“I don’t think we’ll need to go that far. If we cover him in snow, we can come back and bury him later.” Or eat him, if things get bad enough, I thought but didn’t say.

The woman got up and helped me drag Brock across the snow berm. On the other side, the snow was softer, making it easier to bury the body. As we covered Brock’s corpse, I learned the woman’s name. “Francine, not Franny,” she said, which struck me as strange. Who worries about trivialities like nicknames during the aftermath of a massacre? She said it automatically, like it was a habit, a verbal tic that transcended the horror of the situation.

Without thinking about it, I asked her, “What happened?” Then I wished I could bite the words back out of the air. Surely she wouldn’t want to talk about it.

But I was wrong. She seemed to need to talk, and as we moved the next corpse, burying it in the snow beside Brock, she told me the whole story.

All the people in the road—dead and living—were from the Galena FEMA camp, where Darla and I had been held prisoner for eleven days, more than two years earlier. Three days ago the guards, who worked for a FEMA subcontractor named Black Lake, had disappeared—just torn down their tents, packed their vehicles so full they were nearly bursting, and left. Francine had heard a rumor that they had lost contact with the government on the East Coast. Some refugees said the guards had left to try to reestablish contact. Some said the guards were all moving to a huge hoard of wheat stored on barges on the Mississippi. I figured the second version was more likely to be true—at least I knew the part about the wheat barges was true. Darla and I had found the barges before we’d been captured by Black Lake, and later we’d told the guards about them when we were trapped in the Galena camp.

When the guards left, some of the refugees fled immediately—a group of them fastened a makeshift rope to the chain-link fence and ripped down a whole section of it. Other refugees stayed for a few days, but it quickly became clear that no more food would be forthcoming, and the guards hadn’t left any behind.

Three or four hundred refugees were already clustered on the road outside Warren when Francine had arrived. They were arguing with a row of guards Mayor Petty had sent to block the road. Some of the refugees only wanted to pass through Warren. Some of them wanted to stay. All of them needed food. A fight broke out, and then someone fired a shot, and within seconds the massacre had begun.

The shooting only lasted about twenty minutes, Francine thought. It ended when Dr. McCarthy and

Belinda charged through Sheriff Moyers’ line of riflemen and started bandaging wounds even as bullets continued to stab bloody exclamation points and periods into the lives around them.

Sheriff Moyers had called a cease-fire. Even he could see that shooting the town’s only doctor was a very bad idea.

Brock had been Francine’s fiance. They’d gotten engaged just before the volcano erupted, but they had been waiting to get married until they could find a Catholic priest to baptize Francine and officiate their wedding. Now they’d never be married.

Listening to Francine’s story brought a quiet sense of despair bubbling up in my gut. I had always believed that the human race would survive the massive volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, would surmount this disaster, just as we had surmounted so many lesser disasters before. But amid the carnage in the road outside Warren, I wondered: did we deserve to survive?

Chapter 44

Darla wasn’t back by nightfall with the transportation supplies. Sheriff Moyers lit two oil lamps. He and his men huddled uneasily in the light, watching us. After a few minutes, Dr. McCarthy rose from the side of the patient he was trying to treat in the dark, marched up to Sheriff Moyers, and took both the lanterns. To his credit, the sheriff didn’t fight—he just sent one of his men to get two more lanterns from the town behind them.

I assigned two people to hold the lanterns for Dr. McCarthy and Belinda. I worked mostly in the dark, dragging corpses across the berm and interring them in the snow by feel.

Darla returned several hours after dark with the blankets and poles we needed to make improvised stretchers. She had more lanterns and able-bodied help too. As Max’s lantern illuminated a woman who was missing most of one leg, he turned deathly pale and staggered to the edge of the road, vomiting on the blood-soaked ice.

On snowshoes we could make the trek from our homestead to Warren in about two hours. Without snowshoes, carrying a stretcher, it took more than twice that long. I felt a stab of relief when one of our patients died—one fewer person to carry—and then hated myself for feeling that way.

Darla had scrounged enough supplies for fifteen stretchers. We had more than enough able-bodied people to carry the stretchers, so I paired off some of the less seriously wounded with helpers—anyone who could walk would have to. Even so, it took three trips to move everyone back to the homestead. We weren’t finished until after noon the next day.

I was dead tired. My eyes felt sandy and my head spun when I moved too fast. Still, I couldn’t rest yet. I sought out Anna and Charlotte. They and Wyn hadn’t made the trek to the massacre site—they were too young to see it, I thought, although I realized now that I was wasting my time trying to protect them. The longhouse was packed with wounded: we’d brought the massacre back home.

“Anna, I need to know exactly how much food we have. I haven’t updated my inventory since last week. Check the greenhouse records, figure out how much food we can expect to produce, and when we’ll run out, given all the new people here. Assume . . . I don’t know, ask Dr. McCarthy for a guess as to how many of the wounded will survive.”

“But the food records are your job.”

I was only planning to ask her to gather some information while I slept, but then it hit me: with this many people around, I would need a lot of help running the show.

“Not anymore. It’s your job from now on. It’s really important.”

“I know it is. But I can’t do—”

“Alyssa says you’re really good at math.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And your handwriting is beautiful. But the most important thing is that I can trust you. You’ll do great. The records are on the clipboard by my bedroll.” I turned to Charlotte before Anna could protest further. “Charlotte, you’re in charge of the census. Count everyone and get a total number to Anna as fast as you can. Then go back and interview them all. I want to know how old they are, if they have family here, what they’re good at, what they did before the eruption, if they’re wounded, where and how badly—everything, okay?”

Charlotte shifted nervously from foot to foot, but her voice sounded solid enough when she agreed to take on the project.

“Wake me up at dinnertime with a report,” I told them. I picked my way through the wounded to my bunk, collapsed into it, and fell asleep almost instantly.

Dinner was three small pancakes and a kale leaf. As we ate, Anna gave her report. “If we drop to survival rations— eight hundred calories a day for the women and a thousand for the men, then we’ll run out of food in about fifty-seven days.”

“I expected it to be worse.”

“It depends on the survival rate,” Anna said. “Charlotte looked into that for me.”

“We’ve got the twelve original settlers,” Charlotte said, “forty-three uninjured newcomers, twenty-nine walking wounded, and thirty-three more seriously injured. One hundred seventeen total. Dr. McCarthy expects ten percent of the walking wounded to die, along with a third of the others, mostly from infections. So we’ll probably settle out at something like 103. I don’t have the detailed census done yet.”

“That’s okay—you’re doing great.” I privately congratulated myself on delegating these jobs to Anna and Charlotte—I had barely been able to stumble to my bunk, let alone count and do math.