Ashfall

As we got closer, I could see them better. A woman plodded toward us through the deep snow. She was bent almost double, straining against a rope looped around her waist. The rope led to a toboggan. There was a suitcase at the front—a big black one with wheels on it, the type that people used to drag through airports. Three kids sat behind it.

The two kids near the front of the toboggan were tiny, maybe two and four years old. They were bundled up tightly in hats, gloves, and warm-looking snowsuits. A larger girl, maybe six or seven, rode at the back. She had on a good snowsuit, too, but no hat and only one glove. Her head lolled to one side, long blonde hair whipped by the wind. Her gloveless right hand dragged in the snow beside the toboggan.

I didn’t think the woman had seen us. She was making a heroic effort to move up the hill in snow that deep, let alone pull a sled loaded with kids. Darla was fifty or sixty feet from them when the woman finally looked up.

She screamed—a wordless yell of surprise and fear.

Darla kept skiing toward her as slowly as the hill allowed.

“Stay away from me!” the woman yelled. She turned away from the crown of the road, pulling the toboggan toward the ditch. Somehow she managed a burst of speed. “They’re my babies! Mine! You can’t have them!”

The snow had drifted deep in the ditch. The woman fell into it, floundering in snow over her head. The toboggan tilted and came to rest at a steep angle, halfway in the ditch. The girl at the back of the toboggan toppled sideways.

I expected to hear crying, but it was eerily silent. The woman thrashed in the snow, trying to right herself. The two little kids stared as Darla and I approached, their eyes shining with fear. The older girl still hadn’t moved.

Darla got to where the woman had left the center of the road. She kept going, skiing past the woman and her children.

I looked at the toboggan. I couldn’t see the older girl’s face, only her pink snowsuit and a lock of her hair, brilliant yellow against the stark white snow.

I turned toward the ditch. My skis instantly caught in the fresh powder, and I fell in a ten-point face-plant. When I dug my way out of the snow, two women were screaming at me.

Darla: “What are you doing, Alex? Christ!”

The woman: “Get away. Get away, devil man!”

I ignored them both, of course. Nobody ever claimed I was smart. I reached down, unclipped my skis, and forced my way through the snow toward the girl in pink. I called out in the softest, calmest voice I could muster, “I won’t hurt you. I want to help.”

Darla had snowplowed to a stop twenty or thirty feet on down the hill and was sidestepping laboriously back toward me. The woman yanked on the rope, pulling her toboggan close. It slid smoothly out from under the girl, leaving her sprawled alone in the snow.

The girl’s face was porcelain white, her lips pale blue. I put my fingers against her mouth. She was breathing, but unconscious. Her ungloved hand felt hard and cold. The tips of her fingers were black.

The woman had been digging through her suitcase. I saw a flash, a glint of light on metal. She’d pulled out a meat cleaver. She waved it frantically, slashing the air above the two little kids’ heads. She was still yelling, variations on the theme of demon from Hell, leave my children alone.

“I won’t hurt her,” I said. “I want to help. She needs help.” I picked up the little snow-suited body in my arms. She weighed nothing. I looked around—there were scraggly looking stands of leafless trees on either side of the road. No evergreens or anything else that looked like easy shelter.

Darla huffed up to me, out of breath from sidestepping fast. “This is crazy, Alex. Warren. Your family. If we try to help everybody who’s suffering, we’ll never get close.”

“I don’t want to help everyone. I want to help this little girl.”

Darla looked away.

“Can we build a shelter in those trees? We need a place to warm her up and spend the night.”

Darla sighed. “I saw a car down the hill a ways. It might work.” She picked up my skis and poles, bundling them with her own poles. She turned and slid back down the hill.

I looked at the crazy woman. She was holding the cleaver above her head. Her other arm was wrapped protectively over the other two kids. She’d quit yelling, but now she was growling—a low, gravelly noise that would have made a pit bull cower.

I backed up a few steps and then turned to follow Darla. Trudging through the deep snow was hard work. Darla quickly got fifty or sixty feet ahead of me.

The girl’s right arm flopped away from her body. The dull black of her frostbitten fingertips looked u

Darla had stopped by a large rectangular hump in the snow. By the time I caught up, she’d dug a trench about two feet deep along one of the short sides of the hump.

“How can I help?” I said.

“Try to keep that girl warm. And keep an eye on Crazy Mommy over there.”

I looked back the way I’d come. The crazy lady hadn’t moved; she was still hovering over her other two kids in the ditch. I couldn’t see the cleaver.

I unzipped my coat completely. The little girl hadn’t moved or even made a sound, but tiny puffs of frosty air emerged from her lips. I hugged her to my chest and tried to zip up my coat around both of us; it wouldn’t fit, so I had to settle for holding it around her.

Darla was digging in the ash layer by then. She used the front of a ski, stabbing it into the ash and scraping it out of the hole. I remembered the ash as being mostly white, but against the snow it looked dirty gray.

A bit of the vehicle emerged as Darla continued her assault on the ash. First, a strip of maroon paint—part of the car’s roof, maybe. Then, as she dug deeper, she exposed a section of black-tinted auto glass. It was vertical, so I figured she was digging out the back end of a van or SUV.

It was going to take forever. She’d barely cleared a two-square-foot section of one back window. Getting the whole back end of the vehicle unburied might take hours, and even then, wouldn’t it be locked?

“Done,” Darla said. I looked questioningly at her. She smiled and said, “Here goes nothing.” She took a spear grip on one of the skis and rammed the butt end through the window. The glass shattered into a thousand tiny pebbles that rained into the interior of the vehicle. Darla scraped the ski along the edges of the hole, clearing away the remnants of the window. Then she slid through it, feet first. I heard her voice, muffled by the car, “It’s good. Pass the girl in.”

I crouched in the hole and handed the girl to her. “I’ll try to warm her up,” Darla said. “Get some wood. We need a fire.”

“Okay.” I passed our skis, poles, and packs through to her and then slogged toward the scraggly copse near the road.

Every tree was dead—their few remaining lower branches snapped off easily. That was a relief, since any fallen wood was buried under deep snow. But would anything grow again in the spring? Would there even be a spring?

I crawled through the broken window with an armload of firewood. Inside there was a shadowy space, maybe six feet square, between the window and the first bench seat. The ceiling was low; I couldn’t stand, only crouch. Darla and the girl lay against the back of the seat, wrapped in both our blankets. Darla’s backpack was beside her on the floor; Jack peeked out the top.

I built a small fire on the floor to one side of the entry hole. The fire gave off an acrid, chemical reek at first. I figured the fire was burning the carpet. Some of the plastic door trim melted, too. Most of the fumes rose through the hole in the window, so it wasn’t too hard to breathe, so long as I kept my head low.