“I’m freaking freezing,” Darla said.
“It’ll just take a second.” I waited for Uncle Paul to get inside and then turned back to Darla. “Alyssa thinks I’ve been leaving her gifts.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t.”
“Figured,” Darla said. “So who has?”
“I don’t know. But Alyssa was all huggy when she was trying to thank me. She didn’t believe it wasn’t me.”
Darla didn’t reply.
“You okay?”
“If I turn flenser, I’m eating Alyssa first,” Darla said. “She would be delicious,” I said.
“Hey! Don’t be coveting the meat of another woman.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think you’d taste nearly as nice. Too tough and stringy.”
Darla glared at me. “Stringy?”
“It’s okay. I like my women tough.”
“Your women?” Darla’s glare had turned positively murderous.
“Woman, I mean, woman.”
Darla smiled and gave me a quick kiss.
“Seriously,” I said. “Are we okay?”
“Yes. I trust you, Alex. You’ve never given me any reason not to.”
I held the door for Darla, and we went inside.
After more than a month spent studying the wind turbines, Darla had a new list of electrical supplies she needed: eight-gauge wire, electric stoves, electric water heaters, and more. They were mostly things that could be scavenged from homes. We biked to Warren with two sacks of kale to try to trade.
Nobody would talk to us. Doors were slammed in our faces. Shotguns poked out windows as we approached. Oh, a few were friendly enough, like Nylce, but we already had taken everything we could use from her house. We asked Mayor Petty for permission to scavenge from abandoned houses in town, and he smiled sadistically as he said no.
We raided abandoned farmhouses instead. I spent the afternoons on my back in crawlspaces or craning my neck upward in basements to pull staples and liberate lengths of the heavy wire Darla needed for her project. We raided the ranger station in Apple River Canyon State Park, cutting the water heater free with a hacksaw and dragging it out to Bikezilla’s load bed.
The barn began to look like an appliance repair shop, with dozens of water heaters and stoves arranged in neat rows, some in pieces, some intact. A corner held an enormous stack of heavy-gauge wire in various lengths, each piece coiled neatly and labeled.
We used the truck to drag a huge metal tank originally used for storing pesticides from a nearby farm. We left it hitched to the back of the truck sitting outside the workshop Darla and Uncle Paul had built in the barn. Darla cut a hatch in the tank, and she and Uncle Paul started assembling a contraption inside. Darla swore it was a simple water-heating system, but the tangled mess of tubes and wire I saw in there looked as complicated to me as the guts of the space shuttle.
The GEEKs couldn’t help Darla much with the project. There was only room for one person inside the tank, and Uncle Paul hovered at the hatch, talking to her in a strange language full of volts, amps, ohms, and resistances. I worried about exposure to the pesticide residue in the tank, but when I raised the issue, Darla scoffed at me. “We’ll freeze to death a heck of a lot faster than those pesticides will kill me.” I figured she was right and dropped the issue, although I couldn’t get it out of my mind completely. I lay awake that night in bed for more than an hour. Darla claimed modern pesticides were remarkably safe. I was sure she was right, but what if that tank had stored something else? Something older?
When I finally did sleep, I dreamed that Darla had grown huge and stretched out like a cross between the Na’vi from Avatar and Mr. Bendy. She tried to kiss me, but her body bent double, folding over mine so that instead of kissing my lips, she was smooching my Achilles tendon, my head pressed to her stomach, which had somehow molded to fit my face so precisely that it was suffocating me.
I woke with a start. The bell—the one that signaled an attack—was ringing wildly.
Chapter 20
I pulled on my coat and boots, grabbed my go-bag— actually a full-size backpack with frame. I slung the pack over my shoulders and hit the door of the bedroom less than thirty seconds after I’d woken up. Darla was on my heels.
Who was on watch? I wondered as I ran into the hall. Max, I thought. The pull-down staircase to the attic was open, and Max was nowhere in sight. If we were supposed to run, then he should have been in the hall ready to go with us. I charged up the staircase, anxious to find out what was going on.
Max was on the lookout platform, but I didn’t need to ask him why he’d rung the bell. Flames were licking up the outside of the barn, illuminating everything with a flickering red glow. The greenhouses were burning too—wispy blue flames flitted across their skins, turning the irreplaceable plastic into pools of slag.
I started to ask what had happened, changed my mind, and asked a more important question. “Anyone out there?”
“I’m only half finished with my scan,” Max said in a soft voice. “But I haven’t seen anyone. Could the fire have started itself somehow?”
“I don’t see how. Keep looking.”
Darla crowded her way onto the platform. The fire on the barn leapt further up its walls, and a gust of wind carried a blast of heat and choking smoke across us. “My welder!” Darla vaulted off the platform, sliding down the steep, icy roof.
I grabbed for her but missed. “Are you crazy?” Darla was sliding toward the front of the house where the peak of a small porch roof came within five or six feet of the main roof’s gutter. If she missed the porch roof, she would fall more than twenty feet.
Uncle Paul poked his head out from the hatch.
“Get a fire brigade organized,” I told him, then turned to Max. “Stay here. Keep scanning.”
Darla flew off the edge of the roof. If I tried to go through the hatch and down the stairs, it’d take forever— I’d have to push past Uncle Paul and whoever else was coming up.
I hurled myself off the platform, following Darla.
Chapter 21
I flew down the roof headlong, my outstretched gloves throwing stinging particles of snow and ice into my face. I dug my hands in, trying to slow my descent, but all too soon I had reached the edge of the roof. I tried to grab the gutter as I went over, but I was going too fast and couldn’t hold on. Someone was screaming—me, I realized, as my side slammed into the top of the porch roof. A sharp pain spiked through my hip and shoulder, but I didn’t hear anything snapping or crunching, which meant—I hoped—I hadn’t broken any bones.
I rolled sideways, sliding off the ridge of the porch roof in an uncontrolled tumble. Suddenly I was in the air again, still turning as I plummeted into a snowbank beside the concrete steps.
I slowly pushed myself free of the snow, spitting bits of ice and blinking to clear my eyes. Darla was already up, about twenty feet ahead of me, running pell-mell toward the burning barn. My leg and hip hurt as I put weight on them, forcing myself to a run, trying to catch up with Darla, my pack bouncing against my back.
“Wait!” I yelled. “We’ve got to get the panel van out. Our pork!” We hadn’t bothered to move the pork out of the panel van—it made a handy freezer, parked in the barn next to Uncle Paul’s old tractor. If it burned up, we would starve.
Darla didn’t even slow down. “My welder first! Before it explodes!”
I redoubled my efforts to catch up with her. Running into a burning barn to grab tanks of explosive welding gasses did not seem like the best idea Darla had ever had. So of course, that was exactly what she did.
She hurled open the side door of the barn and ducked inside, into the workshop area. The barn was choked with thick smoke. My eyes stung as I followed her inside. The heat was oppressive, overwhelming, and suddenly I remembered charging back into Darla’s barn after Target had set it afire, trying to save our backpacks almost a year and a half ago.