Lifting a clipboard from a nail on the racks, Oleg pointed to the entries on the paper. “At dawn, I discovered the problem here. I did a count, and we’re short right plenty.”
“What’s the tally, Oleg?” asked Abel.
“Whoever our friends are, they’ve taken to the cheddar. We are four twenty-pound wheels down this morning. Edam rounds, off twenty pounds, too. No gjetost, thank heaven. Must not be Norwegians, them.”
Abel rubbed a finger under his nose. “This is getting old.”
“It certainly is,” Oleg agreed.
“We post a watch, and still things go missing.”
“Somebody is using us as a supermarket, I’d say,” the farm manager offered.
“It’s not somebody, it’s a small number of people,” said Abel, examining the earthen floor and the boot impressions in the soil. “Other than ourselves, there are a few different sole prints on the floor here.”
“Could just be shoe prints of any of us here.” Oleg said, scratching his beard and studying the inventory sheets.
“Pop,” called Pelee bending over to draw a finger on the earthen floor.
“What, Pelee?”
“One of these people has a really big foot. It’s huge,” said the youngster, kneeling now.
Abel and Oleg joined Pelee at her level at the floor.
“Who would wear a boot that size here?” the farm manager pondered.
“Huh.” Abel rubbed his chin to stimulate a thought. “I know someone that who could leave a print that size.”
“Who?” Both the child and the farm manager piped up.
“A fellow by the name of Andy Regas,” Abel suggested. “Foster son of an old Sweetly farm family. He is one very immense character.”
“Big or not,” Oleg stammered, “he’s stealing us blind, if that’s who he is.”
After a long minute of silence, the three stood, pumping columns of cooling breath into the dank cave atmosphere, Abel filled the cloister with a bitter oath: “We damn well have to do something about this and do something soon.”
“We’re going to have everybody up all night then, if you want catch the gents,” Oleg figured.
“Well, that’s what we’ll do.”
“Ya, and if we do catch them, what then?” Oleg scowled. “How are we going to put a stop to them, eh? We’re not exactly the Marines.”
PART IV
Yellowstone Refugees Flood Cities; Canada Stops All Food Exports
OTTAWA, CANADA – As refugees continue to stream out of the Yellowstone ash-infested regions of North America, overwhelming relief efforts in cities such as Winnipeg, Edmonton, Chicago, Minneapolis, Chicago, Springfield, Illinois, St. Louis and Memphis, members of parliament here voted to stop all export shipments of Canadian grain. In a near unanimous vote, and following Argentina’s lead yesterday, ministers called for protectionist policies designed to ensure the future of Canada’s food supply. With temperatures in the grain belt cooling and expected to be far below normal during the summer growing and fall harvest seasons, the lawmakers chose to safeguard Canada’s population in the event that Yellowstone-spawned conditions greatly suppress the fall harvest.
Meanwhile, parliament also passed emergency funding measures to provide resources and manpower to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of people who have flooded out of Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta prairies into Calgary and Edmonton in the west and Regina, Winnipeg and Thunder Bay to the east. In the United States, millions are feared dead and perhaps as many as ten million people have been displaced by the eruption and its aftermath. Midwestern and southern cities on the eastern edge of the ashfall have been inundated with desperate citizens who managed to walk overland or travel by boat, in some cases hundreds of miles out of the affected areas.
Martial law is in effect in most of the cities where refugees have sought shelter. Troops roam the streets maintaining order and distributing relief supplies. There have been only sporadic reports of looting and violence in the affected cities now that troop presence has been firmly established.
Around the world, nations have reacted vehemently to the Canadian and Argentinian votes to cut off grain shipments. Communist Party leaders in China, the world’s most populous country and the world’s largest importer of grain, voiced strong opposition to the maneuvers and threatened to cut off all trade with Canada unless exceptions were made. China imports millions of metric tons of grain from Canada and Argentina. The Chinese also lost little time leveling a thinly veiled threat at Australia, the largest producer of wheat on the Asian rim.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Bonfires drew Plains people like June moths to flame. When Milbank played Ortonville High on the local gridiron, valley folks strung out for miles along Big Stone Lake and the Minnesota River converged on the town high school for a homecoming fire. The conflagration was a bona fide can’t-miss annual tradition, better attended than Christmas services. Families eagerly awaited the touch-off ceremony each fall and the sparking flames that followed, if only to be sure to get a glimpse of sons and daughters having good honest fun with school chums beneath the orange glow of the fire.
Harland stood before an angry blaze burning on the playground at the Sweetly Primary School, not two-dozen paces from the shores of the lake. The night wrapped coal-tar black around a snapping pyre burning scavenged lumber, school desks and cabinetry, and the fats and sinews of the dead.
The Swede gazed transfixed into the living flames, stupefied by how fast a town could contract and its citizens disappear in stinking smoke. Something had come on the wind and lay waste the town. Within forty-eight hours, fever swept through the majority of citizens huddled in the school for emergency shelter and warmth. Death infiltrated the crowded classrooms soon after, snatching away the young and old and taking down men and women in their prime.
The farmer ferried his wife, Eda, from the farm to town in a desperate bid to find help for her, or at least find some comfort in the hands of friends and neighbors. He found only a town hollowed out and the dead abandoned to the flames of a bonfire.
Having witnessed the first deaths and endured the agony of the dying, families by the score abandoned the school and melted away into the cold gray landscape. Harland stayed, wet cloth in hand, wiping away the soaking sweats of a raging fever consuming his wife. Eda’s entire frame flushed red with a patchy rash. The pestilence clamped down tight on muscles from head to foot. Her moaning cries for relief from the agony haunted the farmer. He was powerless in the face of it and ashamed of himself for being so.
The woman failed so rapidly that Harland feared that if he took just a minute to sleep, his wife of many years would die unattended, alone. Nodding off in a chair, gravity got hold of him and nudged him over. He awoke in with a start, caught himself, and returned to his vigil. Eda Harland laid still, eyes staring, intent on the schoolroom ceiling. Harland reached out to place a hand on her forehead. She did not respond, eyelids unblinking. Her brow felt cool to the touch. The fever had broken; there was no life force left to do battle with the unknown microbial menace.
Plains men allowed emotion no purchase. His dead wife cooling on the cot before him, Harland thought only of how to dispose of the body. Mourning could be put off, days and weeks if necessary, but a body free of its spirit must not reside in a schoolhouse one minute. Schools were not for the dead. Eda’s remains had to be removed.