Ashen Winter

by Mike Mullin

  I rolled back onto my side and stared into the fire, waiting for the tempestuous mix of desire, regret, and shame to subside. Alyssa was silent, staring at me. I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to take me.

  • • •

  I dreamed of pigs. A hog squealed as Darla slashed its throat. Blood fountained out as the pig cried, sounding exactly like my sister in the midst of a full-blown temper tantrum. Darla’s arms and face were splashed, dripping red in my candlelit dream. She smiled then seemed to see me. Her head turned and her sanguinary visage shifted, mouth open in a little O, eyes wide with pain and betrayal.

  Then the dream shifted and suddenly Darla was naked, suffocatingly beautiful. Her arms and face were still covered in blood. She drew a finger through the blood, painting herself, writhing suggestively, and whispering, “Alex . . . Alex . . .”

  I woke up. Alyssa was spooned against my back, her arm resting on my shoulder, which hurt. On the other side of the fire, less than ten feet from me, a strange man stood, aiming a rifle at my chest.

  Chapter 57

  The man was lean and grizzled, his scraggly beard frosted white. His brown Carhartt coveralls were filthy, as if he’d been sleeping on dirt.

  I pinched Alyssa’s hand, and she startled awake. “Nice job keeping watch,” I hissed.

  “Sorry,” she whispered back.

  The man growled, “Don’t move. Take that knife and gun off his belt, Brand.”

  I rotated my head to see who he was talking to. About five feet behind me stood a woman clutching a silver revolver in a two-handed grip, pointing it at Alyssa’s back. A boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, stood next to her. He stepped over to where Alyssa and I lay and bent to take my knife and pistol. His hands were shaking so badly I was afraid he’d cut me with my own knife. He retreated to stand beside the woman.

  Ben sat up. I hadn’t even realized he was awake. The man swiveled, pointing his rifle at Ben. “I said, don’t move!”

  “Your tactical doctrine is flawed,” Ben said.

  The man gaped.

  “In a three-person team, optimal tactical doctrine calls for enveloping the target in a triangular formation.”

  “Just don’t move, okay?” the man said.

  “If the Sister Unit or Her Attachment stood up, you’d be in each other’s field of fire. If you missed or just grazed your target, you could easily wind up shooting one of your team members.”

  Her Attachment? Me? And what was he doing lecturing these people about infantry tactics? “Shut. Him. Up!” I hissed at Alyssa.

  “Like I could,” she whispered back.

  Ben kept talking. “With a Winchester Model 70 at a range of twelve feet, even a hit might pass through the target and impact a team member.”

  The man looked down at his rifle, clearly surprised.

  “Fixing your deployment would be easy. You, Short One,” Ben said, addressing the kid. “Move over here, on the other side of me.”

  Great, I thought, now he’s telling people how to kill us more effectively.

  To my amazement, the boy did it, moving away from the woman.

  “No. Farther away,” Ben said, “so you can’t be used as a shield or hostage easily.”

  The boy took two steps back.

  “Now, you,” Ben said to the woman. “Take three big steps to your right.”

  She started to turn.

  “No,” Ben said. “Sidestep. So your weapon stays on the target.”

  The woman sidestepped so that now the three of them formed a neat triangle around us.

  “Good,” Ben said. “Now if you discharge your weapons, each of you will have a clear field of fire. This formation is not recommended in situations where there is a risk of encountering flanking forces. In that situation, an enfilade deployment is preferable. . . .”

  Ben kept talking about the benefits and drawbacks of an enfilade deployment, whatever that was. The man’s mouth formed an O, probably because it couldn’t very well form the letters WTF. The situation was so ridiculous and tense that I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing.

  Everyone looked at me as if I were crazy. Which was fair, I guessed. Then the man holding the rifle started laughing, too, and pretty soon everyone but Ben had joined in.

  When the hilarity had died down, the man said, “You all are just crazy enough that I think I understand why you’re still alive.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I pushed myself slowly upright, keeping both hands in view. Maybe this guy was laughing, but he still had a rifle pointed my way. I took a step closer to him and stretched my left hand out as if to shake. My right arm still wasn’t working too well.

  He snicked on the safety and moved the rifle to his shoulder, pointed upward. His handshake was a little too vigorous for my liking—I could move my left arm, but it still hurt when he pumped it. “I’m Eli. My wife there’s Mary Sue, and that’s my son, Brand.” He was so dirty he left a smudge on my hand. Not that my own hands were any too clean.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Brand said, looking at Ben.

  “Nothing’s wrong with him,” Alyssa snapped as she stood up.

  “He’s autistic,” I said.

  “He doesn’t seem artistic,” Brand replied.

  Alyssa wasn’t smiling. “Autistic. And he’s smarter than everyone else in this room put together.”

  “Sorry,” Brand muttered.

  Ben was ignoring us all, sketching something with his fingertip in the dust on the floor. More infantry tactics, maybe.

  I still felt as if I were inching along the edge of a one-hundred-foot cliff. There were no guns pointed at us now, but they were still armed, and we weren’t. “Can I have my stuff back?” I asked Brand.

  He looked at his father, who shook his head.

  “You all weren’t planning on staying here, were ya?” Mary Sue said, the first words she’d uttered. Her voice brought to mind the sibilant whisper of a moving snake.

  “We’re headed to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

  “Huh, probably nothing there. Morley, Olin, and Mechanicsville’s all been ransacked. Not a living soul in any of ’em. No dead people, either, ’less you count bones already cracked and sucked dry of their marrow. We visited, hopin’ to trade.” Mary Sue stepped closer to us as she talked. Her teeth shone yellow in the firelight. Each tooth was outlined in blood.

  “Worthington was fine a week ago,” I said. “Your gums are bleeding. You have scurvy?”

  “Yeah. No fresh food. Girls got it worse.”

  “Girls?” Alyssa said.

  “Alba and Joy,” Mary Sue said. “They’re hidden. Safe.”

  I rummaged through my pack. Eli readied his rifle, eyeing me suspiciously. I was running low on dandelion leaves, and the ones I had left were pretty badly wilted. As I pulled a bag out of my backpack, Eli aimed the rifle at me again and muttered, “Easy . . .”

  “It’s okay. I’m just getting dandelion leaves.” I handed the bag to Mary Sue. “They’re bitter, but they have vitamin C. That’s all I have left.”

  She pulled a leaf out of the bag and bit it. “Fresh greens. Didn’t think I’d live to taste them again. Where’d you get them?” She whispered the question, as if she were asking where I’d learned the secret nature of God, not where I’d picked up some weeds.

  “Worthington. They grow ’em in cold frames.”

  “You got any seeds?” Eli lowered his rifle. “We could make cold frames out of some of our windows.”

  “Yeah, that’s how they do it in Worthington. I don’t have any dandelion seeds, but I can do you one better. I’ve got kale seeds. Good winter variety. It can even come back from a freeze, if it isn’t too hard or too long. Four times as much vitamin C as dandelion.”

  “And where’d that miracle come from?”

  “Warren, Illinois. It’s home now, I guess. We grow kale in greenhouses.” I reached into my jacket and pulled open the bag in my pocket without taking it out. I didn’t want them to see how many packets of kale se
eds I had. I slid out one envelope.

  Eli accepted the envelope I offered him. “You came all the way from Illinois?”

  “Yeah. Now can I have my weapons back?”

  Eli nodded slowly. “Brand, give the man his gun and knife, then fetch your sisters from the cellar.” He set his rifle aside and fed the fire.

  The girls were both younger than Brand. They reminded me of a bed of spring wildflowers I’d seen once after a flood. You could tell they were beautiful, even if they were beaten down and coated in filth.

  Mary Sue carefully split the dandelion leaves into five portions. I noticed that Eli got less than the kids, and Mary Sue got barely any at all. While they ate, we traded stories. I told the saga of my trip from Illinois: how we’d found the shotgun, Blue Betsy, that had spurred this crazy trip to find my parents. Losing Bikezilla in the Mississippi. I choked on my words as I told them about Darla getting shot.

  When I finished, Eli said, “Used to have a lot of trouble with the Peckerwoods ourselves. Had one visit from another gang, called ’emselves the Dirty White Boys. Haven’t seen either of them in almost two months—figured they’d run out of gas.”

  “How’d you survive a visit from the Peckerwoods?”

  “Same way we did when you came. Hid in the root cellar. Could hear ’em shouting and carousing upstairs. We keep everything important down there so we can hide at a moment’s notice. Speaking of which, we’d best post a lookout again. Alba, it’s your turn.”

  “Yes, Papi,” she said in her little girl soprano as she hurried away.

  “You’ve been down there two days? I checked the basement—I didn’t see any root cellar.”

  “We moved the furnace to block the door. And yeah, we would have stayed down there ’til you left, but one of the dang pigs got out last night.”

  “You keep pigs down there?”

  “Can’t keep ’em up here, can we? Anyone comes, that’d give us away fer sure—plus we’d lose valuable food. Anyway, I figured the stupid thing would wake you up, so we came up loaded for bear and found you all hibernatin’.”

  “How’d you keep the pigs quiet?”

  “Well we didn’t, did we? Used to feed ‘em Nyquil, but we’re out.”

  I glared at Alyssa.

  “I already said I was sorry.”

  I turned back to Eli. “You haven’t slaughtered the pigs for meat?”

  “I’m saving a few. To breed. When things start to turn around.”

  “What do you feed them?”

  “Corn and soybeans. All the farms around here are abandoned—there’s more crops left under the snow and ash than we can dig up.”

  I shook my head in amazement. Not only were they surviving, they were preparing for a posteruption future.

  Eli was staring at me in a thoughtful way. He turned toward his wife, “Y’know, we could use more hands. ’Specially if we got to try farmin’ kale.”

  “I’m not staying,” I said. “I’m going after Darla.”

  “Going up against those gangs’ll get you killed in a hurry.”

  I shrugged. Eli turned his gaze toward Alyssa.

  “She can’t stay. Not on her ownsome,” Mary Sue hissed at him.

  “I’m trying to get to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

  “We just need to get the tire on our truck changed, and we’ll be on our way. You got a jack here?”

  “Buried out in the shed, yeah. Might take days to dig it out, though.”

  “Crap. I need to get moving.”

  “Could probably rig something up, do the same work as a jack. Some levers and blocks, maybe.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “How’re you payin’ for the work?”

  “Um, kale seeds?”

  “That’s your rent money for staying here. What else you got?”

  I thought for a moment. “There’re some crates in the back of the truck. We only opened two, but one of them had shotgun shells in it. You get the tire changed, and I’ll split the truck’s load fifty-fifty with you. Ammo’s worth a fortune if you can find someone to trade with.”

  Mary Sue cupped her hands around Eli’s ear, whispering something.

  He recoiled from her, a growl rattling from his throat. “We do that, we ain’t no better than the Peckerwoods.”

  I watched them carefully, looking away only when Mary Sue shot me a murderous glare. Why was she hating on me? I hadn’t done anything.

  Getting the truck jacked up and the tire changed took most of the day. First we had to bend the wheel well away from the tire using a wrecking bar Eli provided. We made a long, heavy lever out of a pair of two-by-ten rafters scavenged from the barn. Then we spent hours digging up patio pavers from the frozen ground at the back of the house to use as a fulcrum and blocks.

  Improvising a makeshift tire iron was much easier—we used an adjustable wrench and a length of galvanized iron pipe cut from the basement.

  We still had to actually jack up the truck. We wedged our lever under the truck just behind the blown wheel and stacked pavers under it to use as a fulcrum. More than twelve feet of the lever protruded from under the truck, angled upward so steeply that we had to reach above our heads to grab it. Using the lever, Eli, Ben, and I could raise the corner of the truck by ourselves, even though I was only using my left arm. We couldn’t raise it very far, though. Brand rushed to stack pavers under the truck. Then we let the truck back down and reset our fulcrum to lift it again. It took seven or eight lifts to finally get the truck high enough to swap the tires. Then we had to lift the truck again while Brand cleared all the blocks out from under it.

  “You ready to split up the load?” Eli said.

  “Yeah.” I helped him drag the wooden crates out of the truck’s load bed. We stacked the crates on the packed snow outside. As I went to move one of the last crates out of the back of the truck, something shifted, and I heard a metallic clunk. Something had been buried under the pile of crates. I couldn’t see exactly what it was, so I grabbed it and carried it out into the light.

  “Son of a mangy coyote bitch,” Eli said when he saw what I was holding. Then we started laughing. I held the truck’s hydraulic jack and tire iron. Instead of stowing the jack in the toolbox, the Peckerwoods had just tossed it in the load bed.

  Four of the crates held manacles; all the rest were loaded with ammo. We split everything down the middle, as agreed, although that probably made it the most fabulously expensive tire change in history. Unfortunately it was all rifle and shotgun loads, and all I had was a pistol. That gave me an idea, “You have any long guns I could trade for?”

  “No way,” Eli replied. “Just got the rifle and revolver you already saw. Can’t afford to give either of them up, not for any price.”

  So much for that idea. We resealed all the crates—I didn’t want the ammo flying everywhere if we hit a pothole or something. By that time the dim daylight was fading to night. We’d have to wait for morning to leave. Navigating unknown roads in a truck I could barely drive would be impossible in the pitch-black postvolcanic night. My anxiety increased with every day that passed—every day that Darla had to endure the Peckerwoods.

  Chapter 58

  I woke with a start. Something had touched my head. I slept using my backpack as a pillow; now, by the light cast by the embers of our fire, I saw the pale gleam of an arm being withdrawn from my pack.

  I whipped out my left arm, caught the intruding arm, and twisted. I heard a high-pitched moan as I forced the intruder’s arm behind her back, bringing her to the floor with a thump. I rolled over onto her, controlling her legs with mine. They weren’t really taekwondo moves, but we had practiced ground fighting occasionally at my dojang.

  I leaned down and whispered in her ear, lacing my words with sarcasm, “You needed something from my pack?”

  “I know you got more of them greens,” Mary Sue replied.

  “I don’t, and if I catch you in my backpack again, I’ll break your arm.” I forced her wrist toward her neck, e
mphasizing just how easy it would be to break her arm in this position. Mary Sue whimpered quietly.

  I let go of her wrist and rolled off her. Mary Sue crawled away. Ben and Alyssa hadn’t even woken up. Mary Sue’s enmity didn’t make any sense to me—I’d given her dandelion greens, kale seeds, and ammo. Maybe it was a case of mama tiger gone rogue. I lay awake for an hour or more, wondering if she would return and force me to make good on my threat. To my relief, she never did.

  • • •

  I woke with the dawn. It took us less than ten minutes to get packed. Eli offered to make us breakfast, but I declined. I didn’t want to spend any more time than I had to in close proximity to his wife. He and Brand said goodbye, clasping arms with me and Alyssa. Ben was already in the truck. Mary Sue wouldn’t even meet my eyes, and the girls were too shy to shake our hands or offer hugs.

  “Come back anytime,” Eli said as I climbed into the truck.

  “I will,” I lied. The scowl on Mary Sue’s face told me exactly how welcome I’d be if I ever showed up again.

  I slammed the door, pushed the starter, and stalled the truck. Not my proudest moment. But on the second try I found first gear, and we rolled away from the farmstead, headed east. I planned to turn north at the first opportunity and loop back to Anamosa. Hopefully there’d be enough gas for Alyssa and Ben to get to Worthington after I left them. Less than a quarter tank remained. Maybe it would be enough.

  I’d driven about a half hour when we approached a small town. A sign barely protruding from the snow bank read WELCOME TO OLIN. I drove down the abandoned and burned-out main street. The highway ended in a T on the far side of town, and a short knoll rose in the field to the left of the road.

  I slowed as I neared the intersection, looking for street signs. Without warning, a telephone pole toppled in front of us. I stomped on the brakes, sliding to a stop well before the intersection. The pole had slammed into the snow berm just ahead of us, so it was perched about four feet above the road, completely blocking our passage. I struggled to throw the truck into reverse, but I was so freaked out that I stalled it again. It didn’t matter. In the rearview mirror, I saw another telephone pole topple behind us, boxing us in.