Sunrise

My head swam, and my vision constricted. All I could see out of the corners of my eyes was blackness, and the rest of my field of vision wasn’t much better, rendered splotchy red by the blood pouring from my forehead. I was losing far too much blood. I had to end this fight, fast.

Red thrust with his other knife, and I dodged to the side, taking the blow on the outside of my thigh instead of in my groin. He stepped toward me, knife held low for another gutting strike. I kicked out, trying to sweep his legs from under him with a round kick. It worked, but my injured leg buckled, and we both went down. Somehow Red wound up on top of me, his knife above my throat, bearing inexorably downward.

I felt consciousness fading. I was finished. If this had been a taekwondo fight, I might have stood a chance. But during all those thousands of hours I had spent training in taekwondo, Red had been training with knives. At least my mother was okay, I thought as the knife bit effortlessly into the scarf at my neck.

The butt of a rifle slammed into the side of Red’s head. Instantly the pressure on the knife eased. I threw Red off me, rolling him onto his back in the snow beside me. Darla reversed the rifle and shot him three times at a range of less than five feet, hitting him dead in the center of his chest.

The knife dropped from his limp fingers. Darla stepped over me and prodded Red’s body with the toe of her black combat boot. He didn’t move. “I didn’t promise you a goddamn thing,” she hissed. “And I never fight fair.”

She safetied the rifle and slung it over her back. Then she was on her knees beside me, cutting strips of cloth and bandaging my wounds at a near-frenzied pace.

Mom crawled over to help. Blood ran freely from the cut on her neck, staining the snow. She glanced at Darla. “You . . . you . . .”

Darla was silent, still working on the deep cut in my left arm.

Mom hesitated a moment and then said, “You saved my son.”

Darla nodded but said nothing, focused on her work.

When they had finished putting temporary patches on all my leaks, Darla pushed herself to her feet. She reached down, helping Mom up. “Can I help you with that cut on your neck?”

“I . . . yes. Thank you.”

Darla turned away, presumably to get more medical supplies, but Mom didn’t let go. She pulled Darla back, drawing her into a fierce embrace. Blood dripped from Mom’s neck into Darla’s hair. I closed my eyes for a moment—the pain had peaked and set off a wave of nausea so intense, it was all I could do not to vomit.

Our troops had taken all the weapons from the nine Reds who were left. “You have one day to leave the State of Illinois,” Darla told them. “If you walk west on Highway 20 all night and all day tomorrow, you might make it. I catch you in this state again, you’ll be shot.”

The cut in Mom’s neck was superficial. Darla used a scrap of boiled cloth and a precious strip of duct tape to hold it closed. We had three other people wounded, but miraculously no one had been killed. Darla organized a party to drag Red and his ten dead followers over the snow berm and bury them.

We camped the rest of the night in the ruins of the bank. I wanted desperately to get home—my wounds needed Dr. McCarthy’s attention—but blundering around in the darkness wouldn’t help.

The trip back to Speranta was slow because we didn’t have enough people to fully man all the Bikezillas. I couldn’t pedal at all and had to ride along like cargo. We arrived back at the longhouse well after lunchtime.

Bob Petty was waiting inside the door of Longhouse One. As I came in riding on a makeshift stretcher, he grabbed my hand, his lips worked, and he stared at me beseechingly, but no words came. I shook his hand off mine, and my stretcher bearers carried me through. Mom was right behind us. When she stepped through the door, Petty burst into tears. Mom leaned down to hug him, and they held each other for a moment.

“How’s Alexia?” Mom asked.

“She’s fine. Rebecca and Wyn are taking good care of her,” Petty said.

Darla tried to step around the logjam at the door, but Mom reached out and grabbed her elbow. “Bob, I want to introduce my daughter-in-law, Darla Halprin.”

“We’ve met,” Petty said, shaking Darla’s hand gravely.

Nylce, Rita Mae, and the kids from Worthington were back already. They had taken Stagecoach Trail, bypassing

Stockton completely. A

I spent the rest of the day in Dr. McCarthy’s makeshift OR. He gave me a blood transfusion, reopened all my wounds, cleaned them, stitched them closed again, and rebandaged them. I was only conscious part of the time.

Early the next morning, I sent for Mom, Alyssa, and Rita Mae. They sat around my cot in what I jokingly called the sickbay. “We need to turn Speranta into a real town. We’re finally producing a significant food surplus. It’s time to open a real school and a library.”

“I’m a little too old to be changing careers,” Rita Mae said, “so I guess you’ll be wanting me to open a library” “I’d be grateful if you would. I’ll see if I can get Uncle Paul and Darla to give up their stash of technical manuals so you can get those organized to start. And Ben’s been collecting military books.”

I turned to Mom, and she spoke up before I could. “I don’t think I have time. I’ve got to take care of Alexia.” Mom drummed her fingers on the table, forgetting her missing pinkie. When the stump hit the table’s rough surface, her face scrunched up, and she moved both hands to her lap. Alyssa watched anxiously

“I know someone who’d love to help with babysitting,” I said.

Mom looked down at the table. “I’m not sure why she’d want to help me, after—”

“It’s okay, Mom. We’ve all . . . it’s been a hard couple of years.” I laid my hand palm up along the edge of the cot, asking her to take it. “I never stopped loving you. Darla doesn’t know you the way I do, but if you let her, she’ll love you too.”

Mom wiped her eyes and took my hand. “I’d be honored to start Speranta’s first school.”

“I want to help,” Alyssa said.

“I know,” I said. “You’ll both be assigned to the school full time. We’ll add more teachers as soon as we can spare the manpower.”

“We’ll both teach,” Mom said. “And I’ll start training Alyssa to take over the school in case—well, when I can’t do it anymore. What did you have in mind as far as students?” “Start with the youngest kids—say, everyone ten and under,” I said. “As soon as we can—as soon as I’m sure we can handle it, labor and food-wise—we’ll expand the school a year at a time. Within six months or so, I hope to have everyone under sixteen in school.”

“Maybe we should plan a trade school or apprenticeship program for those older than sixteen. We need more builders, engineers, and farmers, right?” Mom said.

“Good idea. Put your heads together and figure out what you want in terms of a building to house both the library and school.”

My wounds were deep; it took six weeks before I felt strong enough to resume a normal schedule. A few days of strangely warm weather greeted my return to the workforce. Late each afternoon the temperature even rose briefly above freezing; the top layer of the snow turned slushy, perfect for snowball fights. After a couple days of that, a storm blew through. We huddled in the longhouse, listening to the thunder in amazement—between the drought and winter, we hadn’t had an honest-to-God thunderstorm in more than three years. When it ended a couple of hours after dark, Darla and I took a lantern and wandered around outside. The rain had frozen, leaving a crunchy layer atop the snow. The lantern’s beam glittered on the ice, throwing magical yellow and orange sparkles across the snowscape.

Uncle Paul yelled to us from the longhouse door. “Turbines 8-A and 8-B didn’t get shut off in time. Storm burned them out. We’re going to lose four greenhouses if we don’t get some power over there.”