Ashfall

The sun must have been setting. I couldn’t see it, hadn’t seen it since the eruption, but the western sky glowed a dull, angry red. There wasn’t enough light left to see much. Target could have been standing fifty feet off, and I’d have missed him in the gloom.

I returned to the kitchen and dug a candle out of a drawer. Darla sat where I’d left her, staring at her hands. The shotgun lay beside her on the floor. We didn’t have any shells for it, so I tossed it onto the upper bank of kitchen cabinets where it’d be hidden.

“We’ve got to hide,” I told Darla. “Hole up somewhere overnight.”

No response.

“Come on, Darla. Where’s the best place to hide? Just for tonight.”

Nothing.

Great, like I didn’t have enough problems, now Darla had gone catatonic on me. Not that I blamed her. Much. I wanted to curl up and give in to the tears finally welling behind my eyelids. But Target had said he would come back. I believed him.

I racked my brain, trying to think of someplace safe, hidden, and defendable . . . the hayloft in the barn where we’d gotten boards for the smokehouse. We’d only ripped up part of the floor. There was still plenty of room to hide. I suggested it to Darla.

She said nothing. She didn’t follow me when I left the kitchen, either. I had to go back and take her hand, leading her outside like a three-year-old. It took some coaxing to get Darla, still silent, into her skis. It might have been easier to walk the short distance to the barn, but I was so tired and sore I wasn’t confident I’d be able to pull my feet free once they’d sunk into the ash.

The aluminum ladder to the hayloft was still where I’d remembered it. We had to squeeze past Darla’s bicycle-powered corn-grinding machine, which gave me an idea. After I’d convinced Darla to climb the ladder, I returned to the machine. I disco

I made my way slowly up to the hayloft with one arm wrapped around the quern on my shoulder and one hand on the ladder. As soon as I could, I dropped the grindstone. It landed with an alarming thunk that shook the floor of the hayloft. I pulled up the ladder behind me and left it resting at the edge of the loft.

I checked the wound on my right side. Target’s punch had reopened a corner of it, but it was already starting to scab over. I’d live—if Target didn’t find me again.

It hurt to take off my boots. I shook out my right sock, and two pellets fell out. The right side of my ankle and foot were blotched with green-and-purple bruises where the edge of the shotgun blast had caught me, but it would heal.

I realized I’d forgotten the baseball bat, left it sitting on the floor in the kitchen. I was too tired to do anything about that now.

Darla sat on a hay bale, staring at her hands. I said goodnight and collapsed into a pile of loose hay.

Chapter 29

In my dreams, I was trapped again in my bedroom in Cedar Falls. The desk pressed down on my chest, suffocating me. The wall by my head was hot to the touch. And everything was smoky—my eyes burned with smoke, my nostrils swelled with its stench.

I woke, twitchy with remembered fear, but the smell of smoke hadn’t faded with my dream. If anything, it was stronger now. A lurid orange light shone into the loft from the room below. Darla was still asleep, curled into a fetal position, almost touching my back. I shook her awake and stalked as quietly as I could to the edge of the loft.

There were two separate fires blazing in the room below. Target was there, trying to ignite the workbench with a torch.

I picked up the grindstone. It had seemed impossibly heavy when I’d lugged it up the ladder. Now, charged with adrenaline, I could move it as if it were Styrofoam.

I shuffled sideways along the edge of the loft. One of the boards under my feet creaked—a groan that seemed loud enough to be heard in Worthington. I held my breath, watching Target. He didn’t look up.

I got into position more or less above him. He was wearing a big backpack, one of the old-school kind with an external frame. I stared down at the tattoo inked on the back of his head for a couple seconds, and then I dropped the grindstone, aiming for the center of the target.

There was a soft thunk. Target fell, catching his chin on the edge of the workbench. He landed on the barn floor on his side. The torch fell near his face. Even from ten feet above him, I could see the deep valley the rock had smashed into the back of his skull. He didn’t move, despite the flames licking his nose.

I didn’t feel much of anything. No gladiator’s thrill of victory. Not even relief. Just a numb horror at all the senseless death Target had left in his wake.

Flames were already spreading in the dry hay and shooting up the barn walls. I glanced around for Darla and found her standing at the edge of the loft, staring down at Target. I grabbed the aluminum ladder and threw it into place. Darla just looked at it.

“Hurry up! Go, go, go!” I screamed.

Darla climbed onto the ladder and started down, so slowly she might have been on the way to her own funeral, not trying to escape a burning barn. I jumped on behind her. I wanted to kick her in the head, her pace was so frustrating. Instead, I kept screaming at her. When we finally got down, I grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the barn.

I froze and stared in shock. Target had obviously started with the house. It was completely engulfed in flames. The fire at my house in Cedar Falls was a weenie roast in comparison.

I clenched my fists and screamed. All our food, our water bottles, tarps, clothing—everything was in that house. I thought about trying to save something by ru

I ran back into the barn. The heat and smoke seemed to suck all the oxygen from my lungs. I grabbed our skis, poles, and Mrs. Parker’s bö staff and ran outside, dumping them in a pile at Darla’s feet.

As I gasped cleaner air, I tried to think. There had to be a way to salvage something from this fiasco. Then it hit me: Target’s backpack. Surely he’d scavenged supplies from the house—supplies that might keep us alive.

I dove back into the barn. Target’s torch had started a fire by his face, but the backpack looked okay. I grabbed it and yanked. Nothing. The backpack wouldn’t budge. Target was on his side, his back toward me. One arm was under him, and the other one was flopped into the fire. The heat was so intense I could barely grab the backpack, let alone Target.

I tugged on the backpack, trying to drag Target away from the fire so I could get the pack off him. My feet slipped in the straw, and I screamed in frustration.

The hatchet on Target’s hip caught my eye. I yanked it out of his belt loop and hacked at the backpack straps. I missed once and buried the hatchet in his side, ironically in about the same spot where he’d gouged me three weeks before. Blood dripped from the hatchet’s blade. I chopped at the straps a couple more times before the backpack came free. I ran outside.

I dropped the backpack and hatchet and collapsed in the ash. Darla mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I rested my head in my hands and gulped fresher air. Darla mumbled again.

“What was that?”

“My rabbits . . .” she murmured.

Crap. I’d totally forgotten them. I struggled back to my feet and ran into the blazing barn.

It was impossible to breathe, hotter than the inside of an oven and full of smoke. I held my breath and stumbled into the rabbits’ room. Somehow I found the row of cages. I opened two, and got a rabbit under each arm. They were limp: dead or passed out from the smoke, I couldn’t guess.