seeds they’d had on clearance: carrots, beets, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and more. In our early days of greenhouse farming, it was tough to get anything but kale to grow. Now that we had greenhouses that were both heated and lit, we could probably grow almost anything. Darla said that not all the seeds would germinate—some would have spoiled after two and a half years buried in the wreckage, but that was okay. Many were heirloom varieties, not hybrids. According to Darla, the heirloom plants were much more likely to produce viable seeds. That meant that even if only a few sprouted, we would have an inexhaustible source of more seeds.

Darla’s group worked late into the night by lamplight, and by morning they had the first of what she called a truck model ready. “I’m calling it a BZ-250,” she said with a proud smile. “We’re building a four-person drive model next, with an even bigger load bed. That’ll be the BZ-450.” The 250 was two bicycles side by side with their pedals and frames co

Since we now had a good way to haul bulk supplies, I took my team in search of food. I wanted to check out the GFS warehouse we had found listed in the Yellow Pages. We found it—but it turned out to be a retail outlet store, not a true warehouse. It had been cleaned out completely.

Next we trekked to the Kraft Foods plant. It turned out to be a place where they made chewing gum, of all the useless things. Why, oh why, couldn’t it have been a macaroni-and-cheese plant? I could probably live for years on a diet of macaroni and cheese, and kale.

The Pepsi bottler had been looted. There was plenty of diet soda left, but nothing else. The soda was useless, of course. We had all been on the world’s most horrible diet in the two and a half years since the volcano erupted. If there was any high-fructose corn syrup left in the big stainless steel tanks at the bottling plant, I couldn’t figure out how to get at it.

The PetSmart and PETCO were cleaned out too. Even the rawhide dog toys were gone—boiled down as desperation food, I figured. I thought about how hungry people must have been to eat dog toys. I could relate; I still remembered the hard knots of boiled leather belts sliding down my throat when I had been so close to starvation during our first months on the homestead.

The next day we checked retail grocery stores, even though I knew it would probably be hopeless. At the fifth one—a half-collapsed WalMart—I finally found something interesting. There was no food, of course; even the pallets in the back room had been cleared out. But amid the torn and discarded shrink-wrap, I found routing tags. All the grocery pallets had come from the same place, a distribution center in someplace called Sterling, Illinois. How much stuff would be stored in a WalMart distribution center? And how far was it from Rockford? I quizzed the guys with me until I found someone who knew— Sterling was a tiny town about an hour’s drive south of Warren.

When we rejoined Darla’s group that night, I talked to the rest of the team. Trig had worked in a WalMart. He had never been in one of their distribution centers, but he said they were huge—over a million square feet—and would have everything stocked in a WalMart supercenter, from food to camping supplies to pharmaceuticals to firearms and ammo. It was obvious where we had to go next.

Chapter 51

We spent another two weeks in Rockford. Darla and her team switched to building four-person bikes with even bigger load beds—they built seven to go with the first two-person bike so all thirty of us could ride back to Speranta. In the meantime my team continued scavenging to fill the huge list of supplies we needed for the new greenhouses and longhouses.

Darla came with us to Grainger Industrial Supply on the last day to help select and load supplies. When Darla asked for the grand tour of Grainger, I begged off. I had seen the whole place already

“Where’re you going?” Darla asked.

“I’ll take a quick walk. My head hurts a little,” I lied.

“You shouldn’t be wandering around by yourself,” Darla said.

“Ed,” I called, “come take a walk with me, would you?”

“Yessir.”

As soon as we were out of Darla’s sight, I broke into a jog. “Got a ways to go,” I told Ed. “Mind a run?”

As Ed ran past me, he said, “I will run you into the ground, sir.”

I laughed and picked up the pace. The place I needed to visit was about two miles away. We had passed it several times during our scavenging trips, but there had always been too many people around—word might have gotten back to Darla.

Ed and I reached it in about twenty minutes, moving at a fast jog: J. Kamin Jewelers. The glass entry door and windows at the front of the building had been broken out and some of the stock looted. That probably happened in the days immediately after Yellowstone erupted. Nobody would bother looting a jewelry store now—a cup of rice was worth more than a cup of diamonds these days.

One row of display cases had been turned on their sides. Ed and I flipped them upright, and I rooted pig-like in the glass shards on the floor for a while, tossing aside bracelets, earrings, and loose diamonds. I found a couple of antique, wind-up watches and took those, though that wasn’t what I was after. Finally I hit pay dirt: a velvet tray of engagement rings that had landed upside-down under the fallen display case. They were dazzling in their variety, with diamonds in more shapes and sizes than I had known existed: square, round, pear-shaped, even diamond-shaped diamonds. A couple of the rings featured emeralds or rubies along with the diamonds. I took them all; I had no idea what sort of ring Darla might prefer.