Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

“I think I see people moving by that fire,” Darla whispered.

“Check it out?” I asked. “See if they look friendly?”

“Yeah. But stay hidden ’til we’re sure.”

We crept closer, keeping below the level of the wall of plowed snow that lined the road. Once we were within a few hundred feet, Darla and I slowly raised our heads.

Inside the shed, four men clustered around a small, bright-yellow machine. They were big guys, heavily muscled and tattooed. They looked like they’d been eating well. Three women sat by the fire. Two of them had their backs to us. They were working on something in their laps. The other woman was hunched over the fire, cooking.

“What’s that machine they’re working on?” I whispered. “A jet ski?”

Darla shook her head. “A jet ski? What would they do with that? It’s a snowmobile,” she hissed.

One of the women stood up. She carried a crude mortar and pestle. She dumped ground meal out of her mortar into a paper bag and scooped something from a feed sack. Behind her, I saw something roasting on a spit over the fire: a leg.

“Is that. .?” I asked.

“It’s too thin to be a cow’s leg,” Darla whispered. “Too long to be a pig’s.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“We need to find a place to spend the night.”

“Not in this town.”

Darla started crawling beside the snow berm. I followed on my hands and knees. We didn’t stand up until we’d left the metal building far behind.

Cascade was wrecked. We moved slowly and silently, sticking to the shadowed area alongside the road. Burnt, partially collapsed buildings flanked us, leaning in like gravestones in an unkempt cemetery.

We reached a major intersection. On the far side a mostly collapsed building still sported its bright red CONOCO sign. The area in front of the building, where the gas pumps used to be, was now nothing but a fire-seared crater. A sign clung to a fallen light pole: HIGHWAY 136.

“Right turn here.” Darla’s voice was so soft I could barely make out her words.

The building on the corner to our right had burnt, too. Only its brick walls still stood. A half-melted plastic sign read TRI–COUNTY BANK. Below that, someone had spray-painted a crude drawing of a woodpecker similar to the much-larger one on the water tower. I shuddered, and we hurried past the bank’s abandoned shell.

As we reached the outskirts of Cascade, total darkness fell. Darla and I held hands and stumbled along more by feel than by sight.

After about twenty minutes, I felt a break in the berm at the road’s edge. I groped around, trying to figure out if we’d come to a crossroads. To my right, there was a steep uphill slope. It was strange-the slope was concrete, not snow or ice. I struggled partway up it, trying to figure out what it was-it was far too steep to be a road. The underside of a girder loomed in the darkness. We were under a highway overpass.

There was a low, flat shelf at the top of the slope. The girders were at least five feet high-I could stand upright in between them. “Let’s stop here for the night,” I said.

“We’re still too close to Cascade,” Darla whispered.

“It’s sheltered here and hidden. We’re going to freeze if we keep going.”

I lay down on the concrete floor of our hidey hole. It was intensely cold, chilling my side almost immediately. I wanted a fire for warmth and to cook more wheat, but the flames would have stood out like a beacon. Darla lay next to me, and I wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close. We were both shivering. Darla pushed back against me until we were sandwiched together as close as any two people who still have all their clothes on can be. Eventually our shivers subsided, and I fell into a fitful sleep.

In the morning, I woke to the rattle of gunfire.

I elbowed Darla, but she was already awake. The pop-pop of gunfire was faint, coming from our north, the direction of Worthington, but drawing steadily closer. I could barely make out the muted roar of distant engines, but that noise wasn’t tied to a direction; it seemed to be coming from all around us.

I peered to the north. The light was good-we’d slept at least an hour past dawn, but I couldn’t yet locate the source of the noises. “Let’s move,” I whispered.

“Yeah.” Darla rolled over and started crawling to the north, away from Cascade and toward the gunfire.

“The other way,” I hissed.

Darla kept going. “We need to know what’s happening.”

The gunfire grew louder as we reached the edge of the overpass. A few miles off, a line of trucks raced directly toward us.

“They’re going to pass right through here,” I whispered. “Let’s get on top of the overpass and hide.”

We turned around and crawled as quickly as we could toward the other side of the overpass. There were two bridges above us-both sides of a divided highway with a gap in between. I forced my way through the snow that had fallen between the bridges and wormed to the south side of the overpass. Peeking out, I discovered why the engine sounds seemed to be coming from all around us. Another line of four vehicles was barreling toward us from Cascade to our south. They were small and low, each one kicking up a plume of snow into the air behind it.

“Snowmobiles,” Darla said. “Christ.”

As we watched, the snowmobiles spread out to surround the south side of the overpass in a rough semicircle. The one closest to us stopped, and the two men riding it dismounted and pulled long guns from a saddlebag. They wore military-style fatigues and camo jackets.

“Let’s go!” I tugged on Darla’s jacket. We crawled as quickly as we could back to the center of the overpass. When I reached the break between the bridges, I darted out from under the ledge and started clawing my way upward through the deep snow on the embankment.

I scrabbled with my arms and pumped my legs in and out of the snow, high-stepping, thrusting with panic-fueled urgency. It probably only took us ten seconds to race up the slope, but it seemed like forever. I hurled myself over the snowbank that edged the road atop the overpass. Darla crashed into me a second later.

“What the hell is going on?” Darla asked.

“No idea.” I dashed onto the bridge and peered over the snow berm to the north. The gunfire had gotten louder. Four trucks raced along the road in a column, only a few hundred yards from us and approaching fast. The closest was a modern pickup, followed immediately by a cloth-topped, army-style deuce-and-a-half. After the cloth-topped truck there was a gap, then came two ancient pickups-the type with big rounded fenders and small wooden load beds.

Both the antique trucks were packed with men wearing a ragged array of clothing-five or six squeezed into the back of each truck. Two guys on the closer of the old pickups were leaning over the top of the cab, firing rifles at the deuce in front of them. I thought I saw the muzzle flash of returned fire but couldn’t be sure.

“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s an ambush. The first two trucks are luring the old pickups through the overpass. On the other side all those guys on snowmobiles are perfectly set up to massacre them.”

“Great,” Darla replied. “We’d better hide and sneak out of here when it’s all over.”

The guys on the old pickups looked like farmers to me, and they were driving into a bandit ambush. I clenched my fists. “We’ve got to stop it.”

“Alex, wait-”

I scrambled to the top of the snow berm and stood up. It was a long drop in front of me down the far side of the berm and off the edge of the bridge. I wavered a moment, then started yelling and waving my arms.