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.
Chapter 32
When we finished the structure of the longhouse, we piled snow around and atop it. We also covered the walls of both greenhouses with snow. From downslope the homestead looked like three unusual hillocks of snow butted up against the wind turbine. Once you got closer, the glass roofs of the greenhouses made it obvious that the snow mounds weren’t natural, but there was nothing we could do about that.
When the longhouse was finished, we crushed the igloo and moved into our new digs. That night, we held a celebration. Darla had hooked up an electric range we had taken from one of the farmhouses, and she installed overhead lighting in the longhouse. If the wind was blowing, we could cook without building a fire. It seemed like the acme of luxury after almost two years squatting beside a campfire to cook anything. Darla had asked me to find some electric or hybrid cars—she and Uncle Paul thought they could convert their batteries to allow us to store electricity when the wind wasn’t blow-ing—but I hadn’t gotten around to looking for them yet.
I cooked kale greens in soybean oil. Darla made tortillas from the first wheat harvested from our greenhouse, and Anna made corn pone. There was a time when I would have turned my nose up at a meal like that, refused to eat it. But after surviving on pine bark and dog food, that meal was fabulous—a true feast.
Our next project was the sniper nest near the top of the windmill tower adjacent to the longhouse. I flatly refused to get involved. Just looking up into that tower made my knees shake. Darla planned to build a platform inside the tower near the top, cutting slits in the metal walls so the person on guard duty could look or shoot through. It would have a commanding view of the surrounding countryside since we were on a fairly high ridge to start with.
As we worked on improving the homestead, we all waited for the inevitable attack on Warren, waited for Rebecca to come up the hill toward us, maybe with a flood of refugees trailing in her wake. But no attack came. Darla finished the sniper’s perch, and we started to do sentry duty up there. I hated being on sentry duty. Not the cold; that wasn’t anything new. Or the boredom; I was used to that. It was the climb to and from the sniper’s nest. Two hundred and eighty-four ladder rungs. Once I was up, it wasn’t so bad. The platform Darla built filled the turbine tower—you had to enter through a hatch in the floor. There was no way to fall out—the slits in the tower wall were barely big enough for binoculars or the barrel of a rifle.
There were two panic buttons mounted on the floor: one that would ring an alarm only in the longhouse and another that would sound a Klaxon audible from miles away. They only worked when the wind was blowing, of course. Any other time, we’d use our old system of rifle shots to sound the warning.
As soon as the sniper’s nest was finished, Darla and Uncle Paul built an electric grinder for our wheat. Then they started working on building a battery backup for our electrical power. They found a Chevy Volt with a good battery and hauled the battery—all 435 pounds of it—to the homestead. They started testing it out in the snow about a hundred yards downslope from the greenhouses. Uncle Paul said the battery could explode from overcharging, which sounded crazy to me, but he was the electrical engineer.
The rest of us started building a third greenhouse. Usually only two or three of us were available to work on it—we still had to cook, clean, wash clothes, dig corn and soybeans, and one person always had to be on guard duty in the sniper’s nest. At the rate we progressed on the third greenhouse, I was afraid it would take six months or more to finish. Nonetheless, it was important to build another. We were eating okay, but we weren’t building up a stockpile of food. I wanted to squirrel away a few thousand pounds of flour and dried kale leaves in case something went wrong.
My eighteenth birthday came and went. I remembered it for once, but it was a day like any other—we worked on building the third greenhouse during the day and held a subdued celebration at dinnertime.
Uncle Paul and Darla did indeed blow up the battery from the Volt and then the high voltage battery pack from a Prius, but on the third try—with a battery pack from another Prius—they figured out how to add a circuit to prevent the batteries from overcharging. We had lights that we could turn on anytime we wanted! When Uncle Paul and Darla demonstrated the system, I raised my water cup in a toast, “Here’s to reentering the 1890s!” Alyssa laughed. Darla glared at me.
I sidled over to Darla. “Sorry,” I said in a low voice, “it’s great. Brilliant. I honestly never believed I’d see a working light switch again.”