Ashen Winter

The first time, the truck made a rusty cough and died. The second, it chugged for a moment, and I breathed a prayer, “You can do it, truck. Start . . . start.” Darla would have laughed and informed me that machines run on gears and solvents, not hopes and prayers. But I knew nothing about natural gas-powered trucks; all I could offer was hope and a prayer.

The third time Dad cranked the key, the truck choked to life. The fuel gauge twitched, moving to just above empty. Dad shut down the truck right away—we couldn’t go anywhere blocked in by the small blue car and snow. We trudged back down the narrow path and explained the situation to Mom, Alyssa, and Ben.

“Is it even worth digging out the truck?” Mom asked, “since we barely have any fuel, anyway?”

“I saw a propane distributor just south of Anamosa,” I said. “They had tanks painted like ears of corn. Maybe there’s still propane there.”

“Good idea.” Dad nodded, ruminating.

We spent the rest of the day digging out the truck. We scavenged some shelves from ANAMOSA FLORAL that we used as makeshift snow shovels and scrapers. A mountain of snow crowned the truck, entombing it completely. And we had to clear the snow from around the blue car—which turned out to be a VW Bug—not to mention figuring out some way to move it.

By nightfall, everyone was exhausted and cranky. We all had at least one nasty blister, and Ben had cut his hand on the sharp edge of one of the shelves. But the vehicles were clear of snow and ash. We built a small fire using cardboard from the back of the truck and wood scavenged from the flower shop’s furniture. Di

The temperature dropped more during di

Instead we slept more or less on Main Street in the area we had cleared behind the truck. Each of us took a two-hour guard shift, feeding the fire and keeping a lookout. For once, Alyssa stayed awake during her watch. It figured that the one time she actually kept watch, the night would pass peacefully.

Chapter 75

In the morning, we had to face the problem of the VW Bug. “Maybe we could roll it,” Dad said, “like L.A. rioters after a Lakers championship.”

“Like what?” Alyssa asked.

“Whenever the Lakers won a basketball championship, people used to go out and roll cars over for fun.”

“Destructive way to celebrate,” Alyssa replied.

I bent my knees and hooked my gloved hands under the side of the car. By straightening my knees, I could rock the car, but I sure couldn’t lift it by myself. “This is going to take all of us.”

Everyone crowded in alongside the car. We could only reach the front and the back, where the car was slightly longer than the back of the UPS truck.

“Three . . . two . . . one . . . lift!” I yelled.

We raised the tires a couple inches, and the car settled back to the ground.

“Harder this time. Lift with your legs,” I said. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . heave!” We got the car about a foot off the ground before Ben’s hands slipped and the Bug fell back.

“We can do this. Scream when you lift this time. Three . . . two . . . one . . . now!” I screamed. This time I was able to straighten my legs completely, and the car rocked past its center of balance and crashed onto its side.

We’d created about three feet of space between the car and truck. Now we had room to spread out. Each of us grabbed whatever was handy—the exhaust system, parts of the frame, or the tires. This time we rolled the car easily onto its back.

Now, though, there was nothing to grip. We couldn’t generate enough force by pushing to roll the Bug again. And reaching down didn’t help—we couldn’t reach anything but the smooth, rounded body panels. And the car was still blocking the UPS truck.

“Everybody move down the street,” Dad said. “I’ve got this.”

As he climbed into the UPS truck, Dad yelled, “Move farther!”

We were half a block down the street when he started the truck. He revved the engine and threw the truck into reverse, crunching into the Bug. It slid easily on its roof, coasting five or six feet. Dad pulled the truck forward and backed into the Bug again. He had more space to gain speed this time, so he hit the Bug with a crash and screech of tortured metal. The car sailed across the road, spi

Dad pulled out onto Main Street. “Hurry up, there’s no fuel to waste!”

We sprinted to the truck and piled in. I took shotgun—maybe I should have offered the passenger seat to Mom or Alyssa, but I knew where the propane distributor was. I needed to be able to see and talk to Dad. Everyone else sat on the floor in back amid the remaining wrecked boxes.

The propane distributor was even closer than I remembered—just past the abandoned strip mall and collapsed fast food restaurants south of Anamosa on Highway 1. It was comprised of a low cinderblock building labeled TRI-COUNTY PROPANE, one tank about the size of a semitrailer, and a dozen smaller tanks, each fifteen or sixteen feet long and raised about four feet off the ground, so their bases were at the level of the snow around them. All the tanks were painted to mimic ears of corn—green leaves on one end peeled back partially to reveal yellow kernels on the other. Each tank sported a cap of deep snow. There was also a long row of lumps in the snow, probably marking smaller, buried tanks.

Dad stopped and cut the engine. “How in the world are we going to load one of those tanks onto this truck?”

“Dig out one of the smaller tanks and drag it out here?” I suggested.

“Yeah, maybe.”

We struggled over the high snow berm. Flailing through chest-deep snow to reach the row of mounds was a huge chore, even though we had less than one hundred feet to cross. We dug through a mound, finding that there was indeed a smaller propane tank—an oval six or seven feet long—buried under all that snow. But the gauge on top of the tank read empty.

Mom and Dad started working on the next tank in the line, while Alyssa and I skipped down the row about twenty feet to work on a different tank. Working with our hands and arms, it seemed to take forever just to dig enough snow to read the gauges. Both tanks were empty.

In the meantime, Ben had wandered over to the big tanks. Their gauges were bottom-mounted and easier to clear. He’d checked half a dozen tanks in the time it took the four of us to check two.

“Any luck, Ben?” I yelled.

He stopped and looked down for a moment, as though thinking. “Yes,” he yelled. “I am alive. I am free of the Peckerwoods and free of the Black Lake camp. That is very lucky.”

“I guess. But I wanted to know if any of those tanks have propane in them.”

“You did not ask that,” Ben said.

Gah. What would it take to get a simple, straight answer? “So do they?” Ben looked again at his feet, and I realized what my mistake was. “Do any of the large tanks have propane?”

“I have only inspected six of them,” Ben said. “The one on the end is full, and the rest are empty.”

Dad looked up from digging in the snow. “Maybe we could clear a path and back the truck up to it. Run a hose or something to fill the tanks on the truck?”

“If we’re going to do all that work,” I said, “let’s load the whole tank onto the truck.”

“That thing’s got to weigh a couple tons.”

“So? I’m sure UPS builds these trucks to handle a lot of weight. And it looks like it’ll fit.”

Dad stood and eyed the tank speculatively. “How the heck would we load it on there?”

“It’s at about the right height.” I started pushing through the snow toward it. “If we back up the truck to it so that the end of the tank is already inside, maybe we can slide it the rest of the way on.”