Ashen Winter a-2

by Mike Mullin

  Finally I loosened my belt and tucked the coveralls through the back, so they dangled along the back of my legs. I repeated the process with Darla’s pants and long johns, beating them against a tree and tucking them into my belt.

  Darla was still jogging in place, but now she had a silly grin on her face.

  “What?” I said.

  “You should see yourself-you look ridiculous.”

  For a second I was annoyed, but then I realized that, yeah, I probably did. “What, you don’t appreciate my superpowers? I’m Clothesline Man! Faster than a tumbling dryer, stronger than the scorching sun, saving the day by flying across the snow to dry all your clothes.” I rotated my hips, making the clothing swing around me in an arc.

  Darla was laughing now. The joke seemed pretty lame to me, but probably anything would have been funny after the past few hours.

  “I can even dry these!” I picked her pink panties up out of the snow.

  Her mouth curled at one side. “Usually you have the opposite effect.”

  I thought about that for a moment and then felt my face heat despite the frigid temperature.

  “Actually, forget about those. I’ll just go commando for a while.”

  “Okay.” I pushed the panties into the snowbank to hide them, although I couldn’t have said why I bothered. Then I resumed jogging; I needed to warm up.

  Despite our jogging, we both started shivering again as night fell and the temperature dropped. It got so dark I could barely see the piles of snow around our foxhole.

  “How are we going to figure out which way to go?” I asked.

  “Shh. Listen.”

  I stood still, suppressing my shivering for a moment. I heard the susurration of rushing water very faintly in the distance.

  “Which way is it coming from?” Darla whispered.

  I pointed.

  “Yeah, that’s about what I thought, too. We can use the noise to figure out what direction we’re going.”

  “Lead on.”

  Darla pushed her way out of the foxhole into the deep snow. I followed, watching the snow, trying to place my feet in her footsteps. After a few minutes of that, I looked up and felt a surge of panic when I couldn’t see her.

  Our chances were bad enough together. If we got separated, I didn’t see how we’d survive. Well, Darla might, she knew how to make a fire. I fought down my fear-all I had to do was follow her trail.

  I ran for twenty or twenty-five feet, high-stepping through the snow. I almost bowled into Darla’s back. She was trudging along, oblivious to my panic.

  Another half hour or so brought us to a break in the trees. A steep slope led down to the frozen river. I heard the roller dam faintly to my right. I could see a little farther here without the trees overhead, but the other side of the river was completely shrouded in darkness.

  Darla got down to the river by sitting down and sliding on her butt. I waited a moment for her to move out of the way, then slid to join her.

  Walking across the Mississippi felt like exploring an alien planet. The darkness hid everything but the tiny circles of ice on which we planted our feet. Our boots made weird squeaks and crunching sounds. I feared we might walk through this dark limbo forever, slowing gradually until we froze in place, statues lost from their museum, admired by no one.

  Chapter 22

  I saw Darla’s shoulders trembling and said, “Let’s pick up the pace.”

  “Yeah. C-c-christ, I’m cold.”

  “And hungry,” I added.

  “Thirsty, too. I’d even eat some s-s-snow, but that’d just make me c-c-colder.”

  We started jogging across the ice. Darla fell twice. Both times she took my hand, levered herself up, and kept going without comment. Wiping out had to hurt, but she ignored the pain, determined to keep us moving forward.

  It seemed like it was taking way too long to cross the river. I mean, yeah, the Mississippi is huge, but we’d been jogging twenty or thirty minutes.

  “How much farther?” I asked.

  “How should I know? Keep moving.” Her voice was huffy from exertion-or annoyance.

  Not five minutes later we finally reached the bank.

  “Head downstream following the bank?” Darla said. “That’ll take us farther away from the barge.”

  “Yeah.”

  We jogged south, away from the lock and barges, skirting around big snowdrifts. After a while, the bank started to curve to the right. As we followed it, I noticed the trees were bigger here-their branches hung far out over the river ice. When I caught a glimpse of a tree to our left, I figured out where we were: traveling into an inlet, a frozen tributary of the Mississippi.

  Darla stopped. “Let’s make a camp here. That bend should shield us from anyone at the lock.”

  “Okay. So how are we going to build a fire?”

  “Rubbing sticks together.”

  My chest sank. “Um, that’s going to take for-freaking-ever.”

  “Not the way we’re going to do it.” Darla explained what she wanted me to do.

  I had to do most of the work. Darla was still shivering badly and spent a lot of time running in place or slapping her legs, trying to stay warm. I split a small cottonwood log twice, forming a roughly flat plank that Darla called a fireboard. Another piece of the log became a small rounded grip-a thunderhead, again according to Darla. I whittled an eight-sided spindle out of a cottonwood branch. A long, curved oak branch became a bow, and one of my bootlaces served as a bowstring. I discovered that the inner bark of cottonwood trees would shred nicely to form a fine, dry firestarter or bird’s nest. It took more than an hour to gather and make everything we needed.

  Then we put it together and tested it. I wrapped the bowstring around the spindle, which I placed vertically between the fireboard and thunderhead. The idea was that I’d use one hand to hold the thunderhead in place and the other to pump the bow back and forth, to rotate the spindle. In turn, that’d generate friction between the spindle and fireboard and, hopefully, create a spark.

  Of course it didn’t work. The bootlace slipped on the spindle, and we had to tighten it. Then the spindle kept flying off the fireboard, and we had to cut a deeper dimple to keep the spindle in place.

  While we worked on fixing our makeshift fire-by-friction set, I asked Darla where she’d learned how to build it.

  “From Max’s Boy Scout Handbook,” she replied.

  “I thought he quit scouts after a month?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t know that. I just thought the book looked interesting. And it was.”

  Finally we got it all working. I sawed back and forth on the bow, holding the thunderhead with my other hand, trying to keep even pressure on it. Both ends of the spindle started smoking in surprisingly little time, just a minute or two. About thirty seconds after the spindle started smoking, a spark fell out of the thunderhead onto my glove. I froze, trying to avoid any sudden move that might extinguish the spark, not caring if it burned my hand.

  It winked out.

  “Well, at least we know it works,” Darla said. “The spark is supposed to come from the fireboard, not the thunderhead. I wonder what we’re doing wrong?”

  We set it up again. I was surprised by the spindle-it was noticeably shorter. Deep black holes had been drilled in both the fireboard and thunderhead. Darla put one hand over mine on the thunderhead and grabbed the other end of the bow. Working together we could pump the bow much faster and more smoothly. Less than 30 seconds had passed before smoke was pouring from both ends of the spindle.

  I heard a cracking noise and the thunderhead broke. The end of the spindle hit my palm, twisting the nylon and burning my hand through my glove. I snatched my hand back and the spindle went flying. It had drilled clear through both the thunderhead and fireboard.

  I shook my hand and looked down. The hole in the bottom of the fireboard was nearly filled by a huge spark glowing atop the ash.

  “Now I know what we were doing wrong,” Darla said. “
We were supposed to put a notch in the fireboard to let out the spark. Probably supposed to lubricate the thunderhead somehow, too.”

  I gently lifted the fireboard. There were bits of snow and ice around the spark on the floor of our foxhole. If any of those melted, our spark would be extinguished. I picked up my knife and slid the blade under the spark.

  Slowly, very slowly, I lifted the spark while groping around for the bird’s nest. Darla placed it in my hand. I gently slid the spark off my knife and into the nest, cupped in my left palm.

  The spark was growing, igniting some of the black dust I’d scooped up along with it. I scooped some more of the dust from the fireboard with the blade of my knife and gently fed it to the spark. It grew larger still, a glowing coal nestled in the shredded bark on my palm.

  I whispered to my spark, letting my breath coax it, “Burn. Burn, damn it, burn.” And with a pop and whoosh, it obeyed. The bird’s nest flared to life. I set it down slowly, not caring if it singed my fingers. We had made fire-created life!

  We fed the fire together, starting with slivers of leftover wood and quickly moving on to twigs and branches. Darla’s hands shook so badly that the twigs she dropped occasionally missed the fire altogether. I shuddered to think what might’ve happened if the fire-by-friction set hadn’t worked.

  I took the hatchet and cut three long limbs with forks on their ends. By jamming each branch into the snow and interweaving the forked ends, I created a rough tripod next to our fire. I took Darla’s frozen clothing off my belt and draped it over the tripod to dry.

  Darla was huddled right up against the fire, getting warm. I squatted next to her. “Let me see your hand,” I said.

  She held out her right hand, and I pulled off her glove. She had two roughly parallel crescent-shaped wounds between her palm and the base of her middle finger. Benson had bitten her so hard he’d drawn blood. The bite was scabbed over, but the flesh around it was red and swollen. I got some clean snow to scrub her wound.

  When I started washing it, Darla screamed. I found a mostly clean leftover piece of cottonwood and gave it to her to bite. “Sorry,” I said. “I gotta clean it.”

  Darla nodded, tears rolling down her face. I kissed her cheek, tasting salt. She laid her hand back in my lap, and I resumed scrubbing while she cried.

  “I think it’s getting infected,” I said as I finished.

  Darla just moaned.

  I put her glove back on and rooted around in my jacket for a minute. I’d kept the Cipro tablets zipped into my inner pocket with the kale seeds. I took out a tablet and handed it to Darla. “Take this.”

  She spit the piece of wood out from between her teeth. “They’re for you.”

  “I’ll take a half.”

  “How many do you have left?”

  “Five, counting that one.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to take antibiotics for, like, ten days or something?”

  “Doc said seven. I’ll take a half. If you take full ones today and tomorrow and then go to halves like me, we can make five tablets last three more days. By then maybe we’ll be in Worthington. Maybe we’ll be able to buy some more.”

  “My mouth is too dry to swallow this damn horse pill.”

  “I’ll get some clean snow.”

  We had no pan to melt the snow in, so we put little balls of it in our mouths to melt. That was tolerable with the fire roaring beside us. Darla swallowed her Cipro, and I cut a tablet in half with my knife. The rough edge of the tablet caught in my throat. I had to eat a bunch more snow to choke it down and wash away the nasty taste it left in my mouth.

  Then we cleared off snow from a larger area to sleep in. By the time we’d done that, we needed more firewood. So we spent at least a half hour chopping enough wood to last through the night.

  I felt woolly, like I’d been awake for three days straight. My eyelids drooped, and I had to force myself to concentrate as I chopped wood lest the hatchet miss and add to our growing inventory of injuries.

  But Darla looked even worse. Her eyes made a pair of black holes in her face. She was yawning almost nonstop.

  “Go to sleep,” I said. “I’ll take first watch.”

  “We can both sleep if we build up the fire first.”

  “What if Black Lake finds us? We’d better take turns.”

  Darla used a couple of small logs and one of her scarves to make a crude pillow, and then she lay down beside the fire. Within seconds her breathing slowed as sleep claimed her.

  I wanted nothing more than to curl up around her and sleep, too. But I knew it wasn’t safe. I sat in the volcanic ash beside Darla and watched her chest slowly rise and fall. The firelight played in her hair. I reached out to stroke it but thought better of it and pulled my hand away-I didn’t want to wake her.

  I felt suddenly morose. What was I doing, dragging Darla back into Iowa? Her parents were dead-she had no particular reason to want to find mine. Already she’d been injured. If I got Darla killed on this insane trip, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

  Chapter 23

  I struggled to stay alert, trudging back and forth beside the fire. When I saw the first hint of dawn in the east, I shook Darla awake. “I gotta sleep,” I said. She mumbled something and pushed herself upright. I was fast asleep before my head fully settled on the log.

  It seemed like no time at all had passed when Darla pushed on my shoulder, saying, “Alex, wake up.”

  I startled fully awake, sat up, and looked around. “Something wrong?”

  “No, everything’s okay. But we should get going.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Around noon, maybe.”

  Darla was dressed in her own clothes, and my coveralls were laid out on the tripod by the fire. I slipped my toasty warm coveralls on, struggling to pull the legs over my boots.

  Darla fiddled with a bundle of wood. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I worked on the fire-by-friction set while you were asleep. Made a new thunderhead out of oak, so it won’t burn through. We’ve got two extra spindles now, too. Here’s your shoelace.”

  I started relacing my boot while Darla tied all the fire-by-friction stuff into a neat bundle using a drawstring she’d cannibalized from her jacket. We kicked snow over the fire, tore down the tripod, and set out.

  “Which way?” I asked.

  “Maybe follow this creek upstream? Easier to walk on the ice. Hopefully we’ll hit a road.”

  “How far is it to Worthington?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. We’re near Bellevue. It’s about thirty miles from Worthington to Dubuque, but I think Bellevue is farther. Maybe forty or forty-five miles?”

  “That’s going to take forever if we have to walk through deep snow. And I’m already famished.”

  “Let’s see what the roads are like. If they’re bad, maybe I can improvise some snowshoes.”

  We’d walked along the creek until we reached a railroad trestle that passed about twenty feet above the ice. Beyond that, I saw the concrete pylons and steel girders of a highway bridge.

  We walked under the railroad trestle and turned to fight our way up the bank between the two bridges. The bank wasn’t steep, but the snow was so deep that it was difficult to force our way upward. For every step we managed, we slid back a half step.

  Finally we got to the top, only to confront an enormous berm of plowed snow alongside the road. I led the way up the berm, thrusting my hands into the snow to make tenuous grips and kicking footholds into the side of the pile. The snow here was a filthy blend of volcanic ash and ice plowed off the road.

  We hid near the top of the berm, watching the road for more than an hour. Nothing moved. There was no sound but the chattering of our teeth. I was worried about patrols, but it would take too long to get to Worthington traveling cross-country.

  I got down the far side of the berm to the road by sliding on my butt. We were on a two-lane plowed highway.

  “You think all the road
s are this good?” I said.

  “I hope so.” Darla stood and dusted the snow off herself. “We’ll make good time on this. Maybe get to Worthington in two, two-and-a-half days. Before we starve, anyway.”

  “I guess there is one advantage to FEMA being in Iowa now.” Last year none of the roads on this side of the river had been plowed.

  “That’s the only good those ass-puppets do.”

  “Yeah.” I looked up and down the highway. “Which way?”

  “Right. North. Worthington is northwest of us somewhere.”

  “Won’t that take us closer to the lock and Black Lake?”

  “Yeah. We’ll turn west as soon as we can.”

  We made great time on the packed snow of the road. We didn’t talk-I was listening for engine noises and continually glancing behind us. I hoped there wouldn’t be any Black Lake trucks, but if any trucks did come, I wanted time to try to get away, although that might be impossible-the piles of snow and ash alongside the road were so high that we were essentially trapped.

  We got off the highway onto a back road at the first opportunity. Darla led us through a dizzying succession of turns, heading north and west, she said. The roads were all deserted, which was a relief but also a bit puzzling. Why bother plowing roads nobody was going to use?

  We passed six or seven farmsteads. All of them were clearly abandoned. About half the houses had burned. “Why do you think so many houses are burned?” I asked.

  “Probably people took shelter in them and lit fires in places they shouldn’t have,” she replied. “You build a wood fire in a hearth that’s only designed for a gas log, you’ll burn the house down quick-like.”

  As twilight set in, we stopped at a farmstead. It consisted of two cylindrical concrete grain silos and a one-story farmhouse. There were three hillocks of snow that might have been collapsed barns or sheds-I couldn’t tell. The front door and door trim of the farmhouse were missing-a drift of snow more than two feet deep graced the entryway. It was too dark inside to see much, but what I could see wasn’t pretty. The house had been thoroughly looted-furniture, doors, door trim, baseboards, and cabinets were all missing, probably burned as firewood. The mantle around the living room fireplace was gone, leaving an ugly hole in the wall, but there was a tiled area around the fireplace where we could safely build a fire. A big sooty stain proved we weren’t the first people to build a fire there, although there were no other signs of past occupants.