Mike Mullin - Ashfall

“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.

“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?

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.