Ashen Winter Read online

  “You want to know where we got that shotgun. You going to kill me after I tell you?”

  “What? No.”

  “You’re just going to let me go. Tell me another one, kid. How do they do it here? Hanging? Or a bullet in the brain?”

  “Neither. You’ve just got to move on and never come back.”

  “Huh.” Ed folded his arms and closed his eyes.

  “Where’d that shotgun come from?”

  Ed was silent.

  I leaned forward and breathed out heavily, staring at him. I had to convince him to trust me, at least a little. “You hungry?”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t gonna feed me. Nobody’s got enough food to waste it on half-dead strangers.”

  “Wait here.”

  He laughed a wheezy, halfhearted cackle. “I can’t even sit up by myself.”

  He had a point. I returned to the room Darla and I shared. She was still loudly asleep. I dug through our supplies, pulling out packages of food. I thought about what would impress Ed, but while we had plenty of food, there wasn’t much variety. I settled on a sandwich—two cornmeal pancakes for the bread with a slice of ham and a slab of goat cheese for the filling. Ice crystals shattered off the ham as I cut it, and the slice was hard as a board. We had no way to keep it warm. The cheese crumbled. As a finishing touch I peeled an icy kale leaf off the stack and added that to the sandwich.

  Ed was staring at the door when I returned to his room. I put the sandwich in his hands.

  “That’s . . . for me?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied, “Don’t eat too fast. You’ll barf.”

  “I know.”

  I sat him up, propped against the wall. He took a bite, chewing slowly. He held the sandwich in front of him as he ate, staring at it like a kid with a new iPhone on Christmas morning. Well, like a kid would have stared at an iPhone before the volcano. Now that kid would just toss the useless chunk of metal and glass aside and look for the good stuff: food, clothing, matches, or weapons.

  I refilled his water cup.

  Ed set the water beside him and said, “So this is corn, lettuce—”

  “Kale,” I said.

  “Kale, okay. Cheese and a slab of?”

  “Ham.” I was quiet for a while as Ed ate. “Why’d your buddy leave you in that house, anyway?”

  “I was slowing him down. I think he was going to put me out of my misery, but I got him to leave me there the same way I got you to back off. Pure D bluff. Told him I had one bullet left for the MAC-10. He didn’t want to find out the hard way whether I was telling the truth or not.”

  “Took balls—so what did you do before the eruption?”

  “Before the eruption?”

  “Yeah, like, I went to high school. Cedar Falls High.”

  “I . . .” Ed lifted the sandwich, staring at it, not eating it. “Mandy used to love ham sandwiches.”

  “Mandy?”

  “I haven’t thought about her in months. She was my life—how could I forget?”

  “What about—”

  “I guess you just go along, don’t you—”

  “I don’t—”

  “Every day you do what it takes to survive. And every day what you’re willing to do gets a little worse. Until you’re—Jesus, we were shooting kids.”

  I tried to break in to ask about the shotgun again, but his voice dropped to a whisper and he kept talking. “Dear God, what have I done? What have I become?”

  He buried his face in his hands and started crying huge, racking sobs that traveled in lurching waves down his belly. I was afraid he’d tear his wounds open, he was crying so hard. Tears leaked from between his fingers. I watched him, torn between disgust and an irrational desire to comfort the bandit who had attacked our farm, who would have killed Max and kidnapped Rebecca and Anna if he could have.

  It took a while for Ed’s sobbing to subside to sniffles. “I was a bookkeeper,” he said at last. “I ran Peachtree for a machine shop in Ely. What happened to us? What happened to me?”

  “What did happen to you?” I must have let some of the scorn I felt color my voice. He pulled his hands from his face and stared at me with an expression of such naked torment that I forgot to ask him again about the shotgun.

  “It started with Ralph,” Ed said. “He was our dog. We were starving to death, Mandy and me.”

  “I need—”

  “Then a couple weeks later Mandy died anyway. Flu bug or maybe just the diarrhea. I should have just lain down to die next to her instead of burying her. A lot of people did, you know? I’d find them all over Ely, frozen together in their beds. The guys I ran with later laughed at them. But they did the right thing—instead of doing something just a little worse every day, all in the name of survival, shaving yourself away until the last sliver of who you were is gone.”

  I raised my voice, trying to break in. “Would you let me—”

  “I still dream about him. Ralph. He was a good dog.” Ed looked at me, his eyes stripped of color by the low light and his tears. “They say you are what you eat, you know? Sometimes in my dreams I’m Ralph, my tail thumping the floor, just happy to see Ed come home. Sometimes in my dreams I’m a pile of bones. Endless bones, burnt and cracked, feeding a greasy fire.” He turned his head and started crying again, softly this time.

  I watched him cry for a moment. “I need to know where that shotgun came from,” I said for the eight millionth time.

  “How did I—”

  “Goddamn it, Ed! Tell me where my parents are!” Without thinking about it I’d taken a step toward him and raised my fists to my chin, planting my feet at a forty-five-degree angle: a fighting stance.

  “I want to stay. In Warren. Rejoin civilization. And I want a pardon.”

  “No freaking way am I letting a guy who tried to kidnap my sister and cousin stay within a hundred miles of Warren. The mayor was ready to throw you out while you were unconscious. Dr. McCarthy saved your ass. You tell me about that shotgun, and I’ll try to convince them to let you stay until you’re healthy enough to leave. Then you’ll get the hell out. In fact, you’ll get out of the whole state of Illinois.”

  “I’m not saying anything then.”

  “I could beat it out of you.” I raised my fists again.

  “Go ahead,” Ed’s voice sounded hollow. “I don’t want to rejoin the gang, and if I leave on my own, I’m dead anyway. You may as well beat me to death. Wouldn’t take much right now.”

  Ed’s eyes were brimming with tears again. I let out the breath I’d been holding, and with it my whole body deflated. I couldn’t beat on a defenseless man, no matter what he’d done. “You have to buy your way into Warren,” I said. “They aren’t taking just anybody—they don’t have enough food to do that. You’ve got to bring skills or supplies they need. You’ve got nothing to offer—the only thing Warren needs even less than bookkeepers are lawyers.”

  “So you buy me a spot. Or convince your mayor to give me one.”

  “They don’t want a bandit hanging around.”

  “That’s your problem—if you still want to know about that shotgun.”

  Gah! It was frustrating to admit it to myself, but he was right—he was half-dead, but he still had the upper hand. And I didn’t want to argue with him all night. I reached into my coat pocket and extracted an envelope. “There are 200 kale seeds in here. More than enough to buy you admission to Warren—if you can buy it at all. I’m not going to hang around here and try to convince the mayor and sheriff that you’re an okay guy. I’m not even sure you are. So here’s the deal—you tell me everything you know, and I give you the seeds. Trading them for admission to Warren is your problem, not mine.”

  “How do I know the seeds are any good?”

  “Goddammit—!”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll take it.”

  I handed him the envelope. “Talk.”

  “Danny, he—”

  “Who’s Danny? You said the gun was Bill’s.”

  “Dan
ny’s the leader of the gang I run with. Ran with, I mean. The Peckerwoods. Bill’s just the guy Danny gave the shotgun to.”

  “Peckerwood? Isn’t that some kind of insult?”

  “Yeah, I guess. It’s also the name of a racist gang in Anamosa, in the state prison. I mean, I was never there, but that’s where the leaders were when the volcano blew. Anyway, it started to get hard to find weapons and ammo. So Danny made a deal with some guards at one of the FEMA camps in Iowa. He got all kinds of weapons from them. Ammo, too. Most of the guns weren’t military stuff, so I figure they were confiscated from refugees.”

  “So maybe my dad is at that FEMA camp? Where is it?”

  “Might be, yeah. It’s outside Maquoketa.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “About halfway between Dubuque and the Quad Cities.”

  That made it somewhere southwest of Warren. I wasn’t sure exactly. “So Danny was trading for the guns? What was he trading?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Drugs, maybe. We had all the good stuff. Antibiotics, painkillers, aspirin. Danny had a source in Iowa City, but he never took me along when he cut deals.” A pained look passed over Ed’s face, and he moved his right hand to his side.

  “What else do you know?”

  “Nothing. That’s it. I swear.”

  I shook my head. Two hundred more kale seeds gone. And for what?

  Chapter 11

  When Darla woke, we packed Bikezilla, said goodbye to Dr. McCarthy, and headed for my uncle’s farm. We’d only been gone two days, but even so, the farm looked different. Rebecca and Uncle Paul were out front nailing boards over a window. Most of the ground-floor windows were already boarded over.

  As we made the turn into the driveway, Max came out the front door, leading a string of four goats by a rope. I grinned and waved, thrilled to see him up and about. He waved back before continuing to the barn.

  “Didn’t expect to see you back so soon,” Uncle Paul called as we pulled up.

  “Didn’t expect to be back,” Darla said.

  “Had to do a U-turn at Stockton,” I said as I hugged him.

  “Come into the kitchen,” Uncle Paul said. “We’ve got fresh cornbread.”

  We sat around the kitchen table for a while catching up. Darla went out to Bikezilla and got our maps. She put the Iowa and Illinois maps on the table next to each other, and I traced a line from Warren to Maquoketa with my finger.

  “So the biggest trick will be crossing the Mississippi River?” I said. “Looks like there are bridges in Dubuque or Savanna.”

  “It won’t be a big deal,” Darla said. “That river that flows through the park behind the farm is frozen solid. We can ride Bikezilla across the Mississippi anywhere.”

  Uncle Paul was shaking his head. “No way. That’s Apple River. It freezes almost every year, but the Mississippi never freezes over in Iowa.”

  “It’s never been below freezing for nine straight months either,” Darla retorted.

  “We could cross at the lock near Bellevue, like last year. It wasn’t too hard to climb down onto the barge stuck in the lock and back up the other side.” It hadn’t been fun—I don’t like heights—but I figured I could do it again.

  “I’m telling you, it’s not an issue. Look at these lakes.” Darla pointed at a spot on the Mississippi just north of my finger. “I’ll bet there’s a bunch of boat ramps there—we can ride right down onto the lakes and across the river, which will be frozen over—and into Iowa.”

  “Falling through the ice on a river is no joke.” Uncle Paul sounded concerned. “You can get swept downstream under the ice—”

  “The Mississippi is frozen so solid you could drive a semi on it.” Darla said mildly. “I’d bet my farm on it.”

  “We’re not talking about betting farms—we’re talking about betting your life—and Alex’s. This isn’t—”

  “My farm was my life,” Darla said.

  “Guys, take it easy,” I said. “We can go to the lock to cross.”

  “That’s where you found the barge full of wheat last year?” Uncle Paul asked. “Stuck in the lock?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We could sure use some wheat,” Uncle Paul said. “We’ve got to get some greenhouses going with something other than kale. A northern strain of wheat could work.”

  “I thought you couldn’t plant just any old seeds,” I said. “Didn’t you tell me that’s why we can’t plant any of the corn we’ve been digging out of the ash and snow?”

  “Corn hybridizes easily,” Darla said. “Everything I planted at my farm was a sterile hybrid, kind of like mules are. Wheat’s self-pollinating, so it’s really hard to hybridize. Well, you can but—”

  “Um,” I had to interrupt Darla before she really got going. She’d babble on and on about hybro-pollinizing stuff until I got even more confused. “So what’s all that mean?”

  “Corn won’t grow from seeds we dig up here. But if we get wheat kernels off that barge, they’ll probably sprout.”

  “Yep,” Uncle Paul said. “I was hoping you could stop at the barge and pick up some wheat. It could make a big difference—we’re going to run out of stored corn, and we need some kind of grain.”

  “That a-hole at the FEMA camp near Galena, Captain Jameson, said Black Lake had a contract to guard the barges,” Darla said. “Either the wheat’s all gone by now, or those barges will be crawling with idiots in camouflage. They’re not just going to let us ride up and help ourselves, you know.”

  “The lock is pretty much on the way, though,” I said.

  Uncle Paul fixed a stare on Darla. “Bringing back even a few pounds of wheat kernels would be a godsend if you can manage it. Might make the difference between surviving and starving if the winter weather doesn’t break. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t worth the risk.”

  “We’ll take a look.” I glanced at Darla. “Okay?”

  Her lips tightened, but she didn’t say anything, which I took as enthusiastic agreement. Right. So we spent some time mapping out a path to the lock that avoided Stockton and the FEMA camp near Galena.

  “When do you plan to leave?” Uncle Paul asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said.

  “You sure you’re up to it?” Darla took hold of my wrist. “Maybe we should wait and make sure your infection is under control.”

  “An infected wound is no joke,” Uncle Paul said. “Kill you if you don’t take care of it.”

  “No.” I pulled my wrist free. “I want to get moving.”

  “How are you planning to break your parents out of the camp, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I don’t want to wait.”

  “Be nice to have a bolt cutter and hacksaw for the camp fence,” Darla said.

  “Take them out of my shop,” Uncle Paul replied. “I’ll try to buy replacements in Warren.”

  We spent the rest of the day helping to fortify the house. Uncle Paul, Aunt Caroline, and Anna worked on boarding up windows. Max slept most of the day—his head was healing okay, but the wound had left him weak. Darla, Rebecca, and I built and installed pairs of brackets on the inside of all three exterior doors. Then we cut heavy logs to fit into the brackets, barring the doors from the inside.

  It felt a little futile to me. Ed had started out as a normal guy, a bookkeeper. Would we all wind up like him; slowly forgetting our humanity in the daily struggle to survive? And when the world filled with people like Ed—bandits, murderers, rapists, arsonists—what good would a few bars on the doors do?

  Chapter 12

  By bedtime I was exhausted and sore. Everyone else started to bed down on the living room floor, but Darla grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the stairs. “It’s freezing up there,” I complained.

  “I’ll make sure you’re warm enough,” Darla whispered, grinning at me.

  My resistance evaporated. I’m sure Uncle Paul and Aunt Caroline noticed us leaving, but they didn’t say anything. Before we’d started all sleepi
ng in the same room for warmth in April, Darla and I had shared the guest room. At first my aunt and uncle had balked, but when they discovered we were sneaking out of our separate rooms every night anyway, they relented.

  We got extra blankets and comforters out of the linen closet and heaped them on Max’s old bed. I took off my boots, coat, and coveralls. Even with three layers of shirts still on, I was freezing. I turned down the oil lamp to its lowest setting, and we dove under the covers, pulling them up over our heads.

  Darla pushed her back up against me, spooning for warmth. I wrapped my right arm over her and cupped my hand over her left breast. She moved my hand down to her stomach and held it there—which sort of sucked—but holding hands was nice.

  “I don’t know how to say this right.” Darla hesitated. “But you do realize that your parents might already be dead?”

  I swallowed hard on the first reply that occurred to me: She was probably right.

  She went on, “If they are dead, we’re taking a big risk going into Iowa looking for them. We could get killed or trapped in another FEMA camp for nothing.”

  “Yeah.” I fell silent for a moment. “But I’ve gotta know for sure.”

  “We might not be able to find out.”

  “What, you don’t want to go? You volunteered—I didn’t ask you. It’s not like I’m dragging you.”

  “That’s not it. You’re not going anywhere without me, doof.”

  I squeezed my arm around her, hugging her tighter.

  “All I was trying to say, trying to do, was to keep your expectations real. We might find them, sure. But they might be dead, or we might never even find out where they are or what happened to them.”

  “Never finding out what happened to them—that might suck worse than finding out they’re dead.”

  “Yeah, it might.” Darla let go of my hand and started stroking my arm, which seemed strange at first but was somehow comforting.

  We lay together in silence. Talking about my parents hadn’t been particularly arousing, but now, with her hair brushing my face, her hands on my arms, and her body stretched out against mine, pressing into, well, everything, I started to get uncomfortably cramped. So I began softly nibbling on her neck.