Ashen Winter

The guy was silent.

“Which one of you is in charge?”

“I ain’t tellin’ you shee-it,” he replied with a cocky smile.

“Make sure he can’t kick you again,” Dad said to me.

I moved to the side, out of kicking range. Dad seized the guy’s pinkie in his fist and bent it sharply upward. It made a sickening snap as it broke, and the bandit screamed. I turned away. This was my father, the same guy who had never wanted to watch “CSI” on TV because it was too gory?

I heard a slap and looked back in time to see Dad pull his hand away from the side of the guy’s head. “Now quit screaming! What’s your name?”

“Shawn,” he gasped.

“You have any other weapons?”

“Ain’t allowed to bring no others.”

“Not allowed by who? Why? Who’s in charge?”

“I can’t—”

Dad grabbed his ring finger. This time he had to work to peel it away from Shawn’s fist. But it snapped as easily as the pinkie. Shawn screamed again. My chest heaved, and I tasted bile. “You’ve got eight more chances to tell me,” Dad stated. The calmness of his voice terrified me, and I wasn’t the one having my fingers broken.

“Cody . . . Cody’s in charge.” Shawn was panting. “Can’t bring guns in, case this happens and you get ’em.”

“Where are you all from?”

“I was in Anamosa when the volcano blew.”

“And now?”

Shawn hesitated, and Dad started peeling his middle finger off his fist. “Quit!” he yelled. “Iowa City!”

“So you’re in one of the prison gangs?”

“Yeah.” Tears were streaking the dirt on Shawn’s face.

“Which one?” There was a long pause.

“Ah, fu—” He screamed as Dad snapped his middle finger, interrupting whatever he was going to say. “You could have just looked at my tats.”

“Where?” Dad asked.

“Over my heart.”

Dad looked at me, and I pulled the guy’s coat and shirts up. Tattooed across his chest in an ugly blue color in fancy script were the letters DWB inside an outline of the state of Iowa.

“What’s it mean?” Dad asked.

“Dirty White Boys,” Shawn managed to say with a strut in his voice that was strange, given the tears streaking his face.

“You sure qualify on the dirty part,” I said. He stunk.

“How’d you get into the camp?” Dad asked.

“Just kill me now. Cody’ll flense me if he finds out I answered that.”

Dad peeled his index finger back, and Shawn groaned. It snapped with a sound like a branch breaking, and Shawn’s groan morphed into a scream. “Cody’s not here. I am,” Dad said. “You’re going to tell me everything I want to know. Either now or after I’ve broken your other six fingers.”

Shawn was sobbing now. “Just . . . break them all, then.”

“Goddamn it, I’m not playing!” Dad yelled. “Give me that knife, Alex.”

I couldn’t believe what was happening. My teeth clicked as I closed my mouth. “W-why? What’re you going to do with it?”

“Now!” Dad ordered, his rage barely contained.

I flipped the knife and handed it to him butt first. He grasped the hilt in his right hand and seized the tip of Shawn’s pinkie in his left. The knife flashed as he lowered it, sawing into Shawn’s finger. The icy ground under my feet reached up through my body, freezing me in place.

Dad was still sawing at the finger as Shawn screamed. The knife found the break in the pinkie and sliced through. Blood poured out the stump, splattering Dad’s trousers. He stepped around Shawn, got right in his tear-stained face, and hollered, “You like that, you goddamn ca

My icy immobility shattered, and I lashed out, striking Dad’s wrist. The finger went flying, hitting the side of the tent with a thump. “What the hell!” I shouted. “This isn’t us! This isn’t you! Stop it!”

Dad’s face was twisted by some kind of sick, almost gleeful rage. “Oh, we lost your finger,” he cooed to Shawn. “I know where we can get nine more.” He lifted the knife and stepped behind Shawn.

As he seized Shawn’s broken ring finger, Shawn blubbered, “No. Stop. . . . The DWBs, we have a deal with some of the guards.”

“A deal?” Dad asked.

“They let us in and out.”

“In return for what?”

“We bring them supplies. Drugs, booze, food. Let them do the girls sometimes.”

“What happens to the people you take?”

“Flense most of them. We keep some of the girls to trade.”

I thought of Darla. If she was still alive, she was in the hands of a gang like this one. I stumbled out of the tent and vomited.

Through the wall of the tent, I heard Dad saying, “Which guards work with you?”

Shawn gave him about a dozen names. Then he asked in a tremulous voice, “You going to flense me now?”

“I haven’t decided,” Dad replied. The tent flap rustled, and he strode past me.

I hurried to catch up and grabbed his arm. “What the hell was that?”

“That’s the world we live in now.”

I swung him to face me. “No. You’re blaming the world for choices you made.”

Dad tried to pull away. “That’s just the way things are now.”

There was a wet, choking sound behind me and a thump. “What was that?”

“Jones. Taking care of the flenser.” He said “flenser” like it was the vilest curse word ever invented.

Jones pushed through the tent flap, carrying the light in one hand and awkwardly dragging Shawn in the other. She was bent almost double, straining against his bulk. A trail of blood followed Shawn’s head. His throat had been cut. “What . . .why?”

“They’re flensers,” Dad said flatly. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect those under my care from the likes of him. Whatever. I’ve got no apologies to make. Now let go of me, son.”

“What’re you going to do?” I asked.

“Take care of the rest of the flensers,” Dad replied. “Go help Jones with that offal.”

“So you kill the other three ca

“Three fewer flensers in the world.”

“And they send four other guys. Or forty. It gets us nothing.”

“So what? We let them go?”

Part of me wanted to say forget it, they deserved to die. To let Dad do whatever he wanted to the other three. I didn’t really care what happened to them. But I did care about Dad, about what he was becoming. Or had already become. “What if we let one of them go? Would they trade something for the other two?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said. “What do they have that we’d even want?”

“An end to the raids on the camp would be a good start.”

“We can’t trust the DWBs. And some other gang might start raiding, instead.”

“Yeah. You know, it’s not the gangs. It’s Black Lake. We need some way to stop them from letting gangs into the camp, period. Can we report them to someone? Call their HQ?”

“There’s no cell network anymore. Maybe a shortwave radio. I’ve heard that’s how Black Lake stays in touch with Washington.”

“Can you keep two of them hidden while we work out a trade?”

“Maybe,” Dad shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, we go with plan A and slit their filthy throats.”

The three live flensers were called Trey, Darrell, and Cody, who was the boss. We released Trey with a message: Bring a shortwave radio transceiver and an extra set of batteries to camp, and we’ll free Cody and Darrell. Continue raiding, or tell Black Lake we have captives, and we’ll slit the two guys’ throats without a second thought. For good measure, Dad retrieved the bloody, dirty pinkie stub and told Trey to take it along—to let his bosses know we were serious.

After releasing Trey, Dad went to help move our captives to new tents, and I returned to the tent I shared with Dad. I lay down but didn’t sleep. It was after dawn by then, and the tent flap let in a sliver of light. It let in a frigid breeze, too, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and tie it tighter. Instead I stared into the light while my thoughts churned my brain to mush.