Ashen Winter

by Mike Mullin

  Darla shrugged.

  I bent over the bandit. His skin was pale as snow, and his lips looked bruised. I put the back of my hand against his mouth—he was breathing. When I checked his pulse, though, I had trouble finding it. “He’s alive, but barely.”

  “Let’s melt some snow,” Darla said. “Maybe if we splash water in his face, he’ll wake up enough for us to ask him about the shotgun again.”

  “Should we try to stop the bleeding first? If he dies on us—”

  “Then we won’t find out anything. Yeah, I guess we should patch him up first.” Darla scowled.

  I didn’t like the idea of helping this guy any more than she did. He and his buddies had shot Max, had tried to kidnap the girls for who-knew-what. But we had no good way to track the other guy—the one who’d worn a blue scarf, and I needed to know where the shotgun had come from. I yanked the guy out of the closet. Blood was still oozing from the wound at his side.

  “Get the med kit off Bikezilla, would you?” I asked.

  “Christ.”

  I stripped the bandit to the waist while I waited for Darla to return. She had shot him low on his right side. The wound on his back was just a small puncture that had mostly quit bleeding, but the bullet had left a crater the size of a child’s fist as it exited the front.

  “It’s not like we have a lot of extra bandages to waste on this guy,” Darla said when she returned with our first-aid kit.

  I took a clean cloth out of the box, wadded it, and packed it into the wound as tightly as I could.

  “He isn’t going to make it,” Darla said. “He’s lost too much blood already.”

  I didn’t reply, instead starting to wrap his torso with an Ace bandage. Darla shook her head in disgust but knelt to help.

  When I pulled the Ace bandage tight, the guy woke up and started mumbling. Something about “Gun, gun, where’s my gun?” His hands clenched and unclenched as he talked.

  “Where’d Bill get the shotgun?” I asked him.

  He kept mumbling, his voice dropping and his words becoming incoherent.

  Darla slapped her palm over the wound and pushed down. “Where’d you get the shotgun!”

  The guy moaned and batted at her hand, feebly trying to knock it away from the wound. Darla bore down harder, and suddenly his body went limp. “Is he dead?” she asked.

  I checked his breathing and pulse again. “No.”

  We lit a fire in the living room hearth and melted snow. But no amount of water splashed on the guy’s face would wake him. Darla went outside, scouting for signs of Blue Scarf. When she stomped back into the living room, she said, “That last guy with this loser isn’t leaving a trail. He must have left here by the road. Maybe he kept going south, but as soon as he makes a turn, we’ll lose him.”

  “He could have left hours ago.”

  “Yeah. I think it’s a lost cause. Sorry, Alex.”

  “This guy’s still alive. Maybe he’ll recover.”

  “You want to hang around here and see if he wakes up?”

  “No, that’ll take too long. And he might die. Let’s load him on Bikezilla and take him to a doctor.” I lifted him by his shoulders and started jamming his arms into his shirt.

  Darla sighed and helped me dress him. Then she lifted the guy’s ankles while I grabbed his shoulders. We dragged him out of the house and laid him in the snow beside Bikezilla.

  “We can tie him on the load bed, over the supplies,” I said as I repacked the first-aid kit, lantern, and guns. “You know where we are?”

  “I think so.” Darla took the Illinois roadmap out of its protective, plastic folder and opened it. “I think we’ve been biking south on 78. We should be near Stockton.” She pointed at a dot on the map south of Warren.

  “You know anything about Stockton? Is there a doctor there?”

  “I dunno. It looks bigger than Warren on this map. We could probably make it back to Warren in a couple hours—it’s straight north on 78. Just take him to Doc McCarthy.”

  I looked over her shoulder at the map. “Let’s try Stockton. It’s a lot closer. And I don’t really want to bring a bandit into Warren if we can help it.”

  Darla shrugged. We repacked all our gear and then laid the guy on his stomach over Bikezilla’s load bed. Darla tied him down, leaving his arms and legs overhanging the sides.

  We mounted Bikezilla and started pedaling south along Route 78. Less than ten minutes of travel brought us to a T in the road. We passed three metal sign supports that barely protruded from the snow, but someone had sawn the signs off them. I wasn’t sure why anyone would bother to vandalize the signs—maybe they didn’t want strangers to find Stockton. “Which way?” I asked Darla.

  Darla looked over her shoulder at me. “Right, I think. This should be Highway 20. It’ll take us straight into Stockton.”

  We rounded the corner and passed a burned-out building on our left. The sign in front read GALENA STATE BANK & TRUST. We raced on past a whole series of burnt buildings, but none of the rest of them had signs.

  Peering around Darla, I saw something surreal. A few hundred yards ahead of us, a line of cars stood upright, resting on their front bumpers with their trunks in the air. They formed a wall that stretched as far as I could see to the left and curved away from us to the right. Where U.S. 20 passed through the car-wall someone had built a heavy timber gate across the road. Almost before I’d processed what I was seeing, church bells began ringing furiously. A line of men popped into view one by one, their heads and shoulders above the low log gate.

  Every one of them was pointing a rifle at us.

  Chapter 7

  Darla must have seen the rifles, too, because she slammed on the brakes. I got off the bike and stepped up beside her.

  “I doubt if any of them can hit us from this far off,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “How about if I walk up there with my hands up and try to talk to them, and you turn Bikezilla around so that if they start shooting, we can ride out of here in a hurry.”

  Darla paused. “Okay.” She pulled me close for a kiss. “I’ll get out the binoculars and keep a lookout. If I yell, run back as fast as you can. And be careful.”

  “I will.” I held up my hands with my palms open and started trudging down the road toward the guns.

  The wind was in my face, blowing bits of ice that stung my skin. I had to squint, making everything look indistinct.

  As I got closer, I could see the car-wall better. It was bizarre—made up of every conceivable make and model of automobile: from huge pickup trucks and SUVs to Priuses and mini Coopers. Their front bumpers were planted on the ground, hidden by the snow. The rear bumpers rose in the air at various heights, so that the arrangement looked like a monstrous row of multicolored teeth gnawing up from the ground. Each car touched its neighbor on both sides, forming an impassable wall. I couldn’t tell what held them upright.

  I got to within about a hundred feet of the gate and yelled, “Hello! Is this Stockton?”

  Someone yelled back, “We’re closed.”

  “You got a doctor here?”

  “Yep. She’s closed, too.”

  “I can trade.”

  “Trade what?”

  “Guns, seeds, food . . .”

  A lean man wearing a chocolate-brown coat and overalls set his rifle aside, climbed over the log gate, and started walking toward me. I noticed he was walking to one side of the road, carefully staying out of his buddies’ line of fire. I briefly toyed with the idea of sidestepping to put him between me and the guns, but there was no point—he could easily sidestep, also.

  He stopped about ten feet from me. “Who’re you?”

  “Alex Halprin.”

  “From?”

  “Warren.”

  “No y’aint. Warren only sends four guys here to trade, and I know ’em all.”

  “I live on Paul Halprin’s farm, near Warren.”

  “Don’t know him. Said you got guns to trade? Any ammo?”
>
  “No, just the guns. A MAC-10, maybe a pistol, too.”

  “Don’t need ’em. Got plenty of guns, not enough ammo.”

  “What about seeds? I’ve got good, cold-weather kale seeds. Stuff’s full of vitamin C.”

  The guy turned his head and spat sideways. “Like the last guy who sold us seeds? Claimed they were turnip seeds.”

  “Didn’t sprout?”

  “They sprouted all right. Grew spurry weed. Useless.”

  “This is kale. Same stuff Warren trades. It cures scurvy.”

  “Maybe. Maybe you’re the King of England, too. Don’t rightly know. What’re you trying to trade for, anyway?”

  “Medical care. The guy on the back of our bike’s been shot. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

  “Best you put him out of his misery and give him a proper burial, then.” The guy shrugged. “Best hide the spot you bury him, too, ’less you want a flenser gang to dig him up.”

  Whatever a flenser gang was, I didn’t think telling him that the guy was probably already in one would help my case at all.

  “So what would it take to buy medical care for this guy?” I asked.

  “How ’bout two hog carcasses?”

  “I’ve got some pork, but not that much.”

  “I hear they got plenty up in Warren.”

  “Yeah, thousands. But they’re not mine.”

  The guy spat again in the snow. “You’re no use to me, then. So either go back where you came from or skirt around Stockton out of rifle range. You come within shooting range, we prolly won’t waste a bullet on you, but you never know.” He turned and strode back toward the gate.

  I ground my foot into the snowy road. I knew they’d give me anything I wanted for a packet of kale seeds if I could prove they were good. I stomped back down the road to Darla.

  “No luck?” she asked.

  “Nope. They don’t believe the kale seeds are real. I can’t think of any way to prove it to them other than germinating a few, and by the time we do that, our bandit will be dead.”

  “Well, we can take him to Doc McCarthy in Warren. It looks like about twelve miles on the map. Take us an hour and a half, maybe two.”

  “Let’s do that.” I mounted Bikezilla’s rear seat. “By the way, you know what a flenser gang is?”

  “I’ve heard rumors. You don’t want to know.”

  “If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “Okay. A flensing knife is used to strip skin or fat from an animal, originally a whale.”

  “So a flenser gang . . .?”

  “Well, if the rumors are true, it’s a gang that’s surviving by roaming around and butchering animals to eat.”

  “But almost all the wild animals around here died from the ash after the volcano—they got silicosis.”

  “Flensers butcher the animals that ventured outside but survived—the ones that were smart enough to cover their mouths and avoid breathing the ash.”

  I was silent for a moment, listening to the harsh noise made by the cold air rasping in and out of my lungs. “So we might have a cannibal strapped to the back of the bike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great,” I said in a voice as grim as my mood. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 8

  An hour and a half later we were back in Warren. It was aggravating that more than halfway through the first day of our journey we were barely more than five miles from where we’d started.

  Warren, unlike Stockton, had no wall. They hadn’t had much problem with bandits so far, probably because Warren is a pimple on nowhere’s butt, while Stockton sits astride Highway 20, which connects Dubuque and Galena with Chicago.

  When we stopped at the clinic, Darla worked on untying our cannibal from the load bed while I squatted by his head, checking to see if he was still alive. When Darla rolled him over, he started thrashing and mumbling crazy stuff, which I figured counted as a sign of life.

  We carried him inside. The waiting room was cold and dark, but light streamed from one of the exam rooms down the hall. When we’d first arrived in Warren last year, the doctor’s office had always been packed with people suffering from scurvy. Now, with the steady supply of kale from our farm, we’d often find the place deserted.

  Dr. McCarthy and his assistant, Belinda, were in one of the exam rooms working on patient files by the light of an oil lamp. Darla and I carried in our cannibal and heaved him on top of the examination table.

  “Who’s this?” Dr. McCarthy said. “I don’t recognize him.”

  “One of the guys who attacked our farm yesterday.”

  The doctor picked up one of the bandit’s hands and looked at it for a moment, then held his fingers to the guy’s lips. “Lost a lot of blood. He needs a transfusion. We’ve got a donor system set up, but nobody’s going to want to donate to a bandit.”

  “We need some information from him,” I said.

  “I’ll do what I can, Hippocratic Oath and all, but—”

  “I can pay. Two hundred kale seeds.”

  Darla shot me a glance so heated I felt my face scorch. “Couldn’t you just wake him up? Give him some adrenaline or uppers or something?” she asked Dr. McCarthy.

  “If I had any epinephrine or amphetamines, which I don’t, they wouldn’t work. He’s unconscious from blood loss. The only way to wake him up is to give him a transfusion and fluids.”

  “So can we buy him a transfusion?” I asked.

  “Yes. You don’t happen to know this guy’s blood type, do you?” Dr. McCarthy asked. “I’m out of test kits.”

  “No idea.”

  Dr. McCarthy turned to Belinda. “Who’s next on the O-neg list?”

  She had already retrieved a single sheet of paper from the desk drawer. “Nylce Myers. But she gave 38 days ago.”

  “And she can’t weigh 110 pounds dripping wet. Who’s after her?”

  “Kyle Henthorn. He’s at twenty-nine days, though.”

  “That’s okay, he’s a big guy. Will you go get him?” Dr. McCarthy held out a key ring. Belinda took the keys to his Studebaker, the only working car in Warren, and left.

  Dr. McCarthy turned to me and Darla. “Help me move him onto the floor next to the exam table, would you?” As we lifted the bandit, I noticed his eyes were rolling around as if they were loose in his head. We put pillows under his feet to help treat him for shock and covered him with a blanket.

  “You want me to take this bandage off?” I asked.

  “No,” Dr. McCarthy said. “He might bleed more, which he can’t afford. Wait ’til after he’s had a transfusion.”

  About twenty minutes later, a big, florid-faced guy burst into the exam room with Belinda trailing behind. “What’s this Belinda tells me about donating again, Doc? My last one wasn’t even a month ago.” He stopped in the middle of the room and stared at our bandit. “Who is this guy? You know I’m happy to help out neighbors, but I’ve never seen him.”

  “This one pays, Kyle,” Dr. McCarthy replied. “A hundred kale seeds.”

  “Damn. Bleed me ’til I faint.” Henthorn hopped up onto the exam table and rolled up his sleeve.

  “Why do I feel like I just failed Medical Ethics 101?” Dr. McCarthy said.

  “Because you did.” Belinda was glaring at him.

  Dr. McCarthy shrugged and got to work. They set up a gravity-feed transfusion, straight from Henthorn’s arm into the bandit’s.

  The transfusion had been going about five minutes when the bandit woke and started thrashing. I was pressed into service to keep him from ripping out the IV needle. Keeping his arms pinned to the floor was easy—he was feeble.

  Dr. McCarthy cut off the transfusion after about ten minutes.

  “You sure you don’t need any more?” Kyle asked. “I feel fine.”

  “No, I don’t want to take any chances—I feel bad enough about this already,” Doc McCarthy replied. “I’ll bring by your kale seeds later. Belinda, would you get him something to eat and then drive
him home? Keep him in the waiting room about fifteen minutes—I don’t want him to pass out.”

  Belinda and Kyle left the exam room. Dr. McCarthy started unwrapping the Ace bandage from the bandit’s side. As the doctor gently pulled the packing out of the wound, the bandit screamed and started bucking.

  “I wish I had some kind of sedative left,” Dr. McCarthy said.

  “I could put pressure on his jugular, try to knock him out,” I offered.

  “No, no. He’s already suffering from anemic hypoxia, that’d only make it worse. Just hold him.”

  Dr. McCarthy cleaned and repacked the wound on the bandit’s belly. He passed out again while the doctor stitched him up. Then I had to roll him over so Doc could work on the entrance wound at his back.

  “How long will he be out?” I asked when Dr. McCarthy finished.

  “Can’t tell for sure. Could be an hour, could be he never wakes up. But he’ll probably sleep for three or four days and heal okay.”

  “I want to go out to my uncle’s farm,” I said. “Can you keep him here until Darla and I get back?”

  “You mean, restrain him?” Dr. McCarthy said. “No, I won’t do that. You could talk to the sheriff about it, though.”

  “I guess we’ll stay here until he wakes up then?” I looked at Darla.

  She nodded. “Is there someplace to sleep around here?”

  “We have a cot in the other exam room—one of you can use the exam table.” Dr. McCarthy picked up the tray that held his instruments. “So long as you’re waiting for him to wake up, would you take the night shift for us? Belinda and I have been trading off for six months now—a couple of nights off would be great.”

  “You sure?” I said. “What if a patient comes?”

  “Yeah, you’ll be fine. I’ll show you where my house is. If you need me, one of you stay with the patients, the other run to get me.”

  Somehow I got stuck on the exam table that night while Darla got the cot. Well, I knew how it happened—I offered her the cot and she said, “Sure, thanks,” when I was hoping she’d say, “No, you take it.” Anyway, the metal table was uncomfortable despite the sleeping bag I spread over it.

  So I was awake to hear the moans emanating from the room next door when the bandit woke up. I rolled off the table and padded over there in my socks, trying not to wake Darla. In the hall we’d left a lantern, turned to its lowest possible setting, in case the guy woke up. I turned the lantern a little higher and carried it into his room.