Sunrise

That night I called together my team of advisers: Darla, Ben, Uncle Paul, Ed, and Dr. McCarthy. We held informal meetings in the kitchen area of the first long-house. Anyone was welcome to listen in, and afterward I usually hung around to take suggestions and questions from our citizens. Our government was as open and transparent as I could make it.

“I want to mount an expedition. Take some supplies to the folks in Worthington. Trade for whatever they can spare. It’s roughly seventy miles.”

“I’m all for it,” Darla said. “But you’re not going to get anything like fair value in trade.”

I nodded; I had figured Darla would take my side—not because she was my wife, but because Worthington had been her home.

“It would be a very risky venture for little potential gain,” Ben said. “If the flenser gangs are numerous enough to threaten Worthington, we ca

I nodded again. Most of our citizens were former refugees from the Galena FEMA camp. Black Lake had confiscated the weapons of everyone they had interned there, so we were rich in manpower but poor in firepower. Ben had explained everything he knew about longbows to a couple of former carpenters who were trying to build a working prototype. So far, all their efforts were complete and literal busts. “What about a fast trading expedition? Thirty-two people on eight Bikezillas. Volunteers only. We’ll stay off the roads, navigate by map and compass, avoid any flenser gangs too big to fight.”

“That is a sound plan,” Ben said.

“Uncle Paul?” I asked.

“Let’s do it. I volunteer.”

I nodded but made a mental note to talk to him later. He was still having horrible coughing fits. Whatever illness had lodged in his lungs had stayed there. There was no way I’d allow him to go gallivanting off to Worthington.

“Agreed,” Dr. McCarthy said. “I volunteer too.” Right, I was going to let our only qualified doctor risk himself? I would have to talk to Dr. McCarthy too.

“So it’s settled,” I said. “I’ll lead the expedition. We’ll leave in three days.”

“Alex,” Darla said, “you can’t go. You can send me or Uncle Paul or someone else to lead the expedition—” “Who’ll run our engineering and construction program if you’re gone?” I asked.

“Your uncle. But let me turn the question around. Who’ll run everything if you’re gone?”

I was silent for a moment thinking about that. She was right. Normally I thought of Speranta as a utopia— people worked together, lived together, and ate together, generally harmoniously. But in that moment, it felt more like a prison. I was trapped by my own success.

Chapter 62

During the question-and-answer period after the meeting, I was surprised to find that most people agreed with my decision to attempt to rescue Worthington, even though we were unlikely to get anything like fair value in trade for the supplies we sent them. Even after the apocalypse, the vast majority of people were generous and kind. The few who weren’t, however—like the flensers—were exceptionally dangerous despite their relatively small numbers.

I put Ed in charge of the expedition, with Nylce second in command. Most people didn’t know much about his background as a flenser. And the only people I trusted more than Ed and Nylce had duties they couldn’t abandon. Max begged to be allowed to accompany the expedition. I told him he could go only with Uncle Paul’s permission, which I knew he would never get.

I remembered Eli—the guy whose family Alyssa, Ben, and I had stayed with for a few days more than two years ago. Eli had helped me change a tire on the truck we had been driving when we had fled from the Peckerwoods flenser gang.

Eli’s family had owned several pigs, and I wondered if they might still. Maybe they would be willing to move themselves and their pigs to Speranta. Worthington was only about thirty miles from their farm, so I asked Ed to visit Eli on the way home. We were composting a lot of material that could have been fed to hogs—kale stems and the like. And Dr. McCarthy was worried about our diet being too poor in protein. We were growing tons of black beans now, but I would feel much better if we had several potential sources of protein.

I had offered a bounty—a thousand pounds of food or ten thousand seeds for a breeding population of chickens, ducks, goats, cows, or pigs—and spread the word via the shortwave and the gleaner, Grant, but so far nobody had come forward to claim it. More than three years after the eruption, there were no live animals to be had. Silicosis from breathing the ash in the weeks immediately following the eruption had killed most of the livestock; hungry people had done in the rest.

The hardest part about sending Ed to Worthington was the waiting. I wished a thousand times a day that I had insisted on leading the expedition myself. At least then I wouldn’t have been dangling on tenterhooks, wondering if I had sent Ed and the other volunteers off to their deaths. We needed a mobile shortwave set up. I knew they had existed before the volcano, but none were to be had at any price now.

Ed and I had pla

Ten days after he left, we heard via the shortwave that Ed had arrived in Worthington. I spoke to Ed that night. They had run into flensers, members of the Peckerwoods gang operating out of Cascade, about ten miles southeast of Worthington, and they had spent several days dodging them. Using Ben’s intel, Colonel Levitov, a Black Lake commander, had cleared the Peckerwoods out of the Anamosa prison compound about two years back, but he hadn’t done anything to the branch in Cascade. Ed stayed in Worthington for three days and then moved out in search of Eli’s family. Ed told me that he expected to return to Speranta on his original schedule, about a week from when he left Worthington.

But two more weeks passed with no sign of Ed.

Darla noticed that I was distracted and snappish. She tried to divert my attention from worry about the expedition with sex, and yeah, that worked sometimes, but sometimes I also got the feeling she was trying to entice me into changing my mind about having kids. And we still didn’t have any kind of birth control. That whole argument only added more stress I didn’t need.

Then Darla tried to plan a huge party for my nineteenth birthday. I quashed that idea—no way could I celebrate while Ed was out there, lost or maybe worse. Instead, October 2nd passed like every other day—I led a greenhouse-building crew.

One day about five weeks after Ed had left Speranta, I got called to the phone. Uncle Paul and Darla had rigged a rudimentary intercom system. We had a telephone in each of our five longhouses and in every turbine tower. They hadn’t been able to get any switching equipment working, so the phones were a kind of party line; if you picked up one receiver, they all rang, and the monitors assigned to every phone picked up and could hear everything that was said.

I was leading the construction of—inevitably—another greenhouse. So I had to hoof it into the adjacent longhouse to pick up the phone.

I pressed the receiver to my ear. “Mayor speaking, report please.”

“Sentry, Turbine Tower 1-A reporting.” I didn’t recognize the voice. We had more people living in Speranta than I could keep track of now. Tower One was the first sniper’s nest we had built at the original longhouse. It was still at the edge of the settlement. We were spreading out to the south and east of it. There were sixty-seven wind turbines in the area. Only about four-fifths of them still worked, though. The rest hadn’t been shut down quickly enough when the ashfall hit. Still, that left enough turbines to heat about 110 greenhouses of the size we were building. “Unidentified party of nine confirmed inbound on foot, three and a half miles southeast.”