Mike Mullin - Ashfall

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “How do we pay you?”

“Pay me with whatever you can. I need medical supplies, gas, lamp oil, batteries, flashlights, candles, and the like. Vitamin C tablets are worth more than gold, on account of the scurvy. Food would be welcome also, so long as it’s not pork. Only reason I’ve been able to keep practicing is that folks have been so generous. Some of them even bring supplies when they’re not sick.”

Uncle Paul was still unconscious, and Aunt Caroline’s eyes were closed. “I’ll get some supplies,” I said.

I went to the kitchen and gathered a dozen duck eggs, two small goat cheeses, a bag of cornmeal, and some kale. “This is all we can spare right now,” I said when I returned to the living room. “We’ll bring more stuff later.”

“That’ll be fine.” Dr. McCarthy pulled a purple leaf out of the bag. “Is this kale?”

“Yeah. The greenhouses are too cold to grow anything else.”

“It’s a member of the cabbage family, right?”

“I think so,” Darla said.

“And none of you have scurvy?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Dr. McCarthy reached toward my mouth. “Mind if I look?”

“No, go ahead.”

He peeled back my lower lip and looked at my teeth. Then he repeated the process with my upper lip. “No sign of scurvy at all. I bet that kale is loaded with vitamin C. How much of it do you have?”

“Not enough. That storm last night ripped up one of the greenhouses, and a bunch of it froze. It’s all mushy- really only good for the goats.”

“No, no, no. Mushy or not, it’ll treat scurvy fine.”

“I didn’t feed the goats yet,” Rebecca said. “I’ll go get the buckets of frozen kale.”

“Now look,” Darla said, “we appreciate your help, and we’ll give you all the kale we can spare, but we’ve got to eat, too. We don’t have a lot of extra food-we need most of the kale ourselves.”

“That’s no problem,” Dr. McCarthy said. “We’ve got plenty of pork in town. I’m sure the mayor will agree to give you all the pork you need in return for your kale.”

“We’ll trade,” Darla said, “ten pounds of pork for one pound of kale.”

“Darla,” I whispered. “He said he’d keep us supplied with pork. And we should help out, anyway.”

“What if the greenhouses fail?” she hissed back. “We need to have a supply of stored food in case something goes wrong.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said out loud. “We’ll give you all the kale we can now as payment for your help, and then as we harvest more, we’ll trade it for pork.”

“I’ll have to confirm it with the mayor, but that sounds fine,” Dr. McCarthy said. “Why don’t you ride back to town with me, and I’ll set you up with as much pork as you can carry. Call it a down payment for future kale harvests.”

We gathered up all the kale we had: two five-gallon buckets of frozen leaves and four bags of good stuff. I got our three biggest backpacks, and Max, Darla, and I squeezed into the Studebaker for the ride back to town.

Dr. McCarthy drove us to a huge metal building north of town. The sign over the door read: WARREN MEAT PACKING. A wiry guy sat on a metal folding chair in front of a small fire just outside the main door. A shotgun rested on his knees.

“Hey, Stu,” Dr. McCarthy called as we walked up. “Need to trade some pork for medical supplies. I’ll go down to the mayor’s office and get you the paperwork as soon as we’re done.”

“Aw, Jim, you know you’re supposed to bring the paperwork first.” The guard shrugged and handed Dr. McCarthy a key. “But you may as well go ahead. He always approves your trades, anyway.”

“Thanks, Stu.” Dr. McCarthy unlocked the door and ushered us inside.

Pork gleamed pink in the light filtering in through the open door. The plant was packed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of frozen hog carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Shelves lined the walls, filled to overflowing with pink hams, white loins, and huge slabs of uncut bacon.

“Take as much as you can carry,” Dr. McCarthy said. “I’ll weigh it for the paperwork, and you can pay in kale later.”

My mouth hung open, watering as I imagined that bacon sizzling in a pan. The slaughterhouse held enough pork to feed the small town of Warren for years-enough to feed our family forever. And Dr. McCarthy hadn’t hesitated when Darla proposed trading one pound of kale for ten of pork. All our work building and tending the greenhouses had paid off. Our kale, loaded with vitamin C, was more valuable than gold. Food represented wealth in the post-eruption world, as surely as a bank vault stuffed with one-hundred-dollar bills had represented wealth in the old world.

Darla must have been thinking something similar. She turned and hugged me, her face lit by a smile of the sort I’d rarely seen since we left Worthington-since her mother had died.

Thinking about Mrs. Edmunds turned my happiness bittersweet. I stretched to kiss Darla’s forehead, then disentangled myself and stepped outside to clear my head.

The western sky glowed with a dim, yellow-gray light. I stared at the horizon as if I could see back to the start of my journey in Cedar Falls, 140 miles to the west. I thought about all the people I’d met who were worse off than we were, struggling just to survive: the refugees at Cedar Falls High, the people of Worthington, Katie’s mom and her kids, the inmates at the FEMA camp. And wandering somewhere among them, my mom and dad.

Maybe one day my parents would trudge up the driveway to my uncle’s farm. But if they didn’t, Darla and I would go find them. With Uncle Paul injured, we couldn’t leave anytime soon, because even more of the farm work would fall to us. But I’d made a promise to myself before I‘d left Cedar Falls: not just to get to Warren, but to find my family. A promise I planned to honor.

Darla stepped beside me and wrapped an arm around my waist. Despite my worries about Mom and Dad, I felt strangely hopeful. Even in the icy wind, the warmth of Darla’s body against mine felt like spring.

Author’s Note

There is a colossal volcano under Yellowstone National Park. The volcano’s caldera, or crater, is visible in some places as a ring of cliffs and measures roughly 34 by 45 miles. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, events so powerful they are usually classified as supervolcanoes. The largest of these eruptions released about 2,500 times as much magma as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

It’s often said that the Yellowstone volcano is “due” for another eruption, since the last three were 640,000, 1.3 million, and 2.1 million years ago, respectively. Actually, it’s extremely unlikely that the volcano will explode in our lifetime. The eruption preceding the last three was 4.2 million years ago, so the regularity of the most recent events is deceptive.

The problem with writing a book set in the aftermath of a volcanic supereruption is that no supervolcano has exploded in recorded human history. So in describing it, I’ve had to make do with scientific speculation and accounts of survivors of normal, or Plinian, eruptions such as Mount St. Helens in Washington State and Krakatoa in Indonesia.

For example, early in this book, Alex’s house is hit with a piece of rock thrown 900 miles by the volcano at supersonic speed. Plinian volcanoes don’t do this; all the heavy material they eject falls near the volcano’s vent, and only the much lighter ash travels farther. Some scientists believe supervolcanoes behave differently, blasting chunks of rock on ballistic trajectories from deep pipes in the lithosphere (the solid part of the earth consisting of the crust and outer mantle), but this view is controversial.