Sunrise

“What do you suggest? What’re we going to eat? We could eat our dead, I suppose. Do you want to be the one to suggest that to Uncle Paul? To Max and A

Dr. McCarthy recoiled, drawing his arm back from my shoulder. I bolted out the door.

I stopped by the barn, picking up a coil of rope. Only twenty people, including me, Darla, and Ed, were waiting by the trucks. Twenty to attack a town that had held almost two thousand before the eruption. It seemed the height of foolishness to even try. But I believed in Ben’s plan. In Ben himself. We loaded up the trucks and headed out.

We drove south on Canyon Park Road to avoid Warren. The roads deserted, the only noises were the rumble of our engines and the crunch of our tires on the thin layer of frozen snow. We turned on several minor roads, working our way over to Highway 78, the main route between Warren and Stockton. Neither Ed nor I knew the roads well since we weren’t from Warren, so Ly

When we reached the intersection of Highway 78 and Highway 20, which led directly to Stockton, we pulled the trucks against the snow berm on 78, where they’d be hidden.

I called everyone together and explained the plan, splitting us into two squads of six and one of seven. Darla would stay behind with the trucks. I wasn’t sure how to choose people to lead the other two squads. Ed could have done it, but no one would trust him—a former flenser—as a leader. Someone had to be in charge, though, so I called for volunteers. Nylce and Ly

Ben had told me to circle around Stockton at this point and approach from the south. What he hadn’t explained was how I’d even find Stockton after we left the road. It was dead black. And any light would have made us painfully obvious.

I led the column over the snow berm on the south side of Highway 20. We trudged through the thick snow, hoping we were moving in the general direction of Stockton. The walk seemed interminable.

I’d been counting in my head, trying to estimate how long we’d been out there. I reached four thousand—more than half an hour. Surely we should have reached Stockton by then? I started curving to the right, straining to catch sight of Stockton’s barricade of upturned cars.

My count passed six thousand. Still no Stockton. A wall loomed suddenly in front of me: not Stockton’s car wall, but the backside of a snow berm. We must have walked in a huge arc, winding up back at Highway 20. I took a left, following the berm. No doubt Ben was correct, that it would be better to approach from the south, from a place where there was no road. But we couldn’t attack Stockton if we never found it.

Not five minutes later, we finally reached the wall of cars. A sedan was propped on its front bumper, trunk thrust in the air. On either side of it, more cars were wedged together tightly, forming a solid barrier.

On the other side of the berm, I remembered, there was a log gate blocking the road. That would surely be guarded. I led our troop south along the car wall in near silence. No one talked, but in the frozen night, every crunch of our boots in the snow tightened the cold knot of fear growing at the base of my spine.

I glanced overhead constantly, fearing the moment when someone would appear atop the wall. The scene played over and over in my mind—the figure barely visible in the darkness, swinging a gun toward us, opening fire.

I also looked for a particular kind of car in the wall. I needed an older truck with hefty side mirrors mounted on steel brackets, not the modern, plastic, breakaway type. When I found one, I signaled a halt with an upraised palm.

I stopped—waiting, watching, and listening for any sign of opposition above where we stood. I started counting silently: one Mississippi, two Mississippi. About the time I hit four hundred, I heard a low mumble behind me, and turned to glare, raising my hand in a stop gesture. The grumbling silenced. I forced myself to wait a full ten minutes, as Ben had recommended, counting all the way to six hundred Mississippi. I neither saw nor heard any sign of guards on the wall.

The mirror bracket was just above my head. I grabbed the metal bar and tugged hard, putting my whole weight on it. The bracket and truck were rock-solid. I pulled myself upward. It was no different than doing a chin-up in gym class. I hooked an elbow over the mirror and reached higher. I could barely grab the back of the cab. I pulled myself up until I was standing on the mirror bracket. From there, it was fairly easy to scramble up into the bed of the truck and climb the rest of the way by shimmying up the side rail.

I waited another full two minutes up there, flattened against the tailgate atop the truck. I saw a couple of flickering lights off in the distance, but they didn’t move. Apparently, no one was patrolling this section of the wall. The truck I was on was held upright by a log wedged under its rear axle. The log sloped down to the ground, forming the hypotenuse of a right triangle.

When I felt certain it was safe, I got the rope out of my backpack, tied one end to the tailpipe, and tossed the other end down to Ed. Then I climbed down the inside of the wall. That was much easier than the climb up had been—I just lowered myself down the exhaust pipe until I reached the log that supported the truck. Wrapping my legs around the log made it easy to slide the rest of the way to the ground.

Eighteen people followed the path I’d blazed over the truck. Every grunt and clunk jangled my already-rattled nerves. I moved away from the wall. I’d come down beside a cemetery, so I took a position along its fence, sca

The last person over the wall untied the rope and returned it to me. We broke into our pre-arranged squads, and Ly

My squad left the graveyard, jogging through what looked like a residential neighborhood. It was tough to tell—buildings, except for those right on the street, were hidden by the darkness. The streets were dark and silent—deserted.

We’d been ru

I gave Ed’s group time to work their way around the fire while I waited, counting off two minutes in my head. Then I bent low and stalked along the road, directly toward the fire.

As I got closer, I saw two figures beside the fire—one silhouetted, with his back to us, and another facing us on the far side. The plowed track in the road split where they were camped, one branch continuing straight and the other veering to pass under a huge overhead door, directly into a warehouse. The warehouse looked massive, extending far beyond what the circle of firelight could illuminate. The sign over the closed overhead door read Furst Electrical and chemical Distributors, est. 1951.

I dropped to a crawl, moving in the darkness along the edge of the road. When we got so close that I was sure the guys by the fire had to hear us, I held up my hand, all five fingers splayed. My fingers didn’t shake, which surprised me. On the inside, I was trembling like an autumn leaf. I lowered my fingers one at a time: five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.