Ashen Winter

by Mike Mullin

  The office had a cement slab floor, so we chopped up our battering ram and built a fire right in the middle of the front office. It became a little smoky, but we got enough fresh air through the open door that it was tolerable. Not that we had a choice about leaving the door open—it had deformed so much that it wouldn’t close.

  After lunch, I took the keys outside and quickly found one that fit the padlock. But the lever that clamped the tank to its base still wouldn’t turn. I tried banging on it with a wrench, kicking it, hanging off it awkwardly with my feet off the ground—nothing worked.

  I slumped into the snow, defeated. Everyone else tried to move the lever, and each of them got the same results as I had: bupkis. If Darla were here, she would know exactly how to free up the lever. But we needed to free it to get fuel to go find Darla. I noticed that my fists were clenched, and I was grinding my teeth, so I tried to force myself to relax.

  “The nut’s frozen,” Dad announced.

  “You think?” I said.

  “Yep,” he replied. “You know how I’m going to unfreeze it?”

  “No clue.”

  “I’m going to light a fire under that propane tank.”

  He wasn’t kidding.

  Chapter 76

  “Are you insane?” I asked. “That would be like lighting a fire under a bomb!”

  “Lighting a fire under a bomb usually will not detonate it,” Ben said. “It depends on the intensity of the fire, the type of bomb, the age of the bomb, and its repair status. For example—”

  “See, it’ll work,” Dad said. “The tank’s in good repair. I don’t smell propane around it. I’ll build a fire just big enough to unfreeze the nut. It won’t heat the propane enough for it to blow.”

  “Maybe.” I still thought he was nuts. But on the other hand, I’d built a fire inside an SUV last year when we were escaping Iowa. Darla told me its gas tank wouldn’t explode, and it hadn’t. Would a propane tank work the same way as an SUV’s gas tank?

  “Everyone else go into the office,” Dad ordered.

  “If you’re so confident it’ll work, why are you sending us inside?”

  “It’ll work. But if I’m wrong, that office is built like a bunker.”

  “You sure about this, Doug?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah.” He kissed her. “Go on.”

  We all retreated to the cement-block office. Dad scooped some coals onto a log and grabbed a handful of kindling. Nobody else did anything. We stared at each other, dreading and half-expecting an explosion.

  I leaned out the door to watch Dad work. He was silhouetted by the blaze he’d built under the propane tank. The idea seemed even dumber now as flames licked the underside of the tank, blackening it.

  I felt a hand on my side. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Mom had joined me at the doorway. “Your Dad wouldn’t want you out here,” she said.

  “I know. You either,” I replied, but neither of us made any move to leave.

  Dad took off his left glove and wadded it up in his right hand. He reached almost into the fire, grabbing the lever through the double layer of insulation. He turned it easily; I heard the clank of the catch releasing. Dad yelled “Yes!” and kicked his boot through the fire, scattering the burning sticks into the snow.

  “Told you,” he said as he passed us, returning to the office.

  Mom and I ignored him.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon digging a path from the truck to the tank. The only tools we had were the spade, snow shovel, and three sticks left over from our battering ram. The mountain of hard-packed snow and ice alongside the highway yielded slowly to our assault. Around midafternoon, the snow shovel broke. After that, working on our knees, we used the blade to scrape or push the snow.

  The only tool left that worked well was the spade. Its sharp blade would cut into the packed snow, and the fiberglass handle was apparently unbreakable. Soon we settled into a rhythm—one person would always be on break, watching the road. When the person on the spade slowed, the rested person would take over. Everyone else used their hands to dig.

  The highway was deserted all day. It made sense, I guessed—with the Peckerwoods wiped out, they wouldn’t be using the road. And any Black Lake employees going back to their camp would head east toward Maquoketa, not south toward us.

  By nightfall we’d cleared a hole in the snow berm barely large enough to pull the truck off the road. We still had almost one hundred feet of deep snow between the truck and tank.

  We slept around the fire in the smoky office. Despite the draft from the open door, it was easily the warmest place I’d slept since I’d left Worthington.

  It took us the entirety of the next day to excavate a path large enough for the truck. It was mind-numbing work that left me far too much time to imagine what Darla might be going through while we dug in the snow. By the time we had the truck backed up so that the open rear doors engulfed the end of the tank, the dim yellowish daytime light was being replaced by murky twilight.

  The following morning, we faced the problem of how to get the tank loaded the rest of the way onto the truck. Dad tried backing the truck under it, but it just pushed the base of the tank along. And if the base collapsed, we’d have no good way to raise the tank back up to the right level.

  We needed something to multiply our strength. We needed more of Ben’s levers, although I could have done without his repeat disquisition on the role of the lever in military history. We cut three small trees and jammed them under the back end of the tank so we could slide it forward by pushing up on them. That was the theory, anyway. What actually happened was that one of the trees broke, and we didn’t shift the tank one iota.

  “Use these trees as a brace, maybe?” Alyssa asked.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Brace the back end of the tank so it can’t slide. Then back up the truck. The base will slide back, and the tank should be forced into the truck.”

  Her solution worked beautifully. In less than twenty minutes, we had a UPS truck-cum-propane tank setup that looked like the Jolly Green Giant had knocked over his brown lunch box, leaving an ear of corn sticking out the top.

  It took an hour of fiddling with hoses and fittings to get the big propane tank connected to the smaller tanks inside the truck. When Dad cranked the truck, it started right up—and the fuel gauge shot to full.

  “Now we’re in business!” Dad yelled, a huge smile splitting his face. Alyssa, Dad, and I shared high fives. Ben did not like arbitrary touching, and Mom wasn’t even smiling.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “Now that we’ve got a working vehicle and plenty of fuel, we should go straight to Warren,” Mom said.

  “We discussed this last night, Janice,” Dad replied, his smile disappearing.

  “I’m going with Alex,” Alyssa said.

  “Even if we did go to Iowa City and this Darla is alive, how are we going to find her?” Mom asked.

  “Um,” Alyssa said in a tremulous voice, “I have an idea.”

  Chapter 77

  Dad and Ben thought Alyssa’s idea was genius. I tried to talk her out of it, and Mom still wanted to return to Warren where Rebecca was. Ultimately I relented to Alyssa. I was outvoted, anyway.

  We needed a button or switch—preferably something dangerous looking. Dad thought maybe the biggest propane tank would have some kind of control system, and sure enough, we found one buried in a hump of snow at one end of the tank. Under a label that read EMERGENCY SHUTOFF, there was a red thumb-sized button protected by a clear plastic cover. I hacked it out of the plastic control board with a butcher knife. It looked pretty crude with all the jagged, broken plastic hanging off it, but that would add to its menace—I hoped. I reached into the guts of the wrecked control panel and ripped out a pair of long wires, one black and one green. Perfect.

  Dad made Alyssa practice her part over and over. He tied her hands behind her back with twine—we’d found a whole roll of the stuff in the UPS truck. Then he
stuck a paring knife in her back pocket and made her cut herself free.

  On her second practice run, she cut herself pretty badly, a deep slice in the web of her thumb. Alyssa let out a stream of curses while I worked on bandaging her hand. When we’d both finished, Dad said, “Again, preferably without the self-mutilation this time.”

  I saw Alyssa’s throat work as she swallowed some retort. Instead she stood and turned, offering her hands to be tied. She was just as tough as Darla in her own way. She’d proposed this crazy plan, and now she meant to see it through, even if it cost her some pride and flesh.

  • • •

  By lunchtime, we were forty miles away, and I was wishing Alyssa hadn’t been so steely. I was trying to shimmy up a downspout at the corner of the Bowman Chiropractic Clinic. It’s not that I was having a hard time climbing the thing—I’m plenty strong. But a climb that looks easy from the ground doesn’t feel easy when you’re trying to reach up from the top of a downspout to get a grip on the gutter at the edge of a roof. In gloves. With a badly bruised right arm.

  I had tried to talk Alyssa out of it again during the drive to Iowa City. Mom took shotgun this time, and Ben was behind Dad explaining the Great Turkish War in exhausting detail. Alyssa and I sat next to each other on the propane tank in the back of the truck. She started the conversation by whispering, “Alex, I need a favor.”

  “Sure. Anything,” I said.

  “If this . . . this thing goes badly—”

  “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. I want to do it. It was my idea, after all. But in case it doesn’t go right, I need you to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “If I can’t, well . . . I want you to look after Ben.”

  “Alyssa, you’ll be okay. And Ben’s a smart guy. He can look after himself.”

  “Just . . . make sure he gets to someplace safe. To your uncle’s place in Warren, maybe. And keep an eye out for him, okay?”

  I thought her request was a little ridiculous. If she got killed trying to rescue Darla, I’d almost certainly be dead, as well. But I said, “Okay.”

  “One other favor?”

  “What?”

  “You’ll be up on the roof with the rifle. . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “Save a bullet for me.”

  “What!”

  “If things go badly, if this doesn’t work and I get captured, I want you to shoot me. I thought I’d do anything to survive, but I’ve gone that route before and it’s not worth it. I survived for Ben. But I don’t want to live that way again. I won’t become a slave again!”

  “No!” I was talking too loudly. Mom swiveled in the passenger seat to look at me. I dropped my voice. “Why would you even ask me that?” The answer came to me even as I asked the question. She was giving up. That’s why she’d proposed this crazy plan and put herself in this position in the first place.

  “Alex, please. I don’t want to live that way again. I can’t live that way again.”

  “There are no circumstances under which I would shoot you, Alyssa.”

  “You owe me,” she hissed. “I’m risking my ass going after your girlfriend.”

  “Yeah. I do owe you. If the DWBs capture you and I’m alive, I will get you out. Or die trying.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing.”

  She glared at me. “Then you don’t care about me, do you?”

  “And I retract my promise to look after Ben. If he needs looking after, then you’re just going to have to stay alive to do it.”

  “You’re no different than any other guy. You’re all messed up!” Alyssa folded her arms and turned away from me.

  I didn’t know how to respond. I was trying to be nice. There was no use talking more and making things worse. Maybe she was the one who was messed up. Or maybe she was right.

  I used the rest of the drive to unpack the ammo and first-aid kit we’d found in Anamosa. Even if we survived this, we might need those supplies in a hurry.

  We reached the outskirts of Iowa City and almost immediately saw the glint of a campfire burning in the distance. Dad pulled the truck over, Mom got behind the wheel, and Dad, Alyssa, and I approached the fire on foot, walking in the deep snow on the far side of the berm.

  When we got closer, we peeked over the embankment. A sentry was camped right atop the Highway 1 overpass over I-80, which sliced through the north side of Iowa City. He had a tent pitched near his campfire and a motorcycle next to it. It was a good spot: He’d be able to see anyone approaching from I-80 or Highway 1. But the campfire made him too obvious. I wasn’t complaining, though—the fact that we’d seen him first made this whole crazy idea possible. My role in the plan was to shimmy up onto the roof of the chiropractic clinic and get a drop on him.

  I pulled myself up with a gasp of relief, flopping in the deep snow. The roof was sloped so that I would be invisible from the far side until I reached the peak.

  Pushing through the snow was hard. I worked my way up to the ridge on my stomach so that only my head and the barrel of the rifle I carried were visible. The sentry was still there, sitting atop the overpass, silhouetted by his fire. I’m not very good with a rifle, but even I could probably hit him. That wasn’t our plan, though. We needed this guy alive.

  We weren’t even certain he was a member of the Dirty White Boys. But to survive this close to their base, he had to have some connection with them—a connection we planned to exploit.

  I looked backward at Dad and Alyssa waiting below. I gave Dad a thumbs up and turned back toward the sentry. I still thought I should be the one down there with Alyssa. I’d argued with Dad about it to no avail.

  I knelt and rested the rifle on the ridge, drawing a bead on the sentry. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dad and Alyssa walk slowly into view. Dad had his hands up in a gesture of surrender. Alyssa’s hands were bound behind her back, she was gagged with a strip of cloth, and a piece of shipping twine led like a leash from her neck to Dad’s hand.

  The sight made me queasy. I knew she had a paring knife in her back pocket. I knew the noose was tied loosely enough that she could duck out of it and the gag would slip over the top of her head once her hands were free. I didn’t want to believe this was the world I lived in now—one where it wasn’t shocking to see a girl treated like livestock. Before the volcano, Alyssa’s biggest concerns might have been homework, swapping snark with friends on Facebook, or completing college applications. Now she was risking her life and freedom to help Darla, a girl she’d never met. Or maybe to help me. Either way, I didn’t feel good about it.

  It took a while for the sentry to notice Dad and Alyssa. He snatched a rifle from the ground and turned. I struggled to keep the rifle sighted on him as he moved. I kept moving the barrel too fast, getting the sighting U misaligned with the rifle’s post and then overcorrecting.

  The sentry stopped, aiming his rifle at Dad. I got the Remington lined up again—the U-shaped front sight, rear post, and the center of the sentry’s body formed a neat line starting at my right eye. I was ready.

  “Who are you?” the sentry yelled. Even from my post above him, I could hear the sneer in his voice.

  “Just here to trade,” Dad yelled back.

  “Trade what?”

  “Her.” Dad yanked on the cord around Alyssa’s neck, making her stumble.

  A grin spread across the sentry’s face, reminding me of a hyena looking up from his kill. He lowered his eye to the rifle, preparing to shoot my father and take the spoils for free.

  Chapter 78

  “You shoot and you’re dead.” Incredibly, Dad was smiling, too.

  “You’re at the wrong end of my gun, bud,” the sentry said.

  “And you’re at the wrong end of my son’s.” Dad gestured up at me, on the rooftop to his left.

  The sentry swiveled, pointing his rifle my way.

  I waved. Most of my head and shoulders were protected by the ridgeline. U
nless he was exceptionally good with that rifle, I didn’t think he could hit me.

  “Boy can hit a squirrel in the eye at 300 yards!” Dad yelled, which was a total lie. “Lower your gun. We just want to trade.”

  “Why would I want to trade with you?” He lowered his gun slightly, but I couldn’t relax.

  “You’re a Dirty White Boy, right?”

  The guy pulled up his shirts. DWB was tattooed in ornate letters across his chest, arching over an outline of Illinois. “To the death.”

  “Heard you guys were pimping the hottest girls in Iowa.”

  “Yeah, not hags like that one you brought.”

  He was talking about Alyssa? Was he blind?

  Dad unzipped her jacket and lifted her shirts, revealing a white bra that had been worn and washed so much it was starting to turn gray. He hooked his finger beneath the underwire and roughly lifted it, exposing one breast to the icy air.

  I started to look away, realized I was putting us all in danger, and forced myself to look at the sentry again. I wanted to shoot the sentry to put an end to this farce. Even though Alyssa had hatched this lunatic plan herself, it was my fault she was in this position. I swallowed hard, struggling to concentrate.

  Dad squeezed Alyssa’s breast. “This isn’t some hag. This is primo ass. Young and fresh.”

  Why did Dad have to be so damn crass? I was seized by an irrational desire to shoot him. But it was working. The sentry was chuckling. “Yeah. I’d hit that. But I can’t negotiate. We gotta go see Wolfe.”

  “I’ll give you a ride,” Dad said. “We’ll show up in style.” He turned and waved his arms over his head, signaling to Mom to drive the truck up. She was watching with Ben from a spot about a mile down the road.

  “I can’t leave my sled.” The sentry safetied his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He walked up to Dad and Alyssa, and their conversation dropped in volume so that I couldn’t make out what they were saying.