Текст книги "Sunrise"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Chapter 49

Two days later, on the outskirts of Rockford, we reached a gas station that had partially collapsed under the weight of the snow and ash. We weren’t quite halfway to Chicago yet. We spent most of the afternoon shifting beams and metal roof panels, unburying the sales counter. It had been looted before it collapsed—the broken cigarette displays were all empty. There was no food of any kind. But when we heaved aside a section of countertop, we exposed a book three years out of date: a combination Yellow and White Pages for Rockford.

Darla and I stayed up half the night studying

the book by the light of an oil lamp. It was a mother lode of information. There were maps in the front—not superdetailed, but better than what we had, which was nothing. We combed through the Rockford Yellow Pages section, noting places we needed to visit. There were several snowmobile dealers listed. Two of them, on the north side of Rockford, were close together and looked promising: Loves Park Motorsports and Bergstrom Skegs. Almost a dozen bicycle shops were listed; we marked three near the snowmobile dealers to check first. Darla hoped to scavenge enough parts to create a fleet of jumbo Bikezillas—we would need them to haul our gleanings back to Speranta.

Rockford was also home to four or five electrical and plumbing supply distributors. Darla yelped in delight when she saw some place called Grainger Industrial Supply listed. I had no idea what it was, but anything that made Darla as happy as Grainger had to be heaven on earth for budding engineers.

Then we turned our attention to food. Even if our trip was completely successful, we wouldn’t get the new greenhouses all built and producing for months. We needed to bring back some kind of food to bridge the gap until then. Grocery stores and restaurants had been emptied out within days of the eruption. To find supplies in the quantities we needed, we’d have to be creative, think of things the ordinary looter wouldn’t.

I thought about Rebecca finding pet food in otherwise thoroughly picked-over houses. Unfortunately there didn’t appear to be a distributor or manufacturer of pet food anywhere in Rockford. I added a PetSmart and a PETCO to our list of locations to visit, though.

Next I looked up food distributors. Rockford had something called GFS Foodservice, but no grocery wholesalers I could find.

There was no Yellow Pages section for food manufacturing. On a whim, I looked up Pepsi in the White Pages. There was a bottling plant nearby in Loves Park. Maybe they’d have bulk supplies of sugar or something? Heck, I’d even drink high-fructose corn syrup straight if it’d keep us alive for a couple of months.

That got us started on a game—naming food brands and looking them up in the White Pages. It worked too– it turned out that, along with the Pepsi bottler, the Rockford area boasted a Kraft Foods factory. I lost myself for a moment in a pleasant daydream about ripping into a pallet of macaroni and cheese.

“One of these places is going to have food left,” I told Darla confidently. “We’re going to find everything we need right here. We won’t have to go to Chicago.” I wasn’t looking forward to visiting Chicago. After seeing the mess in small towns across Illinois, the thought of what almost ten million starving people might have done terrified me.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “There must have been lots of people working at all those plants. Wouldn’t they already have snagged the food?”

My sudden burst of hope died in my chest. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. But maybe we’ll get lucky anyway.”

In the morning our first order of business was visiting the snowmobile dealers. We were going to need some way to transport all the other supplies we hoped to find. A truck might have seemed the obvious choice, but that would come with its own problems. Gas, despite our luck in finding a half-tank’s worth in Freeport, was nearly impossible to come by. And a lot of the remaining gasoline was stale—okay for starting fires, but no good for running an engine. Darla said it had something to do with evaporation and oxidization within the gasoline. Even if we could find gas, we’d run out soon enough and have no way to get more. Pedal power was an inexhaustible resource.

My heart sank when we reached our first stop, Loves Park Motorsports. The windows were smashed and the showroom empty. Not a single motorcycle or snowmobile remained. Darla checked the repair bays in back and reported another strikeout. Whoever had taken the snowmobiles had loaded up on spare parts too.

I poked around the sales counter at the front of the store. Advertising circulars were spread around the Formica counter and had cascaded onto the floor nearby. I picked one up; the back was a huge ad for their annual September “Preseason Truckload Snowmobile Sale.”

“Why couldn’t the volcano have erupted in September after the snowmobiles arrived?” I asked, showing the circular to Darla.

She shrugged and started to leave the showroom. Then she stopped, turned back to me, and snatched the circular out of my hand. “So if you’re getting ready for a huge truckload sale, do you wait until the last minute to get your stock in?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, let’s say you don’t wait ’til the last minute. Where do you keep all those snowmobiles?”

“It’s a truckload sale . . .”

We rushed around to the back of the store. There were three semitrailers parked in the back lot. All three were padlocked, which I took as a great sign. What’s the point to putting a padlock on an empty truck?

Darla took the ratchet from the toolkit in my backpack and beat on the padlock for a while. She didn’t even dent it. Ed had disappeared into the shop. He came back with a long tube—something you would use to build a motorcycle frame, maybe—and a coil of wire. Darla understood immediately. She wrapped the wire through the hasp of the padlock and around the tube a few dozen times. Then all three of us could pull on the tube, creating massive leverage.

The padlock didn’t break, but the hasp it was connected to pulled free of the door. Darla and Ed pulled the door open. Inside, the trailer was packed with neatly palletized and shrink-wrapped, brand-spanking-new snowmobiles.

Chapter 50

I left half our force with Darla—four to stand guard and ten to help her construct her fleet of Bikezillas– and took the rest to visit the bicycle and ski shops we had found listed in the Rockford Yellow Pages. We struck out at the first three places we visited—they had been cleaned out completely. Finally we found what we needed at the Rockford Bicycle Company. The dirt bikes had all been taken, probably because their big, knobby tires would work okay in the snow and ice. But there were still dozens of high-end racing bikes and ten-speeds with frames, forks, and gears that would work fine as the core of new Bikezillas.

We cleaned out the bike shop completely, making dozens of trips to haul all the bikes back to our base at Loves Park Motorsports. We cleaned out the repair shop in the back too, taking all the spare parts and tools that were left. By the time we finished, it was dark. I set up the night sentries, and we bedded down right there in the empty showroom.

The next morning Darla handed me a huge list of supplies she wanted. The first thing on the list was skis– if we could get those, she could finish a couple of Bikezillas, which would make it much easier to haul supplies around.

As we headed to North Park Rental, the first place on our list, I wondered why we hadn’t seen any people. Where were they? Huge swathes of Rockford had burned, but there were sections that looked intact, almost normal except for the deep snow and the eerie, unnatural silence. There had to have been a hundred thousand people or more in Rockford and millions more in nearby Chicago. They couldn’t all have died.

And where was the government? Two years ago, Illinois had been part of the Yellow Zone, and FEMA and its subcontractors had been out in force here, keeping people from the Red Zone west of the Mississippi from flooding east. Now, nothing.

Someone had been here. Nearly every place we visited had been picked over—looted, I guessed, although did it really count as looting now that whoever owned all these shops was gone and probably dead?

The cross-country ski section at North Park Rentals looked like a bomb had gone off in it—bits of plastic packaging and cardboard were strewn everywhere.

The other sections hadn’t been cleared out nearly as thoroughly; nobody had bothered with the snowboards or downhill skis. We hauled them back to the snowmobile shop by the armload.

We spent the afternoon hunting for other stuff on Darla’s list: bolts, wire, welding rods, and lumber to build the bikes’ load beds. We found a lot of the stuff at the Grainger Industrial Supply. Other materials came from a nearby Home Depot that had collapsed under the weight of the snow—which was actually fortunate. It was a ton of work to unbury anything, but the store hadn’t been looted nearly as thoroughly as those that were still standing.

We even unearthed a huge bin of seeds they’d had on clearance: carrots, beets, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and more. In our early days of greenhouse farming, it was tough to get anything but kale to grow. Now that we had greenhouses that were both heated and lit, we could probably grow almost anything. Darla said that not all the seeds would germinate—some would have spoiled after two and a half years buried in the wreckage, but that was okay. Many were heirloom varieties, not hybrids. According to Darla, the heirloom plants were much more likely to produce viable seeds. That meant that even if only a few sprouted, we would have an inexhaustible source of more seeds.

Darla’s group worked late into the night by lamplight, and by morning they had the first of what she called a truck model ready. “I’m calling it a BZ-250,” she said with a proud smile. “We’re building a four-person drive model next, with an even bigger load bed. That’ll be the BZ-450.” The 250 was two bicycles side by side with their pedals and frames connected by steel rods. A large load bed covered the snowmobile track at the rear, and the front forks of both bikes ended in snowboards instead of wheels. It was ridiculously difficult to turn—you couldn’t really lean into the turns much to help the snowboards bite into the snow, but it did okay going straight, and it could haul a ton of stuff. Maybe two tons.

Since we now had a good way to haul bulk supplies, I took my team in search of food. I wanted to check out the GFS warehouse we had found listed in the Yellow Pages. We found it—but it turned out to be a retail outlet store, not a true warehouse. It had been cleaned out completely.

Next we trekked to the Kraft Foods plant. It turned out to be a place where they made chewing gum, of all the useless things. Why, oh why, couldn’t it have been a macaroni-and-cheese plant? I could probably live for years on a diet of macaroni and cheese, and kale.

The Pepsi bottler had been looted. There was plenty of diet soda left, but nothing else. The soda was useless, of course. We had all been on the world’s most horrible diet in the two and a half years since the volcano erupted. If there was any high-fructose corn syrup left in the big stainless steel tanks at the bottling plant, I couldn’t figure out how to get at it.

The PetSmart and PETCO were cleaned out too. Even the rawhide dog toys were gone—boiled down as desperation food, I figured. I thought about how hungry people must have been to eat dog toys. I could relate; I still remembered the hard knots of boiled leather belts sliding down my throat when I had been so close to starvation during our first months on the homestead.

The next day we checked retail grocery stores, even though I knew it would probably be hopeless. At the fifth one—a half-collapsed WalMart—I finally found something interesting. There was no food, of course; even the pallets in the back room had been cleared out. But amid the torn and discarded shrink-wrap, I found routing tags. All the grocery pallets had come from the same place, a distribution center in someplace called Sterling, Illinois. How much stuff would be stored in a WalMart distribution center? And how far was it from Rockford? I quizzed the guys with me until I found someone who knew– Sterling was a tiny town about an hour’s drive south of Warren.

When we rejoined Darla’s group that night, I talked to the rest of the team. Trig had worked in a WalMart. He had never been in one of their distribution centers, but he said they were huge—over a million square feet—and would have everything stocked in a WalMart supercenter, from food to camping supplies to pharmaceuticals to firearms and ammo. It was obvious where we had to go next.

Chapter 51

We spent another two weeks in Rockford. Darla and her team switched to building four-person bikes with even bigger load beds—they built seven to go with the first two-person bike so all thirty of us could ride back to Speranta. In the meantime my team continued scavenging to fill the huge list of supplies we needed for the new greenhouses and longhouses.

Darla came with us to Grainger Industrial Supply on the last day to help select and load supplies. When Darla asked for the grand tour of Grainger, I begged off. I had seen the whole place already

“Where’re you going?” Darla asked.

“I’ll take a quick walk. My head hurts a little,” I lied.

“You shouldn’t be wandering around by yourself,” Darla said.

“Ed,” I called, “come take a walk with me, would you?”

“Yessir.”

As soon as we were out of Darla’s sight, I broke into a jog. “Got a ways to go,” I told Ed. “Mind a run?”

As Ed ran past me, he said, “I will run you into the ground, sir.”

I laughed and picked up the pace. The place I needed to visit was about two miles away. We had passed it several times during our scavenging trips, but there had always been too many people around—word might have gotten back to Darla.

Ed and I reached it in about twenty minutes, moving at a fast jog: J. Kamin Jewelers. The glass entry door and windows at the front of the building had been broken out and some of the stock looted. That probably happened in the days immediately after Yellowstone erupted. Nobody would bother looting a jewelry store now—a cup of rice was worth more than a cup of diamonds these days.

One row of display cases had been turned on their sides. Ed and I flipped them upright, and I rooted pig-like in the glass shards on the floor for a while, tossing aside bracelets, earrings, and loose diamonds. I found a couple of antique, wind-up watches and took those, though that wasn’t what I was after. Finally I hit pay dirt: a velvet tray of engagement rings that had landed upside-down under the fallen display case. They were dazzling in their variety, with diamonds in more shapes and sizes than I had known existed: square, round, pear-shaped, even diamond-shaped diamonds. A couple of the rings featured emeralds or rubies along with the diamonds. I took them all; I had no idea what sort of ring Darla might prefer.

“Might need a couple of these too, Chief,” Ed said. He was holding another velvet tray, this one full of plain gold wedding bands.

“You think she’ll say yes?” I said.

Ed smiled. “I’d bet your life on it.”

“That’s about what it feels like.” My palms were sweating despite the diamond-sharp air in the store.

“Scared to death, aren’t you?” Ed patted my shoulder gently.

It didn’t make any sense; I’d faced down prison escapees and cannibals. I knew Darla wanted to get married. Why should I be so afraid?

“I remember what it felt like when I popped the question to Mandy. Never so terrified in my life. Or so happy to hear the word yes . . . damn, I miss her.” Ed bit his lip and turned away

I wasn’t sure what to do. Ed didn’t seem like the kind of guy you hugged. I awkwardly patted him on the shoulder. “We’d better go before Darla starts wondering where we got to.”

“You’re doing the right thing, you know? I’d trade my soul in this world and the next for another day with Mandy You got the chance for something like that, you grab it with both hands and hold on, even if the whole world is dying around you. Maybe especially then.”

“I know, Ed. I love her.”

Ed turned to face me. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled him into a rough hug, and we slapped each other on the back. We left the store together, my arm around his shoulders, but in some sense we were facing in totally opposite directions. Ed’s tears honored his past, his lost life with Mandy. I felt fiercely alive, sad for Ed, but also full of wild joy for the future. My future with Darla.

Chapter 52

On the fleet of Bikezillas, the return trip to Speranta took only three days. We would have made it in two except that one of the bikes broke down and we had to stop for repairs.

As we pedaled up to the longhouse, my niece Anna burst from the doors, her wild, long blond hair escaping from her stocking cap and trailing in the wind as she ran toward us. I climbed down from my seat and opened my arms to give her a hug. Instead of hugging me back, she stopped, allowed me to hug her for a moment, and then pulled back.

“Dad’s really sick. It’s way worse than before,” she said. “And Dr. McCarthy’s got it too.”

I followed her into the longhouse and almost got run over by Belinda, who was on her way out. “Alex,” she said, “we need azithromycin, doxycycline, cefaclor, or vancomycin. I’ve been trying to convince Evans to send out an expedition to find them, but he won’t—”

“Wait, what? I left Uncle Paul in charge. What’s Evans got to do with anything?”

“He’s . . . your uncle’s taken a bad turn for the worse. Pneumonia with sputum-producing cough, 104 fever, chills, chest pain . . . Jim’s got it too. They’re both in bad shape.” The fact that she’d referred to Dr. McCarthy by his first name emphasized just how worried she was. Everyone knew she and McCarthy had a steamier relationship than they let on—it was impossible to keep a secret like that when you’re living in a one-room longhouse. But Belinda stubbornly stuck to calling him “Dr. McCarthy” as if the formality would prevent us from catching on. “But why is Evans—?”

“We’ve lost a lot of people, Alex. Evans just kind of started organizing things.”

“Lost?” A cold finger of fear wrapped itself around my heart and squeezed.

“Who?”

“Zik’s wife, Mary, and eighteen of the newcomers. The bodies are outside, frozen—I’ve been bugging Evans to organize a burial detail, but . . .” Belinda shrugged.

“Okay. I need a list. Everything you need. Make sure to put every kind of medicine that might help on the list so that if one thing isn’t available, I can look for a substitute.”

Belinda pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and held it out toward me.

“No. Keep it until morning. Go over it. Read it to Dr. McCarthy, if he feels up to it. Make sure it’s thorough, ’cause I have no clue what to look for.”

“Maybe I should come with you.”

“I’ve got a lead on a warehouse where there might be medical supplies.” Nearly every WalMart had a pharmacy– the drugs had to come from somewhere. “It’ll take me a minimum of four days to get there and back. You’ve got to stay and care for your patients.”

Belinda made me put on an improvised cloth mask and led me into one of the greenhouses, where nearly three dozen people were on bedrolls—segregated from the still-healthy folks in the longhouse. A faint scent of sweat and feces grew stronger as we approached. Raspy coughs and wheezes filled the air. Dr. McCarthy lay on his side; a trickle of blood-flecked spittle flowed slowly from the corner of his mouth to the pillow.

Belinda wiped his mouth with a rag. “You up to going over the medication order, Jim?”

“Sure thing, hon.” His voice was a terrible thing: low, raspy, and diseased. “Glad you’re back, Alex.”

I seized his hand, clutching it. “I’m going to go get the medicines you need, Doc. Just hold on until I get back, okay?”

“No problem,” he wheezed. “I’ll bury you all, right along with the rest of my patients. I must be the world’s worst doctor.”

“You’re the best doctor in the town of Speranta by a long shot.”

Dr. McCarthy started to laugh, but that turned into a long coughing fit. “I’m the only doctor in Speranta.”

Belinda started quizzing the doctor on medicines, and I turned to Uncle Paul on the bedroll behind me. He looked terrible. His eyes were sunken and black, his skin pallid and sweaty, his voice weak.

“Alex,” he whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I asked. “Impersonating a zombie when it’s not Halloween?”

He choked out a laugh. “No, for—” A coughing fit overwhelmed him.

“Just rest and get better, okay? I’ll go get medicine tomorrow. First thing.”

I left his bedside, thinking about the trip to the distribution center in Sterling. There were several possibilities. The distribution center might already have been completely looted. That possibility didn’t bear thinking on. The best but most unlikely case was that it was abandoned but still full of supplies. More likely, it might have collapsed under the weight of the ash and snow. If that was the case, I would need a lot of manpower to unbury the supplies we needed.

A fourth option occurred to me then—what if there were still people alive in Sterling, surviving on the gleanings from a million-plus square foot warehouse? If that was the case, I needed to bring something to trade. What would people who had been living on canned food for two and a half years want most? That was easy: fresh food.

I made my way across the room to our food storage area. We had put a bunch of old metal cabinets against the wall in the coldest corner of the longhouse. It was like a refrigerator, but it didn’t drain any electricity. I figured I would package up almost all of our stored kale and get it ready to take on my expedition tomorrow.

One of the newcomers, a guy a year or two younger than I, was standing guard at the “refrigerators.” “Hey, Deke,” I said, reaching for the cabinet.

He laid his hand flat against the cabinet door, holding it closed. “Director Evans says nobody but him’s to distribute food.”

“It’s me, Deke.”

“Director Evans says especially not you.”

Wait, what? I briefly contemplated kicking his legs out from under him. That would get his hand off the cabinet door. But it wasn’t his fault. “You know who built the room you’re standing in, right?”

“You did, sir. But Director Evans—”

“I know, I know. Where is he, anyway?”

“Out in the new greenhouse.”

I found him supervising a group of people lifting one of the rafters that would support the greenhouse’s glass roof. His idea of supervision was calling out directions. When I was running things, I made it a point to put my shoulder under the heaviest part of the beam.

“Welcome back,” he called out when he saw me, his face lit by a smile that looked genuine enough.

“We need to talk.” I pulled him aside. When we were out of earshot of the work crew, I said, “Why’s Deke got orders not to let me into the food supply?”

“We’ve got fifty-six hungry people here. Eighty-six now that you folks are back. It only seemed sensible to post a—”

“I’m not debating the need for a guard. What I want to know is why he was given specific orders not to let me into the food stores.”

“Just a misunderstanding,” Evans said smoothly. “I’ll get it straightened out. Your uncle got sicker right after you left. Someone had to step in. And the refugees look up to me—I fed a lot of them, or at least their children, in the camp in Galena.”

I didn’t buy the misunderstanding explanation. “How’d you wind up as a refugee anyway? Last time I saw you, you were in tight with Black Lake.” To be fair to Evans, I supposed he had no choice but to kiss up to the FEMA subcontractors who ran Camp Galena; they wouldn’t have allowed him to help feed the refugees otherwise.

“Not as tight as you thought, I guess. I used all my resources acquiring food for the refugees’ children. I had hoped FEMA would see that I got home. But when Black Lake pulled up stakes and abandoned the Galena camp, they left me behind. I’m just as homeless as you are.”

I was suddenly furious. “I am not homeless. This is my home.” I whirled and stalked away. I was afraid I would punch him the next time he opened his mouth.

I went to find Ben. He, Max, and Alyssa were loading up a Bikezilla with empty jugs, preparing to haul water from the farmhouse well almost a mile away. I hopped on the fourth bike seat and rode there with them. We really needed to dig a well closer to the longhouse.

As we filled and loaded the jugs, I told them about my conversations with Deke and Director Evans.

“Evans has been running things since your uncle got sick,” Alyssa said. “I figured it was okay, just a temporary thing until you got back, or I would have complained or something.”

“Sometimes,” Ben said, “a fast counterattack can accomplish more than a slower, more careful approach to the enemy”

“You can’t, like, shoot Evans,” Max said to Ben.

“You misunderstand me,” Ben said. “I’m talking about a political counterattack. Although really, war is a continuation of politics by another means, as von Clausewitz wrote.”

“That makes sense.” I thought about it all the way back to Speranta. By the time we had finished emptying all the water jugs into one of the greenhouse tanks, I knew what to do. “Thanks, Ben,” I said as I handed him the two empties I held.

“You are welcome,” Ben called as he and the others set off to make another trip to the well. I went to the long-house—I planned to spend the rest of the afternoon preparing my counterattack.

I dragged load after load of supplies in from the Bikezillas. After a couple of trips, Anna and Charlotte showed up. Charlotte had her eight-year-old sister, Wyn, in tow. Their eyes were dark and their cheeks tear-streaked. They’d lost their mother while I was gone. I hadn’t seen their father, Zik, since I’d returned. I gave each of them a hug, telling them how sorry I was but knowing how utterly futile and inadequate my words were.

“Heard you could use some help,” Anna said. She leaned in toward me and whispered, “I think they could use a distraction right now.”

“Thanks.” I was happy to have the help. I pointed out a row of plastic pots and sprouting trays I had brought in from the Bikezillas. “Fill all those with the best dirt you can find, would you?”

We worked all afternoon, filling pots and laying out seeds until nearly every counter and table in the long-house was full. Director Evans stopped by and asked me what I was doing. “Getting ready to plant the seeds we found in Rockford,” I told him. I didn’t want to give him any hint of the counterattack before it hit him.

“A fine idea,” he said. “How can I help?”

“We’ve got it, thanks.”

At twilight Max, Ben, and Alyssa came to help. The only seeds we didn’t lay out, ready to plant, were kale seeds.

When everyone filed in for dinner, they found the potting supplies. I raised my voice enough to be heard over the hubbub. “Before dinner tonight, I’d like to share part of the bounty we found in Rockford with all of you. Take a few pots or sprouting trays—however many you’d like to care for. Plant whatever seeds you wish. There are hundreds of choices laid out on the tables in front of you, almost anything you want—except kale.” A few people laughed. “I kept all the kale for myself.” More people laughed. If there was one thing I was sure of, it was that we were all thoroughly sick of kale.

“Keep your pots in the longhouse or one of the greenhouses and care for your seedlings. Whatever sprouts will form the core of your own garden, and every family will have their own plot of land in a greenhouse to raise their own vegetables.”

Director Evans started to say something, but I spoke over him. “And now, before we begin planting, could I ask Reverend Evans to say a blessing over these plants, to give thanks for the nourishment they will provide?”

“A fine idea,” Evans said and began his blessing.

We spent almost an hour planting. People chatted over the various seeds, oohing and aahing over the pictures on the seed packages, trading seeds until every pot we had was planted. Then we cleared off the tables and sat down to a meager dinner of roasted kale and tortillas made from greenhouse-grown wheat.

After dinner I rose and banged on my water glass with a spoon. Years ago I had seen someone do that in a movie about a wedding. It worked—everyone quieted down and looked my way. I was nervous—not about confronting Evans, though, but about the next topic on my agenda.

“First,” I said, “I’d like to offer my thanks to Jim Evans for his service to Speranta in my absence. When my uncle got sick, Jim stepped in and ably kept things running. We owe our continued supply of kale to him.” There were several groans at the mention of kale—exactly the effect I was hoping for. I led the audience in a round of polite applause. Evans rose and started to speak, but I interrupted him, smiling to soften my words. “Sit down, Jim, I’m not finished yet.”

“I also want to thank the original settlers of Speranta.” I named them all, starting with Darla and ending with myself. “Without your bravery and hard work, we wouldn’t have this fine building sheltering us or the electricity that warms and lights our greenhouses. And we wouldn’t have been able to lend a helping hand to our neighbors as they lay bleeding and dying on the highway outside Warren. Thank you.”

The applause was considerably more enthusiastic that time.

“I owe thanks also to the twenty-nine brave souls who volunteered to accompany me to Rockford. Without their bravery and sacrifice, we wouldn’t have all the seeds you just planted.” I had to quit for a moment, the applause was so loud. “They also found the supplies that will enable us to build more greenhouses to feed ourselves no matter how long this winter lasts!” More applause.

“When there were only twelve of us, we could operate by consensus. Now with the influx of new people and new talents, we need a more formal organizational system. It has been my honor and privilege to guide this settlement, to lead Speranta through its founding and naming, but I couldn’t have done it alone. I owe my success—in fact, we all owe our success—to Paul Halprin and Darla Edmunds, without whose engineering and mechanical genius, we would have no electric lights, no greenhouse, and no food.”