Mike Mullin - Ashfall

Darla grabbed me under my arm and half led, half dragged me along the bank, heading upstream. I kept stumbling, tripping over my own feet. Every time I started to fall, Darla yanked hard on my arm, pulling me upright and dragging me forward.

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.

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 bo 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.