They visited Gratiot, Apple River, Lena, and Winslow. They were all empty, burned, and dead quiet. Every scrap of edible food had long since been looted and eaten. Almost everything flammable was gone: furniture had been broken for firewood, books torn up as kindling. If there were any Yellow Pages around in the first place, they were long gone.
One morning Max and Ed had just returned from an overnight trek to Cadiz and Browntown and were reporting on the towns’ conditions—depressingly similar to the other towns they had explored—when Max stopped talking midsentence.
“You hear that?” Max said after a brief pause.
“What?” Ed said, but I had heard it too. We rushed to the door of the longhouse. Outside, the noise was clearer: the distant, echoing pop of gunfire. Were we under attack? And by whom?
Chapter 42
Our lookout was supposed to hit the panic button in the sniper nest if anyone unknown approached. Why hadn’t anyone heard the alarm? Who was on duty in the sniper’s nest? Charlotte, I thought—Zik’s daughter. She was new, but she’d been completely reliable up until now. I scanned the horizon but couldn’t see the source of the gunfire. “Get up top, Ed. Find out why Charlotte hasn’t pushed the alarm. Stay up there. Have her spot while you shoot, if necessary.”
“Sir!” Ed said and took off at a run.
I turned to Max. “Find everyone. Get them into the longhouse, fast.”
“Got it.”
I ran toward the greenhouse we had under construction, looking for Darla. As soon as I rounded the corner of the longhouse, I saw her, already on her way to me. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Want to go find out?”
“Not really. But I guess we’d better.”
It took about five minutes to gather everyone in the longhouse. Darla and I used the time to change from our work coveralls into the ghillie suits. Then we strapped makeshift snowshoes to our boots. We had found plenty of bicycles during our scavenging, but no snowmobiles, so she still hadn’t been able to replace Bikezilla. These snow-shoes were a poor substitute.
“Stay inside the longhouse,” I told the group once they were all assembled. “Ed and Charlotte are up top. Darla and I are going to try to find out what’s going on. We’ll be back as soon as we can, but before dark, no matter what. Uncle Paul’s in charge.”
“Okay,” Uncle Paul said. He started to add something, but a coughing fit interrupted him. The cough seemed to be getting worse.
I threw on the backpack with my emergency supplies, held the door for Darla, and followed her outside. We set off, heading toward the sound of the gunfire. It seemed to be coming roughly from Warren. We moved slowly, constantly scanning the horizon ahead of us, stopping and listening. The shots tapered off and, after about ten more minutes, ceased completely.
When we got close enough to see the outskirts of Warren, we stopped. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. “It sounded like the shots were coming from here,” Darla said.
“Maybe they were. Or maybe they were coming from the other side of town.”
“If there was a battle in town, people might still have their fingers on their triggers.”
“Let’s go around.”
We skirted Warren, keeping the outermost buildings barely in view. At the far side of Warren, as we came up behind Elmwood Cemetery, we started to hear low moans and the occasional scream. There were no more gunshots, though. We crept closer, using gravestones and tree stumps for cover. The moans were coming from the road—we couldn’t see who was making the noises because of the high snow berms flanking the roadbed. We inched closer, slinking up the side of the snow berm, cautiously raising our heads just high enough to see over.
The road had been transformed into an abattoir. Hundreds of people lay along it as far as I could see in either direction. Many of them were dead. Blood ran at the edges of the road like rainwater, flowing toward Warren in an accusatory river.
Red. It had to be Red.
Chapter 43
Darla looked away, releasing a sigh that sounded like she was in physical pain.
I looked closer. There were knots of people who appeared to be uninjured, moving among the wounded and trying to help. All of them were dressed in ragged clothing, so filthy it was a nearly uniform shade of gray. Both the injured and the ambulatory were gaunt and starved. They could have been extras in a Holocaust movie.
At the end of the road nearest Warren, two figures worked frantically over a prone form: Dr. McCarthy and Belinda, I thought. Beyond them, I could see a line of men stretched across the road, guns held upright against their shoulders. No one else appeared to be armed. I rethought my first assumption—there was no sign of Red or any of his disciplined, black-clad troops.
“Come on.” I tugged on Darla’s sleeve and ducked back behind the snow berm as we worked our way toward Dr. McCarthy. Strange, I thought, that there would be another battle in almost exactly the same location where we were ambushed by the Reds holding Warren eighteen months before. The same place where my Aunt Caroline and Mayor Petty had been shot. Wind and snow had resculpted the surface of the cemetery, hiding all evidence of the earlier fight. From this side of the embankment, the cemetery seemed almost peaceful, its gravestones mostly buried, their tops dusted with snow. But I couldn’t undo the carnage on the road alongside us; the moans of the dying prevented a moment’s solace.
We reached the edge of the cemetery and climbed back to the top of the snow berm. Dr. McCarthy was below us and a little bit to the left. His hands flew over a young man’s body, trying to affix a makeshift tourniquet to his arm. The guy’s wrist had been completely smashed by a high-caliber bullet—the hand appeared to be attached by nothing more than ripped skin and gristle.
Farther to our left, there was a gap of about a hundred yards, followed by the line of men carrying rifles that I’d seen earlier, maybe thirty or forty of them in all. I recognized all of them—they were residents of Warren. Some of them shifted from foot to foot; a couple of them sat in the road or leaned against the snowbank; and others, including Sheriff Moyers, seemed to be a little green around the edges as if they were fighting the urge to vomit.
I wondered where my mom was. None of the victims looked familiar, and none of the armed Warrenites were women, so I hoped that meant she was safe inside the village.
“This wasn’t a fight,” Darla whispered, “it was a massacre.”
“Dr. McCarthy needs help,” I said.
“Alex, wait.” Darla grabbed my arm. “Go slowly. You remember that you’re not the most popular guy in Warren, right?”
“Yeah.” I needed to get down to the road fast. To do something. To help. People were dying down there. But Darla had a point.
I raised my head a little higher, ready to quickly duck back below the lip of the snow berm if any of the men went for their rifles. “Sam!” I yelled. “Sheriff Moyers!”
He turned toward me, holding his rifle low. I raised my hand and hook to about the level of my shoulders and called out again. “You going to shoot me if I help Doc McCarthy?”
Sam shrugged and yelled back, “Suit yourself.”
That wasn’t really an answer, but I guessed it would have to do. I clambered over the berm and slid down to the road. Some of the riflemen eyed me uneasily, but none of them leveled their guns. “Strange outfit you’re wearing,” Sam said, “and what’s up with the hook?” I ignored him.
The person closest to me was bleeding from wounds in his thigh and side. I needed bandages. I looked toward Belinda—she was cutting a strip from her patient’s own T-shirt. Right, we had no bandages.