Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  “I understand. And thank you,” I said.

  “I hear FEMA is in Illinois. Maybe you can find some help there. There are no relief supplies for this side of the Mississippi yet, although I understand the politicians in Washington have figured out that this is a disaster area and declared it so.” Mrs. Nance laughed, a short sharp sound halfway between a bark and a sob.

  * * *

  Dinner that night was thin corn porridge. Everyone filed into the school cafeteria shortly after nightfall. About seventy people were staying at the school. Most of them arrived for dinner covered with ash; they’d been digging corn all day.

  Darla carried the stupid rabbit into the cafeteria with her. She got a few strange looks, but mostly people seemed too tired to care. I saw her sneak two spoonsful of porridge to the rabbit. I don’t think anyone else noticed. There might have been trouble if they had. The portions were small enough without sharing food with a rabbit that would itself have made a nice meal.

  The good beds were all claimed, of course. I’d been hoping for the leather couch or maybe that enormous heart-shaped bed, tacky as it was. An old, wiry guy stretched out on the couch, and a mother shared the heart bed with her three young kids. Darla and I got twin mattresses on the floor near the gym door.

  Darla flopped fully clothed onto her mattress, on top of the blanket. She held the rabbit against her chest. I hoped it would wander off in the night.

  I stripped off my outer shirt, boots, and jeans and crawled under the blanket. A little girl flickered through my memory—the girl who had tried to steal crackers from me while I slept at Cedar Falls High. I pulled my backpack up onto the mattress next to me and flung one arm over it.

  “Goodnight, Darla.”

  Nothing.

  Chapter 31

  Someone moving nearby woke me. I looked around—about half the people in the gym were up, preparing for the new day. Darla still slept. The rabbit lay snuggled against her side.

  I got dressed as quietly as I could. My right ankle was bruised and swollen. I had to grit my teeth and strain to force my boot over it. I stood carefully and shouldered my backpack. Mrs. Nance was up already, working at her desk.

  “Thanks for letting me sack out here,” I told her.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied. “Breakfast will be served in the cafeteria in about ten minutes. You may join us if you wish.”

  “I’d better get going. I’ve imposed on your hospitality enough. Thanks again.”

  “Take care, young man.”

  I paused to look back at Darla. She looked small, alone on the mattress in the big gym. It felt wrong, somehow, to leave her there. I knew I’d miss her terribly. But my mind insisted it was right—she’d be safer here with people she knew, people she’d grown up with, than she would be with me, risking whatever dangers awaited on the road to Warren. And unless . . . until she recovered from the trauma of her mother’s death, she couldn’t move fast enough to travel, anyway. I turned away.

  The temperature had dropped further overnight. My breath left clouds in the air, and I shivered as I snapped into my skis. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough for the weather. I figured I’d be okay so long as I kept moving, but if I had to sleep in the open, it would be a problem.

  I skied two blocks north and turned right on First Avenue, heading east. First Avenue became East Worthington Road. I set a fast pace, thrusting my feet forward and pushing off strongly with my poles. Outside town, there was a long, gentle upward slope. I took the whole thing without having to duck walk or side step. Moving felt good—I put everything I had into it, trying to keep my mind on the skiing. It beat thinking about Target, or Mrs. Edmunds, or my family . . . or Darla.

  At the top of the hill I stretched and looked around. There was no wind, and the day seemed clearer than any since the eruption. It was still dim, like a very dark and overcast day, but there was a bilious tinge to the sky.

  Ahead of me the road ran straight down a long, gentle slope. Along either side, a few lonely cornstalks poked through the ash. I looked backward. My passage had left a trail of ash hanging in the quiet air that led back to the edge of Worthington, barely visible in the distance.

  There was another puff of ash there. A tiny figure on skis had left Worthington, moving east toward me. There was only one other person I’d seen skiing since I left Cedar Falls. I flopped sideways, sitting in the ash to wait. I wasn’t sure whether to groan or cheer as I watched her slow progress up the hill toward me.

  It took Darla almost a half hour to reach me. She was carrying the stupid rabbit under one arm. Her ski poles were dangling from her other hand, utterly useless.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked as she skied up to me.

  She didn’t reply.

  “You don’t have any supplies; you’re not dressed for the cold. . . . What if I hadn’t seen you following me? You could die out here!”

  Nothing.

  “Go back to Worthington. You’ll be safer there. Those people know you. They like you. I’m headed for God knows what. I’ll probably be dead in a week.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Will you at least let that stupid rabbit go?”

  She clutched it tighter against her chest.

  “At least we’ll have something to eat when we run out of food.”

  She eyed me sullenly, scratching behind the rabbit’s ears.

  “Crap.” I thought about the problem for a minute. I could easily outdistance her, leaving her in the dust. But if she followed me east, she’d die for sure. She had no food, water, or bedding. And truth be told, there was a small lonely voice inside me—a voice I’d been trying to suppress—that was mighty glad to see her. I shoved violently off the ridge top, skiing back toward Worthington.

  I made great time going back down the slope. I pushed with both poles and shifted my weight from ski to ski, hurling myself forward with a skating motion. When I got to the outskirts of Worthington, I looked back. Darla was less than a quarter of the way back to town, following me. I skied down First Avenue and took a left on Third, returning to St. Paul’s gym.

  Mrs. Nance was working at her desk. “You’re back? I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t expect to be back. Look, do you know anyone who has an extra backpack I could trade for?”

  “We’ve got a few here—I can’t spare any of the big ones, but I could part with one of the book bags.”

  She lit a candle and led me down the hall to a classroom. It had been converted into a giant supply closet. There was an amazing assortment of junk stacked in the room: six old mattresses, two red children’s wagons, a stack of two-by-fours of various lengths, and piles of clothing, among other things.

  We stopped at a table, one end of which held about a dozen small backpacks. I sorted through them and checked their zippers. Most of them had those cheap plastic zippers that always break halfway through the school year. I figured anything that couldn’t make it through a school year wouldn’t be good for a week out there in the ash. I chose the larger of the two that had metal zippers and asked Mrs. Nance what she’d take in trade for it.

  Yipes, but she was a nasty bargainer. What was it with Worthington women, anyway? Maybe there was a Negotiate Like a Shark Club in town and Mrs. Nance and Rita Mae were founding members. I wound up giving her two smoked rabbit loins, a haunch, and a bag of cornmeal for that dumb backpack. By the time I got back outside, Darla was there, waiting for me.

  I got a blanket out of my pack and jammed it into the bottom of the school bag. Then, thinking about my plan, I packed the plastic tarp over the blanket. Rabbit poop protection. That filled about half the small pack.

  I grabbed the rabbit. Darla pulled it to her chest. “Let go. I won’t hurt it,” I said.

  She released the rabbit. It began squirming, but I managed to jam it into the backpack on top of the tarp. I closed the zipper on it, leaving a two-inch gap so the stupid thing could breathe. Not that I cared much if it suffocated.<
br />
  “Here.” I held the backpack up so Darla could slip it over her shoulders. “Try to keep up, okay?”

  She didn’t reply, so I set off, following the four sets of ski tracks we’d already made that morning. The light outside had dimmed while I was inside St. Paul’s. I glanced up. Gray tendrils crawled across the yellow sky, clouds presaging a storm, perhaps. But they looked like no clouds I’d ever seen.

  My thoughts were as confused as the sky. Leaving Worthington the first time, I’d already started to feel Darla’s absence, a dull ache as inescapable as a broken tooth I just couldn’t quit poking with my tongue. So I should have been happy now, right? Only I wasn’t. As I pushed my skis forward—shh, shh, shh over the ash—the gray-and-yellow sky settled on my shoulders like a heavy blanket.

  I spent several minutes thinking about it before I figured out the source of my grim mood: fear. Right or wrong, I already felt somewhat responsible for her mother’s death. What if following me got Darla killed, too?

  Chapter 32

  It got colder throughout the day. When we stopped for lunch, I was surprised to find that the water bottles I’d packed in the outside pockets of my backpack were partially frozen. After we ate (cold strips of smoked rabbit meat), I repacked everything so that the water was inside the pack, against my back. Hopefully that would keep it liquid.

  Now that she didn’t have to hold the rabbit, Darla kept up easily. She probably could have passed me—she was in way better shape than I was—but she skied behind, matching my pace.

  I started searching for a place to spend the night about midafternoon. There were farmhouses along the road every half mile or so. The first three we passed had tracks in the ash between the outbuildings and the houses. Probably the people in them would have been friendly and let Darla and me hole up in one of their barns overnight, but I was tired of people and their stupid guns. I skied on.

  The fourth place we came to was obviously uninhabited, obvious because the house, barn, and garage had all collapsed. The only intact buildings were two concrete grain silos. I slid twice around both the cylindrical silos, looking to see if we could get inside, but there was no visible entrance. There must have been some way to get in-they’d be useless if the farmers couldn’t load them with grain. Maybe Darla knew how they worked, but she still wasn’t talking.

  The barn had stood next to the silos, but it was hopeless. The ash had flattened it completely—panels of wood siding and rafters jutted randomly from the heaped wreckage.

  The front part of the farmhouse was standing, sort of. The whole back section and roof had collapsed, pulling the front wall backward so it leaned precariously at about a sixty-degree angle. I didn’t want to get near it for fear it would fall on us.

  A big metal garage had stood not far from the house. The roof and walls were down, but something was supporting the wreckage in the middle. I crawled under a bent wall panel to check it out but couldn’t see anything inside. I had to duck out, fish a candle out of my pack, and try again.

  There was a huge John Deere tractor inside, a combine, I guessed. It supported the wrecked roof, creating a triangular area big enough to walk around in. It seemed safe enough; certainly the tractor wasn’t going anywhere. And finding a sheltered spot to spend the night was a huge relief. At least we wouldn’t freeze to death—not tonight, anyway.

  I led Darla in and built a fire beside the combine, using scraps of wood from the fallen barn. It’s a lot harder to cook over a fire than you’d think. I made corn pone. Some of it was a bit burnt, but Darla ate it, and she hates corn pone, so maybe it wasn’t too bad. Either that or she was starving. She got some cornmeal from my pack and tried to feed her rabbit. It didn’t eat much.

  We laid our blankets next to one of the tractor’s huge rear wheels. The concrete-slab floor was cold, but at least we were out of the wind. “Goodnight,” I said, as Darla lay down beside me. She didn’t reply, just rolled over to face the oversized tire. I pulled my backpack close to use as a pillow and rolled onto my left side, facing away from her.

  * * *

  When I woke up, Darla was pressed against my back, one arm flung over my hip. It made me feel warm being spooned together. Her body heat was almost enough to counteract the chill radiating up from the cement floor. I lay as still as I could, trying to enjoy the quiet morning and the comfortable weight of her arm on my side.

  The first sign I had that Darla might be waking up was when she pulled her arm tighter around me, snuggling closer. Maybe she came fully awake then, because a few seconds later, she yanked her arm back and rolled away.

  We ate a cold breakfast and packed in silence.

  * * *

  It started to snow later that morning. Fat flakes drifted lazily down and clung to our clothes for a while before melting. At first it was great. As the snow began to accumulate on the road, our skis slid more easily. Pretty soon we were moving faster than I had since leaving Cedar Falls.

  But the wind picked up and the snowfall got heavier. It got steadily more difficult to see. The wind snapped at the left side of my face, whipping icy particles into my eyes. I wished I still had Dad’s ski goggles, but I’d lost those when Darla’s house burned. Darla and I weren’t dressed for this kind of weather. When we stopped for lunch, I started shivering uncontrollably.

  Darla’s lips and nose were tinged blue. Her hands were jammed into the pockets of her jeans, but I saw her shoulders quivering. I had a hard time repacking our lunch stuff because my hands shook so badly.

  I set a fast pace, trying to warm up. The blizzard got worse. I skied by the edge of the road, looking for mailboxes or any sign of a place to stop and find shelter. Twice I veered off the road accidentally and had to sidestep laboriously out of the ditch.

  We’d been skiing up a gradual incline for a while. Suddenly the slope changed, and I picked up speed, heading downhill. I assumed we had climbed a ridge and were starting down the backside now, but I couldn’t see it. I could barely see the tips of my skis.

  I accelerated dangerously. The wind and snow whipped at my face, turning the world blindingly white. I tipped the backs of my skis outward, forcing them into a downward-facing vee, trying desperately to slow my descent. I hoped Darla wouldn’t run into me. For that matter, I hoped she was still behind me. I couldn’t hear anything over the howling wind, and I was so focused on trying to stay on the road that I couldn’t risk a backward glance.

  I leaned forward and squinted, trying to see the road ahead. Tears leaked from my wind-burnt eyes and froze on my cheeks. We had to find a place to stop, but I couldn’t spare the attention to look—it took everything I had just to stay upright and on the road.

  The edge of an aluminum guardrail appeared suddenly in front of my skis. I screamed and threw my weight to the right, trying to avoid a collision. My left ski clipped the guardrail. I slid down an embankment, totally out of control now, flailing my arms in an effort to stay upright.

  Branches clawed at my arms and legs, breaking as I crashed through. A tree limb slapped my face, leaving a stinging line across my frozen cheek. My ski tips caught on something, and I pitched forward as my boots popped free of the ski bindings. I fell into darkness.

  Chapter 33

  I landed in water. It was so cold, the shock of it was electric—like getting zapped on every part of my body at once. I thrashed in panic, trying to get my head above water. A violent gray-and-white haze filled my eyes: rushing water and wind-beaten snow, indistinguishable from each other and equally frigid. Something brushed against my left hand, and I grabbed for it—a clump of dead grass or reeds, maybe. I pulled my face free of the water and drew a desperate breath.

  The current sucked at my legs, trying to drag me back under. I screamed and strained my left arm, hoping to lift myself out of the stream, but the grass—or whatever it was—began to pull away from the bank. I flailed around with my right hand, reaching for something more substantial to grab. That motion ripped the clump of grass free. I slid back under the
water.

  I slipped deeper underwater this time, and the light faded to a dead winter twilight. My left foot tangled in some rocks, keeping me from being swept downstream. It was strangely silent, the water muffling every sound except my blood rushing at the back of my ears. Was this it, then, the way my life would end? Not with the searing flame of a fire or the boom of a shotgun, but trapped in the frigid embrace of this riverbed, dark and silent?

  I kept thrashing, struggling to grab something or swim upward, but I couldn’t even free my left foot from the rocks trapping me. I wondered if my mother would ever find out what had happened to me, or if Darla would turn around and go back to Worthington once she knew I was dead. I hoped she would. Maybe she’d be safe there.

  A hand searched through the water above me. I grabbed for it but missed. The hand withdrew. The current twisted me partially sideways, and I tilted my head, trying to watch the spot where the hand had appeared.

  Something yanked my hair, hard. I felt the rock trapping my foot lift as I was pulled out of the stream by my hair. When my head broke the surface, I didn’t have enough breath for anything but a soggy cough. Darla stood there, holding onto a sapling and leaning out over the stream. I reached up and caught hold of her wrist.

  God, but that girl was strong. She lifted me out of the stream with one arm and dropped me gasping on the bank. I turned my head and retched, bringing up creek water and the corn pone I’d eaten for breakfast. I took a grateful breath of icy air, but it triggered a convulsive fit of coughing. Darla rolled me onto my stomach and pounded on my back. When the coughs subsided, I lifted one of my hands to my face and noticed it was shaking. I tried to still it and found I couldn’t. Within a few seconds, the rest of my body started shivering uncontrollably as well.

  Darla grabbed me under my arm and half led, half dragged me along the bank, heading upstream. I kept stumbling, tripping over my own feet. Every time I started to fall, Darla yanked hard on my arm, pulling me upright and dragging me forward.