Mike Mullin - Ashfall

“Where are your folks?”

“Warren, Illinois, I hope.”

“You can stay here. You’ll have to work, though. Every able-bodied person is doing something. I’ll assign you to a team in the morning. Food scavenging, roof clearing, or security, maybe.”

Oh, I was tempted. Finally I’d found some people organizing, working to overcome the ash instead of just looting. Maybe I’d be safe here. But last night I’d made a promise to myself: I was going to find my family. “Actually, I was only looking for a place to sleep. I’ll move on in the morning-I’m headed for Warren.”

“Better you wait for help. We don’t have any communication across Cedar Falls or Waterloo yet. Who knows what’s going on farther east.”

“I need to find my family.”

“Suit yourself. Lord knows I’ve already got more mouths than I can feed here.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “You have any food with you?”

“Yeah. You want some?”

“If you’re trying to get to Illinois, you’ll need it,” he said, still whispering. “I’d advise you not to let on that you’ve got food. We ran out yesterday. We don’t keep much in the cafeteria on weekends. We’re scavenging what we can, but it’s not enough. School has its own water tank, thank God. And there are plenty of cots and blankets-we’re a Red Cross disaster site. But they planned on trucking in food during an emergency.”

“Um, thanks.”

“Cots are set up in the gym. Take any empty spot you like.”

“Thanks.”

I carried my junk into the gym. It was packed with row upon row of folding cots arrayed with the head of each almost touching the foot of the next. Narrow aisles separated each row. Maybe two-thirds of the cots were occupied. There were hundreds of people in there, not all of them students. Another kerosene lantern hung from one of the basketball goals, throwing long shadows toward the corners of the gym.

There was a cluster of empty cots in one of the dark areas along a wall. I picked a cot at random and shoved my skis, ski pole, and staff underneath. I was ravenous but didn’t want anyone to see me eating, so I settled for drinking a bottle of water. Toilet water from the girls’ restroom at the dojang, but who could be picky now?

I put the empty water bottle away, shoved my pack under the cot, and stripped down to my T-shirt and boxers. It felt great to get out of my filthy clothing and crawl into a bed.

My arms and legs ached. I’d only been skiing for a day, hadn’t even left Cedar Falls yet, but I was exhausted. Could I make it all the way to Warren? Despite that worry, I felt hopeful. If people were organizing to survive the ashfall here, maybe they’d be organizing in Warren, too. Maybe my family would be okay.

The cot was small, with a tiny pillow and scratchy blanket. People were moving around, messing with their gear or talking to their neighbors. A bunch of them were coughing, great hacking fits brought on by the ash. A mother tried to shush a crying baby, and across the gym two kids argued. I was so tired that none of it mattered. I fell asleep inside five minutes.

Baseball Bat, Tire Iron, and Chain returned to my dreams. Baseball Bat wound up and swung at my head. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream. As he was about to connect, his head exploded. When he fell, he opened up a whole new vista behind him, in that weird way dreams sometimes work. Mom, Dad, and Rebecca were there, eating Chicken McNuggets. I was in a clown costume, but they didn’t recognize me. Every time I told them who I was, they laughed.

I woke up, panting quietly and staring into the darkness overhead. Someone had turned the lantern way down. I felt something bump my back through the canvas cot. I turned my head and saw a dim form kneeling beside me, reaching under my cot with one arm. I snaked my arms out from under the blanket and grabbed for it. I got a fistful of hair with my right hand and yanked it backward and up. That told me about where the guy’s throat should be, so I went for a chokehold with my left forearm.

The whole thing was over in less than two seconds. I craned my head to get a look at the side of his face.

Her face. It was a girl, maybe eight or nine years old. I let go of her hair-my right shoulder ached, anyway. I kept my left forearm locked around her neck. She had pulled two packages of peanut-butter crackers out of my pack. They slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor.

What was wrong with me? I’d been shocked to see Cedar Falls degenerate into looting and violence, but here I was with my forearm crushing a little girl’s throat, a little girl who only wanted something to eat. Was I any better than the looters?

I reached down and felt around the floor. I found both packages of crackers by touch. I scooped them up, put them back in her hand, and curled her fingers around them.

“If you tell anyone where you got these, I’ll find you and break your neck.” I tugged my forearm a little tighter against her throat to emphasize the point. I felt horrible. It was wrong, nasty even, to threaten her. But I couldn’t think of any alternative. I didn’t want everyone to help themselves to my food. She nodded, at least as much as she could with my arm crushed against her larynx.

I let her go, and she shot off into the gloom, both hands clutched around the crackers. The top of my pack was open under the cot, stuff falling out. I put it back together and set it on the cot next to me.

I lay awake for several hours with one arm thrown over my pack, hugging it and thinking. Would anyone survive if food was already so scarce that kids were going hungry? Then I thought about what might have happened if I’d tightened my arm a bit more around her throat, and I felt sick. Mostly, I thought about a little girl who had learned to steal just to get something to eat.

When I awoke the next morning, about half the refugees in the gym were already up. They tried to move quietly and talked in whispers out of consideration for the sleepers. But more than a hundred people trying to be quiet made a heck of a lot of noise.

I sat up on the edge of the cot and groaned when my feet touched the floor. All that skiing yesterday had done nothing good for the muscles in my calves and thighs. So I staggered off the cot and forced myself through some martial arts stretches in my boxers. After I’d gotten my legs loosened up, I spent some time stretching my right arm and shoulder. It was feeling a lot better, although it still hurt to push my arm above my head.

By the time I finished stretching, I felt okay, so I started doing telephone-booth forms. An ordinary form is a series of kicks, punches, and stances that requires a pretty big space to perform. So to practice in a smaller area, I had to modify the moves. If the form called for a step forward, front kick, step forward, knife-hand strike, I’d step backward for the second move instead, covering and recovering the same small patch of ground.

People nearby were looking at me funny, so I called it quits after two forms and pulled on the same dirty jeans and long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing yesterday. I put on my dad’s hiking boots and threw my backpack over my shoulder, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the skiing gear. I waited until nobody seemed to be paying attention and hid the stuff under the blanket on my cot. Hopefully it’d be okay.

The next order of business: a toilet. I knew where the closest boys’ restroom was, but when I got there, partway down a pitch-black hallway, it was locked. I returned to the gym and asked the first guy I saw where we were supposed to pee. He pointed me toward the home locker room.

There was another camp lantern hanging in the locker room, turned about as low as possible while still giving off light. The urinals and stalls were blocked with yellow out-of-order tape. Somebody had dragged two Porta-Potties into the shower room, right in the middle near the floor drain. There were two lines, each four or five people deep, both men and women waiting for the facilities.