Ashfall

Late that afternoon, when I started looking for shelter, we were skiing through one of the wooded areas. I carefully watched the forest on either side for almost an hour, looking for a large pine broken near its base.

I found a tree that might work and yelled for Darla to stop. It was one of the biggest pines I’d seen here, with a trunk almost two feet in diameter. It had broken six or seven feet off the ground. Behind the stump there was a huge hump that looked like a snowdrift extending for sixty or seventy feet. I figured that had been the rest of the tree, now submerged in ash and snow.

Using my hands, I dug a small tu

I yelled out, “Come on in. It’s nice in here.”

Darla crawled through the hole and glanced around in the meager light. “Great idea. It even smells good.”

“Yeah, I spent one night under a tree like this a few days after I left Cedar Falls. It was okay. It might be a bit cold, but we’d probably better not light a fire in here. Too many dead pine needles.”

“It’ll be warm enough with two of us.”

We built a small fire in the snow outside and cooked corn pone. We used all of our cornmeal except for a few handfuls Darla saved for Jack. We wound up with enough pancakes for two more meals, maybe three if we rationed them.

After di

We lay there a long time. I couldn’t sleep, and I could tell from her breathing that she wasn’t sleeping either.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “about giving away most of our food, I mean.”

Darla rolled over. I couldn’t see her, but I felt her lips press against mine. We kissed—a long, wet smooch. “It was dumb.”

“I wouldn’t have survived if nobody had helped me. Mrs. Barslow, your mom . . . Anyway, you could have stopped me. It was your food, not mine.”

“It was our food. And I said it was dumb, not wrong.” She kissed me again. “I know I’ve been bitchy today—”

“No, you’ve—”

“I’m scared.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

“It’s just . . . when I was on the farm, I knew we’d be okay. I knew where to get food. I knew where I’d sleep at night. Mom was . . . well, I knew I could get help. Now who knows where we’ll get anything to eat. Who knows what crazy crap we’ll run into tomorrow.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you, Darla. I promise.” Even as I said it, I knew it was stupid. All kinds of bad stuff could happen that would be totally out of my control. Still, it felt right.

We kissed again. I planted little kisses on the corner of her mouth, her cheek, along the line of her neck. When I kissed her ear, she giggled and pulled away. “That tickles.”

“The first time I saw you, I thought you were a fu

Darla kissed me again. When we broke the kiss, she whispered, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” The words tumbled from my lips without thought. I realized I was only giving voice to what I’d felt for a long while: I’d been in love from almost the moment we’d met.

“Do you think we’ll live through this?”

“We will.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. There was no way she could have seen the gesture, but we were pressed so tightly together, I was sure she felt it. “I believe we will.”

“I believe it, too.”

We fumbled with each other’s shirts. I felt the slick fabric of her bra pressed against my chest. Her fingertips traced the scar at my side, bumping over the ridges her stitches had left in my flesh. When her hand grabbed the tongue of my belt, I stopped her.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s um . . . I don’t think we should—”

“You’re not ready? Isn’t that the girl’s line?”

“Um, no, I want to—I want you. But what if you get pregnant?”

Darla let my belt slide out of her hand. “I du

“We will.” I tried to sound confident, but I wasn’t totally convinced, either.

She wrapped her arms around me, and we held each other in the quiet darkness for a while.

“So, have you ever done it?” she asked.

I was glad for the darkness then; it hid my blush. “No. I only had one real girlfriend. Selene Carter. We, uh, messed around some, kind of like you and I are now.”

“That’s a pretty name, Selene. Is she still in Cedar Rapids?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. We broke up last spring.”

“She didn’t want to?”

“I du

“I would . . . I mean, I feel like I’m ready, with you, anyway. But you’re right; it would suck to get pregnant. Maybe we could find some condoms or something.”

“Yeah.” Condoms instantly shot to the number-one position on my mental list of must-find survival supplies—far ahead of food, water, and a way across the Mississippi.

Darla was quiet for a while.

To break the silence, I asked, “What about you?”

“Sex, you mean? No. I was going to let Robbie McAllister do it. I mean, I was thinking about doing it with him or whatever. We’d gotten pretty hot and heavy, but then he got all pissy about how I was always working on the farm and would never go to the movies in Dubuque with him. So I dumped him.”

“Pretty tough to keep up that farm and have a social life.”

“Yeah.”

Darla was silent for so long, I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. When I was sure she had, she whispered, “You know, there’s plenty of stuff we can do without any chance I’ll get pregnant.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll show you.”

When she reached for my belt this time, I didn’t stop her.

Chapter 40

About an hour after we set out the next day, the road left the ridgetop wood. Below us lay a huge valley blanketed in brilliant snow. On the right side of the valley, high on a hillside, a massive church stood alone. It looked old and imposing, its dark brick bell towers glowering over the snow below it.

On our left, high on the opposing hillside, a second church stared across the valley at the first one. This church was white, limestone or marble maybe, and if possible, even more ornate and imposing than the first. A small town nestled below the second church.

We skied down to where the road we were on teed into a highway. There were two road signs there: Highway 52 and Welcome to St. Donatus. Even from a distance, we could see footprints everywhere in the town’s snow-covered streets. A few of the sidewalks had even been shoveled. Darla and I skirted around the edge of the town. It seemed unlikely that anyone would want to share food with a couple of strangers. And if they couldn’t help us, there was no reason to run the risk that they might try to hurt us.

On the far side of St. Donatus we caught a small, unmarked road that continued east, passing near the white church. As I skied between the two churches, I had the feeling they were looking down on us, blessing our journey. Maybe it was an aftereffect of the night before, but I felt more hopeful than I had since we’d left Worthington.