Ashfall

“What’s this?” I asked, holding out the handful of grain.

“Wheat. You get it out of that hatch?”

“Yeah. This barge is packed full of it.”

“Nice—if we had a way to grind it, we could make bread. Or tortillas, at least.”

“You think Jack would eat it?”

“I du

We walked back to the hatch, and Darla held it open while I scooped out kernels of wheat. My backpack was full of pork, but I fit in some wheat by dumping it over the top and letting it fill the cracks around our other supplies. I dumped some wheat into Darla’s pack, too, right alongside Jack, but he didn’t seem interested in it.

“Maybe we should stay here for a while,” Darla said.

“I want to find my family. Besides, there will be food at my uncle’s farm. They have ducks and goats and stuff.”

“There’s literally tons of food here, enough to last until it spoils—a few years, at least. Plus, it’s hard to get down here—probably nobody will bug us. We could shack up in the tugboat’s wheelhouse, build a grinder for the wheat, and we’re golden.”

My chest felt suddenly heavy. I didn’t want to choose between my family and Darla. “I need to find my family. Maybe we can come back here and get more wheat after we find them. And I bet there will be other people after this grain soon enough. Surely there’re a lot of hungry people out there who need it worse than we do.”

Darla shrugged. “I guess so.” We walked back to the precarious-looking rope Darla had rigged.

“You’re going to climb that?” I asked.

“Yeah. If the rope comes free, catch me and dodge the hatchet, okay?”

“Um, right.”

“Kidding.” Darla climbed the rope slowly and steadily. She used only her arms, pulling herself up hand over hand to disturb the setup as little as possible. Damn, but she was strong. Maybe it was all the farm work. I couldn’t have climbed the rope like that without using my legs.

When she reached the top, Darla untied the hatchet and fastened the rope to the railing. I tied the skis onto the other end of the rope, and Darla hauled them up. Then we repeated the process with my backpack. When we finished that, I grabbed the rope and started laboriously climbing.

“Want me to pull you up?”

“No, no—I got it.” No way was I going to ask for help after watching her slink up the rope so easily. I made it, too, even though I had to wrap my legs around the rope to climb. I was glad I hadn’t needed to go first—all my thrashing probably would have caused the hatchet to come loose.

Now we stood on a narrow metal walkway atop the other half of the lock gate. We followed the walkway until it dead-ended against the dam. There was yet another catwalk atop the dam about twenty feet above us. An ordinary metal door was set into the wall of the dam. I tried the knob; it was locked.

“I think I can use the hatchet trick again to climb to the top of the dam,” Darla said.

“I’ve got another idea.” I took the hatchet and reversed it, so I could use it as a hammer. I whaled on the doorknob, raising the hatchet high above my head in a two-handed grip and bringing it down hard. It took ten or eleven blows, but then there was a ping and the knob finally broke. It bounced on the metal walkway and fell into the river, leaving a round hole in the door where the knob had been. I stuck my finger in the hole and pulled. Nothing—the door was still locked.

“Let me try something.” Darla took the knife off my belt, knelt in front of the door, and jammed the blade into the hole. She dragged the knife to her left. There was a click, and the door swung smoothly open toward us. “You broke the lock, but there’s a slide in there you have to operate.” She never stopped amazing me.

A metal staircase inside led upward to another door—fortunately unlocked, at least from the inside. It opened onto the top of the dam. From there, crossing the Mississippi required only a short hike along the last catwalk.

We had to climb an eight-foot, chain-link fence to get off the dam. When I looked back toward the lock, I saw a sign on the fence: Hazardous, Keep Out! U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On this side of the fence, there was an earthen dike with a narrow, snow-covered road ru

We put on our skis and followed the road roughly east for a couple of miles until we’d left the river completely behind. Nobody had been here for at least five days—no tracks marred the snow.

We came to another fence. The gate across the road was chained and padlocked, but it was easy to climb. The sign on the far side read: Keep Out! Hazard! Superfund Site, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That seemed a little confusing—was it an army site or an EPA site? At least everyone agreed it was hazardous, although we’d come through it fine.

The road continued past the gate and over a railway embankment. At the far side of the embankment, the road teed into a highway. We stopped and stared: the highway had been plowed.

Chapter 42

Before the eruption, a plowed road would have been no big deal. But this was the first clear road I’d seen since I left Cedar Falls, the first real sign of civilization. And it wasn’t only the snow; the ash also had been scraped up. We could see honest-to-God blacktop here and there. Tall berms of snow and ash flanked the highway.

“Which way?” Darla asked.

“Left, I guess. Warren should be northeast of here. It’s near the Illinois/Wisconsin state line, east of Galena.”

The road presented a problem. We couldn’t ski on the blacktop, so we tried the side of the road, but between the huge piles of plowed snow and ash and the underbrush beyond, there was no good place to ski. Finally, we unclipped our skis and carried them, walking north on the road.

We’d been walking a little more than an hour when we heard an unfamiliar noise: a faint whine coming from around the bend in the road. It took us a minute to figure out what it was . . . a car or truck, racing along the highway toward us.

“Let’s get off the road,” I said. Darla nodded, and we stumbled across a pile of ash and snow almost as tall as I was. Even if we’d wanted to, there was no good place to hide. The brush beside the road was leafless, and we’d left all kinds of tracks crossing the snow berm.

A truck roared into view ahead of us. It was a six-wheeled army dually with a cloth cover over its load bed, like a modern version of the Conestoga wagon.

The driver slowed as he approached the spot where we’d left the road. I saw printing in huge letters on the side of the truck: F.E.M.A. Below that, in smaller print, it read: Black Lake LLC, Division of HB Industries.

“Finally, some help.” I thrashed back across the snow berm, waving my arms to attract the driver’s attention. The truck stopped a little bit past us. Two guys in camo fatigues rode in the back. One of them was huge, the other almost as small as me. They both had black guns dangling from straps around their necks: Uzis, maybe.

The small guy jumped down. The big one stood on the back fender and trained his gun on us.

I swallowed hard and glanced at the gun above me. It looked like a toy in the guy’s massive hands. “Um, hi,” I said. “We’re trying to get to Warren. I’ve—”

“Where are you from?” the little guy said.

“Cedar Falls.”

“Serious? Damn, we don’t get many from that far into the red zone.”

“Any way I could get a ride to Warren? I’ve got family—”

“Hop in, we’ll take you to the camp.”

“Okay,” I said. The big guy stepped aside and let his gun hang loose from its strap. Darla and I tossed our skis and poles into the truck bed and climbed in after them.

There were two people huddled inside already, a woman and a young boy. They looked dirty and tired, travel-worn. I said hi, but neither of them responded. Darla and I sat on a bench about halfway between them and the guards.