Текст книги "Sunrise"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Chapter 73

I leapt onto one of the empty seats of a Bikezilla. Ed and the two backseat peddlers jumped on while I was straining to get the bike moving. The eight guys who had ridden in the load bed started to come aboard, and I turned and yelled at them, “Off! Now!” We would be much faster without a load.

Still, it took almost two minutes to cover the distance between the longhouses. I was running for the door before the bike had even come to a stop.

Inside, there was pandemonium. The ex-sheriff of Warren, Sam Moyers, was hanging from a rope strung on the rafters in the center of the longhouse.

His face was fading from purple to a mottled gray. His body swung slightly, wavering with the last impetus of his extinguished life. Ex-Mayor Petty was on top of a table nearby, wheelchair and all. A noose encircled his neck, the rope running up to a rafter high above our heads. Francine was behind him on the table.

My mother lay beside the table, a bruise spreading across one side of her face, her hands wrapped around her gravid belly. Another survivor of the Warren massacre—I couldn’t recall his name at that moment—stood over her, training a pistol at her head. My mother wept and pled incoherently, so loudly that I could hear her over the general furor. The room was riotously full. All the Warrenites who were supposed to be in Longhouse Five were packed against the back wall. Men with semi-automatic rifles stood guard over them. Nearly the entire population of Longhouse Three, most of them survivors of the massacre outside of Warren, ringed the hanging tables in the center of the room.

Francine saw me, caught my eye. Then she raised her foot and shoved Mayor Petty’s wheelchair off the table.

I charged, throwing elbows and yelling, trying to clear the crowd out of the way. The rope snapped taut, and Petty’s wheelchair fell to the floor with a clatter. I couldn’t get there in time—the crowd was too thick.

I slammed my right hand down on someone’s shoulder, vaulting onto a nearby table. Petty’s eyes were bulging, and his face was the color of a spoiled tomato. He was dangling so low that if he’d had legs, he could have just stood up. People crowded around him in the tight quarters, but they were cheering and yelling, not helping. I took two steps on the table and leapt, catching the rope above Petty’s head in my right hand, sending us both swinging, crashing into the spectators.

Petty’s face was purple. I reached down with my hook, sawing at the rope above Petty’s head. Every evening without fail, I spent a few minutes honing the edge on my hook. So the rope parted easily, and Petty crashed to the floor. I held on, kicking out at nearby spectators’ heads, trying to clear some room.

Mom crawled over to Petty, ignoring the gun trained on her and the man holding it. She clawed at the noose, and for a moment I was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to loosen it, and Petty would die despite my efforts. Then she pulled it off his neck, and he gasped and coughed, flopping like an air-drowned fish.

“Silence!” I bellowed. The room fell quiet, and I dropped off the rope, bending my knees and landing neatly beside Mom and Petty.

“These are our guests! I promised they’d be safe here!” “They’re murderers!” someone yelled.

“It’s on me, Captain,” Francine said, looking defiantly down from her perch atop the table. “I organized it. I led it. For my dead fiance. For Brock.”

Ed and at least a dozen soldiers carrying rifles filed in. “Out!” I roared. “I’ve got this.” The last thing I needed was any kind of shootout in the packed longhouse. Hundreds could die. Ed saluted and ordered his soldiers out. He, however, stopped in the doorway, leaving the door wide open. The icy breeze was welcome in the heat of the packed longhouse.

“How could you do it, Francine?” I asked. “How could you betray me like this?”

“It has nothing to do with you, Captain. Move on out of here, and we’ll finish what we started.”

“You will not!” I snatched the noose off the floor and put it around my own neck. “When you harm someone under my protection, under our protection, it’s no different than harming me. Than harming Speranta itself. We’ve survived, prospered even, because we aren’t a pack of animals or flensers, because we have laws and respect them, because people can work and live in safety here.”

“We only want justice,” Francine said.

“Justice.” I practically spat the word. “Who appointed you judge? Who elected you mayor? Who asked you to join a jury? You didn’t give Sam justice! This was vengeance. I should exile you all.”

An alarmed mutter spread around the room. “No. It’s on me,” Francine said. “This was my idea. If you’ve got to exile anyone, it should be me.”

I glared at her for a moment. “Everyone out! Back to your own longhouse,” I said. “Ed, collect their weapons at the door. Put guards outside Three. Nobody leaves until we decide what to do.”

Everything was still for a moment. I took the noose off my neck, letting it dangle from my hook. When they finally moved, I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Not you,” I said as Francine started to join the procession. “You’re coming with me.” I took the pistol off her belt, checked the safety and chamber, and tucked it into the large pocket in my coveralls.

I clambered up on the next table over to check on Moyers. There was no sign of life. His face was nearly pure gray I stretched out, reaching for the rope. A quick slice with my hook brought his corpse crashing down on the floor beside the table.

When all the interlopers from Three except Francine had left, I got down off the table. Mom was still kneeling on the floor beside Petty He wore a necklace of bruises and rope burns, but he seemed to be recovering.

“Let’s go,” I said. “You’ll be safer in Longhouse One.” “Alex,” Mom whispered, “thank you.”

Mayor Petty was perhaps my least-favorite person in Speranta. I would have been more eager to save anyone else. But I didn’t see any point to telling her that. “Sure,” I said, “you ready to go?”

“Our people are here,” Petty said, his voice so raspy it was unrecognizable. “And we need to take care of Sam.” “At least come get your neck checked out.”

Petty shook his head.

“I’ll stay here,” Mom said. “I need to be with my husband.”

I suppressed a scowl. Hearing Mom refer to Petty as her husband made my gut churn. “I’ll ask the doctor to stop by, and I’ll have Darla send someone around to fix your phone line. I’ll also post a team of guards outside, make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.”

Later that night I met with my team of advisers. We talked around the issue of what to do for hours. I desperately wished that the constitution committee had finished their work faster. We needed a process for dealing with problems like this, a judicial system of some kind.

In the end we decided to choose a jury randomly and dump the problem in their laps. I closed my eyes and flipped through Anna’s census book, pointing at names. Anyone from the massacre survivors or Warren was automatically disqualified—the massacre survivors might be biased toward Francine, and the Warrenites biased toward Petty—so we wound up with a jury of a dozen Stocktonites. I appointed Uncle Paul to serve as judge—he was one of the oldest people left alive in Speranta and more or less neutral.

The makeshift court convened the next morning. The trial was simple—Francine contested nothing, taking all the blame on herself. She argued that the lynch mob would never have formed except for her incitement and leadership. Her main worry seemed to be that we would exile all her compatriots. The arguments were finished before lunchtime.

The jury retired to a greenhouse to deliberate in private. Three hours later, they were back. The foreman handed a folded scrap of paper to Uncle Paul. He unfolded it and stared at it for a moment, his face grave. Then he read:

“On the count of first-degree murder, the jury finds Francine Lewis guilty. On the count of attempted first-degree murder, guilty.

“Are you ready to recommend a sentence?” Uncle Paul asked gravely.

“We are.” The foreman handed another folded scrap of paper to Uncle Paul.

He unfolded it and read: “Francine Lewis shall be hung by the neck until dead.”

No! She was a friend. Yes, what she had done was wrong, but who could blame her when faced with the man who had ordered the death of her fiance? Surely she deserved no worse than exile. Surely Uncle Paul would overrule the jury.

After a short pause, Uncle Paul said, “So ordered.” Speaking to Ed he added, “Take her into custody, please, Mr. Bauman. The sentence will be carried out at sunrise tomorrow.”

I stormed up to the table he was presiding from. “My office. Now.”

Uncle Paul followed me into the turbine tower.

When the hatch clanged shut behind us, I wheeled to face my uncle. “We are not going to kill Francine.”

“Yes, we are,” he said.

“She’s a—”

“Alex, she killed a man. Was planning to kill two.” “Who can blame her after what Petty and Moyers did?”

“A jury of her peers can and did blame her.” Uncle Paul leaned against the cold metal wall of the turbine tower.

“She deserves to be punished, no question. But killing her? No. She’s not the only culpable party. Mayor Petty deserves to be on trial too.”

“Maybe so. But that trial might not go the way you expect. I understand that he didn’t actually order a mas-sacre—he just told Sheriff Moyers to keep the refugees out of Warren. Somehow the shooting started. Maybe a finger slipped or one of the refugees had a gun. We’ll never know.”

I took a step toward him. “But the result—”

“And another thing: If we start prosecuting people for crimes they committed before they got to Speranta, we’ll all wind up in jail. Mayor Petty was following the rules of Warren. Should he be liable under the rules of Speranta?” He sort of had a point there. “But what gives us the right to take her life? Hasn’t there been enough killing?” “Alex, if you want to ban capital punishment, then argue to have that rule incorporated in our constitution. Hell, I might even join you. But the jury recommended the harshest punishment they could. And they’re right. If we lose control of this—if we allow the refugees and the Warrenites to go to war with each other, we’re going to lose a lot more people than just Sam and Francine.”

I willed my fists to unball. “What’s the saying? An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind?”

“You can change the rules after tomorrow morning. But if you try to change this ruling, the whole system becomes suspect. You’d be saying your judgment supersedes the jury’s and the judge’s. That’s a step down the road to dictatorship.”

“We can’t kill her,” I said, although I was starting to resign myself to the fact that we might have to. Uncle Paul was right: We needed to put a lid on the tensions between the refugees and the Warrenites, and if I overruled the sentence, it would undermine our fledgling justice system.

“I’ll do it,” Uncle Paul said gently. “I affirmed the recommended sentence. I should carry it out.”

I thought about the terrible burden of serving as a hangman and my history of taking all the worst jobs on myself. Part of the cohesiveness of Speranta, I was convinced, was due to the feeling that we were all in this together, that their leader was a part of the community, not above it. “No. If it has to be done, and you’ve convinced me it does, then I should be the one to do it.”

I rousted everyone before dawn the next morning and threw them out of the longhouse. We would damn well never have any more barbaric spectacles while I led Speranta. I allowed only Uncle Paul, Ed, Darla, and, of course, Francine to stay.

“Do you want a blindfold?” I asked Francine.

“No. I’ll go with my eyes open,” she replied quietly. “And Captain . . . I don’t blame you for this.”

I turned away, biting the inside of my cheek, struggling not to cry.

When I had myself mostly under control, I helped her up onto the table. It wobbled a little as I stepped up beside her. I fitted the dangling noose around her neck, cinching it snug. “Do you have any last words?”

“I’m not as scared as I thought I’d be,” Francine said. “I’m going to see my Brock.”

I didn’t have to push her. She stepped off the edge of the table on her own. The noose dug into her neck. Her mouth opened, as if to scream, but no sound came out. Her legs thrashed and her face turned bright red, then deep purple. A line of pale spittle ran from one corner of her mouth.

My knees shook, and I almost fell trying to climb down off the table. Darla caught me. When Francine was completely still, I fell to my knees beside her hanging body, hugging her ankles and sobbing.

Chapter 74

Nylce’s expedition was back right on schedule, five days after they had left. She found me at the worksite where I was building yet another greenhouse. It didn’t seem possible that she had left before the lynching debacle. “We need to talk,” she said.

As soon as we were out of earshot of the rest of the work crew, I filled her in on the lynching. Then she started her report. “Our expedition was attacked by a group of Peckerwoods and Reds on the way home today We lost one Bikezilla with a full load of supplies. Ranaan Kendall is dead. We have three injured, one seriously Dr. McCarthy is operating now. We killed one of the attackers—the rest got away.” That hit me hard. Ranaan had survived the war in Iraq, only to die now? “I didn’t know Ranaan well—he have any family here?”

“A sister, Marcella. I checked with Charlotte. Marcella’s got cleaning duty in Longhouse Four today.”

“We’d better go tell her before she hears about it through the grapevine.” I sighed. I would rather do absolutely anything else with the next couple of hours instead of telling Marcella her brother was dead. But she deserved to hear it from me.

On our way, I asked Nylce, “How do you know it was Peckerwoods and Reds?”

“The guy we killed had Peckerwoods tattoos. And I saw Red.”

Crap. I had started to believe that he was dead, vaporized by the manure bomb. But there was no way Nylce could be mistaken. How many 5’4” redheaded knife fiends could there be in northern Illinois? “I’m thinking about reorganizing our military. Putting Ed in charge, with you as his second-in-command. We need a police force too.”

“I don’t know anything about running an army!” “People follow you. And I trust you. I’m going to suggest that Ed have you focus on protecting our convoys and scavenging operations—all the stuff that goes on outside of Speranta. Then Ed can focus on settlement defense. I’ll take Ben off shortwave duty and make him our chief planning officer or whatever. He’ll work for both of you. Have him plan convoy protection and devise some kind of an ambush to capture or kill Red.” The image of Francine hanging from the rafter flashed through my mind. But it only made me more determined to catch Red. He needed to die.

Nylce nodded. “That’d work okay.”

“I want Red’s head mounted on a pole in front of Longhouse One.”

“Gross,” Nylce said. “Are you serious?”

“About posting his head?” I said. “No, it was just a figure of speech. About killing him? Yes, I’m deadly serious.”

Ben was thrilled with his new assignment—he said he’d be an S5. I had no idea what he meant, but I didn’t really care what Ben called himself so long as he figured out how to catch Red.

That night after dinner, I took Alyssa aside. “I’ve moved Ben off radio duty,” I told her. “He’s going to work for Ed and Nylce full time as a planning officer.”

“He’ll love that,” Alyssa said.

“Yeah. But I need someone to take over communications. And I thought you’d be—”

“Um, no.”

“But you’d be—”

“No.”

“I really need someone I can rely—”

“Absolutely freaking not. No way. Am I not being clear here?”

I grabbed the edge of the table we were sitting at, squeezing it hard. “You’re being perfectly clear, but—” “Alex, I want to help out any way I can, but if I take on this head of communications job—”

“Chief communications officer,” I said.

“Whatever. If I take it on, I won’t have any time to teach my classes.”

What was she talking about? “Your classes?”

“It was your idea, back on the old farm—”

“I knew you were teaching at the old farm, but I had no idea you’d kept it up after the move.”

“I didn’t at first. But about six months ago, I got Charlotte to assign me to a workgroup made up of all the youngest kids. We plant, harvest, weed—whatever needs doing—and I teach while we work. You really had no idea?” “Um, no.”

“You probably should get a clue about what’s going on in your town, Mayor."

I didn’t think the sarcasm was completely fair. I spent most of my time leading the crews building new greenhouses. “Who’s going to take over communications from Ben?”

“Not me,” Alyssa said. “Why don’t you ask your sister?” Rebecca. Why hadn’t I thought of her? She was smart, hardworking, and better with people than I was. But I always seemed to overlook her.

I left Alyssa and found my sister, who was happy to have an official role. I put her in charge of the shortwave and the phone system, and I asked her to recruit and train enough help to start monitoring the shortwave 24/7. We had more than enough manpower for it now.

We made regular trips to the Wallers’ base in Sterling to trade for food and supplies for our greenhouse building spree. That left plenty of opportunity to try to sucker Red—we tried trailing a Bikezilla behind the convoy, staging a fake breakdown, and even abandoning one and observing it from a nearby ridge. None of the plans worked. Either Red was no longer scouting our convoys, or he had an uncanny ability to detect traps.

The reconciliation commission reported back, recommending that five of our prisoners be exiled and the rest allowed to join Speranta if they wished. I was reluctant to let any of them go—wouldn’t they rejoin Red and help him raid us? But what would I do with them otherwise? I couldn’t order them killed out of hand, even though they were all believed to have committed murders at Red’s behest. Ultimately I accepted the commission’s recommendations, although I had sketches made of all five of them first and warned them that if they were caught with Red or tried to return to Speranta, they would be killed. Two of the other prisoners chose to leave, but the vast majority decided to join Speranta. Charlotte interviewed them all and assigned them jobs.

The constitution committee reported back more than two months later. We needed a more sophisticated system than a typical city government since we didn’t have a state or federal government over us, but a full-blown national government would be overkill. So the committee recommended that we elect a mayor, a judge, and a seven-member legislative and advisory council with a division of power similar to that in the U.S. Constitution. Each branch of government would be elected and serve for up to two six-year terms. The first term for our legislature would be two years, and the judge would serve four years, so that future terms would be staggered, with an election for one of our branches every two years.

I recruited a former state highway patrolman, Chad Brickman, to be our chief of police. He had emigrated to Speranta with the Stocktonites.

Every longhouse would have both a political and military leader. The military leaders were appointed by newly promoted General Ed Bauman. The political leaders would be elected for two-year terms. By that time, we had eight longhouses in total, so a meeting of our whole government would involve seventeen people. The serving military could have no role in politics, exactly as it had been in pre-Yellowstone America.

Our constitution also affirmed our allegiance to the United States, should it ever be reconstituted, and adopted the Bill of Rights in its entirety. Pretty much the only change we made was to lower the age of suffrage to sixteen, a nod to how young Speranta was overall. The average age of all our inhabitants, Charlotte told me, was only a little over twenty.

I tried to have a ban on capital punishment added to our constitution. Uncle Paul supported me on that, but we lost the argument. Roughly eighty percent of Speranta’s population was pro-death penalty, even many who said they had been against it in the old world. I realized that I wasn’t entirely consistent, either. I wouldn’t hesitate to kill Red—but he had started a war with us, which made his case different to my way of thinking.

At the one-year anniversary of my election to mayor, we held another election. The new constitution was approved by over eighty percent of our electorate. A few weeks later, I stood for reelection. This time I was unopposed.

Isaac “Zik” Goldman was elected judge. Uncle Paul, Dr. McCarthy, and Nylce Myers ran for the council, mostly because I threatened them with never-ending latrine duty if they didn’t. They all won. Jim Evans and Bob Petty were elected too. Despite everything, they had enough support from their constituencies among the Warrenites and ex-FEMA camp refugees to come in sixth and seventh in the council voting. The other two council members were Lawrence Mason and Margaret Feldman, both of whom were originally from Stockton. Darla had flatly refused to run for any kind of office. I retaliated by appointing her vice mayor, which meant she would have to run the show in Speranta any time I was gone. That made her exactly as mad as I thought it would; she wanted to tinker and farm, not dabble in politics. Well, what she wanted most was to start a family, but I was still holding out against that idea.

It didn’t help my case when Mom had her baby. Her labor was only three hours and remarkably easy, according to Belinda. Darla redoubled her efforts to convince me to start a family I promised her we would—I wanted the same thing—but I simply couldn’t get the idea out of my head that she might die in childbirth. We faced far more likely deaths every day—a flenser raid, a fall from an underconstruction longhouse roof, any number of diseases– heck, even an infected hangnail could kill in this postvolca-nic world. But I could do something about those potential deaths. The thought that I would watch, helpless, while Darla died of a hemorrhage in childbirth had wormed its way into my brain like a parasite. I couldn’t dislodge it, even after my mother’s pregnancy went so smoothly.

Mom named my new half sister Sorrow, which seemed like a horrible name to saddle a child with. I hoped she would go by her middle name, Alexia. The names seemed like a rather pointed message to me, so I carefully avoided the topic on the rare occasions when Mom and I spoke. I spent almost all my free time with Darla, and Mom was still avoiding her.

When I did see Mom, it was usually because I’d gone looking for Rebecca, Alyssa, Anna, Charlotte, or Wyn. They were so taken with Alexia that they spent nearly all their free time helping Mom in Longhouse Five. When Darla was with me, I would sometimes catch her gazing longingly while Rebecca did some task that seemed utterly repulsive to me, like changing the rags that served as Alexia’s diapers. But whenever Darla had offered to help, Mom would claim she had to go elsewhere, so Darla eventually quit offering.

We started gradually mixing the former FEMA camp refugees, Warrenites, and Stocktonites. One of the former Warrenites needled an ex-Stockton guard so persistently that the Warrenite took a swing at him, starting a fistfight that resulted in two broken fingers, a broken jaw, and a blackened eye. Remembering Francine’s lynching, I was thankful nothing worse had happened. I was also thankful I could dump the whole mess in Zik’s lap—he was our judge, after all.

Zik convened a jury to hear the men out. The jury found them both guilty, and Zik sentenced them to spend two weeks with their hands tied together. He said they’d either get over their animosity, or they would kill each other. Zik also gave them manure duty for the whole two weeks. The hearing took less than an hour. Best of all, they were mad at Zik, not me. I started to truly appreciate the genius of divided government.

More people straggled in, generally starving and filthy. We welcomed them all, and our population grew past twelve hundred. I kept our greenhouse building program going flat-out, and our food production continued to grow even faster than our population. I ordered a cutback on kale planting, shifting to more beans and wheat, which stored better than kale. We squirreled away tons and tons of food—I wouldn’t relax until we had more than a year’s worth stored.

I sent an expedition to raid an old highway depot, hauling off tons of rock salt to use as seasoning and for preserving meat from our rapidly expanding herd of hogs, bred from the pigs Eli had brought us. We could freeze the meat, of course, but we couldn’t make bacon, ham, or even prosciutto without salt.

I woke one night to hear a whispered conversation taking place a few bedrolls over from mine. Someone had left a nightlight plugged in, and it cast just enough light that I could make out faces. Alyssa was sitting up in bed, one hand holding Anna’s wrist. Something glinted from Anna’s hand—a piece of gold jewelry, perhaps.

“You should have told me sooner,” Alyssa whispered. “I . . . I just couldn’t,” Anna said. She sounded utterly crushed.

“I like you. I like you a lot. Just not that way.”

“I know . . . It was silly of me to keep hoping. I knew you liked boys.” Anna’s sigh was louder than her words.

“I do. Although I’m not sure why. They’re all liars.” “Huh?”

“Max told me he’d been giving me gifts.”

Anna’s arms tensed so much, I could see her muscles swell even in the dim light.

“I swear to God I’ll strangle him in his sleep.”

“No. Please don’t. I’ll deal with him.”

Anna was silent for a moment. “That might be worse for him than strangulation anyway.”

“Yeah . . . I love you, Anna. Like a sister. Okay?”

Anna nodded. I could see tears shining on her cheeks in the dim illumination of the nightlight. “Like sisters.” They hugged, and Anna pressed whatever was in her hand into Alyssa’s hands. Then Anna stood and silently stalked back across the roomful of sleeping people.

I lay awake most of the night, thinking about what I’d overheard. I was worried about Anna—crushing on someone for two years and getting rejected, however gently, was painful. But I wasn’t sure what to do.