Ashen Winter (39 page)
A deeper brown caught my attention to the right. A UPS truck had hit the front of Anamosa Floral, shattering the plate-glass window. Someone had dug a narrow path in the snow pile to reach the open passenger-side door. A hillock of snow blocked the back of the truck, although one section had been dug away to reveal the deep blue gas cap of a very small car.
“What’s that symbol?” Alyssa asked, pointing to a diamond-shaped red sticker on the truck that read LNG.
“Must be one of those new natural-gas-fueled trucks UPS has been testing. Lower emissions,” Dad said.
“So the UPS truck crashed, and then that little blue car blocked it in?” I asked.
Dad shrugged. “Let’s check it out.”
I took the precious shake light out of my pocket. The path that had been dug to the truck was so narrow and its sides so high that it felt like a cave. Dad followed me in, but Mom, Ben, and Alyssa stayed in the street.
The inside of the truck looked as though a storm had swept through it. Scraps of cardboard and empty boxes were scattered everywhere, covered in an uneven layer of packing peanuts and bubble wrap. The keys were in the ignition, but the fuel gauge read empty. Which figured. We’d have better luck finding a scrap of paper in a blizzard than a working car in Anamosa.
“Check this out,” Dad said, pointing at a row of four metal tanks strapped to one interior sidepanel. They were squat propane cylinders, like barbeque grills use. The tanks were linked with hoses, but the last hose in the row was disconnected, maybe knocked loose when looters rampaged through the truck. Dad grabbed the hose, slid the quick-connect sleeve back, and reattached it to the tank.
“Is propane the same thing as natural gas?” I asked.
“No,” Dad said. “And they wouldn’t put the tanks inside the truck, anyway. Somebody has converted this one.”
“You think it’ll run?” I asked.
“One way to find out.” He sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key.
The first time, the truck made a rusty cough and died. The second, it chugged for a moment, and I breathed a prayer, “You can do it, truck. Start . . . start.” Darla would have laughed and informed me that machines run on gears and solvents, not hopes and prayers. But I knew nothing about natural gas-powered trucks; all I could offer was hope and a prayer.
The third time Dad cranked the key, the truck choked to life. The fuel gauge twitched, moving to just above empty. Dad shut down the truck right away—we couldn’t go anywhere blocked in by the small blue car and snow. We trudged back down the narrow path and explained the situation to Mom, Alyssa, and Ben.
“Is it even worth digging out the truck?” Mom asked, “since we barely have any fuel, anyway?”
“I saw a propane distributor just south of Anamosa,” I said. “They had tanks painted like ears of corn. Maybe there’s still propane there.”
“Good idea.” Dad nodded, ruminating.
We spent the rest of the day digging out the truck. We scavenged some shelves from A
NAMOSA
F
LORAL
that we used as makeshift snow shovels and scrapers. A mountain of snow crowned the truck, entombing it completely. And we had to clear the snow from around the blue car—which turned out to be a VW Bug—not to mention figuring out some way to move it.
By nightfall, everyone was exhausted and cranky. We all had at least one nasty blister, and Ben had cut his hand on the sharp edge of one of the shelves. But the vehicles were clear of snow and ash. We built a small fire using cardboard from the back of the truck and wood scavenged from the flower shop’s furniture. Dinner was cornmeal mush.
The temperature dropped more during dinner. We debated sleeping inside the floral shop, but if we built a fire inside, the wood floor might ignite. None of us wanted to risk a fire inside the UPS truck near those four propane tanks.
Instead we slept more or less on Main Street in the area we had cleared behind the truck. Each of us took a two-hour guard shift, feeding the fire and keeping a lookout. For once, Alyssa stayed awake during her watch. It figured that the one time she actually kept watch, the night would pass peacefully.
In the morning, we had to face the problem of the VW Bug. “Maybe we could roll it,” Dad said, “like L.A. rioters after a Lakers championship.”
“Like what?” Alyssa asked.
“Whenever the Lakers won a basketball championship, people used to go out and roll cars over for fun.”
“Destructive way to celebrate,” Alyssa replied.
I bent my knees and hooked my gloved hands under the side of the car. By straightening my knees, I could rock the car, but I sure couldn’t lift it by myself. “This is going to take all of us.”
Everyone crowded in alongside the car. We could only reach the front and the back, where the car was slightly longer than the back of the UPS truck.
“Three . . . two . . . one . . . lift!” I yelled.
We raised the tires a couple inches, and the car settled back to the ground.
“Harder this time. Lift with your legs,” I said. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . heave!” We got the car about a foot off the ground before Ben’s hands slipped and the Bug fell back.
“We can do this. Scream when you lift this time. Three . . . two . . . one . . . now!” I screamed. This time I was able to straighten my legs completely, and the car rocked past its center of balance and crashed onto its side.
We’d created about three feet of space between the car and truck. Now we had room to spread out. Each of us grabbed whatever was handy—the exhaust system, parts of the frame, or the tires. This time we rolled the car easily onto its back.
Now, though, there was nothing to grip. We couldn’t generate enough force by pushing to roll the Bug again. And reaching down didn’t help—we couldn’t reach anything but the smooth, rounded body panels. And the car was still blocking the UPS truck.
“Everybody move down the street,” Dad said. “I’ve got this.”
As he climbed into the UPS truck, Dad yelled, “Move farther!”
We were half a block down the street when he started the truck. He revved the engine and threw the truck into reverse, crunching into the Bug. It slid easily on its roof, coasting five or six feet. Dad pulled the truck forward and backed into the Bug again. He had more space to gain speed this time, so he hit the Bug with a crash and screech of tortured metal. The car sailed across the road, spinning on its roof until it slammed into the snowbank on the opposite side and stuck.
Dad pulled out onto Main Street. “Hurry up, there’s no fuel to waste!”
We sprinted to the truck and piled in. I took shotgun—maybe I should have offered the passenger seat to Mom or Alyssa, but I knew where the propane distributor was. I needed to be able to see and talk to Dad. Everyone else sat on the floor in back amid the remaining wrecked boxes.
The propane distributor was even closer than I remembered—just past the abandoned strip mall and collapsed fast food restaurants south of Anamosa on Highway 1. It was comprised of a low cinderblock building labeled T
RI
-C
OUNTY
P
ROPANE
, one tank about the size of a semitrailer, and a dozen smaller tanks, each fifteen or sixteen feet long and raised about four feet off the ground, so their bases were at the level of the snow around them. All the tanks were painted to mimic ears of corn—green leaves on one end peeled back partially to reveal yellow kernels on the other. Each tank sported a cap of deep snow. There was also a long row of lumps in the snow, probably marking smaller, buried tanks.
Dad stopped and cut the engine. “How in the world are we going to load one of those tanks onto this truck?”
“Dig out one of the smaller tanks and drag it out here?” I suggested.
“Yeah, maybe.”
We struggled over the high snow berm. Flailing through chest-deep snow to reach the row of mounds was a huge chore, even though we had less than one hundred feet to cross. We dug through a mound, finding that there was indeed a smaller propane tank—an oval six or seven feet long—buried under all that snow. But the gauge on top of the tank read empty.
Mom and Dad started working on the next tank in the line, while Alyssa and I skipped down the row about twenty feet to work on a different tank. Working with our hands and arms, it seemed to take forever just to dig enough snow to read the gauges. Both tanks were empty.
In the meantime, Ben had wandered over to the big tanks. Their gauges were bottom-mounted and easier to clear. He’d checked half a dozen tanks in the time it took the four of us to check two.
“Any luck, Ben?” I yelled.
He stopped and looked down for a moment, as though thinking. “Yes,” he yelled. “I am alive. I am free of the Peckerwoods and free of the Black Lake camp. That is very lucky.”
“I guess. But I wanted to know if any of those tanks have propane in them.”
“You did not ask that,” Ben said.
Gah. What would it take to get a simple, straight answer? “So do they?” Ben looked again at his feet, and I realized what my mistake was. “Do any of the large tanks have propane?”
“I have only inspected six of them,” Ben said. “The one on the end is full, and the rest are empty.”
Dad looked up from digging in the snow. “Maybe we could clear a path and back the truck up to it. Run a hose or something to fill the tanks on the truck?”
“If we’re going to do all that work,” I said, “let’s load the whole tank onto the truck.”
“That thing’s got to weigh a couple tons.”
“So? I’m sure UPS builds these trucks to handle a lot of weight. And it looks like it’ll fit.”
Dad stood and eyed the tank speculatively. “How the heck would we load it on there?”
“It’s at about the right height.” I started pushing through the snow toward it. “If we back up the truck to it so that the end of the tank is already inside, maybe we can slide it the rest of the way on.”
“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 announced.
“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.
“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—”
