Ashen Winter

by Mike Mullin

  The truck lurched, sinking into the snow, but the four rear wheels of the deuce got enough traction to keep pushing us forward. I didn’t have to use the brake to stop us—with the flat tire and packed snow, the truck simply coasted to a groaning stop after I let off the gas.

  The farmstead was silent. I thought I smelled a faint whiff of smoke. There were no other signs of habitation.

  I eased open my door. “Stay here,” I said. “If you see anything, yell or come get me.”

  Alyssa nodded. I pulled the pistol off my belt, holding it in my left hand, and slipped out of the truck.

  The flat tire had shredded, losing most of its tread. Some of the rubber had melted onto the wheel well. Maybe that accounted for the smoke I smelled.

  I stalked to the back door. The snow on the walk was packed to icy solidity. My exhaustion vanished, replaced by another adrenaline-fueled buzz. I swiveled my head back and forth, totally alert—looking, listening, smelling, even tasting the air.

  There was a lean-to addition on the back of the house. Only four inches or so of snow were on the roof; someone had cleared it off after last year’s blizzards. A skylight, slightly off center, pierced the shingles. A round piece of metal covered the center of the skylight, as though someone had patched it. The snow had melted for a foot or so all around the skylight, which meant there was, or had been, a heat source inside.

  The storm door was open and askew. Its top hinge had been ripped away. The entry door seemed solid, though. I took hold of the knob, slowly twisting it.

  The door was unlocked. I pushed it open.

  Inside there was a small mudroom. An ancient freezer sat in one corner, redundant because the room itself was below freezing, and useless because there was no hum of power. A pile of filthy, frozen clothing occupied another corner. Aside from that, the room was empty.

  The next room was a large kitchen. I could tell it had been a kitchen by the pipes protruding from the walls and the outlines in the paint showing where cabinets had once hung. A thick three-foot-square chunk of foam-board insulation lay on the floor. Someone had laid a double stack of concrete patio pavers on it, and ashes from an old fire were clumped atop the pavers. A huge jumble of branches was heaped in one corner.

  The patched skylight was directly above the makeshift fire pit. A long string with a loop tied in the end dangled from the metal patch. I tugged on the string experimentally—the patch proved to be a metal cover on a spring-loaded hinge. When I pulled it fully open, the loop in the string would just reach a nail jutting from the wall. It was an ingenious setup—you could open the hatch to let smoke out or close it to keep the heat in, all without having to reach the high, sloped ceiling. People had clearly been living here since the eruption. The only question: Were they still here?

  I eased through the entire house, quietly checking every room. Some held furniture and belongings, but much of what I found was broken, ruined, or frozen. I saw lots of signs that people had lived here, but none that they’d been around recently. Where had they gone? And why? I even investigated the basement, returning to the truck to get a candle so I could peer into the dark corners around the dead furnace. This place was abandoned.

  I went back outside to get the others. The truck was on the opposite side of the house from the road—not exactly hidden, but it was the best I could do. When I tried to help Ben out of the truck, Alyssa waved me away. It didn’t seem like she helped him much, just offered a shoulder that he leaned on for support as they trudged inside.

  I built a fire in the kitchen while Alyssa unwrapped Ben’s ankle and struggled to take off his boot. His ankle was hugely swollen and red. We weren’t sure how to tell if it was broken, so we decided to rewrap it for support but leave his boot off. We probably couldn’t have gotten it back on him, anyway.

  I searched Clevis’s pack. He had a couple of two-liter plastic bottles full of water that had stayed liquid, warmed by the heater in the truck; a bundle of corn pone wrapped in paper; a plastic bag filled with dried meat; a few matches; and a small first-aid kit. I tossed the meat into the snow outside. No way would I eat any meat that came from a flenser’s backpack.

  Alyssa filled one of my pans with snow and put it on the fire to melt. Ben asked to use my hatchet. I handed it over, and he crawled to the woodpile and started breaking up the branches, sorting them by size.

  I was starving, so I worked on lunch. Cornmeal mush with dandelion greens and bits of beef jerky—my gourmet specialty. While I worked, I tried to find out more about Alyssa.

  “How long have you two been with the Peckerwoods?”

  “Been slaves, you mean?” Alyssa said. “Almost four months.”

  “Why’d they keep you around?” I wanted to ask why the Peckerwoods hadn’t killed and eaten them both, but that hardly seemed polite.

  “I did stuff for them.” Alyssa wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself.

  “Stuff? Like what?”

  Alyssa’s face turned red, but judging from her expression, she was angry, not embarrassed. “Like—none of your business.”

  Oh. That kind of stuff. Suddenly I thought of Darla, held captive by the same men. I choked my words out through grinding teeth. “Sorry. And Ben . . .?”

  “I told Danny I’d kill myself if he hurt Ben. And I convinced him he didn’t want me to kill myself.” Alyssa’s face was cold—hard and red as a brick.

  “But he was sending you to Iowa City?”

  “The Peckerwoods are running out of food and gas. I guess they got a good price for me.” Alyssa shrugged. “And Danny has a new girl he got from the Peckerwoods in Cascade. He likes short brunettes. Guess she’s that Darla you told me about.”

  My face grew hot, and I ground my teeth into fury. I thrust my hand into my pocket, gripping the chain ’til it cut my fingers. I had to get moving. Had to get back to Anamosa. Had to find Darla.

  Chapter 55

  Alyssa backed up a step, eyeing me warily. “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . it didn’t look like she was hurt too bad.”

  “What’ll they do to her?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Alyssa shied away from me. “Nothing good.”

  “I’ve got to get back to Anamosa.” I started to push myself upright but made the mistake of trying to use my right arm. Pain reverberated through my arm and chest, and I crumpled, falling alongside the fire.

  Alyssa knelt beside me and pulled off my right glove. “Why do you want to get killed over her? Who is she?”

  “Darla. She’s my . . .” Girlfriend didn’t seem to cover it. I struggled to think of a word that did. “She’s the reason I’m alive.”

  Alyssa nodded. “The only reason I’m alive is Ben. When I told Danny that I’d starve myself to death if he flensed Ben, I meant it. There’s nothing in this shitpool life worth living for except him.” She started to strip off my jacket, forcing me to sit up. I tried to protest, but she shushed me and kept going, taking off my clothing until I was bare-chested by the fire. I pushed a couple more sticks of wood into the fire. My back was freezing.

  “Wow,” Alyssa said, looking at my right arm. It was a swollen mass of purple-blue bruises. She gently lifted my arm. Even my armpit was bruised. Alyssa ran her fingers lightly over the horseshoe-shaped scar at the base of my ribcage. “What’s that from?”

  “A bandit—flenser, I guess, got me with a hatchet last year.”

  “And you survived.”

  “I killed him,” I said flatly.

  “And those?” She touched one of the round scabs on my belly.

  “Shotgun pellets.”

  Her fingers wandered to my chest, tracing my pecs, which had gotten considerably larger over the months of nonstop farm work and physically challenging lifestyle, to put it mildly. “You’re strong,” she said.

  I pulled away from her fingers and reached out to stir the corn porridge. “It’s ready.”

  “I’m not sure what to do about your arm. It doesn’t seem like anything’s
broken.”

  I shrugged my left shoulder.

  “Maybe I should strap it to your side? Or make a sling? It might heal faster if you can’t move it.”

  “No,” I said. “I can move it a little. If anything happens, I might need it. Just help me put my clothes back on.”

  She didn’t respond right away. She was staring at me—at the bruises on my arm, maybe, or maybe at my chest. Her eyes weren’t on my face, that was for sure. I wasn’t used to having a girl look at me that way—well, Darla had, sometimes.

  I picked up my T-shirt and held it out toward her.

  “If you go back to Anamosa, you’re going to die. There’s more than a hundred Peckerwoods there,” she said as she helped me struggle into my T-shirt.

  “Darla needs me.”

  “She’ll be—well, they won’t kill her. She’s young and pretty. Valuable.”

  “They can’t have her. I’m going to go get her. I’d leave now if I could.”

  Alyssa’s eyes shone in the firelight.

  “Hey. I’ll just get close. Then you and Ben can have the truck—drive yourselves to Worthington. You’ll be safe there.” I sent up a silent prayer that Worthington hadn’t been overrun, that Rita Mae and even Mayor Kenda were still okay.

  “You’re a tough guy, aren’t you?” Alyssa said.

  “Not really,” I replied. “You’re pretty tough. You survived being captured by the Peckerwoods. Kept your brother alive.”

  Alyssa started softly crying. I looked at Ben—he was immersed in systematically chopping and sorting wood, oblivious to his sister. I reached out and wrapped an arm around her, drawing her into an awkward, one-armed hug. “Hey, it’s okay. You’ll be all right now,” I told her.

  She clung to me. Her tears ran down my shoulder, and her arm hurt me where it pressed against my bruises. She smelled musky, salty—exciting, somehow. Her scent reminded me of Darla. Suddenly I was crying, too.

  We held onto each other for a minute. Then I smelled something burning. I broke our hug and snatched the pot off the fire. Alyssa helped me get dressed while our lunch cooled.

  We ate all the corn mush, even the burnt bits. I was utterly exhausted. I asked Alyssa to keep watch, tucked a pair of pants under my head, and fell asleep curled in front of the fire.

  Chapter 56

  When I awoke, Alyssa was up, cooking corn porridge for breakfast while Ben tended the fire. “Why didn’t you wake me up to take a turn on watch?” I asked.

  “There was no need,” she said.

  “You stayed up all night? You want to sleep now?”

  “No. I couldn’t stay up.”

  “Somebody should have kept watch.”

  “Nothing happened,” she replied.

  I grunted, mildly disgusted but unwilling to continue arguing.

  After breakfast, I struggled to my feet. “I’m going to check the barn.”

  “You can barely move,” Alyssa protested.

  “There might be something useful out there. Maybe a jack.” I took a faltering step toward the door.

  Alyssa got up and tucked herself under my left shoulder. “I’ll help.”

  “Shouldn’t you stay with Ben?”

  “He’s fine.”

  We stumbled outside with my arm slung over her shoulders for support. A rusted tractor sat in the center of the barn. In one corner there was a huge pile of brown-and-yellow cornhusks, useless except to feed to goats or pigs.

  On the way back, I looked into the bed of our truck. The wooden crates were a jumbled mess. “What’s in the crates?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alyssa answered. “The Peckerwoods loaded them before they loaded us.”

  “Help me get up there.”

  Alyssa let down the tailgate and boosted me up. I hacked at the nearest crate with my hatchet. Opening it one-handed proved to be difficult—I struggled fruitlessly for fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally I got the blade of the hatchet jammed under the lid and used the handle as a lever.

  Inside, it was full of steel chains. I picked one up—it was really four chains with manacles attached, identical to the set Ben had been wearing. The key was affixed to one of the manacles with a strip of duct tape.

  I hacked open another box. It was packed with neat rows of identical brown paperboard boxes. I opened the flap of one at random. Gleaming rows of brass shotgun shells, stacked upright, filled the box. There must have been one hundred shells in that one box. Thousands in the whole crate.

  “Too bad I lost the shotgun,” I said. “Anyway, I guess we’re rich.”

  “Those are worth a lot?” Alyssa asked.

  “Yeah. A fortune—if we can find someone to trade with. I was hoping the barn would have something we could use as a jack and maybe a wrench.”

  “Can’t we just drive real slow?”

  “Yeah. But it would take all day to get to Worthington that way. You’d run out of gas.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe we can cut a beam out of the barn. Use it as a lever to lift one side of the truck and block it up.”

  “Will that work?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see any way to try it right now, as beat up as I am. I wish Darla were here. She’d know how to do it.”

  “She was good with trucks?”

  “Yeah. She’s a wizard with any kind of machine.” I turned from Alyssa to hide the trembling in my lip.

  “She’ll be okay. The Peckerwoods . . . well, the crazy ones, the most brutal ones, they’re already dead. The guys that are left . . . some of them are plenty nasty, but they’re smart, too. They won’t kill her. They won’t destroy something that has value.”

  Something. That word sparked my fury. It filled me like the deep breath you take before a scream. But the Peckerwoods weren’t Alyssa’s fault. She hadn’t created this ash-cursed world. I swallowed on my anger. “You’re not really helping,” I said as mildly as I could manage. “Oh. Sorry.”

  • • •

  We spent the rest of the day cooking, eating, and resting. Just the short walk out to the barn and truck had left me exhausted, and I couldn’t do anything but sleep. The weakness in my body infuriated me. Darla might be suffering far worse than I, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d abused my body so badly that I couldn’t keep going, no matter how much I wanted to—I was completely out of gas.

  After dinner, I offered to take the first watch while Alyssa and Ben slept. After waking up completely unguarded the night before, I didn’t trust either of them to do it.

  As they arranged themselves around the fire to sleep, I wondered how I was going to know when to wake Alyssa. In the past, sometimes I’d paced, counting steps and estimating time that way. Now, I was too weak to pace.

  I started counting slowly on my fingers, trying to time a second per finger. As I tapped my pinky against the floor, a nursery rhyme came to mind, unbidden: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. . . .” I started muttering the rhyme instead of counting.

  Reciting the nursery rhyme brought my mother to mind. She used to singsong it with my sister and me, grabbing our toes and wiggling them with each line of the poem. In my worry for Darla, I’d almost forgotten about Mom and Dad. They were the reason we’d left Warren, the reason Darla got shot. Just a week ago, I’d been determined to find them. Now, leaving Warren seemed like a stupid idea. The dumbest thing I’d ever done.

  Maybe ten seconds passed each time I said the rhyme. Six rhymes a minute. Three hundred and sixty mind-numbing rhymes an hour. Fourteen hundred and forty before I could wake Alyssa. I’d probably have nightmares about stupid little piggies.

  By the time I finished, I was speed-mumbling, saying the rhyme in seven or eight seconds instead of ten. My fingers hurt from tapping the floor, but if anything, I hit it even harder. The pain helped keep me awake.

  I grabbed Alyssa’s ankle and shook her. “Your turn to keep watch.”

  “Uh? ’kay.” Alyssa slowly sat up. She’d taken off her coat
to use as a pillow. The lavender sweater she wore underneath wasn’t exactly form fitting, but it looked good on her.

  I rummaged in my pack, looking for a pair of jeans to use as a pillow. “Good night,” I said once I got settled. “And please don’t fall asleep. We need to stay safe.”

  “You know, I never did thank you. For rescuing us.” Alyssa squatted by my head, feeding the fire.

  I would have shrugged, but I was resting on my left shoulder and my right hurt too badly. “I thought you were Darla.”

  “I think you would have helped us, anyway.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Alyssa put a hand on my shoulder, and I winced. “Oh. Sorry. I forgot.” Her hand wandered up to my neck.

  “It’s okay. Goodnight.”

  “How did you beat Clevis? And learn to climb around on moving trucks like an action movie star?” Her hand caressed my cheek. I wasn’t sure how to feel about her touch—my mind was annoyed and wanted to sleep, but at the same time, it felt somehow reassuring. And maybe something else, too.

  “I’ve been training in taekwondo since I was five. Although we never practiced climbing around on a moving truck, that’s true.”

  “You could, you know, come to Worthington with Ben and me.” Alyssa was whispering, bent over me so our faces were close.

  “I can’t. I have—”

  She kissed me. I knew it was wrong, was appalled with myself, but still I returned her kiss, my lips open, drinking in her hypnotic softness. I rolled away, onto my back, which Alyssa took as a sign of encouragement, kissing me more fiercely, her hands busy at my chest, spreading the warmth from my lips down toward my groin.

  I pushed her away. “No.”

  “Why not? I could make you happy.”

  “No. You could make me feel good. Not happy. There’s a difference.”

  “Most of the guys I’ve met don’t think so.”

  I shrugged.

  Her face scrunched, as if in pain. “You’re just going to get yourself killed chasing after her.”

  “Probably.”