Ashfall Read online

  “My house is on fire.”

  “Where?”

  “Six blocks away.” I gave him my address.

  A guy only slightly smaller than the fire truck beside him said, “We’re not supposed to go out without telling dispatch—how we gonna get backup?”

  “Screw that, Tiny. Kid’s house is on fire. Load it up!”

  They all grabbed helmets and fire coats off hooks on the wall. In seconds, I was sandwiched between Tiny and another guy in the back of the cab. I could just see the firefighter at the wheel over the mound of equipment separating the two rows of seats. She flicked a switch overhead, starting the sirens blaring, then threw the truck into gear. It roared down the short driveway and narrowly missed a car that failed to stop.

  I glanced at Tiny once during the drive back to my house. His eyes were scrunched shut, and he was muttering some kind of prayer under his breath. The firefighter at the wheel laughed maniacally as she hurled the huge truck back and forth across the lanes, into oncoming traffic, and even halfway onto a sidewalk once. She swiveled in her seat to look at me, taking her eyes off the road completely. “Anyone else at home, kid?”

  “No,” I answered, hoping to keep the conversation short.

  “Any pets?”

  “No.”

  The ride couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, but it felt longer. Between the crazy driving and Tiny’s muttered prayer, I wished I’d run back home instead. The truck slammed to a stop in front of my house, and before I could get my stomach settled and even think about moving, the cab was empty. Both doors hung open. I groaned and slid toward the driver’s side. Everything hurt: both knees, my right shoulder, the muscles in my calves and thighs: my eyes stung, my throat felt raw and, to top it all off, my head had started to ache.

  Two huge steps led down from the cab. I stumbled on the first one and almost fell out of the truck backward. I caught myself on the grab bar mounted to the side of the truck. When I reached the ground, I kept one hand on the bar, holding myself upright.

  The house was wrecked. It looked like a giant fist had descended from the heavens, punching a round hole in the roof above my sister’s room and collapsing the front of the house. Flames shot into the sky above the hole and licked up the roof. Ugly brown smoke billowed out everywhere.

  Thank God my sister wasn’t home. If she’d been in her room, she’d be dead now. An hour ago I’d been looking forward to an entire weekend without her. Now I wanted nothing more than to see her again—soon, I hoped. Mom would burn rubber all the way back from my uncle’s place in Illinois as soon as she heard about the fire. It was only a two-hour drive. I gripped the bar on the fire truck more tightly and tried to swallow, but my mouth was parched.

  The firefighter wrestled a hose toward the front of the house. Tiny hunched over the hydrant across the street, using a huge wrench to connect another hose to it. Darren and Joe were standing in our next-door neighbor’s yard, so I stumbled over to them. From there I could see the side of my house. One of the firefighters opened the dining room window from the inside and smoke surged out.

  “You okay?” Darren asked.

  “Not really.” I collapsed into the cool grass and watched my house burn.

  “We should take you to the hospital.”

  “No, I’m okay. Can I borrow your cell? Mine’s in there. Melted, I guess.” I wanted, needed, to call Mom. To know she was on her way back and would soon be here taking care of things. Taking care of me.

  “Still no service on mine, sorry.”

  “Maybe it’s only our carrier,” Joe said. “I’ll see if anyone else has service.” He walked across the street toward a knot of people who’d gathered there, rubbernecking.

  I lay back in the grass and closed my eyes. Even from the neighbor’s yard, I felt the heat of the fire washing over my body in waves. I smelled smoke, too, but that might have been from my clothing.

  A few minutes later, I heard Joe’s voice again. “Nobody’s got cell service. Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T—all down. Nobody’s got power or landlines, either.”

  I opened my eyes. “I thought landlines weren’t supposed to go down. I mean, when our power’s out, the old house phone still works. Just not the cordless phones.”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But nobody’s telephones work.”

  “Huh.”

  “You know what happened to your house? Looks like something fell on the roof.”

  “I dunno. Power went out, and then wham, the whole house fell on me.”

  “Meteor, you think? Or a piece of an airplane, maybe?”

  “Would that make the power and phones go down?”

  “No . . . shouldn’t.”

  “And there are other fires. At least four, judging by the smoke.”

  Joe peered at the sky. “Yeah. Looks like they’re a ways off. In Waterloo, maybe.”

  I tried to sit up. The motion triggered a coughing spasm—dry, hacking coughs, every one of them setting off a sharp pain in my head. By the time my coughing fit passed, the headache was threatening to blow off the top of my head.

  “You want some water?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah,” I wheezed.

  “We should take you to the hospital,” Darren said again, as Joe trotted back across the street toward their house.

  I closed my eyes again, which helped the headache some. The water Joe brought me helped more. I chugged the first bottle and sipped the second. Joe left again—said he was going to find batteries for their radio. Darren stood beside me, and we watched the firefighters work.

  They’d strung two hoses through a window at the side of the house. All four of the firefighters were inside now, doing who-knew-what. The hoses twitched and jumped as water blasted through them. Pretty soon the flames shooting out the roof died down. I heard sizzling noises, and the smoke pouring out the windows turned from an angry brown to white as the fire surrendered.

  Two firefighters climbed out a window. One jogged to the truck and got two long, T-shaped metal pry-bars. The other guy walked over to me.

  “Are you okay? Having any trouble breathing?” he asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Good. Look, normally we’d call a paramedic and the Red Cross truck to get you some help, but we can’t even raise dispatch. You got anyone you can stay with?”

  “He can stay with us,” Darren said. “Till we can get hold of his family, anyway.”

  “That okay with you, kid?”

  “Yeah, fine.” I’d have preferred to see Mom’s minivan roaring up the street, but Joe and Darren were okay. They’d lived across the street from us forever.

  “The fire’s pretty much dead. We’re going to aerate some walls and do a little salvage work. Make sure you stay out of the house—it’s not stable.”

  “Okay. What started it?”

  “I don’t know. Dispatch will send an investigator out when we reach them.”

  “Thanks.” I wished he knew more about what was happening, but it didn’t seem polite to say so.

  “Come on,” Darren said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  I struggled to my feet and plodded across the street alongside Darren. The sun had gone down; there was a hint of orange in the west, but otherwise the sky was a gloomy gray. No lights had come on. About halfway across Darren’s yard, I stopped and stared at the white steam still spewing from my partly collapsed home. I put my hands on my knees and looked at the grass. A numb exhaustion had seeped into every pore of my body, turning my muscles liquid, attacking my bones with random aches. I felt like I’d been sparring with a guy twice my size for an hour.

  Darren rested his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be all right, Alex. The phones will probably be back up tomorrow, and we’ll get your folks and the insurance company on the line. A year from now, the house will be as good as new, and you’ll be cracking jokes about this.”

  I nodded wearily and straightened up, Darren’s hand still a comfortable weight on my shoulder.
/>   Then the explosions started.

  Chapter 3

  The sound hit me physically, like an unexpected gust of wind trying to throw me off my feet. Two windows in the house next door bowed inward under the pressure and shattered. Darren stumbled from the force, and I caught him with my left hand.

  I used to watch lightning storms with my sister. We’d see the lightning and start counting: one Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . If we got to five, the lightning was a mile away. Ten, two miles. This noise was like when we’d see the lightning, count one—and wham, the thunder would roll over us-the kind of thunder that would make my sister run inside screaming.

  But unlike thunder, this didn’t stop. It went on and on, machine-gun style, as if Zeus had loaded his bolts into an M60 with an inexhaustible ammo crate. But there was no lightning, only thunder. I glanced around. The firefighters were running for their truck and the knot of rubberneckers had scattered. The sky was clear. I could barely make out a couple of columns of smoke in the distance, but those had been there for more than an hour. Nothing obvious was wrong except for the godawful noise.

  My hands were clamped over my ears. I had no memory of putting them there. The ground thumped against the soles of my sneakers. Darren grabbed my elbow, and we ran for his front door.

  Inside, the noise was only slightly less horrendous. The oak floor in Darren’s entryway trembled under my feet. A fine waterfall of white plaster dust rained from a crack in the ceiling. Joe ran up carrying two stereo headsets and a roll of toilet paper. A third headset was clamped over his ears. He pantomimed tearing off bits of toilet paper and stuffing them in his ears. Quick thinking, that. Joe was definitely the brains of the couple.

  I jammed a wad of toilet paper into each ear and slapped a headset on. The thunderous noise faded to an almost tolerable roar. But I heard a new sound: my ears ringing, like that annoying high-pitched whine a defibrillator makes when a patient is flatlining on TV.

  We probably looked silly, standing there with the black cords dangling from the headsets, but nobody was laughing. I shouted at Joe, “Should we go to the basement?” But I couldn’t even hear myself talking over the noise.

  Joe’s lips moved, but I had no idea what he was saying. Darren was shouting something, too, but the noise of the explosions drowned out all of us. Joe grabbed me and Darren and towed us toward the back of the house. We ran through their master bedroom—it was the fanciest bedroom I’d ever seen, but with the auditory assault we were enduring, I wasn’t about to stop and gawk.

  The master bathroom was equally impressive, at least what I could see of it by the dim light filtering in from the bedroom. Pink marble floor, huge Jacuzzi tub, walk-in shower, bidet—the works. But best of all, it was an interior room, placed right in the center of the first floor. So it was quiet, sort of. When Joe closed the door, the noise diminished appreciably. Of course, that plunged us into total darkness. Joe reopened the door long enough to dig a D-cell Maglite from under one of the sinks.

  I held my hands out at my sides and screamed, “Now what?” but I don’t think they could hear me. I couldn’t hear myself.

  Joe yelled something and pointed the flashlight at the tub. Darren and I didn’t respond, so after a moment Joe stepped into the tub, knelt, and covered the back of his neck with his hands.

  That made sense. The tub itself was plastic, but it was set into a heavy marble platform. If the house fell, it might protect us. Maybe we’d be better off outside, in the open, but the explosive noise was barely tolerable even now, in an interior room. Joe stood up, and I stepped into the tub beside him.

  Joe shined the flashlight on Darren’s face. It was red and he was shouting—I saw his mouth working, but his eyes were wide and unfocused. His arms windmilled in wild gestures. Joe stepped out of the tub and hugged him, almost getting clocked by one of his fists in the process. Darren tried to pull away, but Joe held tighter, stroking Darren’s back with one hand, trying to calm him.

  The beam from the flashlight lurched around the room as Joe moved, giving the whole scene a surreal, herky-jerky quality. He coaxed Darren into the tub, and all three of us knelt. It was a big Jacuzzi, maybe twice the size of the shower/tub combo I was used to, but we were still packed tightly in there. I put my head down on my knees and laced my fingers over the back of my neck. Someone’s elbow was digging into my side.

  Then, we waited. Waited for the noise to end. Waited for the house to fall on our heads. Waited for something, anything, to change.

  My thoughts roiled. What was causing the horrendous noise? Would Joe’s house collapse like mine had? For that matter, what had hit my house? I couldn’t answer any of the questions, but that didn’t keep me from returning to them over and over again, like poking a sore tooth with my tongue.

  I wasn’t a religious guy. Mom was into that stuff, but I had won that fight two years ago. Except for Christmas and Easter, I hadn’t been inside St. John’s Lutheran since my confirmation. Before then, I had gone pretty much every Sunday, sometimes voluntarily.

  When I was eleven or twelve, we had this real old guy as a Sunday school teacher. Mom said he’d been in some war: Iraq, Vietnam . . . I forget. Anyway, almost every class he’d say, “There are no atheists in foxholes, kids.” At the time, it was just weird. What did we know about either atheists or foxholes? Nothing. But I sort of understood it now.

  So I prayed. Nobody could hear me over the noise—I couldn’t even hear myself—but I guess it didn’t matter. It was probably better that Joe and Darren couldn’t hear me, because it didn’t come out too well. “Dear God, please keep my little sister safe. I don’t know what these explosions are, but don’t let them hurt my family. They’re probably in Warren, but I guess you know for sure. I swear I’ll do whatever the hell you want. Go to St. John’s every Sunday, try to be nice to my mother, whatever. Do what you want to me. Just please keep Rebecca, Mom, and Dad—” Thinking about my family got me crying. I hoped prayer counted without the amen and all at the end. I was pretty sure it did.

  I don’t know how long I knelt at the bottom of that tub. Long enough for my tears to dry and my neck to cramp.

  I stretched out, kicking someone. Joe lifted the flashlight, and by its light we rearranged ourselves so we were lying in the tub instead of kneeling. We were still packed in there way too tightly. Someone’s knee dug into my thigh. I tried to rearrange myself but just got an elbow in my shoulder instead.

  Then we waited some more. Two hours? Three? I had no way of knowing. The noise didn’t abate at all. What could make a noise that loud for that long? Thinking about it made me feel small and very, very scared. The smell of fear filled my nostrils—a rancid combination of smoke and stale sweat. The flashlight started to dim, and Joe shut it off—to save the batteries, I figured.

  Sometime later, someone kicked me in the chest. Then I felt a shoe on top of my hand and jerked it away quickly to avoid getting stepped on. Joe snapped on the flashlight. Darren was standing up, feeling for the edge of the tub. He stepped out gingerly. Joe shrugged and followed him.

  I got out of the tub, too. The sweaty plaster dust from my house had dried on my arms and face, making me itch. I twisted the handle on one of the sinks. The water came on, which surprised me. Nothing else was working; why should that have been any different? I washed my arms and face as best I could in the darkness. I realized I was thirsty again and gulped water from my cupped hands.

  While I was cleaning up, Joe had left the room. Darren was sitting on the edge of the tub, staring at his hands folded in his lap. Now Joe returned, carrying an armload of pillows, blankets, and comforters. He spread a comforter in the bottom of the Jacuzzi, added a pillow and a folded blanket, and gestured with the Maglite for me to get back in. I pulled off my filthy sneakers.

  I climbed into the Jacuzzi and lay down, fully dressed. I felt bad about dirtying their comforter with my nasty clothes, but who knew what might happen later. If something else bizarre went down and I had to run, I sure didn’t want
to do it butt naked. I lay on my left side in the Jacuzzi, one pillow under my head, the other clamped on top over the headphones and the toilet paper. The headphones dug into my temples, but that was a minor annoyance. I could still hear both the explosions outside and the ringing in my ears.

  It’s hard to fall asleep when Zeus is machine-gunning thunder at you. It’s hard to stay awake after an evening spent surviving a house fire. It took a couple more hours, but eventually sleep won, and I drifted off despite the ungodly noise and vibration. Everything would be better tomorrow. I thought: a new day, a new dawn would have to be better than this.

  I was wrong. There was no dawn the next day.

  Chapter 4

  I woke up and groaned. Everything hurt. My back ached from lying curled in the tub. My right shoulder had frozen up overnight. The muscles in my legs and bruises on my knees screamed with pain. My head throbbed, and my mouth tasted of ash and fungus. I rolled onto my back, throwing the pillow off the top of my head.

  Losing the pillow was like turning up the volume on the radio four notches—if the radio happened to be playing a thrash band with five drummers. That damn noise. It was still every bit as loud as it had been the night before. I checked the toilet paper in my ears, making sure it was still securely jammed in. The headset had dislodged when I rolled over, so I put it back on, which helped a little.

  I had no idea what time it was, but I felt like I’d slept for six, maybe eight hours. So the explosions, thunder, or whatever they were had gone on at least that long? What could make a noise like that? Everything I could think of—bombs, thunder, sonic booms—would have ended hours ago. It was warm in the bathroom, but my hands and feet still felt cold and numb. I stayed in the bottom of the tub for a while, trembling and trying to get my breathing under control.

  But lying around in the bottom of a Jacuzzi wasn’t going to answer any of my questions. I pushed myself out of the tub and fumbled in the darkness for my shoes. Putting on shoes one-handed in darkness so complete that I couldn’t see the laces or my hands was a bit of a trick. I gave up on tying them—my right arm wouldn’t cooperate with the left. I jammed the laces down into the shoes so I wouldn’t trip.