We packed the trailer so full, we could barely get the door closed. Darla drilled a small hole in the top of the door with a rechargeable drill and then sealed it with candle wax. Then my team covered the whole trailer with a massive pile of wheat straw and put a tarp over that. We needed everything to stay toasty warm overnight. Ben wanted to let it sit and ripen for a couple of days, but Uncle Paul and Darla thought it would work okay tomorrow, and I didn’t want to wait any longer to leave than we had to.
I took a cold shower—we could have set up water heaters, but it would have significantly reduced the amount of energy we could devote to the greenhouses. I even splurged and used a tiny sliver of precious soap. My head spun, and I leaned against the flimsy shower wall rather than falling over. The moment my head hit my pillow, I was out.
In the morning I got a report from our scouts. Most of Warren had been burned. The area around the meatpacking plant was still intact, however. The Reds were loading pork into a pair of panel vans, trying to get it all moved to Stockton.
There was an abandoned farmhouse about a mile northeast of Warren that would work perfectly for our plan. It was close enough that the Reds’ scouts would see us, but far enough that it would take them some time to mobilize a force to confront us.
I took a dozen Bikezillas—forty-eight men and women, including Darla. Three of them were hitched together in a long line to pull the U-Haul. The rest of our forces—about 250 men and women under Uncle Paul’s command— headed for Warren on foot. They would wait just outside the city for our signal. If Ben’s plan worked, there would be almost no shooting. I hoped it would work—we had precious few bullets, and too many people had died already in this ridiculous war between Stockton and Warren.
We parked the U-Haul at an angle at one corner of the house and unhitched our Bikezillas from it. Then the ruse began.
We carried bags of flour, kale, and cases of pasta out the front door of the house and pretended to load them onto the U-Haul, as if we were clearing out a hidden cache of food. In reality we had brought all the food with us. One group carried it in through the back door, and another group carried it out through the front, pretending to load the food onto the U-Haul but actually passing it to the other group hidden behind the truck. They ran it around the corner of the house and returned through the back door, repeating the process.
We had hauled the same bags and boxes of food around and around in a circle for almost an hour before anything happened. A huge group of people emerged from Warren, moving toward us at a jog.
“Step it up to a run!” I called, and for a few minutes we pretended to be in a frenzy, as if we were trying to finish loading the U-Haul. When the Reds had closed about half the distance to us, I called out, “Scram!”
Everyone except me, Darla, and two others tossed the food onto the load beds of their Bikezillas, jumped on the seats, and pedaled off. Darla mounted the back bumper of the U-Haul. She had a long hank of rope in her hand. I grabbed the lit hurricane lamp that she had left hanging on the Bikezilla’s handlebars. Darla picked the wax off the hole she had drilled in the trailer’s door. A methane odor—like a giant fart—wafted out.
Darla jammed the end of the treated rope—a fuse— into the hole. “Time?” she asked. She meant until they reached us.
“Five minutes,” I guessed. Then the Reds broke into a charge. “Three!”
“Make up your mind!” I held the lamp up, and Darla dangled the other end of the fuse into its flame. The fuse caught, burning fiercely, and the four of us ran for our Bikezilla.
As we started to pull away, I looked back at the U-Haul. The Reds were less than two hundred yards away by then. And the fuse had burned out.
Chapter 68
“Turn back!” I yelled. I tried to wrench the handlebars around, but the front forks were ganged together—I couldn’t steer without Darla’s help or at least acquiescence. “Trust me!”
We swung around, heading straight back toward the U-Haul trailer. Some of the charging Reds lifted their guns. I heard a bullet spanging off metal nearby and, a split second later, the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. I grabbed the hurricane lamp in my right hand, leaving my hook around the handlebars. I lifted the lamp and hurled it. It smacked into the side of the U-Haul in a tinkle of breaking glass. Oil ran down the trailer’s wall, and suddenly it was afire. I had hit the side of the trailer, though, not the back. I wasn’t sure if that would be enough to light it.
We swerved wildly, racing away from the oncoming Reds, who were still shooting at us. Darla veered again, putting the house between us and most of the Reds. I kept my head low, trying to merge it with the handlebars, hoping to give our pursuers a more difficult target. My butt, though, was thrust in the air so I could stand on the pedals, slamming them down in a desperate attempt to coax more speed from the bike.
As we put more distance between ourselves and the Reds, the firing started to slacken and then ceased entirely. I risked a look back over my shoulder. A bunch of the Reds were crowded around the U-Haul. A couple of them were using their coats trying to beat out the flames licking up the U-Haul’s side. One of them reached for the handle that kept the rear door of the U-Haul closed. He turned the handle, pulled, and then vanished in a massive yellow-and-orange fireball. The sound and overpressure wave reached me an instant later, making the bike buck uncomfortably and my ears pop.
Three-quarters of the farmhouse had been blasted away. The roof and remaining wall toppled slowly toward the crater where the U-Haul had been, with a crackle and screech of breaking wood. The snow had melted instantly in a radius of at least fifty feet, revealing ash that looked dirty-gray by comparison to the surrounding snow. The Reds closest to the blast were gone, simply gone. Those farther away were scattered in a welter of limbs, some attached, some not.
The noise of the blast was the signal. Uncle Paul and his forces attacked.
Chapter 69
Most of the Reds ran. A few surrendered, throwing down their weapons and raising their hands. A few fought and died quickly under the combined fire of Uncle Paul’s people and mine. We used the Bikezillas like cavalry, wheeling to attack the Reds in the flanks as they ran. I searched for signs of Ed or the people who had been with him. I also looked for Red—I had a score to settle. My hook clanked against the handlebars as if in agreement. But I didn’t see either of them amid the chaos of fleeing Reds.
When the battle seemed well in hand, Darla and I steered our Bikezilla over to a group of prisoners who were being guarded by a detachment of Uncle Paul’s troops. I swung out of the bicycle seat and approached the closest prisoner, a tall, gaunt man who vaguely reminded me of Abraham Lincoln. “You took a group of our people prisoner two days ago,” I said.
He looked utterly terrified. He nodded, shaking too hard to speak. I noticed his eyes were fixed on the sharpened edge of my hook.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said as calmly as I could. “Where are those prisoners?”
“S-s-sent to Stockton. With a detachment. Yesterday.” “Thank you. Where’s Red?”
“D-d-don’t know. W-w-was with us.”
“Thank you.” I leapt back onto the Bikezilla, and we took off in search of Uncle Paul. When we found him, I didn’t even take the time to dismount. “Have ninety-six of your men join us—eight in each bike’s load bed. Ed’s in Stockton, we’re going after him. Keep harrying the Reds—keep them from reforming or reaching Stockton.” “Yes, sir,” he replied, turning to give the orders. Within half an hour, we were on the road to Stockton. I pushed the pace as hard as I could with Bikezillas loaded with passengers. As we flew down the road, I worried. Attacking a well-defended wall with fewer than 150 people would be suicidal. There was no chance the wall would be as lightly defended as the last time we attacked. Red was a lot of things—vicious, amoral, and scary as hell— but he wasn’t stupid. But I owed it to Ed to try.
The best plan I could come up with was to attack in a predictable place with a small force while a larger one circled
around to come at them from the opposite side. If they overcommitted to defending the first attack, the strategy just might work.
A few miles outside of Stockton, I split our forces. Four Bikezillas, including mine, to make the diversionary attack; eight under Nylce’s command to circle around and make the real attack from the opposite side of the city I waited about an hour—enough time for the larger force to get in place—and then we saddled back up and rode directly for Stockton.
When I caught sight of the gate, my heart sank. There were at least a dozen guards. More people appeared as we approached, dozens of them, maybe hundreds—a throng atop the car wall. Attacking here wouldn’t be a diversion; it would be suicide. As we got close to rifle range, I raised a hand, ready to call a stop. Then I noticed something: nobody was aiming weapons at us.
They were cheering.
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I slowed our advance, letting our Bikezillas drift closer. The cheering swelled. When I got close enough to pick out individual faces, I saw Ed standing atop the log gate, waving. Wasn’t he supposed to be a prisoner? Other familiar faces surrounded him, including Eli who had sheltered me, Alyssa, and Ben more than two years earlier while I was looking for Darla and my parents.
“Ed!” I yelled.
He jumped down on the outside of the gate and came toward us at a run. I dismounted, and we embraced, pounding each other on the back.
“Thought I was going to have to fight through half of Stockton to get to you,” I said.
“How’d you know we were here?”
“Nylce. And when we took out Red’s forces in Stockton, a prisoner told us you’d been moved here. What’s the situation?”
“When Red caught us, I figured we were going to be turned into roasts and ribs,” Ed said. “But he was in the middle of marching on Warren, so he sent a detachment to take us back to Stockton.”
“I knew that much.”
“Red left a big force behind in Stockton—more than fifty men. He learned his lesson the last time you caught him with his pants down. But he took all his most loyal men with him. And so I got to talking to the folks guarding us, telling them a little bit about my history, about Speranta, and well, about you. And I sort of promised them they could move to Speranta.” Ed grimaced, looking at me.
“That’s awesome, Ed.”
“Lots of people have friends and neighbors who’ve disappeared. So we’ve had a bit of a revolution here in Stockton.”
My head was spinning. I had arrived expecting to be shot at, and been welcomed with hugs instead. But first things first—the encircling force would be setting up to attack. They were supposed to wait until they heard gunfire, but if something went wrong . . . “I’ve got to get to the other side of town, fast.”
“Open the gate!” he yelled.
Ed and the guy currently in charge of Stockton, Lawrence Mason, hopped on our Bikezilla, and we raced across town. Lawrence ordered the west gate opened, and we biked out into the snow, yelling “Nylce!” and looking for her forces. We found them about two miles out, hidden by a low rise in the road, ready to attack.
“Stockton’s already free,” I told Nylce as we pulled up. “You took the city without us? Damn, Chief, I knew you were a badass, but that’s just ridiculous.”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t—Ed did. Never mind. Let’s head into the city, and he can explain it on the way there.”
I set my forces to guard the walls, looking out for the remnants of the Reds, and asked Lawrence to gather Stockton’s population in front of city hall.
It took more than an hour to call them all together. I spent the time talking to Eli, who embraced me enthusiastically, and his wife, Mary Sue, who was as cold-hearted and suspicious as ever. His kids—Brand, Alba, and Joy—were far taller than I remembered them, but if it was possible, even skinnier. They showed me “their” pigs proudly—seven of them now, including a pregnant sow. Red had probably thought he had stumbled into the mother lode when he had captured them and the rest of Ed’s expedition.
Stocktonites flowed into the intersection in front of city hall until it was packed, overflowing with what looked to be hundreds of people, though Lawrence assured me it couldn’t be more than three or four hundred. They were gaunt and dirty, clothed mostly in rags, clearly fatigued and suffering. None of them were particularly old—I saw very little white hair—but they all looked years older than they probably were. There was a certain amount of hope in their stance and smiles threatening to peek from the corners of their mouths.
I climbed to the second floor balcony above one of the businesses on Main Street and raised my hand for quiet. The silence was total.
“My name is Alex Halprin,” I shouted into the stillness. “I’m the duly elected mayor of Speranta. Ed Bauman has told you there is a place for you in our community, and I’m here to affirm that promise.” They interrupted me with cheers. When it got quiet again, I went on.
“There is a place in Speranta for those of you who are willing to follow our laws and work hard. We have food and shelter and power—everything we need to survive this winter, however long it lasts. But we’ve built our settlement through hard work, and no one is exempt from that.
“If you wish to remain here in Stockton, you’re welcome to do so. I want no one in Speranta who’s there against his or her will. But if you remain here, you must do so under your own resources; you cannot expect us to support you with food or protect you with our troops. We will help you as we can, particularly with technical knowhow, but we have no illusions of saving everyone from this winter. We must conserve our resources to support those who support us through their blood, labor, and tears: the citizens of Speranta.
“Red’s forces are broken, and if he survived the battle, he’s on the run.” There was another cheer. “For those of you who followed his orders, I offer forgiveness. But for Red himself, I demand justice. If he is still alive, we will find him, and he will pay for his crimes.” I punched my hook into the air to emphasize the point, and the crowd grew even quieter.
“Think it over carefully. If you’re ready for a new life, a new place, then start packing. Bring only what you can carry. The work will be hard, the hours long, the risks many. But if you’re equal to the task, we welcome you. We leave for Speranta at first light tomorrow.”
The applause was overwhelming.
Chapter 71
Nearly everyone chose to move. Speranta’s population had almost doubled in the last few weeks, to over eleven hundred. We had more than two hundred people jammed into each longhouse, and they had each been designed for 150 or fewer. It took two days to get everyone settled, counted, and placed in work assignments. Every preexisting citizen with any experience at all was put in charge of a work party. We broke ground on eight greenhouses and two longhouses all at once, by far the single most ambitious expansion project we’d yet tried.
It would have been impossible to start so many buildings at once except for the supplies the
Stocktonites brought us. They freely gave us the material Darla and I had been trying to steal when we were caught and lost our hands.
Ex-Mayor Petty agreed that all the remaining frozen pork should be shared among the whole settlement of Speranta. He didn’t have much choice; the Reds had thoroughly burned Warren. There was no town for the Warrenites to return to, and I wouldn’t allow him to stay in Speranta without sharing the pork—we were all in this together, I figured. There wasn’t as much pork left as I expected, though. The Warrenites would have been starving within a few months in any case.
Uncle Paul spent two days chasing the stragglers before he and his forces returned. He had killed or captured most of the Reds. There was no sign of Red himself, though—either he had been vaporized by our manure bomb, or he had escaped.
I had a more immediate worry than Red, though. I pulled Uncle Paul aside. “What are we going to do with all these prisoners?”
“Put ’em in a longhouse under guard?”
“Sure, b
ut what then? We can’t afford to feed people who aren’t working. Heck, we can’t even feed the people who are.”
“I’m dead on my feet. Mind if we sit down, get something to eat?”
“Yeah. Of course not. Sorry.” He lowered himself slowly onto a bench in the kitchen area, and I poured him a cup of water and grabbed a bowl of kale chips.
“God,” he said wearily, “I am so sick of kale chips.” “You know what Darla says whenever I complain?” I said.
“Yeah. ‘Beats not eating.’ She says the same damn thing to me. So these prisoners. Why not put them to work? Like a chain gang or something.”
“Still have to guard them. And it seems like a temporary solution.”
“Hmm.” Uncle Paul put a couple of kale chips in his mouth and chewed slowly. “You ever hear about that Truth and Reconciliation Commission they had in South Africa?” “No.”
“Before your time. Anyway, they interviewed victims and perpetrators of violence in the apartheid era—not necessarily to prosecute anyone, just to bring closure. We could try something like that.”
“Have them talk to all the refugees and prisoners— sort out who the really bad ones were and who we might be able to integrate into Speranta?”
“Sure. A commission like that might help us get Mayor Petty’s bunch integrated too.”
“I know the perfect person to run it too. Thanks!” “You bet.”
Uncle Paul turned back to the kale chips as I got up to look for Zik. He was perfect to lead the commission. Anyone who had fought for Red was suspect, and who better to sort out those who might be reformed from the rest than Zik, who’d lived in Stockton and knew most of the prisoners personally? It also would give him a chance to question them about his daughter, Emily, who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I told Zik that the top priority was getting rid of the prisoners—they all needed to become members of our community or be exiled as quickly as possible.