Ashen Winter

I was still trying to sleep when Dad finally came in. “You’re awake,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He started to take off his boots. “Look, I—”

“You don’t owe me an explanation,” I said, staring through him toward the sliver of light now blocked by his body.

“I was just doing what I had to.”

“Bullshit. You cut off a guy’s finger and tried to make him eat it, Dad.”

He turned his back toward me. “Yeah,” he said quietly.

I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding.

“You remember what I did before the volcano,” Dad said.

“CAD/CAM drafting. So what?”

“I didn’t always do that. I’ve got a civil engineering degree. Got a great job right out of college. Just what I’d always wanted to do. Designing sewer systems might not sound like fun to most people, but I loved it. The flow dynamics, the treatment ponds—it all has to come together like the sections of symphony. Brown water comes in, and clean water comes out. There’s a beauty to it if you can see it.”

“You never talked about that.”

“No. I designed a huge job in El Mirage, outside Phoenix. Made a mistake calculating the load on a wall. Dropped a zero. Maybe the contractor should have caught it, but they didn’t. The cave-in buried three guys up to their necks. The other workers unburied them in less than an hour, but they still died. Crush syndrome.”

“I didn’t know.”

“After that, I didn’t have any passion for designing the systems anymore. The music of it was gone. I took a crappy job doing CAD/CAM renderings, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”

“I always thought that was what you wanted to do.”

“I guess it was what I wanted. After El Mirage, anyway.” Dad paused for a long time. He was sitting hunched in the front of the tent, facing away from me. “Those three guys who died. They had families. Wives and children. I was responsible. I could have prevented it. . . .”

I didn’t know what to say. I waited out the silence.

“If I made a mistake doing the CAD/CAM drawings, the architect was responsible for catching it. I wasn’t in charge. But I didn’t. Make mistakes. My drawings were perfect—the best. I’ve turned down three promotions in the last ten years. I didn’t want the responsibility.

“When I got here, I helped your mom with the school. Taught math. But I wasn’t really into it—it was just easier to do what Janice wanted instead of arguing with her. But there was one student—Karen. Sixteen. Energetic. Brilliant. I was teaching her what little integral calculus I could remember.

“She told me she was worried. She’d heard rumors about girls disappearing. I shrugged off her concerns.” Dad lowered his head. “She hasn’t been seen in four months.

“Responsibility’s a cruel bitch. She comes for you whether you want it or not. And people are dying here, regardless of what I do, Alex.” He swiveled at the hips toward me, his face silhouetted—all sharp black angles against the tent opening. “But it’s still my job to protect them. If I had to cut off my own finger and eat it, I’d do that. Whatever it takes. Whatever.”

“Some things are beyond our control,” I said. “No matter what we do.” I sat up and hugged him. I still couldn’t reconcile the placid, benignly neglectful father I’d known with this mercurial maniac I had wrapped in my arms. The disaster had warped the landscape of our minds—perhaps even more than it had altered the physical landscape.

When, after a long while, we broke the embrace and laid down side-by-side on our bedrolls, neither of us slept. Instead we stared silently at the tiny sliver of light still peeking from the outside world into the darkness within our tent.

Chapter 65

I found Ben in the breakfast line. “I need to talk to you,” I whispered.

“You are talking to me,” he replied in a normal voice.

“Talk about what?” Alyssa asked.

“Escaping,” I whispered back.

“Escaping is not a difficult problem,” Ben said. “There are vulnerabilities—”

“Ben,” Alyssa whispered urgently. Our neighbors in the line had turned almost in unison to stare at us. “Later. After breakfast.”

“The information is classified as need-to-know only?”

“Yes, only Alex needs to know.”

After breakfast, the three of us huddled behind a tent, out of the wind, while Ben explained his plan. The guards changed twice each night around midnight and four A.M. Ben had observed them congregating at the guard hut during their shift change—the perfect opportunity to escape at the other side of the camp. The only problem: How would we cross the fence?

A bolt cutter would be the obvious solution, but none of us had any idea where we’d get one of those. Ben’s other idea was to build a canvas sling about twenty feet long and two feet wide. The middle would be reinforced with a dozen layers of canvas. We’d toss it over the fence so that the reinforced part overlaid the razor wire. Then we’d tie both sides to the chain-link part of the fence and climb over via hand- and footholds sewn into the sling.

So we needed to dismantle a tent—one of the old types made of heavy-duty canvas. Dad was asleep so I went looking for Mom. I found her crouched in a tent feeding an older woman who was too sick to stand in the food line.

“You need any help?” I asked.

“Sure.” She handed me a bowl of boiled wheat. “See if Jane wants to eat anything.” She gestured at the other woman in the tent.

I took the bowl from her and crouched, shuffling deeper into the tent. “You think you can eat?” I said to Jane.

“Reckon’ so,” she replied in a low, rough voice. She started trying to push herself upright.

“Let me help you.” I put my hand behind her shoulders and lifted, jamming the bedding in behind her to keep her partly upright. I took a spoonful of gruel and held it to her lips.

“Mom,” I said, “I need a tent.”

“Your father snoring or something?” she replied.

“No, it’s not that. I need to . . .” How was I going to explain this? I didn’t really want to lie to her, not that she’d believe me, anyway. “I need to make something out of one of the tents, a heavy canvas one.”

“Make what?”

“A sling. To throw across the fence.”

Mom swiveled toward me, slopping some of the gruel across the cheek of her patient. “You just got here! We’re finally back together, and you—”

“So come with me,” I said. “That’s why Darla and I came back to Iowa in the first place. To find you and bring you home to Uncle Paul’s. To Rebecca.”

“We’ll try to escape as soon as we know the girls here are safe, and we’ll go back to Uncle Paul’s together. Not gallivanting off after some—”

“Without Darla, I wouldn’t be here. Wouldn’t be alive. I’m going after her. With or without you.”

“You’re too young to—”

“I’m not a kid.”

“It’s hopeless—”

“It is not hopeless. I need a heavy canvas tent. And I’d like your help.”

“There are some things we just can’t do.”

“We decide what we can do. That’s the way it was before the volcano, and it’s still true.” I fought to keep my hand steady as I continued spooning gruel into Jane’s mouth. “Things are just a lot harder.”

“Things are different. We have to make hard choices now.”

“Which is exactly what I’m asking you to do. Make a hard choice. Help me go after Darla.”

“I . . . I can’t.”

“You done?” I asked Jane.

She nodded.

“Me, too.” I left the tent without looking back.

Chapter 66

I napped uneasily the rest of the day. Every time I woke up, I looked to where Dad slept alongside me, thinking about waking him and asking him to help me get a tent. Every time I waited, figuring I’d be better off if I asked him after he woke up on his own. I hoped he’d be more likely to say yes.

But when I got up for di

His answer was the same as my mother’s. Maybe she’d gotten to him first. They didn’t have any canvas tents to spare, didn’t want to try to escape yet, and weren’t going to go looking for Darla even if or when they did escape. We argued for what felt like at least an hour, but our positions were calcified. Any pair of statues facing off in a public park might have made more progress than we did.