Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  Darla and I walked along the north edge of the camp. There was nothing beyond the fence here except the path the guards patrolled, an open space, and then the woods that began at the edge of the ridge.

  “I don’t think it’d take long to run to those woods from here,” I said.

  “Yeah. That coil of razor wire on top of the fence is a little bit of a problem, though.”

  “The captain said our names would be published in the roster—if my folks see it, they’ll come.”

  “Yeah. I’d rather have a good pair of wire cutters than a promise from that captain.”

  “Did he even take down our names?” I asked.

  “You know, I don’t think he did,” Darla said. “Bastard.”

  “I wonder if there’s any way to call my uncle or send him a letter? Or if the captain would let us, even if there were?”

  “Doubt it. For now let’s go back to where those guys in the yellow coats were cooking. At least it smelled good there.”

  By the time we got back across the camp, there was a line in front of the yellow coats’ kitchen. It was very different from the mob that morning—this was a fairly straight, orderly line with a few hundred people in it. Strangely, almost all of them were kids. There were a few mothers with babies up front and some kids with parents, but the line was mostly little kids by themselves. They weren’t playing or fighting the way kids did at restaurants when their parents weren’t paying attention. Some of them hung their heads, and some were sitting in the snow—on the whole, they looked miserable.

  Two of the yellow coats were inside the fence with us. They moved along the line, talking to a kid here and there. When they got close to where Darla and I stood, I could read the writing on their coats: Southern Baptist Conference.

  One of them approached us, a woman a few years older than my mom, with long, auburn hair. “You two can move up, you know.”

  “I don’t want to cut,” I said.

  “It’s not cutting. The line’s organized by age. Well, that was the original idea, but it didn’t work out, so we changed it to height. Come on.”

  We followed her to a spot about fifty places farther up. It was the first time I could remember being glad I wasn’t very tall. Darla could have moved another twenty or thirty places forward, but she wanted to stay with me. The woman in the yellow coat moved on, chatting and organizing the line.

  About fifteen minutes later the line began to jerk forward. Closer to the front, I saw a crowd of kids eating stew: black beans and ham served in Styrofoam bowls with plastic spoons. The acme of luxury—well, compared to breakfast.

  The same two yellow coats were inside the fence, watching the crowd. Outside the fence, the rest of the yellow coats were serving the soup or cleaning up. Two guards in fatigues stood out there, too, looking bored.

  We were about fifty feet from the front when everyone lurched to a halt. A low chorus of sighs floated down the line and then it dissolved—all the kids wandered away at once.

  I found the auburn-haired woman I’d talked to earlier. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why’d everyone leave?”

  “We’re out of food. Well, actually, we have food, but we’re rationing it, trying to make it last until the next shipment comes in. Even with as little as we’re serving, we’ll run out completely by next week if the truck doesn’t come.”

  “Oh.”

  “I trust—I have faith that God will provide. But everyone’s saying this winter may last for years. Food prices have skyrocketed. Everyone’s hoarding. The Baptists are one of the only churches still doing disaster relief, because we’ve been doing it for years. We were better prepared.”

  “So when is dinner?”

  “You are new.”

  “Got here yesterday.”

  “The camp quit serving dinner almost two weeks ago. They don’t have enough food, either.”

  “We’re supposed to live on one measly cup of rice a day?” Darla said.

  “For now. Our pastor is doing everything he can to find donations and to pressure FEMA to bring in more supplies.”

  We’d gone from a backpack stuffed with pork to this? I clenched my fists. Sure, some people might think we’d stolen the pork, but we’d worked hard butchering and roasting that pig. I’d never imagined that FEMA would make our food situation worse. But it obviously wasn’t this lady’s fault. I muttered, “Okay. Thanks,” and turned to leave.

  The woman caught me with a hand at the waist of my coat. “Trust in the Lord. You never know what He might put in your pocket.” She met my eyes briefly then walked away.

  Darla wanted to check out the vehicle depot again, so we meandered in that direction. We’d gotten just inside the first line of tents when someone bumped into my side, almost knocking me over.

  Darla yelled, “Alex!” but I was already side-stepping to regain my balance. I glanced to my right—a tall, wiry guy was trying to thrust his hand into my coat pocket. I grabbed him by the hand and spun, twisting his wrist and arm as I went. The move ended perfectly, with me behind him and to his left, controlling his outstretched arm. I kept pressure on his wrist with one hand and launched a knife-hand strike at his neck with the other.

  I didn’t know why I chose that strike. I could have kicked his knee, broken his elbow or wrist, or done any number of less lethal moves. The guy was yammering something and trying to pull away. I checked my strike at the last possible moment and only tapped his neck.

  “Ah! Crap, man. I was only looking for some food!” the guy yelled.

  I let go of his arm, and he ran, rubbing his wrist.

  We hadn’t gone twenty feet before another guy planted himself in my path. “Got a proposition for you,” he said.

  “I don’t have any food.” What the hell was it with this place? Couldn’t I take a walk without people bugging me at every other step?

  “I saw you handle that guy.”

  “I didn’t hurt him.”

  “Yeah, but you could have.”

  I shrugged.

  “We’ve got a place in our tent. Eight inches. You stand guard for three hours each night, you can sleep there.”

  “Eight inches?”

  He gave me a condescending look and started talking more slowly. “A safe place to sleep. Eight inches wide by six feet long. In a platform tent. The best kind. All you have to do is help guard it at night.”

  “I need two spots. She’s with me.” I gestured at Darla.

  “Can’t do it. I just have one. Only have that ’cause Greeley died last night.”

  “Forget it then.” I turned my back to him.

  “Wait a second,” Darla said. “We’ll take the one spot. Alex will stand guard half the night, and I’ll watch the other half. If another spot opens up in the tent, we get it, and we switch to the three-hour guard shifts you proposed.”

  “You know kung fu, too?” the guy asked.

  “It’s taekwondo,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know it,” Darla said. “I only know one move, though. Anything happens, I wake him up, and he beats the crap out of whoever’s messing with your tent. Okay?”

  “Works for me.” The guy showed us the tent and told us to be back at dusk.

  * * *

  We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the vehicle depot through the fence. I already knew Darla was weird, but this clinched it. She could spend an entire hour staring at a parked bulldozer. Every now and then she’d ask me a nonsensical question, something like, “Do you think that’s an auxiliary hydraulic system under those lifters?” Or “What kind of tool do you suppose they use to disengage the keyed link in that track?” The only response I could figure out was to shrug and grunt.

  It wasn’t all bad, though. I could spend an entire hour staring at Darla. Not that there was anything all that thrilling about either of us right then. We were tired, hungry, and wrapped in multiple layers of filthy winter clothing. None of that mattered to me; I was in love. I
thought Darla was, too—but maybe with the bulldozer.

  We’d been standing there awhile when I jammed my hands into my coat pockets to warm them. Something was in my right pocket—I took off my glove to investigate and found a handful of almonds.

  “Check that out.” I held my hand open against my chest so only Darla could see.

  “Those were in your pocket?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that’s what that lady was talking about—God will fill your pockets and all.”

  “Guess so. Nice of her to sneak us some dinner.” I split them up and handed Darla her share: six almonds.

  “Some dinner. More of a snack. Beats not eating, though.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, munching surreptitiously on my almonds.

  * * *

  That night I asked Darla to take the first guard shift. I figured she’d do a better job than I could deciding when to wake me up. I’ve never been very good at judging time, and without the moon or stars, I’d be hopeless.

  I stretched out in my eight inches of floor beside the door. I was nestled against an old woman—Greeley’s wife, I thought. I used my backpack as a pillow so that nobody could take it without waking me.

  It wasn’t too bad, being packed into the tent like that. Sure, it was uncomfortable; I couldn’t roll over without knocking knees and elbows with my neighbor. And it smelled bad, since nobody had showered in weeks. But the tent kept the wind out, and sleeping packed together kept us all warm. The worst part was lying there with nothing to do but think about the emptiness of my stomach. I was starving, but I’d only been without real food for two days. The other people in the tent were much worse off. Nobody talked about it much, but I could see the hunger in their hollow cheeks, hear it in their moans and sighs.

  I was finally starting to drift off when Darla kicked me. “Alex,” she whispered. “Get up.”

  I rolled under the tent flap and jumped to my feet. Darla led me to the far side of the tent at a run. I saw three guys there, kids really; they were probably younger than I. One of them was pulling up the side of the tent, while another knelt and jammed his hands under the canvas. The third was standing guard.

  I struck a pose, double outer knife-hand block. “Get out of our tent.” I tried to growl and sound like Clint Eastwood, but my voice cracked, and it came out more like Mike Tyson.

  The guy standing guard punched one of the others on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The other guy pulled his arms out of the tent and looked at me casually. “There ain’t nothing in this tent nohow.” He stood and the three of them backed away, watching me as they went.

  “Thanks,” Darla said. “That’s the third time tonight. The other two were alone, so I chased them off.”

  “Maybe I should take the first watch—it might quiet down later.”

  “Yeah, let’s try that. Wake me up whenever you get tired. We can always nap during the day.”

  I gave Darla a goodnight kiss, and she wormed under the tent flap to settle down where I’d been sleeping.

  I slowly paced the circumference of the tent, trying to keep my strides even and counting one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi as I went. I thought a circuit of the tent was taking me about forty seconds. During my seventeenth trip, I saw a man and a woman walking up. I planted myself between them and the tent and glared until they moved on. During circuit fifty-eight, I found a guy already halfway under the side wall—only his butt and legs protruded. Someone inside woke up and yelled. I grabbed the guy’s ankles, yanked him backward out of the tent, and watched him run off into the night.

  Things were quiet after that. When my count reached 360, I woke Darla. The blankets were warm and smelled faintly of her. I fell asleep instantly.

  Chapter 45

  I was awakened by someone kicking me accidentally as they tried to leave the tent. I grabbed my backpack and rolled out into the snow. Darla told me nobody had bothered the tent after I’d gone to bed—evidently the first shift was the busy one.

  Breakfast was the same as the day before: a mad crush and two-hour wait for six ounces of boiled rice each. The guards sprayed yellow blobs of paint on our left hands, partly covering the blue from the day before.

  We lay down in the tent after breakfast and took a nap together. Darla wedged the backpack between us.

  I woke to Darla shaking me. “Hey, sleepyhead. I think it’s time for the Baptists’ food line.”

  “Okay.” I shook myself fully awake and packed our blankets.

  This time we lined up separately. Darla was an inch shorter than I, so she could stand about forty feet ahead of me. The same two yellow coats were out chatting with kids and organizing things.

  Our new strategy didn’t help. There were still at least one hundred kids in front of Darla when the yellow coats ran out of food and the line dispersed.

  We caught up with the same longhaired lady we’d talked to the day before.

  “Thanks for the almonds yesterday,” I told her.

  She glanced around. “You might be mistaken—perhaps someone else gave you almonds. We’re not allowed to share our personal rations. Most of us would like to, but it caused . . . problems.”

  I whispered, “Well, thank your twin sister for me then, would you?”

  She smiled and whispered back, “Okay, I will.”

  “I was wondering, why don’t you get the wheat off that barge?”

  Darla elbowed me in the side. “Don’t talk about that, we might need it later,” she hissed.

  “There are a lot of people here that need it worse than we do,” I whispered back.

  “Wait, what are you two talking about?” the woman said. “A barge?”

  “Yeah, there’s a barge stuck in Lock 12, not far from here. It’s loaded with wheat. Must be hundreds of tons of it.”

  “Lock 12?”

  “On the Mississippi, in Bellevue. The barge is stuck in the lock. It might be tough to unload, but there’s plenty of manpower here.”

  Darla let out an exaggerated sigh. “The wheat would have to be ground. But I know how to make a mill. Or we could improvise a zillion mortars and pestles. Like Alex said, there’s plenty of manpower here.”

  “And it’s not far?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Fifteen or twenty miles, tops.”

  “Sounds like the answer to one of my prayers. You can show us where it is?”

  “Sure, no problem. But it’s right there in the lock, easy to find.”

  “What are your names?”

  “I’m Alex. Alex Halprin. This is Darla Edmunds.”

  “Georgia Martin.” She held out her hand. I hesitated a moment since mine was filthy, but she clasped my hand in both of hers, then shook Darla’s, too. “Good to meet you both. Let me talk to the mission director. I’ll look for you here tomorrow and let you know if we need you to show us the barge.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take that long. The next morning, we’d been waiting in the breakfast mob for about an hour when the loudspeakers mounted on the fence posts crackled to life. “Alex Halloran and Darla Edmunds, report to Gate C immediately. Alex Halloran and Darla Edmunds, Gate C.”

  “Guess that’s us,” I said.

  “Guess so, Mr. Halloran.”

  I scowled at Darla. “Well, it sounds sort of like Halprin.”

  “Hope this doesn’t mean we’re going to miss breakfast.”

  We fought our way out of the mob and jogged diagonally across the camp to the same gate we’d come through on our first day. As we approached, I saw Georgia standing on the other side of the fence with an older guy. His face was a little droopy, as if he’d lost a lot of weight recently, and he had a neatly trimmed fringe of hair around his otherwise bald pate. Georgia said something to the guards and they waved us through.

  “Thanks for coming. This is Mission Director Evans—”

  “Call me Jim, please,” the bald guy said. “Very exciting news you brought yesterday. How much wheat did you say i
s on the barge?”

  “I only looked into one of them, but it was packed. And there were nine barges tied together and stuck in the lock. If they all carried the same thing, I don’t know. . .”

  “Hundreds of tons,” Darla said.

  “Mysterious ways. . .” Director Evans muttered. Then he added out loud, “We have an appointment to see Black Lake’s camp commander, Colonel Levitov. Shall we go?”

  He led us into one of the large tents. It was a pavilion, really, much bigger than even the tent my cousin Sarah had had at her wedding reception two years before, but subdivided inside. We followed Director Evans through a maze of canvas corridors and rooms until we reached a small office. A guy in fatigues sat behind a metal desk, typing into a laptop.

  “Morning, Sergeant,” Director Evans said. “We’ve got an appointment with the colonel.”

  “He’s running late. Have a seat.”

  That presented a problem. There were four of us and only two unoccupied chairs in the room. Darla and I stood to the side and looked at Director Evans and Georgia.

  “Have a seat,” Director Evans said.

  “We can stand,” I said.

  “No, please. With how few calories you’re eating, you need to be off your feet far more than we do.”

  I sank into a chair, and Darla took the one beside me. Evans was right. I was tired and hungry, or maybe tired because I was so hungry. I’d been hungry for three days now, but it was better not to think about it. Not that it was possible to not think about it. Just Evans’ comment about calories was enough to bring my empty stomach to the top of my mind. Maybe because it was morning, I thought about breakfast food. Donuts. Bagels. Wheaties, for some reason, even though I hated Wheaties. I put my head on my knees and tried to think about something, anything else.

  We’d been waiting fifteen minutes or so when someone shouted from the other side of the canvas wall behind the sergeant’s desk: “Coffee!” The sergeant left the room for a few minutes and returned with a steaming ceramic mug. The smell rekindled my hunger so powerfully that I was almost nauseated. He carried the mug through a flap in the wall and then returned to his desk.

  We waited another twenty or thirty minutes. I heard a shout, “Ready!”