“I will,” Dr. McCarthy replied as I left.
By the next morning, our population had fallen to 110. Seven people had died during the night. We had bandaged their wounds, carried them more than five miles to the homestead, and they had died anyway. I wanted nothing more than to get back into bed and sleep until the horror of it all passed.
I wasn’t the only one. Everywhere there were people sitting and staring into space. A woman wept quietly in a corner of the longhouse, her face turned toward the walls. A boy folded and refolded the blanket he had slept on. Every time he finished, he would look at the square of fabric, shake it out, and start again. I had to get them moving, get them doing something, anything but ruminating on the massacre.
I called all the original settlers together—ten of them, not counting me or Anna, who was in the sniper’s nest on watch. I assigned each of them a job and five or six newcomers to help. Four groups to scavenge lumber from nearby farmhouses. One group to assist Dr. McCarthy when he returned from Warren. A group to dig latrine pits, even though we didn’t need a new latrine pit yet. And so on.
“Alex,” Darla whispered to me. “You just assigned twenty-five people to scavenging lumber. We don’t have anything like twenty-five hammers, or pry bars, or anything.”
“We’ve got to get them doing something,” I whispered back. “They’re cracking up.” Then I raised my voice to address the whole group. “We don’t have enough tools for everyone. So your first job may be to make, find, or improvise what you need. A rock can serve as a hammer in a pinch, a pipe as a pry bar. The sooner we get these tasks done, the sooner we’ll be safe—with enough longhouses and greenhouses to sustain everyone.”
I expected to have arguments from some of the newcomers, but they went along, zombie-like, with everything I asked them to do. I stayed behind in the longhouse, trying to work out how we would get supplies to build the greenhouses we needed.
When Dr. McCarthy and Belinda got back with the Studebaker a couple of hours later, I had a pleasant sur-prise—Nylce Myers, the tiny woman who’d done such a capable job leading a squad during my attack on Stockton, had come with them. My mom and sister, however, had not.
After dinner that night, I addressed everyone in the longhouse. It was crowded in there, mostly because over half the floor space was taken up by Dr. McCarthy’s makeshift hospital. I wondered how many people could comfortably live in one longhouse this size. Maybe I’d ask Anna to figure it out.
I started with some of the bad news, figuring it was best to get that over with, like pulling off a bandage really fast. “We don’t have enough greenhouses to feed everyone.” A murmur of alarm raced through the room. “Now, we’ll be okay for a couple of months if we ration food carefully, but we’ve got to get more greenhouses producing wheat and kale as fast as we can.
“There is good news here. We’ve built four greenhouses already. We know how to do it. We’ve got sixty-seven wind turbines available for power. There’s no reason why, with all your help, we can’t construct a farm here that will sustain us through this winter, no matter how long it lasts.
“But there’s more bad news too. We don’t have enough wire, pipe, plastic, glass, heating elements, or caulk to finish the fifth greenhouse, let alone build more. We were getting supplies from Stockton, but that source is closed to us now.” I glanced self-consciously at my hook but left the explanation at that. If they wanted to know more, any of the original settlers could fill them in.
“I propose to mount an expedition toward Chicago. All the way to Chicago, if need be. It will be a difficult trip— 150 miles through unexplored territory. I want to take a group large enough that isolated gangs of flensers won’t dare mess with us, but small enough that we can flee if our scouts warn us of serious opposition. Maybe about thirty able-bodied people. We’ll go on snowshoes and skis and try to scavenge bicycles, snowmobiles, or trucks along the way. If all goes well, we’ll bring back the supplies we need to build more greenhouses.
“We’ve also heard rumors that the government in D.C. has collapsed. By heading east, I hope we’ll be able to find out whether the rumors are true or not—whether any remnant of the old United States is left.
“The whole expedition will last about five weeks—a week to travel there, three weeks onsite scavenging, and a week for the return journey. I’m looking for volunteers—”
“I’ll go!” Max yelled.
“Particularly among our new residents. I’ll need most of the original settlers,” I fixed Max under my stare, “to stay here and get as much of the greenhouses done as possible before we return with the wiring. Please see
Charlotte—” I pointed her out, “right after this meeting to let her know if you’re willing to volunteer for the trip.”
There was a sudden murmur of conversation, and I waited a moment for it to die down.
“One more thing. We’ve always called this place the new farm or the homestead. But it’s not really just a homestead anymore. With a hundred people living here, it’s more of a village. And a village needs a name. Any suggestions?”
“You should call it Maxville!” Max yelled. A few people chuckled. I glared at him. What was with him tonight? Had he found a stash of alcohol or happy pills?
“I’ve got a suggestion,” Ed said, which surprised me. Ed rarely said anything, particularly not when a group of people was listening.
“Go on,” I said.
“It’s a word my Romanian grandmother taught me: Speranta. It means hope.”
Speranta. I rolled the word around my head and lips a couple of times. I liked it. We spent about fifteen minutes taking other suggestions, but in the end, Speranta won by acclamation, and I called an end to the meeting.
Later that night, I lay on my bedroll thinking. We’d become a village named Speranta, for hope. Could I deliver on the promise of that name?
Chapter 45
We left for Chicago two days later. Almost everyone who was healthy enough to walk volunteered, though oddly, not Reverend Evans. I chose twenty-seven of them plus Darla, Ed, and me. Max desperately wanted to go, but I dodged that issue by telling him he had to have his father’s permission. All the arguments Max could muster met the stone wall of Uncle Paul’s refusal. I could hardly blame him—he had seen how Darla and I had returned from our last trek away from the relative safety of the homestead.
At the village meeting to see us off after breakfast, I announced that Uncle Paul would be in charge of Speranta while I was gone. I sprang it on him in public so he couldn’t refuse. He knew exactly what was happening too, shooting me a look so dirty I felt a sudden need for a shower. Dr. McCarthy would have been an equally good choice for interim leader, but he had his hands full with the injured. Our population had fallen to 105, and I fully expected it to fall further while we were gone.
We moved cross-country on improvised skis and snow-shoes. They were the only reason it had taken us two days to leave—it took that long to make crude snowshoes for everyone. I put four pairs of scouts out on skis—one pair to our front, one to each flank, and one covering our back trail. I told them to range three or four miles out and rejoin us if they had anything to report, or at the end of the day I desperately wished for some handheld radios and added them to the list of things we hoped to scavenge in Chicago.
It seemed as though the sky were brighter than it had been. It was a hard thing to judge since it changed so little each day, but as we walked, I noticed that I could always tell where the sun was in the sky, despite the fact that I could never see it. The clouds of ash and sulfur dioxide that hid the sky were thinning.