watched him, torn between disgust and an irrational desire to comfort the bandit who had attacked our farm, who would have killed Max and kidnapped Rebecca and Anna if he could have.
It took a while for Ed’s sobbing to subside to sniffles. “I was a bookkeeper,” he said at last. “I ran Peachtree for a machine shop in Ely. What happened to us? What happened to me?”
“What did happen to you?” I must have let some of the scorn I felt color my voice. He pulled his hands from his face and stared at me with an expression of such naked torment that I forgot to ask him again about the shotgun.
“It started with Ralph,” Ed said. “He was our dog. We were starving to death, Mandy and me.”
“I need-”
“Then a couple weeks later Mandy died anyway. Flu bug or maybe just the diarrhea. I should have just lain down to die next to her instead of burying her. A lot of people did, you know? I’d find them all over Ely, frozen together in their beds. The guys I ran with later laughed at them. But they did the right thing-instead of doing something just a little worse every day, all in the name of survival, shaving yourself away until the last sliver of who you were is gone.”
I raised my voice, trying to break in. “Would you let me-”
“I still dream about him. Ralph. He was a good dog.” Ed looked at me, his eyes stripped of color by the low light and his tears. “They say you are what you eat, you know? Sometimes in my dreams I’m Ralph, my tail thumping the floor, just happy to see Ed come home. Sometimes in my dreams I’m a pile of bones. Endless bones, burnt and cracked, feeding a greasy fire.” He turned his head and started crying again, softly this time.
I watched him cry for a moment. “I need to know where that shotgun came from,” I said for the eight millionth time.
“How did I-”
“Goddamn it, Ed! Tell me where my parents are!” Without thinking about it I’d taken a step toward him and raised my fists to my chin, planting my feet at a forty-five-degree angle: a fighting stance.
“I want to stay. In Warren. Rejoin civilization. And I want a pardon.”
“No freaking way am I letting a guy who tried to kidnap my sister and cousin stay within a hundred miles of Warren. The mayor was ready to throw you out while you were unconscious. Dr. McCarthy saved your ass. You tell me about that shotgun, and I’ll try to convince them to let you stay until you’re healthy enough to leave. Then you’ll get the hell out. In fact, you’ll get out of the whole state of Illinois.”
“I’m not saying anything then.”
“I could beat it out of you.” I raised my fists again.
“Go ahead,” Ed’s voice sounded hollow. “I don’t want to rejoin the gang, and if I leave on my own, I’m dead anyway. You may as well beat me to death. Wouldn’t take much right now.”
Ed’s eyes were brimming with tears again. I let out the breath I’d been holding, and with it my whole body deflated. I couldn’t beat on a defenseless man, no matter what he’d done. “You have to buy your way into Warren,” I said. “They aren’t taking just anybody-they don’t have enough food to do that. You’ve got to bring skills or supplies they need. You’ve got nothing to offer-the only thing Warren needs even less than bookkeepers are lawyers.”
“So you buy me a spot. Or convince your mayor to give me one.”
“They don’t want a bandit hanging around.”
“That’s your problem-if you still want to know about that shotgun.”
Gah! It was frustrating to admit it to myself, but he was right-he was half-dead, but he still had the upper hand. And I didn’t want to argue with him all night. I reached into my coat pocket and extracted an envelope. “There are 200 kale seeds in here. More than enough to buy you admission to Warren-if you can buy it at all. I’m not going to hang around here and try to convince the mayor and sheriff that you’re an okay guy.
“How do I know the seeds are any good?”
“Goddammit-!”
“Okay, okay. I’ll take it.”
I handed him the envelope. “Talk.”
“Danny, he-”
“Who’s Danny? You said the gun was Bill’s.”
“Danny’s the leader of the gang I run with. Ran with, I mean. The Peckerwoods. Bill’s just the guy Danny gave the shotgun to.”
“Peckerwood? Isn’t that some kind of insult?”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s also the name of a racist gang in Anamosa, in the state prison. I mean, I was never there, but that’s where the leaders were when the volcano blew. Anyway, it started to get hard to find weapons and ammo. So Danny made a deal with some guards at one of the FEMA camps in Iowa. He got all kinds of weapons from them. Ammo, too. Most of the guns weren’t military stuff, so I figure they were confiscated from refugees.”
“So maybe my dad is at that FEMA camp? Where is it?”
“Might be, yeah. It’s outside Maquoketa.”
“Where’s that?”
“About halfway between Dubuque and the Quad Cities.”
That made it somewhere southwest of Warren. I wasn’t sure exactly. “So Danny was trading for the guns? What was he trading?”
“I don’t know for sure. Drugs, maybe. We had all the good stuff. Antibiotics, painkillers, aspirin. Danny had a source in Iowa City, but he never took me along when he cut deals.” A pained look passed over Ed’s face, and he moved his right hand to his side.
“What else do you know?”
“Nothing. That’s it. I swear.”
I shook my head. Two hundred more kale seeds gone. And for what?
Chapter 11
When Darla woke, we packed Bikezilla, said goodbye to Dr. McCarthy, and headed for my uncle’s farm. We’d only been gone two days, but even so, the farm looked different. Rebecca and Uncle Paul were out front nailing boards over a window. Most of the ground-floor windows were already boarded over.
As we made the turn into the driveway, Max came out the front door, leading a string of four goats by a rope. I grinned and waved, thrilled to see him up and about. He waved back before continuing to the barn.
“Didn’t expect to see you back so soon,” Uncle Paul called as we pulled up.
“Didn’t expect to be back,” Darla said.
“Had to do a U-turn at Stockton,” I said as I hugged him.
“Come into the kitchen,” Uncle Paul said. “We’ve got fresh cornbread.”
We sat around the kitchen table for a while catching up. Darla went out to Bikezilla and got our maps. She put the Iowa and Illinois maps on the table next to each other, and I traced a line from Warren to Maquoketa with my finger.
“So the biggest trick will be crossing the Mississippi River?” I said. “Looks like there are bridges in Dubuque or Savanna.”
“It won’t be a big deal,” Darla said. “That river that flows through the park behind the farm is frozen solid. We can ride Bikezilla across the Mississippi anywhere.”
Uncle Paul was shaking his head. “No way. That’s Apple River. It freezes almost every year, but the Mississippi never freezes over in Iowa.”
“It’s never been below freezing for nine straight months either,” Darla retorted.
“We could cross at the lock near Bellevue, like last year. It wasn’t too hard to climb down onto the barge stuck in the lock and back up the other side.” It hadn’t been fun-I don’t like heights-but I figured I could do it again.
