Mike Mullin - Ashfall

Joe was wearing a wristwatch. I held out my own wrist and tapped it. He nodded and pushed a button on the side of the watch, lighting the display. It read 9:47.

Joe led us into the kitchen and passed out Pop-Tarts for breakfast. We had no way to toast them, of course, but I was so hungry it didn’t matter. He pulled a half-full gallon of milk from the dark fridge. The milk was still cool, even after a night without power. We drank most of it.

The flashlight dimmed further while we were eating breakfast. Joe used it to retrieve a candle and matches from a kitchen drawer along with a pad of scratch paper and a pen. He carried everything back to the table. While Joe lit the candle and shut off the flashlight, I snatched the pen and scribbled, “What’s happening?”

Joe read my note and added his own below it. “Volcano. The big one. Yesterday, while you guys were watching the fire, I heard about it on the radio.” Joe passed the tablet around. I had to hold the note near the candle and hunch over to read it.

Darren took the tablet and wrote, “So that stuff outside is ash? From the volcano?”

I wrote, “Volcano? In Iowa?”

“No. The supervolcano at Yellowstone,” Joe wrote back.

“But that’s what-one thousand miles from here?” Darren wrote.

Joe took the tablet back and wrote for a long time. Darren tried to pull it away once, but Joe swatted his hand. “About nine hundred. The volcano had already gone off yesterday when Alex’s house was burning. You remember the big earthquake in Wyoming a few weeks ago? The radio said that was either a precursor or trigger for the eruption. The little tremor we felt yesterday was the start of the explosion. I don’t know what hit Alex’s house. My guess is that it was a chunk of rock blasted off the eruption at supersonic speed. Then about an hour and a half later, the sound of the explosion finally got here. The ash would be carried our way on the jet stream and take eight or nine hours to arrive.”

“Should we go check on the neighbors?” Darren wrote.

“Radio said to stay indoors during the ashfall. If you have to go out, you’re supposed to cover your mouth and nose.”

“What about my family?” I scrawled.

“They’re in Warren with your uncle, right?” Joe wrote.

“Supposed to be. How’d you know?”

“Your mother told us you’d be home alone this weekend,” Joe wrote. “She asked us to keep an eye out for you.”

Typical Mom. Of course she’d figure out a way to spy on me-although now I was happy she had. “Warren is 140 miles east of here, even farther from Yellowstone. It could be better there, right?”

“Yes,” Joe wrote. “There will be less noise and ash the farther you are from the volcano. There could be a heavy ashfall here but almost none in Warren.”

I hoped Joe was right. I hoped my family was in Warren. They should have made it-they’d left three hours before everything had started. I didn’t remember them talking about stopping for dinner on the way, but I couldn’t really know.

“How long is this noise going to last?” Darren jotted.

“The news didn’t even warn it was on the way, let alone say how long it would last.”

“What about the darkness?”

“Anything from a few days to a couple weeks. They didn’t know exactly how big the eruption was.”

We traded notes for another hour or so, rehashing the same information. Joe had already told us pretty much everything he knew. We’d burned more than half the candle and completely filled the scratch pad by then. Joe wrote, “I’m going to blow out the candle, to save it. Relight it if you need anything.”

The next few hours were, well, how to describe it? Ask someone to lock you in a box with no light, nobody to talk to, and then have them beat on it with a tree limb to make a hideous booming sound. Do that for hours, and if you’re still not bat-shit crazy, you’ll know how we felt. Before that day, I had no idea that it was possible to be insane with both terror and boredom at the same time. I’m not normally a touchy-feely kind of guy, but the three of us held hands most of that time.

Lunch was a huge relief, if only because it gave us something different to do. Joe squeezed my hand once and let go. I saw a couple little flashes of light, him using the light of his watch to find stuff. A few minutes later he was back, pressing food into my hand: a few slices of salami, a hunk of Swiss cheese, and two slices of bread. We finished off the milk as well, passing it around and drinking straight from the jug. Glasses would have been too much of a pain without light to pour by.

After lunch, more terrified boredom. Nothing to do but endlessly ponder: Is my family alive? Would I survive? I sat and thought for uncounted hours. Then something changed.

There was silence.

The silence was an enormous relief-sort of like coming out of that cave into the sunlight when I was ten. I peeled the headphones off my ears and pulled out the toilet paper plugs. They were stuck; it hurt to remove them.

I heard someone-Joe maybe-say, “Can you hear me?” His voice was hollow, as if he were down a well.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can you hear me?” he said again, a little louder.

Finally I caught on. I shouted, “Yeah!”

“Good,” he shouted. “I think my ears were damaged by all that noise.”

“Yeah, mine too,” I yelled back.

“How you feel?”

“Not good,” I yelled.

“Darren?” Joe yelled.

Darren looked up, but didn’t reply.

“You okay?”

Nothing.

“Darren! You okay? What’s wrong?” Joe lit the candle.

Darren’s face was scarlet. He stared sightlessly at a point about halfway between Joe and me. Joe reached out and put a hand on Darren’s shoulder. Darren batted Joe’s hand away and turned on him, screaming, “What’s wrong? I feel like I’ve been thrown into the gorilla cage at the zoo, and they’ve been using my head as a goddamn volleyball!”

I felt pretty much the same way. Plus I was worried about my family. But screaming wouldn’t help anything.

Joe stood up, walked behind Darren’s chair, and started rubbing his shoulders. Darren seemed to deflate, collapsing with his head down on the kitchen table. Joe stood behind him, trying to comfort him.

Finally Darren looked up from the table and muttered something I couldn’t hear.

“It’s okay,” Joe yelled. “I’m going to see if there’s anything on the radio.” He picked up the candle and used it to find a clunky old boombox on the counter. He carried the radio to the kitchen table and blew out the candle, plunging us again into total darkness.

After a while I heard a soft hiss of static waxing and waning as Joe dialed through the stations. I imagined he had the volume cranked up to the max so we could hear anything at all, but still the static sounded faint and hollow. We bent forward, pressing our heads together close to the radio, and listened to static for about an hour.

Every now and then, I could hear a roll of thunder coming from outside-not the painful continuous booms we’d been suffering through, only a natural clap of thunder sounding soft and echoey in my messed-up ears. The sulfur stench was stronger. I could smell it everywhere now, not just near the windows and doors.

“I’ve been through AM and FM three times each. There’s nothing!” Joe shouted.

“Why?” I yelled.

“I don’t know. I was getting all the usual stations on it yesterday. Maybe the ash somehow interferes with radio reception.”

Darren flipped open his cell phone. The bluish light from the screen illuminated his face, hanging ghost-like in the gloom. “Cell phone still doesn’t work.”