Ashen Winter

“Wow,” Alyssa said, looking at my right arm. It was a swollen mass of purple-blue bruises. She gently lifted my arm. Even my armpit was bruised. Alyssa ran her fingers lightly over the horseshoe-shaped scar at the base of my ribcage. “What’s that from?”

“A bandit—flenser, I guess, got me with a hatchet last year.”

“And you survived.”

“I killed him,” I said flatly.

“And those?” She touched one of the round scabs on my belly.

“Shotgun pellets.”

Her fingers wandered to my chest, tracing my pecs, which had gotten considerably larger over the months of nonstop farm work and physically challenging lifestyle, to put it mildly. “You’re strong,” she said.

I pulled away from her fingers and reached out to stir the corn porridge. “It’s ready.”

“I’m not sure what to do about your arm. It doesn’t seem like anything’s broken.”

I shrugged my left shoulder.

“Maybe I should strap it to your side? Or make a sling? It might heal faster if you can’t move it.”

“No,” I said. “I can move it a little. If anything happens, I might need it. Just help me put my clothes back on.”

She didn’t respond right away. She was staring at me—at the bruises on my arm, maybe, or maybe at my chest. Her eyes weren’t on my face, that was for sure. I wasn’t used to having a girl look at me that way—well, Darla had, sometimes.

I picked up my T-shirt and held it out toward her.

“If you go back to Anamosa, you’re going to die. There’s more than a hundred Peckerwoods there,” she said as she helped me struggle into my T-shirt.

“Darla needs me.”

“She’ll be—well, they won’t kill her. She’s young and pretty. Valuable.”

“They can’t have her. I’m going to go get her. I’d leave now if I could.”

Alyssa’s eyes shone in the firelight.

“Hey. I’ll just get close. Then you and Ben can have the truck—drive yourselves to Worthington. You’ll be safe there.” I sent up a silent prayer that Worthington hadn’t been overrun, that Rita Mae and even Mayor Kenda were still okay.

“You’re a tough guy, aren’t you?” Alyssa said.

“Not really,” I replied. “You’re pretty tough. You survived being captured by the Peckerwoods. Kept your brother alive.”

Alyssa started softly crying. I looked at Ben—he was immersed in systematically chopping and sorting wood, oblivious to his sister. I reached out and wrapped an arm around her, drawing her into an awkward, one-armed hug. “Hey, it’s okay. You’ll be all right now,” I told her.

She clung to me. Her tears ran down my shoulder, and her arm hurt me where it pressed against my bruises. She smelled musky, salty—exciting, somehow. Her scent reminded me of Darla. Suddenly I was crying, too.

We held onto each other for a minute. Then I smelled something burning. I broke our hug and snatched the pot off the fire. Alyssa helped me get dressed while our lunch cooled.

We ate all the corn mush, even the burnt bits. I was utterly exhausted. I asked Alyssa to keep watch, tucked a pair of pants under my head, and fell asleep curled in front of the fire.

Chapter 56

When I awoke, Alyssa was up, cooking corn porridge for breakfast while Ben tended the fire. “Why didn’t you wake me up to take a turn on watch?” I asked.

“There was no need,” she said.

“You stayed up all night? You want to sleep now?”

“No. I couldn’t stay up.”

“Somebody should have kept watch.”

“Nothing happened,” she replied.

I grunted, mildly disgusted but unwilling to continue arguing.

After breakfast, I struggled to my feet. “I’m going to check the barn.”

“You can barely move,” Alyssa protested.

“There might be something useful out there. Maybe a jack.” I took a faltering step toward the door.

Alyssa got up and tucked herself under my left shoulder. “I’ll help.”

“Shouldn’t you stay with Ben?”

“He’s fine.”

We stumbled outside with my arm slung over her shoulders for support. A rusted tractor sat in the center of the barn. In one corner there was a huge pile of brown-and-yellow cornhusks, useless except to feed to goats or pigs.

On the way back, I looked into the bed of our truck. The wooden crates were a jumbled mess. “What’s in the crates?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Alyssa answered. “The Peckerwoods loaded them before they loaded us.”

“Help me get up there.”

Alyssa let down the tailgate and boosted me up. I hacked at the nearest crate with my hatchet. Opening it one-handed proved to be difficult—I struggled fruitlessly for fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally I got the blade of the hatchet jammed under the lid and used the handle as a lever.

Inside, it was full of steel chains. I picked one up—it was really four chains with manacles attached, identical to the set Ben had been wearing. The key was affixed to one of the manacles with a strip of duct tape.

I hacked open another box. It was packed with neat rows of identical brown paperboard boxes. I opened the flap of one at random. Gleaming rows of brass shotgun shells, stacked upright, filled the box. There must have been one hundred shells in that one box. Thousands in the whole crate.

“Too bad I lost the shotgun,” I said. “Anyway, I guess we’re rich.”

“Those are worth a lot?” Alyssa asked.

“Yeah. A fortune—if we can find someone to trade with. I was hoping the barn would have something we could use as a jack and maybe a wrench.”

“Can’t we just drive real slow?”

“Yeah. But it would take all day to get to Worthington that way. You’d run out of gas.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we can cut a beam out of the barn. Use it as a lever to lift one side of the truck and block it up.”

“Will that work?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see any way to try it right now, as beat up as I am. I wish Darla were here. She’d know how to do it.”

“She was good with trucks?”

“Yeah. She’s a wizard with any kind of machine.” I turned from Alyssa to hide the trembling in my lip.

“She’ll be okay. The Peckerwoods . . . well, the crazy ones, the most brutal ones, they’re already dead. The guys that are left . . . some of them are plenty nasty, but they’re smart, too. They won’t kill her. They won’t destroy something that has value.”

Something. That word sparked my fury. It filled me like the deep breath you take before a scream. But the Peckerwoods weren’t Alyssa’s fault. She hadn’t created this ash-cursed world. I swallowed on my anger. “You’re not really helping,” I said as mildly as I could manage. “Oh. Sorry.”

• • •

We spent the rest of the day cooking, eating, and resting. Just the short walk out to the barn and truck had left me exhausted, and I couldn’t do anything but sleep. The weakness in my body infuriated me. Darla might be suffering far worse than I, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d abused my body so badly that I couldn’t keep going, no matter how much I wanted to—I was completely out of gas.

After di

As they arranged themselves around the fire to sleep, I wondered how I was going to know when to wake Alyssa. In the past, sometimes I’d paced, counting steps and estimating time that way. Now, I was too weak to pace.

I started counting slowly on my fingers, trying to time a second per finger. As I tapped my pinky against the floor, a nursery rhyme came to mind, unbidden: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. . . .” I started muttering the rhyme instead of counting.

Reciting the nursery rhyme brought my mother to mind. She used to singsong it with my sister and me, grabbing our toes and wiggling them with each line of the poem. In my worry for Darla, I’d almost forgotten about Mom and Dad. They were the reason we’d left Warren, the reason Darla got shot. Just a week ago, I’d been determined to find them. Now, leaving Warren seemed like a stupid idea. The dumbest thing I’d ever done.