Mike Mullin - Ashfall

Elroy spoke in a hushed voice. “Kid, I’m sorry about this.”

I came more fully awake. “Sorry about what?”

“Edna’s convinced we’ve got to keep you here, take care of you-”

“No, I can’t stay-I’ve got to find my folks.”

“That’s a relief, then. Get up and let’s get you on out of here.”

I stood and followed Elroy to the fireplace. A line had been strung in front of it, and all the clothes I’d been wearing yesterday were hanging there. “What-”

“Edna, she stayed up last night and washed your things in the bathtub. They dry enough to pack?”

“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.

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.