Ashfall

Darryl was getting close—too close. I took the staff in a two-handed grip, like a six-foot baseball bat, and started whirling it over my head. Master Parker would have scolded me if she’d seen my form—you’re supposed to step into each swing, so your body spins with the staff—but I’d like to see her do it right while wearing skis.

Darryl was either dumb, desperate, or both. He kept coming. The end of the staff was probably going a hundred miles an hour. If I hit him with it square, he wouldn’t get up—ever. One of the kids on the makeshift sled started crying.

I swung the staff into the piece of corrugated roofing I’d been hiding behind. Smack! The metal made an echoey, booming sound, like reverb on an electric guitar.

Darryl stopped.

“I don’t have any food,” I bellowed. “Leave me alone!”

“Darryl T. Jenkins, get your butt back here right this instant and help me search,” Mabel screeched.

I slid slowly backward on the skis and whirled the staff over my head again.

Darryl glared at me, a hateful stare. Then he slowly turned toward Mabel. I spun and pushed off, skiing as fast as I could to put some distance between us. When I looked back at the family, Darryl and Mabel were bickering as they searched the rubble. Both kids were crying.

Chapter 16

I followed U.S. 20 east. Last night I hadn’t noticed any sign of other people along the road. Today, I saw several sets of tracks: prints from boots, te

I couldn’t tell if there were more people on the road, or if the reduced ashfall was just covering their tracks more slowly. I hadn’t seen many houses along the backcountry roads, but there were none at all on U.S. 20. Clearly the prints weren’t being left by locals.

I hadn’t been skiing long when I topped a rise and saw a knot of five people ahead of me going east. They moved painfully slowly, pulling their feet out of the ash with effort, earning each step. Two of them dragged suitcases.

I thought about Darryl and decided I didn’t want to meet five adults who might share his attitude toward the contents of my pack. I skied about twenty feet back the way I’d come, enough to put the ridgeline between me and the group ahead. Then I turned off the road and took to the countryside, heading roughly southeast.

I worried a little about leaving Highway 20. My family always took 20 to get to Warren; I didn’t know any other route. I wished I had a map, but I hadn’t been able to find any in the wrecked filling station. Perhaps I could head east on some other road and then cut back to 20 when I got closer to Illinois. The day was dim, but brighter than any since the volcano’s eruption. Very little ash fell and no rain at all.

Lunch was part of a bottle of water, and I felt lucky to have that. At the rate it was disappearing, I wouldn’t even have water for lunch tomorrow.

I found it harder and harder to keep my skis moving, as though hunger were a companion riding behind me, weighing me down. I tried to think about something other than food—Laura, Spork, or my family—but my mind kept returning unbidden to waffles, DQ Blizzards, and the gyros at The Pita Pit.

About a year ago, Mom had brought a brochure for Action Against Hunger home from church. It was full of pictures—African kids with forlorn faces, swollen bellies, and skeletal limbs. St. John’s was pla

So for a couple of days, Mom nagged me about doing it. I was in my no-religion phase, as Mom called it, and didn’t really want to get sucked back into St. John’s, but eventually I relented and said fine, I’ll fast for two days. Then Mom was all, fasting for two days isn’t safe, blah, blah, blah, and I pointed out that it took the kids in the brochure a lot more than two days without food to get the potbellies and Skeletor arms. Anyway, we had a huge fight about it, the upshot of which was that I didn’t eat for two days. The first day my whole family fasted. The second, I just refused to eat and shrugged off Mom’s threat to have me hooked up to an IV.

Going without food for two days was hard. I probably couldn’t have done it if Mom hadn’t been nagging me about the IV and constantly offering me stuff to eat. But not eating when there’s a full refrigerator downstairs is a totally different experience than not eating because you have no food and no idea where your next meal will come from. Hunger of choice is a painful luxury; hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.

Early that afternoon, I was losing my battle to stop daydreaming about food when I saw a little flicker of light off to the right, just at the edge of visibility. It wasn’t lightning—too orange and too persistent. But it was something different, something that might take my mind off food for a bit, so I skied toward it.

As I got closer, I saw another farmstead. The barn and both outbuildings were down, squashed flat, but there were two metal grain silos standing. The house was mostly intact, but some kind of porch or addition had been crushed. The mangled ends of a few rafters protruded from the wreckage.

There had been a stand of trees around the house, perhaps planted as a windbreak. Most of the trees were down, and the few still standing looked like ghost trees, coated with light gray ash. A campfire flickered, visible through the branches of a huge fallen tree. I glimpsed a figure silhouetted by the firelight. I skied up to the fallen tree and peered through its limbs.

A guy was sitting on a log between me and the fire. He was a big guy, that’s about all I could tell with him backlit by the fire. He appeared to be alone. A haunch of meat was roasting over the fire. My mouth juiced up instantly at the smell. Sweet and fatty—pork, maybe.

I skied around the fallen tree to get a better look, moving as slowly and quietly as I could. When I cleared the edge of the brush, the guy looked straight at me and said, “You there. Want to give me a hand?”

I should have turned and skied out of there as fast as I could. This guy was big. NFL linebacker big. None of his clothing fit—his jeans missed the top of his boots by at least four inches, and the cuffs of his fla

I stood there staring awhile. My brain and my stomach were arguing. Something rang warning bells in my head—his undersized clothing, outsized body, or maybe the hand-ax. I knew I should turn and ski away, but the smell of that meat made my stomach rumble in anticipation. The guy said, “It’s okay, I just need a hand shaving. I’ll pay you with some meat.”

That tore it. I’d had nothing but a handful of candy to eat since yesterday. The aroma wafting off the meat was intoxicating. My stomach declared victory, and I slid the ski pole into my belt and skied slowly toward him, staff ready.

“You here alone?” he asked.

“Um . . .” I said, trying to decide whether to lie.

“Guess so. It’s okay. I only need someone to hold this mirror.”

As I got closer, I saw a couple more chunks of broken mirror lying flat in the ash. The back half of the guy’s head was covered in half-inch stubble. The front half was shaved bald. A few drops of blood had run down the side of his head from a nick.