Ashfall-3: Sunrise

by Mike Mullin

  Darla nodded and readied the rifle. I pulled the door open and slipped through, running in a crouch for the cover of the bone pile’s nearest edge.

  It was impossible to be both fast and silent. The floor was littered with the cannibals’ detritus. Fragments of bone crunched under my boots, and larger pieces skittered and clacked as I kicked them.

  I stopped at the edge of the bone pile in a crouch. The stench of rotted meat was nearly overpowering—would have been unbearable except for the cold. There was a sort of low ridge of jumbled bones separating me from the hidden area behind the pile. Cautiously I raised my head up over the ridge and peered into the darkness beyond.

  And found myself face-to-face with a flenser.

  Chapter 47

  The flenser’s hand shook, making dark shadows play across the blade of the knife he held. He took an awkward, shuffling step forward. Bones skittered around his feet. He raised the knife as if to plunge it into the top of my head.

  There are two basic approaches to dealing with a knife attack. If you can, you should dodge backward and try to create enough space to run away. If that’s not an option, or if you have the training and practice necessary, you can block the strike and disarm the attacker with a variety of techniques: a wrist grab, an X-block, or a strike to the hand holding the knife. I chose a third option—one taught in no school anywhere but an option I’d been practicing for months. I blocked the strike with my hand—or rather, my hook.

  I raised my arm in a sweeping arc as if to execute a high outer forearm block, catching the blade of his knife on its way down with the inside surface of my hook, trapping the knife within its steel C.

  His strike was slow and weak but still had enough force to carry his knife all the way down the hook until his fingers were nearly in contact with my stump. I twisted my arm, forcing the razor-sharp outer edge of my hook against the back of his fingers. The knife and four of the flenser’s fingers flew out over the bone pile, trailing dark droplets of blood. The knife clattered to the floor somewhere out of sight.

  The flenser let out a polysyllabic moan as if he were trying to say something, but it was so slowed and slurred as to make it unintelligible. He struck at me with his left hand, fingers shaped into a claw as if he meant to rake them down my face. His nails were long, gnarled, and crusted with bits of dark filth—the better to pick out marrow from bones, I assumed.

  Darla was standing to one side. I stepped back, dragging my feet along the floor to push bones out of the way. Darla raised her rifle to shoot, and I held out my palm for her to stop. The flenser was moving toward me in his awkward, shuffling gait, both hands waving—one formed into a claw, the other spewing blood.

  I raised my foot in a simple front kick, catching the flenser right in the middle of his chest. He toppled backward with a crash, and an almost musical tinkling sound of disturbed bones ensued. I stepped forward, planting my boot on his wrist and pinning it to the floor.

  “Move back, and I’ll shoot him,” Darla said.

  “We can’t just shoot him,” I said.

  “Sure I can,” she replied.

  “I don’t want the rest to know where we are.”

  Darla put one of her boots on the flenser’s chest, and he clawed at her leg futilely with his mangled hand, bloodying her boots and coverall legs.

  I pushed down on his wrist with my boot—just enough to let him know I could break his arm if I wanted to. “Are there more of you here?”

  “Ahhhh-ohhhh,” was the only reply he made.

  “Something’s wrong with this guy,” I said.

  “Let’s just kill him,” Darla said. “I’m worried about getting his blood on me.”

  “You know what he’s got?”

  “Shaking sickness, I think. Some kind of disease cannibals get. I saw it in a movie once.”

  “Is it just the three of you here?” I asked him.

  “Ahhhh-ehhhhh.”

  “We’ve got to move,” Darla said.

  “What do we do with this guy?”

  “We need to kill him quietly Preferably without touching him.” Darla pressed down with her boot until I heard the guy’s ribs cracking. It didn’t seem right, killing a man in cold blood like that. The first time I had killed someone—a prison escapee who went by Ferret—I had vomited afterward. I dreamed about him for months: the crunch as the blade of my hand hit his neck; the limp, boneless way he fell; the unnatural angle of his body on Darla’s mother’s kitchen floor. He had utterly deserved death for what he’d done to Darla’s mom, but it was still hard to come to terms with the fact that I’d killed him.

  I thought about Ed. He had been a flenser once, but now he was a friend, comrade, almost an older brother. Could the guy under Darla’s boot be redeemed?

  Darla kept pressing, forcing the air from his chest. He batted at her leg with his damaged hand, but still she pressed down as his face turned red, then purple, and finally blue. He went limp, and Darla stood on him until I was sure he was dead. I wondered if I should have done something, stopped her.

  A three-round burst of rifle fire snapped me from my ruminations.

  We ran around the bone pile toward the front of the store. “Go slow,” Darla whispered. “They could have split up, set an ambush for us.”

  I nodded my agreement, and we split up, pressing ourselves to the wall on either side of the big, plate glass windows and peering out. The gunfire seemed to have come from the spot where Ed had set up his ambush. I couldn’t see him or Nylce, though. I gestured toward the nearest snow mound, which was easily large enough to have hidden an SUV. Darla raised her rifle to cover me, and I ran for the door, bent over as low as I could manage.

  Once I was crouched behind the mound, I looked around— everything was silent and still.

  I waved Darla forward, and she came at a run. We worked our way around the mound in opposite directions, rejoining each other at the far side. She gestured with her rifle, and I prepared to run to the next car/snow mound.

  Some slight sound—a crunch of snow or breath of wind—made me turn and look up. A huge man was above me, stretched out in a flying leap from where he had been hiding on top of the SUV. He held a butcher knife in his outstretched hand. And it was aimed squarely at my head.

  Chapter 48

  I flung up my hands, barely managing to deflect the blade of the butcher knife on the outside edge of my hook. He fell on me, his rotten-meat breath full in my face, so close that the bits of unidentifiable filth clotting his wild beard rubbed my cheeks.

  I rolled backward under the impact, reaching up to grab his wrist and try to control the knife. I kicked out, hoping to continue the backward roll and come out on top.

  But this flenser wasn’t trembling, weak, or slow. Somehow he had avoided the shaking disease that had afflicted the first guy. He threw his free arm out above my head, planting it in the snow and instantly arresting our roll. At the same time, he bore down on the butcher knife. I clutched his wrist with my right hand and put my left arm behind it for support. It felt like I was trying to hold back a hydraulic ram. The knife inched inexorably closer. He grinned, and saliva ran from his crooked, yellow teeth, a drop splattering against my cheek. Darla couldn’t shoot him—her rifle was so powerful that at this range, the bullets would tear right through him and kill me too. I had to change the rules somehow, use his weight and strength against him.

  I shoved his hands one direction and frantically wrenched my head in the other. The butcher knife buried itself in the snow beside my head with a soft, nearly inaudible thunk. The flenser fell forward—right into the blade of my hook.

  I hadn’t had room to do anything but line up a short, weak jab to his throat, but his weight took care of the rest. My hook sunk deep. Blood sprayed from the wound, coating the side of my face in a hot, wet glaze. For a moment he seemed to hover there, poised over me, caught on the edge of my hook. Then he opened his mouth and vomited blood, splashing the top of my head.

  I shoved him sideways, bu
t it was like trying to move a dump truck. Finally I managed to scramble out from under him. Two shots rang out—one from Darla, right next to me; the other from Nylce, up on the nearby hill. Both hit the flenser perfectly, center mass. He gurgled once more and died.

  Ed peered out from behind a nearby snow mound. “That’s two,” he said in a stage whisper.

  “You count the one we killed inside?” Darla asked.

  “No,” Ed replied, “I shot one who was trying to sneak around to the side door and come in behind you. So that makes three.”

  Nylce started to get up and come down the hill toward us, but I waved her off using a series of gestures to tell her and Francine to stay put and keep watch.

  Darla handed her rifle to Trig and knelt beside me. “You get any of that blood in your mouth?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “We’ve got to get it off you.” She grabbed a handful of snow and started scrubbing at my face.

  “This guy wasn’t sick.” I gestured at the big flenser laid out in the snow nearby.

  “He could still be a carrier. The disease might have taken longer to manifest in him.”

  That made sense. I quit protesting and submitted to a painfully vigorous and cold scrubbing.

  When Darla was satisfied I was clean enough, I left Nylce, Francine, and Trig on guard, while Ed, Darla, and I went back into the Penney’s. I wanted to check for any sign that more than three flensers were based here. If we hadn’t gotten them all, we needed to either set an ambush for the rest or spend a lot of time obscuring our trail to and from the Family Affair.

  I stepped closer to the bone pile inside the Penney’s. In one corner there was a filthy profusion of discarded clothing, blankets, and saggy mattresses—more like a rat’s nest than a place for humans to sleep. After staring at it awhile, I noticed there were three distinct rats nests—apparently, we’d killed all the flensers who laired here.

  Darla paused by the bone pile and dead flenser. “Those . . . they were people once.” Her voice was so soft that I could barely hear her.

  “What? The bones or the cannibal?” I asked.

  “Both,” Ed said, his voice barely audible.

  “I wish,” Darla said looking over the bone pile, “I wish we could bury them.”

  I didn’t want to bury them. I wanted to burn it all, burn even the memory of this scene from my mind, burn the spoiled, greasy taste from my mouth, burn time itself if I could, burn away this world in which the best answer, the only answer, was sometimes to kill. I wanted to sear the last few minutes from my mind, or better yet sear away everything since Yellowstone erupted. Everything except Darla. “Can we burn them?”

  “Need a hot fire,” Ed said.

  “I need a bucket,” Darla said.

  I gave her a blank look.

  “To hold gasoline.”

  A Dutch oven crusted with unidentifiable charred food had been tossed to one edge of the sleeping area. I gingerly lifted it with my hook. “Will this work?”

  “I’d rather have a five-gallon gas can, but sure, it’ll do.” We dragged the other two flensers to the bone pile. Maybe we could have just left them where they had died,

  but someday this winter would end, and all the frozen corpses would thaw, creating a huge problem for someone. I believe in the rules I learned in kindergarten—you make a mess, you clean it up. Although I’m thankful that kinder-gartners don’t have to deal with dead flensers.

  Then we started trudging from snow hump to snow hump, unburying cars, unscrewing their gas caps, and sniffing. When we found a locked fuel hatch, Darla jammed her hook under it and pried it open by main force, snapping the lock. When she unscrewed the gas cap, I could smell gas even from where I stood, several feet back. Darla smashed the driver’s side window with the handle of the screwdriver, popped the hood, and ripped some tubing out of the engine compartment.

  Darla stuck one end of the tubing into the gas tank and sucked on the other, getting a siphon going. How she managed without getting a mouth full of gas was beyond me. When the Dutch oven was nearly full, I carried it into the Penney’s and splashed the gas across the bone pile while Darla waited, thumb over the end of the hose to maintain the siphon.

  It took thirteen trips to empty the car’s tank. Without more buckets, there wasn’t really anything Ed could do to help, so he stood guard. As I trudged up to him and Darla after the last trip, he said, “Kind of a waste of gas, isn’t it?” “No,” Darla and I said together.

  “Anyway, everything’s clear,” Ed said. “No sign of anyone else.”

  “Let’s blow this joint,” I said.

  Ed groaned.

  “I’ll do it,” Darla said. “You’re covered in gas.”

  She was right—it was nearly impossible to carry the lidless Dutch oven without splashing. I had gas on my hook, its cuff, and all down my left pants leg.

  Darla made one final trip into the Penney’s. She grabbed the end of a stick that protruded from the flensers’ still-smoldering fire, tossed it into the bone pile, and ran. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the gas caught with a whoosh. Within seconds the fire was so hot we had to move away from the building. Within minutes a substantial chunk of Meadowlands Shopping Center was ablaze.

  As we walked back to the Family Affair, I asked Darla, “What do you think happened in this town?”

  Darla didn’t answer, but Ed did. “Folks in the college are paranoid, shooting at anyone who comes close. Must have been a big group of flensers here. They would have picked off loners, singletons, small parties, maybe even foraging parties from the college. The folks in the college built their wall and buttoned everything up tight. Once there was no other food source, well, my guess is the flensers ate each other. Those three were all that were left.” “Oh.” I was sorry I had asked. It made sense, though. Cannibalism would be a terrible long-term survival strategy. I wondered if something similar was happening in other places. Millions of people were desperate for something— anything—to eat. How many of them would turn to the only readily available food source and, in so doing, seal their own eventual doom? Then I thought of something else.

  “Could you have that shaking disease?” I asked Ed.

  A pained look passed across Ed’s face, and I felt guilty for bringing it up. “I might.” He shrugged. “Would serve me right.”

  “You can quit with the pity party anytime, Ed,” Darla said. “We know what you did, and we don’t care anymore. You’re a different man now.”

  Ed’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “Well . . . thanks.”

  As soon as we got back to the cafe, we packed up and moved on. We didn’t go far that day, though. I called a halt on Business 20 on the east side of Freeport to search a gas station we came upon. It was a wreck, shelves thrown over, glass and plastic detritus everywhere. It took us hours to search it, and we found very little that we could use. Every scrap of food was long since gone. The wire map rack was crushed and empty. There were no phone books. I cursed the Internet in the most inventive terms I knew—by killing the telephone book and map business, it hadn’t done us any favors.

  Darla did find an “Emergency Auto Toolkit,” which she shoved into my pack, nearly doubling its weight. By the time we finished, it was almost dark. We shoved the shelving out of the center of the gas station and set up camp right there. I reviewed the watch plan with everyone who was scheduled for sentry duty, spread my bedroll, and lay down.

  When I finally slept, I dreamed of gnawing teeth and burning bones.

  Chapter 49

  Two days later, on the outskirts of Rockford, we reached a gas station that had partially collapsed under the weight of the snow and ash. We weren’t quite halfway to Chicago yet. We spent most of the afternoon shifting beams and metal roof panels, unburying the sales counter. It had been looted before it collapsed—the broken cigarette displays were all empty. There was no food of any kind. But when we heaved aside a section of countertop, we exposed a book three y
ears out of date: a combination Yellow and White Pages for Rockford.

  Darla and I stayed up half the night studying

  the book by the light of an oil lamp. It was a mother lode of information. There were maps in the front—not superdetailed, but better than what we had, which was nothing. We combed through the Rockford Yellow Pages section, noting places we needed to visit. There were several snowmobile dealers listed. Two of them, on the north side of Rockford, were close together and looked promising: Loves Park Motorsports and Bergstrom Skegs. Almost a dozen bicycle shops were listed; we marked three near the snowmobile dealers to check first. Darla hoped to scavenge enough parts to create a fleet of jumbo Bikezillas—we would need them to haul our gleanings back to Speranta.

  Rockford was also home to four or five electrical and plumbing supply distributors. Darla yelped in delight when she saw some place called Grainger Industrial Supply listed. I had no idea what it was, but anything that made Darla as happy as Grainger had to be heaven on earth for budding engineers.

  Then we turned our attention to food. Even if our trip was completely successful, we wouldn’t get the new greenhouses all built and producing for months. We needed to bring back some kind of food to bridge the gap until then. Grocery stores and restaurants had been emptied out within days of the eruption. To find supplies in the quantities we needed, we’d have to be creative, think of things the ordinary looter wouldn’t.

  I thought about Rebecca finding pet food in otherwise thoroughly picked-over houses. Unfortunately there didn’t appear to be a distributor or manufacturer of pet food anywhere in Rockford. I added a PetSmart and a PETCO to our list of locations to visit, though.

  Next I looked up food distributors. Rockford had something called GFS Foodservice, but no grocery wholesalers I could find.