Ashen Winter

“Nothing,” the paramedic replied. His voice was so loud and anguished that I could understand it even without Rita Mae’s written translation.

“Nothing?” I yelled. “At least give her some antibiotics!”

“Can’t. They’re rationed. Mayor Kenda keeps them locked up.”

“They’re—” I stepped away from the paramedic and slammed my palm into the corrugated metal wall. The pain got me thinking again.

I dug around in my jacket and pulled out the last eleven packets of kale seeds. “I want a ten-day course of antibiotics and a week’s worth of food for five people.” It suddenly occurred to me that kale seeds might not be as valuable now. Presumably Worthington would be growing the ones I’d traded to them right after Darla was shot. I dug deeper in my pocket, pulled out one of my carefully hoarded bags of wheat, and handed it to Rita Mae with all the kale seeds.

“I can get a lot more than that if you give me time to negotiate,” Rita Mae wrote.

“I don’t care. We’re leaving Worthington in fifteen minutes. I’m taking Darla to Dr. McCarthy in Warren.”

“You’re falling down on your feet. You leave now you’ll wreck your truck.”

I started to yell that I didn’t care but bit back my words. She had a point. Crashing on the way to Warren wouldn’t get Darla the help she needed. “You’re right,” I said quietly. “We should get Darla started on her antibiotics, get something to eat, and sleep a few hours.”

The paramedic said something to Rita Mae. “Floyd says he’s got extra blankets,” Rita Mae wrote. “You can all stay here if you like. I’ll be back with the medicine and food.”

Floyd had laid a heavy blanket over Darla. As I turned to help get everyone else settled, I saw Darla staring at me from the exam table. Her eyes reflected the light, shining like distant campfires on an icy winter night. I stepped toward her. I wanted, needed, to talk to her about what had happened, to learn how she’d survived. But by the time I reached her side, she was asleep again. I pulled up a chair to sit in vigil over her—as if my will alone could keep her alive.

Chapter 84

Rita Mae returned in less than an hour, carrying a backpack stuffed with food and drugs. Floyd woke Darla up and gave her a glass of water, two Tylenol, and a Cipro tablet. I held her hand for no more than a minute before she fell back asleep.

Everyone else bedded down on the cots, close to the small fire. I dragged my blankets into Darla’s room and wrapped them around myself, sitting on the chair by her bed. Soon I was asleep.

Darla haunted my dreams. She was naked and curled into a ball, alone in a vast white space. She curled up tighter and tighter, and her skin turned red and blistered, as if from sunburn. I screamed, “Darla!” but she couldn’t hear me. I ran toward her, but she receded faster than I could run. Purple and green and yellow blotches crawled across her skin, and she hunkered down even further, into an impossibly small ball. Suddenly her skin was black and charring, and then there were flames. Darla was burning before my eyes. The flames jumped and lit Mom, who was somehow beside her, and they jumped again and burned Dad. Everything charred to ash.

Alyssa crawled toward me, blocking the cinders of my family from view. She was naked and above me, her breasts swaying pendulously, hypnotically. I was excited and ashamed. She called to me seductively, “Alex . . .,” and I lifted my head toward her.

I woke up. “Alex! Alex!” Alyssa was above me, fully clothed. And she was shaking my shoulder and yelling my name, although it was in no way seductive. And I could hear! Not well, maybe, but well enough to understand her.

“Yeah?” I mumbled.

“You said you wanted to leave in four hours,” she said. “It’s time.”

“Thanks,” I said. Alyssa left, and I stood, turning toward Darla. “You okay?” I asked as her eyes opened.

“Shoulder hurts,” she said. “I’ll live. How about you?”

“I’m okay. Now that I found you.” Suddenly I recalled what finding her had cost. My dad slamming the shifter into reverse. I choked back a sob.

Darla reached out with her good hand, drawing me down into an embrace, and I bawled into the comforting semi-circle of her arm. “Shh,” she said.

When my tears subsided, I whispered, “Things are never going to be the same again, are they?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought that finding my parents would change things. Would . . . well, I knew things wouldn’t go back to the way they were before the volcano, but I thought they’d get better.”

“Get better how?”

“I guess I thought I wouldn’t have to carry everything on my own shoulders, every decision. It’s—I don’t always know what’s right. Sometimes I think it’d be nice to be a little kid again, to leave the weightiest decisions to my parents.”

“Alex,” Darla said, her face serious, “you haven’t been a kid for a long time now.”

“And now I never will be again.”

“No.”

I was afraid I’d start bawling again, so I changed the subject. “You, how did you—I was afraid they’d flense you or . . .”

“Da

“Rape you.” I held the rail of her cot in one hand, gripping it so hard I wondered if it might crumple in my fist.

“Yeah. But Alyssa went missing, and he had to send a girl to the Dirty White Boys as a replacement. I was handy.”

I sat down, rested my head against her shoulder, and listened.

“The truck broke down on the way. Radiator problem. I told them how to fix it. So when I got to Iowa City, I wound up repairing stuff for them instead of filling a bed in their whorehouse, thank God.”

“Yeah,” I replied, as gently as I could manage. “You had a lockpick and a weapon—why were you still there?”

“Look at me. I’m weak. And sick. I wouldn’t eat the meat the DWBs offered me, so I never got enough food to get stronger. And I never found the right moment to use my lockpick and shank until you showed up.”

“The important thing is that you survived,” I said. “Nothing else matters to me.”

“Well it matters to me!” Darla snapped.

An overwhelming gratitude flooded me. I’d been insanely lucky to find her amid the chaos of Iowa. Words failed me, and I hugged her gently instead.

Then she pushed me back out to arm’s length. “I’ve seen the way Alyssa looks at you.”

“I rescued her and Ben. At first I thought she was you.”

“There’s more than gratitude in her eyes.”

“Yeah. She tried to—”

“I knew it! I swear to God, I’ll shank that bitch.”

“Darla, no, it’s okay. She found a way to protect herself and her brother when she was with the Peckerwoods, and she’s still falling back on that—on using sex to survive.”

“It’s wrong.”

“Give her a break. What’s wrong is that she felt she had to—that she had no other options.”

“I don’t trust her.”

“You don’t have to trust her. You can trust me.”

Darla stared into my eyes for a pregnant moment, then pulled me back into a hug.

“I saved this for you,” I said, pulling away from her embrace. I extracted the broken chain from my pocket.

Darla’s eyes shone as she fished the 15/16ths nut I’d given her out of her own pocket. “It was stuck in the layers of my shirts. I fiddled with it when things were bad. It helped.”

I threaded the nut onto my broken chain and knotted it behind Darla’s neck. “We should get moving.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were rolling away from Worthington. Rita Mae had gotten everything I wanted, although she scolded me about not giving her enough time to negotiate properly. She’d also spent part of the night taping plastic over the broken windows of our truck. I hoped I’d see her again—she was one of the few people I trusted.

Mom offered to drive, which I took as a good sign that she might be emerging from her daze. But her hands trembled and her voice quavered, so I told her no. She didn’t argue, which struck me as a strange role reversal.