Ashen Winter

I still felt as if I were inching along the edge of a one-hundred-foot cliff. There were no guns pointed at us now, but they were still armed, and we weren’t. “Can I have my stuff back?” I asked Brand.

He looked at his father, who shook his head.

“You all weren’t pla

“We’re headed to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

“Huh, probably nothing there. Morley, Olin, and Mechanicsville’s all been ransacked. Not a living soul in any of ’em. No dead people, either, ’less you count bones already cracked and sucked dry of their marrow. We visited, hopin’ to trade.” Mary Sue stepped closer to us as she talked. Her teeth shone yellow in the firelight. Each tooth was outlined in blood.

“Worthington was fine a week ago,” I said. “Your gums are bleeding. You have scurvy?”

“Yeah. No fresh food. Girls got it worse.”

“Girls?” Alyssa said.

“Alba and Joy,” Mary Sue said. “They’re hidden. Safe.”

I rummaged through my pack. Eli readied his rifle, eyeing me suspiciously. I was ru

“It’s okay. I’m just getting dandelion leaves.” I handed the bag to Mary Sue. “They’re bitter, but they have vitamin C. That’s all I have left.”

She pulled a leaf out of the bag and bit it. “Fresh greens. Didn’t think I’d live to taste them again. Where’d you get them?” She whispered the question, as if she were asking where I’d learned the secret nature of God, not where I’d picked up some weeds.

“Worthington. They grow ’em in cold frames.”

“You got any seeds?” Eli lowered his rifle. “We could make cold frames out of some of our windows.”

“Yeah, that’s how they do it in Worthington. I don’t have any dandelion seeds, but I can do you one better. I’ve got kale seeds. Good winter variety. It can even come back from a freeze, if it isn’t too hard or too long. Four times as much vitamin C as dandelion.”

“And where’d that miracle come from?”

“Warren, Illinois. It’s home now, I guess. We grow kale in greenhouses.” I reached into my jacket and pulled open the bag in my pocket without taking it out. I didn’t want them to see how many packets of kale seeds I had. I slid out one envelope.

Eli accepted the envelope I offered him. “You came all the way from Illinois?”

“Yeah. Now can I have my weapons back?”

Eli nodded slowly. “Brand, give the man his gun and knife, then fetch your sisters from the cellar.” He set his rifle aside and fed the fire.

The girls were both younger than Brand. They reminded me of a bed of spring wildflowers I’d seen once after a flood. You could tell they were beautiful, even if they were beaten down and coated in filth.

Mary Sue carefully split the dandelion leaves into five portions. I noticed that Eli got less than the kids, and Mary Sue got barely any at all. While they ate, we traded stories. I told the saga of my trip from Illinois: how we’d found the shotgun, Blue Betsy, that had spurred this crazy trip to find my parents. Losing Bikezilla in the Mississippi. I choked on my words as I told them about Darla getting shot.

When I finished, Eli said, “Used to have a lot of trouble with the Peckerwoods ourselves. Had one visit from another gang, called ’emselves the Dirty White Boys. Haven’t seen either of them in almost two months—figured they’d run out of gas.”

“How’d you survive a visit from the Peckerwoods?”

“Same way we did when you came. Hid in the root cellar. Could hear ’em shouting and carousing upstairs. We keep everything important down there so we can hide at a moment’s notice. Speaking of which, we’d best post a lookout again. Alba, it’s your turn.”

“Yes, Papi,” she said in her little girl soprano as she hurried away.

“You’ve been down there two days? I checked the basement—I didn’t see any root cellar.”

“We moved the furnace to block the door. And yeah, we would have stayed down there ’til you left, but one of the dang pigs got out last night.”

“You keep pigs down there?”

“Can’t keep ’em up here, can we? Anyone comes, that’d give us away fer sure—plus we’d lose valuable food. Anyway, I figured the stupid thing would wake you up, so we came up loaded for bear and found you all hibernatin’.”

“How’d you keep the pigs quiet?”

“Well we didn’t, did we? Used to feed ‘em Nyquil, but we’re out.”

I glared at Alyssa.

“I already said I was sorry.”

I turned back to Eli. “You haven’t slaughtered the pigs for meat?”

“I’m saving a few. To breed. When things start to turn around.”

“What do you feed them?”

“Corn and soybeans. All the farms around here are abandoned—there’s more crops left under the snow and ash than we can dig up.”

I shook my head in amazement. Not only were they surviving, they were preparing for a posteruption future.

Eli was staring at me in a thoughtful way. He turned toward his wife, “Y’know, we could use more hands. ’Specially if we got to try farmin’ kale.”

“I’m not staying,” I said. “I’m going after Darla.”

“Going up against those gangs’ll get you killed in a hurry.”

I shrugged. Eli turned his gaze toward Alyssa.

“She can’t stay. Not on her ownsome,” Mary Sue hissed at him.

“I’m trying to get to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

“We just need to get the tire on our truck changed, and we’ll be on our way. You got a jack here?”

“Buried out in the shed, yeah. Might take days to dig it out, though.”

“Crap. I need to get moving.”

“Could probably rig something up, do the same work as a jack. Some levers and blocks, maybe.”

“Sounds good.”

“How’re you payin’ for the work?”

“Um, kale seeds?”

“That’s your rent money for staying here. What else you got?”

I thought for a moment. “There’re some crates in the back of the truck. We only opened two, but one of them had shotgun shells in it. You get the tire changed, and I’ll split the truck’s load fifty-fifty with you. Ammo’s worth a fortune if you can find someone to trade with.”

Mary Sue cupped her hands around Eli’s ear, whispering something.

He recoiled from her, a growl rattling from his throat. “We do that, we ain’t no better than the Peckerwoods.”

I watched them carefully, looking away only when Mary Sue shot me a murderous glare. Why was she hating on me? I hadn’t done anything.

Getting the truck jacked up and the tire changed took most of the day. First we had to bend the wheel well away from the tire using a wrecking bar Eli provided. We made a long, heavy lever out of a pair of two-by-ten rafters scavenged from the barn. Then we spent hours digging up patio pavers from the frozen ground at the back of the house to use as a fulcrum and blocks.

Improvising a makeshift tire iron was much easier—we used an adjustable wrench and a length of galvanized iron pipe cut from the basement.

We still had to actually jack up the truck. We wedged our lever under the truck just behind the blown wheel and stacked pavers under it to use as a fulcrum. More than twelve feet of the lever protruded from under the truck, angled upward so steeply that we had to reach above our heads to grab it. Using the lever, Eli, Ben, and I could raise the corner of the truck by ourselves, even though I was only using my left arm. We couldn’t raise it very far, though. Brand rushed to stack pavers under the truck. Then we let the truck back down and reset our fulcrum to lift it again. It took seven or eight lifts to finally get the truck high enough to swap the tires. Then we had to lift the truck again while Brand cleared all the blocks out from under it.

“You ready to split up the load?” Eli said.