Rockford was also home to four or five electrical and plumbing supply distributors. Darla yelped in delight when she saw some place called Grainger Industrial Supply listed. I had no idea what it was, but anything that made Darla as happy as Grainger had to be heaven on earth for budding engineers.
Then we turned our attention to food. Even if our trip was completely successful, we wouldn’t get the new greenhouses all built and producing for months. We needed to bring back some kind of food to bridge the gap until then. Grocery stores and restaurants had been emptied out within days of the eruption. To find supplies in the quantities we needed, we’d have to be creative, think of things the ordinary looter wouldn’t.
I thought about Rebecca finding pet food in otherwise thoroughly picked-over houses. Unfortunately there didn’t appear to be a distributor or manufacturer of pet food anywhere in Rockford. I added a PetSmart and a PETCO to our list of locations to visit, though.
Next I looked up food distributors. Rockford had something called GFS Foodservice, but no grocery wholesalers I could find.
There was no Yellow Pages section for food manufacturing. On a whim, I looked up Pepsi in the White Pages. There was a bottling plant nearby in Loves Park. Maybe they’d have bulk supplies of sugar or something? Heck, I’d even drink high-fructose corn syrup straight if it’d keep us alive for a couple of months.
That got us started on a game—naming food brands and looking them up in the White Pages. It worked too— it turned out that, along with the Pepsi bottler, the Rockford area boasted a Kraft Foods factory. I lost myself for a moment in a pleasant daydream about ripping into a pallet of macaroni and cheese.
“One of these places is going to have food left,” I told Darla confidently. “We’re going to find everything we need right here. We won’t have to go to Chicago.” I wasn’t looking forward to visiting Chicago. After seeing the mess in small towns across Illinois, the thought of what almost ten million starving people might have done terrified me.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “There must have been lots of people working at all those plants. Wouldn’t they already have snagged the food?”
My sudden burst of hope died in my chest. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. But maybe we’ll get lucky anyway.”
In the morning our first order of business was visiting the snowmobile dealers. We were going to need some way to transport all the other supplies we hoped to find. A truck might have seemed the obvious choice, but that would come with its own problems. Gas, despite our luck in finding a half-tank’s worth in Freeport, was nearly impossible to come by. And a lot of the remaining gasoline was stale—okay for starting fires, but no good for running an engine. Darla said it had something to do with evaporation and oxidization within the gasoline. Even if we could find gas, we’d run out soon enough and have no way to get more. Pedal power was an inexhaustible resource.
My heart sank when we reached our first stop, Loves Park Motorsports. The windows were smashed and the showroom empty. Not a single motorcycle or snowmobile remained. Darla checked the repair bays in back and reported another strikeout. Whoever had taken the snowmobiles had loaded up on spare parts too.
I poked around the sales counter at the front of the store. Advertising circulars were spread around the Formica counter and had cascaded onto the floor nearby. I picked one up; the back was a huge ad for their annual September “Preseason Truckload Snowmobile Sale.”
“Why couldn’t the volcano have erupted in September after the snowmobiles arrived?” I asked, showing the circular to Darla.
She shrugged and started to leave the showroom. Then she stopped, turned back to me, and snatched the circular out of my hand. “So if you’re getting ready for a huge truckload sale, do you wait until the last minute to get your stock in?”
“How should I know?”
“Well, let’s say you don’t wait ’til the last minute. Where do you keep all those snowmobiles?”
“It’s a truckload sale…”
We rushed around to the back of the store. There were three semitrailers parked in the back lot. All three were padlocked, which I took as a great sign. What’s the point to putting a padlock on an empty truck?
Darla took the ratchet from the toolkit in my backpack and beat on the padlock for a while. She didn’t even dent it. Ed had disappeared into the shop. He came back with a long tube—something you would use to build a motorcycle frame, maybe—and a coil of wire. Darla understood immediately. She wrapped the wire through the hasp of the padlock and around the tube a few dozen times. Then all three of us could pull on the tube, creating massive leverage.
The padlock didn’t break, but the hasp it was connected to pulled free of the door. Darla and Ed pulled the door open. Inside, the trailer was packed with neatly palletized and shrink-wrapped, brand-spanking-new snowmobiles.
Chapter 50
I left half our force with Darla—four to stand guard and ten to help her construct her fleet of Bikezillas— and took the rest to visit the bicycle and ski shops we had found listed in the Rockford Yellow Pages. We struck out at the first three places we visited—they had been cleaned out completely. Finally we found what we needed at the Rockford Bicycle Company. The dirt bikes had all been taken, probably because their big, knobby tires would work okay in the snow and ice. But there were still dozens of high-end racing bikes and ten-speeds with frames, forks, and gears that would work fine as the core of new Bikezillas.
We cleaned out the bike shop completely, making dozens of trips to haul all the bikes back to our base at Loves Park Motorsports. We cleaned out the repair shop in the back too, taking all the spare parts and tools that were left. By the time we finished, it was dark. I set up the night sentries, and we bedded down right there in the empty showroom.
The next morning Darla handed me a huge list of supplies she wanted. The first thing on the list was skis— if we could get those, she could finish a couple of Bikezillas, which would make it much easier to haul supplies around.
As we headed to North Park Rental, the first place on our list, I wondered why we hadn’t seen any people. Where were they? Huge swathes of Rockford had burned, but there were sections that looked intact, almost normal except for the deep snow and the eerie, unnatural silence. There had to have been a hundred thousand people or more in Rockford and millions more in nearby Chicago. They couldn’t all have died.
And where was the government? Two years ago, Illinois had been part of the Yellow Zone, and FEMA and its subcontractors had been out in force here, keeping people from the Red Zone west of the Mississippi from flooding east. Now, nothing.
Someone had been here. Nearly every place we visited had been picked over—looted, I guessed, although did it really count as looting now that whoever owned all these shops was gone and probably dead?
The cross-country ski section at North Park Rentals looked like a bomb had gone off in it—bits of plastic packaging and cardboard were strewn everywhere.
The other sections hadn’t been cleared out nearly as thoroughly; nobody had bothered with the snowboards or downhill skis. We hauled them back to the snowmobile shop by the armload.
We spent the afternoon hunting for other stuff on Darla’s list: bolts, wire, welding rods, and lumber to build the bikes’ load beds. We found a lot of the stuff at the Grainger Industrial Supply. Other materials came from a nearby Home Depot that had collapsed under the weight of the snow—which was actually fortunate. It was a ton of work to unbury anything, but the store hadn’t been looted nearly as thoroughly as those that were still standing.
We even unearthed a huge bin of seeds they’d had on clearance: carrots, beets, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and more. In our early days of greenhouse farming, it was tough to get anything but kale to grow. Now that we had greenhouses that were both heated and lit, we could probably grow almost anything. Darla said that not all the seeds would germinate—some would have spoiled after two and a half years buried in the wreckage, but that was okay. Many were heirloom varieties, not hybrids. According to Darla, the heirloom plants were much more likely to produce viable seeds. That meant that even if only a few sprouted, we would have an inexhaustible source of more seeds.