Ashen Winter (2 page)

I blinked repeatedly, but my eyelids couldn’t clear the gruesome scene. My body was coiled tight, caught on a knife edge between two fears: I needed to help Max, to see if he was even alive, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t approach the sled without being seen.

The four bandits grabbed a knotted rope and started hauling the toboggan away. Max’s blood drew an erratic pink streak in the snow. I couldn’t let them abduct my sister and cousins. Rebecca was the only family I had left. I’d rather die than lie there in the snow and watch her being taken. I had a black belt in taekwondo. I’d been forced to use it during my flight from Iowa last year. But trying to fight four of them at once? Suicide.

Suddenly it struck me: All I had to do was slow them down until Darla came with help. If I could get them to talk . . . I stood up. “Stop!” I shouted.

All four of them turned. Three gun barrels swiveled toward me. I sent fruitless orders to my knees to be still.

“Leave the girls. Take me instead.” I was relieved my voice didn’t quaver. Much.

Handgun stalked toward me until he was less than thirty feet away. His mouth twisted in a cruel leer, and he raised his gun, aiming at my head.

Chapter 2

I was dead. He was too far away for me to rush him, too close for the bullet to miss. Trying to talk was a stupid idea—the last stupid decision I’d get to make.

A gun barked. Handgun was thrown sideways, arms splayed, as blood bloomed at the side of his chest. I glanced left. Darla was about 100 feet off, kneeling in the snow, her eye sighting down the length of Uncle Paul’s hunting rifle.

Shotgun raised his weapon, business end pointed at me. Max, whom I’d feared was dead, punched at the bandit, aiming for his groin. He missed, hitting Shotgun in the hip. The gun wavered and boomed. My side felt like it had been stung by a dozen angry hornets, though most of the pellets flew wide, peppering the snow beside me.

Another rifle shot rang out. The bullet caught Shotgun square in the chest and threw him backward against the toboggan.

I was running forward without ever having made a conscious decision to charge. I had to get to Machine Pistol before he started spraying bullets everywhere.

Blue Scarf turned and ran. Machine Pistol hesitated, then stepped backward and raised his gun at me. Darla shot again but missed. I put everything I had into my insane charge, screaming at the top of my lungs. Maybe he’d just shoot me instead of spraying Max and the girls.

Instead, he lowered his gun and fled.

Darla fired again. Machine Pistol stumbled, but collected himself and kept running.

I staggered to Max, my body trembling with fear and adrenaline. A bullet had carved a narrow trough along his temple. Blood soaked the side of his hat, scarves, and coat.

“Get the hell out of my field of fire!” Darla screamed.

I ducked, hoping she could fire past both of us. Bright red blood poured from Max’s head, gushing in time with his heartbeat. I hesitated a moment, unsure what to do. A year ago I would have screamed for help and called 911. Now nobody but Darla would hear me scream. The phone wouldn’t work, and even if it did, there was no one to answer it.

I knew how to stop the bleeding—put a clean cloth over it and apply pressure. But what if his skull were cracked? Wouldn’t pushing on it make it worse, maybe kill him?

I stripped off my gloves and started probing the wound as gently as I could with my fingertips. Max moaned. He was shaking and sweating despite the cold. My hands dripped blood.

Darla was alongside the sled now, kneeling in the snow and firing at the fleeing bandits.

Max’s temple was firm under my fingertips—which I hoped meant his skull wasn’t broken. I ripped off one of my scarves and pressed it against his head.

“They’re in the south hollow, running like wild rabbits,” Darla said as she lifted the rifle and stood. She took the knife off her belt and started cutting Rebecca and Anna free.

“This wound is going to have to be sewn up,” I told her.

“I can do it,” Darla said—she’d stitched up a vicious wound in my side last year.

“I think we should get Dr. McCarthy. What if he’s got a concussion or a break I didn’t find?”

“Okay,” she replied.

“Rebecca?” I asked. “You okay?” She didn’t look okay. She was trembling and rubbing her wrists.

“Not really,” she said. “What should I do?”

“Can you run to the woods and get Aunt Caroline and Uncle Paul?”

She took a deep breath. “I’ll be right back.” She took two tentative steps toward the house, and then changed direction, sprinting for the woods.

Max’s blood had already soaked through my scarf. Darla handed me one of hers, and I wrapped it around his head as tightly as I could.

Anna was crouched with her hands covering her inner thighs. I saw a spot of wetness around one of her hands.

“Anna,” I said softly. “It’s okay. I peed myself the first time I met bandits last year.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, I did.” It wasn’t true. I’d thrown up. But I needed Anna’s help. “Can you take care of your brother while Darla and I get Dr. McCarthy?”

Anna nodded.

“Your mom and dad will be back soon. Tell them we’ve gone to get the doctor, and we’ll be right back, okay?”

She nodded again. I tied the second scarf around Max’s head, and we carried him into the house and laid him on the floor by the living room fireplace. I grabbed a couple of spare scarves while Darla told Anna how to care for Max. As we ran toward the barn, I passed one scarf to Darla and wrapped the other one around my neck. It was one of Aunt Caroline’s—bright orange-red and not particularly warm. Better than nothing. We threw open the barn doors and dragged out Bikezilla.

That’s what I’d dubbed Darla’s snowmobile. She’d built it not long after she finished the gristmill. The snowmobile was a tandem bike frame with a ski attached to the front fork where the tire had been. Darla had scavenged a track off a real snowmobile and installed it in place of the bicycle’s rear wheel. Above that she built a small wooden load bed, almost like a pickup truck’s.

A real snowmobile would have been a lot faster, but we couldn’t get gas. The meager amount still stored in the tanks at Warren’s only gas station was reserved for emergencies.

We’d been using Bikezilla for the last six months to haul kale to Warren to trade for pork. Warren had thousands of frozen hog carcasses stored, since there were several slaughterhouses nearby. Bikezilla wasn’t as fast as a real bicycle, but it could handle deep snow okay, and the load bed could carry plenty of pork. On the icy road to Warren, it was at least twice as fast as running.

Darla and I stood up on the bike for the whole trip, kicking the pedals down. We had no extra breath for talking. My side hurt where the shotgun pellets had hit, and I felt a warm spot of blood soaking into my T-shirt. I gritted my teeth and ignored it.

Darla and I slid up to the clinic, beating our previous best time to Warren by five or six minutes. I could tell Dr. McCarthy was in because I saw his ’41 Studebaker Champion parked around back.

We charged into the small, one-story clinic. Dr. McCarthy was in an exam room, chatting with a patient by the light of an oil lamp. When I told him what was wrong, he got his assistant to take over. “You want to ride along?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “We’ll ride back. I don’t want to leave Bikezilla.” I didn’t think it would get stolen in Warren, but I didn’t want to take that chance, either.

By the time we got back to the farm, Dr. McCarthy was almost done stitching up Max. Aunt Caroline was assisting him. The injured side of Max’s head had been shaved. He was biting down on a leather-wrapped stick, since Dr. McCarthy had run out of painkillers months ago. I wondered if it was the same stick that Uncle Paul had bitten when Dr. McCarthy had set his broken leg the year before. The leather was scarred by dozens of bite marks.

“He okay?” I asked.

“Seems to be,” Aunt Caroline answered. Dr. McCarthy was concentrating on his stitches. “He might be concussed. Although with Max, how would you know if his brains were scrambled?” She was smiling as she said it, but unbidden tears spilled from her eyes.

“Maybe instead of scrambling his brains the bullet knocked them back into working order,” I said.

“I’m still here,” Max grunted through clenched teeth.

“I know you are, honey.” The gratitude in Aunt Caroline’s voice was palpable.

“A leather-wrapped stick is a pretty crappy birthday present,” I said.

Max grunted. I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or just annoyed at my lame joke.

Aunt Caroline broke the short silence. “Max said you just walked up to those bandits, Alex.”

“Pretty much.”

“That was stupid.”

“Yeah. But I knew Darla was getting help. I’m just lucky she decided to get the rifle instead of going to get you guys.”

Dr. McCarthy tied off the last stitch in Max’s head.

“Hey, Doc, can you take a look at my side?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with your side?” Darla said.

“Well, that shotgun—”

“You got hit? And you didn’t tell me?” She was practically yelling.

“I thought you could tell from the holes in my coat.”

“Shut up. Your clothing’s so ragged nobody’d notice a few extra holes. And we rode all the way to—lie down on that couch right now, you jerk!”

I obeyed. When Darla was that angry, doing anything else was insane.

She started stripping my clothing, muttering all the while, “Stupid, pigheaded, obstinate, obnoxious, oviparous, egg-sucking boy.” I both laid and sucked eggs? That didn’t make sense. Whatever.

Most of the shotgun pellets hadn’t penetrated my five layers of clothing. I had eight or nine purplish bruises and three blood-encrusted holes on the side of my belly. All three holes were below the huge, horseshoe-shaped scar where Darla had stitched up the hatchet wound a prison escapee named Target had inflicted on me the year before.

“What, are you collecting scars on that side of your body?” Darla said.

“I guess.”

“Well, quit. The spot I stitched up is enough.”

“That’s a pretty rough-looking patch job,” Dr. McCarthy commented.

Darla scowled. “Like to see you do better with an old sewing needle.”

“I probably couldn’t.” Dr. McCarthy took the leather-wrapped stick from Max, wiped it on a cloth, and gave it to me to bite. He dropped a scalpel and scissor-like pair of tongs he called a hemostat into a pan of water boiling over the living room fire. While we waited for his tools to be sterilized, he gently wiped away the dried blood on my side.

When he slit the side of the first wound, it didn’t hurt much. But then he started digging around in the hole. Tears leaked from my eyes. When he got the hemostat clamped on the pellet and pulled it free, I just about launched off the couch to slug him. Darla grabbed my hand, and I clung to her, trying not to move. Then we had to repeat the whole procedure. Twice.

Dr. McCarthy didn’t stitch up the holes. He just put a bandage over them and taped it in place. “Guess you all get a bulk discount today.”

“I guess.” Aunt Caroline sighed. “I’ll get you some supplies.”

“Got any eggs?”

“A few. Some goat meat, too.” Aunt Caroline stood up.

“Where’s everybody else?” Darla asked.

“Out by the greenhouses,” Aunt Caroline answered.

“I’ll go see if Paul needs help,” Darla said.

“Let me get dressed,” I said. “I’ll come, too.”

“You need to rest,” Darla said.

“If I can bike all the way to Warren with three shotgun pellets in my side, I can walk to the greenhouses without them.”

“Tell him to rest, would you please?” Darla begged Dr. McCarthy.

“He won’t listen to me, anyway. Just stay with him and don’t let him do any heavy lifting for a couple days.”

Darla scowled, but she got a clean T-shirt out of a basket in the corner of the room and tossed it at me.

As we approached the greenhouses, I saw Rebecca’s and Anna’s silhouettes moving around inside. Uncle Paul was bent over the toboggan, sorting through the bandits’ supplies.

“Did you find the shotgun?” I asked.

“Shotgun?” Uncle Paul said. “One of them had a little .22 pistol in his hand.”

I pointed at the other corpse lying in the snow. “He had a shotgun.” I walked over to the body. A huge red stain had spread from the hole in the guy’s chest to the surrounding snow, and the blood had already started to freeze. I looked around. Sure enough, there was a long depression in a snowdrift on the far side of the toboggan. The shotgun must have flown out of his hands and buried itself in the snow when Darla shot him.

I pulled the shotgun free and wiped the snow off it with my shirttail. Someone had painted four tiny blue flowers on the wooden stock. They seemed incongruous—too delicate to decorate a weapon of war. Amid the flowers, two words were drawn in fancy script: “Blue Betsy.”

“Weird,” I said to Darla. “Who decorates their shotgun with flowers?”

Darla shrugged.

“Decorates? With flowers?” Uncle Paul said. “Blue flowers? Let me see.”

I passed the shotgun to him.

“How did—”

“What is it?”

“Remember I told you I traded a pair of goats for a shotgun and gave it to your dad? And he took it with him when he left here last year?”

“Yeah . . .?” I said.

“This is it, Alex. The shotgun he took when he left for Iowa last fall. When he went to search for you.”

Chapter 3

I collapsed into the snowbank. Not a good idea when it’s below zero. But I didn’t notice the cold—I was too numb.

“You okay?” Uncle Paul asked.

“I guess,” I said.

“Give us a minute,” Darla said as she sat down in the snow beside me.

Uncle Paul nodded. “I’m going to help Rebecca and Anna replant the kale those bastards pulled up,” he mumbled as he shuffled off.

Darla turned to me. “You okay?”

“What does it mean? Is Dad dead? Why else would this guy have his shotgun?” I punched at a clump of snow.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe Dad sold it. Or traded it for something. He could be alive, right?”