Darla's Story

by Mike Mullin

  “Darla!” Mom snapped.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “She’s right, though,” Mom said. “In a few days we can have enough cornmeal laid in that we can send some with you. Maybe not enough to get you to Omaha, but enough to keep you fed for a few days.”

  “I wanted to leave tomorrow,” Ruth muttered, bending to resume picking corn.

  Chapter 11

  We picked corn until it got impossible to see. The ash had mostly quit falling, but it was still dim and gray, even in the middle of the day. At twilight, the sky faded to pure black. Then we sat at the kitchen table for what seemed like half the night, shucking and grinding corn by candlelight. We were amassing quite a store of cornmeal—eight bags full. While we’d probably get awfully sick of eating corn pone, it beat starving.

  Sunday I slept like a diabetic cat, waking far past my normal time. But I was still the first one in the kitchen. I stood by the table for a few moments, puzzled. Something looked wrong. When I figured out what it was, I ran to the living room to check the couch. It was empty, the extra blankets pushed roughly aside. I ran upstairs to wake Mom.

  “The cornmeal is gone,” I said as I shook her shoulder. “And so is Ruth.”

  “Wha? Huh?”

  “The cornmeal. Ruth left. And she took our cornmeal.”

  “Goodness.” Mom started climbing out of bed. “Is your tractor still—”

  My tractor! Christ! I ran, taking the stairs three at a time, bursting out the back door without stopping for a breathing rag.

  My tractor was gone. I’d left it parked right by the back door. Almost no ash was falling, but a light rain was steadily filling the troughs left by the big back tires in the slushy ash.

  I charged back into the house, grabbed the truck keys from their hook in a cabinet, and wet down a breathing rag. Just as I finished tying it around my face, Mom came down the stairs, wearing a bathrobe.

  “I’m going after her. I’m taking the truck,” I said as I strode toward the door.

  “Did you pack any water?” Mom yelled after me.

  “No.”

  “Food? Emergency supplies?”

  I stopped. “No . . .”

  “And how were you planning on driving the tractor and the truck back?”

  “You’d better come with me.”

  “Yes. Give me two minutes to change. Get some supplies ready while you wait.”

  Mom turned back to the stairs. It made sense to get prepared, although I didn’t like the fact that Ruth would be getting farther ahead of us. I fidgeted while I waited, wondering what I could’ve done differently. Was I too mean to Ruth? Would she have stolen my tractor if I’d coddled her craziness a little more? Either way, I would get my tractor back. I’d put thousands of hours of hard work and love into that thing. My hands and Dad’s had rebuilt it, touched nearly every part of it.

  Mom got dressed in record time, and less than two minutes later we were in the cab of the truck. I started it up, thinking about the air filter I’d cannibalized for my tractor. The truck wasn’t going to last long in this mess without a filter. But I didn’t have a spare or anything I could use to make one quickly.

  The truck started fine, of course. But when I shifted into first gear—nothing. The rear wheels just spun in the wet ash. I engaged the four-wheel drive and tried again. This time, all four wheels spun. The ash had fallen on and around the truck, so it was sitting in a hole lined with wet, slippery ash.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Mom. “Wait here.”

  I ran into the barn and grabbed the first four pieces of scrap lumber I could find—a couple of short one-by-ten planks and two scraps of plywood. I jammed one scrap in front of each of the truck’s four wheels and climbed back into the driver’s seat.

  This time, the truck climbed out of the hole. I kept it in first gear, rolling slowly to the road. At the end of the driveway, I tapped the brakes and looked both ways, more from habit than anything. The tractor had turned left—north. When I tapped the accelerator to follow, the wheels just spun. I tried every trick Dad had taught me for getting a truck unstuck—a super-gentle start, reverse-gear, rocking it—nothing worked.

  I got out and tried to run back to the barn to get the boards. You can’t really run in wet ash, though. Your feet sink, and it pulls at your boots like wet concrete. I retrieved the boards as quickly as I could and used them to get the truck unstuck again. This time I wasn’t going to stop for anything—I’d never get unstuck.

  The tracks the big tractor wheels made were already fading—Ruth had a huge head start. I slowly accelerated until I was doing almost thirty, but even going that slowly, the truck was sliding all over the road. I wasn’t sure I could control it if I went any faster. Mom had grabbed the handle above her head, clenching it with both white-knuckled fists.

  We’d only been driving about two minutes when the truck’s engine started knocking. At first, it was just a metallic tick-tick-tick. But soon it grew to be more of a muffled clang-clang-clang coming from the engine compartment.

  “What’s that?” Mom asked through tensed lips.

  I kept my eyes glued to the road. I was leaning forward, fingers twitching on the wheel, turning into each little skid as it started, using every trick I knew to keep us on the road. “The ash. It’s getting into the engine. Tearing up the valves.”

  “If the truck dies, how’re we going to get home?” Mom asked.

  “We’ll take the tractor.”

  “And what if we can’t find it?”

  I was going to find it. I’d put too many hours into that tractor over the last eight years to let some crazy grandma make off with it.

  “Darla . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s getting worse.”

  She was right. The clanking had escalated into more of a full-blown clangor. I goosed the accelerator, nudging our speed up to thirty-five.

  “We need to turn around,” Mom said.

  “No.” An annoying wetness was filling my eyes. I lifted my right hand from the wheel briefly to rub them.

  “Turn around. Now.”

  “No!”

  Mom slid her left foot over, and before I realized what was happening, she had jammed on the brake. The truck slewed wildly, whipping through a 540-degree turn in seconds. It stalled, miraculously coming to rest in the middle of the road, facing in the opposite direction.

  I gasped, trying to catch my breath. “You really . . . shouldn’t have . . . done that, Mom.”

  She just nodded. She was as white as a rabbit’s belly fur.

  I tried to start the truck. It made a grinding noise, but it started. The clanging noise was almost deafening, and the whole truck shook. It felt like the pistons were beating the engine to pieces.

  I eased the truck into gear. Of course, the wheels just spun in the wet ash. We were stuck again.

  Chapter 12

  Mom and I were in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t see any buildings nearby, just a few lonely stalks of corn still peeking up from the interminable ashfield. The truck clanked alarmingly, so I shut it down to save what remained of the engine.

  I clambered out of the truck to the field beside the road and started digging through the ash with my hands. It took more than an hour to gather enough cornstalks to make a thick pad of them in front of all four wheels, even though Mom got out and helped me.

  There was no way we’d catch Ruth now. I wasn’t even sure we’d make it home. I started the truck and slid it into gear again. I gently eased my foot onto the accelerator. At first, nothing happened. I glanced at the rear-view mirror—cornstalks were shooting out behind the truck, flung by its spinning wheels. But then something caught, and we lurched into motion.

  I took the return drive much slower, never passing about fifteen miles per hour. The truck lurched and shivered, and the noise the pistons made was deafening. Mom and I might have been able to talk by shouting, but we didn’t.

  I ground my teeth, thinking about Ruth. Los
ing my tractor felt almost as bad as getting kicked in the gut by a cow. This is what kindness gets you, I thought: an aching hole where your chest used to be.

  I was sure we wouldn’t make it home, so when I caught sight of the peak of our roof, I gasped in relief. As I pulled the truck up beside the barn, I moved my foot from the accelerator to the brake, and the truck sputtered and died.

  “Well, that was an adventure,” Mom said.

  “I wish I’d run that woman over more thoroughly,” I replied.

  “We did the right thing. She’ll get her just rewards, in this life or the next.”

  “Maybe. I don’t want to talk about it. Ever.”

  “Okay.”

  Mom and I climbed out of the truck. I slammed the door as hard as I could, kind of hoping the whole thing would fall apart from the force of my frustration. Mom walked around to my side and wrapped her arm over my shoulder. I fought back tears as she led me back to the house, her arm a comforting weight against my back.

  Chapter 13

  The morning after we returned from our fruitless search for Ruth and my tractor, we dug more corn, working by hand. Every spadeful of ash I threw made me angrier. A task that would have taken fifteen minutes with my tractor dragged on all morning.

  In the afternoon, we shucked and ground the corn. It took less than an hour to finish up the grinder. It was an amazing improvement over the mortar and pestle. The concrete stones threw a lot of grit into the meal, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt us. Mom poured kernels of corn into the gristmill while I pumped away on the bicycle, turning the grindstones. We left the barn doors wide open to let in the wan, yellowish afternoon light.

  We were almost finished when a figure on skis appeared in the doorway. He was short and slight, maybe just an inch taller than I was. His whole right side, from his ribcage down, was drenched with blood. He carried a long staff in one hand and a ski pole in the other. Just as I noticed him, his skis slid down the short drop to the barn floor and caught in the dirt and straw. He pitched forward, hitting his head.

  Mom dropped the bag of corn kernels and rushed toward him. I stopped pedaling and scrunched my eyes closed for a moment.

  Not again! I thought as I jumped off the bike to help Mom.

  Acknowledgements

  A huge thank you to my brilliant writing group, the YA Cannibals, for suffering through two early drafts of this story. If it’s any good now, part of the credit goes to Robert Kent, Lisa Fipps, Shannon Lee Alexander, and Jody Sparks.

  Thank you to my wife, Margaret, for suffering through at least four early drafts of this story.

  Thank you to Peggy Tierney for her generous and insightful editorial feedback and to Dorothy Chambers for fixing my atrocious grammar and spelling. Many thanks to Ana Correal for the cover image and to Emlyn Chand for figuring out how to turn my mess into a real ebook. Without all of you, Darla’s Story would not exist.

  About the Author

  Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really glad this writing thing seems to be working out.

  Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Ashen Winter is his second novel. His debut, Ashfall, was named one of the top five young adult novels of 2011 by National Public Radio, a Best Teen Book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and a New Voices selection by the American Booksellers Association.

  Learn more or contact Mike at www.MikeMullinAuthor.com.

  More from the Ashfall Series

  Book 1: Ashfall

  Many visitors to Yellowstone National Park don’t realize that the boiling hot springs and spraying geysers are caused by an underlying supervolcano. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, and it will erupt again, changing the earth forever.

  Fifteen-year-old Alex is home alone when Yellowstone erupts. His town collapses into a nightmare of darkness, ash, and violence, forcing him to flee. He begins a harrowing trek in search of his parents and sister, who were visiting relatives 140 miles away.

  Along the way, Alex struggles through a landscape transformed by more than a foot of ash. The disaster brings out the best and worst in people desperate for food, clean water, and shelter. When an escaped convict injures Alex, he searches for a sheltered place where he can wait—to heal or to die. Instead, he finds Darla. Together, they fight to achieve a nearly impossible goal: surviving the supervolcano.

  Learn more or order your copy at MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books.

  Book 2: Ashen Winter

  It’s been over six months since the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Alex and Darla have been staying with Alex’s relatives, trying to cope with the new reality of the primitive world so vividly portrayed in Ashfall, the first book in this series. It’s also been six months of waiting for Alex’s parents to return from Iowa. Alex and Darla decide they can wait no longer and must retrace their journey into Iowa to find and bring back Alex’s parents to the tenuous safety of Illinois. But the landscape they cross is even more perilous than before, with life-and-death battles for food and power between the remaining communities. When the unthinkable happens, Alex must find new reserves of strength and determination to survive.

  Learn more or order your copy at MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books.

  Book 3: Sunrise

  The Yellowstone supervolcano nearly wiped out the human race. Now, almost a year after the eruption, the survivors seem determined to finish the job. Communities wage war on each other, gangs of cannibals roam the countryside, and what little government survived the eruption has collapsed completely. The ham radio has gone silent. Sickness, cold, and starvation are the survivors' constant companions.

  When it becomes apparent that their home is no longer safe and adults are not facing the stark realities, Alex and Darla must create a community that can survive the ongoing disaster, an almost impossible task requiring even more guts and more smarts than ever—and unthinkable sacrifice. If they fail . . . they, their loved ones, and the few remaining survivors will perish.

  This epic finale has the heart of Ashfall, the action of Ashen Winter, and a depth all its own, examining questions of responsibility and bravery, civilization and society, illuminated by the story of an unshakable love that transcends a post-apocalyptic world and even life itself.

  Coming March 17, 2014. Learn more at MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books.

  Bonus Read

  Check out the first two chapters of Ashfall for free.

  Chapter 1

  I was home alone on that Friday evening. Those who survived know exactly which Friday I mean. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing, in the same way my parents remembered 9/11, but more so. Together we lost the old world, slipping from that cocoon of mechanized comfort into the hellish land we inhabit now. The pre-Friday world of school, cell phones, and refrigerators dissolved into this post-Friday world of ash, darkness, and hunger.

  But that Friday was pretty normal at first. I argued with Mom again after school. That was normal, too; we fought constantly. The topics were legion: my poor study habits, my video games, my underwear on the bathroom floor—whatever. I remember a lot of those arguments. That Friday they only fueled my rage. Now they’re little jewels of memory I hoard, hard and sharp under my skin. Now I’d sell my right arm to a cannibal to argue with Mom again.

  Our last argument was over Warren, Illinois. My uncle and his family lived there, on a tiny farm near Apple River Canyon Stat
e Park. Mom had decided we’d visit their farm that weekend. When she announced this malodorous plan, over dinner on Wednesday, my bratty little sister, Rebecca, almost bounced out of her chair in delight. Dad responded with his usual benign lack of interest, mumbling something like, “Sounds nice, honey.” I said I would not be going, sparking an argument that continued right up until they left without me on that Friday afternoon.

  The last thing Mom said to me was, “Alex, why do you have to fight me on absolutely everything?” She looked worn and tired standing beside the minivan door, but then she smiled a little and held out her arms like she wanted a hug. If I’d known I might never get to argue with her again, maybe I would have replied. Maybe I would have hugged her instead of turning away.

  Cedar Falls, Iowa, wasn’t much, but it might as well have been New York City compared to Warren. Besides, I had my computer, my bike, and my friends in Cedar Falls. My uncle’s farm just had goats. Stinky goats. The males smell as bad as anything short of a skunk, and I’ll take skunk at a distance over goat up close any day.

  So I was happy to wave goodbye to Mom, Dad, and the brat, but a bit surprised I’d won the argument. I’d been home alone before—I was almost sixteen, after all. But a whole weekend, that was new. It was a little disappointing to be left without some kind of warning, an admonition against wild parties and booze. Mom knew my social life too well, I guess. A couple of geeks and a board game I might manage; a great party with hot girls and beer would have been sadly beyond me.