Ashen Winter

Max’s temple was firm under my fingertips—which I hoped meant his skull wasn’t broken. I ripped off one of my scarves and pressed it against his head.

“They’re in the south hollow, ru

“This wound is going to have to be sewn up,” I told her.

“I can do it,” Darla said—she’d stitched up a vicious wound in my side last year.

“I think we should get Dr. McCarthy. What if he’s got a concussion or a break I didn’t find?”

“Okay,” she replied.

“Rebecca?” I asked. “You okay?” She didn’t look okay. She was trembling and rubbing her wrists.

“Not really,” she said. “What should I do?”

“Can you run to the woods and get Aunt Caroline and Uncle Paul?”

She took a deep breath. “I’ll be right back.” She took two tentative steps toward the house, and then changed direction, sprinting for the woods.

Max’s blood had already soaked through my scarf. Darla handed me one of hers, and I wrapped it around his head as tightly as I could.

A

“A

“You did?”

“Yeah, I did.” It wasn’t true. I’d thrown up. But I needed A

A

“Your mom and dad will be back soon. Tell them we’ve gone to get the doctor, and we’ll be right back, okay?”

She nodded again. I tied the second scarf around Max’s head, and we carried him into the house and laid him on the floor by the living room fireplace. I grabbed a couple of spare scarves while Darla told A

That’s what I’d dubbed Darla’s snowmobile. She’d built it not long after she finished the gristmill. The snowmobile was a tandem bike frame with a ski attached to the front fork where the tire had been. Darla had scavenged a track off a real snowmobile and installed it in place of the bicycle’s rear wheel. Above that she built a small wooden load bed, almost like a pickup truck’s.

A real snowmobile would have been a lot faster, but we couldn’t get gas. The meager amount still stored in the tanks at Warren’s only gas station was reserved for emergencies.

We’d been using Bikezilla for the last six months to haul kale to Warren to trade for pork. Warren had thousands of frozen hog carcasses stored, since there were several slaughterhouses nearby. Bikezilla wasn’t as fast as a real bicycle, but it could handle deep snow okay, and the load bed could carry plenty of pork. On the icy road to Warren, it was at least twice as fast as ru

Darla and I stood up on the bike for the whole trip, kicking the pedals down. We had no extra breath for talking. My side hurt where the shotgun pellets had hit, and I felt a warm spot of blood soaking into my T-shirt. I gritted my teeth and ignored it.

Darla and I slid up to the clinic, beating our previous best time to Warren by five or six minutes. I could tell Dr. McCarthy was in because I saw his ’41 Studebaker Champion parked around back.

We charged into the small, one-story clinic. Dr. McCarthy was in an exam room, chatting with a patient by the light of an oil lamp. When I told him what was wrong, he got his assistant to take over. “You want to ride along?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “We’ll ride back. I don’t want to leave Bikezilla.” I didn’t think it would get stolen in Warren, but I didn’t want to take that chance, either.

By the time we got back to the farm, Dr. McCarthy was almost done stitching up Max. Aunt Caroline was assisting him. The injured side of Max’s head had been shaved. He was biting down on a leather-wrapped stick, since Dr. McCarthy had run out of painkillers months ago. I wondered if it was the same stick that Uncle Paul had bitten when Dr. McCarthy had set his broken leg the year before. The leather was scarred by dozens of bite marks.

“He okay?” I asked.

“Seems to be,” Aunt Caroline answered. Dr. McCarthy was concentrating on his stitches. “He might be concussed. Although with Max, how would you know if his brains were scrambled?” She was smiling as she said it, but unbidden tears spilled from her eyes.

“Maybe instead of scrambling his brains the bullet knocked them back into working order,” I said.

“I’m still here,” Max grunted through clenched teeth.

“I know you are, honey.” The gratitude in Aunt Caroline’s voice was palpable.

“A leather-wrapped stick is a pretty crappy birthday present,” I said.

Max grunted. I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or just a

Aunt Caroline broke the short silence. “Max said you just walked up to those bandits, Alex.”

“Pretty much.”

“That was stupid.”

“Yeah. But I knew Darla was getting help. I’m just lucky she decided to get the rifle instead of going to get you guys.”

Dr. McCarthy tied off the last stitch in Max’s head.

“Hey, Doc, can you take a look at my side?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with your side?” Darla said.

“Well, that shotgun—”

“You got hit? And you didn’t tell me?” She was practically yelling.

“I thought you could tell from the holes in my coat.”

“Shut up. Your clothing’s so ragged nobody’d notice a few extra holes. And we rode all the way to—lie down on that couch right now, you jerk!”

I obeyed. When Darla was that angry, doing anything else was insane.

She started stripping my clothing, muttering all the while, “Stupid, pigheaded, obstinate, obnoxious, oviparous, egg-sucking boy.” I both laid and sucked eggs? That didn’t make sense. Whatever.

Most of the shotgun pellets hadn’t penetrated my five layers of clothing. I had eight or nine purplish bruises and three blood-encrusted holes on the side of my belly. All three holes were below the huge, horseshoe-shaped scar where Darla had stitched up the hatchet wound a prison escapee named Target had inflicted on me the year before.

“What, are you collecting scars on that side of your body?” Darla said.

“I guess.”

“Well, quit. The spot I stitched up is enough.”

“That’s a pretty rough-looking patch job,” Dr. McCarthy commented.

Darla scowled. “Like to see you do better with an old sewing needle.”

“I probably couldn’t.” Dr. McCarthy took the leather-wrapped stick from Max, wiped it on a cloth, and gave it to me to bite. He dropped a scalpel and scissor-like pair of tongs he called a hemostat into a pan of water boiling over the living room fire. While we waited for his tools to be sterilized, he gently wiped away the dried blood on my side.

When he slit the side of the first wound, it didn’t hurt much. But then he started digging around in the hole. Tears leaked from my eyes. When he got the hemostat clamped on the pellet and pulled it free, I just about launched off the couch to slug him. Darla grabbed my hand, and I clung to her, trying not to move. Then we had to repeat the whole procedure. Twice.

Dr. McCarthy didn’t stitch up the holes. He just put a bandage over them and taped it in place. “Guess you all get a bulk discount today.”

“I guess.” Aunt Caroline sighed. “I’ll get you some supplies.”

“Got any eggs?”

“A few. Some goat meat, too.” Aunt Caroline stood up.

“Where’s everybody else?” Darla asked.

“Out by the greenhouses,” Aunt Caroline answered.

“I’ll go see if Paul needs help,” Darla said.

“Let me get dressed,” I said. “I’ll come, too.”