Zik left every few weeks. He was gone for days at a time, looking for his daughter, Emily. I’d quit worrying about revealing our location and had relaxed all the early rules about leaving Speranta. The secret was obviously out. I would have to rely on our numbers, defensive plans, and Ben’s military genius to carry us through an attack. After each trip, Zik was surly and withdrawn for days—he hadn’t been able to find any trace of his daughter. She would have been sixteen by then—if she was still alive.
I desperately wanted to know what was going on in the world. We had gotten enough refugees from neighboring states to know that Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky were as bad off as Illinois. Iowa was worse, far worse. There had been some kind of collapse in the government back east almost a year ago, and FEMA and Black Lake had mostly disappeared. Food distribution had ended in the camps and cities; collapse, starvation, and cannibalism inevitably followed.
I’d been trying to get a shortwave radio. I wanted news from back east, to know if there was still a government in operation. It was best to act as if we were completely on our own, though I couldn’t help but hope that some kind of functioning government was left.
One of the newcomers had been a licensed shortwave operator, but he’d left his equipment at home, halfway between Iowa City and Des Moines. I stared at the spot on a map for a while, thinking of mounting an expedition to retrieve it, but his transceiver was too far. And there was no guarantee that his shortwave set would still be there and in working condition.
We caught a break when Grant Clark trudged into Speranta. He had survived in the postapocalyptic world by traveling and trading information and supplies for food and clothing. He was the same gleaner who had sold a camp roster to Rita Mae, the librarian in Worthington, nearly two years earlier—the roster that had enabled me to find my parents. He said he had a working shortwave setup hidden in an abandoned town not far away, but he didn’t want to trade it to me. He powered it on batteries scavenged from cars and sold the information gleaned from the shortwave chatter. I finally convinced him to part with it in return for a custom-made, one-man Bikezilla loaded with two hundred pounds of kale and the promise that he could make Speranta his home base and listen in on the shortwave anytime he wanted.
There was depressingly little chatter on the shortwave bands. Nothing at all from back east. All the government bands that had been full of transmissions only two years ago were dead and silent now. The religious broadcaster who I had asked for help when I was in the FEMA camp in Maquoketa was off the air. Even the strange stations that read lists of numbers were gone. We did make contact with a few isolated communities—a group in Georgia, another in Mexico, and one in the mountains of northern California. They were barely hanging on; there was nothing we could do for each other except share tips on compost piles and greenhouse construction. When conditions were good, we caught snippets of transmissions in Chinese, Spanish, or languages nobody recognized. I hoped the reason we didn’t reach more communities was the difficulty in powering a radio transceiver. The possibility that everyone else was dead was too horrible to contemplate.
I asked Ben to monitor the shortwave, clicking through the bands and transmitting occasionally. He didn’t want to do it at first—it wasn’t a military shortwave set and therefore not interesting to Ben. We talked for nearly an hour about the importance of military intelligence, discussing all the things we might learn from monitoring the shortwave, before he finally agreed to monitor it. Once I convinced him to take the job on, he was amazing at it. He would sit at the set for hours on end, patiently listening and transmitting in impeccable shortwave code. I didn’t know a CQ from a QRA from an XYZPDQ, but Ben took the time to study the manual Grant had brought with the transceiver and learn all the terms, using them perfectly.
A few days after he had started, Ben came charging up to me at the construction site where I was working. We were building . . . wait for it . . . yet another greenhouse. Our nineteenth, or Greenhouse 5-C.
“Mayor Halprin, Mayor Halprin,” Ben yelled.
“Ben,” I replied when he got close enough so I didn’t have to yell, “you can call me Alex, you know.”
“Yes sir, Mayor Alex Halprin.”
I sighed. “What is it, Chief Radio Operator Fredericks?” I said it sarcastically, but it went right over Ben’s head, of course.
“I have a contact. Someone who knows you and wishes to speak to you. I sent them a QRX.”
“What’s a QRX?”
“A request to wait.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Station WB0SX.”
“Yes, but who is that? You have a name or location?”
Ben looked at his shoes for a moment. “I forgot to ask for their QTH,” he said finally. “I am sorry, Mayor Alex Halprin.”
I put Ed in charge of the construction site and left with Ben, running the mile or so back to the original long-house where Darla and I lived and the radio was kept. One disadvantage of clustering our greenhouses around the wind turbines was that we were really spread out.
I picked up the mike, depressing the talk lever. “This is Alex Halprin. Over.”
“You are supposed to say CQ, CQ from K9LC,” Ben said.
“Alex! You survived! Guess I owe Rita Mae a pound of hamburger. Sorry about betting against you.” The voice was a woman’s but so crackly over the connection that I couldn’t tell who was speaking.
“She is supposed to say K9LC here is WB0SX,” Ben said.
“Who’s speaking?” I said.
“I’m sorry,” the woman’s voice replied, “Kenda. Mayor Kenda from Worthington.”
I heard some muttering in the background that I couldn’t make out, and a new voice came on. “Alex, Rita Mae here. I knew you’d make it. Darla told me you were too stubborn and stupid to die, and I believed her.”
“Thanks, I think. Glad to hear your voice.”
“Well, I’ve been sick, but I can’t kick the can yet. Afraid if I weren’t here, Mayor Kenda would strap on a pair of jackboots.”
“Rita Mae!” Kenda yelled, muffled in the background.
“I’m kidding. Keep your pants on back there, Madame Mayor.” Sotto voce, she added, “She hates it when I call her that.” For a moment the airwaves were filled by Rita Mae’s cackle. “We’re hard pressed here, but if you and Ben need a place to stay, you know we’ll always welcome you.” Rita Mae hesitated a moment. I wanted to break in but couldn’t while she was transmitting. “How’s . . . everyone else . . . Darla okay?”
I understood her hesitation. So many people had died, it was risky to ask about family. She’d only heard me and
Ben over the shortwave so far, so she couldn’t be sure who else had survived.
“Rita Mae,” Mayor Kenda said, her voice faintly audible in the background, “you’ve got to say ‘over’ and let up on the lever, or he can’t respond.”
“So excited I plumb forgot,” Rita Mae said. “Over.” “Darla’s fine,” I said. “We got married, oh, four months ago. And thank you for the offer of a place to stay, but we’re doing okay.” I filled them in on Speranta, my election as mayor, our greenhouses, and current population of just under six hundred. So many people had died in Worthington, we had over three times their population now.
“Congratulations!” Rita Mae said when I had finished. “Alex, I hate to even bring this up, but we’re sore pressed here. Flensers control all the cities near us. We’ve sent expeditions to Dubuque, Waterloo, and Cedar Rapids. We lost a lot of good men and women. Food’s way too tight. Ammo’s short. Flensers attack Worthington again, they’re likely to win. There’s been some talk of packing up, trying to head east—abandoning Worthington. Over.”
“We’re short on both ammo and weapons,” I said. “We’ve got a good source of supplies for building green-houses—glass, wire, pipe, and caulk—stuff like that. If you do move east, you’d be welcome here. I’m not sure how we’d cope with two hundred newcomers all at once, but if it comes to that, we’l
l figure it out. Over.”
“Got lots of extra guns here. Be happy to share them and anything else we can spare in return for a little help on the greenhouses or our flenser infestations.”
“That’s not your bargain to make,” Kenda protested in the background.
“Shush,” Rita Mae said in her most authoritative librarian tone. “Oh, sorry, forgot again. Over.”
“I’ll talk to my advisers, see what I can do.”
We chatted a while longer before I signed off. When I started to walk away, Ben called to me. “Mayor Halprin, may I have a small plot of land in one of the greenhouses for personal use?”
“Everyone’s entitled to a personal vegetable plot if they want it. See Anna, and she’ll assign you a space.” I was so distracted by the conversation with Rita Mae, it didn’t occur to me to ask why he wanted a plot. Ben must have been distracted too, because he turned away without a thank you or goodbye—he had gotten so much better at social niceties over the last two years that the lapse surprised me.
That night I called together my team of advisers: Darla, Ben, Uncle Paul, Ed, and Dr. McCarthy. We held informal meetings in the kitchen area of the first long-house. Anyone was welcome to listen in, and afterward I usually hung around to take suggestions and questions from our citizens. Our government was as open and transparent as I could make it.
“I want to mount an expedition. Take some supplies to the folks in Worthington. Trade for whatever they can spare. It’s roughly seventy miles.”
“I’m all for it,” Darla said. “But you’re not going to get anything like fair value in trade.”
I nodded; I had figured Darla would take my side—not because she was my wife, but because Worthington had been her home.
“It would be a very risky venture for little potential gain,” Ben said. “If the flenser gangs are numerous enough to threaten Worthington, we cannot mount an expedition strong enough to fight them. We have the manpower but not enough weapons.”
I nodded again. Most of our citizens were former refugees from the Galena FEMA camp. Black Lake had confiscated the weapons of everyone they had interned there, so we were rich in manpower but poor in firepower. Ben had explained everything he knew about longbows to a couple of former carpenters who were trying to build a working prototype. So far, all their efforts were complete and literal busts. “What about a fast trading expedition? Thirty-two people on eight Bikezillas. Volunteers only. We’ll stay off the roads, navigate by map and compass, avoid any flenser gangs too big to fight.”
“That is a sound plan,” Ben said.
“Uncle Paul?” I asked.
“Let’s do it. I volunteer.”
I nodded but made a mental note to talk to him later. He was still having horrible coughing fits. Whatever illness had lodged in his lungs had stayed there. There was no way I’d allow him to go gallivanting off to Worthington.
“Agreed,” Dr. McCarthy said. “I volunteer too.” Right, I was going to let our only qualified doctor risk himself? I would have to talk to Dr. McCarthy too.
“So it’s settled,” I said. “I’ll lead the expedition. We’ll leave in three days.”
“Alex,” Darla said, “you can’t go. You can send me or Uncle Paul or someone else to lead the expedition—” “Who’ll run our engineering and construction program if you’re gone?” I asked.
“Your uncle. But let me turn the question around. Who’ll run everything if you’re gone?”
I was silent for a moment thinking about that. She was right. Normally I thought of Speranta as a utopia— people worked together, lived together, and ate together, generally harmoniously. But in that moment, it felt more like a prison. I was trapped by my own success.
Chapter 62
During the question-and-answer period after the meeting, I was surprised to find that most people agreed with my decision to attempt to rescue Worthington, even though we were unlikely to get anything like fair value in trade for the supplies we sent them. Even after the apocalypse, the vast majority of people were generous and kind. The few who weren’t, however—like the flensers—were exceptionally dangerous despite their relatively small numbers.
I put Ed in charge of the expedition, with Nylce second in command. Most people didn’t know much about his background as a flenser. And the only people I trusted more than Ed and Nylce had duties they couldn’t abandon. Max begged to be allowed to accompany the expedition. I told him he could go only with Uncle Paul’s permission, which I knew he would never get.
I remembered Eli—the guy whose family Alyssa, Ben, and I had stayed with for a few days more than two years ago. Eli had helped me change a tire on the truck we had been driving when we had fled from the Peckerwoods flenser gang.
Eli’s family had owned several pigs, and I wondered if they might still. Maybe they would be willing to move themselves and their pigs to Speranta. Worthington was only about thirty miles from their farm, so I asked Ed to visit Eli on the way home. We were composting a lot of material that could have been fed to hogs—kale stems and the like. And Dr. McCarthy was worried about our diet being too poor in protein. We were growing tons of black beans now, but I would feel much better if we had several potential sources of protein.
I had offered a bounty—a thousand pounds of food or ten thousand seeds for a breeding population of chickens, ducks, goats, cows, or pigs—and spread the word via the shortwave and the gleaner, Grant, but so far nobody had come forward to claim it. More than three years after the eruption, there were no live animals to be had. Silicosis from breathing the ash in the weeks immediately following the eruption had killed most of the livestock; hungry people had done in the rest.
The hardest part about sending Ed to Worthington was the waiting. I wished a thousand times a day that I had insisted on leading the expedition myself. At least then I wouldn’t have been dangling on tenterhooks, wondering if I had sent Ed and the other volunteers off to their deaths. We needed a mobile shortwave set up. I knew they had existed before the volcano, but none were to be had at any price now.
Ed and I had planned for him to be gone for three weeks: a week to Worthington, a few days there, a few days looking for Eli and his family, and a week back. It should have easily been possible to make the whole trip in two weeks—a seventy-mile trek into Iowa that would have taken an hour and a half each way before the erup-tion—but they needed to move slowly, sending out scouts, avoiding roads and any potential opposition. The key to survival wasn’t being good in a fight, it was avoiding the fight in the first place.
Ten days after he left, we heard via the shortwave that Ed had arrived in Worthington. I spoke to Ed that night. They had run into flensers, members of the Peckerwoods gang operating out of Cascade, about ten miles southeast of Worthington, and they had spent several days dodging them. Using Ben’s intel, Colonel Levitov, a Black Lake commander, had cleared the Peckerwoods out of the Anamosa prison compound about two years back, but he hadn’t done anything to the branch in Cascade. Ed stayed in Worthington for three days and then moved out in search of Eli’s family. Ed told me that he expected to return to Speranta on his original schedule, about a week from when he left Worthington.
But two more weeks passed with no sign of Ed.
Darla noticed that I was distracted and snappish. She tried to divert my attention from worry about the expedition with sex, and yeah, that worked sometimes, but sometimes I also got the feeling she was trying to entice me into changing my mind about having kids. And we still didn’t have any kind of birth control. That whole argument only added more stress I didn’t need.
Then Darla tried to plan a huge party for my nineteenth birthday. I quashed that idea—no way could I celebrate while Ed was out there, lost or maybe worse. Instead, October 2nd passed like every other day—I led a greenhouse-building crew.
One day about five weeks after Ed had left Speranta, I got called to the phone. Uncle Paul and Darla had rigged a rudimentary intercom system. We had a telephone in each of our f
ive longhouses and in every turbine tower. They hadn’t been able to get any switching equipment working, so the phones were a kind of party line; if you picked up one receiver, they all rang, and the monitors assigned to every phone picked up and could hear everything that was said.
I was leading the construction of—inevitably—another greenhouse. So I had to hoof it into the adjacent longhouse to pick up the phone.
I pressed the receiver to my ear. “Mayor speaking, report please.”
“Sentry, Turbine Tower 1-A reporting.” I didn’t recognize the voice. We had more people living in Speranta than I could keep track of now. Tower One was the first sniper’s nest we had built at the original longhouse. It was still at the edge of the settlement. We were spreading out to the south and east of it. There were sixty-seven wind turbines in the area. Only about four-fifths of them still worked, though. The rest hadn’t been shut down quickly enough when the ashfall hit. Still, that left enough turbines to heat about 110 greenhouses of the size we were building. “Unidentified party of nine confirmed inbound on foot, three and a half miles southeast.”
Spotting an approaching group three and a half miles off was incredibly difficult in the dim yellow postvolcanic light. I made a mental note to find out who was manning Tower One and send him something. Maybe one of the boxes of brownie mix the Wallers had sent me. They wouldn’t cook up right—we didn’t have any eggs—but still, it was chocolate! “On-duty platoons to standby,” I said. That would cause two dozen men and women at each longhouse to stop whatever they were doing and prepare to fight.
I could have called for a full mobilization, but that seemed like overkill given that we had only spotted nine people so far. “I’m on my way to Longhouse One.” I handed the phone to the little girl who had been monitoring it and took off at a jog.