Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

Everyone looked at me as if I were crazy. Which was fair, I guessed. Then the man holding the rifle started laughing, too, and pretty soon everyone but Ben had joined in.

When the hilarity had died down, the man said, “You all are just crazy enough that I think I understand why you’re still alive.”

“Yeah,” I said. I pushed myself slowly upright, keeping both hands in view. Maybe this guy was laughing, but he still had a rifle pointed my way. I took a step closer to him and stretched my left hand out as if to shake. My right arm still wasn’t working too well.

He snicked on the safety and moved the rifle to his shoulder, pointed upward. His handshake was a little too vigorous for my liking-I could move my left arm, but it still hurt when he pumped it. “I’m Eli. My wife there’s Mary Sue, and that’s my son, Brand.” He was so dirty he left a smudge on my hand. Not that my own hands were any too clean.

“What’s wrong with him?” Brand said, looking at Ben.

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” Alyssa snapped as she stood up.

“He’s autistic,” I said.

“He doesn’t seem artistic,” Brand replied.

Alyssa wasn’t smiling. “Autistic. And he’s smarter than everyone else in this room put together.”

“Sorry,” Brand muttered.

Ben was ignoring us all, sketching something with his fingertip in the dust on the floor. More infantry tactics, maybe.

I still felt as if I were inching along the edge of a one-hundred-foot cliff. There were no guns pointed at us now, but they were still armed, and we weren’t. “Can I have my stuff back?” I asked Brand.

He looked at his father, who shook his head.

“You all weren’t planning on staying here, were ya?” Mary Sue said, the first words she’d uttered. Her voice brought to mind the sibilant whisper of a moving snake.

“We’re headed to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

“Huh, probably nothing there. Morley, Olin, and Mechanicsville’s all been ransacked. Not a living soul in any of ’em. No dead people, either, ’less you count bones already cracked and sucked dry of their marrow. We visited, hopin’ to trade.” Mary Sue stepped closer to us as she talked. Her teeth shone yellow in the firelight. Each tooth was outlined in blood.

“Worthington was fine a week ago,” I said. “Your gums are bleeding. You have scurvy?”

“Yeah. No fresh food. Girls got it worse.”

“Girls?” Alyssa said.

“Alba and Joy,” Mary Sue said. “They’re hidden. Safe.”

I rummaged through my pack. Eli readied his rifle, eyeing me suspiciously. I was running low on dandelion leaves, and the ones I had left were pretty badly wilted. As I pulled a bag out of my backpack, Eli aimed the rifle at me again and muttered, “Easy. .”

“It’s okay. I’m just getting dandelion leaves.” I handed the bag to Mary Sue. “They’re bitter, but they have vitamin C. That’s all I have left.”

She pulled a leaf out of the bag and bit it. “Fresh greens. Didn’t think I’d live to taste them again. Where’d you get them?” She whispered the question, as if she were asking where I’d learned the secret nature of God, not where I’d picked up some weeds.

“Worthington. They grow ’em in cold frames.”

“You got any seeds?” Eli lowered his rifle. “We could make cold frames out of some of our windows.”

“Yeah, that’s how they do it in Worthington. I don’t have any dandelion seeds, but I can do you one better. I’ve got kale seeds. Good winter variety. It can even come back from a freeze, if it isn’t too hard or too long. Four times as much vitamin C as dandelion.”

“And where’d that miracle come from?”

“Warren, Illinois. It’s home now, I guess. We grow kale in greenhouses.” I reached into my jacket and pulled open the bag in my pocket without taking it out. I didn’t want them to see how many packets of kale seeds I had. I slid out one envelope.

Eli accepted the envelope I offered him. “You came all the way from Illinois?”

“Yeah. Now can I have my weapons back?”

Eli nodded slowly. “Brand, give the man his gun and knife, then fetch your sisters from the cellar.” He set his rifle aside and fed the fire.

The girls were both younger than Brand. They reminded me of a bed of spring wildflowers I’d seen once after a flood. You could tell they were beautiful, even if they were beaten down and coated in filth.

Mary Sue carefully split the dandelion leaves into five portions. I noticed that Eli got less than the kids, and Mary Sue got barely any at all. While they ate, we traded stories. I told the saga of my trip from Illinois: how we’d found the shotgun, Blue Betsy, that had spurred this crazy trip to find my parents. Losing Bikezilla in the Mississippi. I choked on my words as I told them about Darla getting shot.

When I finished, Eli said, “Used to have a lot of trouble with the Peckerwoods ourselves. Had one visit from another gang, called ’emselves the Dirty White Boys. Haven’t seen either of them in almost two months-figured they’d run out of gas.”

“How’d you survive a visit from the Peckerwoods?”

“Same way we did when you came. Hid in the root cellar. Could hear ’em shouting and carousing upstairs. We keep everything important down there so we can hide at a moment’s notice. Speaking of which, we’d best post a lookout again. Alba, it’s your turn.”

“Yes, Papi,” she said in her little girl soprano as she hurried away.

“You’ve been down there two days? I checked the basement-I didn’t see any root cellar.”

“We moved the furnace to block the door. And yeah, we would have stayed down there ’til you left, but one of the dang pigs got out last night.”

“You keep pigs down there?”

“Can’t keep ’em up here, can we? Anyone comes, that’d give us away fer sure-plus we’d lose valuable food. Anyway, I figured the stupid thing would wake you up, so we came up loaded for bear and found you all hibernatin’.”

“How’d you keep the pigs quiet?”

“Well we didn’t, did we? Used to feed ‘em Nyquil, but we’re out.”

I glared at Alyssa.

“I already said I was sorry.”

I turned back to Eli. “You haven’t slaughtered the pigs for meat?”

“I’m saving a few. To breed. When things start to turn around.”

“What do you feed them?”

“Corn and soybeans. All the farms around here are abandoned-there’s more crops left under the snow and ash than we can dig up.”

I shook my head in amazement. Not only were they surviving, they were preparing for a posteruption future.

Eli was staring at me in a thoughtful way. He turned toward his wife, “Y’know, we could use more hands. ’Specially if we got to try farmin’ kale.”

“I’m not staying,” I said. “I’m going after Darla.”

“Going up against those gangs’ll get you killed in a hurry.”

I shrugged. Eli turned his gaze toward Alyssa.

“She can’t stay. Not on her ownsome,” Mary Sue hissed at him.

“I’m trying to get to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

“We just need to get the tire on our truck changed, and we’ll be on our way. You got a jack here?”

“Buried out in the shed, yeah. Might take days to dig it out, though.”

“Crap. I need to get moving.”

“Could probably rig something up, do the same work as a jack. Some levers and blocks, maybe.”

“Sounds good.”

“How’re you payin’ for the work?”

“Um, kale seeds?”

“That’s your rent money for staying here. What else you got?”

I thought for a moment. “There’re some crates in the back of the truck. We only opened two, but one of them had shotgun shells in it. You get the tire changed, and I’ll split the truck’s load fifty-fifty with you. Ammo’s worth a fortune if you can find someone to trade with.”