Sunrise (28 page)

Then we started trudging from snow hump to snow hump, unburying cars, unscrewing their gas caps, and sniffing. When we found a locked fuel hatch, Darla jammed her hook under it and pried it open by main force, snapping the lock. When she unscrewed the gas cap, I could smell gas even from where I stood, several feet back. Darla smashed the driver’s side window with the handle of the screwdriver, popped the hood, and ripped some tubing out of the engine compartment.

Darla stuck one end of the tubing into the gas tank and sucked on the other, getting a siphon going. How she managed without getting a mouth full of gas was beyond me. When the Dutch oven was nearly full, I carried it into the Penney’s and splashed the gas across the bone pile while Darla waited, thumb over the end of the hose to maintain the siphon.

It took thirteen trips to empty the car’s tank. Without more buckets, there wasn’t really anything Ed could do to help, so he stood guard. As I trudged up to him and Darla after the last trip, he said, “Kind of a waste of gas, isn’t it?” “No,” Darla and I said together.

“Anyway, everything’s clear,” Ed said. “No sign of anyone else.”

“Let’s blow this joint,” I said.

Ed groaned.

“I’ll do it,” Darla said. “You’re covered in gas.”

She was right—it was nearly impossible to carry the lidless Dutch oven without splashing. I had gas on my hook, its cuff, and all down my left pants leg.

Darla made one final trip into the Penney’s. She grabbed the end of a stick that protruded from the flensers’ still-smoldering fire, tossed it into the bone pile, and ran. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the gas caught with a whoosh. Within seconds the fire was so hot we had to move away from the building. Within minutes a substantial chunk of Meadowlands Shopping Center was ablaze.

As we walked back to the Family Affair, I asked Darla, “What do you think happened in this town?”

Darla didn’t answer, but Ed did. “Folks in the college are paranoid, shooting at anyone who comes close. Must have been a big group of flensers here. They would have picked off loners, singletons, small parties, maybe even foraging parties from the college. The folks in the college built their wall and buttoned everything up tight. Once there was no other food source, well, my guess is the flensers ate each other. Those three were all that were left.” “Oh.” I was sorry I had asked. It made sense, though. Cannibalism would be a terrible long-term survival strategy. I wondered if something similar was happening in other places. Millions of people were desperate for something— anything—to eat. How many of them would turn to the only readily available food source and, in so doing, seal their own eventual doom? Then I thought of something else.

“Could you have that shaking disease?” I asked Ed.

A pained look passed across Ed’s face, and I felt guilty for bringing it up. “I might.” He shrugged. “Would serve me right.”

“You can quit with the pity party anytime, Ed,” Darla said. “We know what you did, and we don’t care anymore. You’re a different man now.”

Ed’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “Well . . . thanks.”

As soon as we got back to the cafe, we packed up and moved on. We didn’t go far that day, though. I called a halt on Business 20 on the east side of Freeport to search a gas station we came upon. It was a wreck, shelves thrown over, glass and plastic detritus everywhere. It took us hours to search it, and we found very little that we could use. Every scrap of food was long since gone. The wire map rack was crushed and empty. There were no phone books. I cursed the Internet in the most inventive terms I knew—by killing the telephone book and map business, it hadn’t done us any favors.

Darla did find an “Emergency Auto Toolkit,” which she shoved into my pack, nearly doubling its weight. By the time we finished, it was almost dark. We shoved the shelving out of the center of the gas station and set up camp right there. I reviewed the watch plan with everyone who was scheduled for sentry duty, spread my bedroll, and lay down.

When I finally slept, I dreamed of gnawing teeth and burning bones.

Chapter 49

Two days later, on the outskirts of Rockford, we reached a gas station that had partially collapsed under the weight of the snow and ash. We weren’t quite halfway to Chicago yet. We spent most of the afternoon shifting beams and metal roof panels, unburying the sales counter. It had been looted before it collapsed—the broken cigarette displays were all empty. There was no food of any kind. But when we heaved aside a section of countertop, we exposed a book three years out of date: a combination Yellow and White Pages for Rockford.

Darla and I stayed up half the night studying

the book by the light of an oil lamp. It was a mother lode of information. There were maps in the front—not superdetailed, but better than what we had, which was nothing. We combed through the Rockford Yellow Pages section, noting places we needed to visit. There were several snowmobile dealers listed. Two of them, on the north side of Rockford, were close together and looked promising: Loves Park Motorsports and Bergstrom Skegs. Almost a dozen bicycle shops were listed; we marked three near the snowmobile dealers to check first. Darla hoped to scavenge enough parts to create a fleet of jumbo Bikezillas—we would need them to haul our gleanings back to Speranta.

Rockford was also home to four or five electrical and plumbing supply distributors. Darla yelped in delight when she saw some place called Grainger Industrial Supply listed. I had no idea what it was, but anything that made Darla as happy as Grainger had to be heaven on earth for budding engineers.

Then we turned our attention to food. Even if our trip was completely successful, we wouldn’t get the new greenhouses all built and producing for months. We needed to bring back some kind of food to bridge the gap until then. Grocery stores and restaurants had been emptied out within days of the eruption. To find supplies in the quantities we needed, we’d have to be creative, think of things the ordinary looter wouldn’t.

I thought about Rebecca finding pet food in otherwise thoroughly picked-over houses. Unfortunately there didn’t appear to be a distributor or manufacturer of pet food anywhere in Rockford. I added a PetSmart and a PETCO to our list of locations to visit, though.

Next I looked up food distributors. Rockford had something called GFS Foodservice, but no grocery wholesalers I could find.

There was no Yellow Pages section for food manufacturing. On a whim, I looked up Pepsi in the White Pages. There was a bottling plant nearby in Loves Park. Maybe they’d have bulk supplies of sugar or something? Heck, I’d even drink high-fructose corn syrup straight if it’d keep us alive for a couple of months.

That got us started on a game—naming food brands and looking them up in the White Pages. It worked too— it turned out that, along with the Pepsi bottler, the Rockford area boasted a Kraft Foods factory. I lost myself for a moment in a pleasant daydream about ripping into a pallet of macaroni and cheese.

“One of these places is going to have food left,” I told Darla confidently. “We’re going to find everything we need right here. We won’t have to go to Chicago.” I wasn’t looking forward to visiting Chicago. After seeing the mess in small towns across Illinois, the thought of what almost ten million starving people might have done terrified me.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “There must have been lots of people working at all those plants. Wouldn’t they already have snagged the food?”

My sudden burst of hope died in my chest. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. But maybe we’ll get lucky anyway.”

In the morning our first order of business was visiting the snowmobile dealers. We were going to need some way to transport all the other supplies we hoped to find. A truck might have seemed the obvious choice, but that would come with its own problems. Gas, despite our luck in finding a half-tank’s worth in Freeport, was nearly impossible to come by. And a lot of the remaining gasoline was stale—okay for starting fires, but no good for running an engine. Darla said it had something to do with evaporation and oxidization within the gasoline. Even if we could find gas, we’d run out soon enough and have no way to get more. Pedal power was an inexhaustible resource.

My heart sank when we reached our first stop, Loves Park Motorsports. The windows were smashed and the showroom empty. Not a single motorcycle or snowmobile remained. Darla checked the repair bays in back and reported another strikeout. Whoever had taken the snowmobiles had loaded up on spare parts too.

I poked around the sales counter at the front of the store. Advertising circulars were spread around the Formica counter and had cascaded onto the floor nearby. I picked one up; the back was a huge ad for their annual September “Preseason Truckload Snowmobile Sale.”

“Why couldn’t the volcano have erupted in September after the snowmobiles arrived?” I asked, showing the circular to Darla.

She shrugged and started to leave the showroom. Then she stopped, turned back to me, and snatched the circular out of my hand. “So if you’re getting ready for a huge truckload sale, do you wait until the last minute to get your stock in?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, let’s say you don’t wait ’til the last minute. Where do you keep all those snowmobiles?”

“It’s a truckload sale . . .”

We rushed around to the back of the store. There were three semitrailers parked in the back lot. All three were padlocked, which I took as a great sign. What’s the point to putting a padlock on an empty truck?

Darla took the ratchet from the toolkit in my backpack and beat on the padlock for a while. She didn’t even dent it. Ed had disappeared into the shop. He came back with a long tube—something you would use to build a motorcycle frame, maybe—and a coil of wire. Darla understood immediately. She wrapped the wire through the hasp of the padlock and around the tube a few dozen times. Then all three of us could pull on the tube, creating massive leverage.

The padlock didn’t break, but the hasp it was connected to pulled free of the door. Darla and Ed pulled the door open. Inside, the trailer was packed with neatly palletized and shrink-wrapped, brand-spanking-new snowmobiles.

Chapter 50

I left half our force with Darla—four to stand guard and ten to help her construct her fleet of Bikezillas— and took the rest to visit the bicycle and ski shops we had found listed in the Rockford Yellow Pages. We struck out at the first three places we visited—they had been cleaned out completely. Finally we found what we needed at the Rockford Bicycle Company. The dirt bikes had all been taken, probably because their big, knobby tires would work okay in the snow and ice. But there were still dozens of high-end racing bikes and ten-speeds with frames, forks, and gears that would work fine as the core of new Bikezillas.

We cleaned out the bike shop completely, making dozens of trips to haul all the bikes back to our base at Loves Park Motorsports. We cleaned out the repair shop in the back too, taking all the spare parts and tools that were left. By the time we finished, it was dark. I set up the night sentries, and we bedded down right there in the empty showroom.

The next morning Darla handed me a huge list of supplies she wanted. The first thing on the list was skis— if we could get those, she could finish a couple of Bikezillas, which would make it much easier to haul supplies around.

As we headed to North Park Rental, the first place on our list, I wondered why we hadn’t seen any people. Where were they? Huge swathes of Rockford had burned, but there were sections that looked intact, almost normal except for the deep snow and the eerie, unnatural silence. There had to have been a hundred thousand people or more in Rockford and millions more in nearby Chicago. They couldn’t all have died.

And where was the government? Two years ago, Illinois had been part of the Yellow Zone, and FEMA and its subcontractors had been out in force here, keeping people from the Red Zone west of the Mississippi from flooding east. Now, nothing.

Someone had been here. Nearly every place we visited had been picked over—looted, I guessed, although did it really count as looting now that whoever owned all these shops was gone and probably dead?

The cross-country ski section at North Park Rentals looked like a bomb had gone off in it—bits of plastic packaging and cardboard were strewn everywhere.

The other sections hadn’t been cleared out nearly as thoroughly; nobody had bothered with the snowboards or downhill skis. We hauled them back to the snowmobile shop by the armload.

We spent the afternoon hunting for other stuff on Darla’s list: bolts, wire, welding rods, and lumber to build the bikes’ load beds. We found a lot of the stuff at the Grainger Industrial Supply. Other materials came from a nearby Home Depot that had collapsed under the weight of the snow—which was actually fortunate. It was a ton of work to unbury anything, but the store hadn’t been looted nearly as thoroughly as those that were still standing.

We even unearthed a huge bin of seeds they’d had on clearance: carrots, beets, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and more. In our early days of greenhouse farming, it was tough to get anything but kale to grow. Now that we had greenhouses that were both heated and lit, we could probably grow almost anything. Darla said that not all the seeds would germinate—some would have spoiled after two and a half years buried in the wreckage, but that was okay. Many were heirloom varieties, not hybrids. According to Darla, the heirloom plants were much more likely to produce viable seeds. That meant that even if only a few sprouted, we would have an inexhaustible source of more seeds.

Darla’s group worked late into the night by lamplight, and by morning they had the first of what she called a truck model ready. “I’m calling it a BZ-250,” she said with a proud smile. “We’re building a four-person drive model next, with an even bigger load bed. That’ll be the BZ-450.” The 250 was two bicycles side by side with their pedals and frames connected by steel rods. A large load bed covered the snowmobile track at the rear, and the front forks of both bikes ended in snowboards instead of wheels. It was ridiculously difficult to turn—you couldn’t really lean into the turns much to help the snowboards bite into the snow, but it did okay going straight, and it could haul a ton of stuff. Maybe two tons.