Текст книги "Sunrise"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Chapter 29

Three nights later, Darla and I were crouched outside Stockton’s wall of cars. Uncle Paul had objected strenuously, but finally I had overruled him—and been completely shocked when he accepted my decision. His chronic cough would have made it far too dangerous for him to come. We might have found an electrical supply house in Dubuque, and there were dozens of them in Chicago, but going to either of those places would be a multiday trek over unfamiliar ground.

We hid Bikezilla more than a mile from town and approached on foot. We spent more than half the night just observing the guards. There were two-man patrols outside the wall circumnavigating the city, but more than ten minutes separated each patrol. The guards stationed at regular intervals atop the wall were a bigger problem. They were more than five hundred feet apart, but we would have to be very quiet to slip between them.

A guard was stationed right on top of the place where I’d crossed the wall before. We found a spot where two subcompact cars were jammed together about halfway between the fixed sentries and waited for the next patrol to pass.

After the patrol walked by, I counted off two minutes in my head. We had five, maybe six minutes before the next patrol got close enough to catch us. Darla and I scuttled silently to the wall.

I jammed my right boot into the crack where the two cars nestled against each other and reached upward. I couldn’t get a grip on anything. I took off my gloves, tucked them into a pocket, and tried again. This time I could cling to the molding around the cars’ windows, digging my fingernails between the rubber gasket and the metal. It was so cold that my fingers burned, as if I had plunged them into a fire. I knew I would get frostbite if I didn’t get over the wall fast.

I raised my left boot, jamming it into the crack above my right. I slid my hands upward along the windows and pulled my right boot free, slowly ascending the crack one short step at a time.

When I got close enough, I reached out for the rear bumper of the car on my right. The rifle on my back shifted, banging into the car’s hood with a resounding clang.

I froze. The night was inky black—if I didn’t move, the sentries might not see me. Would they investigate the clang? Or assume the next sentry along the wall had dropped something?

I counted off the seconds. Thirty. Sixty. A bead of sweat rolled along the bridge of my nose. I was poised to jump down and run if I were spotted. Ninety. One hundred twenty. The next patrol would be along in two or three minutes. My fingers had quit burning—lost all feeling, in fact. I had to move now—get off the wall or over it. I pulled myself up, slipped over the top of the cars, and dropped into the snow on the inside. I pulled my gloves on with a quiet sigh of relief and then froze, listening. No alarm was raised.

About five minutes later—after the next patrol had passed—Darla dropped into the snow alongside me. She had left her rifle behind.

Silently we slunk through the dark streets of Stockton until we reached the warehouse. There were two guards sitting by a small fire near the front door. The two semis loaded with pork that I had allowed Stockton to keep were there, parked across from the warehouse, so their metal backs were clearly visible from the guards’ fire. One of the semitrailers was standing open and empty. The other was chained and padlocked.

Was Stockton running out of food, or had they moved some of it somewhere else? And what would Red do if they did run out? I hoped I could convince my mother and sister to move out to the homestead before then.

I shook off my gloomy thoughts and led the way to the back of the building. A few bushes—what had once passed for landscaping—had died against the back of the warehouse. They were mostly buried by the snow. Darla crept up between two of the bushes, running her gloved fingers along a seam in the corrugated metal exterior of the building.

“With a crowbar and a hacksaw, I think we could break in here,” she whispered.

I couldn’t see the seam well at all—it was too dark. “We’ll come back,” I said.

We retraced our steps, brushing snow across our path, trying to disguise our tracks. Getting out was much easi-er—there were good holds on the undersides of the cars. We climbed together, stopping at the top to check for the patrols, and then dropped into the snow outside Stockton. Darla retrieved her rifle from the snowbank where she had hidden it, and we began the trek home.

We returned to Stockton the next night. Darla had a large wrecking bar; a small, flat pry bar; a hacksaw; and an extra hacksaw blade. She had wrapped each item in cloth secured by duct tape to keep it all from clanking. We left our rifles behind, but I brought along a revolver we had acquired during our attack on Stockton more than eight months before.

Getting across the wall was easier the second time. We already knew what to expect from the guards. Less than half an hour after we had reached Stockton, we were huddled at the metal seam in the back wall of the warehouse.

We dug a hole in the snow with our hands, trying to access the base of the wall. When we had exposed the whole seam, Darla jammed the flat pry bar between the corrugated metal panels near the base, forcing it deeper into the seam by striking the curved end of the pry bar with her palm. That made the seam open enough that I could slip the extra hacksaw blade between the metal panels and saw at the rivets holding the panels together.

Every noise we made sounded like a scream in the silent night: the thump, thump of Darla beating on the pry bar and driving it deeper, the scritch-scritch of the hacksaw blade worrying at the rivet. We stopped every now and then, listening, wondering if we’d be discovered.

When the bottom rivet gave way, the seam opened considerably. I reversed the hacksaw blade and started working my way upward, one rivet at a time.

I cut six of them before we could bend the panel enough to slip through. It was springy and wouldn’t stay bent, so Darla held it open for me while I wormed through. Then I turned and forced it open with my feet, holding it for her.

There was no light whatsoever inside the warehouse. I extracted a flint and steel and tinder from my pack. I couldn’t see much in the brief flashes the sparks made from the flint, but after a moment, one of the sparks caught in the shredded cottonwood bark I was using for tinder. I used the burning bark to light a candle I’d brought along. We never used candles back at the homestead—we were down to two stubs plus the one I held in my hands—but hauling an oil lamp on this commando raid had seemed impractical.

The warehouse was like a giant candy store to Darla. Actually, better. If there’d been a candy store right next door, I’m pretty sure Darla would have ignored it, preferring to ogle the racks of supplies. Nearly everything we needed was here: pumps, wire, piping, plastic sheeting, water heaters, and more.

Darla found the type of wire we needed on an indus-trial-size spool resting on its end on a pallet. She unwrapped two huge coils of wire, walking around and around the spool to do it and cutting the wire with a bolt cutter that was conveniently laid on a nearby shelf.

When she settled the first coil over my shoulder like a life ring, I staggered under the weight. It had to be more than a hundred pounds of wire. I thought I could get across the wall carrying it. Maybe. She put an even bigger coil across her own shoulders.

I noticed that she carefully placed the bolt cutter back in exactly the same position she had found it in. The spool of wire didn’t look depleted at all, despite the burdens weighing us down.

On the way out, I passed a shelf that held boxes of nails—thousands of large framing nails, perfect for our building projects. I remembered the hours of mind-numbing work pulling and straightening nails for reuse. I grabbed two boxes.

Darla held out a hand in a “stop” gesture. She took the two boxes of nails and put them back where I had found them. Then she grabbed two boxes from the back of the shelf, where it wouldn’t be as obvious they were missing, and stowed them in my backpack. She hoisted an armload of some kind of circular leather belts designed to transfer power on an old-fashioned machine. I pointed at some similar rubber belts—surely those would work better for whatever she had in mind, but she shook her head. She passed me the belts, and I stuffed them into her backpack.

To get back through the seam at the rear of the warehouse, I had to take off the roll of wire and push it through first. Once we were both outside, we worked on disguising the spot where we’d entered the warehouse. We brushed snow over our tracks, and I broke off a huge chunk of the nearest dead bush, planting it in the snow directly in front of the spot we’d broken open.

Getting over the car wall was difficult enough carrying nothing. With a backpack loaded with nails and a huge coil of wire, it was almost impossible—well, for me, anyway. I watched as Darla flowed to the top of the wall seemingly effortlessly, marveling at her strength. She stopped at the top, motionless, waiting for the sentries to pass. When she gestured for me to follow, I huffed and puffed my way up, slipping once and nearly tumbling backward off the exhaust pipe I was clinging to. Jumping down on the other side was no fun either—my collar of wire left a huge bruise across my neck and shoulder, and the nails jingled alarmingly in my backpack. But either no one heard or we were long gone by the time they got to the spot where we had crossed the wall.

The next day, Darla and Uncle Paul worked on bringing another wind turbine online. Max and Anna went to the nearby stand of pine trees to harvest more bark. It may have tasted terrible, but it was helping to keep us alive. Alyssa and Ben went to search for edible soybeans or corn, while Ed and I took the truck to drag another big metal tank to the wind farm to serve as the core of the heating system for the second greenhouse. every abandoned farm nearby had tanks they had used for storing liquids—pesticides, fertilizer, or fuel, according to Darla. The trick was finding a farm with old tanks; the new ones were mostly made out of plastic, and we needed metal for its heat conductivity. I was still concerned about pesticide residue, but Darla insisted there was nothing to worry about.

When Ed and I finished procuring the tank, we started disassembling another farmhouse, collecting glass, pipes, wire, and lumber to build the second greenhouse.

I wanted to start our new living quarters—the longhouse, as we were calling it—but Darla had a point. With only one greenhouse, any failure could cripple our homestead. With two, we had a chance to survive a disaster.

For a few weeks, we teetered on the edge of starvation. Pine bark was filling but not very caloric. We had eaten all the food Dr. McCarthy and Rebecca had given us—even the cans of dog food. (If I ever have to eat pet food again, I hope it’s dry cat food. Alpo is absolutely disgusting.) And I found out why Darla had taken the leather belts. Cut into small pieces and boiled, they were edible. Sort of.

Just when I thought I would have to go back to Warren to beg for more food, Alyssa and Ben got lucky. Along the top of a high ridge about a mile east of our camp, they found a field with corn that hadn’t yet molded. I sent half our group to dig corn but told Alyssa and Ben to keep prospecting for soybeans. Two days later they returned to camp again triumphant, carrying a bag stuffed with fuzzy seedpods containing soybeans. I wasn’t sure how to process or cook them, but Darla knew. Our food situation got better.

It was easier not to worry as we watched the plants in our greenhouses sprout. Those tiny green shoots meant life and hope. When the largest kale plants hit two inches, I plucked one leaf from each of the best-looking plants and shared them with everyone. If pine bark had vitamin C, then it’d prevent scurvy, but I had no idea what its nutritional content was. I figured we had better add kale back into our diets as soon as possible.

After dinner one night, Darla pulled me aside. She led me into the greenhouse. I hoped she wanted to make out. When we got through the double doors, I took her in my arms and gave her a kiss. She broke it off after only a few seconds. “We need to talk.”

Well, crap. At least she wasn’t pulling away from the hug.

“The kale at the lowest side of the greenhouse isn’t sprouting,” she said.

“I noticed that,” I said.

“It’s too cold over there, too far from the tank.”

I nodded. “What do we do?” If there was one thing I was certain of with Darla and a technical problem, it was that she wasn’t bringing me just the problem. She would have a solution in mind, and it would be something that required my help, or she would have already done it.

“I want some flexible tubing and a pump. We’ll bury the tubing out around the perimeter of the greenhouse and use the pump to circulate hot water through it.” “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”

“There was a full roll of flexible tubing in the warehouse in Stockton.”

“No! Absolutely not.” I let my arms drop from her sides. Darla, however, kept her hold on me. “And there were a couple of pumps that might work.”

“Can’t we raid one of the abandoned farmhouses around here? They have tubes, right?”

“They’re called pipes. And they’re not flexible. Yes, I might make that work—the pump would be a bigger problem, but maybe we could find a sump pump that I could make work.”

“Fine. Do that.”

“I’ll need connections and fittings. Solder and flux if I use copper pipe. The only place I’ve seen that stuff around here is at Furst Distributors in Stockton. So either way we need to go.”

“Forget it. If we keep going back, we’re going to get caught.”

“How? We’ve been over that wall twice now. It’s easy.” “How would I know? Bad luck is usually something you aren’t expecting. And anyway, it’s stealing.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “I mean, a little wire we can’t get anywhere else, I can live with. But we can’t keep looting their supplies.”

“Like Red cares? He steals all our food, and you’re going to get squeamish over a few plumbing and electrical parts he’s not even using and will probably never miss?” “What Red does is his business. What I do is mine. Theft is theft—”

“We need—”

“Maybe it’s excusable when it’s done to survive and no one is hurt by the loss of the goods. But we’ll survive without the flexible tubing or pump.”

“Maybe,” Darla said thoughtfully. “But if we’re going to get the first greenhouse producing as much as it should, build the second, and a longhouse? We’re going to need access to supplies. If not Stockton’s, then someone else’s.” “We’re not. Going. Back. To Stockton.” I lifted her hands from my shoulders and left the greenhouse. Darla could usually talk me into anything. But not this time.

Two nights later we were back in Stockton. Darla had sworn we would play it safe, she would do everything I asked her to, we would take our time getting back in, and blah, blah, blah. So I made us wait in the snow outside the wall for two hours, making sure the guards hadn’t changed their patterns. They hadn’t.

We slipped over the wall fast and easily, two black-clad ghosts flitting into the city. The seam at the back of the building was exactly as we had left it. We wormed our way inside where it was dark and quiet. Nothing had changed. The shelves of hardware were the same as we’d left them, except for a thicker layer of dust.

Chapter 30

Two nights later we were back in Stockton. Darla had sworn we would play it safe, she would do everything I asked her to, we would take our time getting back in, and blah, blah, blah. So I made us wait in the snow outside the wall for two hours, making sure the guards hadn’t changed their patterns. They hadn’t.

We slipped over the wall fast and easily, two black-clad ghosts flitting into the city. The seam at the back of the building was exactly as we had left it. We wormed our way inside where it was dark and quiet. Nothing had changed. The shelves of hardware were the same as we’d left them, except for a thicker layer of dust.

Darla cut two massive coils of black, flexible pipe that were designed to be used with irrigation equipment. The coils were much lighter than the collars of electrical wire. We took two pumps out of their boxes and stowed one in each of our backpacks. We closed up the empty boxes and left them on the shelf so it would look like nothing had changed—at least if no one ever opened the boxes.

It was difficult to make the panel at the back of the warehouse open wide enough to push through the huge coils of tubing. I put my feet against one side of the slit and grabbed the other side with both gloved hands, pushing with my legs and straining to make it open wide enough that Darla could get the rolls of tubing through. A rivet above the ones we had cut broke with an atrociously loud ping. Darla blew out the candle, and we froze in the darkness, waiting, listening, praying that no one would come investigate. No one came.

Working by feel now that the candle was extinguished, we finally got the tubing through and slipped out ourselves. I’d bent the panel so much that I couldn’t get it to reclose correctly. I worked on it for a while and then settled for camouflaging the hole with dead bushes and snow.

Once we were well away from the warehouse and its guards, I whispered to Darla, “I want to go downtown. Look for something.”

“You crazy?” she whispered back. “That’s where their troops are headquartered, where Red’s mansion is. You didn’t want to come creeping around the lion’s tail, and now you’re going to stick your head in his maw?”

“Yeah. You’re right, I guess.” I had wanted to check out the jewelry store I’d seen downtown—see if there were any engagement rings left, but no way was I going to tell her that.

We slipped back over the wall and returned to the homestead in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

It took more than two months to build the second greenhouse. The guts of the first one—the tank with its heating elements—were finished before we arrived at our new homestead, and we had all the glass and building materials salvaged from the old farmhouse. Now we were in the process of tearing down the three nearest abandoned farmhouses and taking the glass, lumber, pipe, and wire we needed.

The unmoldy corn and soy improved our diet immensely, and we quit eating pine bark. Two wind turbines turned out to be more than enough to heat both our greenhouses. In high wind we shut down the turbines so they wouldn’t be damaged. They weren’t designed to spin all that fast, Uncle Paul said. They were geared for slow and steady operation—that was more efficient and also safer for birds. Not that we’d seen any birds since the eruption. Those that weren’t killed by breathing in the ash had no doubt fled south to try to survive the volcanic winter. We also had to shut down the wind turbines if the wind blew steadily for several days. The greenhouses would overheat otherwise.

Chapter 31

It took more than two months to build the second greenhouse. The guts of the first one—the tank with its heating elements—were finished before we arrived at our new homestead, and we had all the glass and building materials salvaged from the old farmhouse. Now we were in the process of tearing down the three nearest abandoned farmhouses and taking the glass, lumber, pipe, and wire we needed.

The unmoldy corn and soy improved our diet immensely, and we quit eating pine bark. Two wind turbines turned out to be more than enough to heat both our greenhouses. In high wind we shut down the turbines so they wouldn’t be damaged. They weren’t designed to spin all that fast, Uncle Paul said. They were geared for slow and steady operation—that was more efficient and also safer for birds. Not that we’d seen any birds since the eruption. Those that weren’t killed by breathing in the ash had no doubt fled south to try to survive the volcanic winter. We also had to shut down the wind turbines if the wind blew steadily for several days. The greenhouses would overheat otherwise.

Once we had two greenhouses and two turbines online—giving us some hope of surviving even if something failed—we started building the longhouse. It would be a simple, one-room structure, about forty feet long and twenty feet wide. We had saved exactly enough space for it between the two greenhouses, so it would be bordered on its two long sides by a greenhouse, and one of the short sides would butt directly against the base of the wind turbine. That way, residual heat from the greenhouses would warm our living quarters, and we could enter the turbine tower or either of the greenhouses without going outside.

We planned to build a sniper platform near the top of the turbine tower, but Darla and Ben wanted the longhouse to be a defensive structure too. So we built several test walls, varying thicknesses of wood, snow, galvanized roofing, and ice. Ben suggested building the longhouse out of reinforced concrete, but obviously that was completely impractical—we had no way to get rebar or make concrete.

Darla fired each of our guns at her test walls. None of them would stand up to short-range fire from the AR-l5s. The bullets blew through ice and snow as if they weren’t there and blasted splintered holes in any board in their path. A double layer of logs would usually stop them, but we didn’t have the time or materials to build a wall that heavy. We settled on an A-frame log structure with board walls and corrugated metal roofing, covered with three feet of snow and ice for insulation. That would stop pistol fire just fine.

It seemed to take forever to build the longhouse. We cut huge logs for the support beams, and all eight of us working together couldn’t drag them up the slope to our homestead. Darla and I returned to Stockton to steal aircraft wire and pulleys to construct a system for lifting and dragging logs.

Nothing had changed in Stockton except the semitrucks where Stocktonites stored their food. Both trucks were empty. “What is everyone here eating?” I whispered to Darla.

She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.

We slipped around to the back of the warehouse and wormed our way inside through the metal panels we had separated. Nothing had changed inside either, except that everything was coated in a thicker layer of dust. Darla put two heavy spools of aircraft wire in my backpack and followed them with more than a dozen metal pulleys. Then she loaded her backpack with nails, silicone caulk, plumber’s putty, brass plumbing joints, electrical nuts, circuit breakers, and electrical tape.

It was impossible to walk with a backpack full of metal pulleys without jingling a little. I was afraid we’d get caught. But no alarms were raised, so either no one heard us, or they attributed the noises to one of their own patrols.

The next day Darla used the material we had liberated to rig a pulley system so efficient that Anna could drag a massive tree trunk up the slope to the homestead by herself. While we worked, we worried over what we had seen in Stockton. The empty trucks terrified me. Were they out of food? If so, would Red attack Warren again? It was unlikely he would find us up on our isolated hill five miles east of Warren, but what about Rebecca and Mom?

That evening, Darla and I knocked off work early and snuck into Warren. We visited Nylce first, both to catch up and to find out where Mom and Rebecca were living. Evidently Mayor Petty had given them an empty house right next door to his and just down the street from the mayor’s office.

Mom wasn’t home, but we found Rebecca in the kitchen, sitting on the floor, washing clothes by the light of an oil lamp. I tapped on the back window.

She startled, groping quickly around the chair beside her and coming up with a small pistol. I waved and smiled, hoping she would recognize me before she shot me. She set the pistol back down, got up, and opened the back door.

“Just about nailed you,” she said.

“Good to see you too, Sis.” I walked through the doorway and stamped my feet on the rug. “Mom around?”

Rebecca gave me a quick hug. “No, she’s out with a friend.”

“Who?”

“You don’t want to know,” Rebecca said as she hugged Darla, who had come in behind me.

“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.” Rebecca rubbed her forehead as if she were getting a headache. “Mayor Petty. Or Bob, as she calls him.”

“Oh . . .” I fell into a chair.

“Told you, you didn’t want to know.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“It’s actually helping some. I don’t get the evil eye from the other Warrenites as much as I used to.”

“Well, that’s something. Look, I came to talk to you about . . . where’s your go-bag?”

“Right there.” She pointed at a backpack sitting on one of the unused chairs around the kitchen table.

“And Mom keeps hers close too?”

“No. We’ve had that fight—I’m not going to win it. There’s her bag.” Rebecca grabbed the strap of a bag on another chair and then let it slip from her hands.

I groaned inwardly—the point of a go-bag was to have it at hand at all times—wherever Mom was, she should have taken it with her.

“What’s with the questions?” Rebecca asked. “Stockton’s out of food again,” I said.

“Do I even want to know how you know this?” “Probably not,” I said. “You’ve got to be ready to run.” “You’ll have a good place to run to,” Darla said. “Once we build our sniper perch and finish camouflaging our site with snow and ice, it’ll be about as defensible as any place with eight people can be.”

“You think we’ll be attacked?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes,” I said flatly. “You’ve got food. Stockton doesn’t. And if Red finds out where we are—that we’ve got producing greenhouses—he’ll attack us too.”

“Hope you’re wrong.”

“Yeah, me too. If there’s any way you can leak the info to Mayor Petty without letting him know where you got it . . . he might trust a rumor more than something I told him.”

“I’ll tell Mom I heard it from Nylce or something. She’ll tell Bob.” She said the mayor’s name with disgust. “Good. And tell Mom . . . tell her I miss her.”

“Okay. I will. She misses you too, you know.”

“She could move out to the homestead anytime she wants,” I said.

“I know.” I started to turn away, but Rebecca grabbed my arm, holding it in a surprisingly powerful grip. “It’s going to be okay, Alex. I know it is.”

As I pedaled away from Warren, I thought about her last words. I couldn’t escape my worries, couldn’t shake the inexorable feeling that we had it too good, that something horrible lurked just over the horizon.