Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  I tried to ask Darla where she was taking me, but I was shivering so badly that the words came out garbled. It took every ounce of concentration I had to keep moving forward without falling, and I wasn’t even doing that well.

  We pushed through thick underbrush, stripped of its leaves by the ashfall and the cold. Darla led me back to the bridge I’d missed. Underneath there was a dirt area between the foundation and the stream—shelter from the blizzard above.

  When Darla released my arm, I fell in the dirt. I lay there, shaking so violently that I couldn’t stand back up. I’d lost track of my arms and legs. I assumed they were still attached to my body, but I couldn’t feel them at all. Darla rolled me onto my stomach and pulled the pack off my back.

  I was vaguely aware of her going through the backpack, tossing stuff aside. A sopping-wet blanket made a splat on the dirt nearby. She tossed out a wet undershirt and then a pair of pants that seemed a little drier. I lay with my face in the dirt, shaking incessantly.

  She found a mostly dry change of clothes buried deep enough in the backpack that water hadn’t seeped into it while I’d been submerged. She set the clothing beside me and rolled me onto my back. I tried to help, but the arms and legs that I couldn’t even feel wouldn’t respond to my mental commands. The motion of rolling over provoked an intense wave of nausea. I retched again, but there was nothing left in my stomach.

  Darla fumbled at my shirt buttons. She couldn’t undo them; her hands were shaking too much. After three failed attempts, she grabbed the placket of my shirt and jerked on it. The buttons popped free, one of them pinging off the concrete bridge abutment.

  Darla pulled off my ski boots and the rest of my wet clothes. Mostly she had to rip everything off by force. I was no help at all. The thought occurred to me as I lay there naked that I should hide. At that moment it seemed like a very good idea to dig a hole in the dirt and curl up inside, where I’d be safe and warm. This was nuts, of course. The ground under the bridge was almost as cold as the snow above it. But to my frozen mind, it seemed like a good idea.

  Darla pulled a pair of underwear over my legs. They were backward. I thought about protesting, but couldn’t summon the energy. When she seized my arms to push a T-shirt over them, I saw I’d been scratching in the dirt. Trying to dig a hole, I guessed.

  She got a pair of jeans and an overshirt on me but didn’t bother trying to button them. She draped the dry blanket from her pack over me. Then she disappeared into the blinding white blizzard beyond the bridge.

  I felt a wonderful heat flood over my body. I stopped shivering. My arms and legs were hot—too hot, so I sat up, shrugged off the blanket, and tried to pull off my overshirt. Something still wasn’t working right. I grabbed for the cuff and missed. I tried again, but my fingers wouldn’t grip the fabric. On the third try, I got one arm of the shirt off. I gave up on the other arm. I smiled, enjoying the heat flooding my body. Everything slowed down; I watched individual snowflakes drift downward at the edge of the bridge, each one appearing to take several minutes to meander to the ground.

  Darla returned carrying an armload of dead wood. She may have said something to me—it sounded hollow and far off, so maybe I imagined it. Something like, “Keep your goddamn clothes on, Alex!” She dropped the wood, stuffed my arm back into my shirt, and wrapped the blanket over my shoulders. I was way too hot. I tried to tell her so. What came out made perfect sense to me at the time, but later she told me I’d said, “Green hills wash sunlight blue.”

  Darla dug in the pack and came up with a candle and book of paper matches. She rubbed a match on the striker. Nothing. She tossed the wet matches aside and fished deeper in the pack. She found a box of wood matches that had stayed dry and used one to light the candle. She fed wet twigs into the candle flame. They hissed and popped as they dried, but eventually she got a fire going.

  She left the candle at the center of the fire. I thought about protesting—we had only a few candles left—but the words wouldn’t come out right. She added more wood, building up a roaring blaze that quickly made a black smudge on the concrete underside of the bridge above us.

  Darla pushed me onto my side, facing the fire. She slid under the blanket behind me and threw an arm over my side, hugging me against her body. Her arm was still damp, but it felt warm against my flank. Her hand peeked out from under the blankets—even in the orange firelight, it looked blue and puffy. Something brushed my hair and I looked up; the rabbit was sitting on its haunches beside my head.

  Ironically, as the fire warmed my body, I began shivering again. Darla had never stopped. I grabbed her arm and wrapped both my hands around it, clutching it to my chest.

  We lay under the blanket trembling together, the way I had imagined lovers might hold each other in the afterglow of sex. But I wouldn’t have known. I’m not sure why my mind went there, at that moment, to think about sex and the fact that I was still a virgin. Maybe it had something to do with death, with how closely I’d come to the end. The awareness of it sat in my chest like a knife, making me short of breath. The Grim Reaper had visited me again, had even poked me with his scythe, but Darla had dragged me by the hair from his dark kingdom.

  I crushed her arm tighter to my chest and savored the feeling a tear made as it slowly ran along the bridge of my nose. The instant I quit shivering, I fell asleep.

  Chapter 34

  When I awoke, I was cold but not unbearably so. The fire had burned to embers. Darla was gone.

  I noticed both sets of skis and Darla’s poles stacked near the fire. There was no sign of my ski pole or staff. I was glad to see that my skis, at least, hadn’t been lost. Maybe I’d hit a root, ripped my boots out of the bindings, and left the skis on the bank when I fell in. I felt bad about losing Mrs. Parker’s bö staff, though.

  I sat up, buttoned my shirt and pants, and pulled the blanket over my shoulders. The blizzard continued to vent its fury on the world outside our bridge. As I watched, Darla materialized amid the white flakes, carrying an armload of wet wood.

  I helped her feed the fire. We started with twigs, adding them slowly so that the ice and snow clinging to the branches wouldn’t extinguish the embers. As we worked, I said, “You saved my life. Again.”

  She shrugged.

  “Thanks.”

  Soon we had the fire roaring, and I’d warmed up. I wrapped myself in the blanket and stepped out into the blizzard. Every few steps, I looked back. The scene under the bridge grew dimmer and dimmer as I walked away. After twenty steps, all I could make out was the hazy orange glow of the fire. I decided not to go any farther. It would be too easy to lose my way in the snowstorm and wind up lost or in the river again.

  I peed against a tree. It was freezing cold out. I felt bad for Darla, who had to expose a lot more of herself to accomplish the same thing. I looked around and found two long, Y-shaped tree limbs. Back at the campfire, I used the branches, some rocks, and our rope to rig up a clothesline. I had to rotate the wet clothing several times because the stuff hanging nearest the fire steamed and dried, but everything at the far ends of the clothesline froze solid.

  Darla and I both gathered wood. There were a lot of dead trees, bushes, and driftwood near the bridge. By lunchtime, we’d amassed a huge stash against the bridge abutment—far more than we’d need to feed the fire for another day.

  That afternoon, the wind changed. It had been out of the northwest, so the bridge abutment had protected us from the worst of the weather. Now it howled straight from the north, driving down the river and through our little camp. I had to hurriedly take the clothes off my makeshift line so they wouldn’t blow away.

  Darla threw more wood on the fire. We sat huddled with our backs to the wind. Still, we were freezing. I worried about surviving the night, exposed like this. We waited more than an hour, hoping the wind would shift. Instead, it got steadily worse.

  Something had to change. I thought about it for a while, trying to figure out what to do. Then I got up, wrapped myself in a bl
anket, and walked out from under the bridge into the icy teeth of the wind.

  I bent and formed a snowball with my hands. The snow was too cold and fine to pack well, but with a little force I got it to ball up. I rolled my snowball around on the ground as if I were making a snowman. It was difficult at first, but as the ball got heavier, the snow stuck better.

  When I got about as big a snowball as I wanted, two feet in diameter or so, I rolled it back to the bridge. I jammed it into the corner where the bridge abutment met the ground at the north side of the bridge.

  My hands were icy. I walked to the fire to warm them. Darla was watching me with a puzzled expression on her face, but she didn’t say anything, so I didn’t bother to explain.

  As soon as I could feel my hands again, I went back out into the blizzard and made another big snowball. I jammed it in next to the first one. Pretty soon Darla caught on and started helping me. Using snowballs, we built a wall stretching about eight feet out from the bridge abutment toward the stream. It took all afternoon because we had to stop constantly to warm up, but when we were finished, we had a corner between the abutment and our wall that was sheltered from the wind.

  Darla dragged a couple of branches from our fire to start a new one inside the shelter. We gnawed on frozen strips of rabbit meat for dinner.

  When I lay down to sleep, Darla’s rabbit nestled against the top of my head. For some reason, it seemed to like that spot. Darla curled against my back, so we were spooned together for warmth. We slept with our faces toward the fire.

  * * *

  The blizzard still raged the next day. It was easily the worst snowstorm I’d ever experienced. I wondered how much longer it would blow. Our food wouldn’t last forever. At some point, we would have to leave to find more. If the blizzard abated. If the snow wasn’t too deep to move through.

  The new shelter was okay—it had kept us alive overnight, but gusts of wind occasionally swirled under the bridge, blowing cold snow into our fire and our faces. Darla and I spent all day improving it. We built two more walls, so we had a roughly square igloo under the bridge, about six by six inside. I left a small hole at the top of one of the walls to let the smoke out and used our plastic tarp to cover the entrance. I worried that the fire would melt the walls, and it did, a little, but the melted snow quickly formed a hard ice layer that seemed to want to stay frozen.

  It was warm inside the igloo. Short-sleeve-shirt warm. Wonderfully, heavenly warm. I slept great that night, although there was one disadvantage to the shelter: Darla didn’t need to cuddle against me. She laid her blanket on the other side of the fire.

  * * *

  The blizzard hadn’t slacked at all the next morning—it was into its third full day. We ate breakfast and gathered a little more wood in the morning, but then there was nothing to do.

  We sat in the igloo. I tried to start a conversation, but Darla only stared at the walls. The silence slowly grew oppressive between us. Eventually, I just started talking. I’m not normally a talkative guy, but something about that day, holed up with nothing to do, got me started.

  I told Darla about my bratty little sister, Rebecca. How she’d always run screaming to Mom whenever I did anything even slightly questionable. What was wrong with putting Tabasco sauce in her tube of toothpaste, anyway? It added flavor, right?

  I told Darla about overhearing my mom when she scolded Rebecca for losing so many pencils at school. Later that week, I saw an eighth-grader, Johnny Edgars, going through her book bag in the hall before school, while it was still on her back. He took out a pencil, broke it in front of her face, and dropped the jagged ends on the floor. Then he laughed while she picked up the pieces, crying.

  They were standing at the far end of the hallway. By the time I got to them, Johnny was gone. At recess, I hid when my class was called in and waited for the eighth-graders to come out. When I saw Johnny, I walked up to him and kicked him in the face. Blackened his eye, too.

  I got in so much trouble. Suspended from school for a day. Even my dad lectured me—and that never happened. Mom called Mrs. Parker at taekwondo. She demoted me a belt and suspended me from the dojang for a month.

  But it worked. As far as I know, Johnny never bothered my sister again. He turned his tender mercies to tormenting me instead. That was the year of the bully. I had never told anyone about it before Darla. I think my sister knew. But as far as Mom, Dad, and Mrs. Parker were concerned, that vicious kick was just a random act of violence in my otherwise boring elementary-school career.

  I talked to Darla all day. I told her about my dad, the way his face would glaze over when I tried to talk to him. Oh, he’d nod and make the right noises, but I could tell nobody was home.

  I told her about Mom. How she was always pushing: “Why’d you get a B+ in French?” or “Why don’t you volunteer for the school play, Alex?”

  I told Darla how much I missed them all.

  After a while, it occurred to me that I was being cruel. Darla’s mother and father were dead. She was an orphan, an only child. If she had any living relatives at all, she hadn’t told me about them.

  She didn’t say anything, hadn’t said anything in days. She stroked the rabbit in her lap, staring at nothing in particular.

  I dug through my pack and found a bag of cornmeal. I got a handful of it and crawled around the fire to Darla. I held out my palm to her rabbit. He nipped me while he was eating the cornmeal, but it was only a little pinch, so I ignored it.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Jack.”

  I was so startled to hear her respond that I almost dropped the cornmeal. “You named a rabbit Jack? Like jackrabbit?”

  “Yeah. Stupid, huh?”

  “And you had one named Buck? Did you have male rabbits named Bull? Or Gander?”

  Darla laughed. It sounded musical after the days of silence. “Yeah, I had one named Bull. And Rooster. Didn’t think of Gander. Good idea, though.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice again.”

  She was silent for so long, I was afraid I’d said something wrong, somehow screwed things up. “. . . I’ve been a bitch, haven’t I?” she said finally.

  “No—”

  “I know it wasn’t your fault. Bad things are happening all over. Mom . . . We were unlucky. . . . I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It might have been worse if you hadn’t been there. I might be dead, too. You killed that Ferret guy. You killed them both. Maybe I’d be dead if not for you.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I miss Mom so much.” A low moan built deep in her throat, releasing into a full-fledged sob. “I miss her so much, Alex,” she said through her tears, shoulders heaving.

  I wrapped my arms around her and held her as she cried. I might have cried a little, too, her sadness was so deep.

  That night we moved the fire to one side of our igloo, closer to the smoke hole in the wall. We slept on the other side. It wasn’t cold in the shelter anymore. But we still curled up together to sleep.

  Chapter 35

  When we emerged from our igloo in the morning, it was bitterly cold. No snow was falling, and there was very little wind. The morning light reflected off the snow, making it the brightest day I’d seen since the eruption.

  Darla made breakfast while I scouted around. The snow was deep—I sank to the top of my thighs in it. The north wall of our shelter was completely hidden by a huge snowdrift that sloped gently upward, reaching all the way to the top of the bridge.

  I found two strong branches and hacked them off their tree with the hatchet I’d taken from Target. One branch was the perfect length for a ski pole. The other was about six feet long, so I planned to use it as a makeshift bö staff.

  We ate corn pone for breakfast and refilled all our water bottles. At least the snow had solved our water problems. Now we simply filled the frying pan with snow, held it over the fire for a few minutes, and poured the fresh water into our
bottles. We packed up everything, clipped into our skis, and set out.

  Sidestepping up the embankment to the bridge was difficult. We started at the north side, but the drifts were too deep. Even with the skis, we sank so far into the snow that we couldn’t lift our legs high enough to make any upward progress. We gave up and skied to the south side.

  We made it up that embankment. I sidestepped to the crown of the road, pointed my skis across the bridge, and pushed off.

  What followed was utter fail on two levels: First, my improvised ski poles just poked holes in the snow. They never hit anything solid, so I couldn’t push off. Second, when I tried shuffling forward without pushing off, my skis dug troughs five or six inches deep in the soft snow. The tips of my skis promptly dove under the snow ahead of me and caught, pitching me forward onto my face.

  I lifted my head out of the snow and looked back. Darla was smiling, trying somewhat unsuccessfully to suppress outright laughter. “Fine. You try it,” I grumbled.

  Darla pushed off with her poles and glided smoothly over the surface of the snow. She looked back at me and shrugged.

  I tried again. My ski tips pushed under the snow, nearly causing another fall.

  I glared at my skis. That was when I noticed they were different from Darla’s. For one thing, her poles had big baskets a few inches from the end that caught in the snow and let her push off, even in the deep stuff we were trying to cope with. For another, her skis were a lot wider than mine and a little shorter. They were slightly concave on each edge, too. My best guess was that the librarian had sold us a pretty good pair of off-trail skis, while my dad’s old skis were designed for groomed snow. I shared this theory with Darla.

  “I don’t know anything about skis, but I think you’re right,” she said. “I’ve got an idea—I think I can make some baskets for the ends of your poles if we can find some twine somewhere. I can’t think of any way to fix your skis, though.”