Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

“Darla!” I yelled. “I could use some help out here!”

“What’s going on out there?” Her voice was faint, muffled by the canvas.

What did she think was going on? “Nothing much. I crashed the truck, subdued the guards, and got their weapons.”

“Is it safe?”

That seemed like an even stranger question for her to ask. When had it ever been safe? Not since we had met. Not since the volcano had erupted. What was going on with her? “Yeah. .” I said anyway.

“Coming.”

I kept my gaze fixed on the driver. I needn’t have bothered. His eyes were closed, and he rocked slightly back and forth, totally absorbed in his agony.

“What the hell is going on out here?”

I looked to my left at the girl who had just stepped out from behind the truck.

She wasn’t Darla.

All the oxygen left my lungs, replaced by disbelief and pain. Like I’d taken a kick to the groin. “Who are you?”

“I’m Alyssa-I have no idea who this Darla you keep talking about is,” she said.

“I thought you were Darla.” She was the right height. Brown hair curled around her shoulders, exactly like Darla’s. But Darla had a rectangular, Midwestern face-beautiful, but tough and solid. This girl was elfin by contrast-her face almost diamond shaped, her features delicate, her tiny nose slightly upturned. I guessed she might be a year or two younger than Darla.

“Who’s Darla?” She hadn’t moved from the back of the truck.

“Where’s Darla?” I strode down the length of the truck toward her.

“How am I supposed to know? I just told you I don’t know who she is!”

“She’s a girl. Your height. Same hair. Peckerwoods took her to Anamosa.”

“Shot in her right shoulder?”

“Yes! That’s her. Where is she?”

“Clevis!” Her face twisted with rage, and she pointed behind me.

I spun. The driver had emerged from the truck and was scuttling down the road, hunched over and clutching his broken arm to his chest. As I stared, the girl grabbed the shotgun from under my arm. I turned back toward her, afraid she might try to shoot me, but she’d aimed it down the road at the driver. She tried to pull the trigger over and over again, but the gun was safetied.

“What’s wrong with this thing?” she screeched, turning back toward me and leveling the barrel at my chest.

“Whoa!” I swept the barrel aside with an inner forearm block, wincing from the pain the move triggered in my shoulder. “Don’t point that thing at me. You need to push the safety off. It’s the button on the right side,” I said automatically, instantly regretting my big mouth. Gunning down the driver as he fled seemed wrong, although letting him fetch his buddies in Anamosa wasn’t such a bright idea, either. And what if Alyssa decided to use the shotgun on me?

She snicked off the safety and pulled the trigger. Her shot was high and wide, and she hadn’t braced herself at all. The shotgun knocked her on her ass. “Piece of shit!” she screamed and threw the shotgun aside.

“Waste of a good shell,” I said wryly.

She sprang back to her feet and reached for the knife on my belt.

I caught her wrist as her fingers wrapped over the hilt. “What are you doing?” I yelled.

“Let go!” she screamed back.

The driver had picked up his pace and was more than one hundred feet down the road now.

“What are you going to do with my knife?” I asked again.

“Fine,” she said. “You win.” She released her grip on the knife hilt, and I turned and crouched to retrieve the shotgun. Something tugged at my waist, and I spun back just in time to see Alyssa running down the road toward the driver with my knife raised above her head, ready to stab.

She’d only taken a few steps when an eerie, monotone moan emanated from the truck’s load bed. She took one more step forward, then looked back, clearly undecided. Finally she pivoted and marched back to me.

“Now look what you’ve done. You’ve upset Ben.”

“What are you talking about?”

She pointed the knife at me, waving it as she spoke. “Do. Not. Mess. With. My. Brother.”

“Who do you think I am, other than the guy who just rescued both of you? Give me my knife back. Please.”

She thrust the knife into her belt and turned away, marching toward the truck bed.

I looked down the road at the driver for a while. He was already out of the shotgun’s range, but I wanted to make sure he didn’t double back. I didn’t relax until he was a solid quarter mile down the road.

I turned my attention to the corpse of the truck’s passenger. A ring of keys dangled limply from his belt. I took the keys and started searching his pockets. As I searched, the moaning coming from inside the truck ended. I put the pistol in my belt, stowed the shotgun in the passenger-side footwell, and trudged to the back of the truck.

I pulled aside the canvas flap. Alyssa was crouched in the back of the truck beside the big guy I’d last seen in the Anamosa garage. They sat on a jumbled pile of wooden crates. She had a glove balled up in one hand, and she was rubbing the guy’s back with it, running it repeatedly over his coat. He was blocky, but his flesh appeared to be hung on an oversized skeleton. Like he hadn’t eaten well recently. He looked maybe nineteen or twenty years old.

I let down the tailgate and climbed into the load bed. “Is he okay?”

Alyssa looked at me over her shoulder. She didn’t stop brushing the guy’s back. “He’ll be okay.”

“You didn’t get hurt during the crash?”

“Ben and I were thrown into the canvas wall. With the crates,” she said. “I’ve got some ugly bruises.”

“What about you?” I asked, addressing Ben. He was huge. Sitting with his ankles tucked under him, he was almost as tall as I was standing. He was shackled prison-style, wrists and ankles cuffed and linked with chains that severely restricted his movement.

He didn’t respond. He was gently rocking forward and back, back and forward.

“Doesn’t he talk?” I stretched, trying to work out the painful kinks in my side and shoulder.

“When he wants to.”

“Why are you rubbing his back?”

“I’m brushing, not rubbing. It helps. Why’d you crash the truck?”

“I thought you were Darla. She fell onto a Peckerwood truck during an ambush. I’ve been trying to find her. You’ve seen her? Did you talk to her?”

“No, I never talked to her. The only time I saw her, she was asleep. They had her in the infirmary at Anamosa. She didn’t look like she was hurt too bad.”

“What’ll they do to her?”

The girl shook her head slowly. “They won’t flense her, probably. They’re running out of girls. And we’re valuable. I think they only decided to trade me away because I come with an extra mouth to feed.” She glanced at Ben.

“I’ve got to get back to Anamosa.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“Maybe. What do you want to do? If you stay here, the Peckerwoods might come back and pick you up.”

“No!” She grabbed my arm and stared at me. A fierce light burned in her eyes. “Get us out of here. Anywhere. I don’t care. Worthington, if they’re still holding out.”

“I can’t waste that much time. I’ve got to find Darla. And if you don’t want to wait for the Peckerwoods, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Why didn’t you shoot Clevis? It might have been a couple days before the Peckerwoods sent anyone out to check on him.”

My face grew hot. “I don’t know. I couldn’t.”

“He would have shot you without a second thought. Or done something even worse.”

“I’m not like him.”

The girl shook her head. “What planet are you from? And what’s your name, anyway?”