Ashen Winter (12 page)
Darla grabbed my hand and hauled me to my feet. “Are
you
okay?”
“Yeah.” I looked around—we were at least sixty feet from the path. I hoped that would be enough of a break in the trail that nobody would notice our new track. With any luck, they’d assume we went into the river with Bikezilla and drowned at the base of the roller dam.
I struck out on a course perpendicular to our old path. Pushing through the deep snow was hard, cold work. Soon both of us were shivering again.
We left the clearing and entered a dense wood. The trees were all dead and leafless, so it didn’t offer much cover. I pushed onward for twenty or thirty minutes, breaking the trail for Darla.
I heard a clicking sound behind me and turned. Darla was shivering violently.
“Crap, I’ve got frozen peas rattling around where my brains should be. We’ve got to get you out of the wind.”
“I’m ’k-k-kay,” Darla said around the rattle of her teeth. Her lips were turning blue, and the legs of her coveralls were crusted in ice and snow. She was definitely not okay. But even if our fire-starting kit hadn’t gone down with Bikezilla, we couldn’t afford a fire now—we were still too close to the barges and the Black Lake guards.
“Crap, crap, crap,” I whispered. First things first—I could take care of the wind and wet clothes—maybe. I looked around for the deepest drift, a spot where a cluster of trees had captured and held the blowing snow. “Come on.” I took Darla’s hand and led her toward the drift, using my body as a plow.
When we got well into the drift, I dug a foxhole, shoveling away the snow with my hands and arms. Darla tried to help, but her arms were shaking so badly she could barely control them. My wet arm in particular was freezing, and I was shivering, but Darla had nearly been dunked. I had to get her dry somehow. Now.
As I finished digging, I hit the ash layer under the snow—a grim reminder of the cause of this abominable winter, of the volcano’s eruption ten months ago. Some of the ash came up with the last few armloads of snow and left dirty gray blotches on the white ramparts of my foxhole.
We squatted in the foxhole for a few minutes. I wrapped my arms around Darla, hugging her from behind and rubbing her arms. The foxhole kept us out of the wind, but it wasn’t warming up Darla—if anything, she was shivering more.
“Stand up,” I said. “Let’s get these wet clothes off.” I unlaced her boots and gave one a tug. It came off with a crackle of breaking ice and squelch of wet sock. When I finished with both boots, I reached up, unzipped her coverall, and started pulling it down off her torso.
“I’m n-n-not really in the mood,” she said.
“Yeah, me either,” I said as I pulled the coverall down over her legs.
“That’s a f-f-first.”
I forced myself to smile. I was terrified she’d freeze to death as I watched, helpless. I started stripping off her jeans. Water had gotten through her coverall at the waist and ankles, so only the knees of her jeans and long johns were dry. When I got her long underwear off, I put my hands on her hips against her pink panties. They were sopping wet with river water.
With both my hands against her icy skin, I realized she wasn’t shivering as hard. I took that as the worst kind of sign: When the body quits shivering, it’s preparing to die.
I stripped off Darla’s panties and socks, so she stood bottomless in the frozen air. Her bare feet were porcelain white, streaked with blue. She set them in the snow without protest—obviously she couldn’t feel her feet at all. I had maybe a minute before she started to get frostbite, and not much longer than that before the hypothermia would kill her.
I stripped off my boots as fast as I could and squatted on them to keep my socks dry while I pulled off my coveralls.
I jammed Darla’s feet into my coverall. She was so far gone now I had to lift each foot and put it in the pant leg for her. I had two pairs of socks on, a wool outer pair and some nylon liners. I stripped off my wool stocks and forced them over Darla’s feet. My boots didn’t fit right without the thick wool socks and my toes hurt terribly, but I figured that was a good sign. If they quit hurting, I’d know I was in trouble.
I thought about what to do with Darla’s feet. If I left her in socks, her feet would get wet from the snow. But her boots were sopping. I wrapped my hand in the dry part of her long johns and pushed it up into her boots to try to dry them. I don’t know if it helped much, but it was the best I could do. I put the wet boots back on her feet and tied the laces.
“Come on, Darla,” I said. “You’ve got to run now.”
She started to shamble into the snow at the edge of the foxhole. I threw an arm around her waist to stop her.
“No, just run in place. We’ve got to stay hidden until dark.” It wouldn’t be long. The day was already fading.
Darla lifted one foot and set it back down.
“Faster.” I wanted to yell, but I knew I shouldn’t. Black Lake might have people out looking for us.
Darla started stepping desultorily in place. She lurched from side to side as if drunk, her balance so bad that I kept both hands on her waist, ready to catch her if she started to fall over.
“That’s it. Faster, Darla, faster.”
She started moving more quickly. I concentrated on holding her upright and trying to jog in place without kicking her. When she started shivering again, I breathed a sigh of pure relief.
“W-w-what now?” she asked.
“It’s maybe an hour ’til full dark. We can sneak out of here then and head back to Uncle Paul’s farm.”
“N-n-no.”
“What do you mean, no? We just lost all our supplies. It’s going to get even colder after dark. I don’t even know if we can survive tonight. We might have to turn ourselves in to Black Lake. Better to wind up in a FEMA camp than frozen to death.”
Darla didn’t reply. Instead, she started running in place faster. She was shivering hard—her arms made unpredictable spastic movements. I backed off a little so I wouldn’t get brained.
We ran for fifteen or twenty minutes. Darla steadily picked up her pace, while I stuck with a comfortable, warming jog. Her shivering gradually subsided. She started pumping her arms instead of waving them around, and her teeth quit clattering.
Without any warning, she spun back toward me and quit running. “We are not going back, Alex. We’re going forward.”
“Bikezilla’s at the bottom of the Mississippi with all our supplies.”
“I know. You still have the kale seeds?”
“Yeah, and the wheat, but even if we ate all of them, they’d only last a few days.”
“Not to eat, to trade.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say. We hoof it back to Warren, trade the seeds, and get outfitted for another expedition.”
“No—we go forward to Worthington and resupply there.”
“How do you know anyone’s still in Worthington? They might all be dead—or locked in FEMA camps.”
“They might be.” Darla’s shoulders hinted at a shrug. “But they’re my people—I know them. They’re farmers, used to coming through hard knocks and bad weather. They were already well organized last year. They had water and were digging corn. If anyone’s still alive and free in Iowa, it’s the folks in Worthington.”
“And the bandit gangs, and Black Lake—”
“I never thought this trip would be easy.”
“Look, I don’t even know how we’re going to survive
tonight
, let alone get to Worthington.”
“You still have a hatchet and knife?”
“Yeah, on my belt. But we need a fire, and the flint went down with Bikezilla.”
“We’re okay then. With a knife and hatchet, we’ve got fire.”
“How?”
“Easier to show you. And we should wait for dark and get someplace farther away from the lock, so Black Lake won’t spot the fire.” Darla started jogging in place again as if the conversation were over.
I stayed still. “I don’t want to get us—get you—killed, Darla.”
“We’re only in this situation because
you
insisted on going after that wheat.”
Much as I hated to admit it, she was right. “I know. . . . I’m sorry.”
Darla shrugged. “It’s okay. We’re tougher to kill than you give us credit for. We’ve got money—kale seeds and wheat kernels—we’ve got a knife, a hatchet, and some clothes. We’ll get to Worthington, buy supplies, and then go break your mom and dad out of the FEMA camp in Maquoketa. We’ll be okay.”
Half an hour ago Darla had nearly frozen to death, and now she was trying to talk me into continuing our trek. She was certifiably grade-A, prime-cut crazy. “I love you.”
“Love you, too. Now get your ass jogging so you don’t freeze.”
“I’ve got to figure out something to do with these clothes.” I picked up Darla’s coveralls, thinking I’d wring the water out of them, but they were frozen solid. They crackled, and ice flaked off the legs.
I beat the coveralls on a nearby tree trunk to loosen them up and knock off more ice. I thought for a moment about how best to carry them. I could stuff the coveralls into my coat, but they’d melt and get my chest wet. We needed to keep the coveralls and dry them out, but I couldn’t afford to get hypothermic.
Finally I loosened my belt and tucked the coveralls through the back, so they dangled along the back of my legs. I repeated the process with Darla’s pants and long johns, beating them against a tree and tucking them into my belt.
Darla was still jogging in place, but now she had a silly grin on her face.
“What?” I said.
“You should see yourself—you look ridiculous.”
For a second I was annoyed, but then I realized that, yeah, I probably did. “What, you don’t appreciate my superpowers? I’m Clothesline Man! Faster than a tumbling dryer, stronger than the scorching sun, saving the day by flying across the snow to dry all your clothes.” I rotated my hips, making the clothing swing around me in an arc.
Darla was laughing now. The joke seemed pretty lame to me, but probably anything would have been funny after the past few hours.
“I can even dry these!” I picked her pink panties up out of the snow.
Her mouth curled at one side. “Usually you have the opposite effect.”
I thought about that for a moment and then felt my face heat despite the frigid temperature.
“Actually, forget about those. I’ll just go commando for a while.”
“Okay.” I pushed the panties into the snowbank to hide them, although I couldn’t have said why I bothered. Then I resumed jogging; I needed to warm up.
Despite our jogging, we both started shivering again as night fell and the temperature dropped. It got so dark I could barely see the piles of snow around our foxhole.
“How are we going to figure out which way to go?” I asked.
“Shh. Listen.”
I stood still, suppressing my shivering for a moment. I heard the susurration of rushing water very faintly in the distance.
“Which way is it coming from?” Darla whispered.
I pointed.
“Yeah, that’s about what I thought, too. We can use the noise to figure out what direction we’re going.”
“Lead on.”
Darla pushed her way out of the foxhole into the deep snow. I followed, watching the snow, trying to place my feet in her footsteps. After a few minutes of that, I looked up and felt a surge of panic when I couldn’t see her.
Our chances were bad enough together. If we got separated, I didn’t see how we’d survive. Well, Darla might, she knew how to make a fire. I fought down my fear—all I had to do was follow her trail.
I ran for twenty or twenty-five feet, high-stepping through the snow. I almost bowled into Darla’s back. She was trudging along, oblivious to my panic.
Another half hour or so brought us to a break in the trees. A steep slope led down to the frozen river. I heard the roller dam faintly to my right. I could see a little farther here without the trees overhead, but the other side of the river was completely shrouded in darkness.
Darla got down to the river by sitting down and sliding on her butt. I waited a moment for her to move out of the way, then slid to join her.
Walking across the Mississippi felt like exploring an alien planet. The darkness hid everything but the tiny circles of ice on which we planted our feet. Our boots made weird squeaks and crunching sounds. I feared we might walk through this dark limbo forever, slowing gradually until we froze in place, statues lost from their museum, admired by no one.
I saw Darla’s shoulders trembling and said, “Let’s pick up the pace.”
“Yeah. C-c-christ, I’m cold.”
“And hungry,” I added.
“Thirsty, too. I’d even eat some s-s-snow, but that’d just make me c-c-colder.”
We started jogging across the ice. Darla fell twice. Both times she took my hand, levered herself up, and kept going without comment. Wiping out had to hurt, but she ignored the pain, determined to keep us moving forward.
It seemed like it was taking way too long to cross the river. I mean, yeah, the Mississippi is huge, but we’d been jogging twenty or thirty minutes.
“How much farther?” I asked.
“How should I know? Keep moving.” Her voice was huffy from exertion—or annoyance.
Not five minutes later we finally reached the bank.
“Head downstream following the bank?” Darla said. “That’ll take us farther away from the barge.”
“Yeah.”
We jogged south, away from the lock and barges, skirting around big snowdrifts. After a while, the bank started to curve to the right. As we followed it, I noticed the trees were bigger here—their branches hung far out over the river ice. When I caught a glimpse of a tree to our left, I figured out where we were: traveling into an inlet, a frozen tributary of the Mississippi.
Darla stopped. “Let’s make a camp here. That bend should shield us from anyone at the lock.”
“Okay. So how are we going to build a fire?”
“Rubbing sticks together.”
My chest sank. “Um, that’s going to take for-freaking-ever.”
“Not the way we’re going to do it.” Darla explained what she wanted me to do.
I had to do most of the work. Darla was still shivering badly and spent a lot of time running in place or slapping her legs, trying to stay warm. I split a small cottonwood log twice, forming a roughly flat plank that Darla called a fireboard. Another piece of the log became a small rounded grip—a thunderhead, again according to Darla. I whittled an eight-sided spindle out of a cottonwood branch. A long, curved oak branch became a bow, and one of my bootlaces served as a bowstring. I discovered that the inner bark of cottonwood trees would shred nicely to form a fine, dry firestarter or bird’s nest. It took more than an hour to gather and make everything we needed.
