Free Sunrise by Mike Mullin Page A

wave in their direction and turned toward the stairs. “Alex, wait,” Dr. McCarthy called.
    I took a couple more steps and sagged onto the staircase to wait.
    It took Dr. McCarthy a moment to get to the foyer; the living room was packed so tightly with makeshift pallets that it was difficult to move around without kicking a patient. “Good. You heard me.”
    “Yeah. I’m so tired I may fall asleep right here. What did you need?”
    “I . . . I wanted to apologize. For what I said before you left. You were right. We needed that food. And you got it.” I turned my head away. “Tell that to Mrs. Manck.” “Lynn didn’t make it?”
    I shook my head.
    I felt Dr. McCarthy’s hand on my upper arm. “Maybe it’s kind of like medicine,” he said. “You fight to save everyone, do everything you can, but people die anyway.” I didn’t respond, and after a short silence, Dr. McCarthy went on. “I became a family practitioner in part so I could avoid that—the constant death—I never understood how ER docs or thoracic surgeons handled it. How they could live with all that death. But it found me anyway. And now I think I know. How surgeons deal with it. It becomes motivation. To keep struggling, to keep learning, to save whoever you can.”
    “Maybe I’ll feel more like struggling after I’ve slept.” I stood, but Dr. McCarthy didn’t let go of my arm.
    “You did the right thing. Even though I told you not to. I’m proud of you, Alex. I got to know your dad a bit after the eruption, before he went looking for you. I think he’d be proud too.” Dr. McCarthy dropped my arm and turned back toward the living room.
    I trudged up the stairs, the tears I hadn’t been able to cry before flowing freely down my face. It was all I could do not to sob out loud.
    I reached the empty bedroom still crying, pulled my frozen boots off my nearly frostbitten feet, and crawled into bed without even taking off my coat.
    Eventually the tears subsided, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind ground over the events in Stockton: the guns aimed at me, Standish and Cliff as they died in Doctore s mansion, Lynn’s corpse laid out in dirty snow. My whole body was sore, and my eyes were swollen from crying. I was desperately tired, but my mind wouldn’t allow me to sleep. I laid there for an hour or more before Darla came into the room and slid into the bed alongside me. Then finally, nestled in her arms, I slept.

Chapter 12
    The pork in the trucks was originally from Warren, but Mayor Petty was still mostly unconscious and in no shape to divide it up. I talked to Uncle Paul and Dr. McCarthy about it, and we agreed to send the seven semis of pork back to Warren with the refugees but to keep the panel van. It contained enough meat to feed Uncle Paul’s family—my family now— for years. I sent one of our remaining pickups to Warren and kept one—it’d be useful around the farm, at least until we ran out of gas.
    It took three days to get people moved from the farm back to Warren. Most of them volunteered to
    stay behind and help dismantle the ramshackle structures they’d been living in, but I could tell they were anxious to get home, so I told them not to bother.
    We scavenged the useful bits of the lean-tos but broke most of them up for firewood. For a while that saved us from the increasingly long trek to find uncut timber. We needed a lot of it—Darla said more than a cord per week—to keep the fires burning in the living room and in the hypocausts, the system of small underground tunnels that kept our greenhouses warm.
    Fortunately the greenhouses were in decent shape. Since people had been sleeping in them and all the kale had been harvested and eaten, we had to turn the dirt and replant. I hoped our new crop of kale would come in soon enough to stave off scurvy. I didn’t particularly look forward to pulling a bloody toothbrush out of my mouth every morning. All our ducks were gone, slaughtered over the past few weeks to feed the