Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  “Yeah, I think so. Thanks.” I took my clothing off the line and folded it roughly. Then I followed Elroy’s candle to the mudroom.

  “I filled your water bottles last night. Here’s a few extras.” He handed me a plastic grocery sack with six twenty-ounce Diet Coke bottles filled with water. I’d eaten enough food over the last two days that the Diet Coke bottles would fit in my pack, though just barely.

  “I should say goodbye to Edna.”

  “Naw, you do that and there’ll be a weepy scene. You look kind of like one of our sons did when he was younger.”

  “Well, thank her for me. Thank you for everything—the meal last night, a place to sleep, the water. I really—”

  “Now don’t be getting maudlin. Just get on out of here before Edna wakes up and tries to convince you to stay.”

  “How is it that you’ve got water?” I asked as I finished tying my pack shut.

  “First thing I did when we lost electric and the ashfall started was rig up a hand pump for the well. That was before my shop collapsed. So long as the hand pump works, Edna and I’ll be fine for water. Food, I don’t know. This goes on a couple months, we’ll have trouble feeding two mouths, let alone three.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Elroy.” I shouldered my pack and tied a rag around my face. Then I stuck out my hand.

  The last thing he said to me was, “You take care, now.”

  It was still too dark to see outside. I sat down, leaning against a porch pillar, and waited for the sun to come up. It never did, of course. Instead, there was a little brightening on the eastern horizon of the black, monotone sky. I snapped my boots into my skis and left the farm, sliding toward the light.

  Chapter 14

  About midday I happened across another farmhouse. As I skied up to the yard, a window opened, and I saw the barrel of a rifle poke out. I decided not to push my luck.

  I avoided the rest of the farmhouses I saw. That was easy to do; I just stayed on the road.

  That afternoon, it started to rain. It was getting colder—way too cold for early September. I stopped and got my poncho out of my pack, which helped some. With the rain, the thunder and lightning increased. The thunder had never completely gone away, just faded to an occasional clap in the background. Now it returned with a vengeance, although after that horrible night in the Jacuzzi back at Joe and Darren’s, even loud thunder sounded puny.

  The blessing of the storm was that it got easier to push the skis forward. They slid better on wet ash than dry. The curse was the cold water splashing my jeans and seeping through the hood of my poncho. Even working as hard as I was, I began to shiver. A wet night in the open might get me a bad case of hypothermia, flu, or worse.

  About an hour after I’d started looking for shelter, I spotted a car. It was buried to the tops of its wheels, and ash was mounded nearly two feet deep on top of it. It was an odd place for a car, stuck in the center of the road without any buildings in sight. I wondered what had caused this car to be left here—had the driver fled the ashfall and only made it this far before getting stuck? Or had they run out of gas? More important, were the owners of the car still inside?

  I brushed ash off the rear passenger-side window and tried to peer in. It was too dark to see anything. I pulled on the handle. The door was unlocked but would only open about two inches due to the ash. I still couldn’t see anything through the door, so I sniffed instead. It smelled okay: the omnipresent sulfur stench and a hint of stale French fries.

  It took me a while to dig away enough ash to open the door. As I dug, I thought about the corpse I’d seen in the wrecked car in Cedar Falls. I hoped this car would be empty.

  It was. Inside, it was dry, dark, and felt somehow safe. I stripped off my wet clothing and spread it over the front seat, hoping it would dry overnight. It was too cold to sleep in my underwear, so I put on the clothing from my pack. It hadn’t dried completely in front of the fire last night and felt clammy, but it was far better than the stuff I’d removed.

  Despite my mostly dry clothing, I was cold. I got the plastic tarp out of my pack and used it like a blanket. That helped a little. I thought about how much worse off I’d be sleeping outside and sent a silent thank you to whoever had abandoned this car. Eventually, I drifted to sleep.

  * * *

  It was still storming the next day. I packed the tarp and the damp clothes from the front seat, pulled on my pack and poncho, and slid out into the rain. There didn’t seem to be much ash coming down, but the storm kept everything dark, anyway.

  It was a miserable day spent slogging through that slushy ash. The land was hillier here. Going down was fun—on gentle slopes moving forward was easy. On steeper slopes, I could glide to the bottom without doing any work at all. Going up was murder. On the gentlest slopes I could push my skis uphill in a straight line, as if I were on flat land. But sometimes I had to walk with the ski tips outspread in a huge V, which was brutally hard, or keep the skis parallel to the hill and sidestep up, which was excruciatingly slow.

  I had trouble finding a decent place to sleep that night. I passed a couple of farmhouses, but after yesterday’s experience, I’d started imagining guns in all their windows. Late that evening, when I was beginning to worry about being forced to sleep outside, I came across a slope that had been planted in pine trees—big ones, twenty or thirty feet high, not little Christmas evergreens. The pine boughs had gotten loaded down with so much ash that nearly every one of the trees had been pulled over or broken. The few trees still upright were stripped of their branches, lonely flagpoles without a nation to claim them.

  I picked a large tree that had broken off four or five feet up the trunk and crawled under it. There was a hollow space there—the trunk was still attached to the stump where it had broken, so it formed the ridgepole for a natural lean-to, with pine boughs and the thick ash layer forming the roof. There was a sharp, welcome odor of pine resin almost strong enough to cover the pervasive stench of sulfur.

  I settled into the space, trying not to stir up the ash. My pack became a pillow and my plastic tarp a blanket. If anything, it was an even better bed than the car last night. I wondered who I should thank for this shelter? I drifted to sleep thinking about how far I’d come and trying to guess how much farther I had to travel to reach Warren and, hopefully, my family.

  * * *

  The next day, my fifth on the road, started out pretty well. I’d only been skiing a couple of hours when the storm abated. The end of the cold rain came as such a relief that it took a while before I noticed the thunder and lightning were mostly gone, too. There was an occasional crack of far-off thunder, but nothing like what I’d been hearing for the last week. The ashfall was sparser. It was still hazy and dark, but more like twilight right after the streetlights pop on than dead night. All in all, the changes were very encouraging, and I made good time that morning.

  What brought me crashing back to reality was the food situation. I ate my last rations for lunch, a cold can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. Thanks to all the extra bottles Elroy had given me, I had enough water for another day, maybe two if I was careful.

  Late in the afternoon, I came to an intersection: U.S. 20 and Highway 13, the sign read. There was a gas station near the corner—I recognized the sign. When my sister was little, we used to stop here every time we went to Warren. She had to pee thirty minutes into any trip, like clockwork. That thought was depressing: It had taken me six days to travel only about a quarter of the distance to Warren. On the other hand, I was glad to find U.S. 20; at least I now knew exactly where I was.

  The freestanding metal roof had fallen and twisted, taking out two of the pumps. It lay there like the wing of a crashed airplane. I smelled gas as I slid past the pumps.

  The station itself had collapsed. The cinderblock wall at the rear still stood, but the rest of the station was a tangled ruin of steel girders, glass, and blue plastic. I hunted through the front of the store, looking for something to eat, but there was too much as
h and wreckage in the way.

  I walked around to the back. Where the cinderblock wall stood, it had created a triangular space by holding up one end of the steel roof beams. I crawled inside, but there wasn’t enough light to see anything, so I backed out to get a candle and matches from my pack.

  I wasted half a candle and at least an hour crawling through the wreckage. My haul was four Starbursts and a handful of Skittles. The candy was shockingly bright against the gray ash. It was a pitifully small amount of food—not even a full meal. It seemed to me that there should be more food—after all, gas station convenience stores were full of stuff to eat. Maybe it had already been looted before it collapsed.

  I rubbed the Skittles clean on the inside of my shirt and ate them and the Starbursts. Mom would have told me not to spoil my dinner with candy. I wished I had a dinner to spoil. Or a mom to tell me.

  What little light there was had begun to fail. I pulled my pack into the gas station next to the cinderblock wall and curled up in the wreckage to sleep.

  In the morning, I woke to the sound of breaking glass.

  Chapter 15

  I crawled to the edge of my hidey-hole and peeked out. Someone was rummaging through the front part of the gas station, picking up chunks of debris and tossing them aside. I slunk backward into the wreckage and packed up quickly, wincing every time I made a sound.

  When I emerged from the hole, I crouched behind a twisted metal roof panel, hoping to watch for a while without being seen. A man and a woman were going through the rubble at the front of the store, sifting ash and moving bits of the wreckage. Behind them two kids, one maybe four or five, the other a bit older, sat on a warped piece of plywood. A rope was tied to the upturned edge of the board, turning it into an improvised sled. A pair of duffel bags rested on the board beside the kids.

  I tried to clip into my skis and get ready to move without exposing myself. But it was almost impossible to put skis on while crouching.

  “Hello?” the guy called. “Someone there?”

  I stood up. “Hi.”

  The guy looked at me. Then I saw his eyes scan right and left. “You alone?”

  “Yeah.” I said, although the question made me wonder why he wanted to know. The woman kept poking through the rubble, ignoring us.

  “You find any food here?”

  “Only a handful of candy.”

  “You got any food?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t look hungry,” he said, starting to slog through the ash toward me.

  My heart drooped in my chest. I was hungry, tired, and sore from all the skiing. The last thing I wanted was a confrontation with this guy. I sidestepped on my skis, making sure I had a clear path to push forward or back. I stared at the guy, but said nothing.

  “My family and I, we were on our way to Nebraska when it hit. We only had some snacks with us. We’ve had barely any food for a week.”

  “That’s rough.” I tried to sound sympathetic, but I kept my eyes wide and took a stronger grip on my staff. He was coming on strong, moving toward me as fast as the ash and wreckage would allow.

  “That’s a full backpack you’re wearing. There’s food in there. I can smell it.”

  “I don’t have any food.”

  “Leave him alone, Darryl. He’s only a kid!” the woman yelled.

  I wished people would quit calling me a kid, although if it convinced Darryl to back off, I’d take it.

  “Shut up, Mabel. We need food.”

  I thought about trying to run. I wasn’t sure I could get my skis turned and get moving fast enough to get away. Then I considered the mechanics of fighting on skis while holding a staff and ski pole. Not good. I jammed the ski pole upward through my belt and hoped it would stay put.

  Darryl was getting close—too close. I took the staff in a two-handed grip, like a six-foot baseball bat, and started whirling it over my head. Master Parker would have scolded me if she’d seen my form—you’re supposed to step into each swing, so your body spins with the staff—but I’d like to see her do it right while wearing skis.

  Darryl was either dumb, desperate, or both. He kept coming. The end of the staff was probably going a hundred miles an hour. If I hit him with it square, he wouldn’t get up—ever. One of the kids on the makeshift sled started crying.

  I swung the staff into the piece of corrugated roofing I’d been hiding behind. Smack! The metal made an echoey, booming sound, like reverb on an electric guitar.

  Darryl stopped.

  “I don’t have any food,” I bellowed. “Leave me alone!”

  “Darryl T. Jenkins, get your butt back here right this instant and help me search,” Mabel screeched.

  I slid slowly backward on the skis and whirled the staff over my head again.

  Darryl glared at me, a hateful stare. Then he slowly turned toward Mabel. I spun and pushed off, skiing as fast as I could to put some distance between us. When I looked back at the family, Darryl and Mabel were bickering as they searched the rubble. Both kids were crying.

  Chapter 16

  I followed U.S. 20 east. Last night I hadn’t noticed any sign of other people along the road. Today, I saw several sets of tracks: prints from boots, tennis shoes, and signs of stuff being dragged, like the improvised sled Darryl had. All of them were headed east.

  I couldn’t tell if there were more people on the road, or if the reduced ashfall was just covering their tracks more slowly. I hadn’t seen many houses along the backcountry roads, but there were none at all on U.S. 20. Clearly the prints weren’t being left by locals.

  I hadn’t been skiing long when I topped a rise and saw a knot of five people ahead of me going east. They moved painfully slowly, pulling their feet out of the ash with effort, earning each step. Two of them dragged suitcases.

  I thought about Darryl and decided I didn’t want to meet five adults who might share his attitude toward the contents of my pack. I skied about twenty feet back the way I’d come, enough to put the ridgeline between me and the group ahead. Then I turned off the road and took to the countryside, heading roughly southeast.

  I worried a little about leaving Highway 20. My family always took 20 to get to Warren; I didn’t know any other route. I wished I had a map, but I hadn’t been able to find any in the wrecked filling station. Perhaps I could head east on some other road and then cut back to 20 when I got closer to Illinois. The day was dim, but brighter than any since the volcano’s eruption. Very little ash fell and no rain at all.

  Lunch was part of a bottle of water, and I felt lucky to have that. At the rate it was disappearing, I wouldn’t even have water for lunch tomorrow.

  I found it harder and harder to keep my skis moving, as though hunger were a companion riding behind me, weighing me down. I tried to think about something other than food—Laura, Spork, or my family—but my mind kept returning unbidden to waffles, DQ Blizzards, and the gyros at The Pita Pit.

  About a year ago, Mom had brought a brochure for Action Against Hunger home from church. It was full of pictures—African kids with forlorn faces, swollen bellies, and skeletal limbs. St. John’s was planning a fundraiser: Everyone would fast for twenty-four hours and donate all the money we would have spent on food to ACF. (I didn’t understand why the brochure called the charity Action Against Hunger and abbreviated it ACF, but it did.)

  So for a couple of days, Mom nagged me about doing it. I was in my no-religion phase, as Mom called it, and didn’t really want to get sucked back into St. John’s, but eventually I relented and said fine, I’ll fast for two days. Then Mom was all, fasting for two days isn’t safe, blah, blah, blah, and I pointed out that it took the kids in the brochure a lot more than two days without food to get the potbellies and Skeletor arms. Anyway, we had a huge fight about it, the upshot of which was that I didn’t eat for two days. The first day my whole family fasted. The second, I just refused to eat and shrugged off Mom’s threat to have me hooked up to an IV.

  Going without food for two days was
hard. I probably couldn’t have done it if Mom hadn’t been nagging me about the IV and constantly offering me stuff to eat. But not eating when there’s a full refrigerator downstairs is a totally different experience than not eating because you have no food and no idea where your next meal will come from. Hunger of choice is a painful luxury; hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.

  Early that afternoon, I was losing my battle to stop daydreaming about food when I saw a little flicker of light off to the right, just at the edge of visibility. It wasn’t lightning—too orange and too persistent. But it was something different, something that might take my mind off food for a bit, so I skied toward it.

  As I got closer, I saw another farmstead. The barn and both outbuildings were down, squashed flat, but there were two metal grain silos standing. The house was mostly intact, but some kind of porch or addition had been crushed. The mangled ends of a few rafters protruded from the wreckage.

  There had been a stand of trees around the house, perhaps planted as a windbreak. Most of the trees were down, and the few still standing looked like ghost trees, coated with light gray ash. A campfire flickered, visible through the branches of a huge fallen tree. I glimpsed a figure silhouetted by the firelight. I skied up to the fallen tree and peered through its limbs.

  A guy was sitting on a log between me and the fire. He was a big guy, that’s about all I could tell with him backlit by the fire. He appeared to be alone. A haunch of meat was roasting over the fire. My mouth juiced up instantly at the smell. Sweet and fatty—pork, maybe.

  I skied around the fallen tree to get a better look, moving as slowly and quietly as I could. When I cleared the edge of the brush, the guy looked straight at me and said, “You there. Want to give me a hand?”

  I should have turned and skied out of there as fast as I could. This guy was big. NFL linebacker big. None of his clothing fit—his jeans missed the top of his boots by at least four inches, and the cuffs of his flannel shirt wouldn’t button over his bulging forearms. His pasty white skin was tinged gray by a layer of ash. He had propped a broken mirror in front of him with a stick; it looked like a chunk of one of those big mirrors some people have in their closets. Beside him lay a wide leather belt, a bar of soap, and a hand-ax, its blade gleaming in the firelight. He had a bucket between his knees.