Mike Mullin - Ashfall

I heard a groan from the front of the SUV.

“Darla? You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. No.” Her head poked up above the bench seat. “What a story to wake up to. Christ.”

“I don’t think we’d better go through Dubuque. Maybe we can find another bridge or build a raft.”

“Okay. We’ll figure something out.”

“Every night since then I’ve had the same dream-nightmare, I mean. I see those men crowded around that fire. But they’re not cooking my Roger. Instead, it’s Katie over that fire. And she’s screaming. She’s screaming-” The woman broke down into quiet, choked little sobs. She let my hand go and clutched her daughter’s corpse to her chest. The other two kids slept through it all.

Darla volunteered to cook breakfast, so I went outside to try to dig a grave. I found a likely looking flat spot on the far side of the ditch. I cleared away the snow, mostly using my hands and arms. The ash layer underneath was frozen, but it was only a thin crust of ice. I broke it up with my staff and then scraped the ash up out of the hole using the butt end of a ski. Under the ash, the ground was rock hard. Little white tendrils of dead grass lay in clumps atop the frozen earth, bleached remainders of a dead world. I poked the ground with my ski. It was hopeless. Without a sharp spade or pickax, I couldn’t dig any deeper.

After breakfast, we carried Katie’s body out to the shallow grave. Darla suggested we take off her pink jumpsuit, in case one of the other kids needed it. The woman glared at her, and Darla shrugged. I mounded the ash up over the body, but it was a very shallow grave-twelve inches deep at best.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t dig any deeper. The ground is frozen solid.”

“It’s okay,” the woman said, “the ashfall claimed my Katie’s life, now it can have her body, too.”

I said a prayer over the grave. I’d been getting way too much practice at leading impromptu funerals. I hoped this would be the last one.

When we got back to the SUV, I saw Darla had repacked our gear. Jack was poking his nose out of the top of her knapsack. I opened my pack. We had five bags of cornmeal left. I pulled out three of them.

“What are you doing?” Darla’s eyes narrowed.

“I’m leaving them some food. They’ve got nothing to eat.”

“What the hell? And exactly what are we going to eat? That’s probably not enough to make it to Warren, even before you give most of it away.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer. She was right. There wasn’t enough there for two of us to make it to Warren. I thought about Mrs. Barslow, who’d fed me steak and stayed up late to wash my clothes. She should have let Elroy run me off. Darla’s mom should have rolled me back out into the ash outside their barn. If all we did was what we should to survive, how were we any better than Target? I took out three water bottles and the frying pan.

“You can’t, absolutely cannot leave the pan here, Alex.”

“How are they going to melt snow for water? They don’t have one.”

“I don’t know, and it’s not my problem. Why didn’t they bring their own damn pot and water bottles?”

The woman had dropped through the hole into the SUV as we argued. “Roger had them in his pack: the water bottles and pans.”

“Christ.” Darla grabbed the knife, hatchet, and my staff and threw herself out of the SUV. “Just wait here!” she yelled back through the broken window.

“She’s right, you know,” the woman said. “You don’t owe us anything. You should keep your supplies. Keep your wife alive.”

“She’s not my wife.” Somehow, that made the situation feel even worse, the fact that she agreed with Darla. I took another bag of cornmeal out of the pack and set it with the pile of supplies I was leaving behind.

Darla was gone quite awhile. After forty minutes or so, we heard banging and screeching sounds coming from the front of the SUV. She returned a bit later, carrying a concave chunk of the truck’s front quarter-panel. Two edges were roughly sawn, as if Darla had used the hatchet or knife to cut the sheet metal. I’d had no idea that was even possible.

“You can melt snow with this. But watch the sharp edges around the kids.” Darla tossed down the improvised pan and jammed our skillet back into my pack.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “And… I’m sorry.”

Darla grabbed the woman’s coat and got right in her face. “We might die because of all the stuff my stupid, softhearted boyfriend is leaving you. So don’t you die, too. You take this stuff, and you keep yourself and your kids alive. You hear?”

“I hear.”

I didn’t care much for being called stupid and softhearted. The boyfriend bit I could live with.

Darla grabbed her pack and dove through the hole, going back outside. I grabbed the woman’s hand, gave it a goodbye squeeze, and followed Darla.

Despite our late start, the day was still dim and overcast, adding to the now-normal haze of high-atmosphere dust and sulfur dioxide hiding the sun.

Darla set off at a furious pace. She stomped up the hill in a duck walk so fast I could barely keep up. We headed south on 151, following the tracks we’d made the day before.

About two miles on, we hit a crossroads. We turned left and set off across virgin snow.

Lunch was a sullen affair. We stopped and sat on a snow-covered guardrail. I dug out a strip of dry rabbit-our last meat, unless we ate Jack-and two cornmeal pancakes left over from breakfast. Darla got out a handful of cornmeal and fed Jack. Somehow, I didn’t think we’d be eating him any time soon. As we ate, I tried several times to start a conversation and got nothing but grunts in return.

The land had changed around us. The hills were steeper here and more wooded. Instead of the gunshot-straight roads we’d followed earlier in the journey, this road meandered, following hillsides, creeks, or ridgetops. There were fewer farms, too. We spent large parts of the day with nothing but a partly evergreen forest on either side of the road. Then, occasionally, we’d pop out into huge open areas surrounding a farmstead. All the houses appeared to be occupied, so we avoided them.

Late that afternoon, when I started looking for shelter, we were skiing through one of the wooded areas. I carefully watched the forest on either side for almost an hour, looking for a large pine broken near its base.

I found a tree that might work and yelled for Darla to stop. It was one of the biggest pines I’d seen here, with a trunk almost two feet in diameter. It had broken six or seven feet off the ground. Behind the stump there was a huge hump that looked like a snowdrift extending for sixty or seventy feet. I figured that had been the rest of the tree, now submerged in ash and snow.

Using my hands, I dug a small tunnel alongside the stump. The fallen tree had created a protected space underneath it. I took the hatchet from my belt and chopped off some of the downward-pointing limbs. That created a nearly ideal spot to spend the night: dry, warm, and hard to see from the outside. The pine branches would make for a soft bed, too.

I yelled out, “Come on in. It’s nice in here.”

Darla crawled through the hole and glanced around in the meager light. “Great idea. It even smells good.”

“Yeah, I spent one night under a tree like this a few days after I left Cedar Falls. It was okay. It might be a bit cold, but we’d probably better not light a fire in here. Too many dead pine needles.”

“It’ll be warm enough with two of us.”

We built a small fire in the snow outside and cooked corn pone. We used all of our cornmeal except for a few handfuls Darla saved for Jack. We wound up with enough pancakes for two more meals, maybe three if we rationed them.