“You don’t have to be a suck up,” Darla said.
“That’s not true.”
“Why do you say that?”
I leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “Because you’re the only person in the world who wants to have sex with me?”
“That’s not true either.” Darla shot a murderous glare at Alyssa.
I intentionally misunderstood. “What? We’ve known each other two years, and you’re already bored with this?” I swept both hands down my scrawny, half-starved body and had to stifle a laugh.
Darla just rolled her eyes.
“I mean, I was going to let myself go after we got married, but now I guess I can quit working out any—” Darla stifled my speech with a long, intense kiss. Everyone else in the room was doing their best to ignore us. Living in a one-room longhouse takes some getting used to. “Wow,” I said, coming up for air, “that was—”
“Be serious for a moment, okay?”
I nodded, letting the grin fade from my face.
“Your uncle and I want to work on lights for the greenhouses next instead of helping to build the third greenhouse.”
“Won’t the light be visible for miles?”
“We’ll shield all the light fixtures and only leave them on during the day. Might boost production a lot.”
I nodded. It made sense—none of the greenhouses, even the ones at the old farm, had produced as well as they could. There just wasn’t enough light in the dim, yellowish sky. “We’ve got plenty of light fixtures and bulbs—we can scavenge more from any of the farmhouses around here.”
“Good. But we also need more flexible tubing and another pump. To heat the edges of the greenhouse.”
“And so you want to make another trip to the warehouse.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“We’ll be fine.”
I was uneasy, but she had a point. We’d raided the warehouse four times with no trouble at all. “Okay. We’ll go next week. I need some caulk and nails too.”
“Thanks,” Darla said.
“But as soon as we finish these two projects, we’re going to spend some time exploring other towns. And find a source of supplies that isn’t in a town controlled by a knife-wielding psychopath.”
Chapter 33
We’d climbed Stockton’s wall often enough that we were getting good at it. Darla flowed up the outside of the wall like a black silk scarf caught by a fast breeze, dropping lightly to the ground on the other side. I followed—a little bit less efficiently and a lot less gracefully, but fast and silent all the same.
Nobody was around except the infrequent guard patrols, but that was no surprise. It was nighttime and so cold that nobody in their right mind would be outdoors. What was surprising was that there were no guards in front of the warehouse. The two empty semitrailers were still there, looming rectangles in the darkness, and the big overhead and pedestrian doors to the warehouse were both locked.
“What does it mean?” I whispered.
“They were mostly guarding the food in the trucks,” Darla whispered back. “No need to waste manpower now that it’s gone.”
We slipped around to the back of the warehouse. Everything looked the same back there. I moved the piece of brush away from the seam we had opened in the wall, wiped the snow away from it, and held the panel for Darla. “Ladies first,” I whispered.
She snorted softly and lay down, sliding sideways into the dark interior of the warehouse. Then she held the seam open from the inside so I could follow her.
We lit a candle and gathered our supplies in silence, stuffing our backpacks with caulk, nails, and electrical supplies, and then settling rolls of flexible tubing over our shoulders. My gaze landed on the leather belts hanging from a hook set in a pegboard wall. I remembered the hard knots of boiled leather, chewy and slightly slimy, sliding down my throat toward my sunken stomach. I shuddered and turned away.
Darla made a point of holding the metal flap out of the way for me when it was time to leave. “Ladies first,” she whispered.
I scowled at her, although I realized she couldn’t see me—we had already blown out the candle. I lay sideways on the floor, thrust my pack and the roll of tubing through, and then wriggled my way into the gap.
On the far side, someone seized my arms and yanked me roughly to my feet.
Chapter 34
At least three guys surrounded me—one holding each arm, and one I could sense as a dark shape looming in front of me.
Darla. I had to warn Darla without tipping off these guys that anyone was with me.
I slammed my heel into the wall, knocking the metal panels together with a clang. “Let go of me!” I screamed. I couldn’t move my arms, so I lifted my foot again and brought it down full force on the instep of the guy to my right. There was a crunch of breaking bones, and he howled in pain.
I heard the scrape of metal on metal as someone unshielded a lantern, blinding me momentarily. The guys holding my arms picked me up, lifting me off my feet, and slammed me facedown into the snow. On my way down, I saw that there were more than a dozen men out there. Behind them, watching everything and fingering a knife, stood Red.
The guys holding me had my wrists twisted and one hand on the back of each of my elbows. All they had to do was pull up on my wrists, push down on my elbows, and snap—my arms would break. I tried to fight anyway, lashing out with my legs. Someone fell on them, holding them down. Another guy approached with a rope. In less than two minutes, my arms and legs were trussed; there was nothing I could do but lay there like some useless, abandoned parcel.
“The other one is still inside,” Red said. “Break into squads. One through the front, one through the back. Tie him, and bring him out here.”
The men split up and disappeared from my field of vision. Nothing happened for a long while. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Red took out a leather strap and stropped his knives. The two-foot gladius at his right hip. Then the hunting knife at his left hip, its spine rippled with wicked serrations. Two small throwing knives, one from his right boot and then one from his left. The snow burned my left cheek and forehead. I heard shouting, Darla’s high voice mixed with the grunts and heavy breathing of men exerting themselves. Red impassively pulled a dagger from a sheath somehow attached to the back of his collar and started stropping both sides of its wicked-looking blade. Just as Red was reaching into his jacket—presumably for yet another knife—the men came around the corner, carrying a wriggling and struggling Darla, bound even more thoroughly than I was. They dropped her into the snow beside me.
“You okay?” I whispered.
“I’m trussed like a calf at a rodeo, lying in snow so cold it’d freeze the tits off a snowshoe hare. What do you think?”
“Shut up,” one of the men near her said, kicking her leg.
I struggled with the ropes that bound me, which only made them bite deeper into my arms. I tried to shift my legs over Darla’s to protect her in some meager way. I couldn’t even do that.
“Load them on the sled,” Red ordered. “Keep them in the barracks under guard tonight. I’ll deal with the problem tomorrow.”
We were tossed roughly onto a sled that resembled an oversized toboggan. I landed across Darla in an X pattern.
“Christ and Santa Claus,” she whispered. “You gain weight?”
“Not really How’s your leg?” Four guys took up ropes tied to the front of the sled and pulled. It lurched into motion with a jerk that rocked me back against Darla’s thighs.
“Ow! It was fine until now.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Might bruise. Hope we’re alive long enough to find out.”