Текст книги "Ashen Winter"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter 55

Alyssa backed up a step, eyeing me warily. “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . it didn’t look like she was hurt too bad.”

“What’ll they do to her?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Alyssa shied away from me. “Nothing good.”

“I’ve got to get back to Anamosa.” I started to push myself upright but made the mistake of trying to use my right arm. Pain reverberated through my arm and chest, and I crumpled, falling alongside the fire.

Alyssa knelt beside me and pulled off my right glove. “Why do you want to get killed over her? Who is she?”

“Darla. She’s my . . .” Girlfriend didn’t seem to cover it. I struggled to think of a word that did. “She’s the reason I’m alive.”

Alyssa nodded. “The only reason I’m alive is Ben. When I told Danny that I’d starve myself to death if he flensed Ben, I meant it. There’s nothing in this shitpool life worth living for except him.” She started to strip off my jacket, forcing me to sit up. I tried to protest, but she shushed me and kept going, taking off my clothing until I was bare-chested by the fire. I pushed a couple more sticks of wood into the fire. My back was freezing.

“Wow,” Alyssa said, looking at my right arm. It was a swollen mass of purple-blue bruises. She gently lifted my arm. Even my armpit was bruised. Alyssa ran her fingers lightly over the horseshoe-shaped scar at the base of my ribcage. “What’s that from?”

“A bandit—flenser, I guess, got me with a hatchet last year.”

“And you survived.”

“I killed him,” I said flatly.

“And those?” She touched one of the round scabs on my belly.

“Shotgun pellets.”

Her fingers wandered to my chest, tracing my pecs, which had gotten considerably larger over the months of nonstop farm work and physically challenging lifestyle, to put it mildly. “You’re strong,” she said.

I pulled away from her fingers and reached out to stir the corn porridge. “It’s ready.”

“I’m not sure what to do about your arm. It doesn’t seem like anything’s broken.”

I shrugged my left shoulder.

“Maybe I should strap it to your side? Or make a sling? It might heal faster if you can’t move it.”

“No,” I said. “I can move it a little. If anything happens, I might need it. Just help me put my clothes back on.”

She didn’t respond right away. She was staring at me—at the bruises on my arm, maybe, or maybe at my chest. Her eyes weren’t on my face, that was for sure. I wasn’t used to having a girl look at me that way—well, Darla had, sometimes.

I picked up my T-shirt and held it out toward her.

“If you go back to Anamosa, you’re going to die. There’s more than a hundred Peckerwoods there,” she said as she helped me struggle into my T-shirt.

“Darla needs me.”

“She’ll be—well, they won’t kill her. She’s young and pretty. Valuable.”

“They can’t have her. I’m going to go get her. I’d leave now if I could.”

Alyssa’s eyes shone in the firelight.

“Hey. I’ll just get close. Then you and Ben can have the truck—drive yourselves to Worthington. You’ll be safe there.” I sent up a silent prayer that Worthington hadn’t been overrun, that Rita Mae and even Mayor Kenda were still okay.

“You’re a tough guy, aren’t you?” Alyssa said.

“Not really,” I replied. “You’re pretty tough. You survived being captured by the Peckerwoods. Kept your brother alive.”

Alyssa started softly crying. I looked at Ben—he was immersed in systematically chopping and sorting wood, oblivious to his sister. I reached out and wrapped an arm around her, drawing her into an awkward, one-armed hug. “Hey, it’s okay. You’ll be all right now,” I told her.

She clung to me. Her tears ran down my shoulder, and her arm hurt me where it pressed against my bruises. She smelled musky, salty—exciting, somehow. Her scent reminded me of Darla. Suddenly I was crying, too.

We held onto each other for a minute. Then I smelled something burning. I broke our hug and snatched the pot off the fire. Alyssa helped me get dressed while our lunch cooled.

We ate all the corn mush, even the burnt bits. I was utterly exhausted. I asked Alyssa to keep watch, tucked a pair of pants under my head, and fell asleep curled in front of the fire.

Chapter 56

When I awoke, Alyssa was up, cooking corn porridge for breakfast while Ben tended the fire. “Why didn’t you wake me up to take a turn on watch?” I asked.

“There was no need,” she said.

“You stayed up all night? You want to sleep now?”

“No. I couldn’t stay up.”

“Somebody should have kept watch.”

“Nothing happened,” she replied.

I grunted, mildly disgusted but unwilling to continue arguing.

After breakfast, I struggled to my feet. “I’m going to check the barn.”

“You can barely move,” Alyssa protested.

“There might be something useful out there. Maybe a jack.” I took a faltering step toward the door.

Alyssa got up and tucked herself under my left shoulder. “I’ll help.”

“Shouldn’t you stay with Ben?”

“He’s fine.”

We stumbled outside with my arm slung over her shoulders for support. A rusted tractor sat in the center of the barn. In one corner there was a huge pile of brown-and-yellow cornhusks, useless except to feed to goats or pigs.

On the way back, I looked into the bed of our truck. The wooden crates were a jumbled mess. “What’s in the crates?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Alyssa answered. “The Peckerwoods loaded them before they loaded us.”

“Help me get up there.”

Alyssa let down the tailgate and boosted me up. I hacked at the nearest crate with my hatchet. Opening it one-handed proved to be difficult—I struggled fruitlessly for fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally I got the blade of the hatchet jammed under the lid and used the handle as a lever.

Inside, it was full of steel chains. I picked one up—it was really four chains with manacles attached, identical to the set Ben had been wearing. The key was affixed to one of the manacles with a strip of duct tape.

I hacked open another box. It was packed with neat rows of identical brown paperboard boxes. I opened the flap of one at random. Gleaming rows of brass shotgun shells, stacked upright, filled the box. There must have been one hundred shells in that one box. Thousands in the whole crate.

“Too bad I lost the shotgun,” I said. “Anyway, I guess we’re rich.”

“Those are worth a lot?” Alyssa asked.

“Yeah. A fortune—if we can find someone to trade with. I was hoping the barn would have something we could use as a jack and maybe a wrench.”

“Can’t we just drive real slow?”

“Yeah. But it would take all day to get to Worthington that way. You’d run out of gas.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we can cut a beam out of the barn. Use it as a lever to lift one side of the truck and block it up.”

“Will that work?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see any way to try it right now, as beat up as I am. I wish Darla were here. She’d know how to do it.”

“She was good with trucks?”

“Yeah. She’s a wizard with any kind of machine.” I turned from Alyssa to hide the trembling in my lip.

“She’ll be okay. The Peckerwoods . . . well, the crazy ones, the most brutal ones, they’re already dead. The guys that are left . . . some of them are plenty nasty, but they’re smart, too. They won’t kill her. They won’t destroy something that has value.”

Something. That word sparked my fury. It filled me like the deep breath you take before a scream. But the Peckerwoods weren’t Alyssa’s fault. She hadn’t created this ash-cursed world. I swallowed on my anger. “You’re not really helping,” I said as mildly as I could manage. “Oh. Sorry.”

• • •

We spent the rest of the day cooking, eating, and resting. Just the short walk out to the barn and truck had left me exhausted, and I couldn’t do anything but sleep. The weakness in my body infuriated me. Darla might be suffering far worse than I, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d abused my body so badly that I couldn’t keep going, no matter how much I wanted to—I was completely out of gas.

After dinner, I offered to take the first watch while Alyssa and Ben slept. After waking up completely unguarded the night before, I didn’t trust either of them to do it.

As they arranged themselves around the fire to sleep, I wondered how I was going to know when to wake Alyssa. In the past, sometimes I’d paced, counting steps and estimating time that way. Now, I was too weak to pace.

I started counting slowly on my fingers, trying to time a second per finger. As I tapped my pinky against the floor, a nursery rhyme came to mind, unbidden: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. . . .” I started muttering the rhyme instead of counting.

Reciting the nursery rhyme brought my mother to mind. She used to singsong it with my sister and me, grabbing our toes and wiggling them with each line of the poem. In my worry for Darla, I’d almost forgotten about Mom and Dad. They were the reason we’d left Warren, the reason Darla got shot. Just a week ago, I’d been determined to find them. Now, leaving Warren seemed like a stupid idea. The dumbest thing I’d ever done.

Maybe ten seconds passed each time I said the rhyme. Six rhymes a minute. Three hundred and sixty mind-numbing rhymes an hour. Fourteen hundred and forty before I could wake Alyssa. I’d probably have nightmares about stupid little piggies.

By the time I finished, I was speed-mumbling, saying the rhyme in seven or eight seconds instead of ten. My fingers hurt from tapping the floor, but if anything, I hit it even harder. The pain helped keep me awake.

I grabbed Alyssa’s ankle and shook her. “Your turn to keep watch.”

“Uh? ’kay.” Alyssa slowly sat up. She’d taken off her coat to use as a pillow. The lavender sweater she wore underneath wasn’t exactly form fitting, but it looked good on her.

I rummaged in my pack, looking for a pair of jeans to use as a pillow. “Good night,” I said once I got settled. “And please don’t fall asleep. We need to stay safe.”

“You know, I never did thank you. For rescuing us.” Alyssa squatted by my head, feeding the fire.

I would have shrugged, but I was resting on my left shoulder and my right hurt too badly. “I thought you were Darla.”

“I think you would have helped us, anyway.”

“Maybe so.”

Alyssa put a hand on my shoulder, and I winced. “Oh. Sorry. I forgot.” Her hand wandered up to my neck.

“It’s okay. Goodnight.”

“How did you beat Clevis? And learn to climb around on moving trucks like an action movie star?” Her hand caressed my cheek. I wasn’t sure how to feel about her touch—my mind was annoyed and wanted to sleep, but at the same time, it felt somehow reassuring. And maybe something else, too.

“I’ve been training in taekwondo since I was five. Although we never practiced climbing around on a moving truck, that’s true.”

“You could, you know, come to Worthington with Ben and me.” Alyssa was whispering, bent over me so our faces were close.

“I can’t. I have—”

She kissed me. I knew it was wrong, was appalled with myself, but still I returned her kiss, my lips open, drinking in her hypnotic softness. I rolled away, onto my back, which Alyssa took as a sign of encouragement, kissing me more fiercely, her hands busy at my chest, spreading the warmth from my lips down toward my groin.

I pushed her away. “No.”

“Why not? I could make you happy.”

“No. You could make me feel good. Not happy. There’s a difference.”

“Most of the guys I’ve met don’t think so.”

I shrugged.

Her face scrunched, as if in pain. “You’re just going to get yourself killed chasing after her.”

“Probably.”

I rolled back onto my side and stared into the fire, waiting for the tempestuous mix of desire, regret, and shame to subside. Alyssa was silent, staring at me. I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to take me.

• • •

I dreamed of pigs. A hog squealed as Darla slashed its throat. Blood fountained out as the pig cried, sounding exactly like my sister in the midst of a full-blown temper tantrum. Darla’s arms and face were splashed, dripping red in my candlelit dream. She smiled then seemed to see me. Her head turned and her sanguinary visage shifted, mouth open in a little O, eyes wide with pain and betrayal.

Then the dream shifted and suddenly Darla was naked, suffocatingly beautiful. Her arms and face were still covered in blood. She drew a finger through the blood, painting herself, writhing suggestively, and whispering, “Alex . . . Alex . . .”

I woke up. Alyssa was spooned against my back, her arm resting on my shoulder, which hurt. On the other side of the fire, less than ten feet from me, a strange man stood, aiming a rifle at my chest.

Chapter 57

The man was lean and grizzled, his scraggly beard frosted white. His brown Carhartt coveralls were filthy, as if he’d been sleeping on dirt.

I pinched Alyssa’s hand, and she startled awake. “Nice job keeping watch,” I hissed.

“Sorry,” she whispered back.

The man growled, “Don’t move. Take that knife and gun off his belt, Brand.”

I rotated my head to see who he was talking to. About five feet behind me stood a woman clutching a silver revolver in a two-handed grip, pointing it at Alyssa’s back. A boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, stood next to her. He stepped over to where Alyssa and I lay and bent to take my knife and pistol. His hands were shaking so badly I was afraid he’d cut me with my own knife. He retreated to stand beside the woman.

Ben sat up. I hadn’t even realized he was awake. The man swiveled, pointing his rifle at Ben. “I said, don’t move!”

“Your tactical doctrine is flawed,” Ben said.

The man gaped.

“In a three-person team, optimal tactical doctrine calls for enveloping the target in a triangular formation.”

“Just don’t move, okay?” the man said.

“If the Sister Unit or Her Attachment stood up, you’d be in each other’s field of fire. If you missed or just grazed your target, you could easily wind up shooting one of your team members.”

Her Attachment? Me? And what was he doing lecturing these people about infantry tactics? “Shut. Him. Up!” I hissed at Alyssa.

“Like I could,” she whispered back.

Ben kept talking. “With a Winchester Model 70 at a range of twelve feet, even a hit might pass through the target and impact a team member.”

The man looked down at his rifle, clearly surprised.

“Fixing your deployment would be easy. You, Short One,” Ben said, addressing the kid. “Move over here, on the other side of me.”

Great, I thought, now he’s telling people how to kill us more effectively.

To my amazement, the boy did it, moving away from the woman.

“No. Farther away,” Ben said, “so you can’t be used as a shield or hostage easily.”

The boy took two steps back.

“Now, you,” Ben said to the woman. “Take three big steps to your right.”

She started to turn.

“No,” Ben said. “Sidestep. So your weapon stays on the target.”

The woman sidestepped so that now the three of them formed a neat triangle around us.

“Good,” Ben said. “Now if you discharge your weapons, each of you will have a clear field of fire. This formation is not recommended in situations where there is a risk of encountering flanking forces. In that situation, an enfilade deployment is preferable. . . .”

Ben kept talking about the benefits and drawbacks of an enfilade deployment, whatever that was. The man’s mouth formed an O, probably because it couldn’t very well form the letters WTF. The situation was so ridiculous and tense that I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing.

Everyone looked at me as if I were crazy. Which was fair, I guessed. Then the man holding the rifle started laughing, too, and pretty soon everyone but Ben had joined in.

When the hilarity had died down, the man said, “You all are just crazy enough that I think I understand why you’re still alive.”

“Yeah,” I said. I pushed myself slowly upright, keeping both hands in view. Maybe this guy was laughing, but he still had a rifle pointed my way. I took a step closer to him and stretched my left hand out as if to shake. My right arm still wasn’t working too well.

He snicked on the safety and moved the rifle to his shoulder, pointed upward. His handshake was a little too vigorous for my liking—I could move my left arm, but it still hurt when he pumped it. “I’m Eli. My wife there’s Mary Sue, and that’s my son, Brand.” He was so dirty he left a smudge on my hand. Not that my own hands were any too clean.

“What’s wrong with him?” Brand said, looking at Ben.

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” Alyssa snapped as she stood up.

“He’s autistic,” I said.

“He doesn’t seem artistic,” Brand replied.

Alyssa wasn’t smiling. “Autistic. And he’s smarter than everyone else in this room put together.”

“Sorry,” Brand muttered.

Ben was ignoring us all, sketching something with his fingertip in the dust on the floor. More infantry tactics, maybe.

I still felt as if I were inching along the edge of a one-hundred-foot cliff. There were no guns pointed at us now, but they were still armed, and we weren’t. “Can I have my stuff back?” I asked Brand.

He looked at his father, who shook his head.

“You all weren’t planning on staying here, were ya?” Mary Sue said, the first words she’d uttered. Her voice brought to mind the sibilant whisper of a moving snake.

“We’re headed to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

“Huh, probably nothing there. Morley, Olin, and Mechanicsville’s all been ransacked. Not a living soul in any of ’em. No dead people, either, ’less you count bones already cracked and sucked dry of their marrow. We visited, hopin’ to trade.” Mary Sue stepped closer to us as she talked. Her teeth shone yellow in the firelight. Each tooth was outlined in blood.

“Worthington was fine a week ago,” I said. “Your gums are bleeding. You have scurvy?”

“Yeah. No fresh food. Girls got it worse.”

“Girls?” Alyssa said.

“Alba and Joy,” Mary Sue said. “They’re hidden. Safe.”

I rummaged through my pack. Eli readied his rifle, eyeing me suspiciously. I was running low on dandelion leaves, and the ones I had left were pretty badly wilted. As I pulled a bag out of my backpack, Eli aimed the rifle at me again and muttered, “Easy . . .”

“It’s okay. I’m just getting dandelion leaves.” I handed the bag to Mary Sue. “They’re bitter, but they have vitamin C. That’s all I have left.”

She pulled a leaf out of the bag and bit it. “Fresh greens. Didn’t think I’d live to taste them again. Where’d you get them?” She whispered the question, as if she were asking where I’d learned the secret nature of God, not where I’d picked up some weeds.

“Worthington. They grow ’em in cold frames.”

“You got any seeds?” Eli lowered his rifle. “We could make cold frames out of some of our windows.”

“Yeah, that’s how they do it in Worthington. I don’t have any dandelion seeds, but I can do you one better. I’ve got kale seeds. Good winter variety. It can even come back from a freeze, if it isn’t too hard or too long. Four times as much vitamin C as dandelion.”

“And where’d that miracle come from?”

“Warren, Illinois. It’s home now, I guess. We grow kale in greenhouses.” I reached into my jacket and pulled open the bag in my pocket without taking it out. I didn’t want them to see how many packets of kale seeds I had. I slid out one envelope.

Eli accepted the envelope I offered him. “You came all the way from Illinois?”

“Yeah. Now can I have my weapons back?”

Eli nodded slowly. “Brand, give the man his gun and knife, then fetch your sisters from the cellar.” He set his rifle aside and fed the fire.

The girls were both younger than Brand. They reminded me of a bed of spring wildflowers I’d seen once after a flood. You could tell they were beautiful, even if they were beaten down and coated in filth.

Mary Sue carefully split the dandelion leaves into five portions. I noticed that Eli got less than the kids, and Mary Sue got barely any at all. While they ate, we traded stories. I told the saga of my trip from Illinois: how we’d found the shotgun, Blue Betsy, that had spurred this crazy trip to find my parents. Losing Bikezilla in the Mississippi. I choked on my words as I told them about Darla getting shot.

When I finished, Eli said, “Used to have a lot of trouble with the Peckerwoods ourselves. Had one visit from another gang, called ’emselves the Dirty White Boys. Haven’t seen either of them in almost two months—figured they’d run out of gas.”

“How’d you survive a visit from the Peckerwoods?”

“Same way we did when you came. Hid in the root cellar. Could hear ’em shouting and carousing upstairs. We keep everything important down there so we can hide at a moment’s notice. Speaking of which, we’d best post a lookout again. Alba, it’s your turn.”

“Yes, Papi,” she said in her little girl soprano as she hurried away.

“You’ve been down there two days? I checked the basement—I didn’t see any root cellar.”

“We moved the furnace to block the door. And yeah, we would have stayed down there ’til you left, but one of the dang pigs got out last night.”

“You keep pigs down there?”

“Can’t keep ’em up here, can we? Anyone comes, that’d give us away fer sure—plus we’d lose valuable food. Anyway, I figured the stupid thing would wake you up, so we came up loaded for bear and found you all hibernatin’.”

“How’d you keep the pigs quiet?”

“Well we didn’t, did we? Used to feed ‘em Nyquil, but we’re out.”

I glared at Alyssa.

“I already said I was sorry.”

I turned back to Eli. “You haven’t slaughtered the pigs for meat?”

“I’m saving a few. To breed. When things start to turn around.”

“What do you feed them?”

“Corn and soybeans. All the farms around here are abandoned—there’s more crops left under the snow and ash than we can dig up.”

I shook my head in amazement. Not only were they surviving, they were preparing for a posteruption future.

Eli was staring at me in a thoughtful way. He turned toward his wife, “Y’know, we could use more hands. ’Specially if we got to try farmin’ kale.”

“I’m not staying,” I said. “I’m going after Darla.”

“Going up against those gangs’ll get you killed in a hurry.”

I shrugged. Eli turned his gaze toward Alyssa.

“She can’t stay. Not on her ownsome,” Mary Sue hissed at him.

“I’m trying to get to Worthington,” Alyssa said.

“We just need to get the tire on our truck changed, and we’ll be on our way. You got a jack here?”

“Buried out in the shed, yeah. Might take days to dig it out, though.”

“Crap. I need to get moving.”

“Could probably rig something up, do the same work as a jack. Some levers and blocks, maybe.”

“Sounds good.”

“How’re you payin’ for the work?”

“Um, kale seeds?”

“That’s your rent money for staying here. What else you got?”

I thought for a moment. “There’re some crates in the back of the truck. We only opened two, but one of them had shotgun shells in it. You get the tire changed, and I’ll split the truck’s load fifty-fifty with you. Ammo’s worth a fortune if you can find someone to trade with.”

Mary Sue cupped her hands around Eli’s ear, whispering something.

He recoiled from her, a growl rattling from his throat. “We do that, we ain’t no better than the Peckerwoods.”

I watched them carefully, looking away only when Mary Sue shot me a murderous glare. Why was she hating on me? I hadn’t done anything.

Getting the truck jacked up and the tire changed took most of the day. First we had to bend the wheel well away from the tire using a wrecking bar Eli provided. We made a long, heavy lever out of a pair of two-by-ten rafters scavenged from the barn. Then we spent hours digging up patio pavers from the frozen ground at the back of the house to use as a fulcrum and blocks.

Improvising a makeshift tire iron was much easier—we used an adjustable wrench and a length of galvanized iron pipe cut from the basement.

We still had to actually jack up the truck. We wedged our lever under the truck just behind the blown wheel and stacked pavers under it to use as a fulcrum. More than twelve feet of the lever protruded from under the truck, angled upward so steeply that we had to reach above our heads to grab it. Using the lever, Eli, Ben, and I could raise the corner of the truck by ourselves, even though I was only using my left arm. We couldn’t raise it very far, though. Brand rushed to stack pavers under the truck. Then we let the truck back down and reset our fulcrum to lift it again. It took seven or eight lifts to finally get the truck high enough to swap the tires. Then we had to lift the truck again while Brand cleared all the blocks out from under it.

“You ready to split up the load?” Eli said.

“Yeah.” I helped him drag the wooden crates out of the truck’s load bed. We stacked the crates on the packed snow outside. As I went to move one of the last crates out of the back of the truck, something shifted, and I heard a metallic clunk. Something had been buried under the pile of crates. I couldn’t see exactly what it was, so I grabbed it and carried it out into the light.

“Son of a mangy coyote bitch,” Eli said when he saw what I was holding. Then we started laughing. I held the truck’s hydraulic jack and tire iron. Instead of stowing the jack in the toolbox, the Peckerwoods had just tossed it in the load bed.

Four of the crates held manacles; all the rest were loaded with ammo. We split everything down the middle, as agreed, although that probably made it the most fabulously expensive tire change in history. Unfortunately it was all rifle and shotgun loads, and all I had was a pistol. That gave me an idea, “You have any long guns I could trade for?”

“No way,” Eli replied. “Just got the rifle and revolver you already saw. Can’t afford to give either of them up, not for any price.”

So much for that idea. We resealed all the crates—I didn’t want the ammo flying everywhere if we hit a pothole or something. By that time the dim daylight was fading to night. We’d have to wait for morning to leave. Navigating unknown roads in a truck I could barely drive would be impossible in the pitch-black postvolcanic night. My anxiety increased with every day that passed—every day that Darla had to endure the Peckerwoods.