Ashen Winter

by Mike Mullin

  “What’s it mean?” Dad asked.

  “Dirty White Boys,” Shawn managed to say with a strut in his voice that was strange, given the tears streaking his face.

  “You sure qualify on the dirty part,” I said. He stunk.

  “How’d you get into the camp?” Dad asked.

  “Just kill me now. Cody’ll flense me if he finds out I answered that.”

  Dad peeled his index finger back, and Shawn groaned. It snapped with a sound like a branch breaking, and Shawn’s groan morphed into a scream. “Cody’s not here. I am,” Dad said. “You’re going to tell me everything I want to know. Either now or after I’ve broken your other six fingers.”

  Shawn was sobbing now. “Just . . . break them all, then.”

  “Goddamn it, I’m not playing!” Dad yelled. “Give me that knife, Alex.”

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. My teeth clicked as I closed my mouth. “W-why? What’re you going to do with it?”

  “Now!” Dad ordered, his rage barely contained.

  I flipped the knife and handed it to him butt first. He grasped the hilt in his right hand and seized the tip of Shawn’s pinkie in his left. The knife flashed as he lowered it, sawing into Shawn’s finger. The icy ground under my feet reached up through my body, freezing me in place.

  Dad was still sawing at the finger as Shawn screamed. The knife found the break in the pinkie and sliced through. Blood poured out the stump, splattering Dad’s trousers. He stepped around Shawn, got right in his tear-stained face, and hollered, “You like that, you goddamn cannibal? You want to eat people, start with yourself.” Dad jammed the bloody finger against Shawn’s lips, trying to force it down his throat. “I’ll feed you all ten of your bloody fingers—”

  My icy immobility shattered, and I lashed out, striking Dad’s wrist. The finger went flying, hitting the side of the tent with a thump. “What the hell!” I shouted. “This isn’t us! This isn’t you! Stop it!”

  Dad’s face was twisted by some kind of sick, almost gleeful rage. “Oh, we lost your finger,” he cooed to Shawn. “I know where we can get nine more.” He lifted the knife and stepped behind Shawn.

  As he seized Shawn’s broken ring finger, Shawn blubbered, “No. Stop. . . . The DWBs, we have a deal with some of the guards.”

  “A deal?” Dad asked.

  “They let us in and out.”

  “In return for what?”

  “We bring them supplies. Drugs, booze, food. Let them do the girls sometimes.”

  “What happens to the people you take?”

  “Flense most of them. We keep some of the girls to trade.”

  I thought of Darla. If she was still alive, she was in the hands of a gang like this one. I stumbled out of the tent and vomited.

  Through the wall of the tent, I heard Dad saying, “Which guards work with you?”

  Shawn gave him about a dozen names. Then he asked in a tremulous voice, “You going to flense me now?”

  “I haven’t decided,” Dad replied. The tent flap rustled, and he strode past me.

  I hurried to catch up and grabbed his arm. “What the hell was that?”

  “That’s the world we live in now.”

  I swung him to face me. “No. You’re blaming the world for choices you made.”

  Dad tried to pull away. “That’s just the way things are now.”

  There was a wet, choking sound behind me and a thump. “What was that?”

  “Jones. Taking care of the flenser.” He said “flenser” like it was the vilest curse word ever invented.

  Jones pushed through the tent flap, carrying the light in one hand and awkwardly dragging Shawn in the other. She was bent almost double, straining against his bulk. A trail of blood followed Shawn’s head. His throat had been cut. “What . . .why?”

  “They’re flensers,” Dad said flatly. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect those under my care from the likes of him. Whatever. I’ve got no apologies to make. Now let go of me, son.”

  “What’re you going to do?” I asked.

  “Take care of the rest of the flensers,” Dad replied. “Go help Jones with that offal.”

  “So you kill the other three cannibals. What good does it do?”

  “Three fewer flensers in the world.”

  “And they send four other guys. Or forty. It gets us nothing.”

  “So what? We let them go?”

  Part of me wanted to say forget it, they deserved to die. To let Dad do whatever he wanted to the other three. I didn’t really care what happened to them. But I did care about Dad, about what he was becoming. Or had already become. “What if we let one of them go? Would they trade something for the other two?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “What do they have that we’d even want?”

  “An end to the raids on the camp would be a good start.”

  “We can’t trust the DWBs. And some other gang might start raiding, instead.”

  “Yeah. You know, it’s not the gangs. It’s Black Lake. We need some way to stop them from letting gangs into the camp, period. Can we report them to someone? Call their HQ?”

  “There’s no cell network anymore. Maybe a shortwave radio. I’ve heard that’s how Black Lake stays in touch with Washington.”

  “Can you keep two of them hidden while we work out a trade?”

  “Maybe,” Dad shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, we go with plan A and slit their filthy throats.”

  The three live flensers were called Trey, Darrell, and Cody, who was the boss. We released Trey with a message: Bring a shortwave radio transceiver and an extra set of batteries to camp, and we’ll free Cody and Darrell. Continue raiding, or tell Black Lake we have captives, and we’ll slit the two guys’ throats without a second thought. For good measure, Dad retrieved the bloody, dirty pinkie stub and told Trey to take it along—to let his bosses know we were serious.

  After releasing Trey, Dad went to help move our captives to new tents, and I returned to the tent I shared with Dad. I lay down but didn’t sleep. It was after dawn by then, and the tent flap let in a sliver of light. It let in a frigid breeze, too, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and tie it tighter. Instead I stared into the light while my thoughts churned my brain to mush.

  I was still trying to sleep when Dad finally came in. “You’re awake,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  He started to take off his boots. “Look, I—”

  “You don’t owe me an explanation,” I said, staring through him toward the sliver of light now blocked by his body.

  “I was just doing what I had to.”

  “Bullshit. You cut off a guy’s finger and tried to make him eat it, Dad.”

  He turned his back toward me. “Yeah,” he said quietly.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding.

  “You remember what I did before the volcano,” Dad said.

  “CAD/CAM drafting. So what?”

  “I didn’t always do that. I’ve got a civil engineering degree. Got a great job right out of college. Just what I’d always wanted to do. Designing sewer systems might not sound like fun to most people, but I loved it. The flow dynamics, the treatment ponds—it all has to come together like the sections of symphony. Brown water comes in, and clean water comes out. There’s a beauty to it if you can see it.”

  “You never talked about that.”

  “No. I designed a huge job in El Mirage, outside Phoenix. Made a mistake calculating the load on a wall. Dropped a zero. Maybe the contractor should have caught it, but they didn’t. The cave-in buried three guys up to their necks. The other workers unburied them in less than an hour, but they still died. Crush syndrome.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “After that, I didn’t have any passion for designing the systems anymore. The music of it was gone. I took a crappy job doing CAD/CAM renderings, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”

  “I always thought that was what you wanted to do.�
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  “I guess it was what I wanted. After El Mirage, anyway.” Dad paused for a long time. He was sitting hunched in the front of the tent, facing away from me. “Those three guys who died. They had families. Wives and children. I was responsible. I could have prevented it. . . .”

  I didn’t know what to say. I waited out the silence.

  “If I made a mistake doing the CAD/CAM drawings, the architect was responsible for catching it. I wasn’t in charge. But I didn’t. Make mistakes. My drawings were perfect—the best. I’ve turned down three promotions in the last ten years. I didn’t want the responsibility.

  “When I got here, I helped your mom with the school. Taught math. But I wasn’t really into it—it was just easier to do what Janice wanted instead of arguing with her. But there was one student—Karen. Sixteen. Energetic. Brilliant. I was teaching her what little integral calculus I could remember.

  “She told me she was worried. She’d heard rumors about girls disappearing. I shrugged off her concerns.” Dad lowered his head. “She hasn’t been seen in four months.

  “Responsibility’s a cruel bitch. She comes for you whether you want it or not. And people are dying here, regardless of what I do, Alex.” He swiveled at the hips toward me, his face silhouetted—all sharp black angles against the tent opening. “But it’s still my job to protect them. If I had to cut off my own finger and eat it, I’d do that. Whatever it takes. Whatever.”

  “Some things are beyond our control,” I said. “No matter what we do.” I sat up and hugged him. I still couldn’t reconcile the placid, benignly neglectful father I’d known with this mercurial maniac I had wrapped in my arms. The disaster had warped the landscape of our minds—perhaps even more than it had altered the physical landscape.

  When, after a long while, we broke the embrace and laid down side-by-side on our bedrolls, neither of us slept. Instead we stared silently at the tiny sliver of light still peeking from the outside world into the darkness within our tent.

  Chapter 65

  I found Ben in the breakfast line. “I need to talk to you,” I whispered.

  “You are talking to me,” he replied in a normal voice.

  “Talk about what?” Alyssa asked.

  “Escaping,” I whispered back.

  “Escaping is not a difficult problem,” Ben said. “There are vulnerabilities—”

  “Ben,” Alyssa whispered urgently. Our neighbors in the line had turned almost in unison to stare at us. “Later. After breakfast.”

  “The information is classified as need-to-know only?”

  “Yes, only Alex needs to know.”

  After breakfast, the three of us huddled behind a tent, out of the wind, while Ben explained his plan. The guards changed twice each night around midnight and four A.M. Ben had observed them congregating at the guard hut during their shift change—the perfect opportunity to escape at the other side of the camp. The only problem: How would we cross the fence?

  A bolt cutter would be the obvious solution, but none of us had any idea where we’d get one of those. Ben’s other idea was to build a canvas sling about twenty feet long and two feet wide. The middle would be reinforced with a dozen layers of canvas. We’d toss it over the fence so that the reinforced part overlaid the razor wire. Then we’d tie both sides to the chain-link part of the fence and climb over via hand- and footholds sewn into the sling.

  So we needed to dismantle a tent—one of the old types made of heavy-duty canvas. Dad was asleep so I went looking for Mom. I found her crouched in a tent feeding an older woman who was too sick to stand in the food line.

  “You need any help?” I asked.

  “Sure.” She handed me a bowl of boiled wheat. “See if Jane wants to eat anything.” She gestured at the other woman in the tent.

  I took the bowl from her and crouched, shuffling deeper into the tent. “You think you can eat?” I said to Jane.

  “Reckon’ so,” she replied in a low, rough voice. She started trying to push herself upright.

  “Let me help you.” I put my hand behind her shoulders and lifted, jamming the bedding in behind her to keep her partly upright. I took a spoonful of gruel and held it to her lips.

  “Mom,” I said, “I need a tent.”

  “Your father snoring or something?” she replied.

  “No, it’s not that. I need to . . .” How was I going to explain this? I didn’t really want to lie to her, not that she’d believe me, anyway. “I need to make something out of one of the tents, a heavy canvas one.”

  “Make what?”

  “A sling. To throw across the fence.”

  Mom swiveled toward me, slopping some of the gruel across the cheek of her patient. “You just got here! We’re finally back together, and you—”

  “So come with me,” I said. “That’s why Darla and I came back to Iowa in the first place. To find you and bring you home to Uncle Paul’s. To Rebecca.”

  “We’ll try to escape as soon as we know the girls here are safe, and we’ll go back to Uncle Paul’s together. Not gallivanting off after some—”

  “Without Darla, I wouldn’t be here. Wouldn’t be alive. I’m going after her. With or without you.”

  “You’re too young to—”

  “I’m not a kid.”

  “It’s hopeless—”

  “It is not hopeless. I need a heavy canvas tent. And I’d like your help.”

  “There are some things we just can’t do.”

  “We decide what we can do. That’s the way it was before the volcano, and it’s still true.” I fought to keep my hand steady as I continued spooning gruel into Jane’s mouth. “Things are just a lot harder.”

  “Things are different. We have to make hard choices now.”

  “Which is exactly what I’m asking you to do. Make a hard choice. Help me go after Darla.”

  “I . . . I can’t.”

  “You done?” I asked Jane.

  She nodded.

  “Me, too.” I left the tent without looking back.

  Chapter 66

  I napped uneasily the rest of the day. Every time I woke up, I looked to where Dad slept alongside me, thinking about waking him and asking him to help me get a tent. Every time I waited, figuring I’d be better off if I asked him after he woke up on his own. I hoped he’d be more likely to say yes.

  But when I got up for dinner, he was gone. I looked for him all evening but didn’t catch up to him until well after dark.

  His answer was the same as my mother’s. Maybe she’d gotten to him first. They didn’t have any canvas tents to spare, didn’t want to try to escape yet, and weren’t going to go looking for Darla even if or when they did escape. We argued for what felt like at least an hour, but our positions were calcified. Any pair of statues facing off in a public park might have made more progress than we did.

  Our argument ended suddenly when a distant scream pierced the air. No sooner had we started running toward it than two more screams, in different places, shattered the stillness of the night.

  We glanced at each other. “Go wake up the day shift!” Dad ordered.

  “Right.” I reversed course, sprinting for the tents where the prefects slept. By the time I got back with reinforcements, the whole camp was in an uproar. A flood of refugees was pouring into the center of the camp, fleeing the crescendoing screams and chaos. Dad was yelling to be heard over the noise, dispatching teams of prefects to search for whatever or whoever was causing the ruckus.

  Dad grouped me with two others, Jones and Altemeier, and told us to sweep the perimeter of the camp along the fence. We set off at a run.

  By the time we got to the fence, it seemed like the commotion had mostly moved deeper inside the camp. I scanned constantly back and forth as we ran, hyperalert for any movement.

  As we passed the gate, I saw four Black Lake guys, double the usual contingent, leaning against the guard shack outside the fence. “Why don’t you do something?” I yelled. They laughed, and one of them pantomimed sho
oting me. I turned away, and we ran on.

  A few hundred yards farther on, we heard a child screaming. Following the noise, we found a little girl, maybe four or five years old, sitting in the snow between two of the tents, screaming, “Mommyyyyy! Mommyyyyy! Mommyyyyy!” She paused just long enough between each scream to breathe.

  We quickly scouted the adjacent tents. Nobody was there. I scooped up the girl in my arms, which only made her scream louder. “I’ll run her to the middle of camp, then catch up to you,” I yelled. Jones nodded, and she and Altemeier took off along the fence line.

  I headed toward the center of the camp, slowing to a jog to conserve my strength. I had to detour once, to avoid a chaotic melee between three black-clad biker-types and five or six prefects. I would have been worse than useless in the middle of a fight with a squirming little girl in my arms.

  It took more than ten minutes to find Mom in the chaos at the center of camp. She was organizing refugees who weren’t part of the prefect system into groups she designated runners or fighters. I guessed she was organizing for an attack, but I didn’t stop to ask her. Instead I thrust the little girl into her startled arms and took off again.

  I couldn’t find Jones or Altemeier. I looked for a few minutes before I came across another fight. A group of three flensers armed with knives were fighting with a much larger cluster of refugees. I ran toward them, but by the time I arrived, the invaders had broken off, running toward the gate. Nobody chased them—two of the refugees involved in the fight had been stabbed and were bleeding badly. I stopped to help.

  A few minutes later, it was over almost as suddenly as it had started. The cries of rage died, replaced by the wails of the wounded and moans of the dying.

  It took more than twelve hours for Dad to get a clear picture of what had happened. We’d been attacked by members of the Dirty White Boys. Something between fifteen and thirty of them, working in groups of three or four, had swarmed through the camp searching tents and stabbing anything that moved.

  We had eleven fresh corpses. Eight refugees and three Dirty White Boys. Dozens more were wounded, including a few that might soon join the dead. Dad decided to deliver all the corpses to the guard gate along with a protest—not that either of us really thought it would do any good. The guards had let the DWBs in. They knew what would happen.