Текст книги "Ashen Winter"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter 74

Shards of concrete flew off the corner. Dad had barely gotten clear in time.

“Peckerwoods?” I hissed.

“Black Lake,” Dad replied.

“Quit shooting! We’re the good guys,” I hollered.

“Back up!” Dad ordered. “Now!”

We ran back down the corridor, Dad shuffling backward and pointing the rifle behind us. Maybe the gunfire had been a mistake, but none of us wanted to go back and find out.

We made our way out of the prison. The black night had been replaced by a greasy yellow light. A cluster of Black Lake mercenaries conferred by one of their trucks, but they paid no attention to us.

“Going to be a long walk to wherever we’re going,” Dad said.

“There’s a vehicle depot at the back,” I said. “We can try to liberate a truck.”

“Gas?”

“Yeah, gas, too.”

I led the way around to the back of the prison. The place was huge—just walking around it seemed like a half-mile hike.

Black Lake had beaten us to the vehicle depot. Three mercenaries were guarding it, and they flatly refused to let us “borrow” a truck or any gas. At least they didn’t shoot at us.

“Maybe we can find a car in town?” I suggested.

“Any vehicle that was run during the ashfall will be damaged,” Ben said.

“We might get lucky. Find one that was garaged. Or overhauled afterward.”

Dad shrugged.

I noticed something weird as we kept walking: Although the snow and ash had buried most of each car we passed, all of them had a clear spot over their gas caps. It didn’t matter whether the gas cap was on the left or right side of the car or which way the car was facing.

I stopped by one of the cars and pried open the gas hatch. The plastic cap unscrewed easily, and no air hissed out. I smelled only a faint odor of gas.

“Someone take the gas out of all these cars?” I asked.

“Looks that way,” Dad said. “Why else would they just dig out the gas caps?”

“How would they do that?”

“A siphon would work,” Ben said, “or a portable pump.”

“We’re not going to be able to find gas anywhere, are we?” I said.

“If the Peckerwoods drained all the cars, surely they hit the gas stations, too,” Dad replied.

I nodded morosely.

It took only another five minutes to reach Anamosa’s small downtown. Main Street was plowed. Towering piles of snow and ash lined both sides of the street, making the road a white-and-gray canyon. A few two-story buildings peeked above the snow, their brown bricks streaked with ash and ice. The five of us looked like refugees from a bombed out Bristol-Myers Squibb convention as we lugged our packed Abilify bags awkwardly on our shoulders.

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 ANAMOSA FLORAL 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.

Chapter 75

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 TRI-COUNTY PROPANE, 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.

Chapter 76

“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—”

“See, it’ll work,” Dad said. “The tank’s in good repair. I don’t smell propane around it. I’ll build a fire just big enough to unfreeze the nut. It won’t heat the propane enough for it to blow.”

“Maybe.” I still thought he was nuts. But on the other hand, I’d built a fire inside an SUV last year when we were escaping Iowa. Darla told me its gas tank wouldn’t explode, and it hadn’t. Would a propane tank work the same way as an SUV’s gas tank?

“Everyone else go into the office,” Dad ordered.

“If you’re so confident it’ll work, why are you sending us inside?”

“It’ll work. But if I’m wrong, that office is built like a bunker.”

“You sure about this, Doug?” Mom asked.

“Yeah.” He kissed her. “Go on.”

We all retreated to the cement-block office. Dad scooped some coals onto a log and grabbed a handful of kindling. Nobody else did anything. We stared at each other, dreading and half-expecting an explosion.

I leaned out the door to watch Dad work. He was silhouetted by the blaze he’d built under the propane tank. The idea seemed even dumber now as flames licked the underside of the tank, blackening it.

I felt a hand on my side. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Mom had joined me at the doorway. “Your Dad wouldn’t want you out here,” she said.

“I know. You either,” I replied, but neither of us made any move to leave.

Dad took off his left glove and wadded it up in his right hand. He reached almost into the fire, grabbing the lever through the double layer of insulation. He turned it easily; I heard the clank of the catch releasing. Dad yelled “Yes!” and kicked his boot through the fire, scattering the burning sticks into the snow.

“Told you,” he said as he passed us, returning to the office.

Mom and I ignored him.

We spent the rest of the afternoon digging a path from the truck to the tank. The only tools we had were the spade, snow shovel, and three sticks left over from our battering ram. The mountain of hard-packed snow and ice alongside the highway yielded slowly to our assault. Around midafternoon, the snow shovel broke. After that, working on our knees, we used the blade to scrape or push the snow.

The only tool left that worked well was the spade. Its sharp blade would cut into the packed snow, and the fiberglass handle was apparently unbreakable. Soon we settled into a rhythm—one person would always be on break, watching the road. When the person on the spade slowed, the rested person would take over. Everyone else used their hands to dig.

The highway was deserted all day. It made sense, I guessed—with the Peckerwoods wiped out, they wouldn’t be using the road. And any Black Lake employees going back to their camp would head east toward Maquoketa, not south toward us.

By nightfall we’d cleared a hole in the snow berm barely large enough to pull the truck off the road. We still had almost one hundred feet of deep snow between the truck and tank.

We slept around the fire in the smoky office. Despite the draft from the open door, it was easily the warmest place I’d slept since I’d left Worthington.

It took us the entirety of the next day to excavate a path large enough for the truck. It was mind-numbing work that left me far too much time to imagine what Darla might be going through while we dug in the snow. By the time we had the truck backed up so that the open rear doors engulfed the end of the tank, the dim yellowish daytime light was being replaced by murky twilight.

The following morning, we faced the problem of how to get the tank loaded the rest of the way onto the truck. Dad tried backing the truck under it, but it just pushed the base of the tank along. And if the base collapsed, we’d have no good way to raise the tank back up to the right level.

We needed something to multiply our strength. We needed more of Ben’s levers, although I could have done without his repeat disquisition on the role of the lever in military history. We cut three small trees and jammed them under the back end of the tank so we could slide it forward by pushing up on them. That was the theory, anyway. What actually happened was that one of the trees broke, and we didn’t shift the tank one iota.

“Use these trees as a brace, maybe?” Alyssa asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Brace the back end of the tank so it can’t slide. Then back up the truck. The base will slide back, and the tank should be forced into the truck.”

Her solution worked beautifully. In less than twenty minutes, we had a UPS truck-cum-propane tank setup that looked like the Jolly Green Giant had knocked over his brown lunch box, leaving an ear of corn sticking out the top.

It took an hour of fiddling with hoses and fittings to get the big propane tank connected to the smaller tanks inside the truck. When Dad cranked the truck, it started right up—and the fuel gauge shot to full.

“Now we’re in business!” Dad yelled, a huge smile splitting his face. Alyssa, Dad, and I shared high fives. Ben did not like arbitrary touching, and Mom wasn’t even smiling.

“What?” I asked her.

“Now that we’ve got a working vehicle and plenty of fuel, we should go straight to Warren,” Mom said.

“We discussed this last night, Janice,” Dad replied, his smile disappearing.

“I’m going with Alex,” Alyssa said.

“Even if we did go to Iowa City and this Darla is alive, how are we going to find her?” Mom asked.

“Um,” Alyssa said in a tremulous voice, “I have an idea.”