Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  I didn’t feel much of anything. No gladiator’s thrill of victory. Not even relief. Just a numb horror at all the senseless death Target had left in his wake.

  Flames were already spreading in the dry hay and shooting up the barn walls. I glanced around for Darla and found her standing at the edge of the loft, staring down at Target. I grabbed the aluminum ladder and threw it into place. Darla just looked at it.

  “Hurry up! Go, go, go!” I screamed.

  Darla climbed onto the ladder and started down, so slowly she might have been on the way to her own funeral, not trying to escape a burning barn. I jumped on behind her. I wanted to kick her in the head, her pace was so frustrating. Instead, I kept screaming at her. When we finally got down, I grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the barn.

  I froze and stared in shock. Target had obviously started with the house. It was completely engulfed in flames. The fire at my house in Cedar Falls was a weenie roast in comparison.

  I clenched my fists and screamed. All our food, our water bottles, tarps, clothing—everything was in that house. I thought about trying to save something by running into that inferno. But as I watched, part of the roof collapsed. It was hopeless. Without any supplies, we’d die for sure. The only question was what would kill us first: silicosis, cold, thirst, or starvation.

  I ran back into the barn. The heat and smoke seemed to suck all the oxygen from my lungs. I grabbed our skis, poles, and Mrs. Parker’s bö staff and ran outside, dumping them in a pile at Darla’s feet.

  As I gasped cleaner air, I tried to think. There had to be a way to salvage something from this fiasco. Then it hit me: Target’s backpack. Surely he’d scavenged supplies from the house—supplies that might keep us alive.

  I dove back into the barn. Target’s torch had started a fire by his face, but the backpack looked okay. I grabbed it and yanked. Nothing. The backpack wouldn’t budge. Target was on his side, his back toward me. One arm was under him, and the other one was flopped into the fire. The heat was so intense I could barely grab the backpack, let alone Target.

  I tugged on the backpack, trying to drag Target away from the fire so I could get the pack off him. My feet slipped in the straw, and I screamed in frustration.

  The hatchet on Target’s hip caught my eye. I yanked it out of his belt loop and hacked at the backpack straps. I missed once and buried the hatchet in his side, ironically in about the same spot where he’d gouged me three weeks before. Blood dripped from the hatchet’s blade. I chopped at the straps a couple more times before the backpack came free. I ran outside.

  I dropped the backpack and hatchet and collapsed in the ash. Darla mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I rested my head in my hands and gulped fresher air. Darla mumbled again.

  “What was that?”

  “My rabbits . . .” she murmured.

  Crap. I’d totally forgotten them. I struggled back to my feet and ran into the blazing barn.

  It was impossible to breathe, hotter than the inside of an oven and full of smoke. I held my breath and stumbled into the rabbits’ room. Somehow I found the row of cages. I opened two, and got a rabbit under each arm. They were limp: dead or passed out from the smoke, I couldn’t guess.

  I ran outside and passed the rabbits to Darla. I tried to go back, but it was impossible. My skin already felt burnt, like a bad sunburn. I couldn’t get within five feet of the barn door now, the heat had grown that intense.

  I turned back to Darla. “It’s too hot. I can’t . . . sorry.” She was sitting in the ash, cradling the rabbits in her lap and petting them. They weren’t moving at all.

  I inventoried the contents of Target’s pack. It was a jackpot. A big plastic tarp and two heavy blankets were rolled up on top. Under those I found a dozen full water bottles, six bags of cornmeal, a frying pan, what looked to be our entire supply of smoked rabbit meat, a coil of rope, all the matches and candles from Mrs. Edmunds’ kitchen drawer, and the five-inch chef’s knife I’d carried from Cedar Falls. There was some clothing, too. Probably way too big for me or Darla. Anyway, the supplies would be enough to keep us alive and fed for a week, maybe longer with a little luck.

  I used a bit of the rope to repair the backpack straps where I’d hacked through them. Darla was still petting the rabbits. One of them was moving a little. The other was clearly dead. I took the limp rabbit from her and got the chef’s knife.

  “Will you help me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I could butcher the rabbit by myself.

  Darla didn’t look up, just kept petting the rabbit squirming in her lap.

  Fine. I’d do it myself. I put the tip of the knife against the rabbit’s throat and started a downward cut. There were only a couple droplets of blood, but somehow it reminded me of the blood bubbling out of Mrs. Edmunds’ mouth . . . and Ferret’s body, his head lolling at an odd angle on the kitchen floor . . . and the soft thump as the grindstone crushed Target’s skull.

  I retched, bringing up nothing but scalding stomach acid. When I was done trying to vomit, I dug a crude hole with my staff and buried the dead rabbit.

  Darla watched.

  “We should go,” I said as I finished kicking ash over the tiny grave.

  Darla stared at the blackened husk of her home. The roof had collapsed completely. The walls and chimney still stood, but all the windows had burst from the heat. There were flames gnawing on the skeleton of the house here and there. Darla whispered something: “Mom,” maybe.

  “It’s okay,” I said. What a stupid thing to say. It definitely was not okay.

  Darla just stared. Maybe she was looking at the roiling brown smoke rising from the fire, searching for her mother’s face in the ever-shifting doppelganger cloud.

  I took one of her hands in mine, pulling it away from the rabbit. I led her closer to the house, until we could feel the heat from the fire on our faces.

  I stopped and tried to pull my hand away from hers, but she held on. “We should have buried her,” Darla whispered.

  One of the walls crashed inward, and sparks flew into the sky. “Some people get cremated when they die,” I said. “And she’s at home. I don’t think she would have minded.”

  We held hands in silence for a while. The rabbit squirmed in Darla’s other arm, and she gripped it tighter.

  “You want . . . should we say a prayer or something?” I said. “Like a funeral?”

  She nodded.

  I wished I hadn’t said anything. I’d only been to one funeral, for my grandfather almost ten years ago. At that moment, I couldn’t remember a bit of it, only the waxy pallor of his skin in the casket during the viewing and the way his dead hand felt—cold and plastic, nothing like real skin.

  But I had to try. “Dear God, um . . .” Not such a good start. I had no idea what to say. I stood silently, holding Darla’s hand, searching my brain for something, anything, to talk about. I thought about the first time I had seen Mrs. Edmunds pouring corn into the gristmill, right before I passed out on the barn floor. So I began there:

  “When I met Mrs. Edmunds, I was almost dead. I’d been running—skiing, I guess—away from trouble for days. I was bleeding, dizzy with pain, struggling to keep pushing one foot in front of the other. I was hoping for nothing more than a quiet barn to hide in, a place where I could heal or die.

  “Instead, I met Mrs. Edmunds and Darla. They took me in, fed me, and sewed up my side. I’m alive because of the kindness they showed to me, a complete stranger.

  “God, I don’t know if I caused Mrs. Edmunds’ death.” I tried to drop Darla’s hand, but she held on. “Maybe I led Target to her, or maybe it was just horrible luck. I wish . . . I wish Target had killed me instead of Mrs. Edmunds. I would have been dead anyway if not for her help.

  “But I can’t change that. And I guess You have some plan.” (A crappy plan, one that had transformed Iowa into an ashen hell, that had left Darla an orphan and me unable to discover whether I was an orphan or not. But saying all that wouldn’t help her.) “So I’m thank
ful that I met Mrs. Edmunds. She welcomed me, made me feel . . . loved, I guess. Wherever she is now, please welcome her the way she welcomed me, a bleeding stranger at her barn door. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Darla said. “I miss you already, Mom,” she added, whispering.

  I hugged her. We stood there a long time, warmed by the dying embers of Mrs. Edmunds’ funeral pyre, the rabbit squirming between us. Three fading sparks of life on an endless, burnt field of ash.

  Chapter 30

  I snapped my boots into my skis and shouldered Target’s pack. Darla hadn’t moved.

  “We’ve got to go,” I said.

  Darla stroked the rabbit.

  “Put your skis on and get your poles.”

  Nothing.

  “Damn it, Darla, we’ve got to go. There’s no shelter here now.” It was probably midmorning by now, and I was feeling antsy. I didn’t know why. The burnt buildings, Target’s body—I wanted to get away from the farm as fast as possible.

  But Darla wasn’t budging.

  I wanted to scream in frustration, but instead I said as gently as I could, “Put your skis on, now, please.”

  Finally, she moved. She transferred the rabbit to one arm and slowly clipped her boots into the skis.

  “Pick up your poles.” I tried to take the rabbit from her, but she shied away, clutching it with both hands. I gave up and handed the ski poles to her. She took both of them in one hand, the other still clutching the rabbit tightly against her chest.

  I sighed and pushed off powerfully with my pole and staff, heading for the road in front of Darla’s farm. About thirty feet off, I stopped and turned. She hadn’t inched forward at all.

  “Come on, Darla. Get moving!” I yelled.

  She shuffled out to meet me.

  It was excruciatingly slow. Darla held the poles as deadweight in one hand. Twice, the rabbit got unruly, and Darla dropped her poles to cuddle him. The second time, I stopped and strapped her ski poles to the back of my pack.

  We made better time then. At least the rabbit wasn’t holding us up—with both hands free, Darla could keep him under control. Better time didn’t mean we made good time, though. Without poles, Darla couldn’t balance as well or push herself along. I had to stop again and again to wait for her to catch up.

  I couldn’t keep going this way. I felt terrible for Darla. She’d lost her home, her mother, everything she’d built, and almost all her rabbits. I thought I partly understood how she felt—at that moment I wanted to stop, curl up into a ball, and let someone take care of me again. But even more than I wanted to check out and give my emotional wounds time to scab over, I wanted to live. Neither Darla nor I were likely to survive if we kept heading for Warren at a snail’s pace. So when we reached the intersection where I’d planned to turn east, I turned south toward Worthington instead. Darla followed me.

  A couple miles farther on, we skied down a steep hill into a small valley. A creek burbled merrily under the bridge at the bottom of the hill. It had washed away some of the ash from each bank, revealing a few tendrils of sickly yellow vegetation.

  I stopped, shrugged off my pack, and sat on the guardrail along the edge of the bridge. As I dug through the backpack, hunting for lunch, I talked to Darla.

  “We can leave the rabbit here. There’s water. There are some plants to eat. It’ll be okay.” I didn’t really believe this. That rabbit was dead either way. If it stayed with Darla, she’d probably eat it when she got hungry enough. The plants by the creek looked dead—and there weren’t enough of them to sustain a mouse, let alone a rabbit. I was just hoping she’d give it up, so we could move at a reasonable pace.

  “No,” Darla replied.

  Okay then, that was progress, I guessed. It was the first word she’d said since we’d left the farm over two hours before. I handed her a strip of smoked rabbit. Lunch.

  She held the strip of meat in one hand and the rabbit in the other and sat beside me on the guardrail to eat. The rabbit sniffed the meat and wrinkled its nose—in disgust, perhaps.

  When she finished eating, Darla rummaged through the backpack one handed. She came up with a handful of cornmeal and started feeding the stupid rabbit out of her hand.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted. “We need that food!”

  Darla gave no sign that she’d heard me. I yelled some more, but I might as well have screamed at the ash for all the good it was doing. I thought the rabbits wouldn’t eat corn, but it seemed to be nibbling on it now. Maybe it had gotten so hungry it couldn’t afford to be picky anymore. Anyway, I closed up the backpack and took off, skiing along the road to Worthington.

  I got about a half mile ahead of Darla before I felt guilty and stopped to wait. I thought about our other trip to Worthington, just the day before. In places where the road was sheltered from the wind, I could see our tracks in the ash: one set of ski tracks going, with Darla’s deep boot prints running alongside. Two sets of ski tracks returning.

  How different that trip had been: Darla riding on my skis down the hills, pressed up against my back, rolling around together in the ash, and playfully hurling handfuls of it at each other.

  Eventually, Darla caught up. I never let myself get more than thirty feet ahead of her the rest of the way to Worthington.

  The putrid yellow haze in the sky was slowly being replaced by gray twilight as we skied into Worthington. Incredibly, we’d made better time yesterday with Darla walking than we had today with both of us on skis.

  I led Darla through town to the school I’d seen yesterday, St. Paul’s. There were ramparts of ash around it where someone had shoveled off the roof. A cleared path led to the front door, but it was locked and dark inside. I banged on the door, but no one answered. Surely this was the right place? Several people had mentioned yesterday that this school was serving as a shelter.

  I slogged to the side door next to the gym, with Darla following. These doors were unlocked. I brushed as much ash off my clothes as I could, unsnapped my skis, and stepped inside.

  The gym here wasn’t nearly as large as the one at Cedar Falls High, but the scene inside was similar, if a little more chaotic. An elderly woman sat at a desk inside the gym doors, working by the light of a battery-powered lantern. The gym floor was covered with every type of bed imaginable laid out in a grid. There were leather couches, sleeper sofas, futons, cots, a bunch of twin beds, and even a heart-shaped monstrosity—a honeymooner’s red nightmare bed. Some of the beds were surrounded with makeshift enclosures, drapes hanging on rough frames made of two-by-fours, curtain rods, and rope. Most of the drapes were pulled back at the moment, I assumed to allow light into the sleeping areas.

  There must have been eighty beds in there, but there weren’t many people in the gym, only the woman at the desk, a couple of adults napping on couches, and a group of very small kids playing Chutes & Ladders on the floor.

  I stepped up to the desk. Nobody noticed me. The woman was completely engrossed in a piece of paper that had Duty Schedule printed in block letters across the top.

  “Uh, hi,” I said.

  The woman jumped halfway out of her chair. She whipped open one of the desk’s drawers and thrust her hand inside. I heard a metallic click, but her hand didn’t emerge from the drawer. I held my hands up by my shoulders, palms open.

  “Sorry I startled you,” I said.

  “You certainly did, young man. I’m going to strangle Larry.”

  That didn’t make sense, but I let it pass. “Darla and I don’t have a place to stay, and we heard this was a shelter. . . .”

  The woman removed her hand from the desk drawer and looked at Darla standing beside me. “Darla Edmunds? I heard you were in town yesterday. Heard you and your mother were doing well, all things considered.”

  Darla looked away.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. “They were. Doing well, I mean. Yesterday. But Darla’s mom is dead now, and she has no place to stay. I wondered if she could stay here for a while.”

  “Gloria�
�s dead? I’m so sorry. How?”

  “Bandits. They’re dead now. Darla and I killed them. But they burned—”

  A beefy guy emerged from the locker room and ran to the desk. “Sorry, Mrs. Nance. I think it’s all this corn. Gives me constipation—”

  She cut him off with a glare and struck through a name under “Security” on her duty roster. She wrote “Larry Boyle” in a column labeled “K.P.” Larry slunk off toward the gym doors. Mrs. Nance turned back to me, “Of course you can both stay here. You’ll need to work—everyone’s expected to do something. I’ve heard Darla’s a wizard with machines. There’s a crew trying to rig some of the old farm windmills to recharge batteries. That suit you, Darla?”

  Darla didn’t reply.

  “Yes, that sounds fine,” I said.

  Mrs. Nance frowned but made a note on her roster. “And your name, young man?”

  “Alex.”

  “Are you particularly good at anything?”

  “Not really.”

  “Field duty then, digging corn. You look strong enough.”

  “If it’s okay, I’d been planning to move on tomorrow. My family, they’re in Warren, Illinois. At least I hope they are.”

  Darla turned her head and stared at me then. She had an expression on her face that I found impossible to interpret.

  “Lot of lawless country between here and there,” Mrs. Nance replied. “And where are you planning to cross the Mississippi? I hear there’ve been riots in Dubuque.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’d noticed—about the lawless country, that is. And I hadn’t thought ahead about crossing the river.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  She teased the whole story out of me. I didn’t really want to talk about it. I tried giving her one-word answers, but she kept asking me questions, and gradually I gave her the whole story. My room collapsing in Cedar Falls. The three guys trying to invade Darren and Joe’s place. My lonely trek across northeast Iowa. When I finished, Mrs. Nance shook her head. “That’s quite a story, young man. I can offer you dinner tonight and one night’s lodging. I wish I had supplies to spare to help you along, but we have our hands full here.”