Mike Mullin - Ashfall

The woman’s eyes swiveled from me to Darla. She stared, and I realized it wasn’t Darla she was looking at but Katie, nestled in Darla’s arms. The cleaver disappeared and the woman slithered through the window headfirst. She fell with a thunk on the floor next to the fire. Darla unwrapped the blankets from herself and Katie and handed the girl to her mother. The woman clutched Katie to her chest and backed into the corner where the rear seat met the wall. Darla wrapped both of them in our blankets.

I heard a faint mewling noise outside and crawled to the smoke hole to stick my head out. The toboggan was about ten feet away. The youngest kid, really only a baby, was crying softly while the older one, who couldn’t have been more than four himself, tried to quiet her. “Shh. Mommy said shh,” he whispered over and over.

I looked at the woman. “Your kids are cold and scared. They can come in here with you, if you want.”

She stared at me for a long time. Finally she nodded.

“I’ll hand them in to you,” I told Darla. She shook her head no, but I figured she was expressing her general disgust at the whole project, rather than refusing to catch the kids.

I crawled out of the truck and pushed through the snow to the toboggan. “Your mom’s inside. It’s warm in there. Will you come with me?”

The older kid went dead silent and rigid as a board. The little one started screaming. So much for my way with kids. I hope I’m never a dad. I’d probably suck at it.

I picked up the bigger kid. He reeked of urine. He stayed stiff while I passed him through the window, which helped; I don’t know if we could have got him through the little hole if he’d been windmilling his arms.

The little one did fight and scream. I had to clamp her arms to her sides to shove her through the hole.

I dragged the toboggan closer to our shelter. On impulse, I opened the suitcase resting at the front of the toboggan. It held mostly clothing. There was no food, no way to start a fire, no water or water bottles, and no pans. At the bottom, I found three framed pictures. One showed the entire family: the woman, three kids, and a tall, kind of geeky-looking guy. The other two were wedding photos. The woman looked young and so happy, I got the impression that she might float away in her billowy white dress. The guy looked younger and even more geeky in his rented tux, but he had this smug smile, as if he were saying he’d found the best woman, and the rest of us would have to settle for leftovers. I gently repacked all three pictures amid the clothing. I added the woman’s cleaver to the top of the suitcase and zipped it shut.

Inside, all three kids were pressed against their mom. The back of the SUV was crowded with six people and a fire. I rummaged through our pack.

“What are you doing?” Darla whispered.

“Making some dinner.”

“Alex, we should move on. Find another camp for tonight. We’ve helped them enough.”

“I went through their suitcase.” I was whispering, but the woman no doubt could hear me in the tiny space. “They don’t have any food or water bottles. Who knows how long it’s been since they’ve eaten.”

“And who knows how long ’til we’ll eat again if you give away all our food.”

“I won’t give it all away.”

“Where are we going to get more when we run out?”

“I don’t know.”

I made corn pone for everyone. Darla insisted that we give our guests only one pancake each-any more and they might vomit, she said. Then I melted snow to refill all the water bottles and passed those around.

The woman had gone silent. She took the food and water without comment, but her suspicious eyes glared at me, and she kept her back firmly against the wall. Katie was still unconscious, but the other two kids gobbled up everything I offered them.

That night, I spread our blankets on the bench seat. When I asked Darla to join me, she refused. “I’m going to keep watch half the night,” she said. “I’ll wake you up when it’s my turn to sleep.” I wasn’t sure how she’d figure out when half the night had passed, but knowing Darla, she had a way to do it. I lay down alone and let sleep claim me.

Katie died during the night.

It happened after Darla shook me awake and took my place on the makeshift bed. Katie was alive then, but hot to the touch. Too hot, as if a fire were spreading under her skin. She lay in her mother’s arms, both of them mercifully asleep.

I watched her breathe by the firelight. She’d gasp and suck in a dozen breaths quickly, panting almost. Then she’d stop breathing for so long I’d wonder if she’d died-a minute, maybe longer. I laid my fingers gently on her neck the first few times she quit breathing-her pulse was fast and erratic.

I wished-no, wanted, needed-to do something for her. But I couldn’t even get her to take a sip of water. If we’d had any medicine, I didn’t know how we could have gotten her to take it without a syringe. But all that-medicine, doctors, and syringes-belonged to the pre-eruption world, the world that had died almost six weeks before.

A few hours later, Katie trembled for a moment. Her eyes snapped open and glanced left, then right. They were a rich blue, like the last August sky before the volcano. She drew a breath-a long, shuddering gasp-and then lay still.

I thought about doing something. Pulling her out of her mother’s arms and trying CPR, maybe. I knew how. I had taken a class Mrs. Parker had organized at the dojang. Maybe I should have tried to revive her. But it felt wrong. Instead, I found her hand, still hot with fever, and held it. Her blackened fingertips felt stiff and lifeless against my palm. After five minutes or so with no breathing and no pulse, I knew she was dead.

Everyone else-her mother, her brother, her sister, and Darla-slept through it. But I watched Katie die.

Hours later, after sunrise, her mom woke. She pulled her arm tighter around Katie and glanced down. Katie’s eyes were still open, staring at nothing and everything.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” the woman asked.

I tried to reply. Something was stuck in my throat. No words would exit. Instead, I cried.

I felt a hand grip mine. I looked up. The woman was staring into my eyes.

“The troubles of this world can’t hurt my Katie now.”

“I wish I could have done… I’m sorry.”

The woman nodded. A moment later, a change came over her face, and her stare took on a suspicious cast. “You won’t eat her, will you?”

“Katie? God, no… who would do something like that?”

“There’s them that will. My Roger, he…” She fell silent for a long time. I held her hand and waited. “We ran out of food a week ago. Couldn’t get more. Katie was already sick. We decided to walk across the bridge in Dubuque: Roger, the kids, and me. Heard there’s a camp on the other side, near Galena. FEMA camp with food and medicine.”

“What happened?” I asked softly.

“Oh, we’d been told there were gangs in Dubuque, a couple of them, fighting over food and turf. Roger figured we could slip past them on side streets, get across the bridge. It didn’t work. Three guys found us. Roger fought them, and that gave me time to run off with the kids.”

She was quiet again for a while. Catching her breath or deciding whether to tell me the rest of her story, maybe. “I snuck back later, to see if I could help Roger. There was a whole group of them, at least a dozen. Right in the middle of Jones Street. They’d built a bonfire… Above it, spitted like a pig, there was my Roger.” Her face was contorted with fury; she spat her words out. “They were roasting my Roger. Roasting him like a pig.”