Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  “That worked pretty well. We should try it again,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You riding on the back of my skis.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She climbed onto my skis, and I pushed off, carefully this time.

  We must have been quite a sight. Two gray-white ghosts, sailing down the rest of the hill on one pair of skis, cackling maniacally and trailing a plume of ash in our wake.

  The rest of the way into Worthington, Darla rode on the back of my skis whenever there was a downhill slope steep enough, which wasn’t often. It was more than nice, feeling her back there, her hands clinging to my chest, although it made the skis harder to control. I hoped for more steep slopes, but most of the way was flat or gently sloped. I kept my pace slow on the flat parts, so we could travel side by side and talk. We chatted about nothing in particular, mostly life before the volcano. I wished this, or something like it, could go on forever: Darla at my side talking about nothing much and—occasionally—hugging me as we sailed down a hill.

  Chapter 25

  I first caught sight of Worthington later that morning, just as my stomach started to tell me it was lunchtime. Three huge gray cylinders loomed in the dimness ahead: grain silos, much bigger than the ones on nearly every farm around there.

  As we got closer to Worthington, I could make out a few other buildings, vague shapes beyond the silos. Between us and the town, a row of people worked in a field alongside the road. They were stretched in a long line, digging. Some of them had shovels, some had hoes, and some wielded only pointed sticks. There were men, women, and quite a few kids. Some of the kids looked younger than my little sister.

  When we got close, a man carrying a rifle detached himself from the diggers. He held it casually in front of himself, pointed at the ground between us. “You have business in Worthington?”

  “Since when do I have to have business to visit Worthington, Earl?” Darla replied.

  “That you, Darla? Didn’t recognize you under all that ash. What’ve you been doing, rolling in it?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “How’s your ma? I’ve been meaning to get out and check on you folks, but things have been a mite busy.”

  “Good as can be, I guess. We’re getting by, anyway.”

  “Glad to hear it. You can head on into town if you want. Guess I’ve got corn to dig.”

  “What, you don’t care what my business is now?”

  “Now, I’m sorry about all that, but there’s been folks coming down off Highway 20, thinking there’s corn in those silos—”

  “There’s not—” I shut up midsentence when Darla gave me a withering look.

  “Not right before harvest, there’s not. It’s all been sold and shipped out,” Earl said.

  “We’d better get about our business,” Darla said. “See you later, Earl.”

  We passed the granary and then a couple of large metal commercial buildings that had been squashed by the ash. A block farther the houses started, small ranch-style homes on big lots on either side of the road. The second one we came to had a sign out front: Smith Veterinary.

  From a distance, the house looked fine. The roof was mostly clear of ash. The metal barn beside the house was a different story. It looked as though an angry giant had smashed down his fist, punching the roof into the building. All four walls were standing, but the sliding metal doors had come off their tracks and hung cattywampus in the opening.

  Darla turned, and I followed her across the front lawn—well, the front ash field. When we got closer to the house, we could see that the lock was broken off the front door. It stood slightly ajar, and a breeze carried ash inside.

  Darla pushed on the door with her fingertips. It swung slowly open. The front hall was coated in a blanket of ash, smooth except for a raised rectangle that concealed the entry rug. Farther inside it was too dark to see anything.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” Darla called.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” I said, thinking it was downright creepy and wanting to move on.

  “No.” Darla pulled the door closed. It wouldn’t latch, but it was good enough to look shut from the street. She looked right and left, studying the neighboring houses. There was a curl of white smoke twisting out of a standpipe on the roof of the house to the left. We walked toward it across the ash field.

  The front door to this house was closed, and the lock looked intact. A piece of particleboard had been nailed over the upper part of the door, where perhaps there originally had been a window. Darla knocked.

  A rotund woman with a ruddy face answered the door. Two things caught my attention. First, she carried a rifle, but she was holding it by the barrel, so it dangled from her left hand. In no way was she ready to use it. Second, she was clean, shockingly clean—not a spot of ash on her face, hands, or apron. I hadn’t seen anyone that clean since I’d left the Barslow place over three weeks ago.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Darla replied. “We were looking for Doc Smith—”

  “And you are?”

  “Darla Edmunds. My mother’s Gloria.”

  “Oh, yes, your mother knows Mrs. Peterson?”

  “Yes ma’am, they used to play euchre together.”

  “I’m Jean. Jean Matthews.” She put down the rifle, leaning it in a corner.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Darla replied.

  “I’d invite you in but—”

  “We’re a bit dirty,” Darla said. “Sorry.”

  “Come around back, to the deck. You can help me get lunch out to the harvest crew.”

  “We were just looking for . . .” Darla said, but the woman had already turned away and closed the door.

  At the back of the house there was a big white propane tank beside their modest deck. A sliding glass door opened onto the kitchen. All four burners on the stove were in use. My mouth watered at the smell: bacon and corn.

  “It smells delicious,” I said.

  Mrs. Matthews smiled. “It’s only hasty pudding. I’d have been embarrassed to serve it before all this, you know. But now . . . well, it will keep a belly full.”

  Darla said, “About Doc Smith—”

  “I’ll tell you all about it on the way to the field,” Mrs. Matthews said. “We’ve got to get everyone fed.” Somehow it had become our job to help her feed everyone. I looked at Darla, and she shrugged.

  Mrs. Matthews bustled around the kitchen, packing a couple of big canvas bags with a mismatched assortment of spoons and ceramic mugs. She shut off the stove and handed the pots out the back door to us. There were four of them: big, heavy Dutch ovens. I wasn’t sure if I could carry them on skis, so I unclipped my boots and left my skis, ski pole, and staff on the deck.

  The three of us walked back out of town to the field where we’d met Earl. On the way, Darla asked. “So is Doc Smith working in the field? We stopped by his place, but the front door’s broken and nobody’s home.”

  “No, dear, Doc Smith passed on.”

  “Dead? Wha—how?”

  “He fell off his shed roof trying to shovel off the ash.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Lottie, she moved into the school. There’s a bunch of folks staying there now. But she doesn’t say much these days. Took Doc’s passing hard, poor thing.”

  “Hmm,” Darla said. “My rabbits are sick. I was hoping to ask Doc what’s wrong with them.”

  “The closest thing we have left to a doctor or vet is the paramedic down at the fire station. I hear he’s pretty good at setting bones and whatnot, but I don’t know if he’d be any help on rabbit sickness.”

  “Probably not.”

  “A lot of folks used to see a doctor up in Manchester, but I don’t know if he’s still there or not. We aren’t getting any news from them these days.”

  “Is the library open?” Darla asked.

  “Rita Mae’s library? Just try to shut it down. Mayor took her assistant to work in the fields, a
nd the front porch of her house collapsed, but she still opens that library every day. I hear she’s living on a cot in the back now. Her ghost will probably be in there lending books fifty years after she’s passed.”

  “We’ll see what we can find out there, thanks.”

  Darla and I helped serve lunch to the crew digging corn in the field. Hasty pudding turned out to be a sort of cornmeal mush flavored with bits of pork. After we’d served everyone else, Mrs. Matthews scooped a couple mugs of it for Darla and me.

  I didn’t recall volunteering, but somehow we wound up helping Mrs. Matthews haul all the dirty dishes back to her house. When we got to her back deck, she reached inside the sliding glass door for a broom. She handed it to Darla, telling her, “Beat the dust off that boy and then have him try to clean you off.”

  Darla took the instructions to heart. I felt like an old threadbare rug by the time she finished thwacking me with that broom, avoiding none of my parts except my side and my manhood—what was left of it, so to speak. I endured it without complaint by reminding myself that my turn to use the broom on her would come next. Mrs. Matthews was using a whiskbroom on herself, not that she needed to. Despite the hike to the field, everything but her pants legs was mostly clean. I couldn’t figure out how she did it—dust just didn’t stick to her.

  By the time I’d beaten most of the ash off Darla, Mrs. Matthews was already inside. When we stepped into the kitchen, she was carefully scraping out the remnants of hasty pudding from the Dutch ovens into a plastic leftover container. She finished the Dutch ovens and started on the mugs people had eaten out of. Most of them were already licked clean, but when she found even a speck of food, into the leftover container it went.

  But what really shocked me was when she put a stopper in the kitchen sink and began filling it. With water. From the faucet. I must have been staring, because she gave me a funny look and said, “You look like you’ve never seen indoor plumbing before, child.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I mean, yes, of course I have, but not since the eruption.”

  “Mayor’s responsible for it. Got a crew to go around after the noise stopped. Made everyone promise to use less than five gallons a day. Anyone uses more, their water gets shut off. They say the water in the tower might last a year.”

  “Smart guy, your mayor.”

  “Gal. Yep, she’s done all right. Helped organize the shelter at St. Paul’s school and the crews out there digging for corn. There’s folks that complain, of course, about the government rationing everything, telling them what to do and whatnot, but most see the sense of it and try to help.”

  The Dutch oven in the sink was full of water now. I grabbed a scrubby out of the plastic basket hanging in the sink and went to work on it. There was a bottle of Dawn beside the sink, but when I reached for it Mrs. Matthews knocked my hand away, saying something about how I’d ruin the finish on her good iron pans. I didn’t know; it seemed to me that a little soap would help get everything cleaner. Whatever.

  So I scrubbed while Darla rinsed and dried. It took us about a half hour to finish. By unspoken agreement, we hustled out of there as fast as we could just to keep Mrs. Matthews from volunteering us for any more jobs.

  Chapter 26

  The library occupied a third of a long metal building across from the town park. The rest of the building was shared by the city hall and fire department. A fire truck sat outside the big overhead door on one side of the building. It was halfway in the street and buried to its rims in ash, hopelessly stuck.

  Darla hiked toward the library door, and I slid along beside her. There were huge drifts of ash surrounding the building except in front of the doors, which had been shoveled clear. I glanced up and figured out why. Someone had cleared the ash off the roof, throwing it down in piles below the eaves.

  Darla tried the metal door labeled Worthington Public Library. “Weird, it’s locked. Supposed to be open.” She rapped on the door.

  I heard a click—the lock turning in the door. A muffled voice came from inside, “Come in.” I unclipped my boots from the skis and followed Darla through the door.

  The first thing that caught my eye was the huge double-barreled shotgun pointed at us. It gleamed in the light of an oil lamp. My eyes followed the barrel of the gun back to where it was planted against its owner’s shoulder. She was a tiny old woman; she looked smaller than the gun she was wielding. Her hair bloomed in a crazed white tangle above her eyes, which peered suspiciously along the barrel at us.

  “Christ!” Darla said. “What is wrong with Worthington? Does everyone here have to point a gun at me?”

  I didn’t say anything—just held up my hands and shuffled backward toward the door. Antagonizing a little old lady holding a shotgun seemed like a very bad idea.

  “Darla?” The woman behind the gun said. “Darla Edmunds?”

  “Yeah, it’s me, Rita Mae. Now would you put that goddamn gun down?”

  She leaned the shotgun against the circulation desk. “Now there’s no call to be cussing and using the Lord’s name in vain, young miss.”

  “Maybe not but sh—, I mean, that’s the third time in two hours someone’s pointed a gun at me. That’s not at all like people around here.”

  “Maybe not, but there’s good reason.”

  “What, the pheasants have flown up out of the ash to exact revenge for years of hunting? Worthington’s got to be the safest place in Iowa.”

  “Now don’t get all impertinent. Why, you know the Fredericks’ place, outside town? Someone broke in there and murdered them all. Horrible.” Rita Mae glared at Darla.

  I decided to interrupt before the argument got out of hand. “We came to see if you had any information about rabbit diseases.”

  Rita Mae swung her glare onto me. “And you are?”

  “That’s Alex,” Darla said. “He’s a . . . uh, friend.”

  “Well, son, I believe in free public libraries. But considering the situation we’re in, it’s become customary to offer something for the maintenance of the library in order to use our services. We’re in dire need of candles, batteries, lamp oil, and the like.”

  “I don’t have anything like that,” Darla said.

  “I might have a candle stub and a few matches,” I said.

  “What about food?” Darla asked. “That help?”

  “Certainly,” Rita Mae said. “A librarian can’t live by books alone, and I wouldn’t eat them if I could. Feel too much like cannibalism.” She shuddered.

  Darla dug through her pack and found one of the bags of cornmeal. “So, my rabbits. They’re running a temperature, and they keep climbing into their—”

  “Water bowls, right?” Rita Mae said. “You feel any funny bumps or growths on their bones, especially legs? Labored breathing, panting, or signs of respiratory distress?”

  “I haven’t noticed anything weird about their bones, but I haven’t checked that carefully.”

  Rita Mae pulled a book off the shelf behind her desk. “This is about the dig at Ashfall Beds. You know it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s a paleontology site in Nebraska. They’re digging up hundreds of animal skeletons there—ancient rhinos, deer, birds—”

  “Okay, but what does this have to do with my rabbits?” Darla asked.

  “I’m getting to that. About twelve million years ago, an enormous volcano erupted in what’s now southern Idaho. It’s the same volcano as Yellowstone, but the tectonic plate has moved above the volcanic hot spot, shifting it from southern Idaho to northwestern Wyoming.

  “The eruption dumped more than a foot of ash in northeast Nebraska, about a thousand miles from the volcano. The animals living there breathed in the ash and got sick with silicosis, a lung disease. Symptoms include high fever, respiratory distress, and unusual porous deposits on bones.

  “Since the animals were running a fever, they crowded into a watering hole to cool off. They died there and then were buried by drifting ash.”

&
nbsp; “So it’s breathing the ash that’s making my rabbits sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do I treat it?”

  “You can’t. Clean air will keep it from getting worse, but there’s no cure.”

  “Crap,” Darla said. “Sure hate to lose all of them—if I could keep five or six to breed I could—”

  “What about us?” I said. “Can we get this . . . silicosis, too?”

  “Yep. Don’t go outside without a mask, or at least a damp cloth over your mouth and nose. Stay in clean air, and try not to stir up the ash.”

  I remembered our ash-throwing fight on the way to Worthington. Brilliant. My thoughts were turning positively grim, so I changed the subject. “We got a bit of a radio broadcast at the farm, but nothing about what’s going on east of here. You heard anything here?”

  “Everyone with a working radio’s been listening for news. Mayor organized info sharing at City Hall next door. If anyone hears anything, they write it down and post it on the wall over there.”

  “Anything about Illinois? Warren? It’s not far from Galena.”

  “There’s a refugee camp outside Galena. Government says they’re focusing triage efforts on Illinois and setting up camps there for any Iowans who can make it across the Mississippi. Fools in Washington think Iowa’s a lost cause. Guess we’ll show them.” Rita Mae looked like she was sucking on a sourball.

  I didn’t say anything, but I was relieved to find out people were getting help in Illinois. Maybe my family would be okay.

  “You know anyone in town who might have an extra set of cross-country skis for sale?” Darla asked.

  “Might be. I’ve got a pair gathering dust in the basement. What are you offering?”

  Rita Mae haggled with Darla over those skis for more than half an hour. Darla wound up giving her both rabbit haunches and another bag of cornmeal on top of the bag we’d already given her as a “donation” to support her “free” public library. I had to throw in my candle stub and matches to seal the deal.