Ashen Winter

There was a low, flat shelf at the top of the slope. The girders were at least five feet high—I could stand upright in between them. “Let’s stop here for the night,” I said.

“We’re still too close to Cascade,” Darla whispered.

“It’s sheltered here and hidden. We’re going to freeze if we keep going.”

I lay down on the concrete floor of our hidey hole. It was intensely cold, chilling my side almost immediately. I wanted a fire for warmth and to cook more wheat, but the flames would have stood out like a beacon. Darla lay next to me, and I wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close. We were both shivering. Darla pushed back against me until we were sandwiched together as close as any two people who still have all their clothes on can be. Eventually our shivers subsided, and I fell into a fitful sleep.

In the morning, I woke to the rattle of gunfire.

Chapter 27

I elbowed Darla, but she was already awake. The pop-pop of gunfire was faint, coming from our north, the direction of Worthington, but drawing steadily closer. I could barely make out the muted roar of distant engines, but that noise wasn’t tied to a direction; it seemed to be coming from all around us.

I peered to the north. The light was good—we’d slept at least an hour past dawn, but I couldn’t yet locate the source of the noises. “Let’s move,” I whispered.

“Yeah.” Darla rolled over and started crawling to the north, away from Cascade and toward the gunfire.

“The other way,” I hissed.

Darla kept going. “We need to know what’s happening.”

The gunfire grew louder as we reached the edge of the overpass. A few miles off, a line of trucks raced directly toward us.

“They’re going to pass right through here,” I whispered. “Let’s get on top of the overpass and hide.”

We turned around and crawled as quickly as we could toward the other side of the overpass. There were two bridges above us—both sides of a divided highway with a gap in between. I forced my way through the snow that had fallen between the bridges and wormed to the south side of the overpass. Peeking out, I discovered why the engine sounds seemed to be coming from all around us. Another line of four vehicles was barreling toward us from Cascade to our south. They were small and low, each one kicking up a plume of snow into the air behind it.

“Snowmobiles,” Darla said. “Christ.”

As we watched, the snowmobiles spread out to surround the south side of the overpass in a rough semicircle. The one closest to us stopped, and the two men riding it dismounted and pulled long guns from a saddlebag. They wore military-style fatigues and camo jackets.

“Let’s go!” I tugged on Darla’s jacket. We crawled as quickly as we could back to the center of the overpass. When I reached the break between the bridges, I darted out from under the ledge and started clawing my way upward through the deep snow on the embankment.

I scrabbled with my arms and pumped my legs in and out of the snow, high-stepping, thrusting with panic-fueled urgency. It probably only took us ten seconds to race up the slope, but it seemed like forever. I hurled myself over the snowbank that edged the road atop the overpass. Darla crashed into me a second later.

“What the hell is going on?” Darla asked.

“No idea.” I dashed onto the bridge and peered over the snow berm to the north. The gunfire had gotten louder. Four trucks raced along the road in a column, only a few hundred yards from us and approaching fast. The closest was a modern pickup, followed immediately by a cloth-topped, army-style deuce-and-a-half. After the cloth-topped truck there was a gap, then came two ancient pickups—the type with big rounded fenders and small wooden load beds.

Both the antique trucks were packed with men wearing a ragged array of clothing—five or six squeezed into the back of each truck. Two guys on the closer of the old pickups were leaning over the top of the cab, firing rifles at the deuce in front of them. I thought I saw the muzzle flash of returned fire but couldn’t be sure.

“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s an ambush. The first two trucks are luring the old pickups through the overpass. On the other side all those guys on snowmobiles are perfectly set up to massacre them.”

“Great,” Darla replied. “We’d better hide and sneak out of here when it’s all over.”

The guys on the old pickups looked like farmers to me, and they were driving into a bandit ambush. I clenched my fists. “We’ve got to stop it.”

“Alex, wait—”

I scrambled to the top of the snow berm and stood up. It was a long drop in front of me down the far side of the berm and off the edge of the bridge. I wavered a moment, then started yelling and waving my arms.

“Get down, you idiot!” Darla screamed. She started scrambling up the snow berm toward me.

All four trucks roared toward us. I pointed at the first old pickup and held my arms out, palms forward, in a gesture to stop.

A spray of snow kicked up beside my feet and the pop of a gunshot sounded from my left. The first pickup roared under the bridge directly below me. I glanced to my left. I could barely see one of the guys from the snowmobiles lying atop the snow berm a couple hundred yards off, pointing a rifle at me.

I felt Darla’s hands grab my right arm. She wrenched me around, throwing me down. I heard another gunshot. Darla exhaled heavily—a quiet “oof.” A red stain bloomed on her right shoulder and everything slowed around me. Her knees crumpled, and she slid down the outside of the snow berm. I lunged toward her. Snow plumed into the air beside me, and another gunshot sounded. I grabbed for her. My hand caught in her hair. It tore from her scalp, and Darla slipped away.

Chapter 28

Darla fell from the overpass and landed on her back with a whump of compressed fabric on the roof of the cloth-top deuce passing underneath us. My scarf followed her, twisting in the wind. I teetered on top of the snow berm for a split second, afraid to jump after her, a hesitation I would regret for the rest of my life. I was left holding a clump of her hair and the necklace I’d given her, now broken. The truck passed under the bridge. And she was gone.

I ran for the south side of the overpass, hoping to catch the truck there. As I ran, I jammed the broken necklace into the pocket of my coveralls. The situation seemed impossible. I couldn’t run as fast as the truck was moving, let alone cross the gap between the lanes of the highway in time.

Something punched my right arm, and I heard another gunshot. The impact spun me partway around and knocked me off balance. To my west, the guy with the rifle was aiming, lining up yet another shot at me. Ru

I heard another gunshot, but didn’t feel or see anything. A miss. When I reached the northern edge of the overpass, I scrambled up the snow berm and threw myself over the other side. I slid face first down the snow berm and then down the long embankment to the base of the overpass. Flecks of snow flew into my eyes and ice abraded my cheek.

The two old pickups had pulled up and stopped north of the overpass. A guy jumped out of the lead truck’s load bed and ran up to me. I pushed to my feet and turned to run to follow the cloth-topped truck with its precious cargo under the bridge. My red scarf was pooled on the icy road. The guy grabbed me. Pain so intense that my fingertips tingled shot through me when his fingers closed around my right arm. I fought down dizziness and tried to pull away.

“Why were you trying to signal us?” the man demanded.

“Let go!” I tried to punch, aiming for his radial nerve. He caught my other arm before my punch could co