Ashen Winter

With the pistol on my belt, lantern in one hand, and staff in the other, I jogged back, careful to zigzag, just in case. We stalked back into the house. The hallway was empty, and all three doors at the far end of it were closed. We moved as quietly as we could, but even the whisper of my feet against the carpet sounded loud in my ears.

I opened the first door, Darla beside me with the shotgun ready. The lamplight gleamed on porcelain. A bathroom. The toilet tank was broken, the water within frozen into a block of dirty ice. I stepped inside to peek behind the shower curtain. Empty.

The second door led to a bedroom. The bed was a rumpled mess. Filthy clothes were piled in one corner, next to scattered splinters that might have once been a dresser. The room was otherwise empty.

I opened the third and last door. The lantern revealed another unmade bed. The rest of the furniture had been reduced to broken scraps.

“Check the far side of the bed,” Darla whispered.

I crept across the bedroom. Nobody was beside the bed. But as I turned to go, I noticed a bloodstain on the sheets. I swung the light in a big, slow circle, looking for more blood. And I found some: two droplets low on the closed closet door. I pointed at it.

Darla nodded, and we tiptoed to the closet. I grasped the knob, standing to one side, while Darla trained the shotgun on the center of the door. I yanked it open.

A blond man sat on the floor, his right side soaked in blood, wild blue eyes flicking up at us. The shelves and closet bar were empty. But I noticed all that in passing. What really caught my attention was the machine pistol he had trained on Darla.

Chapter 6

“Take it easy,” I said, trying to pitch my voice low and calm. “No need for anyone to get hurt.”

“You know,” Darla said, “if I pull this trigger it’ll turn you into bloody confetti.”

I glared at her out of the corner of my eye. That wasn’t exactly the calm, rational tone I’d been going for.

“Thish ish a MAC-10.” The guy’s words were slurred, as if he were drunk or something. “Put all 30 rounds into you in lesh than two sheconds. Back away!”

I held up my hands, clutching my staff in one and the lantern in the other. “It’s okay. We’re backing up.” I took a slow step backward. “Chill.”

Darla hadn’t moved, and she was glaring sidelong back at me.

“Back up a step, Darla,” I said, using as calm a voice as I could muster.

Her mouth hardened to a line, but she did it, moving back a pace with the shotgun still trained on the bandit.

He started to nod. His head drooped, and his eyes closed. The MAC-10’s barrel fell. When it touched his knee, he gave a start and snapped awake, the gun barrel twitching from Darla to me and back to Darla. “Keep backing up,” he growled.

I took another slow step backward, studying the guy. His right elbow was clamped against his side. His coat and pants shone with fresh blood in the lamplight. A small puddle had collected by his right hip. He could have shot me on the farm. But he hadn’t—he’d run instead. Why? “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” he replied, almost whispering.

“Strange first name your parents gave you, Mr. Matter,” Darla muttered.

“You had me dead to rights back on the farm. Why didn’t you shoot?”

“Was a losht cause. Can’t be washting ammo. Now git out of here!”

“We need to know where the shotgun Darla’s holding came from. Maybe we could trade. We could patch you up if you tell us about that shotgun.”

“I can see the flensing knife on your hip, boy. Don’t take me for no fool.” The gun sagged again, and he snapped it back to horizontal.

“You’re bleeding out—we could help you if you tell us what we want to know. You even know where the shotgun came from?”

“Course I do. Was Bill’s.” His gun dipped again.

“Where’d Bill get it?”

He raised the gun again, training it on me. “Get on out of here,” he whispered, “or I’ll drill you both.”

“Okay, okay. Take it easy.” I backed out of the bedroom. Darla kept pace with me, the shotgun trained on the guy all the way.

Once we were in the hall, out of his line of sight, Darla hissed, “What now?”

“What was that?” I whispered back. “Last night you were crying about killing two of them. Today you’re ready to blow one of them away?”

“Slumbitches had it coming. Just because I felt bad about shooting them doesn’t mean it was wrong. They weren’t taking Rebecca and A

“Yeah. Maybe so.”

“So what now?”

“Just wait and listen a sec.”

Everything was still for a minute. It was so quiet in the hall that I could hear Darla’s soft breathing. Strange, that such a quiet place was almost the scene of gunfire; that bullets could easily have shredded this silence—and Darla and me with it. I rested my hands on my knees, trying to stop their trembling. My side hurt, but I welcomed the pain. Welcomed the aliveness of it.

I heard a soft thump from the bedroom. I got down on my knees to peek around the doorjamb, figuring the guy would probably expect me to be standing.

I couldn’t see anything in the darkness of the bedroom, so I thrust the lamp through the doorway. The guy had slumped sideways in the closet. The hand holding the MAC-10 was flung outward, resting on the carpet beside him. I stood and stepped quickly through the bedroom.

When I got to the guy, I stepped on his wrist so he couldn’t raise the gun. He didn’t even wake up.

Darla reached down and pried the MAC-10 from his fingers. She fiddled with it for a moment and pulled a rectangular piece off the bottom of the weapon. “Huh. Check this out.” She held the block of metal out toward me.

I shrugged. “What am I looking at?”

“The magazine, dummy. It’s empty. Guy was out of bullets. That’s why he didn’t shoot you at the farm.”

“I can see why his buddy left him here. He was bleeding out, probably slowing his friend down. But why’d he leave him with the gun? It’s valuable. And one without bullets? Useless for defense.”

Darla shrugged.

I bent over the bandit. His skin was pale as snow, and his lips looked bruised. I put the back of my hand against his mouth—he was breathing. When I checked his pulse, though, I had trouble finding it. “He’s alive, but barely.”

“Let’s melt some snow,” Darla said. “Maybe if we splash water in his face, he’ll wake up enough for us to ask him about the shotgun again.”

“Should we try to stop the bleeding first? If he dies on us—”

“Then we won’t find out anything. Yeah, I guess we should patch him up first.” Darla scowled.

I didn’t like the idea of helping this guy any more than she did. He and his buddies had shot Max, had tried to kidnap the girls for who-knew-what. But we had no good way to track the other guy—the one who’d worn a blue scarf, and I needed to know where the shotgun had come from. I yanked the guy out of the closet. Blood was still oozing from the wound at his side.

“Get the med kit off Bikezilla, would you?” I asked.

“Christ.”

I stripped the bandit to the waist while I waited for Darla to return. She had shot him low on his right side. The wound on his back was just a small puncture that had mostly quit bleeding, but the bullet had left a crater the size of a child’s fist as it exited the front.

“It’s not like we have a lot of extra bandages to waste on this guy,” Darla said when she returned with our first-aid kit.

I took a clean cloth out of the box, wadded it, and packed it into the wound as tightly as I could.

“He isn’t going to make it,” Darla said. “He’s lost too much blood already.”

I didn’t reply, instead starting to wrap his torso with an Ace bandage. Darla shook her head in disgust but knelt to help.

When I pulled the Ace bandage tight, the guy woke up and started mumbling. Something about “Gun, gun, where’s my gun?” His hands clenched and unclenched as he talked.