Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  I heard a groan from the front of the SUV.

  “Darla? You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. No.” Her head poked up above the bench seat. “What a story to wake up to. Christ.”

  “I don’t think we’d better go through Dubuque. Maybe we can find another bridge or build a raft.”

  “Okay. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Every night since then I’ve had the same dream—nightmare, I mean. I see those men crowded around that fire. But they’re not cooking my Roger. Instead, it’s Katie over that fire. And she’s screaming. She’s screaming—” The woman broke down into quiet, choked little sobs. She let my hand go and clutched her daughter’s corpse to her chest. The other two kids slept through it all.

  Darla volunteered to cook breakfast, so I went outside to try to dig a grave. I found a likely looking flat spot on the far side of the ditch. I cleared away the snow, mostly using my hands and arms. The ash layer underneath was frozen, but it was only a thin crust of ice. I broke it up with my staff and then scraped the ash up out of the hole using the butt end of a ski. Under the ash, the ground was rock hard. Little white tendrils of dead grass lay in clumps atop the frozen earth, bleached remainders of a dead world. I poked the ground with my ski. It was hopeless. Without a sharp spade or pickax, I couldn’t dig any deeper.

  After breakfast, we carried Katie’s body out to the shallow grave. Darla suggested we take off her pink jumpsuit, in case one of the other kids needed it. The woman glared at her, and Darla shrugged. I mounded the ash up over the body, but it was a very shallow grave—twelve inches deep at best.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t dig any deeper. The ground is frozen solid.”

  “It’s okay,” the woman said, “the ashfall claimed my Katie’s life, now it can have her body, too.”

  I said a prayer over the grave. I’d been getting way too much practice at leading impromptu funerals. I hoped this would be the last one.

  When we got back to the SUV, I saw Darla had repacked our gear. Jack was poking his nose out of the top of her knapsack. I opened my pack. We had five bags of cornmeal left. I pulled out three of them.

  “What are you doing?” Darla’s eyes narrowed.

  “I’m leaving them some food. They’ve got nothing to eat.”

  “What the hell? And exactly what are we going to eat? That’s probably not enough to make it to Warren, even before you give most of it away.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer. She was right. There wasn’t enough there for two of us to make it to Warren. I thought about Mrs. Barslow, who’d fed me steak and stayed up late to wash my clothes. She should have let Elroy run me off. Darla’s mom should have rolled me back out into the ash outside their barn. If all we did was what we should to survive, how were we any better than Target? I took out three water bottles and the frying pan.

  “You can’t, absolutely cannot leave the pan here, Alex.”

  “How are they going to melt snow for water? They don’t have one.”

  “I don’t know, and it’s not my problem. Why didn’t they bring their own damn pot and water bottles?”

  The woman had dropped through the hole into the SUV as we argued. “Roger had them in his pack: the water bottles and pans.”

  “Christ.” Darla grabbed the knife, hatchet, and my staff and threw herself out of the SUV. “Just wait here!” she yelled back through the broken window.

  “She’s right, you know,” the woman said. “You don’t owe us anything. You should keep your supplies. Keep your wife alive.”

  “She’s not my wife.” Somehow, that made the situation feel even worse, the fact that she agreed with Darla. I took another bag of cornmeal out of the pack and set it with the pile of supplies I was leaving behind.

  Darla was gone quite awhile. After forty minutes or so, we heard banging and screeching sounds coming from the front of the SUV. She returned a bit later, carrying a concave chunk of the truck’s front quarter-panel. Two edges were roughly sawn, as if Darla had used the hatchet or knife to cut the sheet metal. I’d had no idea that was even possible.

  “You can melt snow with this. But watch the sharp edges around the kids.” Darla tossed down the improvised pan and jammed our skillet back into my pack.

  “Thank you,” the woman said. “And . . . I’m sorry.”

  Darla grabbed the woman’s coat and got right in her face. “We might die because of all the stuff my stupid, softhearted boyfriend is leaving you. So don’t you die, too. You take this stuff, and you keep yourself and your kids alive. You hear?”

  “I hear.”

  I didn’t care much for being called stupid and softhearted. The boyfriend bit I could live with.

  Darla grabbed her pack and dove through the hole, going back outside. I grabbed the woman’s hand, gave it a goodbye squeeze, and followed Darla.

  Chapter 39

  Despite our late start, the day was still dim and overcast, adding to the now-normal haze of high-atmosphere dust and sulfur dioxide hiding the sun.

  Darla set off at a furious pace. She stomped up the hill in a duck walk so fast I could barely keep up. We headed south on 151, following the tracks we’d made the day before.

  About two miles on, we hit a crossroads. We turned left and set off across virgin snow.

  Lunch was a sullen affair. We stopped and sat on a snow-covered guardrail. I dug out a strip of dry rabbit—our last meat, unless we ate Jack—and two cornmeal pancakes left over from breakfast. Darla got out a handful of cornmeal and fed Jack. Somehow, I didn’t think we’d be eating him any time soon. As we ate, I tried several times to start a conversation and got nothing but grunts in return.

  The land had changed around us. The hills were steeper here and more wooded. Instead of the gunshot-straight roads we’d followed earlier in the journey, this road meandered, following hillsides, creeks, or ridgetops. There were fewer farms, too. We spent large parts of the day with nothing but a partly evergreen forest on either side of the road. Then, occasionally, we’d pop out into huge open areas surrounding a farmstead. All the houses appeared to be occupied, so we avoided them.

  Late that afternoon, when I started looking for shelter, we were skiing through one of the wooded areas. I carefully watched the forest on either side for almost an hour, looking for a large pine broken near its base.

  I found a tree that might work and yelled for Darla to stop. It was one of the biggest pines I’d seen here, with a trunk almost two feet in diameter. It had broken six or seven feet off the ground. Behind the stump there was a huge hump that looked like a snowdrift extending for sixty or seventy feet. I figured that had been the rest of the tree, now submerged in ash and snow.

  Using my hands, I dug a small tunnel alongside the stump. The fallen tree had created a protected space underneath it. I took the hatchet from my belt and chopped off some of the downward-pointing limbs. That created a nearly ideal spot to spend the night: dry, warm, and hard to see from the outside. The pine branches would make for a soft bed, too.

  I yelled out, “Come on in. It’s nice in here.”

  Darla crawled through the hole and glanced around in the meager light. “Great idea. It even smells good.”

  “Yeah, I spent one night under a tree like this a few days after I left Cedar Falls. It was okay. It might be a bit cold, but we’d probably better not light a fire in here. Too many dead pine needles.”

  “It’ll be warm enough with two of us.”

  We built a small fire in the snow outside and cooked corn pone. We used all of our cornmeal except for a few handfuls Darla saved for Jack. We wound up with enough pancakes for two more meals, maybe three if we rationed them.

  After dinner, I made a bed in our shelter by laying out the tarp and both blankets. We snuggled together under the blankets. I’d taken off my coat, overshirt, and boots, but otherwise we were sleeping fully clothed—it was warmer that way. I probably smelled pretty foul, but Darla didn’t seem to mind. I could smell her sweat, too, b
ut somehow it made me want to pull her closer, not push her away.

  We lay there a long time. I couldn’t sleep, and I could tell from her breathing that she wasn’t sleeping either.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “about giving away most of our food, I mean.”

  Darla rolled over. I couldn’t see her, but I felt her lips press against mine. We kissed—a long, wet smooch. “It was dumb.”

  “I wouldn’t have survived if nobody had helped me. Mrs. Barslow, your mom . . . Anyway, you could have stopped me. It was your food, not mine.”

  “It was our food. And I said it was dumb, not wrong.” She kissed me again. “I know I’ve been bitchy today—”

  “No, you’ve—”

  “I’m scared.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s just . . . when I was on the farm, I knew we’d be okay. I knew where to get food. I knew where I’d sleep at night. Mom was . . . well, I knew I could get help. Now who knows where we’ll get anything to eat. Who knows what crazy crap we’ll run into tomorrow.”

  “I won’t let anything happen to you, Darla. I promise.” Even as I said it, I knew it was stupid. All kinds of bad stuff could happen that would be totally out of my control. Still, it felt right.

  We kissed again. I planted little kisses on the corner of her mouth, her cheek, along the line of her neck. When I kissed her ear, she giggled and pulled away. “That tickles.”

  “The first time I saw you, I thought you were a funny-looking angel. They’re not supposed to wear overalls or ride bicycles, you know.”

  Darla kissed me again. When we broke the kiss, she whispered, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” The words tumbled from my lips without thought. I realized I was only giving voice to what I’d felt for a long while: I’d been in love from almost the moment we’d met.

  “Do you think we’ll live through this?”

  “We will.”

  “How do you know?”

  I shrugged. There was no way she could have seen the gesture, but we were pressed so tightly together, I was sure she felt it. “I believe we will.”

  “I believe it, too.”

  We fumbled with each other’s shirts. I felt the slick fabric of her bra pressed against my chest. Her fingertips traced the scar at my side, bumping over the ridges her stitches had left in my flesh. When her hand grabbed the tongue of my belt, I stopped her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “It’s um . . . I don’t think we should—”

  “You’re not ready? Isn’t that the girl’s line?”

  “Um, no, I want to—I want you. But what if you get pregnant?”

  Darla let my belt slide out of her hand. “I dunno—I can’t worry about stuff that might happen nine months from now. I’m not totally convinced we’ll survive the next week.”

  “We will.” I tried to sound confident, but I wasn’t totally convinced, either.

  She wrapped her arms around me, and we held each other in the quiet darkness for a while.

  “So, have you ever done it?” she asked.

  I was glad for the darkness then; it hid my blush. “No. I only had one real girlfriend. Selene Carter. We, uh, messed around some, kind of like you and I are now.”

  “That’s a pretty name, Selene. Is she still in Cedar Rapids?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. We broke up last spring.”

  “She didn’t want to?”

  “I dunno if I was ready. She wasn’t, or didn’t like me enough, or something. It wasn’t a big deal, really. I didn’t mind. Well, until she dumped me. I minded that.”

  “I would . . . I mean, I feel like I’m ready, with you, anyway. But you’re right; it would suck to get pregnant. Maybe we could find some condoms or something.”

  “Yeah.” Condoms instantly shot to the number-one position on my mental list of must-find survival supplies—far ahead of food, water, and a way across the Mississippi.

  Darla was quiet for a while.

  To break the silence, I asked, “What about you?”

  “Sex, you mean? No. I was going to let Robbie McAllister do it. I mean, I was thinking about doing it with him or whatever. We’d gotten pretty hot and heavy, but then he got all pissy about how I was always working on the farm and would never go to the movies in Dubuque with him. So I dumped him.”

  “Pretty tough to keep up that farm and have a social life.”

  “Yeah.”

  Darla was silent for so long, I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. When I was sure she had, she whispered, “You know, there’s plenty of stuff we can do without any chance I’ll get pregnant.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  When she reached for my belt this time, I didn’t stop her.

  Chapter 40

  About an hour after we set out the next day, the road left the ridgetop wood. Below us lay a huge valley blanketed in brilliant snow. On the right side of the valley, high on a hillside, a massive church stood alone. It looked old and imposing, its dark brick bell towers glowering over the snow below it.

  On our left, high on the opposing hillside, a second church stared across the valley at the first one. This church was white, limestone or marble maybe, and if possible, even more ornate and imposing than the first. A small town nestled below the second church.

  We skied down to where the road we were on teed into a highway. There were two road signs there: Highway 52 and Welcome to St. Donatus. Even from a distance, we could see footprints everywhere in the town’s snow-covered streets. A few of the sidewalks had even been shoveled. Darla and I skirted around the edge of the town. It seemed unlikely that anyone would want to share food with a couple of strangers. And if they couldn’t help us, there was no reason to run the risk that they might try to hurt us.

  On the far side of St. Donatus we caught a small, unmarked road that continued east, passing near the white church. As I skied between the two churches, I had the feeling they were looking down on us, blessing our journey. Maybe it was an aftereffect of the night before, but I felt more hopeful than I had since we’d left Worthington.

  * * *

  By that afternoon, the hopeful feeling had left me. The road, which had been heading steadily east, began twisting unpredictably. Sometime after lunch, I completely lost track of which way we were going. Darla thought we were still heading east, but she also said we should have hit the Mississippi by then. We had only passed two farms, but both were obviously occupied, so we hadn’t found any food.

  A bit before dark, Darla spotted a low structure near the road. She skied around it and found an open doorway at the far side.

  It was too low to stand up inside the building. The ceiling was about three feet high at one side of the shed and five feet or so at the other. We had plenty of room though: the building was seven or eight feet wide and at least thirty feet long. It reeked of pig crap.

  “Sleeping in a pigsty. That’s a new low,” I said.

  “It’s a pig barn, not a sty. Pigsties are outdoor corrals. Anyway, it beats sleeping in the snow.”

  “I guess. Where are the pigs?”

  “I dunno. Dead or in a barn closer to the farmhouse, maybe.”

  We ate our last two pancakes. Darla fed Jack from our dwindling supply of cornmeal.

  We laid out our bedding in the cleanest-looking corner. I was hoping to fool around some more, but Darla just gave me a quick kiss and rolled over. Maybe she was tired, or maybe eau de pig crap didn’t turn her on. Couldn’t say I blamed her—much.

  * * *

  Only Jack got breakfast the next morning. I thought about suggesting we cook the last bit of cornmeal instead of saving it for the rabbit, but that would’ve made only one pancake.

  The road ended in a T not far from where we’d spent the night. I wasn’t sure which way to turn. I asked Darla, but she was as lost as I was. Her mechanical skills didn’t include directional aptitude, apparently. We turned rig
ht, figuring that if we’d generally been heading east, that would turn us south, away from Dubuque.

  By lunchtime, we’d been forced to make two more turns. We’d had to guess which way to go each time. The roads were getting narrower and the ditches at the side shallower. Where the road ran through trees, it was easy to follow. Where it ran through open fields, we had trouble. We’d seen no sign of the Mississippi, although Darla said the steep hills here meant we were close.

  Lunch was a short rest break and some water. I struggled to think of anything other than food. But my mind returned over and over to corn pone, to the bags of cornmeal I’d left with Katie’s mom. I wondered what Darla was thinking. Giving our food to Katie’s mom seemed more boneheaded by the minute. I remembered desperately scrounging for Skittles in the gas station on Highway 20. How hungry and weak I had been. We needed to find food soon.

  Less than an hour later, we came across another farmhouse. It was hidden at the back end of some twisty, no-name road. There was a small, ranch-style house and four big, low sheds, maybe ten feet wide by fifty feet long. Arrayed along the outside of the sheds was a series of big metal silos and tanks connected to the sheds by a system of pipes.

  “Pig farm,” Darla said.

  I sniffed. The air was cold and clean, with a hint of pinesap from the nearby woods. “How can you tell?”

  “Low sheds with silos and water tanks connected to them by an automatic feeder system—it’s a pig farm.”

  “No tracks I can see. Check it out?”

  “Yeah.”

  We skied up to the house. Everything was quiet and still—too quiet. It made me nervous. Darla popped the bindings on her skis. She tried the storm door—it was unlocked, but it wouldn’t open because too much snow had drifted up against it.