Ashen Winter

He was rolling around under his blankets, moaning “’a’er, ’a’er” in a breathy voice. I figured out what he wanted and poured some water from the jug on the counter into a plastic cup.

His hands were shaking so badly, he couldn’t hold the cup. So I propped him up with one arm and poured the water slowly past his lips.

After he drank about half the cup, he started coughing. That went on for a while—a series of dry, rasping coughs that had to be painful with his fresh stitches. When his coughing subsided, he motioned at the water cup, and I helped him drink the rest of it.

As I turned to put the cup away, he said in a surprisingly clear voice, “Thank you.”

I put the cup down and came back to his bedside. “What’s your name?”

“Ralph.”

“You know where Bill got that shotgun?”

He grabbed my arm, clutching it tightly enough to hurt. “The bones, they’re burning. Burning. White ends turn brown and blacken in the fire.” He levered himself partway upright and stared into my eyes. “The flame eats, but it’s never satisfied. It eats all night, every night, but there aren’t enough bones.”

“What about the shotgun?” I pried his hand off my arm.

He moaned, then whispered, “There are too many bones.” Then, abruptly, he fell back to sleep.

Chapter 9

Dr. McCarthy returned to the office early the next morning. He poked his head into the exam room, letting in a sliver of light. “You guys up?”

I groaned. I’d barely slept. “I am now.”

“Bring your breakfast into the office so we don’t have to light another lantern, would you?”

“Sure.” I rolled out from under the blankets and groped for my coat. Darla was already up.

Dr. McCarthy stepped into the room and raised the lantern. Darla grabbed a couple packages of ham from our pack, and I picked up our toothbrushes and the pail of washwater. A crust of ice had formed on it overnight. All three of us trooped into the hall.

“I’ve got to check on the patient,” Dr. McCarthy said.

Darla and I waited in the dark hallway while the doctor checked on Ralph. It took less than five minutes. “How is he?” I asked as Dr. McCarthy emerged.

“Unconscious. Pulse and breathing are okay, but he’s ru

“You think he’ll wake up today?”

“No way to tell.”

As we were eating breakfast, the mayor of Warren, Bob Petty, joined us. He was the only person I knew who’d retained his pre-volcano roundness—in his face, belly, and stentorian baritone voice. “Heard you’ve got a bandit here, Jim.”

“They brought him in.” Dr. McCarthy tilted his head at Darla and me.

“You catch him out at your uncle’s farm?”

“Sort of,” Darla said. “We killed two of them. One got away.”

“We can’t have his type here. I’ll send the sheriff to escort him out.”

“You will not,” Dr. McCarthy said emphatically. “Bandit or not, he’s a patient. And he’s unconscious, hardly a threat.”

“Folks are worried.”

Dr. McCarthy stared at the mayor until the silence got uncomfortable.

The mayor cleared his throat. “Well, he wakes up, you fetch me or the sheriff. We’ll talk about it then.”

Dr. McCarthy changed the subject, asking about the latest news. The mayor had traded some pork for a handcranked battery charger and an emergency radio, which they were using to monitor the few shortwave stations still transmitting. Rumors and speculation abounded: The Chinese had a

There was no way to know if any of the rumors were true, and it didn’t seem to matter much, anyway. The only news that mattered to me was news of my parents—and none of that came in over the shortwave.

Belinda came in just as the mayor was leaving. She smiled and shook his hand, but her eyes were wary. When we’d cleaned up from breakfast, Belinda put us to work organizing patient files. All the office staff had left, so the filing was way behind. Having us work with the records was a violation of HIPAA rules, Belinda said, but she didn’t sound particularly worried, and I wasn’t sure what she meant by HIPAA, anyway. Each patient had a folder with brightly colored tabs that slotted into one of the open bookcases around the office. One entire bookcase, packed with records, had been marked DECEASED.

After a while, I started looking inside the folders. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but the work was tedious, and I was curious. Every file ended with a sheet of copier paper, neatly torn in half. They all had the same handwritten heading: CERTIFICATE OF DEATH. Under that in smaller letters it read, “Prepared by James H. McCarthy, M.D.”

Every sheet listed a time, date, and cause of death. The causes varied wildly: stroke, exposure, heart attack, periodontitis—whatever that was. Darla started looking in the files, too, and we called out causes of death as we worked: blunt trauma from a fall, chronic bronchitis aggravated by silicosis, pneumonia, renal failure.

Then I heard a soft slap as the file Darla was holding hit the counter. “Jesus H. Christ,” she whispered.

“What is it?” I asked, turning toward her.

She didn’t respond, just slid the file along the counter to me.

There were two death certificates stapled to the file. The top one was for Elsa Hayward. I’d never heard of her. Cause of death: hemorrhage during childbirth. I lifted it to read the second certificate. Jane Doe Hayward: suffocated in childbirth. A full sheet of paper protruded below the death certificates—Elsa had evidently been a patient of Dr. McCarthy’s for a long time and had a chart. The last entry on the chart read, “If she’d been born six months ago, I could have saved them both.” The last phrase was repeated, ground into the paper with such force that it had torn through twice. “I could have saved them both. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

His scrawled signature was smeared, bleeding into the page. The paper rippled. I ran my finger across it, feeling it pop and crackle under my touch. Suddenly I realized what I was touching—dried tears. I pulled my hand away from the file and swallowed hard, deeply embarrassed, as if I’d opened a door and found Dr. McCarthy behind it, sobbing. I gently closed the file and set it in its place on the bookcase with the other records of the deceased. Darla hugged me, her eyes shining with unshed tears. After that, we quit opening the files.

After lunch we hauled water for the office on Bikezilla. Warren’s water system had failed shortly after the volcano erupted. So we filled jugs and pails from the nearest working well, about two blocks away. Well water never freezes, even in the hardest winter, although the pipes and handpumps can.

As I set one of the jugs on the counter, I must have winced, because Darla said, “How’s your side?”

“It’s fine,” I replied.

“Let me check it. I should change the bandage, anyway.”

“I’m fine. Let’s see what else Belinda wants us to do.”

“After I check your bandage.”

I sighed, sank into a chair, and started taking off clothing.

When Darla began removing the bandages from my side, I bit back a scream. I knew it would hurt—it had ever since I’d been shot, but not this badly. The three puncture wounds were swollen and oozing puss. Red streaks radiated from my side like cobwebs.