Текст книги "Ashfall"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Chapter 5

The silence was an enormous relief—sort of like coming out of that cave into the sunlight when I was ten. I peeled the headphones off my ears and pulled out the toilet paper plugs. They were stuck; it hurt to remove them.

I heard someone—Joe maybe—say, “Can you hear me?” His voice was hollow, as if he were down a well.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can you hear me?” he said again, a little louder.

Finally I caught on. I shouted, “Yeah!”

“Good,” he shouted. “I think my ears were damaged by all that noise.”

“Yeah, mine too,” I yelled back.

“How you feel?”

“Not good,” I yelled.

“Darren?” Joe yelled.

Darren looked up, but didn’t reply.

“You okay?”

Nothing.

“Darren! You okay? What’s wrong?” Joe lit the candle.

Darren’s face was scarlet. He stared sightlessly at a point about halfway between Joe and me. Joe reached out and put a hand on Darren’s shoulder. Darren batted Joe’s hand away and turned on him, screaming, “What’s wrong? I feel like I’ve been thrown into the gorilla cage at the zoo, and they’ve been using my head as a goddamn volleyball!”

I felt pretty much the same way. Plus I was worried about my family. But screaming wouldn’t help anything.

Joe stood up, walked behind Darren’s chair, and started rubbing his shoulders. Darren seemed to deflate, collapsing with his head down on the kitchen table. Joe stood behind him, trying to comfort him.

Finally Darren looked up from the table and muttered something I couldn’t hear.

“It’s okay,” Joe yelled. “I’m going to see if there’s anything on the radio.” He picked up the candle and used it to find a clunky old boombox on the counter. He carried the radio to the kitchen table and blew out the candle, plunging us again into total darkness.

After a while I heard a soft hiss of static waxing and waning as Joe dialed through the stations. I imagined he had the volume cranked up to the max so we could hear anything at all, but still the static sounded faint and hollow. We bent forward, pressing our heads together close to the radio, and listened to static for about an hour.

Every now and then, I could hear a roll of thunder coming from outside—not the painful continuous booms we’d been suffering through, only a natural clap of thunder sounding soft and echoey in my messed-up ears. The sulfur stench was stronger. I could smell it everywhere now, not just near the windows and doors.

“I’ve been through AM and FM three times each. There’s nothing!” Joe shouted.

“Why?” I yelled.

“I don’t know. I was getting all the usual stations on it yesterday. Maybe the ash somehow interferes with radio reception.”

Darren flipped open his cell phone. The bluish light from the screen illuminated his face, hanging ghost-like in the gloom. “Cell phone still doesn’t work.”

Joe held down the button on his watch and used its faint light to stumble to the house phone. “It’s dead, too,” he yelled.

“How long is everything going to be down?” Darren asked.

“I don’t know.” Joe shook his head slowly.

“Why’s the water work?” I shouted. “Everything else is down, why should that be any different?”

“Good point,” Joe yelled. He lit the candle and we went upstairs, cleared the bedding out of the Jacuzzi and filled it with water. The water trickled slowly out of the spigot. It smelled funny, too, a bit like rotten eggs. I tried a sip—it didn’t taste too bad.

After that, we got an armload of towels and walked around the house by candlelight, jamming them under the doors and along the windowsills. It didn’t help, though—the rotten egg smell kept getting worse.

As the afternoon and evening wore on, the thunder outside got louder. I didn’t know if the storm was getting worse or if my ears were getting better; the latter, I hoped. Joe wanted to cook some of the stuff in the freezer for dinner, but the gas cooktop wouldn’t light. He sniffed it and said there was no gas, although I didn’t see how he could tell—I couldn’t smell anything but sulfur. So we ate bread again, this time with some lettuce and fresh peaches. Darren wanted salami and cheese, but Joe overruled him. He said we needed to save the food that would keep the longest.

As we were finishing dinner, I said, “Thanks for taking me in and feeding me and all. I really appreciate—”

“Don’t be silly,” Darren said. “That’s what neighbors are for.”

“Well, thanks. You guys are great neighbors. At least that’s what Mom always—” Thinking about Mom got me choked up, and I had to stop. We sat in silence then, waiting for nighttime, although we could have gone to bed whenever—it was still pitch black and had been all day.

Then the explosions started again.

Chapter 6

Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom! The continuous thumping roar hurt my ears and drowned out the normal thunder. Joe flicked on the Maglite and used it to find a box of tissues on the kitchen counter: Puffs with lotion. Slimy, but they felt better than toilet paper while I was jamming some into my ears. Darren pressed the headphones into my hands, and I slapped them over my ears.

We sat in the kitchen, going crazy with both worry and boredom. The fear rested on my stomach like a dull weight, pressing down and making me queasy. I didn’t want to go to bed and try to sleep through another night of that horrid noise, and Darren and Joe must have felt the same way, because neither of them made any move to leave.

At least I knew what it was now. That made the current round of explosions a little better than yesterday’s, when the boredom and terror were compounded by wild speculation. This, I figured, must be the noise of some kind of secondary eruption. There was still plenty of reason to be scared, of course. My house had been hit by something thrown off by the eruption. What if Darren and Joe’s house got hit, too? We weren’t even taking cover in the bathtub like last night. Besides, the noise itself was terrifying without even thinking about the awesome eruption it represented—powerful enough to hurt my ears from nine hundred miles away.

I endured hour after hour of nothing: nothing to see but blackness, nothing to hear but machine-gunned explosions, nothing to do. Nothing to smell but—well, okay, there was something to smell: sulfur and yesterday’s sweat. My breathing slowed, and the fear gave way to numb, wary boredom. The noise lasted for a little over three-and-a-half hours by Darren’s watch. And then, mercifully, the explosions stopped again.

I yanked off the headphones and pulled the Puffs out of my ears. I heard a normal thunderclap as if from a storm. It sounded puny and hollow after the aural bombardment we’d just endured.

Joe lit the candle and, by its light, led me to the guest room upstairs. There was another box of Puffs on the nightstand, so I set my headphones beside it, within easy reach. Joe turned down the covers and left the lit candle and a book of matches on the bedside table.

I kicked off my shoes and climbed into the bed fully dressed in the same disgusting jeans and T-shirt I’d been wearing for two days now. I blew out the candle, rolled onto my left side, and fell asleep the instant my head settled on the pillow.

* * *

The next day started out pretty much the same. It was still pitch black. Ash still fell in a thick blanket past the windows. We could still hear normal, storm-like thunder. It sounded maybe a little louder, which I took as a hopeful sign that my ears might be improving. The storm had been going on for a day and two nights now. Perhaps it was related somehow to the volcano. The other weird thing about the thunder was that I hadn’t seen any lightning, and there was no rain, at least not that I could see by candlelight through the windows.

When I turned on the kitchen faucet, hoping to wash up, nothing came out. Hot, cold—neither worked. I checked the downstairs bathroom; there was no water there, either. So we’d have to drink from the bathtub now. And the toilets were only going to flush one more time. That was a problem—it was going to get stinky in a hurry.

Joe served more lettuce for breakfast. He wanted to finish all the perishables. Darren grumbled about it some—I didn’t like a salad for breakfast any better than he did, but I figured Joe was making sense. Complaining wouldn’t improve anything. Besides, I was a guest—they didn’t have to share.

After breakfast Joe took me to the master bedroom and got some clean clothes out of his closet for me. They didn’t fit very well. Darren and Joe are both a bit taller than I am and a lot heavier. Not fat, exactly, but big enough that Joe’s jeans bunched uncomfortably around my waist and his T-shirt was like a maternity blouse. Still, it beat my filthy clothing.

Late that morning we noticed something new. There was an occasional flash of lightning visible in the windows through the ashfall. It was always accompanied by an immediate clap of thunder—the lightning was close.

As the day wore on, it got steadily brighter. At first, we could only see during the lightning flashes. But by late afternoon, it wasn’t pitch-black anymore. Oh, it was still dark, but I could see my fingers if I stood by a window and waggled them near my eye. It was like a moonless, overcast night—about like the darkest night I’d ever experienced until two days ago. But it beat the cave-like blackness I’d woken up to that morning.

Joe played with the Maglite for a while, swapping D-cells to it from the boombox until it had a pretty strong beam. He tried the boombox again too, quickly scanning all the channels. Nothing. He shut it down to save the batteries.

It started to rain. Fat black raindrops splattered on the windows and washed streaks in the fine dust that clung to the panes. It was strange; I would have thought the rain would wash the ash out of the sky, but it didn’t work like that. The rain fell, and the ash kept coming down, at about the same rate and density as before. It didn’t even clump up like ash from a fire.

The rain had been falling for a couple hours, and we were thinking about dinner, when we heard a cracking sound and then a huge crash from outside. Joe grabbed the Maglite and ran for the front door. Darren and I followed him.

The ash had blown up over the front porch, covering it in a layer a couple inches deep. It was dry under the porch roof, so our feet stirred up the stuff. It rose in little clouds around us. I took a deep breath, which was a mistake, earning me a mouthful of sulfurous grit. It tasted nasty and set off a fit of hacking coughs. I tried to breathe shallowly and through my nose after that.

A concrete stairway led to the yard from the porch—four steps, I remembered. The bottom two were now buried in ash. Joe took a tentative step into the ash. His foot sank a few inches and pulled free only with a visible effort. I followed him, and we slogged around to the side of the house in the direction the noise had come from, while Darren waited on the porch.

Walking in the wet ash was like walking in thick, wet concrete. My sneakers kept trying to pull off my feet. Scrunching up my toes helped some.

The side of the house was a mess: a confused tangle of wood, asphalt shingles, and metal guttering. The ash, heavy with water, had pulled down the old-fashioned, built-in gutters, taking the soffit and the edge of the roof as well. As we gawked, a load of wet ash landed with a splat amid the wreckage.

We couldn’t see the roof very well, even in the powerful beam of the Maglite. What if more of the roof fell while we were standing there? I took a couple steps backward. Then another worry occurred to me: How long would the house itself be able to withstand the weight of the ash and water on the roof?

Joe shrugged and plodded back to the front door. As we were closing the door behind us, we heard a crack and crash from the other side of the house. I assumed the gutters on that side had just fallen.

Ash clung to us everywhere. Joe and I beat at it, knocking clumps of wet ash onto the entryway floor. It was hopeless, though; the stuff was so fine it clung to our clothes and skin despite our efforts.

The ash looked almost white in the dim light, giving us a ghostly aspect. Maybe we were ghosts of a sort, spirits from the world that had died when the volcano erupted. Now we haunted a changed land. Would there be any place for us in this new, post-volcanic world?

Chapter 7

It was brighter the next morning. Still dark—the ash continued to fall—but at least we could walk around the house without crashing into stuff.

Joe and I dragged the propane grill into the kitchen from the back deck. We wet rags before we went out and tied them around our mouth and nose, like old-time bandits. That kept most of the grit out of our mouths and lungs. The grill was buried in a foot and a half of heavy, wet ash. I cleaned off the top of the grill while Joe tried to pull it free. Even when both of us heaved, the legs wouldn’t come up. Joe fought through the ash to his detached garage and returned with a shovel. I volunteered to dig—it took about ten minutes to free the grill.

Miraculously, the grill worked. The smoke wasn’t going to do their kitchen ceiling any good, but neither Joe nor Darren seemed to care. Their house was pretty much wrecked, anyway. I’d noticed water running down one of the guest room walls that morning, presumably from holes ripped in the roof when the built-in gutters had fallen.

We ate steaks for lunch, Black Angus filet mignon. They tasted heavenly after a day and a half of salads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Joe told me to eat as many as I wanted since they were all going to spoil anyway. I ate three.

That afternoon I was napping off the huge lunch in an easy chair in the living room when somebody started banging on the front door. They were whaling on it, too—the noise was almost louder than the thunder, loud enough to wake me up.

I stood and tried to shake the postnap loginess out of my brain. Joe went to get the door. Something made me suddenly nervous. Who would be out in the ash? And why? Whoever it was kept hitting the door, slamming something into it so hard that I wondered if it would break. I suppressed a sudden desire to move away—hide in the back of the living room or go upstairs, maybe. Instead, I moved to the living room doorway where I could watch Joe in the foyer.

“Don’t answer,” Darren said. I nodded.

“Why not?” Joe replied. “It’s probably just the neighbors. We ought to be banding together, helping each other out.”

“You don’t know that. It sounds like they’re trying to break down the door.” Darren retreated past me into the living room.

“If they weren’t knocking that loudly, we wouldn’t be able to hear them over the thunder.” Joe peered into the glass peephole set into the door. “I can’t see anything. Too dark.” He unlocked the deadbolt and twisted the knob.

The door flew all the way open, pushed violently from outside. Joe stumbled backward as the door struck him. Three guys burst through. They were so coated in ash that it was impossible even to tell what color their hair or skin was. The lead guy was carrying a baseball bat. I shrank back into the living room, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. My heart lurched, starting a hammering thump in my chest. I thought about running, following Darren toward the far side of the living room, but I would have had to cross the large open doorway between the living room and foyer. They’d have seen me for sure.

The second guy had a length of heavy tow chain, and the last one carried a tire iron. Baseball Bat advanced on Joe, waving his weapon wildly and yelling, “Where’s the stuff? What you got? OCs? Boo? Ice? Tell me, old man!”

Joe held out both his hands, palms up. How he managed to react calmly was beyond me. I was shaking with a mixture of fear and adrenaline. I sent silent, useless orders to my body: Calm down. My breathing was ragged, so I focused on that. Two quick breaths in through the nose, two quick breaths out through the mouth. That helped some. Darren turned and ran toward the master bedroom.

“Stop that peckerwood!” Baseball Bat ordered.

Chain ran toward Darren, with Tire Iron right behind him. They were running right past me. I froze, unsure what to do. Chain ran by. He was swinging his weapon—he passed so close I heard the links clinking even over the roar of my labored breathing.

On impulse, I kicked out—a low, sweeping roundkick. Chain was already past me, but I kicked Tire Iron right in the shins, taking him down. His weapon clunked as it hit the wood floor. He yelled and reached for the tire iron.

I just stood there and watched him grab the tire iron and push himself onto his knees. I knew I should follow up on my kick, but I hadn’t been in a real fight since sixth grade. And those didn’t count as real fights, anyway—they were just stupid schoolyard stuff. Nothing like this.

Tire Iron started to stand, staring at me murderously. If I didn’t do something—now—he’d cave in my skull. I stepped toward him and hit the side of his neck with a palm-heel strike. It’s supposed to stun an opponent by interrupting the blood supply through the jugular, but I never figured I’d have to use it for real. It worked beautifully. The steel bar clattered to the floor, and Tire Iron followed it, falling sideways with a heavy thump.

I stood over him for a second, panting and trembling, and then looked around. Chain was at the back of the living room, chasing Darren, who had disappeared into the master bedroom.

I glanced at Joe in time to see Baseball Bat take a swing at his head, but I was too far away to help. Joe had the presence of mind to step toward Baseball Bat instead of away, so he got clubbed by the guy’s hands instead of taking the murderous hit of the bat’s business end. Still, Joe went down. I screamed, taking a step toward him.

Baseball Bat raised his weapon over his head and moved to meet me. Instinctively, I crouched in a sparring stance, hands up by my chin. My thoughts raced. What could I do? If he chopped down with the bat, maybe I’d sidestep and go for a wrist grab and joint lock.

I heard a noise like a pair of M80 firecrackers behind me. Blam-Blam! Something fell, tinkling to the floor with a noise like ice dropping into a glass. Baseball Bat lowered his weapon and took a step backward, so I risked a glance behind me.

Darren was stalking through the living room, a big chrome pistol clutched in front of him in a two-handed grip. Chain lay beside the sofa; blood gushed from his ruined skull and soaked the rug. My nostrils filled with the copper tang of blood blended with a faint fecal stink. I fought back vomit.

Darren got close enough to see Joe, motionless on the floor of the entryway. Darren screamed—an inhuman, animal yowl. Baseball Bat turned and took a step toward the door. He reached for the doorknob. Blam-Blam! Darren shot him in the back of the head. His face exploded. I heard a thunk as part of it hit the door and then a dull thump as Baseball Bat’s body slumped to the floor. A dark stain marred the door, like someone had hurled a blood-filled water balloon against it.

Tire Iron moaned and pushed himself up on one arm. Darren screamed again.

I shouted, “Darren, take it—”

“Yearrrgh!” Darren pushed the pistol against Chain’s temple. Blam-Blam! His head pretty much burst, showering my legs with blood and bits of hair and skull and brain. The scent of blood and shit was overpowering now.

Joe groaned loudly and rolled over. Darren’s gaze twitched from corpse to corpse, rage disfiguring his face.

I ran for the front door.

Chapter 8

The door snagged on Baseball Bat’s body, but there was enough space for me to slip through. Behind me I heard Joe call out weakly, “Alex . . .” I didn’t care. Didn’t care what he had to say. Didn’t care where I was going, either. I had to get away. Had to leave that horrible, gore-splattered foyer. Had to clear the stench of blood from my nostrils—if that was even possible.

Running through the ashfall wasn’t easy. Water and ash scoured my face. With every step, my feet sank into the gooey mess. It was less like running than doing a fast, high-step march. I couldn’t see very far, and I wasn’t really looking around, but the street seemed deserted. There were no moving vehicles, only half-buried parked cars. No sign of any people. No noise except the thunder. Very little light other than the occasional flash of lightning.

I made it only two blocks before I got too winded to keep going. I’d lost my shoes somewhere, sucked off by the wet-concrete-like ash. I rested my hands on my knees and stood there a minute, panting. The image of Tire Iron’s head exploding invaded my brain. I vomited. The steaks tasted a whole lot worse coming up than they had going down.

I didn’t know if it was running or spewing, but something got me thinking straight again. I needed water, food, and some kind of protection from the ash. Shoes, too. Running around like a madman would get me killed in a hurry. But I couldn’t go back to Darren’s house. I doubted I could ever look at him again without seeing that rage-contorted face. And just thinking about returning to his gore-drenched foyer—no way.

But I had to go somewhere. I dragged myself slowly back down the road toward my house. The ash had permeated my socks and was abrading my skin. Every step hurt the sides of my feet where my skin was soft and thin. The ash caked the inside of my mouth and got into my eyes, making them water and causing me to blink constantly.

The front of my house had collapsed further under the weight of the ash. My room and my sister’s were pretty much pancaked. The gutters had ripped off the house, but we had modern aluminum gutters, unlike Darren’s, so it hadn’t done much damage. The back part of the house looked okay. I found a window the firefighters had left open and climbed in.

The inside wasn’t too bad. A lot of ash had blown in through the open windows, but so long as I didn’t walk in it and stir it up, it didn’t bother me. I checked the faucet in the kitchen sink. It sighed when I opened it, air rushing into empty pipes. No water. I got a warm Coke out of the fridge and used the first swig to rinse my mouth. That got me coughing. When I pulled my arm away from my mouth it was spotted with bloody flecks. That scared me; coughing up blood couldn’t be good. But what could I do about it? I finished off the Coke, slugged down another, and devoured two apples.

I needed to pee. The downstairs bathroom and the one my sister and I shared were in the wrecked part of the house, so I went up the back staircase to the master bath. As I was getting ready to do my business, I thought of something. Grody though it was, I might need the toilet water. The water in the tank would be clean, right? And one of my friends had this cat, George, that always drank from the toilet—it hadn’t killed him. I went downstairs and peed out an open window into the ash.

Back upstairs in my parents’ bedroom, I stripped off the now repulsive clothing Joe had lent me and threw it in the trash. Ash clung to the inside of my underwear. My clothes were all burned or buried at the front of the house, but Dad’s stuff fit me okay. Way too loose in the waist, but otherwise not bad. It was getting cold, which worried me. I thought for a moment and figured out it was the last day of August. The volcano must be messing with the weather somehow. How cold would it get? I had no way to answer that question, so I ignored it for the moment. I put on one of Dad’s long-sleeved shirts over a T-shirt.

I slept in my parents’ bed that night, fully clothed. Under the oppressive smell of sulfur, I caught a hint of my mom—a faint whiff of the Light Blue perfume we bought her every year for Mother’s Day.

Lately I’d been so consumed with fighting with Mom that it never occurred to me what my life might be like without her. Without Dad’s benevolent disinterest. Without the brat, my sister. Who would I be, if they were all gone?

I clenched my eyes shut and refused to cry. Would I see them again? Yes, I decided. If they were alive, I would find my family. There was no way they could come home to get me. Nothing short of a bulldozer would be able to move in all that ash. And if the gang that had invaded Joe and Darren’s house was any indication, Cedar Falls would only get more dangerous. Tomorrow, I’d set out for Warren to find my family. The journey might be impossible, but I had to try. I had to find my mother. With that resolution, I drifted off to sleep.

I slept badly. Sweat-soaked nightmares featuring Tire Iron woke me a few times. Baseball Bat invaded my dreams, too. Morning announced itself with a shift in the darkness, from pitch black to merely dark and gloomy. I rolled over and went back to sleep, the first solid sleep I’d had in days.

A coughing fit woke me for good. No blood this time, thank God. I needed water, so I got up and found a cup in the bathroom. I took the lid off the toilet tank and scooped out some water. It smelled okay. I sipped it. It tasted fine, sweet even. I drank that cup and dipped myself another.

I brushed my teeth with my dad’s toothbrush and rinsed my mouth with a tiny sip of water. My freshly brushed teeth felt heavenly. Maybe it was the normalcy of getting up and brushing my teeth, or maybe it was just having one part of my body clean, but I felt much better.

Breakfast was wilted lettuce and two more apples.

After breakfast, I searched for supplies. If I planned to honor the promise I’d made the night before, to find my family, then I needed to get prepared.

My backpack was buried in my room with everything else. But I needed a way to carry supplies, so I dug through my dad’s closet. Way in the back, I found an old knapsack from back when he used to hike and ski. I wished it were bigger, but it would have to do.

I got one extra change of clothes out of my dad’s closet, but I couldn’t afford the space in the backpack for any more clothing than that. I did take two T-shirts though—I might need the cloth to make breathing masks. I also snagged a pair of Dad’s work boots. They fit okay if I wore two pairs of socks.

We had six bottles of water in the fridge—I packed them all. Then I threw in all the food that would fit: cans of soup, pineapple, and baked beans, as well as all the cheese and ham from the fridge. I found an old, manual can opener in the back of the knife drawer. I dug a few packages of peanut-butter crackers out of a cabinet and packed those, too. It didn’t seem like very much food. If it took longer than a week to get to Warren, I’d be in trouble.

I tossed in a spoon, three books of matches, and a couple of candles. I figured I’d want a knife, both to use as a weapon and to eat with. I thought about the butcher knives, but they seemed like they’d be too clumsy. I grabbed Mom’s favorite knife instead, a five-inch mini-chef’s knife that she kept honed to a wicked edge. I tested it on one of the T-shirts, cutting a strip about the right size to cover my mouth and nose.

I didn’t want the knife in my backpack—too slow to get at. So I took off my belt and cut a horizontal slit in the leather. That worked okay as a makeshift sheath; it kept the knife at my hip with the blade angled away from my body.

In the mudroom, I got the biggest rain poncho I could find, one of my dad’s. It had a hood and enough extra girth to cover both me and my pack. I also grabbed the spare garage key Mom kept there on a hook. All my keys were gone, another casualty of my collapsed room.

Then I trekked back upstairs. I scooped water out of the toilet tank and drank until I felt I might be sick. I wet down my cut T-shirt bandanna and tied it around my face. I was ready to go.

I got as far as the back door on the first try. The door itself pulled open fine, but there was ash piled at least a foot and a half deep against the storm door. I couldn’t force it open. I gave the screen door a frustrated kick and then closed the back door and locked it. (As I turned away, I realized there was no point to locking the door, but whatever.) I climbed out a window instead.

Slogging to our detached garage through the ash was painfully slow. I sank three or four inches with every step and had to struggle to wrench my feet free. If I had to cover the 140 miles to Warren like this, it might take a year, not a week.

The pedestrian door to our garage opened inward, thankfully. When I pushed it open, the ash flowed in, so I couldn’t close the door behind me. I saw a folded plastic dropcloth on a shelf and thought about using it as a makeshift tent. Of course it wouldn’t fit in my pack. I moved some stuff to outer pockets and took out a couple cans of food to make room.

My bicycle was leaning against the garage wall next to my sister’s. I wheeled it out into the ash-covered backyard. I mounted and put my feet to the pedals—I was on my way to Warren!