Darla's Story

by Mike Mullin

  DARLA'S STORY

  by Mike Mullin

  Copyright © 2013 by Mike Mullin

  Published by Mike Mullin at Smashwords.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Although some of the places mentioned are real, any similarities to actual people or events are coincidental.

  Also by Mike Mullin:

  Ashfall

  Ashen Winter

  Sunrise

  Dedication

  For Dad

  Chapter 1

  I can almost hear the drone of my world history teacher’s voice: “If one person dies, it’s a tragedy. If a million die, it’s a statistic.” Mr. Wembender didn’t make that up; he was quoting someone. I’m not sure who, though—I slept through most of world history. Sometimes he’d interrupt his lectures by shouting “Darla! Wake up!” but mostly he let me sleep.

  That was the bad year, the year my dad died. Mom and I tried to keep the farm running by ourselves, and I almost flunked out of school. Then we sold the dairy cows, and things got better.

  At the time, I thought Mr. Wembender was full of manure. Look at it this way: If a good milker dies, it’s a tragedy, sure. If the whole herd dies, it’s a really big freaking tragedy, not just a statistic.

  But now I sort of get it. When the volcano erupted—the big one, at Yellowstone—I knew millions of people were dying. I even knew that Mom and I might die. But I didn’t feel those deaths the way I felt it when I ran over the old lady with my tractor.

  Chapter 2

  Everything started on an otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon. The rabbits knew something was wrong before I did. I mean, I���d heard the reports on the radio about the huge earthquake in Wyoming—I’d even heard some nut on KUNI babbling about the end of times and the volcano under Yellowstone National Park. But I didn’t believe any of it, at least not until after my rabbits started acting crazy.

  I was out in the barn, working on my dollhouse. I had a crapload of weekend homework, but who does homework on Friday?

  The dollhouse was more my dad’s thing than mine. When he presented it to me for my eighth birthday, I had to fight back sudden tears. Dad thought they were tears of joy and started babbling about all the micro-furniture we could build together. But I was trying, and failing, to hide my disappointment. I’d been hoping to get a tractor—or at least an ATV.

  For a while, I kind of liked the dollhouse, despite my initial disappointment. Building furniture with Dad was fun. We made bureaus and nightstands—the drawers joined with dovetails so fine I had to carve them with an Exacto knife. Dad whittled lion’s-paw legs for the tables and chairs, while I laboriously fashioned tiny tabletops and chair backs mortised so tightly that they didn’t need glue.

  About the time I turned twelve, I got bored with the dollhouse. I had my own tractor by then, an ancient Deere that spent more time in the shop than it did running. When I wasn’t working on the tractor, I built oddments like my potato cannon. I could shoot a potato more than five hundred feet with that thing. I just needed a target—and the dollhouse was perfect.

  When Dad saw the results, he was as crushed as the dollhouse itself. He tried to hide his disappointment, but I saw the light glinting from his damp cheek as he turned away. Before then, I didn’t realize what the dollhouse meant to him. He told me it was okay—that the dollhouse was mine, and destroying it with ballistic potatoes was no big deal—but I could tell he didn’t really mean what he was saying.

  I had hauled the broken pieces of the dollhouse into my room. It took more than a month of exacting labor to rebuild it. Shattered boards had to be recut, yellow potato-juice stains painted over, furniture repaired or rebuilt. But the look on Dad’s face when I hauled the resurrected dollhouse out of my room made all the hours of labor worthwhile.

  A year and a half after that, Dad was dead. Crushed under a cattle grate he had been trying to clean.

  When I missed him, I worked on the dollhouse. I kept it in the workroom in our barn, on the rough wooden slab that had served as a workbench during those happy hours Dad and I had spent building miniature furniture.

  On that Friday, the day of the eruption, I was building a tiny pergola to shade the back patio. I cut a joist, working with an Exacto knife to carve a curved flourish into the joist’s tail. As I reached for a square of sandpaper, the power went out.

  Losing power on the farm was no big deal. It happened far too often, although usually not on blue-skied, late-August afternoons. I stood and heaved the barn’s massive sliding door wide. With the door fully open, enough light would enter the barn that I could continue working at least until dusk.

  As the door slammed against its backstop, jarring my shoulder, the ground shook. An earthquake, maybe, although I couldn’t be sure—I’d never been in an earthquake before. They’re not exactly common in Iowa.

  I looked around. A column of smoke rose against the deep blue sky. It looked like it was coming from the Haymaker place, a few miles northwest of us. The Haymakers were a bit odd, so the smoke didn’t completely surprise me. Most folks clear and burn their brush in late fall, after the harvest is in and the sap has run out of the trees. But if the Haymakers wanted to do it in August, well, it was their land and their brush.

  On my way back to the workbench, I thrust my head into the side room that held my rabbits. I’d just meant to glance at them, but what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

  The dumb bunnies were in a lather over something, scrabbling against the floor of their cages, running and pushing against the wire-mesh walls. But the weirdest thing? They were all trying to run exactly the same direction—roughly east.

  I peered into the darkness at the west end of the room. What had spooked them? The earthquake hadn’t seemed severe enough to still be scaring the rabbits. Maybe a coyote? Not likely in the daytime. Same went for owls. Fox? Nothing made sense. I strode into the dark part of the room, kicking through the straw on the floor. I found nothing to explain my rabbits’ strange behavior.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked them. They didn’t answer, and I couldn’t figure out what else to do, so I returned to my whittling.

  I’d spent at least an hour and a half cutting and placing more than two dozen joists when Mom walked into the workroom.

  “You see the fire?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “Looks like it’s coming from the Haymaker place—we should check on them.”

  “They’re probably just burning brush.”

  “Wrong time of year for that. What if it’s their house?”

  “Then we’d have heard fire engines. You call the fire department?”

  “I tried,” Mom said. “Phone’s out. Thought it isn’t supposed to go down, even when the power’s out.”

  “It’s not.”

  “We should check on them.”

  I started stowing my tools. I didn’t want to go—the pergola was almost finished. “Christ,” I said.

  “Darla Jane Edmunds,” my mom admonished. “Thou shall not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Sorry, Gloria,” I muttered.

  “And none of that sarcasm. I’ve raised you better than—”

  A sudden roar drowned out my mom’s lecture. The noise was so loud, it swept into the barn like a tornado, scattering the straw on the floor.

>   I saw that Mom was screaming, but I couldn’t hear her over the apocalyptic roar. Flaming knives stabbed through my ears, deep into my brain. My hands were clamped over my ears, but I had no memory of putting them there.

  The unearthly noise was so overwhelming, I couldn’t think. I stood, stunned. I must have looked something like a sheep separated from its flock, mouth stupidly wide. Maybe I was even bleating a little—it was impossible to tell over the all-consuming noise.

  Mom’s hands were plastered over her ears, and her mouth hung open like mine. She twisted, obviously in pain, although I couldn’t hear her moans.

  Mom’s suffering shocked me into action. I leapt off my stool and grabbed for the headphones hanging on the pegboard above the bench. My dad had lost forty percent of his hearing from a lifetime of working with power tools and engines, so he had become a fanatic about headphones. He’d bought a matched set for us—two high-end Peltor hearing protectors. I put one on, and the noise eased from intolerable to merely deafening. I ran to Mom and slapped the second pair around her head.

  Mom pressed her hands over the headphones, as if trying to meld them to her ears. I shouted, “What the hell!?” but I couldn’t even hear my own voice—there was no way Mom could understand me.

  Eventually, my paralysis broke, and I crept toward the door. My heart hammered in my chest so hard that I could feel it even over the noise. I feared what I’d see outside the barn—maybe a blasted and sere landscape, something like those pictures of Hiroshima in my world history textbook, our barn somehow the lone survivor of an architectural holocaust.

  But the view outside was bizarre: everything looked normal. The leaves on the trees were whipped by a fierce wind, and there was a lot of dust in the air, but that’s not unusual in Iowa. The sky was a brilliant sapphire blue, marred only by the column of smoke still rising at a shallow angle from the Haymaker place. So where was this appalling noise coming from? Whatever its source, I didn’t think waiting it out in the barn was safe.

  Mom grabbed my arm, trying to pull me away from the door. I resisted and shouted, “Let’s go to the cellar!” but there was no way she could hear me. I tried to explain my idea with gestures, but I’ve never been any good at charades, and Mom kept trying to pull me deeper into the barn. I twisted free and ran out the door.

  I looked back. Mom was chasing me, shouting something, her features twisted in an appalling mixture of terror and rage. I ran faster. When I reached the cellar door, which was mounted at an angle at the side of the house, I threw it open and started down the dark stairs.

  It was cool and noticeably quieter in the root cellar. Mom stumbled down the stairs behind me. She was frowning now instead of shouting, so I figured she agreed with my plan to hide out down there. Dust rained off the joists above us, rattled free by the neverending roar. I dashed back up the stairs and closed the door behind Mom, plunging us into darkness.

  I groped for the string that controlled the single bulb in the root cellar, found it, and pulled. Nothing. Idiot—I already knew the power was out.

  I felt my way to one of the root cellar’s ancient brick walls and sat down with my back to the wall. The dirt floor felt cool even through my jeans, but that was a bit of a relief after the heat of the barn.

  Mom stumbled on my ankle, caught herself, and sat down beside me. Her hand found mine, and we clung to each other, waiting for the roar to subside.

  My thoughts ground over and over. What could make a noise that loud for that long? A nuclear bombardment, but that didn’t seem likely. An asteroid strike would be loud, but it wouldn’t continue for this long, would it? Maybe an earthquake, but the walls weren’t shaking, just vibrating with the noise. I knew volcanoes could be loud, but as the minutes stretched into hours with no abatement in the noise, that seemed less and less likely an explanation. Surely an eruption would end at some point?

  I got fed up with waiting and wondering what in the world was going on. I stood, wrenching my hand free from Mom’s. I groped blindly toward the stair. When I found it, I scrambled up on all fours and threw the door at the top open.

  The noise instantly redoubled. It was fully dark, but I could see okay by the light of the stars and moon. Everything looked peaceful, despite the unearthly roar. I glanced back—Mom was standing at the foot of the stairs with a scowl on her face and one palm upraised in a “stop” signal. I mouthed “water” and stepped out of the cellar.

  I ran around to the back door of the house. Inside, I groped around under the kitchen sink until I felt the flashlight we keep there, thumbed it on, and used it to find a pad of paper and a couple of pens. It was well past suppertime, so I grabbed two bottles of water and a box of granola bars. I didn’t want to stay above ground long enough to mess with anything more elaborate. That got me thinking: what if we were forced to hide out all night? I ran to the living room and grabbed two pillows and the afghan, wrapping everything up into a bundle. Mom stormed into the living room. She wrapped me in a hug and dragged me back toward the door.

  We returned to the cellar with the bundle of supplies. Mom took the flashlight and began writing furiously on the pad. “DON’T YOU DARE RUN OFF LIKE THAT AGAIN!!!” she wrote.

  “We needed the supplies,” I scrawled beneath her note.

  “We need to stay safe.”

  This wasn’t an argument I was likely to win. “What is this?” I wrote and then pointed at my covered ears.

  “Judgment day,” Mom wrote in a shaky scrawl.

  “No. Judgment day, you’d be raptured. I’d be alone.”

  “Not true. If not judgment day, what?”

  “Dunno. Someone on the radio said the earthquakes in Wyoming meant the volcano under Yellowstone was going to erupt. Nobody believed him. We’ll know soon.”

  “How?”

  “Ash.” I figured any volcano powerful enough to drown out conversation from a thousand miles off would easily fling ash all the way to Iowa. Maybe all over the world.

  After a short pause, Mom wrote, “How long will this noise go on?” Her writing was so shaky now, it was hard to read.

  I shrugged.

  Mom crumpled in on herself, her chest falling. She looked like she had at Dad’s funeral. Smaller somehow.

  “You can’t check out on me, Mom,” I whispered, knowing she couldn’t hear me. The only thing worse than the damn noise would be facing it alone. I wrapped one arm around her and offered her a bottle of water and a granola bar. She took them but made no move to eat or drink.

  I sipped a little water and nibbled on a granola bar. Whatever was happening, starving ourselves wouldn’t help. The chunks of granola rasped down my too-dry throat, reluctant to enter the hard knot of my stomach. I took Mom’s hand, moving her still-wrapped bar toward her mouth. She startled, glanced at the bar as if puzzled to find it in her hand, and set it aside. I gave up and laid down my own half-eaten bar.

  I formed our supplies into a neat pile in the corner of the cellar and laid our afghan and pillows out on the dirt floor. I looked back at Mom—she was curled up, hand over her mouth, head nodding, her face red as if she were having a huge coughing fit. Which made sense, as the house vibrated so badly, the air was choked with dust. I took the water bottle from Mom’s hand, twisted it open, and held it to her lips. She drank, and her coughing eased.

  The dust got me thinking: if the roar got even stronger, could it shake the house down? I thought about pictures I’d seen of Muscatine, Iowa, after a tornado roared through, and I moved the makeshift bed to the edge of the cellar, against one of the brick walls.

  I lay down on my side, my back pressed against the wall. The floor and wall vibrated, sending percussive basso tremors through my body, as if I were curled up inside the engine case of a gigantic, mistuned Harley. I scooted away from the wall, which eased the shaking against my back. There was nothing I could do about the vibrating floor.

  The headphone dug into my right ear, but I stayed on my side—I wanted to watch Mom. She hadn’t moved. I made a “come
here” gesture in the beam of the flashlight and held my arms out for a hug. Her immobility shattered, and she slid into my arms. I turned the flashlight off and clung to her.

  ***

  We must have dozed off at some point, despite the unholy noise. What woke me was the smell. A reek of sulfur—not quite like rotten eggs—more like what I imagined a TV preacher’s fire and brimstone might smell like.

  It was pitch dark. I groped for the flashlight, bumping Mom in the process. She startled in a sudden flurry of motion that I could feel but not hear. My hand found the flashlight, and I switched it on.

  Mom’s head swiveled toward me, her eyes huge and unfocused in the flashlight’s beam. Her mouth was open, panting in sudden fear. I reached out and took her hand. She gathered herself, looking me in the eye and saying something I couldn’t make out over the roar. I shined the flashlight on her wristwatch: 7:07 a.m.

  I dropped Mom’s wrist and started to get up. She grabbed my hand and tugged, urging me back to the improvised bed. I twisted free and found the pad of paper and pen. “My rabbits!” I wrote.

  “NO!” Mom wrote back.

  I pressed the flashlight into Mom’s hand and got up to grope my way toward the stairway. She reached for me with her other hand, but I dodged her.

  The flashlight beam illuminated the base of the stairs. I glanced back at Mom, who was following me, holding the light. I made my way to the top of the stairs and tried to push the door open. It seemed heavier. I had to put my shoulder against it and heave upward. It shifted, and a fine waterfall of gray powder fell past the edges of the door. I poked a finger into the stream of powder—it was fine like talc, yet gritty like sand. Mom had backed up a step.

  I heaved the door wider, expecting daylight. Instead, I got blackness.