Ashfall

The corporal hit the side of Darla’s face with a vicious backhand, knocking her down. He bent over her, cocking his fist for another strike. I dove on top of Darla. The guy hit my back, but since I’d blocked his punch short of its intended target, it didn’t have much force.

Darla struggled under me. I tried to hold her still and keep her head and body protected. Someone caught my right hand and wrenched my arm behind my back. I felt a plastic loop around my wrist, cutting into it as he cinched it tight. Then my left wrist was forced to join the right and locked into the other half of the handcuffs.

Someone grabbed me under my arm and dragged me off Darla, setting me upright. They cuffed her as well and marched us back into the tent.

The captain still sat at his desk. Darla strained against the guy holding her and yelled, “What the—”

“Quiet!” Captain Jameson roared. “I’ll overlook this behavior since you’re new here, but one more word and you’ll start your stay at Camp Galena in a punishment hut.”

I watched Darla. She screwed up her face to start yelling at the guy again. I kicked her ankle. She glowered at me, her face twisted into a ferocious scowl. I shook my head.

It worked, because Darla didn’t say anything else, and we didn’t learn what a punishment hut was. At least not right at that moment. The guards marched us to a gate in the fence and cut off the handcuffs. Then they thrust our backpacks into our arms and shoved us through the gate.

Chapter 43

The guards weren’t the least bit gentle when they tossed us through the gate. I fell on my face in the packed snow. I pushed myself upright on arms that still trembled from the fight, wiped the ice off my cheeks, and looked around.

The first thing I noticed was how many people were there. This place was crowded. Old, young, families, individuals, white, Hispanic, black—the only thing everyone had in common was that they were all dressed in dirty, ragged clothing. I hadn’t seen so many people in one place since the eruption; in fact, I hadn’t seen a crowd like this even before the volcano.

The second thing I noticed was the camp’s size. We were on a relatively flat ridgetop. The fence stretched three hundred or four hundred yards in each direction before it reached a corner. It was chain link, like all the fences we’d seen here, twelve feet high and topped by a coil of razor wire.

A thin guy with a dirty gray beard reached for my backpack. I shoved his hand away and grabbed our packs. He slunk off into the crowd.

Inside the fence, the snow had been churned to a dirty, frozen slush by thousands of feet. Outside, a smaller fenced area contained four large white canvas tents—the admissions area we’d come through. Beyond that, I saw the highway.

There were green canvas tents in ragged rows inside the camp. A few of them were erected on raised wooden platforms, but most were pitched directly on the cold ground. Almost all of them were closed, flaps tied tightly against the wind. The tents that weren’t closed were full, each packed with a dozen or more people.

A loudspeaker mounted on a nearby fence post crackled to life. The sound was distorted and overly loud: “Mabel Hawkins, report to Gate C immediately. Mabel Hawkins, Gate C.”

A narrow strip about five feet wide just inside the fence was clear of people. Darla walked into the clear area and I asked her, “You sure it’s safe? What if that fence is electric?”

“It’s fine,” she replied. “You can’t electrify chain link directly—it’d just ground out. If this were electric there’d be insulators and extra wires. She slapped the fence to prove her point. Then she squatted and reached into my pack, inventorying the contents.

They’d taken almost everything. Our skis, food, rope, knife, and hatchet were all gone. All we had left was our clothing, blankets, plastic tarp, water bottles, frying pan, and a few matches.

Darla snatched the frying pan and hurled it at the base of the fence. It hit with a dull clank and came to rest a few feet away. “Christ!” she yelled. “They took goddamn everything.”

A nasty purple bruise was spreading across the side of Darla’s face. I touched it as gently as I could, trying to figure out if the guards had broken any of her bones. “That hurt?” I asked.

“The pork, the wheat, our knife, and the hand-ax—what the hell do the guards need with that crap, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” I kept probing her cheekbone. It didn’t seem broken, but I wasn’t sure.

Darla slapped my hand away. “Quit messing with my face. It’s fine. And Jack, what was the point of killing him? He survived silicosis, a burning barn, the blizzard, and a long trip in a backpack just to be shot by some asshole guard? Why? I just don’t get it.”

“I don’t know.” I tried to give her a hug, but she pushed me away and started ramming stuff back into my pack. At least our backpacks had plenty of extra room now. Darla stuffed her pack inside mine.

I squatted on my ankles, resting my back against the fence, and Darla squatted beside me. Her hands were on one of the backpack straps, crinkling it into a ball and releasing it, over and over, in barely restrained fury.

“We’ll get out of here somehow,” I said. “What’s a twelve-foot fence and coil of razor wire to us, after everything we’ve been through?”

“Why pen us in at all? I feel like a pig on the way to the slaughterhouse.”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. “We’ll find a way out.”

“Yeah, they’re going to regret the day they locked us in here.” Darla’s eyes had narrowed to a hard squint, and she was scowling.

A pair of guards patrolling along the outside of the fence walked toward us. As they approached, one of them yelled, “Hey, you! No leaning on the fence.”

I ignored him. When he got close enough, he kicked at my back through the chain link. I saw it coming and scrambled away, but not quite fast enough. His toe caught me in the small of my back.

“Asshole,” Darla said aloud.

The guards laughed.

It was getting late, and neither of us had any idea where we’d sleep. But more urgently, we hadn’t used the bathroom since we’d been picked up on the road hours ago. Darla stopped a kid who was hurrying by and asked him where the restrooms were. He pointed, then twisted free of her grasp and ran off.

We walked for a long time in the direction the kid had pointed without seeing anything resembling a latrine. It was slow going, picking our way around knots of people. Some were huddled in groups, talking or just shivering together. Others lay on the ground, wrapped in blankets and pressed against their family or friends for warmth. Every now and then we passed someone who was alone. Most of the loners looked dead, frozen to the ground where they lay, but when I got too close to one of them, his eyes popped open and he glared, warning me away.

We smelled the latrine before we saw it—although calling it a latrine was far too generous. Beside the far fence, a long ditch had been dug, about twenty-four inches wide and eighteen inches deep. Ten or eleven people squatted along its length, doing their business in front of God and everyone.

The other problem, besides the complete lack of privacy, was the lack of toilet paper, sinks, or soap. Sure, Darla and I hadn’t been too particular about those things as we traveled, but this was different: Thousands of people were using this ditch as a public restroom. I glanced up and down the line. Two people had brought their own toilet paper, but others were using newspaper or handsful of snow to clean themselves. Darla turned away and put her hands on her knees.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Yeah. A little nauseous. I’ll be okay.”

I shrugged and stepped up to the ditch. I don’t like going in public—even the rows of urinals without dividers at school used to bug me. So it took me awhile. But when I zipped up and left the stench of the ditch, Darla hadn’t moved.