Sunrise

Then I got the biggest shock of that evening. My mother peeled off her coat. She was pregnant.

Chapter 67

“You’re, you’re, you’re—”

“Pregnant,” Mom said. “You’re going to have a little brother. Or sister.”

“Half—”

“Yes. Half brother. Or half sister.”

“I thought you were too old?”

“I’m only forty-one!”

“Oh.” What was happening? My mother had gotten remarried, decided to have children, and told me nothing of any of it. We had grown that far apart? To be fair, I had completely forgotten how old she was, but still. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thank you,” Mom said. “I—I’m sorry we’ve struggled with each other lately.” She held her arms halfway up as if thinking about asking for a hug, but then she let them drop back to her sides.

“You don’t owe me an apology.” She did owe Darla an apology, but I didn’t see anything to be gained from starting up that argument.

Mom gave me a tired half shrug instead of answering.

“I’d better go help Charlotte.” I retreated to the kitchen area where Charlotte was interviewing newcomers and recording data for her census.

As the sun came up, our snipers reported seeing a huge column of smoke. I climbed Turbine Tower 1-A to get a look for myself. A hazy smudge was drifting across the sky toward us, from the northwest. I had no doubt what was causing it. Warren was ablaze.

It was almost noon by the time we got all the newcomers settled in Longhouse Five. I was dead on my feet. The only difference between me and a zombie at that point was that a zombie could easily have outthought and outrun me. But as long as Ed was out there in Red’s untender care, I couldn’t rest, wouldn’t rest well until we had rescued him or learned his fate. I called a council meeting.

Once everyone was seated around a table, I opened the meeting. “We’re going to attack Stockton and get Ed back.” Several people spoke up at once.

Darla: “You can’t—”

Uncle Paul: “No, we don’t—”

Ben: “There’s a high probability—”

“No!” I said, banging my fist on the table. “I wasn’t asking for an opinion. We are going to attack Stockton. Ed has put his life on the line for us over and over again. We’re not leaving him or our other people with Red one minute longer than we have to. Now here’s the subject of this meeting. How do we attack Stockton without getting slaughtered?” “We use subterfuge,” Ben said. “Any kind of direct attack on a walled enemy with similar numbers but superior firepower would be doomed to failure.”

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.

Ben’s plan involved shoveling shit. Literally. A lot of it. I, along with three other people, pedaled a Bikezilla from greenhouse to greenhouse, raiding the compost piles for our latest . . . deposits.

In the compost piles, we separated layers of feces with organic material—mostly wheat straw, sawdust, and wood chips—which helped the decomposition process somehow and kept the smell down to tolerable levels. Now we were picking the filler out with our shovels as we worked. We needed the pure . . . shit . . . for Ben’s crazy project. Three other teams were doing the same thing in other greenhouses. Ben wanted a—there’s really no other word for it—shitload of human feces.

By the time the bed of our Bikezilla was fully . . . loaded, you could smell us coming from a mile away. We pedaled up to the workshop we had built for Uncle Paul and Darla not far from Longhouse One.

They were outside working on an old, enclosed U-Haul trailer that was tipped on its side. Its wheels were gone, and in their place were two snowboards. Darla had a welding helmet on; she was attaching a strut to the underside of the trailer. Sparks flew from her torch.

Uncle Paul came to meet us, wrinkling his nose as he approached. “Good timing—we’ll be ready to load it in a half hour or so.”

“Thirty-minute break,” I told the guys working with me. I rubbed my hand and hook in the snow, trying to clean up, even though I knew I would get dirty again shortly. The rest of the shit-loaded Bikezillas showed up while we waited.

When the trailer was finished, we tipped it upright so it rested on the snowboards and started filling it. Six inches of feces, then a sprinkle of warm water from one of the greenhouse heating tanks. Then another layer of feces, and so on. We had to keep the inside of the trailer wet and warm to get the effect we needed. Darla and Uncle Paul watched for a few minutes, making sure we were doing it right, and then headed inside the workshop, saying they were going to work on the fuse. I figured they were just trying to escape the stench, but whatever.

We packed the trailer so full, we could barely get the door closed. Darla drilled a small hole in the top of the door with a rechargeable drill and then sealed it with candle wax. Then my team covered the whole trailer with a massive pile of wheat straw and put a tarp over that. We needed everything to stay toasty warm overnight. Ben wanted to let it sit and ripen for a couple of days, but Uncle Paul and Darla thought it would work okay tomorrow, and I didn’t want to wait any longer to leave than we had to.

I took a cold shower—we could have set up water heaters, but it would have significantly reduced the amount of energy we could devote to the greenhouses. I even splurged and used a tiny sliver of precious soap. My head spun, and I leaned against the flimsy shower wall rather than falling over. The moment my head hit my pillow, I was out.

In the morning I got a report from our scouts. Most of Warren had been burned. The area around the meatpacking plant was still intact, however. The Reds were loading pork into a pair of panel vans, trying to get it all moved to Stockton.

There was an abandoned farmhouse about a mile northeast of Warren that would work perfectly for our plan. It was close enough that the Reds’ scouts would see us, but far enough that it would take them some time to mobilize a force to confront us.

I took a dozen Bikezillas—forty-eight men and women, including Darla. Three of them were hitched together in a long line to pull the U-Haul. The rest of our forces—about 250 men and women under Uncle Paul’s command— headed for Warren on foot. They would wait just outside the city for our signal. If Ben’s plan worked, there would be almost no shooting. I hoped it would work—we had precious few bullets, and too many people had died already in this ridiculous war between Stockton and Warren.

We parked the U-Haul at an angle at one corner of the house and unhitched our Bikezillas from it. Then the ruse began.

We carried bags of flour, kale, and cases of pasta out the front door of the house and pretended to load them onto the U-Haul, as if we were clearing out a hidden cache of food. In reality we had brought all the food with us. One group carried it in through the back door, and another group carried it out through the front, pretending to load the food onto the U-Haul but actually passing it to the other group hidden behind the truck. They ran it around the corner of the house and returned through the back door, repeating the process.

We had hauled the same bags and boxes of food around and around in a circle for almost an hour before anything happened. A huge group of people emerged from Warren, moving toward us at a jog.

“Step it up to a run!” I called, and for a few minutes we pretended to be in a frenzy, as if we were trying to finish loading the U-Haul. When the Reds had closed about half the distance to us, I called out, “Scram!”

Everyone except me, Darla, and two others tossed the food onto the load beds of their Bikezillas, jumped on the seats, and pedaled off. Darla mounted the back bumper of the U-Haul. She had a long hank of rope in her hand. I grabbed the lit hurricane lamp that she had left hanging on the Bikezilla’s handlebars. Darla picked the wax off the hole she had drilled in the trailer’s door. A methane odor—like a giant fart—wafted out.