Darla’s group worked late into the night by lamplight, and by morning they had the first of what she called a truck model ready. “I’m calling it a BZ-250,” she said with a proud smile. “We’re building a four-person drive model next, with an even bigger load bed. That’ll be the BZ-450.” The 250 was two bicycles side by side with their pedals and frames connected by steel rods. A large load bed covered the snowmobile track at the rear, and the front forks of both bikes ended in snowboards instead of wheels. It was ridiculously difficult to turn—you couldn’t really lean into the turns much to help the snowboards bite into the snow, but it did okay going straight, and it could haul a ton of stuff. Maybe two tons.
Since we now had a good way to haul bulk supplies, I took my team in search of food. I wanted to check out the GFS warehouse we had found listed in the Yellow Pages. We found it—but it turned out to be a retail outlet store, not a true warehouse. It had been cleaned out completely.
Next we trekked to the Kraft Foods plant. It turned out to be a place where they made chewing gum, of all the useless things. Why, oh why, couldn’t it have been a macaroni-and-cheese plant? I could probably live for years on a diet of macaroni and cheese, and kale.
The Pepsi bottler had been looted. There was plenty of diet soda left, but nothing else. The soda was useless, of course. We had all been on the world’s most horrible diet in the two and a half years since the volcano erupted. If there was any high-fructose corn syrup left in the big stainless steel tanks at the bottling plant, I couldn’t figure out how to get at it.
The PetSmart and PETCO were cleaned out too. Even the rawhide dog toys were gone—boiled down as desperation food, I figured. I thought about how hungry people must have been to eat dog toys. I could relate; I still remembered the hard knots of boiled leather belts sliding down my throat when I had been so close to starvation during our first months on the homestead.
The next day we checked retail grocery stores, even though I knew it would probably be hopeless. At the fifth one—a half-collapsed WalMart—I finally found something interesting. There was no food, of course; even the pallets in the back room had been cleared out. But amid the torn and discarded shrink-wrap, I found routing tags. All the grocery pallets had come from the same place, a distribution center in someplace called Sterling, Illinois. How much stuff would be stored in a WalMart distribution center? And how far was it from Rockford? I quizzed the guys with me until I found someone who knew— Sterling was a tiny town about an hour’s drive south of Warren.
When we rejoined Darla’s group that night, I talked to the rest of the team. Trig had worked in a WalMart. He had never been in one of their distribution centers, but he said they were huge—over a million square feet—and would have everything stocked in a WalMart supercenter, from food to camping supplies to pharmaceuticals to firearms and ammo. It was obvious where we had to go next.
Chapter 51
We spent another two weeks in Rockford. Darla and her team switched to building four-person bikes with even bigger load beds—they built seven to go with the first two-person bike so all thirty of us could ride back to Speranta. In the meantime my team continued scavenging to fill the huge list of supplies we needed for the new greenhouses and longhouses.
Darla came with us to Grainger Industrial Supply on the last day to help select and load supplies. When Darla asked for the grand tour of Grainger, I begged off. I had seen the whole place already
“Where’re you going?” Darla asked.
“I’ll take a quick walk. My head hurts a little,” I lied.
“You shouldn’t be wandering around by yourself,” Darla said.
“Ed,” I called, “come take a walk with me, would you?”
“Yessir.”
As soon as we were out of Darla’s sight, I broke into a jog. “Got a ways to go,” I told Ed. “Mind a run?”
As Ed ran past me, he said, “I will run you into the ground, sir.”
I laughed and picked up the pace. The place I needed to visit was about two miles away. We had passed it several times during our scavenging trips, but there had always been too many people around—word might have gotten back to Darla.
Ed and I reached it in about twenty minutes, moving at a fast jog: J. Kamin Jewelers. The glass entry door and windows at the front of the building had been broken out and some of the stock looted. That probably happened in the days immediately after Yellowstone erupted. Nobody would bother looting a jewelry store now—a cup of rice was worth more than a cup of diamonds these days.
One row of display cases had been turned on their sides. Ed and I flipped them upright, and I rooted pig-like in the glass shards on the floor for a while, tossing aside bracelets, earrings, and loose diamonds. I found a couple of antique, wind-up watches and took those, though that wasn’t what I was after. Finally I hit pay dirt: a velvet tray of engagement rings that had landed upside-down under the fallen display case. They were dazzling in their variety, with diamonds in more shapes and sizes than I had known existed: square, round, pear-shaped, even diamond-shaped diamonds. A couple of the rings featured emeralds or rubies along with the diamonds. I took them all; I had no idea what sort of ring Darla might prefer.
“Might need a couple of these too, Chief,” Ed said. He was holding another velvet tray, this one full of plain gold wedding bands.
“You think she’ll say yes?” I said.
Ed smiled. “I’d bet your life on it.”
“That’s about what it feels like.” My palms were sweating despite the diamond-sharp air in the store.
“Scared to death, aren’t you?” Ed patted my shoulder gently.
It didn’t make any sense; I’d faced down prison escapees and cannibals. I knew Darla wanted to get married. Why should I be so afraid?
“I remember what it felt like when I popped the question to Mandy. Never so terrified in my life. Or so happy to hear the word yes… damn, I miss her.” Ed bit his lip and turned away
I wasn’t sure what to do. Ed didn’t seem like the kind of guy you hugged. I awkwardly patted him on the shoulder. “We’d better go before Darla starts wondering where we got to.”
“You’re doing the right thing, you know? I’d trade my soul in this world and the next for another day with Mandy You got the chance for something like that, you grab it with both hands and hold on, even if the whole world is dying around you. Maybe especially then.”
“I know, Ed. I love her.”
Ed turned to face me. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled him into a rough hug, and we slapped each other on the back. We left the store together, my arm around his shoulders, but in some sense we were facing in totally opposite directions. Ed’s tears honored his past, his lost life with Mandy. I felt fiercely alive, sad for Ed, but also full of wild joy for the future. My future with Darla.
Chapter 52
On the fleet of Bikezillas, the return trip to Speranta took only three days. We would have made it in two except that one of the bikes broke down and we had to stop for repairs.
As we pedaled up to the longhouse, my niece Anna burst from the doors, her wild, long blond hair escaping from her stocking cap and trailing in the wind as she ran toward us. I climbed down from my seat and opened my arms to give her a hug. Instead of hugging me back, she stopped, allowed me to hug her for a moment, and then pulled back.