Ashfall

“You sure you’re okay?”

“No, I need to pee.”

“Well?” I shrugged.

“I can’t squat over that thing without taking my jeans off. And there’s nothing to lean against.”

I understood what she meant. When she had needed to pee on the road, she’d find a tree to lean her back against and pull her jeans just partway down. I’d never, um, watched the whole process of course; I’m not that pervy. But I’d seen enough to get the general idea of how it was done. “Come on. I’ll be your tree.”

So I stood on one side of the ditch, and Darla stood on the other. She leaned her back against me and pulled her pants down just enough to do her business. I tried not to watch, but there was no point. Hundreds of people were within eyesight, and Darla wasn’t the only woman squatting over that ditch.

“Well, that was humiliating . . . and disgusting,” Darla said as she pulled up her pants.

“Nobody was really looking.”

“You’re not helping.”

“And you’re not the one who got splashed.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“No worries. It’s only a little bit on my boot. Goes with the territory when you volunteer to be a tree.”

It was getting dark. I was hungry, but we hadn’t seen any sign of food since we’d been thrown into the camp. I was more worried about finding a safe place to sleep. It would be a cold night if we couldn’t find shelter of some sort.

At first, we wandered from tent to tent. But every tent was full, and just touching the flaps often brought shouted curses and threats from within. Some of the tents even had people posted outside guarding them. Other refugees clustered on the lee sides of the tents where they’d be protected from the wind. We might have done that, too, but all the good spots had been taken already.

“I’ve got an idea,” Darla said. “Follow me.”

She led us directly into the teeth of the wind, which had picked up as darkness fell, making it harder and harder to see. It started snowing—hard, icy pellets that stung as the wind whipped them against my skin. I shivered, remembering almost freezing to death under the bridge just a week before. Several times we stumbled over people lying on the ground, made invisible by the snow and darkness.

Darla led us all the way across the camp. The wind was fiercer here with nothing but a chain-link fence to block it. A few tents were scattered on this side of the camp, all of them full, of course. Darla trudged toward one that was built on a low wooden platform. The lee side of the tent was packed—people lay pretty much on top of each other in a long V shape, trying to escape the wind’s nip and howl.

We walked to the windward side of the tent. For the first time since we’d arrived, we were alone. Everyone was avoiding this, the most exposed spot in the whole camp. I didn’t see any reasonable place to sleep—hopefully Darla knew what she was doing.

Snow had drifted against the tent platform. Darla dug a trough in the snow against the tent. It was less than two feet wide and a foot deep, but it would hold us both. She lined the snow-ditch with our plastic tarp and blankets. Then we lay down and wrapped the tarp and blankets over ourselves.

At first, it was terribly cold. But as we lay there shivering and hugging each other for warmth, the snow began to blow up over us, covering our tarp. After an hour or so, we were completely buried and toasty warm. I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up once in the night, feeling sweaty and claustrophobic. I stretched my arm out over my head and poked a hole in the snowdrift. The icy air smelled sharp and relieved my sense of confinement. Darla murmured something in her sleep and pressed herself even tighter against me.

The next time I awoke, it was to the gentle pressure of Darla’s lips against mine. I returned her kiss, getting more and more into it until it occurred to me that I probably had terrible morning breath. Still, Darla tasted fine, and she wasn’t complaining. . . . I broke off the kiss, anyway.

“We should get up,” she said. “I heard voices a while ago.”

“Is it morning?”

Darla reached out and reopened the hole I’d made during the night. A spot of light hit my face. “Guess so.”

We unburied ourselves from the snowdrift. It would have been a beautiful day if there’d been any sun. The snow and wind had died down during the night, leaving behind a thin white blanket that temporarily hid the camp’s ugliness.

We packed our bedding and scouted the area. Nobody was around; the tents were empty, and the dog piles of people sleeping at the lee side of each tent were gone. Paths beaten in the snow led away from every tent. Strangely, all the trails ran parallel. Every single person had gotten up and walked, zombie-like, in the exact same direction. We’d slept through it all.

Curious, we followed one of the paths. It was almost perfectly straight, except for an occasional swerve around a tent. After a quarter mile or so, the paths started to blend into each other so that all the snow was pocked with footprints. There was no longer a discernable trail to follow, but we kept walking in the same direction.

We’d seen only one person along our route, a woman about my mother’s age in the snow beside one of the tents, curled into a fetal position, unmoving. Her hands and feet were bare and tinged blue. I walked over to her, ignoring Darla’s glare, and put my hand against her neck. It was cold and lifeless.

I stood and took a deep breath. The icy air entering my lungs brought something else with it: a wave of sadness so intense I had to close my eyes and fight to hold back tears. That woman could have been my mother. I felt Darla’s arms around me. “You okay?” she said.

“Yeah . . . no.” My sorrow dissolved in a wave of pure fury. What kind of place was this, where tens of thousands of people were herded together without adequate shelter, without decent latrines? A cattle pen, not fit for humans. And the guards, Captain Jameson, they were people just like me. For the first time ever, I felt ashamed of my species. The volcano had taken our homes, our food, our automobiles, and our airplanes, but it hadn’t taken our humanity. No, we’d given that up on our own.

A little farther on, I heard a dull roar that slowly increased in volume as we walked. We rounded a tent and found the source of the noise—a huge crowd, thousands upon thousands of people pressed together in a mob that stretched as far as I could see to both my left and my right.

We stepped to the back of the crowd. It sounded worse than the high-school cafeteria used to at that moment when everyone had finished eating and a few hundred shouted conversations were going on simultaneously.

Darla tapped some guy on the back and yelled, “What’s going on?”

He turned and shouted back, “New here?”

“Yeah.”

“Chow line.”

“Slop line, more like it,” someone else yelled.

Slop mob would have been an even better description. There was no organization that remotely resembled a line. But we hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime yesterday, so we settled into the back of the crowd to wait.

After a while, we saw people forcing their way out of the mob. They had a terrible time of it—everyone else was pressing forward into any open space. But the folks trying to leave shoved and jammed their elbows into others, eventually managing to worm their way out of the crush. I noticed something odd: all the people leaving had a blotch of blue paint on their left hands. A few of them were carrying Dixie cups, but nobody had any food.

We waited in the mob for more than two hours before I got close enough to see. The crowd pressed forward toward a fence. Beyond the fence stood a series of field kitchens, something like what the Lion’s Club used to set up every year at the Black Hawk County Fair. Dozens of small hatches had been cut in the fence at about chest height. Guys in fatigues were ma