Ashen Winter (7 page)

“The bleeding’s good,” Dr. McCarthy said. “Helps clean out the wound.”

“Uh,” I moaned around the stick.

“Almost done . . . there.”

Darla reached up and took hold of the stick. I couldn’t unclamp my teeth from it.

“Leave it there for now,” Dr. McCarthy said. “We’ll let the punctures bleed for a bit, then I’ll clean and bandage them. He’ll need the stick for that. I’m going to get fresh water and antiseptic.” He left the room.

“Can I let go of your legs for a minute?” Darla asked me.

I nodded weakly.

Darla pulled her sleeve over her hand and used it to wipe the tears from my face. Until then, I hadn’t even been aware I’d been crying. “You’re a tough guy, you know?”

“Uh,” I moaned.

Darla gently wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pressed herself against me. She softly kissed my eyelids, right then left. “Love you,” she whispered.

“’Uv ’ou ’oo,” I grunted back.

Dr. McCarthy came back into the room carrying a basin of water and two small bottles. “I leave for thirty seconds, and you’re making out in my operating room? Teenagers.”

Darla quit hugging me and glared at him, but he ignored her as he prepared to wash my wounds. I caught the hint of a smile peeking out of the corner of his mouth.

Washing and rebandaging the wounds didn’t hurt as badly as the cutting had, but there were still fresh tears for Darla to wipe away. It took a couple of minutes for me to relax enough to release the stick from between my teeth.

A wave of exhaustion washed over me. It was late afternoon, nowhere near bedtime, but I was suddenly so tired that I could barely sit upright. I stumbled to my feet. Darla grabbed my arm, concern plain on her face.

“I’m okay. Just tired.” I didn’t want her to worry.

She helped me down the hall to the exam room we’d slept in the night before, and I stretched out on the cot. My last thought before I drifted into unconsciousness: Why couldn’t I have passed out half an hour earlier?

Chapter 10

Darla’s snoring woke me. She didn’t snore all the time, but when she did, she sounded like a hibernating grizzly.

She’d left an oil lamp burning as a nightlight. I watched her sleep for a while as she lay curled up on the exam table. Her face was gorgeous, golden in the lamplight, although the effect was ruined by the flutter her nostrils made with each rip-roaring snore.

I thought about waking her—sometimes a gentle shake would be enough to end her snoring. But we’d both had a long day yesterday. And my side hurt badly enough that I didn’t think I could get back to sleep, anyway.

I rolled out of bed. I was dressed, but my boots were propped upright beside the cot. Darla must have taken them off me. I slipped on my boots, picked up the lantern, and went to peek out the back door of the clinic. It was pitch black and bitterly cold outside—still sometime in the middle of the night.

I closed the door and went back down the hall to the room the bandit occupied. He was curled on his left side under three blankets. Most of his face was hidden, covered by long hair and a scraggly beard. The one eye I could see was open, shining in the lamplight as he stared at me.

“You ready to talk?” I asked.

He tried to say something but started coughing instead. He hacked a huge wad of greenish phlegm onto the sheet. “Need to pee something fierce,” he said finally.

I sighed. “Bathroom doesn’t work. You want to go to the pit toilet outside or use a bedpan?”

“Try to get up, I guess.”

“Okay.” I grabbed a rag from the desk and tossed it at him. “Wipe up your mess first so you don’t smear it everywhere.”

He dabbed feebly at the phlegm, then dropped the rag on the floor. I scowled at him, picked up a clean corner of the rag with two fingers and tossed it into the laundry bin. He started to push himself upright, got to about forty-five degrees, and cried out. He grabbed his right side and collapsed back into the bed. When he regained his breath, he said, “Better use the bedpan.”

“Tell me when you’re done,” I said when I returned with it. “I’ll wait in the hall.” I left the door cracked so I’d hear if he tried to get out of the bed.

It seemed like a long wait. I remembered having to use a bedpan while I was staying at Darla’s house after I’d been injured by Target the year before. Actually, what I used was her mother’s second-best bread pan. We never did tell her mother about that. The memory of Mrs. Edmunds sat heavy in my chest. I’d known her for less than three weeks before she was murdered, but still, I missed her.

I’d be dead now if not for her. She’d shown me a kindness I could never repay—a kindness that moved her to welcome a bleeding stranger into her home.

“Done,” I heard from the exam room.

I went inside and took the bedpan from the bandit. It sloshed with urine so dark it was almost orange. I carefully set the stinking pan on the desk and lowered myself into a chair. “So, Ralph, you got that—”

“Ralph? Who’s Ralph?”

“You said your name is Ralph.”

“I did? When?”

“Last night.”

“Don’t remember that. No, I’m Ed. My dog’s name was Ralph.”

“Huh, wonder why you told me your name was Ralph?”

He twisted his head and stared at the ceiling.

“I need to know where you got that shotgun,” I said. “Blue Betsy, remember?”

“Why am I here?”

“Because I need to know where the shotgun came from.” This was getting old. “Trust me, I’d have preferred to leave you where you were. You’d have bled out or frozen to death.”

“Might’ve been better if you had.”

“Yeah. But—”

“You want to know where we got that shotgun. You going to kill me after I tell you?”

“What? No.”

“You’re just going to let me go. Tell me another one, kid. How do they do it here? Hanging? Or a bullet in the brain?”

“Neither. You’ve just got to move on and never come back.”

“Huh.” Ed folded his arms and closed his eyes.

“Where’d that shotgun come from?”

Ed was silent.

I leaned forward and breathed out heavily, staring at him. I had to convince him to trust me, at least a little. “You hungry?”

“Yeah, but you ain’t gonna feed me. Nobody’s got enough food to waste it on half-dead strangers.”

“Wait here.”

He laughed a wheezy, halfhearted cackle. “I can’t even sit up by myself.”

He had a point. I returned to the room Darla and I shared. She was still loudly asleep. I dug through our supplies, pulling out packages of food. I thought about what would impress Ed, but while we had plenty of food, there wasn’t much variety. I settled on a sandwich—two cornmeal pancakes for the bread with a slice of ham and a slab of goat cheese for the filling. Ice crystals shattered off the ham as I cut it, and the slice was hard as a board. We had no way to keep it warm. The cheese crumbled. As a finishing touch I peeled an icy kale leaf off the stack and added that to the sandwich.

Ed was staring at the door when I returned to his room. I put the sandwich in his hands.

“That’s . . . for me?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, “Don’t eat too fast. You’ll barf.”

“I know.”

I sat him up, propped against the wall. He took a bite, chewing slowly. He held the sandwich in front of him as he ate, staring at it like a kid with a new iPhone on Christmas morning. Well, like a kid would have stared at an iPhone before the volcano. Now that kid would just toss the useless chunk of metal and glass aside and look for the good stuff: food, clothing, matches, or weapons.

I refilled his water cup.

Ed set the water beside him and said, “So this is corn, lettuce—”

“Kale,” I said.

“Kale, okay. Cheese and a slab of?”

“Ham.” I was quiet for a while as Ed ate. “Why’d your buddy leave you in that house, anyway?”

“I was slowing him down. I think he was going to put me out of my misery, but I got him to leave me there the same way I got you to back off. Pure D bluff. Told him I had one bullet left for the MAC-10. He didn’t want to find out the hard way whether I was telling the truth or not.”

“Took balls—so what did you do before the eruption?”

“Before the eruption?”

“Yeah, like, I went to high school. Cedar Falls High.”

“I . . .” Ed lifted the sandwich, staring at it, not eating it. “Mandy used to love ham sandwiches.”

“Mandy?”

“I haven’t thought about her in months. She was my life—how could I forget?”

“What about—”

“I guess you just go along, don’t you—”

“I don’t—”

“Every day you do what it takes to survive. And every day what you’re willing to do gets a little worse. Until you’re—Jesus, we were shooting kids.”

I tried to break in to ask about the shotgun again, but his voice dropped to a whisper and he kept talking. “Dear God, what have I done? What have I become?”

He buried his face in his hands and started crying huge, racking sobs that traveled in lurching waves down his belly. I was afraid he’d tear his wounds open, he was crying so hard. Tears leaked from between his fingers. I watched him, torn between disgust and an irrational desire to comfort the bandit who had attacked our farm, who would have killed Max and kidnapped Rebecca and Anna if he could have.

It took a while for Ed’s sobbing to subside to sniffles. “I was a bookkeeper,” he said at last. “I ran Peachtree for a machine shop in Ely. What happened to us? What happened to me?”

“What did happen to you?” I must have let some of the scorn I felt color my voice. He pulled his hands from his face and stared at me with an expression of such naked torment that I forgot to ask him again about the shotgun.

“It started with Ralph,” Ed said. “He was our dog. We were starving to death, Mandy and me.”

“I need—”

“Then a couple weeks later Mandy died anyway. Flu bug or maybe just the diarrhea. I should have just lain down to die next to her instead of burying her. A lot of people did, you know? I’d find them all over Ely, frozen together in their beds. The guys I ran with later laughed at them. But they did the right thing—instead of doing something just a little worse every day, all in the name of survival, shaving yourself away until the last sliver of who you were is gone.”

I raised my voice, trying to break in. “Would you let me—”

“I still dream about him. Ralph. He was a good dog.” Ed looked at me, his eyes stripped of color by the low light and his tears. “They say you are what you eat, you know? Sometimes in my dreams I’m Ralph, my tail thumping the floor, just happy to see Ed come home. Sometimes in my dreams I’m a pile of bones. Endless bones, burnt and cracked, feeding a greasy fire.” He turned his head and started crying again, softly this time.

I watched him cry for a moment. “I need to know where that shotgun came from,” I said for the eight millionth time.

“How did I—”

“Goddamn it, Ed! Tell me where my parents are!” Without thinking about it I’d taken a step toward him and raised my fists to my chin, planting my feet at a forty-five-degree angle: a fighting stance.

“I want to stay. In Warren. Rejoin civilization. And I want a pardon.”

“No freaking way am I letting a guy who tried to kidnap my sister and cousin stay within a hundred miles of Warren. The mayor was ready to throw you out while you were unconscious. Dr. McCarthy saved your ass. You tell me about that shotgun, and I’ll try to convince them to let you stay until you’re healthy enough to leave. Then you’ll get the hell out. In fact, you’ll get out of the whole state of Illinois.”

“I’m not saying anything then.”

“I could beat it out of you.” I raised my fists again.

“Go ahead,” Ed’s voice sounded hollow. “I don’t want to rejoin the gang, and if I leave on my own, I’m dead anyway. You may as well beat me to death. Wouldn’t take much right now.”

Ed’s eyes were brimming with tears again. I let out the breath I’d been holding, and with it my whole body deflated. I couldn’t beat on a defenseless man, no matter what he’d done. “You have to buy your way into Warren,” I said. “They aren’t taking just anybody—they don’t have enough food to do that. You’ve got to bring skills or supplies they need. You’ve got nothing to offer—the only thing Warren needs even less than bookkeepers are lawyers.”

“So you buy me a spot. Or convince your mayor to give me one.”

“They don’t want a bandit hanging around.”

“That’s your problem—if you still want to know about that shotgun.”

Gah! It was frustrating to admit it to myself, but he was right—he was half-dead, but he still had the upper hand. And I didn’t want to argue with him all night. I reached into my coat pocket and extracted an envelope. “There are 200 kale seeds in here. More than enough to buy you admission to Warren—if you can buy it at all. I’m not going to hang around here and try to convince the mayor and sheriff that you’re an okay guy.
I’m
not even sure you are. So here’s the deal—you tell me everything you know, and I give you the seeds. Trading them for admission to Warren is your problem, not mine.”

“How do I know the seeds are any good?”

“Goddammit—!”

“Okay, okay. I’ll take it.”

I handed him the envelope. “Talk.”

“Danny, he—”

“Who’s Danny? You said the gun was Bill’s.”

“Danny’s the leader of the gang I run with. Ran with, I mean. The Peckerwoods. Bill’s just the guy Danny gave the shotgun to.”

“Peckerwood? Isn’t that some kind of insult?”

“Yeah, I guess. It’s also the name of a racist gang in Anamosa, in the state prison. I mean, I was never there, but that’s where the leaders were when the volcano blew. Anyway, it started to get hard to find weapons and ammo. So Danny made a deal with some guards at one of the FEMA camps in Iowa. He got all kinds of weapons from them. Ammo, too. Most of the guns weren’t military stuff, so I figure they were confiscated from refugees.”

“So maybe my dad is at that FEMA camp? Where is it?”

“Might be, yeah. It’s outside Maquoketa.”

“Where’s that?”

“About halfway between Dubuque and the Quad Cities.”

That made it somewhere southwest of Warren. I wasn’t sure exactly. “So Danny was trading for the guns? What was he trading?”