Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  “Me, either.”

  “Try skiing in my tracks.”

  That worked okay. So long as I stayed behind Darla and kept my weight centered on my skis, I could shuffle along in the grooves her skis cut in the new snow. I was a lot slower than she was. Being able to use her poles more than compensated for the extra effort she had to put in to break the trail. Every forty or fifty feet she’d stop and wait for me to catch up. I thought fondly back to our first trip to Worthington, when I’d been on skis and she’d been on foot. We had been a strange team, even back then.

  * * *

  We broke into a farmhouse that night. It looked deserted—no tracks in the snow, no smoke from the chimney—and it was, sort of.

  Darla found a window ajar at the back of the house. We unclipped from our skis and stuck them upright in the snow. I shoved the window fully open and climbed through.

  It was late and too dark to see much in the room. There was a vaguely unpleasant smell, a hint of something putrid lingering on the knife-edge of the frozen air. Darla stepped behind me and dug a candle and matches out of my backpack.

  By the candlelight we discovered we were in a bedroom. A queen bed, sheets pulled tight with military precision, filled the center of the room. A man wearing a black suit lay in the center of the bed, his skin frozen to a blue-white pallor. He looked almost normal—peaceful, even—except for the gun clutched in his right hand and the huge black stain wreathing his head in a sanguinary halo.

  Darla jumped and let out a yelp. Maybe I should have been startled, as well. Finding myself in a room with a corpse would have scared the bejeezus out of me only five weeks ago. But I’d seen a lot of corpses since I’d left home; this fellow wasn’t the worst—and probably wouldn’t be the last.

  Darla turned away from the bed. She stared at a cracked mirror mounted above the dresser. The mirror was so coated in dust that it didn’t reflect anything. She dragged her splayed fingers across its surface, and our reflections appeared, fractured into five narrow lines by the paths she’d drawn.

  I held the candle over the bed. Flecks of blood spotted the guy’s lips, gleaming black in the candlelight.

  “What do you think happened?” Darla asked.

  “He shot himself. Put the gun in his mouth.”

  “He put on his best suit, too. His funeral suit. . . . Why?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was asking why he had killed himself, or why he had dressed up to do it, but either way the answer was the same. “I dunno.” I reached out and touched the guy’s hand. It felt cold and hard as marble.

  “What are you doing?” Darla asked.

  “Getting the gun.” I had to bust his finger to get it out of the trigger guard. It cracked, like ice breaking. “You know anything about pistols?”

  “Not much.”

  I handed the gun to her anyway. “Not much” beat what I knew, which was absolutely nothing. Darla found a latch on the left side of the gun that released the cylinder. There was one spent casing in there—no bullets. Darla picked the casing out with her fingernail and closed the cylinder. She put the gun in one of the exterior pockets of my backpack.

  We looked through the rest of the house. It was small: two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, and a living room with a fireplace. Nobody else was there, alive or dead.

  I unlocked the front door and opened it. Snow was piled so high against the storm door that I couldn’t get out, so we trooped in and out through the bedroom window and around the dead guy’s bed carrying firewood. We could have burnt a kitchen chair or the coffee table instead, but there were plenty of trees around the house. Besides, burning the furniture seemed rude somehow, since we were guests, albeit uninvited ones.

  At first, walking by the dead guy creeped me out a little. But after hauling three armloads of wood and a couple of frying pans full of snow past him, I got used to it. I even said “hi” the last time I walked through that night.

  I made corn porridge with bits of rabbit meat for dinner. Darla fed some of it to Jack. We’d make a cannibal out of that poor rabbit yet. He seemed to be doing better. One nice thing about all the snow was that it covered the ash, keeping it from blowing around. We were breathing the cleanest air we’d had since the eruption—maybe that was helping Jack, too.

  I shook out a blanket and laid it between the fireplace and the couch. The spare bedroom held a nice bed, but it was frigid in there. We’d sleep warmly in front of the fire.

  “You can have the couch if you want,” I said.

  “I think there’s room for both of us.”

  There was not room for both of us on that couch. But Darla moved all our blankets onto it and got me to help her drag it closer to the fireplace. She efficiently stripped off her overshirt, boots, and jeans. I tried not to watch. She was wearing a T-shirt that read Rabbits Bite! in huge letters across her boobs and Dubuque County 4H below that. Her panties were cute girlie things with yellow stripes and pink hearts—not like her at all. The effect was ruined somewhat by the gray streaks of ash staining them. I’d seen them before, of course. I had no idea why I was noticing them again at that moment.

  Darla sat on the edge of the couch and rubbed her feet.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “It’s just my feet—the ski boots are too tight.”

  “I’ll help if you want.”

  “Sure.” She stretched out her feet toward me.

  I sat on the floor and massaged her feet. They were crosshatched with red welts. They didn’t smell bad at all, which surprised me—my feet probably stank.

  “Oh,” Darla sighed, “that feels so good.” She pulled her feet away from my lap, climbed under the blankets, and stretched out on her side with her face toward the fire. I sat on the edge of the couch beside her and pulled my boots off.

  Suddenly I felt funny about getting undressed. It made no sense—I’d been completely naked in front of Darla repeatedly over the last few weeks. I sent strict orders to my body to chill out. Concentrating on my breathing helped. Two quick breaths in through the nose, two quick breaths out through the mouth, just like I’d use during a sparring match. I peeled off my jeans and overshirt and crawled under the blankets with her.

  I spooned against her, my back against her stomach. Well, honestly, what I noticed were her breasts against my back. They formed two puddles of warmth beneath my shoulder blades, although maybe my overactive imagination was at work. I didn’t think I was pressed that tightly against her.

  I probably smelled rank in my sweaty underclothes. I had probably smelled rank for days, but it hadn’t bothered me until then.

  “Goodnight,” Darla said.

  “Goodnight.”

  My knees and arms hung over the edge of the couch. The room was bright—we’d built the fire up before we turned in. I stared into the flames for a while.

  “You awake?” I asked, my voice pitched low.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You just did.”

  “What?”

  “Obviously, you can ask me something. You just did. You asked if you could ask me something.”

  “Do you know you’re annoying?” I punctuated this comment by elbowing her in the side.

  “Yeah, sorry. What did you want to ask me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, really, what was it?”

  I sighed. “It was . . . I was wondering. Why’d you follow me out of Worthington?”

  “I dunno.”

  “No, I’m serious. You would have been safer there. They’re organized. They’ve got water and food. The people there know you and like you. But I’m . . . with me, your chances aren’t so good. I’ve almost died three or four times already. We’ve got food for what? Four or five more days, maybe? Maybe we can make it to Warren by then, but I don’t know what’s waiting for us, if anything. I mean, I hope my parents are there with my uncle and his family, but I don’t know. I don’t know anything, really.”

  She was silent.r />
  “I mean, I’m glad you did follow me,” I said. “I’d have been dead in that river without you. But I’m not sure it was so smart.”

  “I’m not exactly sure why myself.” Her voice was so soft that the whisper of the flames in the fireplace threatened to drown it. “I . . . look, it’s not logical, but I feel safe with you. I should be freaked out by the dead guy in the room behind us, but I’m not. I know I’d be safer in Worthington, but I didn’t feel that way when I woke up that morning and you weren’t there.”

  I reached back, caught her left hand in mine, dragged it to my chest, and held it there.

  “I guess I never bothered to ask whether you wanted me with you,” Darla continued. “Maybe you could make better time without me. And I know I was a real drag to have around—”

  “Want you? Of course I do, Darla. I’d be dead twice over now except for you. And you’re an amazing girl. I’ve never met anyone who works as hard as you do. Or knows as much about machines. When I first saw you in your barn, I thought you were an angel. If I didn’t know you were already in love with Jack, I might seriously let myself—”

  “Roll over.”

  I did. Darla’s lips were on mine before I’d completely turned over. We kissed. I felt like I was falling, plunging headlong down a warm, moist tunnel.

  My eyes were closed. My right arm was wrapped around her shoulder; my hand gently cupped the back of her head, as if it were some wondrous glass sculpture, fragile in my palm.

  Darla started crying.

  No, that’s wrong. She wasn’t crying; she was sobbing, in full-throated wails. I pulled away, shocked. What had I done wrong?

  Darla wrapped her arms around me, pulling my body back to hers as she cried. She held on as if she were trying to crush my body in her arms. I returned her embrace a little weakly—I was having trouble breathing.

  When she’d finally run out of tears, her arms relaxed, and I sucked in a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That kiss. It was . . . how can we feel so good when so many people are dying? I started thinking about Mom, Dad . . .”

  She was quiet. I held her tighter.

  We lay like that for a long time, but eventually it got uncomfortable. Our knees knocked together. Darla rolled over again, and I snuggled against her back.

  Her breathing calmed as she drifted to sleep. I watched the firelight play with her hair, watched it until the fire had burned so low that I couldn’t see her anymore. Then, at last, I slept too.

  Chapter 36

  After breakfast the next morning, we thoroughly searched the house. We both thought there must be more bullets somewhere—what use is a gun with only one bullet, anyway? But we couldn’t find any.

  We did find clothing: hats, gloves, scarves, heavy flannel shirts, and even an insulated pair of overalls. By mixing and matching the new stuff with what we already had, we managed to put together two decent sets of winter gear.

  There was no food at all in the house. The refrigerator stood open and empty except for a box of baking soda. We found two candles in the kitchen, fat pillars of the sort that would be annoying to carry in our pack. Darla borrowed my knife and gave them impromptu liposuction, whittling the excess wax off the sides.

  I found a ball of string in one of the kitchen drawers, but Darla said it wasn’t heavy enough. She wanted something tougher to fix my ski poles, so we explored the barn.

  A snowdrift had covered the long side of the barn, reaching upward almost to the eaves, which made it something like fifteen feet deep. We skied around, looking for a way in.

  There were no doors on the right side or back of the barn. When we got to the left side, we found a big square hatch set on the inside of the jamb so it would open inward. Darla said it was for unloading manure, but I didn’t know how she could tell. There was no sign or smell of manure there.

  I tried the hatch; it was locked. But it had a little wiggle to it on the right side, like it was loose. I took off my skis and kicked the door with a simple front kick. I got my hips behind the kick, thrusting forward for extra power, like I would for a board break in taekwondo. The door rattled, but the latch didn’t break. I tried again. On the third try it finally gave, and the door flew open with a bang.

  I stepped into the barn. The door had been secured from the inside with a simple hook and eye. My kick had ripped the hook out of the doorframe.

  “Damn,” Darla said appreciatively, looking at the splintered spot in the wood.

  I shrugged. We broke boards all the time at the dojang. It was no big deal.

  In the barn’s loft, we found fifty or sixty bales of hay—the small, rectangular kind.

  “Perfect,” Darla declared.

  “We need hay?”

  “No, silly, the baling twine—I can make ski pole baskets with that.”

  So I cut twine off the hay bales while Darla searched for some wood. We carried everything back to the living room and built up the fire.

  Darla whittled a shallow groove into both my poles about five inches from the bottoms, using my mother’s mini-chef’s knife. She cleaned off the bark from two sticks and cut them about eight inches long. Then she lashed the sticks to one of the poles in an X shape, wrapping twine in the groove so the sticks couldn’t slide up or down.

  I handed her stuff and cut twine for her. She talked while she worked. “This reminds me of working with my dad. He used to let me do everything—well, everything I was strong enough for. He’d hand me tools and tell me what to do with them. I’d usually screw it up, at least the first time, but he’d just tell me what I was doing wrong and let me try again.”

  “What’d you guys work on?”

  “All kinds of stuff. We built a hydraulic tree-digger when I was ten or eleven. Big thing with four blades on it that you could hook up to the tractor and use to move live trees around. That’s when he taught me how to weld.”

  “You learned to weld when you were ten?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t think I was allowed to touch the stove when I was ten, let alone use a welder.”

  “Yeah, well. With your amazing mechanical aptitude, I wouldn’t have let you touch a stove, either.”

  I might have taken offense, but she was smiling at me in a way that made it impossible to be mad. “Why’d you want to learn all that stuff?”

  “I dunno. I’ve always been interested in machines. And Dad was a great teacher. He’d smile when I got to the barn after school. He had the most amazing smile—it lit up his whole face. Then he’d turn everything over to me, show me where the project was at. It was probably a lot slower than doing it himself, but he never once complained. We did everything together—fixed the tractor, mended fences, built stuff . . .”

  “It must have been hard when he died.” The moment I said it I realized how stupid it sounded. Duh. But Darla didn’t seem to mind.

  “Yeah. I tried to keep the farm going. At first the neighbors came by all the time to help. But that didn’t last long.”

  “The farm? I thought you only had the rabbits.”

  “You didn’t think all that corn we were digging up planted itself, did you?”

  “You did all that?”

  “Yeah. Got crappy grades at school. Kept falling asleep in class. Almost had to repeat sophomore year.” Darla frowned. “It got better junior year. Mom and I sold off the cows and leased out some of our land, so it wasn’t as hard to keep up.”

  “Junior year . . . how old are you?”

  “I’ll be eighteen in February. You?”

  “Um, I dunno.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “What’s the date today?”

  Darla thought for a few seconds. “It’s the fourth of October.”

  “I guess I’m sixteen then. My birthday was two days ago.”

  “Wow, missed your own birthday.”

  I shrugged. “So . . . I’ve fallen for an older woman? You going to take me to prom?”

&
nbsp; “Yeah, right. Even if there was a prom, I probably wouldn’t be going. Probably be too busy.”

  “So much for the benefits of dating an older woman.”

  “Happy birthday.” She leaned over and kissed me, a quick peck on the lips. I hoped we’d keep kissing, but Darla returned to working on my ski poles. She tied a series of strings connecting the crossbars so that when she was finished they looked like diamond-shaped dream catchers.

  When Darla finished she said, “Ta-da! New ski poles. For your birthday. Not much of a present, I know, but it’s all I’ve got.”

  “When you followed me out of Worthington, that was my real birthday present.”

  * * *

  The poles worked great. The combination of crossbars and string grabbed in the snow, so my poles only sank a few inches. It didn’t do anything for my skis, of course. They still had an annoying tendency to dive under the powder instead of gliding on top of it, but if I stayed in Darla’s tracks, we made progress.

  Early that afternoon we came to an intersection. A wide road crossed our path. A sign poked about a foot above the snow. Darla knocked the ice off it: U.S. 151.

  That startled me a little. The snow on 151 was completely undisturbed—no one had used it since the blizzard had ended. Shouldn’t a major highway have had some kind of traffic? People walking along it, at least? Was everyone dead? The east-west road we’d been on for a while, Simon Road, had been deserted as well, but it was a minor county lane, probably not even paved.

  “Highway 151 goes to Dubuque,” Darla said. “We should head north.”

  “I dunno. Didn’t Mrs. Nance say there’d been riots in Dubuque?”

  “The only bridges across the Mississippi within thirty miles of here are in Dubuque.”

  “Crap. Okay.” We turned north.

  * * *

  Two hours later, we still hadn’t seen signs of anyone on the road. We passed two farmsteads that had tracks in their yards, and two more that appeared to be deserted, but it was too early to stop for the night.

  Every now and then we passed a big rectangular shape covered in snow. I asked Darla what she thought they were.