Sunrise

Spotting an approaching group three and a half miles off was incredibly difficult in the dim yellow postvolcanic light. I made a mental note to find out who was ma

I could have called for a full mobilization, but that seemed like overkill given that we had only spotted nine people so far. “I’m on my way to Longhouse One.” I handed the phone to the little girl who had been monitoring it and took off at a jog.

Could it be some sad remnant of Ed’s expedition? It seemed likely. We got newcomers in all the time, but almost never in groups that large. They would usually show up as families—five or six people at most. I pulled three guys off construction duty to help me pedal a Bikezilla back to Longhouse One. Darla had continued to build four-person Bikezillas out of every snowmobile we found—the four-person models were much more practical for hauling supplies than smaller ones.

I was waiting at Longhouse One long before the group of strangers reached it. Uncle Paul stood next to me, holding a rifle. Evidently he was part of the duty platoon for the longhouse. Every now and then, he doubled over and released a series of long, dry coughs.

I stared out at the group as they came into view above the crest of the neighboring hill. One of them looked kind of like Ed. Even though I desperately wanted to see Ed again, I hoped it wasn’t him. Because if it was Ed, what had happened to the other twenty-three people who’d left with him?

Chapter 63

When they got within a few hundred yards, I could see that the guy in the lead wasn’t Ed. They were no threat either: bedraggled, beat down, and apparently unarmed, they were barely able to drag themselves up the rise toward the longhouse.

I asked Uncle Paul to relay the order to stand down the duty platoons. The sooner they got the order, the sooner everyone could get back to work.

There were two men and three women who looked to be in their forties, although looks were deceiving with people who had been starved as badly as this bunch. They all could easily have been in their late twenties. Nothing ages you like an apocalypse.

Two teenage guys and two young girls—eight or nine, maybe—rounded out the group.

“Hello,” I called.

“H-h-hello,” the guy in the lead replied.

“What brings you to Speranta?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

“Heard Zik brought his family here and that they were doing all right. Heard it was safe here. That you had food.”

“Nowhere’s safe anymore, I guess. But we’re doing okay. And we have food to share with those who’re willing to work hard and contribute.”

“Th-th-that’d be us.”

I stretched out my good hand to him. “I’m Alex. Or Mayor Halprin. Some folks call me Captain though, ’cause of the hook, I guess.”

“I’m Roy Feldman,” he said as we shook.

“You look more like Peter Pan than Captain Hook,” one of the teenage boys said.

I raised my eyebrows. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

“Sorry.”

I ushered them all into Longhouse One. We had walled off a chunk of it to serve as our medical clinic. I left most of the newcomers in Belinda’s care, but Roy and I walked over to the kitchen area.

“How do you know Zik?” I asked once we were settled in with a bowl of dried kale chips and glasses of water.

Roy took a kale chip. He ate slowly but steadily, as if he were afraid that at any moment I would snatch back the

bowl. I didn’t eat any—I had eaten enough kale chips to last a lifetime. “We were neighbors in Stockton.”

“Why’d you leave?” I asked, although I figured I already knew.

“People been disappearing for more ’n a year. You just wake up and they’re gone. Nobody talks about it or complains. Red gets wind of a complaint, he cuts out your tongue. Heard he’s got a string of ’em hanging in his bedroom. Dried up like old leaves.”

Eww. His bedroom?

“We’ve heard reports he’s trading girls to the Peckerwoods,” I said.

“It’s not just girls anymore,” Roy said, “whole families disappear. If you’re in tight with Red, you’re okay, but anyone else . . . ain’t that many left who aren’t part of Red’s circle. Figured it was time we got out before we disappeared. Went over the wall last night, me and my neighbors.” “What’s he want with whole families?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Roy said. “But I s’pect the meat we’ve been eating in Stockton lately ain’t pork.”

Chapter 64

I convened the council that night to share Roy’s news. I finished up my summary by saying, “I want Red’s head on a pole. Give me some options.”

Ben was shaking his head. “They have 150 men under arms behind a wall, and we have fewer than nineteen hundred rounds for our guns. Any kind of direct attack will fail.”

“Alex,” Darla said, “we can’t right all the wrongs of this world. And when you try, that’s when we get into trouble.”

“But they’re killing each other—”

“Let ’em!” Darla was almost yelling now. “They’ll get weaker and weaker. Eventually they’ll be exactly like those three ca

“She’s right,” Uncle Paul said. “We can’t risk our people.” “We can welcome anyone who escapes,” Dr. McCarthy said.

“If they attack us, our odds will be much better,” Ben said. He and Ranaan—the Iraq War veteran—had developed an elegant plan for defending our spread-out settlement, and we had drilled on it endlessly. Whatever longhouse was attacked would hunker down to repel a siege, while all our forces from the other longhouses gathered to fall on the attackers in the flank or rear. Meanwhile our network of snipers would exact a terrible price on any attacking force. I was thankful we hadn’t had to put it to the test, but I had every confidence it would work, unless we were attacked by an absolutely overwhelming force or one with artillery, an air force, or tanks.

“What would you do in Red’s place, Ben?” I asked. “He’s ru

Ben replied almost immediately, “I would attack Warren.”

I wrote a long missive to Mayor Petty, summarizing what we knew about Stockton, and a shorter letter to my mother, begging her to reconsider and move to the safety of one of our longhouses. I even offered to put her in the newest one, Longhouse Five, where she would rarely see either me or Darla if she preferred not to.

Belinda volunteered to deliver the letters. I wanted to do it, but everyone on the council objected. Only Dr. McCarthy objected to Belinda going, and he was overruled.

Belinda slipped into Warren overnight, putting both letters through the mail slot at Mayor Petty’s house. “It was easy,” she told me the next morning. “They’re sitting ducks.”

The weeks crawled by without any word from Ed. Neither Mayor Petty nor my mom responded to my notes either. To be fair, we had no routine way to communicate with Warren, but it was only about five miles from there to Speranta. Someone could have come.

More escapees joined us from Stockton. Never again nine at once—they came in dribs and drabs of twos, threes, and fours.

My unease grew with every passing day. The very air around me felt charged, electric. Nothing was stable: Ed’s missing expedition, Stockton’s starvation and descent into ca