Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

I saw Darla’s face, hair streaming past, as she fell away from me. But now she was falling upward, into the yellow-gray post-volcanic sky. I reached for her, but she faded, and my hand passed through her insubstantial form, stirring it like smoke until it dissipated.

The ground under me bucked and my shoulder blade hit it hard enough to bruise. I realized I was on my back in the pickup as it raced along the road.

I sat up far too fast. Pain and nausea mounted a twin assault on my head and stomach. I twisted and vomited bile onto the wooden floorboards of the truck bed.

“Y’okay?” Earl laid his hand against my back.

“No.” I shoved myself onto my feet, ignoring the protestations of my head and stomach.

I stumbled, and Earl grabbed my left arm, holding me up. “Worthington’s a bit different from when you were here before,” he said.

I held onto the back of the cab for support and looked around. A gleaming wall stretched away from the road, curving out of sight in both directions. It was a solid, vertical wall of ice about sixteen feet high. A heavy wooden gate had been built across the road. Three guards struggled with each half of the gate, wrenching it open so the trucks could pass through.

“Impressive, ain’t it?” Earl said.

“Yeah.” It was amazing. I might have been awestruck if Darla had been there to see it with me.

“We built it with two bulldozers and a sprayer truck. Bulldozed huge piles of snow, carved a vertical face, and then sprayed it down with water to freeze it solid.”

I grunted.

“Keeps us safe, anyway. And it’ll last exactly as long as we need it-’til this cussed winter is over.”

“I gotta get going.” I took a step toward the back of the truck, wobbled, and would have fallen except for Earl’s grip on my arm.

“You need to get that arm patched up,” Earl said.

I glanced at it-he’d tied a rag around my right bicep. It was already blood-soaked. “I don’t care. I’m going back to the bridge.” I tried to twist free, but Earl held on.

“There’s some hard facts to this situation,” Earl said, talking in a low voice directly into my ear. “You said Darla got shot. That might have killed her. If that didn’t kill her, they might have flensed her by now. Easier to carry meat than a person.”

That couldn’t be true. Darla was alive. She had to be. “Let go!” I shouted. I threw a punch at him, but my right arm was weak. He caught it and wrapped me in a bear hug.

“Don’t make me hit you again, son. Hurt my dang knuckles. You come into town, get patched up. If the mayor gives the say-so, I’ll take you back to the bridge and help you look for Darla.”

We pulled through the gate and the guards strained to close it behind us. As it crashed shut, Earl released me. On the inside, the wall was just an enormous pile of packed snow. Steps had been carved into it here and there so defenders against a siege could easily reach the makeshift battlement at the top.

The pickups rolled slowly through town. Nobody was outside, but that wasn’t surprising; it was too cold to be outdoors without a good reason. We pulled up at the low metal building that housed the library, city hall, and fire station-the same building where Darla and I had met the town’s librarian, Rita Mae, the year before. The fire truck that had been stuck outside was gone. Other than that and the deep snow, it looked about the same.

“C’mon,” Earl said. It was an order, not a suggestion.

I leaned against the roof of the cab, ignoring him. My mind whirled around the idea Earl had planted, that Darla was dead. I kept approaching the concept in my thoughts and then skittering away from it, like trying to catch a porcupine bare-handed.

“Let’s go see the mayor,” Earl said.

I didn’t respond.

Earl’s hand pressed against my back between my shoulder blades. “Look, son. I’m sorry ’bout what I said to you, ’bout Darla being dead and all. I know it wasn’t Christian of me to put it that blunt. But lyin’ to you wouldn’t be doing you no kindness, neither.”

I whirled and whipped my left hand toward his neck. I grabbed the collar of his coat and shook him so hard his head nodded involuntarily. “Darla is alive,” I growled.

“Okay, okay. Let go of me.”

I released my grip on his collar.

Earl said, “If she’s alive-”

“She is-”

“Let me finish,” Earl said. “If she’s alive, how are you going to find her? You’ve got no pack, no food, no weapons-nothing. You leave the city walls like that, you’re going to die.”

“So help me. Gather up some men, and let’s go get her.”

“I can’t. Not without the mayor’s say-so. I can’t even let you stay inside the city walls unless she okays it. Things are tough. We’re not taking in refugees, much as some might want to.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go see your mayor.”

“That’s all I was trying to do in the first place,” Earl grumbled.

He led me through the middle door of the building labeled CITY HALL. My gut clenched with a fear as visceral as any I’d ever felt. I had to convince these people to help me. To find Darla. My Darla.

Inside City Hall there was a reception room with a desk. One wall was completely covered in a mismatched patchwork of every imaginable type of bulletin board: cork, cloth, framed, unframed, tan, white, red, and black. A crowd of people pressed around the boards, reading the hundreds of handwritten notices posted on them.

Earl led me deeper into the building past a row of office cubicles. One of them was occupied by an elderly woman doing some sort of paperwork. Three others contained people listening to radios through headsets. They had sheets of copy paper beside them, which they were filling with tiny, neatly handwritten notes.

We stopped at a door at the back of the room of cubicles. Earl knocked once and, without waiting for an answer, opened the door to usher me through.

We interrupted a discussion so heated it seemed likely to ignite. A tiny, elderly woman with a huge flare of crazed white hair stood with her back to us. She was gesturing forcefully at a much taller, regal-looking woman, her steel-and-salt hair tied up in a bun.

“. . have to supply more lamp oil, Kenda,” the shorter woman said.

“We don’t have any to spare,” the taller woman said.

“Then at least cut some more windows in the walls.”

“I already told you, Rita Mae. All the window glass is allocated to build cold frames. You’ll just have to read your precious books outside.”

“It’s not good for the-”

Earl cleared his throat. “Excuse me.”

Rita Mae spun and glared at Earl. Then her gaze skipped to me. I recognized her-she was the librarian who’d helped me and Darla last year. “You,” she said, leveling a finger at me. “I’ve met you. Alex, right?”

“Yeah. Alex Halprin,” I said. “How’d you remember?”

“I never forget a patron. Or their questions. You asked about rabbit diseases.”

“I found him on the road,” Earl said, addressing Kenda. “Or he found us. Couple a’ bandit trucks took a potshot at us as we were getting set up to dig corn. We chased ’em, but they were trying to lure us into an ambush. He,” Earl nodded my direction, “saved us.”

“Hmm,” Kenda said, “guess we owe him, then.”

“Owe him a place in town, you ask me,” Earl replied. “Would’ve lost a lot of men without his warning.”

“Why not?” Kenda frowned. Then her words turned bitter. “What’s one more soul to starve to death with the rest of us?”

“I’m not staying,” I said. “I need help to rescue Darla.”