Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

Dad’s face was twisted by some kind of sick, almost gleeful rage. “Oh, we lost your finger,” he cooed to Shawn. “I know where we can get nine more.” He lifted the knife and stepped behind Shawn.

As he seized Shawn’s broken ring finger, Shawn blubbered, “No. Stop. . The DWBs, we have a deal with some of the guards.”

“A deal?” Dad asked.

“They let us in and out.”

“In return for what?”

“We bring them supplies. Drugs, booze, food. Let them do the girls sometimes.”

“What happens to the people you take?”

“Flense most of them. We keep some of the girls to trade.”

I thought of Darla. If she was still alive, she was in the hands of a gang like this one. I stumbled out of the tent and vomited.

Through the wall of the tent, I heard Dad saying, “Which guards work with you?”

Shawn gave him about a dozen names. Then he asked in a tremulous voice, “You going to flense me now?”

“I haven’t decided,” Dad replied. The tent flap rustled, and he strode past me.

I hurried to catch up and grabbed his arm. “What the hell was that?”

“That’s the world we live in now.”

I swung him to face me. “No. You’re blaming the world for choices you made.”

Dad tried to pull away. “That’s just the way things are now.”

There was a wet, choking sound behind me and a thump. “What was that?”

“Jones. Taking care of the flenser .” He said “flenser” like it was the vilest curse word ever invented.

Jones pushed through the tent flap, carrying the light in one hand and awkwardly dragging Shawn in the other. She was bent almost double, straining against his bulk. A trail of blood followed Shawn’s head. His throat had been cut. “What. .why?”

“They’re flensers,” Dad said flatly. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect those under my care from the likes of him. Whatever. I’ve got no apologies to make. Now let go of me, son.”

“What’re you going to do?” I asked.

“Take care of the rest of the flensers,” Dad replied. “Go help Jones with that offal.”

“So you kill the other three cannibals. What good does it do?”

“Three fewer flensers in the world.”

“And they send four other guys. Or forty. It gets us nothing.”

“So what? We let them go?”

Part of me wanted to say forget it, they deserved to die. To let Dad do whatever he wanted to the other three. I didn’t really care what happened to them. But I did care about Dad, about what he was becoming. Or had already become. “What if we let one of them go? Would they trade something for the other two?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said. “What do they have that we’d even want?”

“An end to the raids on the camp would be a good start.”

“We can’t trust the DWBs. And some other gang might start raiding, instead.”

“Yeah. You know, it’s not the gangs. It’s Black Lake. We need some way to stop them from letting gangs into the camp, period. Can we report them to someone? Call their HQ?”

“There’s no cell network anymore. Maybe a shortwave radio. I’ve heard that’s how Black Lake stays in touch with Washington.”

“Can you keep two of them hidden while we work out a trade?”

“Maybe,” Dad shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, we go with plan A and slit their filthy throats.”

The three live flensers were called Trey, Darrell, and Cody, who was the boss. We released Trey with a message: Bring a shortwave radio transceiver and an extra set of batteries to camp, and we’ll free Cody and Darrell. Continue raiding, or tell Black Lake we have captives, and we’ll slit the two guys’ throats without a second thought. For good measure, Dad retrieved the bloody, dirty pinkie stub and told Trey to take it along-to let his bosses know we were serious.

After releasing Trey, Dad went to help move our captives to new tents, and I returned to the tent I shared with Dad. I lay down but didn’t sleep. It was after dawn by then, and the tent flap let in a sliver of light. It let in a frigid breeze, too, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and tie it tighter. Instead I stared into the light while my thoughts churned my brain to mush.

I was still trying to sleep when Dad finally came in. “You’re awake,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He started to take off his boots. “Look, I-”

“You don’t owe me an explanation,” I said, staring through him toward the sliver of light now blocked by his body.

“I was just doing what I had to.”

“Bullshit. You cut off a guy’s finger and tried to make him eat it, Dad.”

He turned his back toward me. “Yeah,” he said quietly.

I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding.

“You remember what I did before the volcano,” Dad said.

“CAD/CAM drafting. So what?”

“I didn’t always do that. I’ve got a civil engineering degree. Got a great job right out of college. Just what I’d always wanted to do. Designing sewer systems might not sound like fun to most people, but I loved it. The flow dynamics, the treatment ponds-it all has to come together like the sections of symphony. Brown water comes in, and clean water comes out. There’s a beauty to it if you can see it.”

“You never talked about that.”

“No. I designed a huge job in El Mirage, outside Phoenix. Made a mistake calculating the load on a wall. Dropped a zero. Maybe the contractor should have caught it, but they didn’t. The cave-in buried three guys up to their necks. The other workers unburied them in less than an hour, but they still died. Crush syndrome.”

“I didn’t know.”

“After that, I didn’t have any passion for designing the systems anymore. The music of it was gone. I took a crappy job doing CAD/CAM renderings, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”

“I always thought that was what you wanted to do.”

“I guess it was what I wanted. After El Mirage, anyway.” Dad paused for a long time. He was sitting hunched in the front of the tent, facing away from me. “Those three guys who died. They had families. Wives and children. I was responsible. I could have prevented it. . ”

I didn’t know what to say. I waited out the silence.

“If I made a mistake doing the CAD/CAM drawings, the architect was responsible for catching it. I wasn’t in charge. But I didn’t. Make mistakes. My drawings were perfect-the best. I’ve turned down three promotions in the last ten years. I didn’t want the responsibility.

“When I got here, I helped your mom with the school. Taught math. But I wasn’t really into it-it was just easier to do what Janice wanted instead of arguing with her. But there was one student-Karen. Sixteen. Energetic. Brilliant. I was teaching her what little integral calculus I could remember.

“She told me she was worried. She’d heard rumors about girls disappearing. I shrugged off her concerns.” Dad lowered his head. “She hasn’t been seen in four months.

“Responsibility’s a cruel bitch. She comes for you whether you want it or not. And people are dying here, regardless of what I do, Alex.” He swiveled at the hips toward me, his face silhouetted-all sharp black angles against the tent opening. “But it’s still my job to protect them. If I had to cut off my own finger and eat it, I’d do that. Whatever it takes. Whatever.”

“Some things are beyond our control,” I said. “No matter what we do.” I sat up and hugged him. I still couldn’t reconcile the placid, benignly neglectful father I’d known with this mercurial maniac I had wrapped in my arms. The disaster had warped the landscape of our minds-perhaps even more than it had altered the physical landscape.