Sunrise

Eventually the party wound down, and people started retiring to their bedrolls at the edges of the longhouse. I told the band to pack up so those who wished to could sleep. Darla and I stayed up a while longer, talking with the remaining revelers, some of whom were well and truly smashed. My feet ached and my head spun, more from exhaustion than the tiny bit of alcohol I had consumed.

“You want to go to bed?” I whispered to Darla.

“Thought you’d never ask,” she replied with a wicked grin.

Usually we all slept out in the middle of the longhouse floor. There was no privacy whatsoever. A room that can sleep ninety-eight people comfortably can’t really be cut up into ninety-eight bedrooms, and we didn’t have the time or manpower to build partition walls anyway. Greenhouses took priority. For tonight, though, someone had erected a temporary screen made of plywood panels around one corner of the room. I lifted Darla into my arms and carried her into our makeshift bedroom to the catcalls and cheers of the partiers.

Someone had strewn plastic roses all over our bedroll. I laid Darla down atop them, and she immediately started rolling, digging around and tossing the roses aside. I brushed the faux roses off my side of the bedroll, kicked my shoes off, and lay down beside her.

Darla attacked me—that’s the only way I can put it. She rolled on top of me and kissed me with a fire and passion and intensity that left me breathless and bruised. Her hand was everywhere, and she was in far too much of a hurry to bother undressing. Instead she shifted bits of clothing and undergarments, and things were going much too fast, but I wanted nothing more than to lie back and enjoy it, to let her do whatever she wanted with me.

But I couldn’t. I pushed her off me, rolling her onto her back beside me.

“What the hell?” she said, loud enough that I was afraid people on the other side of the screen would hear.

“We can’t,” I whispered. “I mean, I want to, and we can do anything you want to except that, but . . .”

“But what?” Darla said, still talking way too loudly for my comfort.

“You already know what,” I said. We had tried to buy condoms during our visit to the Wallers. There weren’t any to be had at any price. They had a small stock of Triphasil—a birth control pill—but it would have cost us a small fortune in kale. We had opted to buy more antivi-rals and antibiotics instead.

“I don’t care, Alex. I want children. Lots of them. You know that. There’s no reason not to start now.”

“There’s every reason not to start now!” Now I was the one talking too loudly. “You could easily—”

“That tired old argument? Animals have babies without veterinarians every day. Women had babies back when medical ‘science’ consisted of balancing the humors in the body with leeches. I won’t magically self-destruct just because I get preggers.”

“Animals die in childbirth, Darla—you know that better than I do. And women used to die at a far higher rate than I—”

“At what rate?” Darla was flat-out yelling now. “One percent? Two percent? Ten percent? I don’t care. I will take that risk. I want to take that risk.”

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t take that risk. I can’t lose you, Darla.”

She was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was softer. “I think we should take that risk. A baby would be important to our community. Important to Speranta. It would bring real meaning to the name Hope.” “You don’t have a baby just to give hope to other people. And if we added another grave—your grave—to the rows outside, it would kill me. Might kill Speranta too.” Darla made a scoffing noise.

“You underestimate yourself. Without you, we’d have no Bikezillas, no greenhouses, no wind turbines—”

“I couldn’t have figured out the electronics without your uncle.”

“You would have, eventually. You’re the heart of this community.”

“No, you’re the heart. I’m the brains.”

“On every subject but this one, I agree with you,” I said. Darla scowled at me for a too-long moment. Then she forcefully smoothed down the skirts of her wedding dress so that they covered her long, muscular legs. She reached up to switch off the lamp. Then she rolled over, ignoring me. And that was how I ruined our wedding night.

Chapter 61

More people filtered into Speranta over the following weeks and months. The wedding had been in April, and by mid-June, Charlotte’s census had passed four hundred. People were crowded into the two long-houses we had finished.

I worried that the extra refugees would be a burden, a weight that would sink the precariously floating SS Speranta, but I was wrong. Charlotte had a positive genius for finding skills we needed among the newcomers. We got a guy who had paid his way through college by working in his dad’s well-drilling company. With his help, we were finally able to get a well drilled inside Speranta, ending the constant, mile-long water treks to the nearest farmhouse.

Charlotte practically bounced off the walls with joy when a woman showed up who had sold irrigation equipment in her old life. I didn’t see what the big deal was until we hooked her up with a plumber, and they designed and built an automatic watering system for one of the greenhouses. The new system increased production and freed up a massive amount of labor for building more irrigation systems and greenhouses.

We built greenhouses at a furious pace, managing to stay so far ahead of our population, we were able to store surplus food, begin paying down our debt to the Wallers, and buy more supplies from them. After the third such shipment, the Wallers’ leader, Dean, relented on the hostage deal and allowed Ed and our other people to move back to Speranta. More than thirty Wallers accompanied Ed—they had grown tired of hiding in the warehouse and wanted to help build greenhouses. I welcomed each of them with a hug, and Charlotte welcomed them with a twenty-minute quiz.

One of the newcomers had been a hard-core organic gardener in her previous life. She convinced us to dig up our old latrine pits and compost our fecal matter instead of burying it. Dr. McCarthy argued with her about it for a while, but eventually she won him over by promising to properly monitor the temperature of our compost piles. I wasn’t sure what good that would do, but it satisfied Dr. McCarthy, which was good enough for me. We also had to start peeing into a five-gallon pail fitted with a toilet seat instead of into the latrine. Evidently, human urine diluted properly is a fabulous fertilizer. Who knew? The productivity of our greenhouses climbed further.

Another newcomer, Ranaan Kendall, had served in the second Iraq war. He was young—maybe in his late twenties—but he had a ridged and grooved face, pitted from childhood acne too much sun and sand, or both. He worked with Ben to improve our military readiness. They set up flags so our snipers could account for windage, and they developed a system of arm signals so we could communicate without wasting precious ammo.

Zik left every few weeks. He was gone for days at a time, looking for his daughter, Emily. I’d quit worrying about revealing our location and had relaxed all the early rules about leaving Speranta. The secret was obviously out. I would have to rely on our numbers, defensive plans, and Ben’s military genius to carry us through an attack. After each trip, Zik was surly and withdrawn for days—he hadn’t been able to find any trace of his daughter. She would have been sixteen by then—if she was still alive.

I desperately wanted to know what was going on in the world. We had gotten enough refugees from neighboring states to know that Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky were as bad off as Illinois. Iowa was worse, far worse. There had been some kind of collapse in the government back east almost a year ago, and FEMA and Black Lake had mostly disappeared. Food distribution had ended in the camps and cities; collapse, starvation, and ca