Sunrise

“And you’re heating these greenhouses how?”

I told her about our old greenhouses, heated by wood-burning hypocausts, and the new model, heated by electricity from the wind turbines. Thelma seemed skeptical, but Dean was clearly interested. I was very careful not to tell her how many people lived in Speranta or let on that so many of them were newcomers and wounded. I didn’t want to say anything to dispel the impression of strength Ed had given them.

“So here’s the deal,” I said. “You’re going to run out of food eventually.”

Dean and Thelma spoke over each other:

“Got enough for fifty-seven months,” she said.

“We’ve got thirty-four months of supplies,” he said. They glared at each other, and I spoke up quickly before the glaring match could turn into an argument. “This winter might last ten years. You help us get through the next six months, and we’ll pay you back double by weight what you lend us now.”

“Riiight,” Thelma said, “we send you off with a bunch of our food, and we never see you again.”

I thought about it for a moment. Something Ben had said flitted around the edges of my mind. That we would inevitably become a feudal society. Nobles had sealed bargains with an exchange of hostages, right? Royal children or whatever. “We know where you are. We’ll show you where Speranta is. And then we trade hostages. We’ll send five people here to live and work with you. You send five to us, and we’ll teach them everything we know about growing food in a volcanic winter.”

“That could work . . .” Dean rubbed his chin.

“We send you the food, you dump five slackers on us, and then you slaughter our people,” Thelma said.

“You wouldn’t have to send all the food we need at once,” I said. “We’ve got enough grown and stored for fifty days or so. You could send a week’s worth at a time, and if you don’t like what your people are learning from us, pull out of the deal.”

“How far is this Speranta place anyway?” Dean asked. About sixty miles north of here,” I said.

“Well, that bird won’t fly,” Dean said. “You’re talking about food for hundreds and hundreds of people, right?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t risky. If I told him we had hundreds of people, I would be starting this deal off with a lie. If I told him our true numbers, we’d look weak. So I kept my mouth shut.

“We can’t haul all that food sixty miles,” Dean said. “Sure, we got trucks coming out our asses—”

“Must be painful,” Ed said. Dean groaned, but Thelma cackled.

“But there’s no stabilized, nonstale gas to be had anywhere in Sterling.”

“I’ve got that covered,” I said. “In fact, I’d like to seal this bargain with a gift. If you guys would come outside?”

“You gave away what!?” Darla yelled when I tried to explain the bargain to her about fifteen minutes later. “I’ve built ten Bikezillas, and you’ve lost three of them? Thirty percent! You’d be uninsurable if there were still insurance companies.”

“Technically I don’t think I was responsible—”

Ed leaned toward me and said, “You should take some advice my dad used to give me: Don’t dig a hole deeper than your shovel. You might not be able to climb out.” “This is a great deal,” I said. “We get the food we need to tide us over until we can build more greenhouses, and they get the technical know-how to build their own greenhouses. They’ve got almost five hundred people in that warehouse, sitting on their butts, eating from a three-year food supply. If we get all that labor mobilized building something . . . ?”

“How’re we all going to get home?”

“Four of us will need to ride in the load beds.” I didn’t think this was the best time to bring up the exchange of hostages. Not all of us would be going back to Speranta. “It’ll mean we can’t load as much food.”

“The gift was perfect—I don’t think they really believed what I was telling them about wind turbines and greenhouses until I demonstrated the Bikezilla for them. Well, and the fresh kale helped. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone salivate that much over kale before. And anyway, you can build more Bikezillas. They told me there’s a snowmobile dealer in town.”

“Yeah. They are impressive, aren’t they?”

“Of course!” After her fury over losing another Bikezilla, I figured I was really in for it when I explained that we had promised to leave five people behind. But strangely, that didn’t bother Darla nearly so much as my gift had.

Thelma decided to come back to Speranta with us. She still didn’t trust me—I got the feeling she expected us to butcher and eat her as soon as we got back to the homestead, but that only made her more determined to be one of the hostages who would seal our deal. I asked Ed to stay behind in charge of four volunteers from the newcomers. He agreed reluctantly, only after I promised we’d bring him back to Speranta at the first possible moment.

I understood Ed’s reluctance. The Wallers, as they called themselves, lived crammed into the back of the warehouse. They hid whenever anyone approached, dousing their fires and sitting silently in the dark warehouse. It was a good strategy—they’d kept nearly five hundred people alive for more than two and a half years, but it wasn’t a way I would have wanted to live.

We loaded up the Bikezillas with food from the warehouse. Dean gave us hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it, stuff none of us had eaten in more than a year: pasta and ca

Dean was willing enough to trade some of his medical supplies for fresh kale. I wound up getting small stocks of about half the drugs and supplies on Belinda’s list. I also convinced him to part with a few candles.

Those supplies didn’t nearly fill our seven remaining Bikezillas’ load beds. Dean invited us to take all the clothing we wanted—there was more of it in the warehouse than the Wallers could wear in a decade or more. I also looked for tuxes and wedding dresses, but of course WalMart didn’t stock those. When I asked Dean about it, he told me to check Sterling Formal Wear downtown. He also gave me a large supply of plastic roses and other decorations.

On our way out of Sterling, we stopped at the formal wear shop, grabbing huge armloads of wedding dresses and tuxes. We didn’t bother to look at sizes or styles—just grabbed everything we could in fifteen minutes or so. I was uncomfortable delaying our return to Speranta even that little bit more.

The fully loaded Bikezillas were slower, but we still made it home in two days. Belinda ran out to meet us—she had obviously been told we were coming by one of our lookouts in the sniper’s nests. “Lost three more while you were gone,” Belinda said.

“Uncle Paul? Dr. McCarthy?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“They’re doing better,” she said.

We reached the Bikezilla that held the medical supplies, and Belinda got too busy unloading everything to answer more questions. I assigned four guys to help her carry the supplies, then I gathered up Thelma and the other four Wallers—they needed to be interviewed and given job assignments by Charlotte.

I held the longhouse door for Thelma. She took one step inside and stopped dead.

“Move on in,” I said. “You’re letting out the warm air.”

She turned back toward me. “You’ve got generators ru

“No. The electric lights all run off the wind turbine.”

“But the wind’s not blowing.”

“There’s a battery bank scavenged from a Prius in a shack behind the wind turbine. We put them out there so nobody’ll get hurt if they explode. The lights are ru