“I don’t want to be your mayor.” Darla winced again. “But I want to live!” I practically shouted the word. “I want a place where Darla and I can get married, have kids, grow old together, and die together. I’m going to create that place. Small groups won’t be viable in the future. A decent way of life demands manpower and womanpower and division of labor. It demands a group large enough to defend itself. If the only way I can create that is to lead it, then that’s what I’ll do. That’s why I’m running for mayor.
“I liked that story Mayor Petty told about the sunrise and the Humvees and the coffee, the chocolate, and the fresh fruit. But it’s just that. A story. There’s no help coming. Ever. We must, we must survive on our own resources with what we can make and raise with our own hands.
“So I ask you for your vote. If you vote for me, we’ll start preparing for the long term. We’ll build a wall. We’ll develop a sustainable way to stay warm. If I’m wrong, we will have wasted some time and effort, sure. But if I’m right about the future, then a vote for me is a vote for survival itself. Thank you.”
As I sat down, a scattering of polite applause echoed hollowly in the church. It was quickly extinguished, as if the clappers were embarrassed or maybe afraid to be seen supporting me.
I lost the election. It wasn’t even close. So much for my political career—doomed from the start.
“Did you even use three words of the speech you practiced?” Darla asked as we pedaled back to Uncle Paul’s farm.
“Nope. Just two,” I replied. “‘Thank’ and ‘you.’”
Chapter 18
“Did you even use three words of the speech you practiced?” Darla asked as we pedaled back to Uncle Paul’s farm.
“Nope. Just two,” I replied. “‘Thank’ and ‘you.’”
“Christ on a broomstick,” Darla muttered.
I bore down on the pedals in silence for a while. We were moving so fast that the wind fell like a lash across my eyes. Uncle Paul was curled in a blanket on the load bed. He either ignored the conversation or couldn’t hear it. “I just… when he brought out Sawyer, it threw me off my stride. Everything I planned to say flew out of my head. I guess I had nothing left in me but the truth…. I’m sorry.”
Darla swiveled in her seat to look at me. “I’m glad you’re not some kind of goddamn politician, Alex. If—no, since—they won’t listen to the truth, those fools in Warren deserve what they get.”
“No, they don’t. Nobody deserves what’s coming. Nobody deserved any of this.”
“Maybe the few who actually paid attention to you don’t deserve this. But the rest? Pfft.” She waved one gloved hand in the cold air.
“They all listened. Most of them just didn’t like what I was saying.”
We had to slow to make the turn onto Canyon Park Road. When we were back up to speed, Darla said, “We’ll figure it out. Some other way of defending ourselves.”
“Like what?”
“Let me talk to Ben about my ideas. Work out a solid plan.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t ready to think about other options anyway. We had spent months of effort on the election. I needed to mope some more before I could move on to plan B—whatever it was.
“What you said in that church, in front of all those people, about us, about wanting a place we could raise a family and grow old together. It… I don’t know how to say it… I was mad at you for screwing up the speech, and suddenly all that anger turned to fire.”
“Fire? Like you were even madder?”
“I’m not saying this right. I want that future. I will kill for it. I will drag all those people in Warren kicking and screaming into something resembling sense if I have to, even though I don’t care about most of them.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel the same way.”
We pulled to a stop beside the house and dismounted Bikezilla. I took Darla in my arms, and she crushed me against her body. The world around us was frozen, quiet, and still, as if the last point of warmth in the universe burned between her chest and mine.
Chapter 19
Little changed except that Darla and I didn’t have to ride to Warren every afternoon to campaign. Instead, Uncle Paul and Darla often took Bikezilla out to the wind farm east of Warren. They broke into three of the windmills, climbing inside the turbine towers to study their workings and refine the plan for converting one to produce heat.
I spent part of my time with Ben working on a plan to survive if the farm were attacked again. We built a platform atop the roof of the farmhouse, accessible from a hatch we cut in the attic. I created a watch schedule—there were ten of us, so to cover the entire day and night, each watch had to be two hours and twenty-four minutes long. With one of us constantly on watch, the workload for everyone else increased. We were always tired; tempers grew shorter as the workdays grew even longer.
Darla helped me rig a rope from the platform to a bell hung in the second floor hallway so that whoever was on watch could wake us without leaving their post. We practiced endlessly; if more than six hostiles showed up, we’d run rather than trying to fight. Everyone had a go-bag of food and crucial supplies. After weeks of practice and drills, we got to the point where we could be out the back door and away from the farmhouse less than two minutes after the bell rang, even starting from a deep sleep. Actually it took longer during the day, because we were spread out all over the farm doing chores.
Ben studied the approaches to the farm, and we did our best to block the problematic ones. For example, behind the barn there was a huge blind spot, a wedge of land that wasn’t visible from the observation platform. So we spent almost a week moving snow into that area, creating a huge pile of loose snow and ice that made it difficult to walk in the places invisible to our lookout. In other places—atop the low hills around the farm, for example—we packed down the snow, creating areas that were easy to traverse and visible from the observation post.
One afternoon, Anna was on watch on the platform. I joined her, checking the sightlines, making sure that a new pile of snow Ben and I had moved that morning would funnel attackers into a spot where we could see—or shoot—them easily.
Alyssa came, opening the hatch from the attic to the platform and clomping up the stairs. The platform was not really big enough for three—we were packed on it shoulder to shoulder.
Alyssa flung her arms around me and gave me a huge, smacking kiss on the cheek.
“What… what’s that about?” I spluttered, trying to remove her arms without knocking either of us off the platform.
“I love them!” Alyssa was practically gushing enthusiasm. Anna had turned beet red.
“Love what?” I asked.
“The earrings you left under my pillow.” She tossed her head so her earrings bobbed. I hadn’t noticed them before, but they were lovely—gold filigree hummingbirds with tiny ruby eyes.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“They’re even better than the square of chocolate you left for me last week. It was a little stale.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that either.”
“You don’t need to be coy,” she said. She pressed herself up against me, and I turned my head, dodging another kiss.
Alyssa left, and I turned back to Anna. “Not a word to Darla,” I warned.
She nodded, her lips pressed together, her face still flaming red.
When Darla and Uncle Paul returned to the farm after a day of studying wind turbines east of Warren, I met them outside. “I need to talk to you,” I told Darla as she dismounted Bikezilla II.