Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

Darla shrugged. We repacked all our gear and then laid the guy on his stomach over Bikezilla’s load bed. Darla tied him down, leaving his arms and legs overhanging the sides.

We mounted Bikezilla and started pedaling south along Route 78. Less than ten minutes of travel brought us to a T in the road. We passed three metal sign supports that barely protruded from the snow, but someone had sawn the signs off them. I wasn’t sure why anyone would bother to vandalize the signs-maybe they didn’t want strangers to find Stockton. “Which way?” I asked Darla.

Darla looked over her shoulder at me. “Right, I think. This should be Highway 20. It’ll take us straight into Stockton.”

We rounded the corner and passed a burned-out building on our left. The sign in front read GALENA STATE BANK amp; TRUST. We raced on past a whole series of burnt buildings, but none of the rest of them had signs.

Peering around Darla, I saw something surreal. A few hundred yards ahead of us, a line of cars stood upright, resting on their front bumpers with their trunks in the air. They formed a wall that stretched as far as I could see to the left and curved away from us to the right. Where U.S. 20 passed through the car-wall someone had built a heavy timber gate across the road. Almost before I’d processed what I was seeing, church bells began ringing furiously. A line of men popped into view one by one, their heads and shoulders above the low log gate.

Every one of them was pointing a rifle at us.

Darla must have seen the rifles, too, because she slammed on the brakes. I got off the bike and stepped up beside her.

“I doubt if any of them can hit us from this far off,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “How about if I walk up there with my hands up and try to talk to them, and you turn Bikezilla around so that if they start shooting, we can ride out of here in a hurry.”

Darla paused. “Okay.” She pulled me close for a kiss. “I’ll get out the binoculars and keep a lookout. If I yell, run back as fast as you can. And be careful.”

“I will.” I held up my hands with my palms open and started trudging down the road toward the guns.

The wind was in my face, blowing bits of ice that stung my skin. I had to squint, making everything look indistinct.

As I got closer, I could see the car-wall better. It was bizarre-made up of every conceivable make and model of automobile: from huge pickup trucks and SUVs to Priuses and mini Coopers. Their front bumpers were planted on the ground, hidden by the snow. The rear bumpers rose in the air at various heights, so that the arrangement looked like a monstrous row of multicolored teeth gnawing up from the ground. Each car touched its neighbor on both sides, forming an impassable wall. I couldn’t tell what held them upright.

I got to within about a hundred feet of the gate and yelled, “Hello! Is this Stockton?”

Someone yelled back, “We’re closed.”

“You got a doctor here?”

“Yep. She’s closed, too.”

“I can trade.”

“Trade what?”

“Guns, seeds, food. .”

A lean man wearing a chocolate-brown coat and overalls set his rifle aside, climbed over the log gate, and started walking toward me. I noticed he was walking to one side of the road, carefully staying out of his buddies’ line of fire. I briefly toyed with the idea of sidestepping to put him between me and the guns, but there was no point-he could easily sidestep, also.

He stopped about ten feet from me. “Who’re you?”

“Alex Halprin.”

“From?”

“Warren.”

“No y’aint. Warren only sends four guys here to trade, and I know ’em all.”

“I live on Paul Halprin’s farm, near Warren.”

“Don’t know him. Said you got guns to trade? Any ammo?”

“No, just the guns. A MAC-10, maybe a pistol, too.”

“Don’t need ’em. Got plenty of guns, not enough ammo.”

“What about seeds? I’ve got good, cold-weather kale seeds. Stuff’s full of vitamin C.”

The guy turned his head and spat sideways. “Like the last guy who sold us seeds? Claimed they were turnip seeds.”

“Didn’t sprout?”

“They sprouted all right. Grew spurry weed. Useless.”

“This is kale. Same stuff Warren trades. It cures scurvy.”

“Maybe. Maybe you’re the King of England, too. Don’t rightly know. What’re you trying to trade for, anyway?”

“Medical care. The guy on the back of our bike’s been shot. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Best you put him out of his misery and give him a proper burial, then.” The guy shrugged. “Best hide the spot you bury him, too, ’less you want a flenser gang to dig him up.”

Whatever a flenser gang was, I didn’t think telling him that the guy was probably already in one would help my case at all.

“So what would it take to buy medical care for this guy?” I asked.

“How ’bout two hog carcasses?”

“I’ve got some pork, but not that much.”

“I hear they got plenty up in Warren.”

“Yeah, thousands. But they’re not mine.”

The guy spat again in the snow. “You’re no use to me, then. So either go back where you came from or skirt around Stockton out of rifle range. You come within shooting range, we prolly won’t waste a bullet on you, but you never know.” He turned and strode back toward the gate.

I ground my foot into the snowy road. I knew they’d give me anything I wanted for a packet of kale seeds if I could prove they were good. I stomped back down the road to Darla.

“No luck?” she asked.

“Nope. They don’t believe the kale seeds are real. I can’t think of any way to prove it to them other than germinating a few, and by the time we do that, our bandit will be dead.”

“Well, we can take him to Doc McCarthy in Warren. It looks like about twelve miles on the map. Take us an hour and a half, maybe two.”

“Let’s do that.” I mounted Bikezilla’s rear seat. “By the way, you know what a flenser gang is?”

“I’ve heard rumors. You don’t want to know.”

“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Okay. A flensing knife is used to strip skin or fat from an animal, originally a whale.”

“So a flenser gang. .?”

“Well, if the rumors are true, it’s a gang that’s surviving by roaming around and butchering animals to eat.”

“But almost all the wild animals around here died from the ash after the volcano-they got silicosis.”

“Flensers butcher the animals that ventured outside but survived-the ones that were smart enough to cover their mouths and avoid breathing the ash.”

I was silent for a moment, listening to the harsh noise made by the cold air rasping in and out of my lungs. “So we might have a cannibal strapped to the back of the bike?”

“Yeah.”

“Great,” I said in a voice as grim as my mood. “Let’s go.”

An hour and a half later we were back in Warren. It was aggravating that more than halfway through the first day of our journey we were barely more than five miles from where we’d started.

Warren, unlike Stockton, had no wall. They hadn’t had much problem with bandits so far, probably because Warren is a pimple on nowhere’s butt, while Stockton sits astride Highway 20, which connects Dubuque and Galena with Chicago.

When we stopped at the clinic, Darla worked on untying our cannibal from the load bed while I squatted by his head, checking to see if he was still alive. When Darla rolled him over, he started thrashing and mumbling crazy stuff, which I figured counted as a sign of life.

We carried him inside. The waiting room was cold and dark, but light streamed from one of the exam rooms down the hall. When we’d first arrived in Warren last year, the doctor’s office had always been packed with people suffering from scurvy. Now, with the steady supply of kale from our farm, we’d often find the place deserted.