Ashfall

She stepped back across the gap. I took another step away from the cliff and put my hands on my knees, resting and trying not to collapse altogether.

Darla waited beside me for a couple of minutes, then we slogged on up the hill. The slope wasn’t as steep here, but it was still tough going. The snow was almost three feet deep. We had to high-step, lifting our feet up and dragging them through the top layer of snow. We started out side by side, but I quickly fell behind and took to walking in Darla’s footsteps. Also it was dark, and without the ru

After a few minutes of this, my pants legs were soaked through. Darla’s fatigues were damp all the way up to the small of her back—she was getting the worst of it since she was breaking the trail. I felt cold, but the effort required to move forward was keeping me from freezing. I imagined that if we stopped now, without a fire or shelter, both of us would be hypothermic in no time.

At the top of the slope, the woods ended, and we stepped into a field. Darla bent double to rest. “Which way?”

“Northeast, somewhere. I sort of remember how to get there. In a car, anyway. We’ll have to find a road.”

“I was pla

“Makes sense. How did you manage to steal a bulldozer, anyway? That was . . . wow.”

Darla looked away. I couldn’t see her cheek very well in the darkness, but she might have been blushing. “I just did, okay?”

“It was amazing. I was trying to figure out some way to escape, find you, and slip out of the camp, and then wham! You knocked the whole hut down.”

“Do we have to talk about it?”

“No, I guess not. . . . What’s wrong?”

Darla didn’t answer right away. “You remember when Captain Jameson was telling you about the ‘evening entertainment’—”

“Yeah, I hope I broke his nose.”

“You did. Both his eyes were turning black by the time he dragged you into that hut. I followed and watched from inside the fence.”

“So that’s how you knew which hut I was in.”

“Yep. So anyway, he should have called it a prostitution detail—”

“I knew that’s what he was talking about. Something about the way he said it—I could hear the slime oozing off his voice.”

“So, anyway . . . I volunteered for it.”

“You what?”

“You heard me.”

“But—”

“But nothing. How else was I supposed to get in the guards’ enclosure? Chet always watched me during the day, and I figured we’d have a better chance to get away at night, anyway.”

“But that’s why I kicked the guy. Because what he was suggesting was so repulsive in the first place. Because I wanted to protect you.”

“Then you did a crappy job of it. He was propositioning me, not you, and I didn’t try to beat him down. What were you thinking? If you’d kept your cool, I wouldn’t have needed to offer to prostitute myself, wouldn’t have needed to steal a bulldozer and break your ass out of that hut.” Darla poked me in the chest with one finger, hard.

“I would have gotten—”

“You don’t even know how bad off you were! I wheedled it out of Chet. They may call those doghouses ‘punishment huts,’ but they’re not for punishment. Nobody comes out of them alive, Alex. They throw troublemakers in there to die, so there’s no physical evidence to contradict the reports they file with FEMA. ‘Died of exposure’ doesn’t call for an investigation. It’s safer for them than putting a bullet in your fool head. Although a bullet in the brain might not kill you, because it’d sure miss all the organs you do your thinking with.”

Darla whirled away, following the tree line to our right.

For about fifteen minutes I struggled to keep up with the furious pace she set. Then I stopped and called to her. “Darla,” I said between gasps for air, “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know that sorry cuts it.” She strode back to me, kicking through the snow. “As it happened, I only volunteered to be a camp prostitute. I didn’t have to go through with it. But so what if I had? So what if I’d screwed every motherless guard in that godforsaken camp?”

“I don’t—”

“Would that have made me less of a woman in your mind? Less of a person? Just one of those girls, the easy ones, the ones the high-school cliques gossip about and call sluts? Is that the kind of boy you are, Alex? Is that the kind of man you want to be?”

“No, I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I’d been angry when she began her rant, but it occurred to me that she was right. I had reacted impulsively when I kicked Captain Jameson. That had made things worse for both of us. A thought hit me almost physically, like the sound wave of the eruption eight weeks ago: I realized exactly how much Darla had been willing to sacrifice on my behalf. I fought back tears. There was only one thing I could say. “I love you, Darla.”

I held out my arms. She stumbled into them, whispering, “God, I was scared, Alex. I was so scared.” She was crying, and I lost the fight to hold back my own tears. We stood in the icy snow and hugged for a while.

“So,” Darla said, “I was filthy, like everyone else in the camp. Captain Jameson had some grunt take me to the showers. He stood guard outside the shower room door—either to keep me from escaping or to stop anyone from bothering me, I don’t know.”

“Your hands still feel greasy.”

“I didn’t shower. When I got in there, I noticed it was built of temporary walls under a big canvas tent—no ceiling. So I flipped on the water and climbed over the back wall into the next room.”

“How’d you know what was on the other side of the wall?”

“I didn’t before I climbed up there. Turns out it was an empty barracks room. I stole a uniform and ditched my old clothes. I was hoping I could pass for a guard—at least at a distance.”

“And that worked?”

“Yep. I walked out to the vehicle depot. Nobody was around that late at night, so I used a hammer to bash open the lockbox and grabbed the key to my favorite dozer.”

“That was crazy. And brave. Thanks.”

“They should call us the seven-mile-an-hour bandits.”

“Huh?”

“Top speed for that bulldozer. Seven miles per hour. Well, eight in reverse.”

I laughed. “Lot better time than we’re making while we stand here and talk.”

Darla nodded. “Let’s go.”

As the night wore on, I got slower and slower. Darla was breaking the trail, but she still had to stop every few minutes and wait for me to catch up. I tried to up my pace, to force myself to keep up with Darla by willpower alone, but I couldn’t. It doesn’t matter how hard you push down on the accelerator of a car, if there’s no gas in the tank, it won’t go.

On top of that, the edge of the woods was meandering, following the contour of the hillside. I had no idea if we were still going east—if we even had been in the first place.

“We’ve got to find a road,” Darla said.

“Be a lot easier for Black Lake to find us.”

“I don’t think they’ll be looking—”

“Of course they will. They chased us in those Humvees.”

“Yeah, but that was a knee-jerk reaction. Chet said Black Lake gets paid by how many refugees they’ve got in the camp. It’s worth a lot more money to round up some of the thousands of people who ran than to chase the two of us.”

“Maybe. But it might be personal to them now.”

“We’ve got to risk it,” Darla said. “I don’t think I can keep up this pace all night, pushing through deep snow like this.”

What she really meant was that there was no way I could keep up. I hated the fact that I was holding us back. I hated that she had to break the trail for us. I even hated her a little for being so damned nice about it.

Darla turned away from the woods, cutting across the field. At the far side, we stumbled onto a berm of snow. After we’d struggled across it, we found a gift: there was the road. It was a two-lane county road, but someone had plowed it to a solid layer of packed snow.