Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  I needed to take a leak. But Darren and Joe had sacked out between me and the toilet last night. I had no idea if they were still there, and I really didn’t want to kick them in the dark. After all, I was a houseguest. Sort of a weird houseguest—a fire refugee, sleeping in their bathtub—but still. I figured I could hold it for a while.

  I had a general memory of where the door was—a few steps diagonally from the head of the bathtub. I stretched out my left arm and shuffled in that direction. Of course I found it by jamming my middle finger painfully against the knob. I slipped into the master bedroom and closed the door behind me.

  Blackness. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand held in front of my face. I’d expected the bathroom to be dark since it was an interior room. But last night I’d been able to see fine in the bedroom—the three huge windows let in plenty of light. Even if it was still nighttime, I should have been able to see something. The darkest overcast night I’d ever been in hadn’t been this black.

  I’d been in darkness like this only once before. About five years ago, Dad took me and my sister into a cave on some land one of his friends owned. Mom flatly refused to go. I didn’t like the narrow entrance or the tight crawlways that followed, but I endured it without complaining; I couldn’t let my sister show me up, after all. I even got through the belly crawl okay, pulling myself along by my fingers, trying not to think about the tons of rock pressed against my back.

  We stopped in a small but pleasant room at the back of the cave to eat lunch. After we finished, Dad suggested we turn out all our lights to see what total darkness was like. I couldn’t see anything, not even my fingers in front of my eyeballs. As we sat there, it got more and more claustrophobic, like a cold, black blanket wrapped around my face, smothering me.

  I grabbed for my flashlight, only to feel it slip from my sweating hands and clatter to the cave floor. I groped for it but couldn’t find it. Next thing I knew, I was screaming in my high-pitched, ten-year-old voice, “Turn it on! Turn on the light! Turn it on!”

  Now, the darkness was exactly like the cold black blanket that had smothered me at the back of the cave. I stifled a sudden urge to yell, “Turn it on!” The only flashlight was back in the bathroom with Joe and Darren. And Dad was over a hundred miles away.

  I stumbled forward, found the bed by banging my shin into the metal bed frame, and sat down. Putting a dirty butt-print on the bed probably wasn’t the nicest thing to do, but it couldn’t be helped. The world had tilted under me—I had to sit down or fall down, and I had enough bruises already.

  The gears in my brain ground over the possibilities, trying yet again to make sense of what was happening. Nuclear strike? Asteroids? The mother of all storms? Nothing could account for everything that had happened: the thunderous noise, the flaming hole punched in the roof of my house, the dead phones, this uncanny darkness.

  A beam of light shining from the bathroom cut through the room. Darren appeared in the doorway; I could see his face in the backwash from the flashlight. The light poked around the bedroom a bit and came to rest on me.

  Darren said something. I couldn’t hear him over the noise, but I could sort of see his lips. Maybe, “Are you okay?”

  I shrugged in response. Then I stood up and pantomimed taking the flashlight and going to the bathroom. Darren nodded and handed it over. As I walked into the bathroom, Joe passed me on his way out.

  I used the toilet and washed my hands at the closer of the two sinks. The water still worked, but the pressure seemed to have dropped since yesterday.

  Back in the master bedroom, I handed the flashlight to Darren and mouthed “Thanks” at him. He and Joe walked to a window on the other side of the room and pointed the flashlight at the glass.

  The beam died not far outside, snuffed out by a thick rain of light gray dust falling slowly, in a dense sheet that blacked out all light. Little drifts of dust clung to the muntins dividing the window panes. I tapped the glass, and a bunch of the stuff sloughed off and drifted down, joining the main flow raining down unceasingly.

  Darren took two steps backward and collapsed onto the bed. The flashlight in his hand trembled as he sat there, staring at his feet. Joe sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder. I could see Darren’s shoulders shaking—the cord dangling from his headphones wavered—so I turned away to give them some privacy.

  I stared out the window, trying to figure out what the falling stuff was. It was light gray, like ash from an old fire, but a lot finer—sort of like that powder for athlete’s foot. I leaned closer to the window, trying to get a better look. What I got instead was a smell—the stench of rotten eggs.

  Someone tapped my shoulder. I turned, and Joe gestured for me to follow. The three of us trooped out of the room using the flashlight to find our way. When we got to the entryway, Darren shined the flashlight on the front door. It was closed and presumably locked, but a two-inch drift of ash had blown under it. I reached down and touched the stuff—nothing happened, so I picked some up between two fingers. It was fine and powdery but also gritty and sharp, like powdered sugar but with the texture of sand. Slicker than sand, though. It reeked with the same sulfur smell I’d noticed at the window.

  Joe was wearing a wristwatch. I held out my own wrist and tapped it. He nodded and pushed a button on the side of the watch, lighting the display. It read 9:47.

  Joe led us into the kitchen and passed out Pop-Tarts for breakfast. We had no way to toast them, of course, but I was so hungry it didn’t matter. He pulled a half-full gallon of milk from the dark fridge. The milk was still cool, even after a night without power. We drank most of it.

  The flashlight dimmed further while we were eating breakfast. Joe used it to retrieve a candle and matches from a kitchen drawer along with a pad of scratch paper and a pen. He carried everything back to the table. While Joe lit the candle and shut off the flashlight, I snatched the pen and scribbled, “What’s happening?”

  Joe read my note and added his own below it. “Volcano. The big one. Yesterday, while you guys were watching the fire, I heard about it on the radio.” Joe passed the tablet around. I had to hold the note near the candle and hunch over to read it.

  Darren took the tablet and wrote, “So that stuff outside is ash? From the volcano?”

  I wrote, “Volcano? In Iowa?”

  “No. The supervolcano at Yellowstone,” Joe wrote back.

  “But that’s what—one thousand miles from here?” Darren wrote.

  Joe took the tablet back and wrote for a long time. Darren tried to pull it away once, but Joe swatted his hand. “About nine hundred. The volcano had already gone off yesterday when Alex’s house was burning. You remember the big earthquake in Wyoming a few weeks ago? The radio said that was either a precursor or trigger for the eruption. The little tremor we felt yesterday was the start of the explosion. I don’t know what hit Alex’s house. My guess is that it was a chunk of rock blasted off the eruption at supersonic speed. Then about an hour and a half later, the sound of the explosion finally got here. The ash would be carried our way on the jet stream and take eight or nine hours to arrive.”

  “Should we go check on the neighbors?” Darren wrote.

  “Radio said to stay indoors during the ashfall. If you have to go out, you’re supposed to cover your mouth and nose.”

  “What about my family?” I scrawled.

  “They’re in Warren with your uncle, right?” Joe wrote.

  “Supposed to be. How’d you know?”

  “Your mother told us you’d be home alone this weekend,” Joe wrote. “She asked us to keep an eye out for you.”

  Typical Mom. Of course she’d figure out a way to spy on me—although now I was happy she had. “Warren is 140 miles east of here, even farther from Yellowstone. It could be better there, right?”

  “Yes,” Joe wrote. “There will be less noise and ash the farther you are from the volcano. There could be a heavy ashfall here but almost none in Warren.”

  I hoped Joe w
as right. I hoped my family was in Warren. They should have made it—they’d left three hours before everything had started. I didn’t remember them talking about stopping for dinner on the way, but I couldn’t really know.

  “How long is this noise going to last?” Darren jotted.

  “The news didn’t even warn it was on the way, let alone say how long it would last.”

  “What about the darkness?”

  “Anything from a few days to a couple weeks. They didn’t know exactly how big the eruption was.”

  We traded notes for another hour or so, rehashing the same information. Joe had already told us pretty much everything he knew. We’d burned more than half the candle and completely filled the scratch pad by then. Joe wrote, “I’m going to blow out the candle, to save it. Relight it if you need anything.”

  The next few hours were, well, how to describe it? Ask someone to lock you in a box with no light, nobody to talk to, and then have them beat on it with a tree limb to make a hideous booming sound. Do that for hours, and if you’re still not bat-shit crazy, you’ll know how we felt. Before that day, I had no idea that it was possible to be insane with both terror and boredom at the same time. I’m not normally a touchy-feely kind of guy, but the three of us held hands most of that time.

  Lunch was a huge relief, if only because it gave us something different to do. Joe squeezed my hand once and let go. I saw a couple little flashes of light, him using the light of his watch to find stuff. A few minutes later he was back, pressing food into my hand: a few slices of salami, a hunk of Swiss cheese, and two slices of bread. We finished off the milk as well, passing it around and drinking straight from the jug. Glasses would have been too much of a pain without light to pour by.

  After lunch, more terrified boredom. Nothing to do but endlessly ponder: Is my family alive? Would I survive? I sat and thought for uncounted hours. Then something changed.

  There was silence.

  Chapter 5

  The silence was an enormous relief—sort of like coming out of that cave into the sunlight when I was ten. I peeled the headphones off my ears and pulled out the toilet paper plugs. They were stuck; it hurt to remove them.

  I heard someone—Joe maybe—say, “Can you hear me?” His voice was hollow, as if he were down a well.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Can you hear me?” he said again, a little louder.

  Finally I caught on. I shouted, “Yeah!”

  “Good,” he shouted. “I think my ears were damaged by all that noise.”

  “Yeah, mine too,” I yelled back.

  “How you feel?”

  “Not good,” I yelled.

  “Darren?” Joe yelled.

  Darren looked up, but didn’t reply.

  “You okay?”

  Nothing.

  “Darren! You okay? What’s wrong?” Joe lit the candle.

  Darren’s face was scarlet. He stared sightlessly at a point about halfway between Joe and me. Joe reached out and put a hand on Darren’s shoulder. Darren batted Joe’s hand away and turned on him, screaming, “What’s wrong? I feel like I’ve been thrown into the gorilla cage at the zoo, and they’ve been using my head as a goddamn volleyball!”

  I felt pretty much the same way. Plus I was worried about my family. But screaming wouldn’t help anything.

  Joe stood up, walked behind Darren’s chair, and started rubbing his shoulders. Darren seemed to deflate, collapsing with his head down on the kitchen table. Joe stood behind him, trying to comfort him.

  Finally Darren looked up from the table and muttered something I couldn’t hear.

  “It’s okay,” Joe yelled. “I’m going to see if there’s anything on the radio.” He picked up the candle and used it to find a clunky old boombox on the counter. He carried the radio to the kitchen table and blew out the candle, plunging us again into total darkness.

  After a while I heard a soft hiss of static waxing and waning as Joe dialed through the stations. I imagined he had the volume cranked up to the max so we could hear anything at all, but still the static sounded faint and hollow. We bent forward, pressing our heads together close to the radio, and listened to static for about an hour.

  Every now and then, I could hear a roll of thunder coming from outside—not the painful continuous booms we’d been suffering through, only a natural clap of thunder sounding soft and echoey in my messed-up ears. The sulfur stench was stronger. I could smell it everywhere now, not just near the windows and doors.

  “I’ve been through AM and FM three times each. There’s nothing!” Joe shouted.

  “Why?” I yelled.

  “I don’t know. I was getting all the usual stations on it yesterday. Maybe the ash somehow interferes with radio reception.”

  Darren flipped open his cell phone. The bluish light from the screen illuminated his face, hanging ghost-like in the gloom. “Cell phone still doesn’t work.”

  Joe held down the button on his watch and used its faint light to stumble to the house phone. “It’s dead, too,” he yelled.

  “How long is everything going to be down?” Darren asked.

  “I don’t know.” Joe shook his head slowly.

  “Why’s the water work?” I shouted. “Everything else is down, why should that be any different?”

  “Good point,” Joe yelled. He lit the candle and we went upstairs, cleared the bedding out of the Jacuzzi and filled it with water. The water trickled slowly out of the spigot. It smelled funny, too, a bit like rotten eggs. I tried a sip—it didn’t taste too bad.

  After that, we got an armload of towels and walked around the house by candlelight, jamming them under the doors and along the windowsills. It didn’t help, though—the rotten egg smell kept getting worse.

  As the afternoon and evening wore on, the thunder outside got louder. I didn’t know if the storm was getting worse or if my ears were getting better; the latter, I hoped. Joe wanted to cook some of the stuff in the freezer for dinner, but the gas cooktop wouldn’t light. He sniffed it and said there was no gas, although I didn’t see how he could tell—I couldn’t smell anything but sulfur. So we ate bread again, this time with some lettuce and fresh peaches. Darren wanted salami and cheese, but Joe overruled him. He said we needed to save the food that would keep the longest.

  As we were finishing dinner, I said, “Thanks for taking me in and feeding me and all. I really appreciate—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Darren said. “That’s what neighbors are for.”

  “Well, thanks. You guys are great neighbors. At least that’s what Mom always—” Thinking about Mom got me choked up, and I had to stop. We sat in silence then, waiting for nighttime, although we could have gone to bed whenever—it was still pitch black and had been all day.

  Then the explosions started again.

  Chapter 6

  Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom! The continuous thumping roar hurt my ears and drowned out the normal thunder. Joe flicked on the Maglite and used it to find a box of tissues on the kitchen counter: Puffs with lotion. Slimy, but they felt better than toilet paper while I was jamming some into my ears. Darren pressed the headphones into my hands, and I slapped them over my ears.

  We sat in the kitchen, going crazy with both worry and boredom. The fear rested on my stomach like a dull weight, pressing down and making me queasy. I didn’t want to go to bed and try to sleep through another night of that horrid noise, and Darren and Joe must have felt the same way, because neither of them made any move to leave.

  At least I knew what it was now. That made the current round of explosions a little better than yesterday’s, when the boredom and terror were compounded by wild speculation. This, I figured, must be the noise of some kind of secondary eruption. There was still plenty of reason to be scared, of course. My house had been hit by something thrown off by the eruption. What if Darren and Joe’s house got hit, too? We weren’t even taking cover in the bathtub like last night. Besides, the noise itself was terrifying without even thinking abo
ut the awesome eruption it represented—powerful enough to hurt my ears from nine hundred miles away.

  I endured hour after hour of nothing: nothing to see but blackness, nothing to hear but machine-gunned explosions, nothing to do. Nothing to smell but—well, okay, there was something to smell: sulfur and yesterday’s sweat. My breathing slowed, and the fear gave way to numb, wary boredom. The noise lasted for a little over three-and-a-half hours by Darren’s watch. And then, mercifully, the explosions stopped again.

  I yanked off the headphones and pulled the Puffs out of my ears. I heard a normal thunderclap as if from a storm. It sounded puny and hollow after the aural bombardment we’d just endured.

  Joe lit the candle and, by its light, led me to the guest room upstairs. There was another box of Puffs on the nightstand, so I set my headphones beside it, within easy reach. Joe turned down the covers and left the lit candle and a book of matches on the bedside table.

  I kicked off my shoes and climbed into the bed fully dressed in the same disgusting jeans and T-shirt I’d been wearing for two days now. I blew out the candle, rolled onto my left side, and fell asleep the instant my head settled on the pillow.

  * * *

  The next day started out pretty much the same. It was still pitch black. Ash still fell in a thick blanket past the windows. We could still hear normal, storm-like thunder. It sounded maybe a little louder, which I took as a hopeful sign that my ears might be improving. The storm had been going on for a day and two nights now. Perhaps it was related somehow to the volcano. The other weird thing about the thunder was that I hadn’t seen any lightning, and there was no rain, at least not that I could see by candlelight through the windows.

  When I turned on the kitchen faucet, hoping to wash up, nothing came out. Hot, cold—neither worked. I checked the downstairs bathroom; there was no water there, either. So we’d have to drink from the bathtub now. And the toilets were only going to flush one more time. That was a problem—it was going to get stinky in a hurry.