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.