Ashen Winter

“That’s int—”

“The lever-action rifle was invented in 1849 by Walter Hunt. The first important model was the Spencer Repeating Rifle. It had a seven-shot magazine capacity. It was used during the U.S. Civil War by Union forces only after Abraham Lincoln test fired one in 1863. But it was too late for the rifle to make a significant difference in the war.”

By this time we had reached the remnants of a crushed barn. Ben started rummaging through the rafters while he lectured me. I helped him shift the rubble, having some idea what he was looking for.

“The principle of the lever allowed E. M. Darque to invent a compact can opener used by American troops during World War II. The first military model was called the P-38, developed in 1942. Not long after, an additional model named the P-51 was introduced. Some people believe the can openers were named after the aircraft that share the same designation, but that is a coincidence. The can openers were named for their size; the P-38 was 38 millimeters in length, and the P-51 was 51 millimeters in length.”

We’d found a suitable board—a broken two-by-eight. It was fourteen or fifteen feet long. Ben pried scraps of roof decking off it while he talked. He made it seem effortless—clearly, he was as strong as his size suggested.

Alyssa huffed up and more or less pushed her way between us. “What’s wrong with him?” I whispered.

“Nothing!” she hissed back.

“Why’s he going on and on about levers?” He’d continued talking—now he was giving a long dissertation on the importance of levers to the landing gear and ailerons on F-14 fighter jets. I was pretty much tuning him out.

“It’s his special interest. Not levers, I mean. Anything to do with the military.”

“So he’s one of those, what do you call them? Idiot savants?”

“He’s not an idiot,” she whispered. “He’s smarter than you are. Or me. And he’s the kindest, most gentle—the best big brother anyone could have. Don’t hurt. . . . Just get us somewhere safe. . . . Please?”

“I’ve got to get to Anamosa. But I’ll give you the truck and all the supplies I can spare. You didn’t answer my question, though—what’s he got?”

“Dad called it Autism Spectrum Disorder,” she whispered. “Mom said it was his special blessing, not a disorder. I used to think she was crazy. Before. When Mom and Dad were still alive.”

We had the two-by-eight stripped of all the excess chunks of wood now. There were still about a zillion nails in it, but I didn’t think they’d get in our way. I picked up one end of the rafter and Ben grabbed the other. He was still talking—now it was something about the use of levers in airplane launch-and-retrieval systems aboard aircraft carriers. We trudged back toward the truck. Alyssa walked beside me.

“He wasn’t this bad before the volcano,” she whispered. “Stress makes it harder for him to cope. And there’s been tons.”

“Yeah.” I was quiet for a minute, paying attention to where I placed my feet as we crossed the snow berm. “How did you survive? With the Peckerwoods?”

Alyssa looked away. “I did what I had to. To keep us both safe.”

How could this slight girl protect her overgrown big brother? It should have been the other way around. I didn’t want to think too hard about it.

When we got back to the truck, Alyssa left me to get into the driver’s seat. Ben fed one end of the rafter under the front bumper of the truck and joined me at the other. It would’ve been easier if we could have used the snow berm as a fulcrum, but it was too tall. Ben kept talking about aircraft carriers. He didn’t seem to care or even realize that I wasn’t listening.

Alyssa fired up the truck. The wheels spun in reverse. Ben and I pushed up on the rafter, trying to use the lever to force the truck up and off the snow berm.

We moved the truck an inch . . . then two. The board bowed as we heaved upward on it. Suddenly the rafter snapped. The truck rocked back into place and Ben and I fell, sliding down the snow berm and coming to rest against the front bumper.

The rafter was broken in a jagged line right where it had pushed against the bumper. “I should have placed the lever vertically,” Ben said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “It probably would have been stronger that way.”

We tried using the longer of the two remaining pieces of rafter, but we couldn’t get enough leverage to budge the truck at all. So we all trudged back to the wrecked barn.

We’d taken the easiest rafter the first time. It took twenty or thirty minutes to free another one of the right length and size from the tangled wreckage. I was starting to worry about how long we’d been there. Clevis had long since disappeared over the horizon.

Ben placed the rafter under the bumper—oriented correctly this time, and Alyssa got back in place behind the wheel. As soon as we pushed up on the rafter, we could feel the truck rolling backward. We started rocking it rhythmically. I slid up so my shoulder was jammed under the rafter, and I could use my legs to lift it. Ben and I heaved upward, Alyssa gu

I sprinted across the road. “Don’t get it stuck again!” I yelled.

“I wasn’t trying to!” Alyssa retorted.

“I know. But let me drive, okay?”

“Gladly. Stupid truck.” Alyssa unbuckled her seat belt and scooted to the middle of the bench seat, straddling the gearshift. Ben got in the passenger side, smearing the blood on the seat into his pants. I passed him my backpack to stow under the passenger seat. A bulging daypack already rested under there, but I didn’t want to spend time investigating it at that moment. When I got in, Ben was pulling out the seat belt on his side. It stretched across both his lap and Alyssa’s. I fastened my own seat belt.

Ben put the shotgun in his lap with the barrel pointed toward the passenger door. He bent over it, minutely inspecting some aspect of its workings.

“Will he be okay with that?” I asked Alyssa. What I really needed to know was whether he was likely to accidentally shoot me.

“Safer than you or me. Knows so much about firearms he used to get email from adult collectors who read his blog. Before.”

“How many shells we got?” I said to Ben.

“This is a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. It is the most popular shotgun ever made. Law enforcement and military all over the world use this gun.” Ben tried to pump the shotgun, but the slide wouldn’t operate. “It is loaded.”

“So how many shots are in it?” I asked as I started the truck.

Ben clicked a lever on the side of the gun and started pumping the slide. Chunk-chunk. Chunk-chunk. Each time he pumped the gun a shell flew out, landing in the footwell. “None,” Ben said when he finished.

“None? Those shells are duds?”

“No. There are no shells in the shotgun now. There were five.”

I wanted to throttle him despite the fact that he was roughly twice my size. “Well, reload it, would you?”

“Yes, I would.” Ben started picking up shells off the floorboard.

“You want to test fire one out the window?” I forced the shifter left and down for first gear, lifted off the clutch, and promptly stalled the truck again.

Ben ignored my question, continuing to reload the shotgun.

“He doesn’t shoot guns,” Alyssa said while I restarted the truck. “We took him to a rifle range for his tenth birthday. He was already into all things military then. He fired a .22, put it down, and left the range. He doesn’t like the noise.”

“That’s . . . different.” I stalled the truck once more before I got it in first. Then I pulled out too fast and nearly ran over the corpse we’d left lying in the road.

At last we were rolling down the road away from Anamosa—south, I thought. We’d made it away before Clevis could send a search party from the prison—though if the Peckerwoods sent anyone after us, it would be more like a search-and-destroy party. Ben put the shotgun back in the footwell. He rolled down his window and peered out, twisting his head to look behind us.