Ashen Winter

“Might work. I wonder what’s holding up the tank?”

“One way to find out,” I said as we both reached it. I started clearing the snow from its base.

The tank rested in a metal cradle. A crank on one side of the cradle would disengage a set of clamps that locked the tank in place, but the crank was padlocked to a flange on the side of the tank.

“Let’s break the padlock,” I said.

“I bet the key is in there.” Alyssa gestured at the cinderblock office.

We went to check out the office. Two sides were solid cinderblock walls. The front and left side each had two glass-block windows. The only door—a heavy metal thing—was locked. I tried kicking it, using a simple front kick. I thrust my hips forward for extra power and landed my kick right alongside the knob, hoping to break the lock. But the door barely shivered. I tried kicking it twice more before I gave up.

“You need a battering ram,” Ben said. “A Stinger has the advantage of a one- or two-man operation and can breach doors or masonry walls—but a tree trunk would work almost as well.”

That made sense. A narrow stand of trees remained between two nearby fields. The ash and snow had stripped them of their leaves and broken their branches, so they looked like parallel cracks in the yellow-gray sky.

It took all morning to fight through the deep snow and fell a tree with our butcher knives. We chose a pine with a trunk five or six inches in diameter so we could carry it without too much trouble. We left a dozen branches on the trunk, cut to about two feet each so they’d make good handles.

By the time we got back to the building carrying our tree, I was ready for lunch. Not looking forward to it exactly—all we had to eat was cornmeal mush. But Ben was so excited to try the battering ram that he harassed the rest of us until we agreed to delay lunch.

We lined up in front of the door, each of us holding one of the remaining branches. The rough bark bit into my hands through my gloves, aggravating my blisters. Our first swing was tentative but still made a solid thump and dented the metal door. We swung the ram harder the next time, and it hit with a resounding crash and left a huge dent in the door. We swung it again and again, each strike harder and louder than the previous one. The door deformed, but the jamb didn’t break. Finally, after a dozen or more hits, we bent the door so much that the deadbolt slipped out of the jamb and the door flew open.

Inside we found a small, utilitarian office with a metal desk and chairs. One wall was covered in pegboard. A dozen crescent wrenches hung from hooks. A set of keys hung beside the wrenches. Elsewhere there were bins holding a wide variety of brass hose fittings. In a back room that mostly held janitorial supplies, I found a snow shovel and a spade with a yellow fiberglass handle. The toilet in the tiny bathroom was cracked—all the water had frozen. In the medicine cabinet above the toilet, Dad struck gold: a bottle of Tylenol.

The office had a cement slab floor, so we chopped up our battering ram and built a fire right in the middle of the front office. It became a little smoky, but we got enough fresh air through the open door that it was tolerable. Not that we had a choice about leaving the door open—it had deformed so much that it wouldn’t close.

After lunch, I took the keys outside and quickly found one that fit the padlock. But the lever that clamped the tank to its base still wouldn’t turn. I tried banging on it with a wrench, kicking it, hanging off it awkwardly with my feet off the ground—nothing worked.

I slumped into the snow, defeated. Everyone else tried to move the lever, and each of them got the same results as I had: bupkis. If Darla were here, she would know exactly how to free up the lever. But we needed to free it to get fuel to go find Darla. I noticed that my fists were clenched, and I was grinding my teeth, so I tried to force myself to relax.

“The nut’s frozen,” Dad a

“You think?” I said.

“Yep,” he replied. “You know how I’m going to unfreeze it?”

“No clue.”

“I’m going to light a fire under that propane tank.”

He wasn’t kidding.

Chapter 76

“Are you insane?” I asked. “That would be like lighting a fire under a bomb!”

“Lighting a fire under a bomb usually will not detonate it,” Ben said. “It depends on the intensity of the fire, the type of bomb, the age of the bomb, and its repair status. For example—”

“See, it’ll work,” Dad said. “The tank’s in good repair. I don’t smell propane around it. I’ll build a fire just big enough to unfreeze the nut. It won’t heat the propane enough for it to blow.”

“Maybe.” I still thought he was nuts. But on the other hand, I’d built a fire inside an SUV last year when we were escaping Iowa. Darla told me its gas tank wouldn’t explode, and it hadn’t. Would a propane tank work the same way as an SUV’s gas tank?

“Everyone else go into the office,” Dad ordered.

“If you’re so confident it’ll work, why are you sending us inside?”

“It’ll work. But if I’m wrong, that office is built like a bunker.”

“You sure about this, Doug?” Mom asked.

“Yeah.” He kissed her. “Go on.”

We all retreated to the cement-block office. Dad scooped some coals onto a log and grabbed a handful of kindling. Nobody else did anything. We stared at each other, dreading and half-expecting an explosion.

I leaned out the door to watch Dad work. He was silhouetted by the blaze he’d built under the propane tank. The idea seemed even dumber now as flames licked the underside of the tank, blackening it.

I felt a hand on my side. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Mom had joined me at the doorway. “Your Dad wouldn’t want you out here,” she said.

“I know. You either,” I replied, but neither of us made any move to leave.

Dad took off his left glove and wadded it up in his right hand. He reached almost into the fire, grabbing the lever through the double layer of insulation. He turned it easily; I heard the clank of the catch releasing. Dad yelled “Yes!” and kicked his boot through the fire, scattering the burning sticks into the snow.

“Told you,” he said as he passed us, returning to the office.

Mom and I ignored him.

We spent the rest of the afternoon digging a path from the truck to the tank. The only tools we had were the spade, snow shovel, and three sticks left over from our battering ram. The mountain of hard-packed snow and ice alongside the highway yielded slowly to our assault. Around midafternoon, the snow shovel broke. After that, working on our knees, we used the blade to scrape or push the snow.

The only tool left that worked well was the spade. Its sharp blade would cut into the packed snow, and the fiberglass handle was apparently unbreakable. Soon we settled into a rhythm—one person would always be on break, watching the road. When the person on the spade slowed, the rested person would take over. Everyone else used their hands to dig.

The highway was deserted all day. It made sense, I guessed—with the Peckerwoods wiped out, they wouldn’t be using the road. And any Black Lake employees going back to their camp would head east toward Maquoketa, not south toward us.

By nightfall we’d cleared a hole in the snow berm barely large enough to pull the truck off the road. We still had almost one hundred feet of deep snow between the truck and tank.

We slept around the fire in the smoky office. Despite the draft from the open door, it was easily the warmest place I’d slept since I’d left Worthington.

It took us the entirety of the next day to excavate a path large enough for the truck. It was mind-numbing work that left me far too much time to imagine what Darla might be going through while we dug in the snow. By the time we had the truck backed up so that the open rear doors engulfed the end of the tank, the dim yellowish daytime light was being replaced by murky twilight.