Ashen Winter Read online

  “How far is it to Worthington?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. We’re near Bellevue. It’s about thirty miles from Worthington to Dubuque, but I think Bellevue is farther. Maybe forty or forty-five miles?”

  “That’s going to take forever if we have to walk through deep snow. And I’m already famished.”

  “Let’s see what the roads are like. If they’re bad, maybe I can improvise some snowshoes.”

  We’d walked along the creek until we reached a railroad trestle that passed about twenty feet above the ice. Beyond that, I saw the concrete pylons and steel girders of a highway bridge.

  We walked under the railroad trestle and turned to fight our way up the bank between the two bridges. The bank wasn’t steep, but the snow was so deep that it was difficult to force our way upward. For every step we managed, we slid back a half step.

  Finally we got to the top, only to confront an enormous berm of plowed snow alongside the road. I led the way up the berm, thrusting my hands into the snow to make tenuous grips and kicking footholds into the side of the pile. The snow here was a filthy blend of volcanic ash and ice plowed off the road.

  We hid near the top of the berm, watching the road for more than an hour. Nothing moved. There was no sound but the chattering of our teeth. I was worried about patrols, but it would take too long to get to Worthington traveling cross-country.

  I got down the far side of the berm to the road by sliding on my butt. We were on a two-lane plowed highway.

  “You think all the roads are this good?” I said.

  “I hope so.” Darla stood and dusted the snow off herself. “We’ll make good time on this. Maybe get to Worthington in two, two-and-a-half days. Before we starve, anyway.”

  “I guess there is one advantage to FEMA being in Iowa now.” Last year none of the roads on this side of the river had been plowed.

  “That’s the only good those ass-puppets do.”

  “Yeah.” I looked up and down the highway. “Which way?”

  “Right. North. Worthington is northwest of us somewhere.”

  “Won’t that take us closer to the lock and Black Lake?”

  “Yeah. We’ll turn west as soon as we can.”

  We made great time on the packed snow of the road. We didn’t talk—I was listening for engine noises and continually glancing behind us. I hoped there wouldn’t be any Black Lake trucks, but if any trucks did come, I wanted time to try to get away, although that might be impossible—the piles of snow and ash alongside the road were so high that we were essentially trapped.

  We got off the highway onto a back road at the first opportunity. Darla led us through a dizzying succession of turns, heading north and west, she said. The roads were all deserted, which was a relief but also a bit puzzling. Why bother plowing roads nobody was going to use?

  We passed six or seven farmsteads. All of them were clearly abandoned. About half the houses had burned. “Why do you think so many houses are burned?” I asked.

  “Probably people took shelter in them and lit fires in places they shouldn’t have,” she replied. “You build a wood fire in a hearth that’s only designed for a gas log, you’ll burn the house down quick-like.”

  As twilight set in, we stopped at a farmstead. It consisted of two cylindrical concrete grain silos and a one-story farmhouse. There were three hillocks of snow that might have been collapsed barns or sheds—I couldn’t tell. The front door and door trim of the farmhouse were missing—a drift of snow more than two feet deep graced the entryway. It was too dark inside to see much, but what I could see wasn’t pretty. The house had been thoroughly looted—furniture, doors, door trim, baseboards, and cabinets were all missing, probably burned as firewood. The mantle around the living room fireplace was gone, leaving an ugly hole in the wall, but there was a tiled area around the fireplace where we could safely build a fire. A big sooty stain proved we weren’t the first people to build a fire there, although there were no other signs of past occupants.

  Darla started setting up the fire-by-friction set while I looked for wood. Everything burnable inside the house was gone. There were a bunch of trees outside, but all the lower limbs and smaller trees had been cut. I picked out the smallest of the remaining trees and started the long process of felling it with my hatchet—a job that really required a chainsaw or at least a full-size ax.

  It was almost an hour later and fully dark by the time I returned to the living room with an armload of wood. I could barely make out Darla’s form hunched over a tiny, glowing spark.

  “This is so cool—this black dust the set makes will keep a spark alive, like forever. We’ve got to find some way to store this stuff.”

  “Sorry I took so long. Had to cut a tree down to get at the branches.”

  “It’s okay. Make me a bird’s nest, would you?”

  It was so dark, I could barely see anything. I stripped the bark from a couple of branches, working by feel. I took off my gloves to make it easier to shred the bark, and soon my hands were freezing. Darla stayed hunched over her spark, feeding it with black powder from the fire-by-friction set and fanning it gently with her knife blade.

  “I think this thing is ready,” I said, holding the bird’s nest out to Darla.

  “Just hold it next to the spark.” Darla cut the spark in two with her knife and lifted half of it into the bird’s nest.

  I slowly lifted the bird’s nest to my lips. I whispered to it, “Burn, baby, burn,” letting the gentle breath of my whisper fan the spark. Darla was feeding the other half of the spark more black powder, building it up in case mine died.

  A strand of bark flared orange, looking like the filament in an old incandescent lightbulb. A tiny flame followed, and in seconds the whole bird’s nest was engulfed in fire. I laid it down in the middle of the tiled area. It threw off just enough light that I could find pieces of kindling to feed it.

  Darla abandoned the rest of the spark and helped me feed the fire. I offered to get more wood, but it was so dark out that I wasn’t sure I could find the tree I’d felled again. I took a flaming stick out of the fire, hoping to use it as a torch. It went out before I even reached the front doorway.

  I bent low, using the faint glow of the embers still clinging to my stick to follow my footprints back to the tree. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to the house, but the glow of the fire was clearly visible through the open maw left by the missing front door.

  That aroused a new worry: What if someone came by? It would be obvious from the light that we were camping in the abandoned house. But we hadn’t seen anyone on the roads all day, and it would be even harder to travel by night.

  I broke more small branches and carried them back to the house. “We’re going to need some bigger logs to keep the fire going all night,” Darla said as I dropped the wood.

  “I can’t see well enough to use the hatchet,” I replied.

  “Hmm.” Darla gathered up several long, slender branches, arranging them in a bunch. She thrust one end into the fire. When she pulled it out, the tip of the bundle was engulfed in a steady flame that survived movement, unlike the single branch I’d used. “Come on. I’ll hold the light for you.”

  With Darla clutching her makeshift torch and me chopping, we got enough wood to last the night. By the time we finished, I was hungry and thirsty. I’d been hungry all day—there was nothing I could do about that. But the thirst I could deal with. “I’m going to get some snow,” I said.

  I didn’t bother taking a torch. Snow was easy to find—it was everywhere. I molded two cantaloupe-sized snowballs and carried them inside. Darla took one, broke off a piece, and put it in her mouth to melt. “Just when I get warm, I’ve got to eat this damn snow,” she said.

  “Beats going without water.”

  “I guess. Let me see the hatchet.”

  I passed the hatchet to her. She wandered around the bare living room for a minute, staring at the ceiling and floor and holding the hatchet by her s
ide. Just as I was getting ready to ask her what in the world she was doing, she gripped the hatchet firmly in two hands and buried it with a thunk in the floor.

  She swung the hatchet like a madwoman, chopping at the floor. Tufts of ash-filled, mildewed carpet flew everywhere. Darla was quickly coated in ash and dirt. She looked like a chimney sweep turned ax murderer: completely insane.

  Chapter 24

  “What are you doing?” I yelled.

  “I am sick . . .” The hatchet thunked back into the carpet. “Of eating . . .” A chunk of wood from the subfloor flew up. “Snow!” Darla slammed the hatchet back into the floor.

  “Take it easy. How’s killing the floor going to help?”

  Darla didn’t answer, just kept destroying the floor. I saw wood joists and a rectangular metal heating duct through the ragged hole she’d opened. Darla turned her attention to the heating duct, slamming the hatchet into it with a clang and screech of tearing metal.

  I heard another noise when Darla hit the duct, an almost musical tinkling, kind of like a bottle rolling on the sidewalk. It seemed to be coming from the far side of the room beneath one of the windows. I followed the path of the duct with my eye—it led straight to a grate in the floor.

  I stepped over to the grate, giving Darla and the wildly swinging hatchet a wide berth. She was still whaling on the ductwork, trying to cut it or rip it up out of the floor. Had the cold and hunger tipped her over the edge?

  I couldn’t see what was holding the grate in place, so I got my fingernails under its edges and pulled it up. It came free fairly easily. The duct behind it jerked and shivered as Darla whacked the other end of it. I clearly heard something rolling around. I reached down into the duct and withdrew a half-full bottle of Canadian Mist.

  “Hey,” I yelled, “check this out.”

  “Just a sec.” Darla was totally focused on butchering the heating duct. A big chunk of it came free with a metallic shriek. She set aside the chunk of metal and let the arm holding the hatchet fall. “That was in the duct?”

  “Yeah, someone must have hidden it down there. You think we should drink it?”

  “I dunno. Alcohol has calories. Maybe it would help.”

  I unscrewed the cap and sniffed the bottle. Even the smell of alcohol made my empty stomach turn and clench. “I’d probably barf.”

  “Yeah. Let me finish, and then we’ll put that whisky to good use.” Darla started hacking at the piece of ductwork with the hatchet and knife. The sheet metal was thin and soft enough that our knife would cut it—although Darla was straining at it, holding the duct in one hand and sawing the knife back and forth with the other.

  I groaned, thinking about what she was doing to the edge of the knife. We didn’t have a sharpening stone. But saying anything was useless—getting between Darla and a project was as futile as standing on a railroad track hoping to stop a train with an upraised palm.

  So I watched while Darla shaped the sheet metal into a rough, square pan. Each corner had a triangular fold, and the top was sharp and ragged, but it looked like it would hold water. “Tada,” she said. “No more eating snow.”

  “That’s great. But will the hatchet still cut wood?”

  Darla picked it up and looked at the edge. Even by firelight, the nicks and dull spots were obvious. “We’ll look for a stone to sharpen it on tomorrow.”

  I shrugged and loaded the balls of snow into the pan. Darla set the pan at the edge of the fire. Then she plucked the bottle of whisky from the floor.

  Darla sniffed the whisky and wrinkled her nose. She lifted the bottle to her lips and took a huge swig.

  “Ugh, that’s disgusting,” she said, coughing as she passed the bottle to me.

  Disgusting or not, I couldn’t let Darla show me up. I raised the bottle to my mouth and knocked back as much as I could swallow at one gulp. It was horrid—a smell like paint thinner and a sharp taste so strong it burned my throat. I bent double, gasping and coughing, trying to clear the alcohol sear from my nostrils. Once that passed, though, it tasted kind of good for a few seconds, sort of like smoke from a campfire. But the pleasant taste passed, too, and then I was left with nothing but the chemical aftertaste of the cheap whisky.

  “Maybe this stuff does have calories, but I don’t think I want to drink any more,” I said.

  “Me, either,” Darla replied. “Maybe we can find some real food tomorrow. Save the rest of the alcohol to use as an antiseptic.”

  “Makes sense. Let me see your hand.” I gently stripped off the makeshift bandage from Darla’s palm. The wound looked better—a little puffy and swollen, but there were no red streaks, and it didn’t smell bad. I washed it as best I could with whisky, then rebandaged it, using more cloth torn from my undershirt.

  “Your turn.” Darla took the whisky bottle and went to work on my side. It looked a lot better, the red streaks had mostly faded, and it didn’t smell like roadkill anymore. By the time Darla finished washing and bandaging me, we’d torn up more than half my T-shirt. All that remained were the shoulders, neck, and a ragged fringe of cloth hanging partway down my chest.

  “If you keep using my clothes for bandages at this rate, I’ll be naked in a few days,” I said.

  Darla laughed. “Fine by me. I’ll enjoy the naked boyfriend show. Might be a bit cold for you, though.” She pulled the makeshift pan away from the fire. All the snow had melted.

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll wait until we get somewhere warmer before I let you rip all my clothing to rags.”

  “Deal.”

  We waited a bit for the pan to cool, then carefully sipped warm water from its sharp edges. “We’ve got six bags of wheat. Maybe we should cook one?”

  “We don’t need to,” Darla said. “We should make it to Worthington the day after tomorrow.”

  “Better to keep up our strength. How do you cook wheat, anyway?”

  Darla shrugged. “Boil it like corn? I don’t know.”

  I refilled the pan with snow. When that melted, I dumped a bag of wheat in. While I waited for that to boil, I whittled flat spots on a couple of sticks—improvised spoons.

  I had no idea how long to cook it. After about fifteen minutes of boiling, I scooped out a few kernels with my stick. They were so hard that they were difficult to chew, and they had an unpleasant, hairy texture.

  “How is it?” Darla asked.

  “Not good.”

  She frowned. “Let’s get some sleep. Figure it out in the morning.”

  I pulled the pan off the fire and started getting ready for bed. We hadn’t had any Cipro yet that day, so I split a tablet and handed half of it to Darla. She choked it down with a grimace.

  The floor beside the fire was hard, but we were so tired it didn’t matter. I wrapped Darla up in a hug and kissed her goodnight. We slept like that, our limbs entangled, warmed by each other and the comfort of our hard-won fire.

  Chapter 25

  The next morning I tried the wheat again. The pan was warm from sitting by the fire all night. Soaking overnight had transformed the kernels—they were soft and delicious. Darla and I quickly ate them all.

  When we’d finished breakfast, I packed the makeshift pan, the bottle of whisky, and the remaining bags of wheat under my coat. I cinched the drawstring around my waist extra-tight so everything would stay put. Darla carried the fire-by-friction set under her jacket, the bow sticking out at her collar. We looked lumpy and awkward, strange aliens trudging across the snowscape. The pan rubbed uncomfortably as I moved, its edges digging into my chest through the coveralls and overshirt.

  The countryside reinforced my feeling of strangeness. Last year, more than half of the Iowa farmsteads had been occupied. Many of the unoccupied ones had collapsed under the weight of the ash and snow, but very few had burned. Now all of them were abandoned and more than half had burned. Often all that marked a former farm was a grain silo and some charred rubble. Where had all the people gone?

  A faint stench of charcoal, melted plastic, and sulfur fol
lowed us along the road. The burnt-out buildings made the countryside seem more desolate. The only break in the solitude came late that morning. We heard an engine in the distance and rushed to the side of the road, thinking we’d hide. But the noise faded, and we never saw the vehicle that made it.

  Iowa had been a vibrant place just ten months ago. Even on the back roads, you could always see signs of civilization, of people. Now . . . nothing. What kind of life could Darla and I hope for in this desolation? I took her hand and held it for a while as we walked.

  I was hungry despite the half-pan of boiled wheat I’d eaten that morning. The hunger made us tired. Our steps slowed as the day wore on, and we barely talked.

  About an hour before nightfall, we passed a whole series of burnt houses. All that remained were a few scarred and blackened brick walls and chimneys. We trudged up a slight rise. At the top perched a dark-blue, cylindrical water tower overlooking the town. CASCADE, it read in huge white block letters. Below the town’s name, someone had spray-painted a crude drawing of a woodpecker in garish red and neon blue. The woodpecker stood on its hind feet, wings thrust into the air some twenty feet above his head. Fat red boxing gloves capped each of the woodpecker’s upraised wings.

  “Excellent,” Darla said. “Cascade is only ten miles from Worthington. But what is that drawing on the water tower?”

  “Woody Woodpecker,” I said.

  “Woody what?”

  “You know. The cartoon.” I tried to make the Woody Woodpecker sound, but it didn’t come out too well.

  She looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

  “You’ve never heard of Woody Woodpecker?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Country people.” I shook my head in mock seriousness. “They lack cultural awareness.”

  Darla slugged my shoulder. “Well, if that’s a woodpecker, it’s got a huge evolutionary advantage.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s so ugly, trees will die at the sight of it.”

  “Yeah, it is ugly. I wonder why someone bothered painting it up there. Must have taken a lot of spray paint to make it that big.”