Ashen Winter

“Where’d Bill get the shotgun?” I asked him.

He kept mumbling, his voice dropping and his words becoming incoherent.

Darla slapped her palm over the wound and pushed down. “Where’d you get the shotgun!”

The guy moaned and batted at her hand, feebly trying to knock it away from the wound. Darla bore down harder, and suddenly his body went limp. “Is he dead?” she asked.

I checked his breathing and pulse again. “No.”

We lit a fire in the living room hearth and melted snow. But no amount of water splashed on the guy’s face would wake him. Darla went outside, scouting for signs of Blue Scarf. When she stomped back into the living room, she said, “That last guy with this loser isn’t leaving a trail. He must have left here by the road. Maybe he kept going south, but as soon as he makes a turn, we’ll lose him.”

“He could have left hours ago.”

“Yeah. I think it’s a lost cause. Sorry, Alex.”

“This guy’s still alive. Maybe he’ll recover.”

“You want to hang around here and see if he wakes up?”

“No, that’ll take too long. And he might die. Let’s load him on Bikezilla and take him to a doctor.” I lifted him by his shoulders and started jamming his arms into his shirt.

Darla sighed and helped me dress him. Then she lifted the guy’s ankles while I grabbed his shoulders. We dragged him out of the house and laid him in the snow beside Bikezilla.

“We can tie him on the load bed, over the supplies,” I said as I repacked the first-aid kit, lantern, and guns. “You know where we are?”

“I think so.” Darla took the Illinois roadmap out of its protective, plastic folder and opened it. “I think we’ve been biking south on 78. We should be near Stockton.” She pointed at a dot on the map south of Warren.

“You know anything about Stockton? Is there a doctor there?”

“I du

I looked over her shoulder at the map. “Let’s try Stockton. It’s a lot closer. And I don’t really want to bring a bandit into Warren if we can help it.”

Darla shrugged. We repacked all our gear and then laid the guy on his stomach over Bikezilla’s load bed. Darla tied him down, leaving his arms and legs overhanging the sides.

We mounted Bikezilla and started pedaling south along Route 78. Less than ten minutes of travel brought us to a T in the road. We passed three metal sign supports that barely protruded from the snow, but someone had sawn the signs off them. I wasn’t sure why anyone would bother to vandalize the signs—maybe they didn’t want strangers to find Stockton. “Which way?” I asked Darla.

Darla looked over her shoulder at me. “Right, I think. This should be Highway 20. It’ll take us straight into Stockton.”

We rounded the corner and passed a burned-out building on our left. The sign in front read GALENA STATE BANK & TRUST. We raced on past a whole series of burnt buildings, but none of the rest of them had signs.

Peering around Darla, I saw something surreal. A few hundred yards ahead of us, a line of cars stood upright, resting on their front bumpers with their trunks in the air. They formed a wall that stretched as far as I could see to the left and curved away from us to the right. Where U.S. 20 passed through the car-wall someone had built a heavy timber gate across the road. Almost before I’d processed what I was seeing, church bells began ringing furiously. A line of men popped into view one by one, their heads and shoulders above the low log gate.

Every one of them was pointing a rifle at us.

Chapter 7

Darla must have seen the rifles, too, because she slammed on the brakes. I got off the bike and stepped up beside her.

“I doubt if any of them can hit us from this far off,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “How about if I walk up there with my hands up and try to talk to them, and you turn Bikezilla around so that if they start shooting, we can ride out of here in a hurry.”

Darla paused. “Okay.” She pulled me close for a kiss. “I’ll get out the binoculars and keep a lookout. If I yell, run back as fast as you can. And be careful.”

“I will.” I held up my hands with my palms open and started trudging down the road toward the guns.

The wind was in my face, blowing bits of ice that stung my skin. I had to squint, making everything look indistinct.

As I got closer, I could see the car-wall better. It was bizarre—made up of every conceivable make and model of automobile: from huge pickup trucks and SUVs to Priuses and mini Coopers. Their front bumpers were planted on the ground, hidden by the snow. The rear bumpers rose in the air at various heights, so that the arrangement looked like a monstrous row of multicolored teeth gnawing up from the ground. Each car touched its neighbor on both sides, forming an impassable wall. I couldn’t tell what held them upright.

I got to within about a hundred feet of the gate and yelled, “Hello! Is this Stockton?”

Someone yelled back, “We’re closed.”

“You got a doctor here?”

“Yep. She’s closed, too.”

“I can trade.”

“Trade what?”

“Guns, seeds, food . . .”

A lean man wearing a chocolate-brown coat and overalls set his rifle aside, climbed over the log gate, and started walking toward me. I noticed he was walking to one side of the road, carefully staying out of his buddies’ line of fire. I briefly toyed with the idea of sidestepping to put him between me and the guns, but there was no point—he could easily sidestep, also.

He stopped about ten feet from me. “Who’re you?”

“Alex Halprin.”

“From?”

“Warren.”

“No y’aint. Warren only sends four guys here to trade, and I know ’em all.”

“I live on Paul Halprin’s farm, near Warren.”

“Don’t know him. Said you got guns to trade? Any ammo?”

“No, just the guns. A MAC-10, maybe a pistol, too.”

“Don’t need ’em. Got plenty of guns, not enough ammo.”

“What about seeds? I’ve got good, cold-weather kale seeds. Stuff’s full of vitamin C.”

The guy turned his head and spat sideways. “Like the last guy who sold us seeds? Claimed they were turnip seeds.”

“Didn’t sprout?”

“They sprouted all right. Grew spurry weed. Useless.”

“This is kale. Same stuff Warren trades. It cures scurvy.”

“Maybe. Maybe you’re the King of England, too. Don’t rightly know. What’re you trying to trade for, anyway?”

“Medical care. The guy on the back of our bike’s been shot. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Best you put him out of his misery and give him a proper burial, then.” The guy shrugged. “Best hide the spot you bury him, too, ’less you want a flenser gang to dig him up.”

Whatever a flenser gang was, I didn’t think telling him that the guy was probably already in one would help my case at all.

“So what would it take to buy medical care for this guy?” I asked.

“How ’bout two hog carcasses?”

“I’ve got some pork, but not that much.”

“I hear they got plenty up in Warren.”

“Yeah, thousands. But they’re not mine.”

The guy spat again in the snow. “You’re no use to me, then. So either go back where you came from or skirt around Stockton out of rifle range. You come within shooting range, we prolly won’t waste a bullet on you, but you never know.” He turned and strode back toward the gate.

I ground my foot into the snowy road. I knew they’d give me anything I wanted for a packet of kale seeds if I could prove they were good. I stomped back down the road to Darla.

“No luck?” she asked.

“Nope. They don’t believe the kale seeds are real. I can’t think of any way to prove it to them other than germinating a few, and by the time we do that, our bandit will be dead.”

“Well, we can take him to Doc McCarthy in Warren. It looks like about twelve miles on the map. Take us an hour and a half, maybe two.”