Текст книги "Ashfall"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“No, Beamers,” Dr. McCarthy snorted. “I had one. After the ashfall started, the ambulance couldn’t make it here from Galena. So I used my BMW. Ash got in the air intakes and tore up the engine. Pretty much all the cars in town were wrecked by the ashfall. Gale Shipman kept this beauty in his garage under a tarp. Man, he was mad when the mayor told him he had to lend it to me. I don’t know if he’ll ever speak to either of us again.”

“What in the world were you giving that guy at the clinic?” I said. “It looked like . . . Froot Loops?”

“Yep, Kellogg’s Froot Loops,” Dr. McCarthy said.

“Why?”

“We ran out of Special K.”

“Never heard of a doctor prescribing breakfast cereal,” I said.

“I work with what I have. All those people in the clinic have scurvy—it’s caused by vitamin C deficiency. We’re all going to get it if we can’t find anything to eat other than pork. It simply manifests in children and seniors first.”

“And breakfast cereal has vitamin C?”

“Yep, exactly. We found a whole truckload of it abandoned up on Highway 11. I’d have preferred a truckload of multivitamins, but I’ll take what I can get. Don’t know what we’ll do when we run out, though.”

“How is it that you’ve got pork to eat?” Darla asked.

“Factory hog farms. There were three of them near Warren. Had better than ten thousand head of hogs. Whole town pitched in to butcher them and preserve the meat. Still, most of it would have spoiled if we hadn’t gotten this cold weather so early. Saved our bacon, so to speak.”

Darla groaned. “At least you don’t have to worry about getting enough to eat.”

“You don’t have to worry, either,” Max said. “We’ve only run out of food twice, and that was before you got here and built the corn grinder.”

“Yeah,” Darla said, “But with your dad hurt, we won’t be able to dig up as much corn. And losing that greenhouse—”

“It’ll be okay,” I said. I didn’t want Max to worry about the food situation, although truthfully, I was a bit worried myself.

“Turn here,” Max said, and Dr. McCarthy cranked the wheel over, turning down Canyon Park Road. A few minutes later we stopped in the road in front of the farm’s driveway. We had only shoveled one path in the snow from the house to the road, nowhere near wide enough for the Studebaker. All four of us jogged down the driveway toward the house. Aunt Caroline and Rebecca left the damaged greenhouse and joined us.

Uncle Paul’s skin was gray and sweaty. Anna had cut off his left pant leg. Livid bruises blotched his leg around the break, and it was grotesquely lumpy, but there was no blood. Dr. McCarthy knelt by his leg and examined it for a moment.

“How’s it look, Jim?” Uncle Paul asked.

“Not bad. Wish I could X-ray the break, but I think it should set fine.”

“Good, good.” Uncle Paul exhaled heavily.

“I’ll get to work, then. Now the good news is that I still have some fiberglass casting tape.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“We’ve been out of painkillers for weeks.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“I need a pail of water.”

“I’ll get it,” Anna offered.

Dr. McCarthy took a thin stick wrapped in leather from his bag. The leather was dented and scarred with tooth marks. A deep frown creased Uncle Paul’s face, but he reached up and took the stick from the doctor, put it in his mouth, and chomped down.

“Let’s have the adults hold his arms and legs,” Dr. McCarthy said. “The less he moves around, the better.”

I wasn’t sure who he meant at first. Aunt Caroline knelt and took hold of one of her husband’s arms. Dr. McCarthy was looking at me, so I grabbed my uncle’s other arm.

“Who’s the strongest?” Dr. McCarthy asked.

“Alex,” Darla said.

“Darla,” I said.

“Well, one of you should hold his left leg above the break. I need it immobilized while I set the bone.”

“You do it,” I told Darla.

Darla held Uncle Paul’s thigh, and Max grabbed his unbroken leg. Dr. McCarthy gently ran the fingers of his left hand along the break. With his right, he took a firm grip on Uncle Paul’s ankle. A low moan escaped Uncle Paul’s lips around the stick. Rebecca and Anna stood to one side, holding hands and watching.

“Everyone ready?”

I nodded.

Dr. McCarthy pulled back on the ankle, straining with the effort. Uncle Paul screamed, a trumpeting sound muffled by the leather-wrapped stick locked in his teeth. All his muscles clenched, and I had to lean forward, using both hands and all my weight to keep his arm forced against the floor. His face turned into a flaming rictus mask of pain. Even over his scream, I could hear the bones grind as Dr. McCarthy straightened his leg.

The scream ended abruptly and Uncle Paul’s arm went slack in my hands. “Check his breathing! Make sure his airway is clear,” Dr. McCarthy ordered.

I bent lower and put my cheek against his mouth. I felt a puff of breath against my skin. “He’s breathing fine.” I put my fingers against his neck. “Pulse feels strong.”

“Okay, good.” Dr. McCarthy had straightened the leg and was wrapping it in a cloth bandage.

Aunt Caroline swayed. I grabbed her upper arm. “You okay?” I asked.

“A little woozy,” she said.

“You should lie down.” I helped her stretch out on the couch.

Dr. McCarthy ripped open a foil packet and removed a bright purple strip of fiberglass tape. He dunked the tape in water and wrapped it around the break, over the cloth bandages. Darla helped, holding Uncle Paul’s leg off the floor to make it easier to wrap. Dr. McCarthy wrapped three more strips of fiberglass tape over the bandages, completely immobilizing the leg and ankle.

“That should do it,” Dr. McCarthy said as he repacked his bag. “If you see any red streaks or if the leg starts to smell bad, come get me again. Aspirin or willow bark tea would help with the swelling, if you can manage it.”

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “How do we pay you?”

“Pay me with whatever you can. I need medical supplies, gas, lamp oil, batteries, flashlights, candles, and the like. Vitamin C tablets are worth more than gold, on account of the scurvy. Food would be welcome also, so long as it’s not pork. Only reason I’ve been able to keep practicing is that folks have been so generous. Some of them even bring supplies when they’re not sick.”

Uncle Paul was still unconscious, and Aunt Caroline’s eyes were closed. “I’ll get some supplies,” I said.

I went to the kitchen and gathered a dozen duck eggs, two small goat cheeses, a bag of cornmeal, and some kale. “This is all we can spare right now,” I said when I returned to the living room. “We’ll bring more stuff later.”

“That’ll be fine.” Dr. McCarthy pulled a purple leaf out of the bag. “Is this kale?”

“Yeah. The greenhouses are too cold to grow anything else.”

“It’s a member of the cabbage family, right?”

“I think so,” Darla said.

“And none of you have scurvy?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Dr. McCarthy reached toward my mouth. “Mind if I look?”

“No, go ahead.”

He peeled back my lower lip and looked at my teeth. Then he repeated the process with my upper lip. “No sign of scurvy at all. I bet that kale is loaded with vitamin C. How much of it do you have?”

“Not enough. That storm last night ripped up one of the greenhouses, and a bunch of it froze. It’s all mushy– really only good for the goats.”

“No, no, no. Mushy or not, it’ll treat scurvy fine.”

“I didn’t feed the goats yet,” Rebecca said. “I’ll go get the buckets of frozen kale.”

“Now look,” Darla said, “we appreciate your help, and we’ll give you all the kale we can spare, but we’ve got to eat, too. We don’t have a lot of extra food—we need most of the kale ourselves.”

“That’s no problem,” Dr. McCarthy said. “We’ve got plenty of pork in town. I’m sure the mayor will agree to give you all the pork you need in return for your kale.”

“We’ll trade,” Darla said, “ten pounds of pork for one pound of kale.”

“Darla,” I whispered. “He said he’d keep us supplied with pork. And we should help out, anyway.”

“What if the greenhouses fail?” she hissed back. “We need to have a supply of stored food in case something goes wrong.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said out loud. “We’ll give you all the kale we can now as payment for your help, and then as we harvest more, we’ll trade it for pork.”

“I’ll have to confirm it with the mayor, but that sounds fine,” Dr. McCarthy said. “Why don’t you ride back to town with me, and I’ll set you up with as much pork as you can carry. Call it a down payment for future kale harvests.”

We gathered up all the kale we had: two five-gallon buckets of frozen leaves and four bags of good stuff. I got our three biggest backpacks, and Max, Darla, and I squeezed into the Studebaker for the ride back to town.

Dr. McCarthy drove us to a huge metal building north of town. The sign over the door read: WARREN MEAT PACKING. A wiry guy sat on a metal folding chair in front of a small fire just outside the main door. A shotgun rested on his knees.

“Hey, Stu,” Dr. McCarthy called as we walked up. “Need to trade some pork for medical supplies. I’ll go down to the mayor’s office and get you the paperwork as soon as we’re done.”

“Aw, Jim, you know you’re supposed to bring the paperwork first.” The guard shrugged and handed Dr. McCarthy a key. “But you may as well go ahead. He always approves your trades, anyway.”

“Thanks, Stu.” Dr. McCarthy unlocked the door and ushered us inside.

Pork gleamed pink in the light filtering in through the open door. The plant was packed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of frozen hog carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Shelves lined the walls, filled to overflowing with pink hams, white loins, and huge slabs of uncut bacon.

“Take as much as you can carry,” Dr. McCarthy said. “I’ll weigh it for the paperwork, and you can pay in kale later.”

My mouth hung open, watering as I imagined that bacon sizzling in a pan. The slaughterhouse held enough pork to feed the small town of Warren for years—enough to feed our family forever. And Dr. McCarthy hadn’t hesitated when Darla proposed trading one pound of kale for ten of pork. All our work building and tending the greenhouses had paid off. Our kale, loaded with vitamin C, was more valuable than gold. Food represented wealth in the post-eruption world, as surely as a bank vault stuffed with one-hundred-dollar bills had represented wealth in the old world.

Darla must have been thinking something similar. She turned and hugged me, her face lit by a smile of the sort I’d rarely seen since we left Worthington—since her mother had died.

Thinking about Mrs. Edmunds turned my happiness bittersweet. I stretched to kiss Darla’s forehead, then disentangled myself and stepped outside to clear my head.

The western sky glowed with a dim, yellow-gray light. I stared at the horizon as if I could see back to the start of my journey in Cedar Falls, 140 miles to the west. I thought about all the people I’d met who were worse off than we were, struggling just to survive: the refugees at Cedar Falls High, the people of Worthington, Katie’s mom and her kids, the inmates at the FEMA camp. And wandering somewhere among them, my mom and dad.

Maybe one day my parents would trudge up the driveway to my uncle’s farm. But if they didn’t, Darla and I would go find them. With Uncle Paul injured, we couldn’t leave anytime soon, because even more of the farm work would fall to us. But I’d made a promise to myself before I‘d left Cedar Falls: not just to get to Warren, but to find my family. A promise I planned to honor.

Darla stepped beside me and wrapped an arm around my waist. Despite my worries about Mom and Dad, I felt strangely hopeful. Even in the icy wind, the warmth of Darla’s body against mine felt like spring.

Author’s Note

There is a colossal volcano under Yellowstone National Park. The volcano’s caldera, or crater, is visible in some places as a ring of cliffs and measures roughly 34 by 45 miles. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, events so powerful they are usually classified as supervolcanoes. The largest of these eruptions released about 2,500 times as much magma as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

It’s often said that the Yellowstone volcano is “due” for another eruption, since the last three were 640,000, 1.3 million, and 2.1 million years ago, respectively. Actually, it’s extremely unlikely that the volcano will explode in our lifetime. The eruption preceding the last three was 4.2 million years ago, so the regularity of the most recent events is deceptive.

The problem with writing a book set in the aftermath of a volcanic supereruption is that no supervolcano has exploded in recorded human history. So in describing it, I’ve had to make do with scientific speculation and accounts of survivors of normal, or Plinian, eruptions such as Mount St. Helens in Washington State and Krakatoa in Indonesia.

For example, early in this book, Alex’s house is hit with a piece of rock thrown 900 miles by the volcano at supersonic speed. Plinian volcanoes don’t do this; all the heavy material they eject falls near the volcano’s vent, and only the much lighter ash travels farther. Some scientists believe supervolcanoes behave differently, blasting chunks of rock on ballistic trajectories from deep pipes in the lithosphere (the solid part of the earth consisting of the crust and outer mantle), but this view is controversial.

The loudest sound in recorded history was probably Krakatoa’s eruption on August 27, 1883 in Indonesia. That eruption was audible almost 3,000 miles away on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. There, it sounded like the roar of heavy artillery for several hours. Yet the Yellowstone supereruption 2.1 million years ago was about 120 times more forceful than Krakatoa’s blast.

The ashfall I’ve depicted in the book is similar to what Yellowstone released 2.1 million years ago. This amount of ash would have darkened the skies for months, possibly years, and caused a global volcanic winter lasting a minimum of three years. Ash particles are tiny and electrically charged, so they are often associated with lightning storms. They can also cause odd weather effects, usually abnormally heavy precipitation in the short term, followed by years of drought.

No one knows exactly how much warning we’d get before an eruption at Yellowstone. It’s possible it could happen suddenly, but more likely there would be years of earthquakes and topographical changes to warn us. Whether we’d prepare adequately, even if given enough warning, is another question, of course.

If you’d like to read more about the science behind Ashfall, the following books are a good start:

Supervolcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park by Greg Breining. MBI Publishing, 2007. Provides an excellent overview of the history and geology of Yellowstone. Includes an account of major volcanic events that have impacted humans and speculates about the possible consequences of a Yellowstone supereruption.

Supervolcano: The Catastrophic Event that Changed the Course of Human History by John Savino, Ph.D. and Marie D. Jones. Career Press, 2007. Contains information on supervolcanoes around the world, including Yellowstone (Wyoming), Long Valley (California), and Toba (Indonesia). Chapter 10 is an interesting fictional account of a future supereruption at the Long Valley volcano.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester. HarperCollins, 2003. An exhaustive and beautifully written account of the biggest modern Plinian eruption.

Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World by David Keys. Ballantine, 1999. Describes how a volcanic event in 535 A.C.E. changed civilizations across the globe. Very useful for considering the possible political, social, and epidemiological consequences of a supervolcano.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, my thanks go to my mother and father, Shirley and Stan Mullin. Without their unwavering support, Ashfall would not exist. I’m also grateful to Helen-Louise Boling for her feedback on Ashfall and for being the good kind of mother-in-law.

Thank you to Ian Strickland, who showed me Ashfall through a teen’s eyes and boosted my confidence, and to Dorothy Menosky, who showed me Ashfall through a teacher’s eyes and boosted my humility. It is a better novel for their input.

To everyone at Critique Circle who gave feedback on pieces of this novel (Angela Ackerman, Ardyth, Vicky Bates, Darla Davis, Liam Deihr, Karla Gomez, Gorse_wine, Greenguy, Molly Hart, Katy, Helen Kitson, Audrey Koudelka, Andrea Mack, Martha 2150, Memyselfi, Shannon O’Farrell, Quotelover, Sky, Tamamushi, and Elizabeth Taylor), thank you. I also appreciated the generous advice Jim McCarthy offered, if not the rejection that accompanied it. Ashfall improved dramatically due to his insight.

I’m grateful to Pete Matthews and Erin Stoesz, who volunteered their geology expertise to ferret out scientific errors in Ashfall. Any errors that remain are mine alone.

I owe my publisher and editor, Peggy Tierney, an unpayable debt for her steadfast belief in Ashfall and patience with me as we worked to make it the best book it could be. I came to dread her emails that read, “Could you rewrite the ending, just one more time?” But she knew exactly what the novel needed, and the blame falls on me for taking six tries to get it right.

Lisa Rojani Buccieri did a masterful job editing Ashfall . . . twice! I’ve placed the only exclamation point in these acknowledgments in her honor. She made my writing better than I believed it could be. Thanks to Dorothy Chambers for saving me from unspeakable embarrassment. To Ana Correal, who brought the emotional subtext of Ashfall to life through her cover art, thank you. I also appreciated the help Gabe Tierney offered in regard to the first chapter and cover.

Mrs. Parker and Mr. Wesson at Indianapolis ATA Black Belt Academy showed nearly superhuman patience and per severance in teaching me the taekwondo that became such an important part of Ashfall. Thank you both.

Thank you to my brother, Paul Mullin, for his help with Darla’s Macgyver moments. Also thank you to Paul, Caroline, Max and Anna for teaching me about goats, ducks, and greenhouse farming.

A huge thank you to Larry Endicott, who is such a brilliant photographer that even I look good in his camera lens. Thanks also to Mab Graves, who provided cheerleading and much needed help with artistic questions.

I’ve been thrilled and humbled by the support of the authors, booksellers, librarians, and teachers who read Ashfall and offered advance praise: Charles Benoit, Cinda Williams Chima, Carol Chittenden, Robert Michael Evans, Michael Grant, Carl Harvey, Kathy Hicks-Brooks, Christine Johnson, Saundra Mitchell, David Patneaude, Richard Peck, and Dave Richardson.

And most of all, thank you Margaret: my wife, first reader, best friend, and true love.

About the Author

Photo by Larry Endircott

Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really hoping this writing thing works out.

Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Ashfall is his first novel.

COMING IN

OCTOBER 2012

sequel to Ashfall

Visit www.mikemullinauthor.com

to read an excerpt.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author