Ashfall

“I don’t have any food.” What the hell was it with this place? Couldn’t I take a walk without people bugging me at every other step?

“I saw you handle that guy.”

“I didn’t hurt him.”

“Yeah, but you could have.”

I shrugged.

“We’ve got a place in our tent. Eight inches. You stand guard for three hours each night, you can sleep there.”

“Eight inches?”

He gave me a condescending look and started talking more slowly. “A safe place to sleep. Eight inches wide by six feet long. In a platform tent. The best kind. All you have to do is help guard it at night.”

“I need two spots. She’s with me.” I gestured at Darla.

“Can’t do it. I just have one. Only have that ’cause Greeley died last night.”

“Forget it then.” I turned my back to him.

“Wait a second,” Darla said. “We’ll take the one spot. Alex will stand guard half the night, and I’ll watch the other half. If another spot opens up in the tent, we get it, and we switch to the three-hour guard shifts you proposed.”

“You know kung fu, too?” the guy asked.

“It’s taekwondo,” I said.

“Yeah, I know it,” Darla said. “I only know one move, though. Anything happens, I wake him up, and he beats the crap out of whoever’s messing with your tent. Okay?”

“Works for me.” The guy showed us the tent and told us to be back at dusk.

* * *

We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the vehicle depot through the fence. I already knew Darla was weird, but this clinched it. She could spend an entire hour staring at a parked bulldozer. Every now and then she’d ask me a nonsensical question, something like, “Do you think that’s an auxiliary hydraulic system under those lifters?” Or “What kind of tool do you suppose they use to disengage the keyed link in that track?” The only response I could figure out was to shrug and grunt.

It wasn’t all bad, though. I could spend an entire hour staring at Darla. Not that there was anything all that thrilling about either of us right then. We were tired, hungry, and wrapped in multiple layers of filthy winter clothing. None of that mattered to me; I was in love. I thought Darla was, too—but maybe with the bulldozer.

We’d been standing there awhile when I jammed my hands into my coat pockets to warm them. Something was in my right pocket—I took off my glove to investigate and found a handful of almonds.

“Check that out.” I held my hand open against my chest so only Darla could see.

“Those were in your pocket?”

“Yeah.”

“So that’s what that lady was talking about—God will fill your pockets and all.”

“Guess so. Nice of her to sneak us some di

“Some di

“Yeah,” I replied, munching surreptitiously on my almonds.

* * *

That night I asked Darla to take the first guard shift. I figured she’d do a better job than I could deciding when to wake me up. I’ve never been very good at judging time, and without the moon or stars, I’d be hopeless.

I stretched out in my eight inches of floor beside the door. I was nestled against an old woman—Greeley’s wife, I thought. I used my backpack as a pillow so that nobody could take it without waking me.

It wasn’t too bad, being packed into the tent like that. Sure, it was uncomfortable; I couldn’t roll over without knocking knees and elbows with my neighbor. And it smelled bad, since nobody had showered in weeks. But the tent kept the wind out, and sleeping packed together kept us all warm. The worst part was lying there with nothing to do but think about the emptiness of my stomach. I was starving, but I’d only been without real food for two days. The other people in the tent were much worse off. Nobody talked about it much, but I could see the hunger in their hollow cheeks, hear it in their moans and sighs.

I was finally starting to drift off when Darla kicked me. “Alex,” she whispered. “Get up.”

I rolled under the tent flap and jumped to my feet. Darla led me to the far side of the tent at a run. I saw three guys there, kids really; they were probably younger than I. One of them was pulling up the side of the tent, while another knelt and jammed his hands under the canvas. The third was standing guard.

I struck a pose, double outer knife-hand block. “Get out of our tent.” I tried to growl and sound like Clint Eastwood, but my voice cracked, and it came out more like Mike Tyson.

The guy standing guard punched one of the others on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

The other guy pulled his arms out of the tent and looked at me casually. “There ain’t nothing in this tent nohow.” He stood and the three of them backed away, watching me as they went.

“Thanks,” Darla said. “That’s the third time tonight. The other two were alone, so I chased them off.”

“Maybe I should take the first watch—it might quiet down later.”

“Yeah, let’s try that. Wake me up whenever you get tired. We can always nap during the day.”

I gave Darla a goodnight kiss, and she wormed under the tent flap to settle down where I’d been sleeping.

I slowly paced the circumference of the tent, trying to keep my strides even and counting one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi as I went. I thought a circuit of the tent was taking me about forty seconds. During my seventeenth trip, I saw a man and a woman walking up. I planted myself between them and the tent and glared until they moved on. During circuit fifty-eight, I found a guy already halfway under the side wall—only his butt and legs protruded. Someone inside woke up and yelled. I grabbed the guy’s ankles, yanked him backward out of the tent, and watched him run off into the night.

Things were quiet after that. When my count reached 360, I woke Darla. The blankets were warm and smelled faintly of her. I fell asleep instantly.

Chapter 45

I was awakened by someone kicking me accidentally as they tried to leave the tent. I grabbed my backpack and rolled out into the snow. Darla told me nobody had bothered the tent after I’d gone to bed—evidently the first shift was the busy one.

Breakfast was the same as the day before: a mad crush and two-hour wait for six ounces of boiled rice each. The guards sprayed yellow blobs of paint on our left hands, partly covering the blue from the day before.

We lay down in the tent after breakfast and took a nap together. Darla wedged the backpack between us.

I woke to Darla shaking me. “Hey, sleepyhead. I think it’s time for the Baptists’ food line.”

“Okay.” I shook myself fully awake and packed our blankets.

This time we lined up separately. Darla was an inch shorter than I, so she could stand about forty feet ahead of me. The same two yellow coats were out chatting with kids and organizing things.

Our new strategy didn’t help. There were still at least one hundred kids in front of Darla when the yellow coats ran out of food and the line dispersed.

We caught up with the same longhaired lady we’d talked to the day before.

“Thanks for the almonds yesterday,” I told her.

She glanced around. “You might be mistaken—perhaps someone else gave you almonds. We’re not allowed to share our personal rations. Most of us would like to, but it caused . . . problems.”

I whispered, “Well, thank your twin sister for me then, would you?”

She smiled and whispered back, “Okay, I will.”

“I was wondering, why don’t you get the wheat off that barge?”

Darla elbowed me in the side. “Don’t talk about that, we might need it later,” she hissed.

“There are a lot of people here that need it worse than we do,” I whispered back.

“Wait, what are you two talking about?” the woman said. “A barge?”