Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  I helped her dig out the snow until the storm door would open enough for us to slip through. Darla tried the main door. It was also unlocked, opening with a creak as if it hadn’t been used in a while.

  “Who leaves their front door unlocked?” I whispered.

  “Lots of folks do. Or maybe whoever lived here wasn’t planning on being gone long.”

  We stepped into a small entryway. Beyond, I saw a living room plainly furnished with a battered oak coffee table and a sofa upholstered in worn, striped cloth. A huge limestone fireplace dominated one side of the room.

  “Should we call out?” Darla whispered.

  “Might as well.”

  “Anyone home?” she yelled.

  No one answered. I thought I heard a distant thump from outside, but I might have imagined it.

  We tiptoed through the living room into the kitchen. A dirty bowl rested in the sink. White fuzz covered it, like the stuff that grows on food left too long in the freezer. Neither the water nor the electric stove worked, of course.

  We searched the refrigerator and cabinets. Our whole haul was a box of cream of wheat with about two inches left in the bottom, a three-quarter empty can of Crisco, and four packets of Sweet’N Low. Not much of a meal.

  “Where’d the people go?” Darla said softly.

  “Dunno. Out to get food? They didn’t have much, that’s for sure.”

  “Let’s check the sheds.”

  We left the house the same way we’d come in and skied to the closest pig barn. Darla found the entrance: a door so short we’d have to duck to get through. A yellow handle, leaning against the metal wall, protruded from the snow. I pulled it free—it was a full-sized ax with a fiberglass handle and rusted iron head. I looked a question at Darla. She shrugged, and I put the ax down.

  I pushed down the lever-style doorknob. I’d only opened the door five or six inches when I heard a grunt, and the door was shoved closed violently from inside. I leapt back, holding my staff at the ready.

  Everything was still for a minute. It was quiet, other than the blood rushing in my ears and my heart thumping in my chest. I yelled, “Hello? Who’s there?”

  Nothing.

  I tapped the metal door a few times with my staff.

  No response.

  I started to open the door again, cracking it a few inches. A bit of snow fell past the bottom of the door into the space inside. It was too dark inside to see through the narrow opening. I stood and listened for four or five seconds. I heard a grunt and the door slammed again.

  “This is weird, let’s move on,” Darla said.

  I agreed with her, it was strange. But my hunger was stronger than my fear. “We need food.”

  “Maybe we’ll find another place farther on.”

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Look, whoever’s in there, if it comes to a fight, I need to be able to see.”

  “What is it with you and fighting, anyway? Let’s just move on. We’ll find food someplace else.”

  “There might not be anyplace else. And we need the food. Look, just give me a hand here.”

  Darla gave me the evil eye for a few seconds. “Humph.” Then she dug a candle out of the pack on my back and lit it.

  I unlatched the door, opening it a half inch, then stepped back and kicked it as hard as I could. It flew open about a quarter of the way and hit something solid. I heard a squealing noise and a series of thunks like wood hitting concrete, and then the door swung fully open. I ducked my head and charged in, holding my staff in front of me. Darla followed me with the candle.

  Inside, the candlelight revealed an abattoir. There were partially chewed hog carcasses everywhere. The floor was slick with frozen blood. Two live pigs were in full flight away from the door, their hooves striking the concrete floor, their heads streaked with fresh blood.

  Darla pointed. “Oh. My. God. What’s that?”

  I looked. To one side of the room there was a row of pens built with metal pipes. They were all empty. Beside one of them, I saw what Darla was pointing to. A man, or what was left of him, lay alongside the fence. One of his legs was obviously broken: a large yellow-white bone stuck out of his torn jeans, pointing almost directly at us. Half his face and most of his torso had been chewed way. The gnawed white ends of his ribs protruded like skeletal fingers from his chest. “That’s disgusting,” I said, turning away.

  “Yeah,” Darla replied. The two live pigs had moved around us, back to the door, while we looked at the corpse. They were lapping at the snow that had fallen into the barn, grunting and slamming into the door and each other in their haste to get fresh water.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  “This guy ran out of food, came out here with his ax to butcher a pig, I guess. Usually people send their pigs to a processor for slaughter, even if they’re going to eat the meat themselves, so he might not have known what he was doing. Somehow he broke his leg. Maybe the pigs were starving, thirsty, or whatever and crushed him against that fence. Once he bled out, well, pigs will eat anything.”

  “Gross,” I said. “Too bad there’s no food in here.”

  “Hello? There’s enough food here for both of us to live on for weeks.”

  “You want to eat—you can’t be serious.”

  Darla kicked one of the pig carcasses. It was frozen solid. “The dead ones would probably be okay to eat. But I was thinking we should butcher one of those.” She pointed at the two pigs licking snow by the door.

  “I don’t know—”

  “What, you don’t like pork?”

  “I like bacon, although it feels kind of slimy getting it out of the package.”

  One side of her mouth wrinkled. “City people. Let me see your knife.”

  I handed it to her. “You ever butcher a pig?”

  “No. But how much worse can it be than cutting up a rabbit?”

  It was way, way worse. Darla handed me the candle and retrieved the ax from where I’d left it outside the door. “Any idea what the best way to kill a pig is?”

  “What, you don’t know?”

  “Um, no. Maybe a whack on the back of the head? Like some people use for rabbits?”

  “Gonna need to be a heck of a whack.” These pigs were huge—two hundred pounds or more. “I dunno if that will do it. Hitting a person on the back of the head doesn’t usually kill them—it knocks them out or stuns them.”

  “Hmm, okay.”

  Holding the ax in a two-handed grip, Darla got alongside one of the pigs. She reversed the ax so the blunt end aimed down and raised it high above her head. The pig kept lapping at the snow, oblivious to the doom poised above it.

  The ax fell, thunking onto the back of the pig’s head. The pig went limp and slumped to the ground. The other pig let out a squeal and galloped away, seeking refuge at the far side of the shed.

  Darla dropped the ax and grabbed the knife. She plunged it into the underside of the pig’s neck, just above its chest, and pulled the knife upward toward its snout. It woke and thrashed, all four legs churning the air as if it were trying to run away. One of its forelegs caught Darla on her shin and she yelled, “Ow! Crap!” and jumped back, pulling the knife out of the pig’s neck.

  Blood fountained out, spraying her arm. The blood gleamed black in the candlelight. A few drops spotted Darla’s face. I felt suddenly ill and turned away. The pig began squealing nonstop, a sound that resembled nothing so much as a kid throwing a full-throated tantrum. We were forced to listen to that awful noise for at least five minutes before the pig finally bled out.

  I hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before. Still, when I saw the carnage in the pig shed, I’d lost my appetite. Now I felt so sick, I wasn’t sure whether I ever wanted to eat again. “If we live through this, I’m going to become a vegetarian.”

  “Not if I’m cooking for you,” Darla said.

  “That’s okay, I’ll do the cooking. Hope you like tofu.”

  “Tofu? Now that’s disgusting,”
said the girl whose arm dripped with pig blood. “Give me a hand with this.”

  Darla and I each grabbed one of the dead pig’s back legs and dragged the carcass outside. It left a wide, red smear in the snow.

  I volunteered to build a fire, hoping to avoid butcher duty. By the time I got the fire done, Darla had gutted the pig and was trying to hack the hams free with the hatchet. Her arms and chest dripped with pig blood. I looked down for a moment, trying to get my stomach under control.

  “That’s a lot of meat. Won’t it spoil?” I said.

  “If we had time, we could smoke it. But I’m guessing you’d rather not hang around here.”

  “Right.”

  “So I figured we’d try to cook it all and freeze it. If the weather stays cold, it should be fine in our backpacks.”

  “Okay. I’m afraid you’ll say yes, but is there anything I can help with?”

  Of course there was. So I wound up getting almost as bloody as Darla. It seemed like we wasted a lot of that pig—I left tons of meat clinging to its bones and skin. Darla just shrugged. “Yeah, we’re wasting a ton. But we can’t possibly carry it all, anyway. And this is a lot different than butchering a rabbit. I’m doing the best I can.”

  I was wrong about never eating again. The smell of roasting meat brought hunger surging back to my stomach. We ate a late lunch of very thick-cut bacon fried in our skillet over the open fire. Well, Darla said it wasn’t really bacon since it hadn’t been cured, but it tasted similar: juicier and much less salty.

  As I reached for my third slice, a thought occurred to me that stopped my hand in midair and brought my nausea back. “Um, so we’re eating this pig . . .”

  “Yeah?” Darla replied around a mouthful of pork.

  “And this pig ate part of that farmer. Doesn’t that make us cannibals?”

  Darla quit chewing. “Gross.” She thought a moment and then swallowed. “No. If a cow eats grass, and we eat the cow, then we aren’t grass eaters. In fact, we can’t eat grass. Cows have a special digestive system for that.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I thought about it for another second or so, then served myself another slab of side pork.

  It took all afternoon and part of the evening to finish roasting the meat. We spitted all the different cuts over the fire, which worked okay. Some of the meat was a bit burnt, and some was tough and hard to eat, but it would keep us alive.

  We buried the meat in a snow bank to freeze it. Darla worried about wild animals getting into it. I didn’t think that would be an issue because all the wild animals had probably died of silicosis. But it couldn’t hurt to be careful, so I spread the plastic tarp over our cache and weighed it down with three logs.

  After a late dinner, I built a fire in the farmhouse’s living-room hearth. I poked around in one of the bedrooms and found two clean flannel shirts. We discarded the overshirts we’d been wearing, as they were both drenched in pig blood.

  There were two bedrooms in the house, both with queen beds. They looked pretty inviting to me: plenty of room to spread out and, uh, do whatever. Darla said it was too cold in the bedrooms. She was right. We did just fine on the ratty old couch in front of the fire.

  Chapter 41

  Not long after we left the pig farm the next morning, we came back to Highway 52. I groaned. We’d spent two days skiing in a circle, damn it. At least we’d found the pigs—even though it had been disgusting, I felt a lot better with a full stomach and a heavy pack stuffed with pork on my back.

  We weren’t at the same place where we’d crossed 52 before. There was no sign of St. Donatus or the two sentinel churches. “You think we’re north or south of where we hit 52 the first time?” I asked.

  “South, probably. We were heading east, and we mostly turned right.”

  “Those roads were pretty twisty, though.”

  “Either way, if we turn right, we’ll eventually hit Dubuque. I’m not sure where 52 goes if we turn left, but I think it follows the Mississippi River.”

  I thought about Katie’s mom and her failed attempt to cross the Mississippi. “I don’t want to go to Dubuque.”

  “Me, either. Left it is.”

  The highway ran along a ridgetop for a few miles and then veered left and began a long decline. We picked up speed as the slope grew steeper—I raced along behind Darla, trying to stay in her ski tracks. The wind felt icy on my face, but still it was fun; soon we were laughing and screaming as we shot down the hill.

  We flew past a green road sign: Welcome to Bellevue, Population 2337. Then the road flattened out, and we were coasting through a quaint riverside town. Or rather, the buildings were quaint with lots of dark-brown brick and an old-fashioned main street. The town itself was weirdly deserted. There were no tracks in the snow, no signs of people. We skied past Hammond’s Drive In, Horizon Lanes, and a Subway. The storefronts gaped like monstrous maws, shards of glass in their smashed windows forming transparent teeth.

  Darla and I had fallen into an uncomfortable silence, mirroring the eerie quiet of the town. To break it, I asked, “Where are all the people?”

  “I dunno. Crossed the river to get help from FEMA, maybe?”

  I saw a drugstore, Bellevue Pharmacy. Its windows were smashed, too. “Let’s go in there and look around.”

  “You think they have some food? We’ve got plenty of pork, but I wouldn’t mind some variety.”

  “Well, um . . .” I felt the blood rush to my face and looked down.

  “Condoms.” Darla shook her head, but to my relief, she was smiling. “Okay. Look for sanitary supplies, too. I’d kill for something better than rags.”

  The drugstore had been thoroughly picked over. We searched for over an hour, even pushing two fallen shelving units upright to look underneath. We found nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. If we’d wanted to know what the latest celebrity gossip had been in August, there were plenty of magazines in the rack to inform us. The small electronics aisle was pretty much untouched. Hair dryers, curling irons, electric shavers, and electric toothbrushes were there for the taking. But everything useful—food, condoms, sanitary supplies, and drugs—was long gone.

  “That blows,” I said as we gave up the search.

  Darla squeezed my hand. “We’ll figure something out.”

  We skied down a hill to the river. The Mississippi itself had changed. A few years ago, my family had taken a three-hour riverboat cruise in Dubuque. Back then, the river had been wide and powerful, filling its banks from tree line to tree line. Now it was a narrow silver thread winding through a gray plain of ashy sludge. Upriver, I could see two barges, both partially grounded in the ash.

  The area at the bottom of the hill was fenced-off. A sign on the chain link read: Mississippi Lock and Dam Number 12.

  “Maybe we can cross here,” Darla said.

  “How? If the lock’s closed, sure, but—”

  “Let’s check it out.”

  That made sense—it couldn’t hurt to take a look. I climbed the fence. Darla tossed our skis over and followed me. The dam started at the far bank of the river and extended about three-quarters of the way across. Between us and the dam there was a lock, a huge channel over a one hundred feet wide and six hundred feet long, defined by massive steel and concrete walls at each side and a set of metal gates at either end. The upstream gate had been left wide open. The downstream gate was open, too, forced ajar by a barge stuck within its jaws. Atop both the gates and the walls ran wide metal catwalks. Dead fish lolled belly up in the water below us. It smelled atrocious, like the time Dad had brought home a bunch of bass from a fishing trip, gutted them, then left the trash in the garage for three weeks. (Actually, I was supposed to take the trash out. Whatever.)

  “How are we going to cross that?” I said.

  “We’ve got rope. We’ll climb down onto that barge.”

  “The drop looks like twenty-five or thirty feet. How will we get up the other side of the lock?” From where I stood, it looked like a long d
rop onto the barge’s hard, metal deck.

  “I’ll improvise something.”

  We climbed over another chain-link fence. That put us on the open-gridded metal walkway alongside the lock. We stepped along the catwalk, lugging our skis, and made a forty-five-degree turn as we followed it over the top of the lock gate. The ash and snow had fallen through the grid of the catwalk, but it was still slick with ice. I felt uneasy; there was nothing but a low, metal fence between me and a very long drop to the water below.

  When we reached the end of the gate, directly above the stuck barge, Darla dug the rope out of my backpack. She bundled the skis and lowered them to the barge’s deck, where they landed with a clang. Then she looped the other end of the rope around the top bar of the railing and lowered herself down hand over hand, clutching both strands of rope.

  Darla yelled “Come on down!” just like a game show host.

  I wasn’t too sure. It looked like a long way down. And I wasn’t very comfortable with heights. When I was in fourth grade, Dad had taken me to a huge sporting-goods store that had a climbing wall. He had needed new ski goggles, or something like that. Anyway, I bugged him ’til he let me try the climbing wall. It was easy and fun—I scampered up in no time. But when I stood at the top and peered over the edge, ready to turn around and rappel down, I just . . . couldn’t. Couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t step backward over the edge. Couldn’t even pull my eyes away from the drop. One of the store’s employees had to climb up and pretty much drag me off the edge so another guy could lower my rigid body. I spun on the way down, slamming my ankles into the wall, but I couldn’t move—I was frozen in terror. As far as I knew, Dad never told Mom or Rebecca about that incident. But he’d never offered to take me back to that sporting goods store, either.

  I climbed slowly over the railing and got a good grip, holding the ropes with both hands. I didn’t want to step off the metal platform. A little voice in my head screamed at me: Don’t do it! You’re going to fall! You’re going to die!

  But I couldn’t let Darla show me up. And this was the best way across the river. Plus, I wasn’t in fourth grade anymore. I’d faced far more dangerous situations over the last six weeks: the looters at Joe and Darren’s house, Target, the plunge into the icy stream. I could do this. I would do this.