Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

When, after a long while, we broke the embrace and laid down side-by-side on our bedrolls, neither of us slept. Instead we stared silently at the tiny sliver of light still peeking from the outside world into the darkness within our tent.

I found Ben in the breakfast line. “I need to talk to you,” I whispered.

“You are talking to me,” he replied in a normal voice.

“Talk about what?” Alyssa asked.

“Escaping,” I whispered back.

“Escaping is not a difficult problem,” Ben said. “There are vulnerabilities-”

“Ben,” Alyssa whispered urgently. Our neighbors in the line had turned almost in unison to stare at us. “Later. After breakfast.”

“The information is classified as need-to-know only?”

“Yes, only Alex needs to know.”

After breakfast, the three of us huddled behind a tent, out of the wind, while Ben explained his plan. The guards changed twice each night around midnight and four A.M. Ben had observed them congregating at the guard hut during their shift change-the perfect opportunity to escape at the other side of the camp. The only problem: How would we cross the fence?

A bolt cutter would be the obvious solution, but none of us had any idea where we’d get one of those. Ben’s other idea was to build a canvas sling about twenty feet long and two feet wide. The middle would be reinforced with a dozen layers of canvas. We’d toss it over the fence so that the reinforced part overlaid the razor wire. Then we’d tie both sides to the chain-link part of the fence and climb over via hand- and footholds sewn into the sling.

So we needed to dismantle a tent-one of the old types made of heavy-duty canvas. Dad was asleep so I went looking for Mom. I found her crouched in a tent feeding an older woman who was too sick to stand in the food line.

“You need any help?” I asked.

“Sure.” She handed me a bowl of boiled wheat. “See if Jane wants to eat anything.” She gestured at the other woman in the tent.

I took the bowl from her and crouched, shuffling deeper into the tent. “You think you can eat?” I said to Jane.

“Reckon’ so,” she replied in a low, rough voice. She started trying to push herself upright.

“Let me help you.” I put my hand behind her shoulders and lifted, jamming the bedding in behind her to keep her partly upright. I took a spoonful of gruel and held it to her lips.

“Mom,” I said, “I need a tent.”

“Your father snoring or something?” she replied.

“No, it’s not that. I need to. .” How was I going to explain this? I didn’t really want to lie to her, not that she’d believe me, anyway. “I need to make something out of one of the tents, a heavy canvas one.”

“Make what?”

“A sling. To throw across the fence.”

Mom swiveled toward me, slopping some of the gruel across the cheek of her patient. “You just got here! We’re finally back together, and you-”

“So come with me,” I said. “That’s why Darla and I came back to Iowa in the first place. To find you and bring you home to Uncle Paul’s. To Rebecca.”

“We’ll try to escape as soon as we know the girls here are safe, and we’ll go back to Uncle Paul’s together. Not gallivanting off after some-”

“Without Darla, I wouldn’t be here. Wouldn’t be alive. I’m going after her. With or without you.”

“You’re too young to-”

“I’m not a kid.”

“It’s hopeless-”

“It is not hopeless. I need a heavy canvas tent. And I’d like your help.”

“There are some things we just can’t do.”

“We decide what we can do. That’s the way it was before the volcano, and it’s still true.” I fought to keep my hand steady as I continued spooning gruel into Jane’s mouth. “Things are just a lot harder.”

“Things are different. We have to make hard choices now.”

“Which is exactly what I’m asking you to do. Make a hard choice. Help me go after Darla.”

“I. . I can’t.”

“You done?” I asked Jane.

She nodded.

“Me, too.” I left the tent without looking back.

I napped uneasily the rest of the day. Every time I woke up, I looked to where Dad slept alongside me, thinking about waking him and asking him to help me get a tent. Every time I waited, figuring I’d be better off if I asked him after he woke up on his own. I hoped he’d be more likely to say yes.

But when I got up for dinner, he was gone. I looked for him all evening but didn’t catch up to him until well after dark.

His answer was the same as my mother’s. Maybe she’d gotten to him first. They didn’t have any canvas tents to spare, didn’t want to try to escape yet, and weren’t going to go looking for Darla even if or when they did escape. We argued for what felt like at least an hour, but our positions were calcified. Any pair of statues facing off in a public park might have made more progress than we did.

Our argument ended suddenly when a distant scream pierced the air. No sooner had we started running toward it than two more screams, in different places, shattered the stillness of the night.

We glanced at each other. “Go wake up the day shift!” Dad ordered.

“Right.” I reversed course, sprinting for the tents where the prefects slept. By the time I got back with reinforcements, the whole camp was in an uproar. A flood of refugees was pouring into the center of the camp, fleeing the crescendoing screams and chaos. Dad was yelling to be heard over the noise, dispatching teams of prefects to search for whatever or whoever was causing the ruckus.

Dad grouped me with two others, Jones and Altemeier, and told us to sweep the perimeter of the camp along the fence. We set off at a run.

By the time we got to the fence, it seemed like the commotion had mostly moved deeper inside the camp. I scanned constantly back and forth as we ran, hyperalert for any movement.

As we passed the gate, I saw four Black Lake guys, double the usual contingent, leaning against the guard shack outside the fence. “Why don’t you do something?” I yelled. They laughed, and one of them pantomimed shooting me. I turned away, and we ran on.

A few hundred yards farther on, we heard a child screaming. Following the noise, we found a little girl, maybe four or five years old, sitting in the snow between two of the tents, screaming, “Mommyyyyy! Mommyyyyy! Mommyyyyy!” She paused just long enough between each scream to breathe.

We quickly scouted the adjacent tents. Nobody was there. I scooped up the girl in my arms, which only made her scream louder. “I’ll run her to the middle of camp, then catch up to you,” I yelled. Jones nodded, and she and Altemeier took off along the fence line.

I headed toward the center of the camp, slowing to a jog to conserve my strength. I had to detour once, to avoid a chaotic melee between three black-clad biker-types and five or six prefects. I would have been worse than useless in the middle of a fight with a squirming little girl in my arms.

It took more than ten minutes to find Mom in the chaos at the center of camp. She was organizing refugees who weren’t part of the prefect system into groups she designated runners or fighters. I guessed she was organizing for an attack, but I didn’t stop to ask her. Instead I thrust the little girl into her startled arms and took off again.

I couldn’t find Jones or Altemeier. I looked for a few minutes before I came across another fight. A group of three flensers armed with knives were fighting with a much larger cluster of refugees. I ran toward them, but by the time I arrived, the invaders had broken off, running toward the gate. Nobody chased them-two of the refugees involved in the fight had been stabbed and were bleeding badly. I stopped to help.