It didn’t help my case when Mom had her baby. Her labor was only three hours and remarkably easy, according to Belinda. Darla redoubled her efforts to convince me to start a family I promised her we would—I wanted the same thing—but I simply couldn’t get the idea out of my head that she might die in childbirth. We faced far more likely deaths every day—a flenser raid, a fall from an underconstruction longhouse roof, any number of diseases— heck, even an infected hangnail could kill in this postvolca-nic world. But I could do something about those potential deaths. The thought that I would watch, helpless, while Darla died of a hemorrhage in childbirth had wormed its way into my brain like a parasite. I couldn’t dislodge it, even after my mother’s pregnancy went so smoothly.
Mom named my new half sister Sorrow, which seemed like a horrible name to saddle a child with. I hoped she would go by her middle name, Alexia. The names seemed like a rather pointed message to me, so I carefully avoided the topic on the rare occasions when Mom and I spoke. I spent almost all my free time with Darla, and Mom was still avoiding her.
When I did see Mom, it was usually because I’d gone looking for Rebecca, Alyssa, Anna, Charlotte, or Wyn. They were so taken with Alexia that they spent nearly all their free time helping Mom in Longhouse Five. When Darla was with me, I would sometimes catch her gazing longingly while Rebecca did some task that seemed utterly repulsive to me, like changing the rags that served as Alexia’s diapers. But whenever Darla had offered to help, Mom would claim she had to go elsewhere, so Darla eventually quit offering.
We started gradually mixing the former FEMA camp refugees, Warrenites, and Stocktonites. One of the former Warrenites needled an ex-Stockton guard so persistently that the Warrenite took a swing at him, starting a fistfight that resulted in two broken fingers, a broken jaw, and a blackened eye. Remembering Francine’s lynching, I was thankful nothing worse had happened. I was also thankful I could dump the whole mess in Zik’s lap—he was our judge, after all.
Zik convened a jury to hear the men out. The jury found them both guilty, and Zik sentenced them to spend two weeks with their hands tied together. He said they’d either get over their animosity, or they would kill each other. Zik also gave them manure duty for the whole two weeks. The hearing took less than an hour. Best of all, they were mad at Zik, not me. I started to truly appreciate the genius of divided government.
More people straggled in, generally starving and filthy. We welcomed them all, and our population grew past twelve hundred. I kept our greenhouse building program going flat-out, and our food production continued to grow even faster than our population. I ordered a cutback on kale planting, shifting to more beans and wheat, which stored better than kale. We squirreled away tons and tons of food—I wouldn’t relax until we had more than a year’s worth stored.
I sent an expedition to raid an old highway depot, hauling off tons of rock salt to use as seasoning and for preserving meat from our rapidly expanding herd of hogs, bred from the pigs Eli had brought us. We could freeze the meat, of course, but we couldn’t make bacon, ham, or even prosciutto without salt.
I woke one night to hear a whispered conversation taking place a few bedrolls over from mine. Someone had left a nightlight plugged in, and it cast just enough light that I could make out faces. Alyssa was sitting up in bed, one hand holding Anna’s wrist. Something glinted from Anna’s hand—a piece of gold jewelry, perhaps.
“You should have told me sooner,” Alyssa whispered. “I… I just couldn’t,” Anna said. She sounded utterly crushed.
“I like you. I like you a lot. Just not that way.”
“I know… It was silly of me to keep hoping. I knew you liked boys.” Anna’s sigh was louder than her words.
“I do. Although I’m not sure why. They’re all liars.”
“Huh?”
“Max told me he’d been giving me gifts.”
Anna’s arms tensed so much, I could see her muscles swell even in the dim light.
“I swear to God I’ll strangle him in his sleep.”
“No. Please don’t. I’ll deal with him.”
Anna was silent for a moment. “That might be worse for him than strangulation anyway.”
“Yeah… I love you, Anna. Like a sister. Okay?”
Anna nodded. I could see tears shining on her cheeks in the dim illumination of the nightlight. “Like sisters.” They hugged, and Anna pressed whatever was in her hand into Alyssa’s hands. Then Anna stood and silently stalked back across the roomful of sleeping people.
I lay awake most of the night, thinking about what I’d overheard. I was worried about Anna—crushing on someone for two years and getting rejected, however gently, was painful. But I wasn’t sure what to do.
The next morning I called Uncle Paul into my conference room and told him the whole story. I felt a little bit uneasy telling Anna’s secrets, but I wanted someone to keep an eye on her, and I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough time given everything else I had to do.
Later that day I heard that Alyssa had dumped Max. Max moped around for a few weeks, and then he started chasing after one of the newcomers, a stunning eighteen-year-old girl who was clearly out of his league.
The only thorn in my side was Red. He was still out there with a group of Peckerwoods. Occasionally they tried to raid one of our expeditions, which forced us to post a heavy guard on every foraging party and supply convoy, wasting a lot of manpower. But all in all, things were going well. At least until Rita Mae called on the shortwave.
A messenger ran up to me at the building site where I was working. “Rebecca says you’re needed at the shortwave set, stat.” I commandeered two workers, the messenger, and a Bikezilla and pedaled my way back to Longhouse One.
As I approached the table near the turbine tower door where we kept the shortwave receiver, I heard Rita Mae’s rough, distinctive voice, “Is he here yet? Over.”
“Running up now,” Rebecca replied. “Over.”
She handed the mike to me, and I mashed the talk lever. “Good to hear from you, Rita Mae. Over.”
“I’ve got no time,” she said, and I heard the pop and rattle of gunfire in the background. “The DWBs are here. Hundreds of them. They’ve taken half the city. Mayor Kenda’s dead. We’re going to have to bug out any minute now. Over.”
I thought furiously. Last I’d heard, there were still flensers in Dubuque. Peckerwoods, though, not Dirty White Boys. It would take at least four days to get a force of any size all the way to Worthington. Obviously Rita Mae didn’t have that kind of time. “Head for Bellevue. I’ll meet you there. Over.”
“We may not—” There was a pop and a hiss. The line went dead.
Chapter 75
It took all day to get ready to leave. Ed and Nylce had all kinds of questions I couldn’t answer and issues I didn’t know how to deal with. Charlotte and Anna were panicked about the dent that taking three hundred people out of Speranta on an expedition toward Worthington would make in the work rosters. And then, to top it all off, a council meeting was called, and I spent more than an hour twisting arms, trying to convince four of the seven of them to vote to authorize the expedition. The real sticking point was whether I would be allowed to go, but I wasn’t willing to compromise on that—Rita Mae was in trouble, and I owed it to her to help. By the end of the meeting, I was cursing the stupid system of divided government we had adopted. We didn’t get away from Speranta until the next morning.