Ashen Winter

“Whatever.”

“You going to let me go?”

“Not right now.”

“Let me go!” Brick was yelling now. I grabbed my T-shirt from the ground and gagged him again.

I searched his pockets, finding a billfold with a bunch of worn photos of guys on motorcycles, a handful of heads for socket wrenches, and a rock with eyes and a mouth painted on it.

I kept searching, starting with the minivan. It was hard to see—the fire had almost burnt out. I went back to the front of the shed and peeked out the door—everything outside was dark and still. There was a small pile of wood near the fire, so I threw two logs on. As it flared back to life, I saw a bundle of crude torches beside Brick’s filthy sleeping bag.

I lit a torch and resumed my search. Besides the keys, I needed a map—or some way to figure out how to get from Cascade, where I was, to Anamosa, where they’d sent Darla.

A quick pass through the maintenance shed didn’t reveal anything useful, so I settled in for a serious search. I probably spent a half hour just on the minivan. I searched the glove compartment, under the hood, under the seats, in the compartment where the spare tire used to be, inside all the cup holders—everywhere I could think of. I found three water-stained salt packets, a fossilized French fry, and an old maintenance log.

I moved on, searching each of the five snowmobiles, the pickup truck, and the tool bench. My torch burned down, and I had to swap it for a new one. It seemed like I’d been searching for hours.

The only place I hadn’t looked was the meat locker. It didn’t seem a likely place to hide anything. And I would have preferred a hatchet wound in my side to spending more time in that horrific abattoir. But I had little choice. I turned toward it, torch in hand.

A woman’s gravelly voice boomed from outside the shed. “Brick, you lazy sonofabitch! Why ain’t you built up the fire for breakfast?”

I dropped my torch, stamped out its flames, and threw myself to the ground. A heavy woman wrapped in a huge, shapeless gray coat stepped into the shed. She kicked Brick’s sleeping bag and harrumphed. Then she turned and started feeding the fire.

While her attention was on the fire, I belly-crawled behind the minivan. Brick was making a low trumpeting sound, trying to shout around his gag. I put my elbow on his throat and leaned down until he got the message.

Another woman trudged through the shed’s doors. “What, Brick ain’t built the fire up?”

“He ain’t even here, lazy sonofabitch.”

“Well, where’d he get to?”

“The hell should I know? Guy’s so dumb he probably went out to piss and forgot where his own pecker was.”

Brick moaned around the gag. I jabbed my elbow against his throat again, and he shut up even before I had to press down.

The first woman said, “Fetch some belly meat, would ya?”

“Mmm, bacon.” The second woman left the fire, heading toward the door of the meat locker. I pulled my head behind the minivan.

I heard a clatter as the door to the meat locker opened. There was a long silence. I crouched behind the minivan on my hands and knees, ready to spring up to run or fight.

The door clattered again as the woman shut it and jammed the ratchet back in place. I let out the breath I’d been holding and relaxed—the fire was a lot farther from my hiding place than the door to the meat locker.

As the women cooked, more people started to straggle into the shed. They all stayed near the fire, which made sense—it was freezing in my hiding place at the far corner of the shed. But how was I going to get out of here? The only exit was through the big sliding doors—right where the fire was. I peeked out. There were now ten guys and five women clustered around the fire.

I was trapped.

Chapter 37

I thought through my options. That didn’t take long—I could sit, wait, and hope not to be discovered, or try to make a break for it, in which case I’d almost certainly be caught and killed. I could get caught immediately or later. I sat tight, choosing later, although waiting made my stomach clench with fear. What was happening to Darla?

The meat sizzled over the fire. It smelled like bacon—if I hadn’t known what it was, the smell might have made me hungry. As it was, I wondered if I’d ever be able to eat meat again.

I tried to listen in on their conversation as they ate, but with all of them talking at once, it was hard to make out what they were saying. Someone mentioned Brick’s absence. The cook repeated her joke—that he’d wandered off to pee and forgotten where his thing was—and everyone laughed and dropped the subject. I also gathered that Ace, the boss of this group, was gone but expected back today.

After breakfast, four of the guys mounted two of the snowmobiles and roared out of the shed. That still left six guys and five women. The guys dragged a rickety table and some folding chairs near the fire and sat around playing cards.

The women put a huge steel tub on a metal rack at one side of the fire. Then they all trooped in and out of the shed, carrying bucket loads of snow to fill the tub. The men didn’t help at all—just kept playing cards. That seemed awfully sexist to me, but I guessed they weren’t the enlightened kind of ca

After a while, I figured out what the tub was for: washing clothes. The women put another tub over the fire next to the first one and filled it with snow, as well. One of them dumped some Tide—where they’d found laundry soap was beyond me—and a load of clothing in the first tub and started scrubbing. The second tub was the rinse water. They were scrubbing the clothing with a serrated wooden stick, wringing it out by hand, and hanging it on a line strung near the fire to dry. It reminded me of how back at Uncle Paul’s farm, we’d found an old-time washboard someone had been using as a percussion instrument before the volcano. And we wrung out our clothes with a machine Darla built—you pushed down on a lever, and it used a series of gears to amplify the force—clothes came out of that wringer almost dry.

My hand was in my pocket—I realized I’d been ru

I checked on Brick. He looked asleep—or maybe dead. But when I put my hand against his nose, I could feel him breathing. I’d kept him awake most of the night—hopefully he’d sleep quietly for a while.

The card game got boisterous. The women were yelling back and forth to each other, too, so I couldn’t make out what any of them were saying in the general hubbub. But at least the din would cover any noise Brick or I made.

The women had just started their fourth tub of laundry when one of the men facing the shed’s door shouted, “Ace’s back.” They laid down their cards and jumped up to heave on the sliding metal doors, opening them wider. A blast of frigid air blew in, shuffling up some of the cards and eliciting howls of protest from the men.

The cloth-topped truck started backing into the shed alongside the fire. The women rushed to move their clotheslines.

When the truck was fully inside, two men hopped out of the cab. The guys instantly crowded around the driver, clasping his forearm and bumping his shoulder in greeting. When the clamor of hellos died down, I heard one of them say, “Yo, Ace, what’d Da

“You won’t believe me unless I show you.” Ace strutted to the back of the truck, untied the canvas flap, and pulled it away with a theatrical flourish. “Reinforcements!”