Author: Mike Mullin
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: farm; apocalypse; Survival; disaster; Dystopian; volcano; yellowstone; ash; eruption; ashfall
Description: Darla's Story is a 60 page novelette that tells everything that happens to Darla from the time the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts to when she meets Alex. It will be released in all e-reader formats for $0.99 in November, 2013.

DARLA'S STORY
by Mike Mullin

Copyright © 2013 by Mike Mullin

Published by Mike Mullin at Smashwords.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Although some of the places mentioned are real, any similarities to actual people or events are coincidental.

Also by Mike Mullin:

Ashfall

Ashen Winter

Sunrise

Dedication

For Dad

Chapter 1

I can almost hear the drone of my world history teacher’s voice: “If one person dies, it’s a tragedy. If a million die, it’s a statistic.” Mr. Wembender didn’t make that up; he was quoting someone. I’m not sure who, though—I slept through most of world history. Sometimes he’d interrupt his lectures by shouting “Darla! Wake up!” but mostly he let me sleep.

That was the bad year, the year my dad died. Mom and I tried to keep the farm running by ourselves, and I almost flunked out of school. Then we sold the dairy cows, and things got better.

At the time, I thought Mr. Wembender was full of manure. Look at it this way: If a good milker dies, it’s a tragedy, sure. If the whole herd dies, it’s a really big freaking tragedy, not just a statistic.

But now I sort of get it. When the volcano erupted—the big one, at Yellowstone—I knew millions of people were dying. I even knew that Mom and I might die. But I didn’t feel those deaths the way I felt it when I ran over the old lady with my tractor.

Chapter 2

Everything started on an otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon. The rabbits knew something was wrong before I did. I mean, I���d heard the reports on the radio about the huge earthquake in Wyoming—I’d even heard some nut on KUNI babbling about the end of times and the volcano under Yellowstone National Park. But I didn’t believe any of it, at least not until after my rabbits started acting crazy.

I was out in the barn, working on my dollhouse. I had a crapload of weekend homework, but who does homework on Friday?

The dollhouse was more my dad’s thing than mine. When he presented it to me for my eighth birthday, I had to fight back sudden tears. Dad thought they were tears of joy and started babbling about all the micro-furniture we could build together. But I was trying, and failing, to hide my disappointment. I’d been hoping to get a tractor—or at least an ATV.

For a while, I kind of liked the dollhouse, despite my initial disappointment. Building furniture with Dad was fun. We made bureaus and nightstands—the drawers joined with dovetails so fine I had to carve them with an Exacto knife. Dad whittled lion’s-paw legs for the tables and chairs, while I laboriously fashioned tiny tabletops and chair backs mortised so tightly that they didn’t need glue.

About the time I turned twelve, I got bored with the dollhouse. I had my own tractor by then, an ancient Deere that spent more time in the shop than it did running. When I wasn’t working on the tractor, I built oddments like my potato cannon. I could shoot a potato more than five hundred feet with that thing. I just needed a target—and the dollhouse was perfect.

When Dad saw the results, he was as crushed as the dollhouse itself. He tried to hide his disappointment, but I saw the light glinting from his damp cheek as he turned away. Before then, I didn’t realize what the dollhouse meant to him. He told me it was okay—that the dollhouse was mine, and destroying it with ballistic potatoes was no big deal—but I could tell he didn’t really mean what he was saying.

I had hauled the broken pieces of the dollhouse into my room. It took more than a month of exacting labor to rebuild it. Shattered boards had to be recut, yellow potato-juice stains painted over, furniture repaired or rebuilt. But the look on Dad’s face when I hauled the resurrected dollhouse out of my room made all the hours of labor worthwhile.

A year and a half after that, Dad was dead. Crushed under a cattle grate he had been trying to clean.

When I missed him, I worked on the dollhouse. I kept it in the workroom in our barn, on the rough wooden slab that had served as a workbench during those happy hours Dad and I had spent building miniature furniture.

On that Friday, the day of the eruption, I was building a tiny pergola to shade the back patio. I cut a joist, working with an Exacto knife to carve a curved flourish into the joist’s tail. As I reached for a square of sandpaper, the power went out.

Losing power on the farm was no big deal. It happened far too often, although usually not on blue-skied, late-August afternoons. I stood and heaved the barn’s massive sliding door wide. With the door fully open, enough light would enter the barn that I could continue working at least until dusk.

As the door slammed against its backstop, jarring my shoulder, the ground shook. An earthquake, maybe, although I couldn’t be sure—I’d never been in an earthquake before. They’re not exactly common in Iowa.

I looked around. A column of smoke rose against the deep blue sky. It looked like it was coming from the Haymaker place, a few miles northwest of us. The Haymakers were a bit odd, so the smoke didn’t completely surprise me. Most folks clear and burn their brush in late fall, after the harvest is in and the sap has run out of the trees. But if the Haymakers wanted to do it in August, well, it was their land and their brush.

On my way back to the workbench, I thrust my head into the side room that held my rabbits. I’d just meant to glance at them, but what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

The dumb bunnies were in a lather over something, scrabbling against the floor of their cages, running and pushing against the wire-mesh walls. But the weirdest thing? They were all trying to run exactly the same direction—roughly east.

I peered into the darkness at the west end of the room. What had spooked them? The earthquake hadn’t seemed severe enough to still be scaring the rabbits. Maybe a coyote? Not likely in the daytime. Same went for owls. Fox? Nothing made sense. I strode into the dark part of the room, kicking through the straw on the floor. I found nothing to explain my rabbits’ strange behavior.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked them. They didn’t answer, and I couldn’t figure out what else to do, so I returned to my whittling.

I’d spent at least an hour and a half cutting and placing more than two dozen joists when Mom walked into the workroom.

“You see the fire?” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Looks like it’s coming from the Haymaker place—we should check on them.”

“They’re probably just burning brush.”

“Wrong time of year for that. What if it’s their house?”

“Then we’d have heard fire engines. You call the fire department?”

“I tried,” Mom said. “Phone’s out. Thought it isn’t supposed to go down, even when the power’s out.”

“It’s not.”

“We should check on them.”

I started stowing my tools. I didn’t want to go—the pergola was almost finished. “Christ,” I said.

“Darla Jane Edmunds,” my mom admonished. “Thou shall not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Sorry, Gloria,” I muttered.

“And none of that sarcasm. I’ve raised you better than—”

A sudden roar drowned out my mom’s lecture. The noise was so loud, it swept into the barn like a tornado, scattering the straw on the floor.

I saw that Mom was screaming, but I couldn’t hear her over the apocalyptic roar. Flaming knives stabbed through my ears, deep into my brain. My hands were clamped over my ears, but I had no memory of putting them there.

The unearthly noise was so overwhelming, I couldn’t think. I stood, stunned. I must have looked something like a sheep separated from its flock, mouth stupidly wide. Maybe I was even bleating a little—it was impossible to tell over the all-consuming noise.

Mom’s hands were plastered over her ears, and her mouth hung open like mine. She twisted, obviously in pain, although I couldn’t hear her moans.

Mom’s suffering shocked me into action. I leapt off my stool and grabbed for the headphones hanging on the pegboard above the bench. My dad had lost forty percent of his hearing from a lifetime of working with power tools and engines, so he had become a fanatic about headphones. He’d bought a matched set for us—two high-end Peltor hearing protectors. I put one on, and the noise eased from intolerable to merely deafening. I ran to Mom and slapped the second pair around her head.

Mom pressed her hands over the headphones, as if trying to meld them to her ears. I shouted, “What the hell!?” but I couldn’t even hear my own voice—there was no way Mom could understand me.

Eventually, my paralysis broke, and I crept toward the door. My heart hammered in my chest so hard that I could feel it even over the noise. I feared what I’d see outside the barn—maybe a blasted and sere landscape, something like those pictures of Hiroshima in my world history textbook, our barn somehow the lone survivor of an architectural holocaust.

But the view outside was bizarre: everything looked normal. The leaves on the trees were whipped by a fierce wind, and there was a lot of dust in the air, but that’s not unusual in Iowa. The sky was a brilliant sapphire blue, marred only by the column of smoke still rising at a shallow angle from the Haymaker place. So where was this appalling noise coming from? Whatever its source, I didn’t think waiting it out in the barn was safe.

Mom grabbed my arm, trying to pull me away from the door. I resisted and shouted, “Let’s go to the cellar!” but there was no way she could hear me. I tried to explain my idea with gestures, but I’ve never been any good at charades, and Mom kept trying to pull me deeper into the barn. I twisted free and ran out the door.

I looked back. Mom was chasing me, shouting something, her features twisted in an appalling mixture of terror and rage. I ran faster. When I reached the cellar door, which was mounted at an angle at the side of the house, I threw it open and started down the dark stairs.

It was cool and noticeably quieter in the root cellar. Mom stumbled down the stairs behind me. She was frowning now instead of shouting, so I figured she agreed with my plan to hide out down there. Dust rained off the joists above us, rattled free by the neverending roar. I dashed back up the stairs and closed the door behind Mom, plunging us into darkness.

I groped for the string that controlled the single bulb in the root cellar, found it, and pulled. Nothing. Idiot—I already knew the power was out.

I felt my way to one of the root cellar’s ancient brick walls and sat down with my back to the wall. The dirt floor felt cool even through my jeans, but that was a bit of a relief after the heat of the barn.

Mom stumbled on my ankle, caught herself, and sat down beside me. Her hand found mine, and we clung to each other, waiting for the roar to subside.

My thoughts ground over and over. What could make a noise that loud for that long? A nuclear bombardment, but that didn’t seem likely. An asteroid strike would be loud, but it wouldn’t continue for this long, would it? Maybe an earthquake, but the walls weren’t shaking, just vibrating with the noise. I knew volcanoes could be loud, but as the minutes stretched into hours with no abatement in the noise, that seemed less and less likely an explanation. Surely an eruption would end at some point?

I got fed up with waiting and wondering what in the world was going on. I stood, wrenching my hand free from Mom’s. I groped blindly toward the stair. When I found it, I scrambled up on all fours and threw the door at the top open.

The noise instantly redoubled. It was fully dark, but I could see okay by the light of the stars and moon. Everything looked peaceful, despite the unearthly roar. I glanced back—Mom was standing at the foot of the stairs with a scowl on her face and one palm upraised in a “stop” signal. I mouthed “water” and stepped out of the cellar.

I ran around to the back door of the house. Inside, I groped around under the kitchen sink until I felt the flashlight we keep there, thumbed it on, and used it to find a pad of paper and a couple of pens. It was well past suppertime, so I grabbed two bottles of water and a box of granola bars. I didn’t want to stay above ground long enough to mess with anything more elaborate. That got me thinking: what if we were forced to hide out all night? I ran to the living room and grabbed two pillows and the afghan, wrapping everything up into a bundle. Mom stormed into the living room. She wrapped me in a hug and dragged me back toward the door.

We returned to the cellar with the bundle of supplies. Mom took the flashlight and began writing furiously on the pad. “DON’T YOU DARE RUN OFF LIKE THAT AGAIN!!!” she wrote.

“We needed the supplies,” I scrawled beneath her note.

“We need to stay safe.”

This wasn’t an argument I was likely to win. “What is this?” I wrote and then pointed at my covered ears.

“Judgment day,” Mom wrote in a shaky scrawl.

“No. Judgment day, you’d be raptured. I’d be alone.”

“Not true. If not judgment day, what?”

“Dunno. Someone on the radio said the earthquakes in Wyoming meant the volcano under Yellowstone was going to erupt. Nobody believed him. We’ll know soon.”

“How?”

“Ash.” I figured any volcano powerful enough to drown out conversation from a thousand miles off would easily fling ash all the way to Iowa. Maybe all over the world.

After a short pause, Mom wrote, “How long will this noise go on?” Her writing was so shaky now, it was hard to read.

I shrugged.

Mom crumpled in on herself, her chest falling. She looked like she had at Dad’s funeral. Smaller somehow.

“You can’t check out on me, Mom,” I whispered, knowing she couldn’t hear me. The only thing worse than the damn noise would be facing it alone. I wrapped one arm around her and offered her a bottle of water and a granola bar. She took them but made no move to eat or drink.

I sipped a little water and nibbled on a granola bar. Whatever was happening, starving ourselves wouldn’t help. The chunks of granola rasped down my too-dry throat, reluctant to enter the hard knot of my stomach. I took Mom’s hand, moving her still-wrapped bar toward her mouth. She startled, glanced at the bar as if puzzled to find it in her hand, and set it aside. I gave up and laid down my own half-eaten bar.

I formed our supplies into a neat pile in the corner of the cellar and laid our afghan and pillows out on the dirt floor. I looked back at Mom—she was curled up, hand over her mouth, head nodding, her face red as if she were having a huge coughing fit. Which made sense, as the house vibrated so badly, the air was choked with dust. I took the water bottle from Mom’s hand, twisted it open, and held it to her lips. She drank, and her coughing eased.

The dust got me thinking: if the roar got even stronger, could it shake the house down? I thought about pictures I’d seen of Muscatine, Iowa, after a tornado roared through, and I moved the makeshift bed to the edge of the cellar, against one of the brick walls.

I lay down on my side, my back pressed against the wall. The floor and wall vibrated, sending percussive basso tremors through my body, as if I were curled up inside the engine case of a gigantic, mistuned Harley. I scooted away from the wall, which eased the shaking against my back. There was nothing I could do about the vibrating floor.

The headphone dug into my right ear, but I stayed on my side—I wanted to watch Mom. She hadn’t moved. I made a “come here” gesture in the beam of the flashlight and held my arms out for a hug. Her immobility shattered, and she slid into my arms. I turned the flashlight off and clung to her.

***

We must have dozed off at some point, despite the unholy noise. What woke me was the smell. A reek of sulfur—not quite like rotten eggs—more like what I imagined a TV preacher’s fire and brimstone might smell like.

It was pitch dark. I groped for the flashlight, bumping Mom in the process. She startled in a sudden flurry of motion that I could feel but not hear. My hand found the flashlight, and I switched it on.

Mom’s head swiveled toward me, her eyes huge and unfocused in the flashlight’s beam. Her mouth was open, panting in sudden fear. I reached out and took her hand. She gathered herself, looking me in the eye and saying something I couldn’t make out over the roar. I shined the flashlight on her wristwatch: 7:07 a.m.

I dropped Mom’s wrist and started to get up. She grabbed my hand and tugged, urging me back to the improvised bed. I twisted free and found the pad of paper and pen. “My rabbits!” I wrote.

“NO!” Mom wrote back.

I pressed the flashlight into Mom’s hand and got up to grope my way toward the stairway. She reached for me with her other hand, but I dodged her.

The flashlight beam illuminated the base of the stairs. I glanced back at Mom, who was following me, holding the light. I made my way to the top of the stairs and tried to push the door open. It seemed heavier. I had to put my shoulder against it and heave upward. It shifted, and a fine waterfall of gray powder fell past the edges of the door. I poked a finger into the stream of powder—it was fine like talc, yet gritty like sand. Mom had backed up a step.

I heaved the door wider, expecting daylight. Instead, I got blackness.

The moon and stars were gone. It was so dark that I couldn’t see the side of the house, though I could reach out and touch it. More dust rained through the beam of the flashlight, falling onto the stairs. I sagged, letting the door slam, only now it wouldn’t close completely—the grit in the hinges held it ajar. I pushed past Mom, retreating to the bedroll to think.

Mom sat next to me and picked up the pad and pen, holding the flashlight awkwardly under her arm. “What is it?” she wrote.

“Ash, I think,” I wrote back.

Mom wrote a big question mark.

“If it’s dust from storms or nukes, there wouldn’t be so much. Would there?”

Mom shrugged.

I put down the pen and paper, and Mom wrapped me in a hug. When she lowered her arms, I reached out to switch the flashlight off—maybe this whole mess would end soon, and the electric light in the cellar would pop on, but what if it didn’t? I had to do something. Get out to the barn to replenish my rabbit’s food and water. How much of this noise, ash, and darkness could they survive? But the rabbits weren’t the worst of my worries: if this kept up, how could Mom and I survive?

Chapter 3

We cowered in the cellar, hoping the horrible explosive noises would end, but they continued all morning. We’d skipped breakfast—something about being stuck in a cellar during what sounded like an artillery barrage killed our appetite. Maybe it’d be the next fad diet for townie girls—on TV, they’d call it the Apocalyptic Abs Diet, if there was any TV after this. I had always thought the townie girls should try a diet of farm work and farm food, but when I suggested that to Lindsay, the chief frizzy-haired airhead at school, she’d laughed condescendingly and turned back to a salad that appeared to be made with broccoli and sphagnum moss. I still wasn’t hungry at lunchtime, but I dutifully got out water and granola bars, forcing two down and nagging Mom to eat, too.

Mom kept shifting uncomfortably as we ate. After lunch, she picked up the pad and wrote, “I need a number one badly.”

Number one? Who says that anymore? “Just pee in the corner,” I wrote, gesturing at the far side of the cellar’s dirt floor with the beam of the flashlight.

“Not sanitary,” Mom wrote.

“It’d be better if we dug a pit toilet, but I’d have to go get a shovel from the barn. We shouldn’t use the house bathroom—not enough water.” I’d been thinking about that quite a bit—how to get water out of our well with the electricity off. I had an idea for a simple hand pump that might work, but we definitely needed to conserve water until I could try it out.

Mom gave up discussing it, and we both peed in the corner of the cellar. So then the omnipresent sulfur stench was augmented by the smell of urine. We returned to our blankets, huddling together in the cool darkness of the cellar, waiting. Our terror had abated and been replaced by a sort of anxious boredom. Would this ever end? When? Was anything left of the world outside the safety of our cellar? My thoughts spun like the wheels of a stuck truck.

Finally, something changed: abruptly, the noise ended.

Chapter 4

The silence was shocking. My ears rang, but other than that, I couldn’t hear anything. Mom and I sat still for a few minutes, saying nothing, doing nothing, just soaking in the flood of relief triggered by the silence. I peeled the headphones off. I rubbed my earlobes, trying to massage away the tingling sensation.

Finally I broke the silence. “I need to go check on the rabbits.” My voice sounded funny—hollow and distant. Mom didn’t respond. I groped for the flashlight, fumbling around ’til I found it. Mom looked okay—she’d taken her headphones off, too. Her lips were moving, but all I could make out was a sibilant whisper.

“Mom!” I shouted. “Can you hear me?”

Her lips moved, but I still couldn’t hear anything.

“Yell. I think our ears are messed up.”

When she shouted directly at my ear, I could understand her, but her voice sounded like an echo of the original.

“I’m going to go check on the rabbits,” I yelled and started to get up.

“Wait,” she shouted. “We should pray. Give thanks for being spared.”

I wasn’t sure we’d actually been spared. It seemed to me that there still might be a myriad of ways to die in the aftermath of a volcanic eruption—thirst would be the first issue. But I wouldn’t turn down help, divine or otherwise.

Mom clasped my hand in hers and began speaking. I couldn’t understand the prayer—I guess she didn’t think shouting it would be proper. But I bowed my head and tossed in an amen when she finally released my hand.

I tromped up the cellar stairs. The door was obviously covered in ash again; I couldn’t even lift it with my arms. Instead, I planted my shoulder under it and thrust upward, using my legs to lift it. Ash slid off, raining through the gap on the hinge side. Without the ash, the door seemed almost weightless, and I threw it fully open.

Mom’s watch said it was late afternoon, but it was still darker than the blackest night imaginable. The beam of the flashlight died just a few feet from its lens, snuffed out by the thick, nonstop rain of gray, powdery ash.

Mom had followed me up the stairs. “How am I going to even find the barn in this mess?” I yelled.

“Don’t go out there,” she yelled back.

“Hold this.” I pressed the flashlight into her hand. “Keep it aimed at me. Stay there, so I don’t get lost.”

I turned to face Mom and started stepping backward, keeping my eye on the light. It faded to invisibility shockingly fast—in just four steps. I hurried to rejoin Mom.

Even in the brief time I’d been outside, the ash had coated my mouth and nose in a vile, acidic sludge. I bent double, hacking and spitting.

Mom laid her hand on my back. “You okay?”

“Let’s get out of this junk,” I gasped.

I swung the cellar door shut, and we followed the wall of the house around to the back door. The air in the mudroom was stale and sulfurous but much nicer to breathe than the ash-choked air outside.

We staggered into the kitchen. Mom poked around the dark interior of the refrigerator with the flashlight’s beam, found a bottle of water, and handed it to me. I rinsed my mouth out and then drank about half the remaining water before handing the rest to Mom.

The water was a stark reminder—I had to figure out a way to get water out of our well without electricity. If the ashfall didn’t kill us, dehydration would. How deep was the well? Thirty feet? Forty? And my rabbits would run out of water soon. They were meat rabbits, not pets, but still, I had a responsibility to them. To kill them humanely. Dying of thirst wouldn’t be particularly pleasant—for them or us.

Mom used the flashlight to find a candle and book of matches in one of the kitchen drawers. She got out a bag of rice and a pan. What was she thinking? Without electricity, the water wasn’t going to work. I let her find that out the hard way—she held a pan under the faucet, flipped it on, and nothing came out. Our stove was propane, so at least that would work until the tank was empty.

“I’ll try to figure out a way to get water out of the well without power,” I told her.

“How? Can you run the pump on batteries or something?”

“Probably not. Maybe some kind of inertial pump.”

“How are we going to cook?”

“Stove should work until the propane runs out. Then we’ll have to switch to the living room fireplace, I guess.”

Mom set the pan down and sagged into a chair. I took the flashlight and went looking for the ball of kitchen string I knew Mom kept in one of the drawers. I would’ve preferred rope for what I had in mind, but all our rope was in the barn. I found the string and then went upstairs to my room to fetch an old T-shirt. I sliced the T-shirt into wide strips, one of which I tied around my mouth and nose.

When Mom saw me, she gave a start. “Scared me, walking up with that mask.”

“I’m going to find the barn.” I thought Mom might argue, but she just nodded.

“How will you keep from getting lost?” she asked.

I held up the ball of string.

Mom nodded and followed me to the back door. I tied one end of the string to the screen-door handle and started reeling it out, walking slowly toward—I hoped—the barn.

From my very first ash-filled breath, I realized the mask wasn’t going to work. My mouth and nose collected a fine haze of particles, irritating my throat with their grit and acidic sting. “Christ!” I growled to myself. I wasn’t cursing at the mask: I learned long ago that things—machines particularly—aren’t to blame for their failings. If you maintain and operate your equipment properly, it won’t let you down. People are another matter.

I stumbled back into the house and ripped my mask off. My throat burned. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge—our last one—and rinsed my mouth out as best I could with a tiny sip of water. Even if I made it to the barn, where was I going to get water for the rabbits? Without power tools and supplies from the hardware store in Dyersville, it might take days to fabricate a working pump. I needed the water now.

I took another tiny sip of water as I thought. It was cool, soothing my throat. I knew I was swallowing ash and hoped it wouldn’t hurt me. I figured I’d be okay; little kids eat dirt all the time. Breathing the ash, though—that scared me. I’d heard about that disease miners get—black lung or something. Maybe wetting down my mask would keep the ash out of my lungs, but we didn’t have enough water for that.

There was water in the house pipes. There had to be. The well had a backflow preventer, so the water couldn’t drain out of the system. I could cut a pipe in the cellar ceiling to drain the water, but my hacksaw was in the barn.

Suddenly it hit me: I’d forgotten about the hot water! The water heater wouldn’t be working, of course, but it held tons of water. Fifty gallons, I thought. I threw open the cabinet beside our stove and started rummaging through Mom’s pans.

“What are you doing?” Mom asked.

“We’re out of water—”

“I noticed that.”

“I need a flattish pan with sides—like this.” I held up a Pyrex casserole dish.

“What for?”

“Hold the flashlight for me. I’ll show you.”

I led Mom to our cramped laundry room. The water heater was in the corner. I set the pan under the drain valve, cranked the handle open, and was rewarded with a stream of fresh water.

Mom shook her head, her quizzical smile visible in the backwash of the flashlight. “How did you do that?”

“What? I just opened the drain.”

“No, I meant how did you know to open it? That there was water in the tank?”

“Dad.” I paused. We usually didn’t talk much about him. It’d be kind of like picking each other’s scabs. “He installed this water heater. I helped. I remember draining the old tank—carrying endless pans of water to the kitchen sink, because we couldn’t get enough drop for a hose to flow right.”

We refilled all our water bottles and two plastic gallon jugs that Mom normally used to water her plants. I stuffed the gallon jugs into my school backpack and shouldered it. Then I was ready to try again. I shook the ash off my breathing rags and wetted them down, tying them back in place around my nose and mouth. It was harder to breathe, but I figured that was a good sign—maybe my mask would keep out the ash this time.

I found the ball of string where I’d left it in the ash by the back door. The end was still tied to the storm-door handle. I stepped slowly into the ashfall, paying out string as I went. The wet rags worked almost perfectly. I moved steadily across the backyard, aiming in the direction of the barn.

After three steps, I couldn’t see anything in front or behind me. Just the dim glow of the flashlight beam and a never-ending blizzard of gray ash. My eyes burned and I blinked incessantly. I counted my steps, trying to guess how many it would take to reach the barn. Forty or fifty, I thought.

My count had just reached forty-six, with no sign of the barn, when the explosions started again.

The noise was so loud, so visceral, that I reacted without thinking, flinging my hands to my ears. The string went taut and snapped. I was forty-six steps from my house without a lifeline home.

Chapter 5

I started cussing at the top of my lungs but couldn’t even hear the words over the horrid noise. I was forty-six steps from home. It struck me that I could die out here. If I tried to take those forty-six steps without the string to guide me, one slight turn—only ten or fifteen degrees—would be enough to miss the house completely. I’d wind up as an ash-covered lump for Mom to find when this God-forsaken ashfall finally ended. I fell to my knees. My ears hurt, and the mask made breathing difficult. I couldn’t get enough air—it seemed suddenly far harder to inhale through the mask than it had just a moment ago.

You’re panicking, Darla, I thought. You do not panic. Not anymore. It all flooded back over me then: Dad’s funeral. Standing when I was supposed to say a few words. Taking two halting steps toward the altar. Freezing, utterly unable to move. Some well-intentioned soul had taken my hand, tried to lead me back to my seat. Instead I’d fallen, hit my head on a pew, and awakened in the hospital.

Never again, I’d promised myself. At least not in public, when people are watching. Even though I was desperately alone—forty-six steps from Mom, utterly isolated by the dense ashfall and the all-consuming noise—the thought comforted me somehow. I could pretend someone was watching me. In that moment, I felt certain it was true, that I was being watched over. And that feeling was enough to calm the storm of panic rising within me.

I looked for my footprints. They were already filling, nearly invisible through the ashfall. The end of the string was still clutched in my right hand, which was clamped against my ear. I hadn’t lost the flashlight, thank God; it was wrapped in the fingers of my left hand, and my palm was jammed against my left ear. Maybe I could follow the string backward. It would have broken at the knot, I guessed—the bend in the fibers would stress the string, make that spot weakest. My flailing arm must have moved it, but maybe I could follow the string back to somewhere near my house.

I bent low, crawling awkwardly on my knees and elbows, with my face just a few inches from the ground. I’d only shuffled a few feet before the string disappeared beneath the ash, buried in less than a minute by the dense ashfall. I moved my hands away from my ears, intending to follow the string by touch, but the noise burned in through my ears like a pair of misaimed blowtorches, meeting in the center of my head in a molten glob of pure pain. I clamped my hands back over my ears.

I bent even lower. My backpack slid forward, smacking me in the back of my head. I shrugged it off, hooking one arm through the strap so I could drag it alongside me. I brushed at the string with my cloth-covered nose. It was painstakingly slow—crawling along with my face thrust against the ground, following the string—but it might get me back to the general vicinity of the house.

I’d been following the string for ten or fifteen minutes and had probably covered only a few feet, when the string ahead of me pulled free of the ash, snapping taut. Mom. She’d found the other end of the string.

Gasping with relief, I stood and let the gentle pull of the string guide me to her. She held a flashlight in one hand and the string in her other. She wore one pair of the hearing protectors, and the other pair hung from her wrist like an oversized bracelet. I seized the headphones and slapped them on, releasing a pent-up breath as they reduced the noise from actively painful to merely deafening.

Mom hugged me and I clung to her, crying the tears I hadn’t allowed myself when I was alone. It was as if all the fear I’d been suppressing had decided to pour out of my tear ducts, mixed with some of the joy I felt at seeing my mother’s cloth-wrapped, ash-coated face.

When I raised my head from Mom’s shoulder, I realized something was missing. Where was the house?

Chapter 6

“Mom, which way’s the house!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, my breathing mask pressed against her headphones. She didn’t even flinch. The noise was so powerful, she probably couldn’t even tell I was talking.

I held her out at arm’s length and gestured broadly with the flashlight, trying with body language to ask if we were lost. I had a sinking feeling that I knew the answer.

Mom held a hand in the beam of the flashlight, palm out, gesturing to stop. Then she turned and groped behind her, coming up with the kitchen broom, of all things. What good a broom would do was beyond me—a thousand Paul Bunyans armed with oversized brooms instead of axes wouldn’t be able to sweep up all this ash. Babe the Blue Ox with a bulldozer blade wouldn’t have made a dent.

But Mom surprised me. She held the broom out behind us, arms outstretched so it was parallel to the ground. Then she swung it in an arc. When it suddenly stopped, jarring her arms, we walked in that direction. It turned out that we were only three short steps from the house. She had used the broom to stay in contact with the house while searching for the broken end of the string. If she hadn’t found the string, I might never have found my way back.

When we got back inside, we huddled in the closet off the master bedroom. The noise abated some when we closed the door, although it was still far louder there than it had been in the cellar. I had no desire to return to the dank, dirt-floored cellar, and Mom made no move to leave the closet, either. Not that it was clean in the closet—we were both filthy with ash, and the sulfur stench hung around us in a noxious cloud.

You might think it would be impossible to get bored in the middle of a volcanic roar, but you’d be wrong. There’s a limit to how long you can stay terrified, and I’d reached it. Or maybe I’d just gotten used to the roar—it’s astonishing what you can get used to, given enough time.

We sat in the closet for hours, nestled close together. We couldn’t talk—it was too loud. Couldn’t write notes or pantomime anything, because I’d turned the flashlight off to conserve its batteries. I passed the time by braiding three strands of string together, working by touch. Tripled, the string was strong enough that I couldn’t break it by hand.

I don’t know how long I sat in the closet before the aural barrage finally ended. Long enough that I’d braided the whole roll of string, creating a coil of thin, makeshift rope. It must have been late—I was exhausted—but tired or not, I had to try again to get to the barn, to get food and water to my rabbits.

I wet a rag, tying it around my face. Mom came with me to the back door. She stood just inside, taking a firm grip on one end of the coil of makeshift rope. I gave her a hug, took the coil of rope, and stepped into the ashfall outside.

It took a half-dozen tries, but eventually I found the corner of the barn. I followed it to the door and tied the end of my rope to the handle. Inside, I tried taking my mask off, but ash was swirling through gaps in the barn siding, making the air uncomfortable and possibly dangerous to breathe.

My rabbits were alive but suffering—panting, tongues lolling in the wan light of my flashlight. As soon as I refilled the bottle for each cage, they scrabbled for it, jostling and climbing over each other in their haste to be the first to drink.

“I came as soon as I could,” I said apologetically. They couldn’t understand me, of course, but the tone of my voice seemed to calm them—the ones that had already gotten water, at least. I filled their food bowls and then made my way back along the line strung between the barn and house to Mom. She pulled me into a hug, clinging as though I’d been on a trip to France or somewhere, not just to the barn. As soon as I could, I broke the hug and took the rope from her so I could tie it off to the door handle. Now we had a permanent line strung from the house to the barn: a lifeline for my rabbits.

***

When I woke the next day, I thought it was morning but wasn’t sure until I checked Mom’s watch. It was still pitch-black outside. One thing had changed—it was raining. When I saw the water glistening on the outside of my bedroom window in the beam of my flashlight, I hoped it signaled an end to the ashfall—hoped the rain would wash the ash from the sky. But it didn’t. The ash was still falling, about as heavily as before. The rain seemed to fall amid it, somehow.

After I took care of my rabbits’ morning feeding, I was covered in a goopy slurry of wet ash. I tried to knock the ash from my clothes, but it clung, and ultimately I had to strip down in the entryway and trudge up to my room in my underwear for clean clothes. Which got me thinking: how were we going to do laundry? But more importantly, where was the water going to come from?

I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table, clutching her Bible. A candle threw a calm light over her. She wasn’t reading, just gripping the Bible’s cracked, black leather cover. A spray of long, brightly colored ribbons fountained from the book’s spine, like a peacock wearing a funeral suit. Mom’s eyes were closed and her lips were moving. She knew the Bible so well, she could probably read it without opening the cover.

“I need a ball,” I said.

“Amen,” Mom murmured.

“About an inch and a half in diameter. Two inches would be better.”

“I was praying, you know.”

“It can’t float. A ball bearing from a combine would be perfect. I could get one at the junkyard in Dubuque, but I’m not sure how I’d get there in this mess.”

“Sit down. Pray with me for a bit,” Mom held out her hand.

I started pacing, Mom hates it when I pace, but I had to let the nervous energy flooding my body escape somehow. “Prayer isn’t going to get water out of the well,” I said. “I’ve got to build an inertial pump. And I need—”

“Darla! Prayer most certainly will get water out of the well. Prayer brought you to me—”

“I’m pretty sure that involved Dad and sex,” I muttered.

Mom glared at me and kept talking. “And gave you your father’s love of machines. Pray with me for a minute, and then I’ll get you a nonfloating ball about the right size.”

I had no idea where she’d find the ball I needed. I’d been racking my brain, trying to think of a way to make one. It had to be heavy enough to sink and perfectly spherical—incredibly difficult to fabricate without specialized tools. Mom obviously wasn’t going to tell me what she had in mind until I prayed with her, so I sat and took her hand.

Mom got something from her prayers—they relaxed and calmed her. But when I sat with her to pray, I always had the urge to jump up and do something instead.

Maybe I was a little fidgety, because she cut her murmured prayer short. She didn’t scold me, just dropped my hand, picked up the candle, and led me to her bedroom.

“Pull the box out from under the left side of the bed,” Mom instructed. “No, the one closer to the headboard.”

I slid an ancient box marked Ivory Soap Flakes out from under the bed. Mom opened the top of it and pulled out a Mason jar full of marbles. They seemed to glow in the candlelight, tiger’s eyes and whorls gleaming even through the dusty glass of the Mason jar.

“Where’d you get—”

“They were my mother’s. I got them out once when you were little—three or four, maybe—but you weren’t interested in them. You inspected them for a few minutes and then went back to following your dad around, carrying that plastic hammer you used to lug everywhere.” Mom’s eyes gleamed in the candlelight, like the marbles, but wetter.

“Are you . . . okay?”

“I’m fine.” She wiped her eyes.

I pulled her into a hug. “I wasn’t always a very good daughter, was I?”

“No, Darla. You were the very best daughter. Are the best. And I love you, even though I don’t always understand you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I never told you, did I? Why you’re an only child?”

“No . . . I just figured you only could handle one of me.”

Mom smiled ruefully. “That’s probably true, but . . . I got pregnant again only a year after I had you. A boy. We were going to name him Tom.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this strange confession. I pulled away from Mom, wrapping my arms around myself.

“He came early. It was a horrible birth. Everything went wrong. Tom . . . he died, and I couldn’t have more children after that.”

I hugged my arms around myself tighter. “That’s . . . terrible, Mom.”

“We never told you because we never wanted you to feel like you weren’t enough. And your dad, he latched onto you as if you were Tom. You seemed to like the attention, and you picked up mechanical stuff so fast. Still . . .”

The look on her face was heartbreaking. I flung my arms around her. “I should have spent more time with you.”

“No, Darla. You did exactly what you should have. I see so much of your father in you, it’s like a part of him is still with us.”

I gripped Mom tighter, holding on until I was afraid I’d drown in her maudlin mood. The embrace went on so long that I started to get antsy. “Well, this pump isn’t going to build itself.”

“I guess not.” Mom released me.

I dumped the marbles on the bed and sorted through them, selecting the three largest—Mom called them shooters. They were perfect—more than an inch and a half in diameter. As I thought through what else I’d need to make an inertial pump, I muttered to myself, “Thank God the well’s not too deep for this.”

“See,” Mom said.

“What?”

“I told you prayer works. Who do you think gave us a high water table?”

“Christ, Mom.”

“Darla!”

Chapter 7

Now I had a marble the right size, but it still took the rest of the day to finish the pump. I cut up the washing machine’s drain to get a piece of pipe large enough for the body of my pump. I made a huge hole in the wall, getting at the drain, but when I shoved the washing machine back in place, the hole was hidden. I’d have to remember to tell Mom before she used the washing machine. And trek to the hardware store in Dyersville to get parts to fix the damage I’d done. If we got our power back, Mom probably wouldn’t mind. Much.

I chopped up an old pair of Dad’s boots, making an O-ring from the leather. When I put it in place within the pipe, it leaked like a sieve. I soaked the leather in olive oil for a while, and that helped, but it still didn’t seal well enough to work. Then I hit on the idea of carving up the rubber soles of the boots. I made three rubber O-rings—cutting up both boots—before I got good enough at it to make one that didn’t leak.

I attached a reducing fitting to the end of the drain pipe with PVC cement. The O-ring nestled against the inside of the fitting nicely. Then I used a rope of plumber’s epoxy to lock the O-ring in place. I dropped the marble in the pipe, made sure it was free to move up and down, and my pump was done.

Mom went outside with me to help me pull off the well cover and lift the submersible electric pump out of the well. We tied wet dishtowels over our faces and used a roll of baling twine to make sure we wouldn’t get lost in the dense ashfall.

The ash was thick over the pump cover—three or four inches. It was heavy, far heavier than wet snow, and it stuck to my hands, turning them a ghostly shade of light gray.

We got the useless electric pump out of the well, and I cut the water supply tubing and electrical wire with a hacksaw. Mom and I trooped to the barn, carrying the pump and the tubing we’d pulled out of the well.

The dollhouse was still on my workbench. It looked alien somehow in the ashen haze of the flashlight’s beam. Too pristine to be part of my world now. Mom and I moved the dollhouse to the barn’s storage room to make room to work on the pump. Our ash-stained clothes left long smears of gray on the dollhouse’s white paint.

I replaced the electric pump with my inertial pump, paying special attention to the joint where my pump connected to the tubing. I didn’t have any fittings the right size, so I used a lot of epoxy and duct tape. It would hold, I thought. It had to hold—I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my pump.

Mom helped me haul the contraption back out to the well. She held a flashlight for me while I threaded my pump down the shaft and duct-taped a pole onto the tubing where it emerged from the well, to make it easier to pump. Then I took hold of one end of the bamboo pole and started pumping.

Nothing happened at first, of course. I pumped for one minute . . . two . . . nothing. It seemed like it was getting heavier—harder to pull up after each downstroke—but I was getting tired. And then, finally—water! It splashed out the end of the tube Mom held, glistening in the light of the flashlight, soaking her left pant leg.

Mom laughed, her voice a distillation of pure relief and joy. “You’re a wonder, Darla.”

“It’s a really simple machine, Mom.” I turned my head to hide the grin spreading across my face before I realized Mom couldn’t see it through my breathing rag, anyway.

“We’d be mighty thirsty before I figured out how to build that ‘simple machine.’” She had redirected the tubing into a bucket, but we’d barely wet the bottom of it before we noticed that way too much ash was falling in, fouling our water.

So I spent the next hour making a bucket cover with a hole just the right size for the pump tube. We worked well past midnight, according to Mom’s watch. It was impossible to tell by the sky—noon was just as dark as midnight. We filled almost every waterproof container we owned. If my pump failed at some point, I wanted to have enough water on hand to last until I could fix it or build another.

***

When I woke in my bed the next morning, Monday, I wasn’t sure what was going on. For a moment, I forgot about the eruption, despite the grit clinging to my skin and the omnipresent sulfur stench. I was seized by a ridiculous panic—I hadn’t done my homework. Then I came fully awake and realized it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to worry about school; I needed to focus on surviving.

So that’s the way I spent the next few days. I got up early every morning, fed and watered my rabbits, worked on mechanical projects all day and most of the night, then collapsed into bed.

After the water pump, I pulled the toilet out of the downstairs bath and built a squat tube—a piece of pipe and funnel—so we wouldn’t have to trek out into the ash to pee.

I started worrying about the roof, so I attached a series of poles to an old garden rake, lengthening the handle, and used that to pull ash off the barn and house roofs. I’d noticed how heavy the ash and rain were, and we had more than six inches on the ground now. Both the barn and house were old, sturdy buildings constructed of heavy timber, but if you put enough weight on anything, eventually it’ll collapse.

As I raised the rake for the first time, I bumped the gutter. It ripped free with a screech, narrowly missing me. As the gutter crashed to the ground, big glops of wet ash splurted out, splattering me. More fell off the roof, and I cursed out loud. The wet ash reminded me of the time a pigeon pooped on me in Dubuque. But for a pigeon to make droppings like these, it’d have to be elephant-sized. I ducked my head and stumbled farther back, waiting for the bombardment to end. When it did, I dragged my long-handled rake out of the muck and returned to clearing our roof.

By Thursday, it was a little brighter. At least we could tell the difference between night and day and didn’t have to carry flashlights and candles everywhere during the daytime. Which was good—all our batteries were dead, and we were running low on candles. We’d run the batteries out both in the flashlight and listening to the radio, trying to find a station. Either no radio stations were broadcasting, our radio was broken, or the ashfall was messing up the signal somehow. We had two sets of rechargeable batteries, but without power, they were useless. Maybe I could figure out a way to recharge them by hand—I filed that thought away for later.

I decided to use the daylight to work on my tractor. We were running out of food, both for humans and rabbits, but I’d planted over 190 acres of corn in the spring. The ears were mature, but the kernels were way too moist—if we had harvested this early, we would’ve had a horrendous drying charge at the co-op. But wet or not, the corn was perfectly edible, despite being buried under almost a foot of ash. Digging it up by hand would be an exhausting nightmare. I wished I had a bulldozer blade for the tractor. Instead, I used an old piece of angle-iron to fashion a long blade that I could drag behind the tractor on two chains. With one chain longer than the other, the ash would get scraped off to one side.

As I worked, I sent a silent thank-you to my dad, wherever he was, for buying an oxy-acetylene welding rig instead of the electric kind. An electric rig would’ve been as useful as a boat anchor, but the oxy-acetylene setup worked fine without electricity. I would feel so much better—so much safer—if he were here with me. Still, he’d left me the knowledge and tools I needed now, so maybe he was with me in a way.

Then it was time to consider the tractor itself. Its air filter was good, designed for dusty jobs like plowing, but no way would it hold up in this God-awful ashfall. I took the air filter out of our pickup, fashioned a cloth cover for it, and attached it over the tractor’s air intake. It was a bit of a spit-wad setup, but it worked okay. The tractor ran way too lean—starving for oxygen due to the doubled filter—but it ran.

I grabbed an armload of old feed sacks, hopped onto the tractor, and drove it right up to the house, the blade scraping through the ash behind me.

“You continue to amaze me, Darla.” Mom said when she saw the tractor running.

“I know—”

“And you’re humble, too.” Mom’s smile morphed to a scowl.

“Let’s go get some corn.”

“We should check on the Haymakers, see if they came through the eruption okay.”

“We’ve got maybe a day’s worth of rabbit pellets left, and what, two or three days of food for ourselves? And only that much if we both eat your cream of wheat.” You have to be half dead of starvation to eat cream of wheat. Unless you’re my mother. Who’s weird.

“The Haymakers might have even less. And that fire we saw was over by their place.”

“We don’t have enough gas to go driving all over the place.”

“We’re not driving all over the place. Just a couple miles to check on the Haymakers.”

I sighed and went to unhook the blade from the back of the tractor. Arguing with Mom when she got all neighborly was hopeless. My tractor was an old model, a single-seater, so Mom and I had to squeeze in together, with me sitting at the front of the seat between her legs. Normally this would’ve been unbearably hot, but with the rain, ash, and dim light, we kind of needed to huddle close for warmth. In fact, it seemed way too cold for Iowa in the first week of September.

We rumbled down the road to the Haymakers’ place. I almost missed it, but I caught a glimpse of the mailbox through the ashfall as we passed.

The place was deserted. Mom and I both banged on the door and yelled. No one answered. The ash was smooth and untracked, although that didn’t mean much since it was still falling—filling in tracks and footprints fast. Their barn was gone; all that remained were a few sticks poking up from the huge ash-covered mound where it had been. We even checked their grain silos—there was no sign of humans there, either. We couldn’t tell what had caused the fire we’d seen. Maybe they really were burning brush, or maybe the fire hadn’t been here. Finally, we gave up and headed for home.

That was when I ran over the old lady.

Chapter 8

I’m a great driver; I’ve got thirteen years of experience. I learned to drive when I was four. I couldn’t reach the pedals of our old F150, of course, or operate the gearshift, but I loved to sit on Dad’s lap and steer while we checked our fields.

I wasn’t tall enough to drive on my own until I was nine. That was the same year I bought my own beat up ’63 Deere, trading two heifers I’d raised as a 4H project. Dad and I spent hundreds of happy hours getting that thing to run.

The point is that I’m a great driver. I’ve got thirteen years of practice. So when I ran over the old lady, it was almost as shocking to me as it was to her.

Mom saw her before I did, screaming “Darla!” which snapped me out of my daydream about Dad and tractors. I slammed on the brake, but not before I heard the thump of the engine cowling hitting a figure in a long dress, cloaked in gray shadows by the ashfall.

My whole body was shaking with adrenaline. How could this happen? Had I just killed someone? As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t wind back and redo the last few seconds. But maybe I could keep from making it even worse. It looked like she was trapped under the small front wheels of the tractor: if she was alive, would it do less harm to free her by backing up or pulling forward? I couldn’t tell from the driver’s seat. I set the parking brake and vaulted out of the seat to check.

“Can you hear me?” I yelled.

She moaned, and I let out a huge sigh of relief. I hadn’t killed her—yet, anyway. I knelt over her—every part of her but her bright blue eyes was covered, swathed in cloth to protect her from the ash. The corners of her eyes were crinkled and gray—I guessed she must be at least fifty. She was trembling, probably from shock. Her feet weren’t visible. I patted her legs, touching delicately here and there, trying to figure out if her feet were pinned under the tractor wheels. And gasped in pure relief when I found her feet intact. The tractor wheel had caught her dress, and by some lucky instinct she’d pulled her feet up as she fell. That plus my quick stop had saved her.

I grabbed the pleats of her dress, trying to pull it free or rip it. That didn’t work—the dress was made of a heavy fabric and thoroughly trapped under the wheel. I fished out the pocket knife I carry everywhere and hacked her free, leaving a ragged hem on the dress and a swatch of cloth stuck under the wheel.

“Can you stand?” I asked.

She nodded hesitantly and started levering herself up. She wore a child-sized backpack stuffed nearly to bursting, the bright pink Hello Kitty logo smeared with gray ash. Halfway to her feet, she collapsed. I caught her—she’d passed out.

Mom slid off the truck to stand beside me. “Is she okay?”

“She’s passed out. Maybe she hit her head when she fell down?”

“Let’s take her home.”

I nodded and ducked my shoulder, getting it under her waist to heft her like a feed sack. She was lighter than I expected, about like lifting two grain sacks. There was no good way to carry her on the tractor; I climbed into my seat awkwardly and rolled her off my shoulder, holding her across my lap. Mom climbed up behind me, so we now had three people jammed into a space meant for one.

Luckily the house wasn’t far. Getting off the tractor proved to be almost as tricky as getting on had been. Mom slid off first, and I wormed my way out from under the woman, leaving her draped across the seat. Then I ducked under her torso to load her onto my shoulder again.

As I trudged into the house, she started coughing, a dry hacking noise like the asthmatic wheeze of a smoker. In the living room, I rolled her off my shoulder and onto the couch. Ash fell from her dress in clumps—it was going to be a nightmare to get the living room clean again. Which made me wonder: Who wore a dress to hike around in an ashfall? I would never wear a dress again if Mom would let me get away with it. Overalls would be way easier to clean up. And for that matter, who hikes through an ashfall—and down the middle of the road, no less?

Mom carried a cup of water into the living room. I levered our guest upright, and Mom held the water to her lips. She drank deeply, draining the whole thing. Then she collapsed back onto the couch, her eyes closed.

Chapter 9

Mom tried to shake our guest awake—we thought she’d be more comfortable if she got cleaned up before she slept—but she moaned, batted at Mom’s hand feebly, and went right back to sleep. She was lying on her backpack with her head askew. Mom levered her up, and I worked the straps off her shoulders. Mom checked her legs over, making sure nothing was broken, while I set the backpack beside the couch and unwrapped the scarves she’d been using as breathing cloths. She was older than I’d thought, her mouth and corners of her eyes creased with laugh lines. She looked pleasant and friendly, like everyone’s favorite grandmother.

“You recognize her?” I asked Mom.

“No.”

“She’s not from around here, is she?”

“Probably not.”

Mom arranged a pillow under her head, and we let her sleep. And sleep. And sleep. She woke once late that evening, and I gave her more water and helped her stumble to the bathroom. I asked who she was, but she wasn’t coherent enough to give me her name. Other than that, she slept solidly through the night, too.

Mom made pancakes for breakfast the next morning. Well, actually they were more like tortillas—we were out of eggs and milk, so we couldn’t make real pancakes—but they tasted okay.

Not long after the first pancake hit the skillet, the old lady appeared in the kitchen doorway. Ash still clung to her clothes and to the narrow band around her eyes that had been uncovered, making her look ethereal: a masked ghost ready for some netherworld ball.

“You sleep well?” Mom asked.

“Where am I?” She leaned into the doorway, as if the jamb were holding her upright.

“You’re safe,” Mom replied. “I’m Gloria. This is my daughter, Darla.”

“Where am I? Where’s the bathroom?”

“You don’t remember? Waking up last night?” I replied.

Mom started to bustle over to her, but I jumped up to show her the bathroom. I didn’t want to get stuck cooking.

In the bathroom, I had to explain the squat tube again, and when I put a pail of clean wash water in the sink, she drank from it. I offered to get her a cup, but she shook her head between gulps of water.

Mom had me fetch some clean clothes for her—jeans and a blouse, not a ridiculous dress. By the time she’d changed and cleaned up, there was ash all over the bathroom. I groaned inwardly; ashfall or not, Mom would insist on cleaning the bathroom until it was spotless.

Finally, we were all seated at the kitchen table, a plate of steaming tortilla cakes sitting between us. Mom blessed and served the food, and then the interrogation began.

“We didn’t get your name,” Mom said.

“Ruth,” she answered between mouthfuls.

“Where are you from, Ruth?” Mom asked.

“Champaign.”

“Illinois? You’re a ways from home.”

“I’m not exactly sure where I am.”

“About five miles north of Worthington.” Ruth’s face looked blank, so Mom went on. “Iowa. Southwest of Dubuque.”

“A long ways from Omaha?”

“Omaha?” I said. “You’re not even close. All the way on the wrong side of the state.”

Ruth sighed, deflating a little in her chair. “I thought I’d gotten closer. Before my minivan broke down.”

“Omaha’s a lot closer to Yellowstone,” I said. “It’s going to be worse there.”

“I know, I know. I tried to fly out, but nobody was at the airport. Can you imagine that? We’re in the middle of a disaster, and they closed the airport!”

“Um, yeah.” I lifted my eyebrows at Mom, and she gave me a stern look in return.

“Well, that’s just when we need to fly the most.”

“Planes can’t fly in an ash cloud,” I said. “Don’t you remember that volcano in Iceland a few years ago? That shut down all the airports in Europe?”

“Well . . . yes,” she said so hesitantly. I was sure she had no idea what I was talking about. “But they could have sent just one more flight to Omaha. Instead of abandoning the airport.”

“Sure they could’ve,” I said. “And instead of being here, having this delightful conversation, you’d be a few dozen hunks of blackened flesh on a crash site not far from the Champaign airport.”

“Darla!” Mom glared at me.

“I’m sure it would’ve been fine,” Ruth said.

“Christ,” I muttered.

Mom hurried to change the subject. “You have family in Omaha, Ruth?”

“Yes, my grandbabies. There’s Esther and Rachel and the newborn, Peter. Such beautiful children. Let me show you.” She glanced around, “Where’s my pack?”

“In the mudroom,” Mom replied.

Ruth got up from the table, and I showed her the door to the mudroom. She grabbed her pack and brought it back to the table, setting it beside her chair. From it she produced, of all things, an electronic picture frame. “Where do I plug this in?”

Mom and I just stared at her; I had no idea what to say.

“Oh, there.” She noticed one of the outlets above the kitchen counter and plugged her frame in. Of course it remained blank. “Your power is down? Mine was off when I left. But I was sure it’d be back up by now. It’s been what, seven days?”

“Eight,” I answered.

“Shameful. Just shameful. When I was a younger woman, the power was never down for more than a few hours. Those linemen would come out in the middle of the night, in any kind of weather, and fix it. They wouldn’t have let a little ash stop them.”

I had no idea what to say to that, either. I looked into her pack—it was stuffed with more electronic picture frames. “You brought nothing but picture frames?”

“Well, I had more of them in the van. I couldn’t fit them all in the backpack. So I just brought my favorites. The baby pictures, the ballet recital, the Lion King performance—oh, you should see Esther in her Zazu costume. Adorable! I do hope the power comes on soon.”

“So,” I said, “you’re walking across Iowa in a dress—”

“It’s Esther’s favorite. The one she likes to hug.”

“And you brought nothing but useless hunks of plastic and metal?”

“They’re not useless—they’ll work fine when the power comes back on. I had water and snacks in the outside pockets, but I ran out.”

I leaned down, cradling my forehead in my hand, trying to hold my thoughts inside my brain. Unsuccessfully. “When they taught common sense in kindergarten, you were in the timeout corner, weren’t you?”

Mom and Ruth erupted into simultaneous protests.

Ruth: “Well, I’ll be—”

Mom: “Darla Jane Edmunds, you apologize. This instant! I’d most certainly trek to Omaha if you were stranded there.”

I glared at Mom for a moment and then turned to Ruth. “Ma’am, I am most sincerely and wholeheartedly sorry if I in any way offended your sensibilities by stating too baldly what any reasonable person would find obvious.”

“Darla!”

“May I be excused, please? I need to try to harvest some corn. Unless you’re both planning to eat picture frames?”

“We will talk about this later, young woman,” Mom said. She made a shooing motion with her hands and turned back to Ruth. “I do apologize for my daughter’s rudeness.”

“Why, Rachel is only four and she would never . . .”

I closed the mudroom door so I wouldn’t have to hear whatever else our addlepated guest said.

Chapter 10

The ash scraper on my tractor worked okay. It took some getting used to; I could only drive about twenty feet before the ash overloaded it, and I had to stop and pry it up, leaving a ridge of ash behind. And it took two passes to clear a section. Still, it was way more efficient than digging up the corn by hand. Within two hours, I’d hung six gunnysacks stuffed with corn ears off the side of the tractor.

I drove back to the house and shut down the tractor. The cloth covering the extra air filter was almost completely jammed with ash, so I took it to the pump to rinse it. Then I hauled all six bags of corn into the mudroom. By the time I got cleaned up, Mom had set up a mortar and pestle—unfortunately a small one, designed for grinding spices, not corn—two plastic laundry baskets for the husks and silks, and pans for the kernels and meal.

“Can I help?” Ruth asked.

“You’re our guest,” Mom said.

“Sure, you can help,” I said. “I’ll husk the corn, you get the kernels off, then Mom can grind it. Sometimes you can just twist the ears in your hands, or you might have to use a knife.” I thought about the fact that Ruth had dragged electric picture frames along on her trek from Champaign, so I added, “Make sure you don’t hold on to the sharp end of the knife, okay?”

Mom silenced me with a glare. And maybe I was being a bit unfair. I didn’t hate Ruth—she was just so . . . impractical.

The operation went fine—better than I expected. I’d shucked all six bags of corn before Ruth had finished removing the kernels from the first bag’s worth. Grinding was going even more slowly. We needed more mortars and pestles, or better yet, a real grinder with a stone. The finished product was a little mushy—we’d have to dry the cornmeal to preserve it.

“I’m going to head out to the barn,” I said. “See if I can improvise some kind of gristmill.”

“Thank goodness,” Mom said. “I don’t know how much more of this my hands can take.”

“Would you like to trade for a while?” Ruth asked.

“Yes, thank you.”

I slogged out to the barn, thinking about grinders. Maybe I could hook one to my bicycle? And I thought I might be able to make the grinding stones with the bags of Redi-Mix concrete I kept on hand for fixing fence posts.

I spent Friday afternoon sketching out a plan for a bicycle-powered grinder and building forms for the concrete. I had to make two stones, a base and a runner. The runner stone needed a feed hole for the corn kernels and some way to attach it to the bicycle chain.

Making a circular concrete form is tricky. The only time I could recall Dad and I doing it, we’d run to the hardware store in Dyersville and bought a heavy cardboard cylinder the right size. That wasn’t an option, of course, so I figured I’d need to make some kind of template. I struggled for more than an hour to cut a misshapen, sort-of-circular chunk of plywood with an old coping saw.

While staring at the useless lump of plywood I’d cut, I had an epiphany. I wet down my breathing rag, tied it around my face, and trooped back to the house.

Mom and Ruth were barely a quarter of the way through the pile of corn ears on the kitchen table. As I came back through the kitchen, carrying one of our round end tables, Mom asked, “Do I want to know what you’re doing with that?”

“Probably not,” I replied.

I stopped to use the bathroom, which was lucky, because while I was in there, I noticed the vinyl cove molding that served as a baseboard in the bathroom. The molding was about four inches tall, thin, flexible, and strong—perfect for making a round concrete form. I ripped about five feet of it off the wall and carried it out to the barn with the end table.

Saturday morning, I finished assembling the gristmill—or at least did everything I could do while waiting for the concrete to set—and Mom and Ruth ground the rest of the corn we’d harvested the day before. In the afternoon, all three of us ventured out into the field to harvest more.

It took me less than fifteen minutes on the tractor to clear most of the ash off an area as big as we could pick in one afternoon. I shut the tractor down and hopped off to help pick the corn.

Ruth straightened out and looked my way. “That tractor handles the ash real well.”

“It’s made for muddy fields. That’s why the rear wheels are so big. Ash isn’t that different, I guess.”

“I’ve got to be going soon,” Ruth said.

“You’re welcome to stay with us,” Mom said.

“Oh no, I couldn’t. I need to get to Omaha, to make sure my Esther, Rachel, and Peter are okay.”

“They have parents, don’t they?” I said.

“Well, of course. But Bruce works all the time. Naomi might need help. And with the phones and Internet down, I haven’t heard from them in more than a week.

“I’m sure they’re all right,” Mom said. “The Lord will keep them in the palm of His loving hand.”

I looked away to hide a scowl, forgetting again that the breathing rags hid my face completely. Mom had no way to know they were all right—in fact, they probably weren’t.

“You could take me,” Ruth said. She stared at me with a hungry look in her eyes. “On your tractor.”

“Take you? To Omaha?” Ruth was nodding as I went on. “That’s more than 300 miles. And the top speed on this tractor is fourteen miles an hour. I don’t have enough gas—”

“I’ll pay for the gas.”

“Or time. And how were you planning to pay for gas? If there’s any for sale. Which I doubt.”

“I brought my platinum card.”

I couldn’t even think of a reasonable response to that.

After a moment of silence, Ruth added, “If you won’t drive me, how about selling the tractor?”

“No.”

“I brought my checkbook, too.”

“The tractor’s not for sale,” I said, staring her down.

She turned to Mom. “I’d pay well.”

“It’s Darla’s tractor, not mine. If she doesn’t want to sell, that’s her choice. And she’s right, you know. You won’t be able to buy anything with a credit card or check.”

“I’ve got to get to Omaha,” Ruth said.

“Maybe Darla would drive you into Worthington. Could be that someone there has a vehicle they’d sell.”

“Mom!” I didn’t want to waste half a day hauling Ruth to Worthington.

Mom gave me the stare that said, Don’t fight me on this.

“Okay,” I sighed. “After the grinder is finished. And we have all our corn ground. I’m not gallivanting off to Worthington before we have plenty of food laid in.”

“But how long will that take?” Ruth asked. “I was hoping to leave tomorrow.”

“A few days.”

“But—”

“Deal with it.”

“Darla!” Mom snapped.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“She’s right, though,” Mom said. “In a few days we can have enough cornmeal laid in that we can send some with you. Maybe not enough to get you to Omaha, but enough to keep you fed for a few days.”

“I wanted to leave tomorrow,” Ruth muttered, bending to resume picking corn.

Chapter 11

We picked corn until it got impossible to see. The ash had mostly quit falling, but it was still dim and gray, even in the middle of the day. At twilight, the sky faded to pure black. Then we sat at the kitchen table for what seemed like half the night, shucking and grinding corn by candlelight. We were amassing quite a store of cornmeal—eight bags full. While we’d probably get awfully sick of eating corn pone, it beat starving.

Sunday I slept like a diabetic cat, waking far past my normal time. But I was still the first one in the kitchen. I stood by the table for a few moments, puzzled. Something looked wrong. When I figured out what it was, I ran to the living room to check the couch. It was empty, the extra blankets pushed roughly aside. I ran upstairs to wake Mom.

“The cornmeal is gone,” I said as I shook her shoulder. “And so is Ruth.”

“Wha? Huh?”

“The cornmeal. Ruth left. And she took our cornmeal.”

“Goodness.” Mom started climbing out of bed. “Is your tractor still—”

My tractor! Christ! I ran, taking the stairs three at a time, bursting out the back door without stopping for a breathing rag.

My tractor was gone. I’d left it parked right by the back door. Almost no ash was falling, but a light rain was steadily filling the troughs left by the big back tires in the slushy ash.

I charged back into the house, grabbed the truck keys from their hook in a cabinet, and wet down a breathing rag. Just as I finished tying it around my face, Mom came down the stairs, wearing a bathrobe.

“I’m going after her. I’m taking the truck,” I said as I strode toward the door.

“Did you pack any water?” Mom yelled after me.

“No.”

“Food? Emergency supplies?”

I stopped. “No . . .”

“And how were you planning on driving the tractor and the truck back?”

“You’d better come with me.”

“Yes. Give me two minutes to change. Get some supplies ready while you wait.”

Mom turned back to the stairs. It made sense to get prepared, although I didn’t like the fact that Ruth would be getting farther ahead of us. I fidgeted while I waited, wondering what I could’ve done differently. Was I too mean to Ruth? Would she have stolen my tractor if I’d coddled her craziness a little more? Either way, I would get my tractor back. I’d put thousands of hours of hard work and love into that thing. My hands and Dad’s had rebuilt it, touched nearly every part of it.

Mom got dressed in record time, and less than two minutes later we were in the cab of the truck. I started it up, thinking about the air filter I’d cannibalized for my tractor. The truck wasn’t going to last long in this mess without a filter. But I didn’t have a spare or anything I could use to make one quickly.

The truck started fine, of course. But when I shifted into first gear—nothing. The rear wheels just spun in the wet ash. I engaged the four-wheel drive and tried again. This time, all four wheels spun. The ash had fallen on and around the truck, so it was sitting in a hole lined with wet, slippery ash.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Mom. “Wait here.”

I ran into the barn and grabbed the first four pieces of scrap lumber I could find—a couple of short one-by-ten planks and two scraps of plywood. I jammed one scrap in front of each of the truck’s four wheels and climbed back into the driver’s seat.

This time, the truck climbed out of the hole. I kept it in first gear, rolling slowly to the road. At the end of the driveway, I tapped the brakes and looked both ways, more from habit than anything. The tractor had turned left—north. When I tapped the accelerator to follow, the wheels just spun. I tried every trick Dad had taught me for getting a truck unstuck—a super-gentle start, reverse-gear, rocking it—nothing worked.

I got out and tried to run back to the barn to get the boards. You can’t really run in wet ash, though. Your feet sink, and it pulls at your boots like wet concrete. I retrieved the boards as quickly as I could and used them to get the truck unstuck again. This time I wasn’t going to stop for anything—I’d never get unstuck.

The tracks the big tractor wheels made were already fading—Ruth had a huge head start. I slowly accelerated until I was doing almost thirty, but even going that slowly, the truck was sliding all over the road. I wasn’t sure I could control it if I went any faster. Mom had grabbed the handle above her head, clenching it with both white-knuckled fists.

We’d only been driving about two minutes when the truck’s engine started knocking. At first, it was just a metallic tick-tick-tick. But soon it grew to be more of a muffled clang-clang-clang coming from the engine compartment.

“What’s that?” Mom asked through tensed lips.

I kept my eyes glued to the road. I was leaning forward, fingers twitching on the wheel, turning into each little skid as it started, using every trick I knew to keep us on the road. “The ash. It’s getting into the engine. Tearing up the valves.”

“If the truck dies, how’re we going to get home?” Mom asked.

“We’ll take the tractor.”

“And what if we can’t find it?”

I was going to find it. I’d put too many hours into that tractor over the last eight years to let some crazy grandma make off with it.

“Darla . . .”

“What?”

“It’s getting worse.”

She was right. The clanking had escalated into more of a full-blown clangor. I goosed the accelerator, nudging our speed up to thirty-five.

“We need to turn around,” Mom said.

“No.” An annoying wetness was filling my eyes. I lifted my right hand from the wheel briefly to rub them.

“Turn around. Now.”

“No!”

Mom slid her left foot over, and before I realized what was happening, she had jammed on the brake. The truck slewed wildly, whipping through a 540-degree turn in seconds. It stalled, miraculously coming to rest in the middle of the road, facing in the opposite direction.

I gasped, trying to catch my breath. “You really . . . shouldn’t have . . . done that, Mom.”

She just nodded. She was as white as a rabbit’s belly fur.

I tried to start the truck. It made a grinding noise, but it started. The clanging noise was almost deafening, and the whole truck shook. It felt like the pistons were beating the engine to pieces.

I eased the truck into gear. Of course, the wheels just spun in the wet ash. We were stuck again.

Chapter 12

Mom and I were in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t see any buildings nearby, just a few lonely stalks of corn still peeking up from the interminable ashfield. The truck clanked alarmingly, so I shut it down to save what remained of the engine.

I clambered out of the truck to the field beside the road and started digging through the ash with my hands. It took more than an hour to gather enough cornstalks to make a thick pad of them in front of all four wheels, even though Mom got out and helped me.

There was no way we’d catch Ruth now. I wasn’t even sure we’d make it home. I started the truck and slid it into gear again. I gently eased my foot onto the accelerator. At first, nothing happened. I glanced at the rear-view mirror—cornstalks were shooting out behind the truck, flung by its spinning wheels. But then something caught, and we lurched into motion.

I took the return drive much slower, never passing about fifteen miles per hour. The truck lurched and shivered, and the noise the pistons made was deafening. Mom and I might have been able to talk by shouting, but we didn’t.

I ground my teeth, thinking about Ruth. Losing my tractor felt almost as bad as getting kicked in the gut by a cow. This is what kindness gets you, I thought: an aching hole where your chest used to be.

I was sure we wouldn’t make it home, so when I caught sight of the peak of our roof, I gasped in relief. As I pulled the truck up beside the barn, I moved my foot from the accelerator to the brake, and the truck sputtered and died.

“Well, that was an adventure,” Mom said.

“I wish I’d run that woman over more thoroughly,” I replied.

“We did the right thing. She’ll get her just rewards, in this life or the next.”

“Maybe. I don’t want to talk about it. Ever.”

“Okay.”

Mom and I climbed out of the truck. I slammed the door as hard as I could, kind of hoping the whole thing would fall apart from the force of my frustration. Mom walked around to my side and wrapped her arm over my shoulder. I fought back tears as she led me back to the house, her arm a comforting weight against my back.

Chapter 13

The morning after we returned from our fruitless search for Ruth and my tractor, we dug more corn, working by hand. Every spadeful of ash I threw made me angrier. A task that would have taken fifteen minutes with my tractor dragged on all morning.

In the afternoon, we shucked and ground the corn. It took less than an hour to finish up the grinder. It was an amazing improvement over the mortar and pestle. The concrete stones threw a lot of grit into the meal, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt us. Mom poured kernels of corn into the gristmill while I pumped away on the bicycle, turning the grindstones. We left the barn doors wide open to let in the wan, yellowish afternoon light.

We were almost finished when a figure on skis appeared in the doorway. He was short and slight, maybe just an inch taller than I was. His whole right side, from his ribcage down, was drenched with blood. He carried a long staff in one hand and a ski pole in the other. Just as I noticed him, his skis slid down the short drop to the barn floor and caught in the dirt and straw. He pitched forward, hitting his head.

Mom dropped the bag of corn kernels and rushed toward him. I stopped pedaling and scrunched my eyes closed for a moment.

Not again! I thought as I jumped off the bike to help Mom.

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to my brilliant writing group, the YA Cannibals, for suffering through two early drafts of this story. If it’s any good now, part of the credit goes to Robert Kent, Lisa Fipps, Shannon Lee Alexander, and Jody Sparks.

Thank you to my wife, Margaret, for suffering through at least four early drafts of this story.

Thank you to Peggy Tierney for her generous and insightful editorial feedback and to Dorothy Chambers for fixing my atrocious grammar and spelling. Many thanks to Ana Correal for the cover image and to Emlyn Chand for figuring out how to turn my mess into a real ebook. Without all of you, Darla’s Story would not exist.

About the Author

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 glad this writing thing seems to be working out.

Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Ashen Winter is his second novel. His debut, Ashfall, was named one of the top five young adult novels of 2011 by National Public Radio, a Best Teen Book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and a New Voices selection by the American Booksellers Association.

Learn more or contact Mike at www.MikeMullinAuthor.com.

More from the Ashfall Series

Book 1: Ashfall

Many visitors to Yellowstone National Park don’t realize that the boiling hot springs and spraying geysers are caused by an underlying supervolcano. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, and it will erupt again, changing the earth forever.

Fifteen-year-old Alex is home alone when Yellowstone erupts. His town collapses into a nightmare of darkness, ash, and violence, forcing him to flee. He begins a harrowing trek in search of his parents and sister, who were visiting relatives 140 miles away.

Along the way, Alex struggles through a landscape transformed by more than a foot of ash. The disaster brings out the best and worst in people desperate for food, clean water, and shelter.  When an escaped convict injures Alex, he searches for a sheltered place where he can wait—to heal or to die. Instead, he finds Darla. Together, they fight to achieve a nearly impossible goal: surviving the supervolcano.

Learn more or order your copy at MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books.

Book 2: Ashen Winter

It’s been over six months since the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Alex and Darla have been staying with Alex’s relatives, trying to cope with the new reality of the primitive world so vividly portrayed in Ashfall, the first book in this series. It’s also been six months of waiting for Alex’s parents to return from Iowa. Alex and Darla decide they can wait no longer and must retrace their journey into Iowa to find and bring back Alex’s parents to the tenuous safety of Illinois. But the landscape they cross is even more perilous than before, with life-and-death battles for food and power between the remaining communities. When the unthinkable happens, Alex must find new reserves of strength and determination to survive.

Learn more or order your copy at MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books.

Book 3: Sunrise

The Yellowstone supervolcano nearly wiped out the human race. Now, almost a year after the eruption, the survivors seem determined to finish the job. Communities wage war on each other, gangs of cannibals roam the countryside, and what little government survived the eruption has collapsed completely. The ham radio has gone silent. Sickness, cold, and starvation are the survivors' constant companions.

When it becomes apparent that their home is no longer safe and adults are not facing the stark realities, Alex and Darla must create a community that can survive the ongoing disaster, an almost impossible task requiring even more guts and more smarts than ever—and unthinkable sacrifice. If they fail . . . they, their loved ones, and the few remaining survivors will perish.

This epic finale has the heart of Ashfall, the action of Ashen Winter, and a depth all its own, examining questions of responsibility and bravery, civilization and society, illuminated by the story of an unshakable love that transcends a post-apocalyptic world and even life itself.

Coming March 17, 2014. Learn more at MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books.

Bonus Read

Check out the first two chapters of Ashfall for free.

Chapter 1

I was home alone on that Friday evening. Those who survived know exactly which Friday I mean. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing, in the same way my parents remembered 9/11, but more so. Together we lost the old world, slipping from that cocoon of mechanized comfort into the hellish land we inhabit now. The pre-Friday world of school, cell phones, and refrigerators dissolved into this post-Friday world of ash, darkness, and hunger.

But that Friday was pretty normal at first. I argued with Mom again after school. That was normal, too; we fought constantly. The topics were legion: my poor study habits, my video games, my underwear on the bathroom floor—whatever. I remember a lot of those arguments. That Friday they only fueled my rage. Now they’re little jewels of memory I hoard, hard and sharp under my skin. Now I’d sell my right arm to a cannibal to argue with Mom again.

Our last argument was over Warren, Illinois. My uncle and his family lived there, on a tiny farm near Apple River Canyon State Park. Mom had decided we’d visit their farm that weekend. When she announced this malodorous plan, over dinner on Wednesday, my bratty little sister, Rebecca, almost bounced out of her chair in delight. Dad responded with his usual benign lack of interest, mumbling something like, “Sounds nice, honey.” I said I would not be going, sparking an argument that continued right up until they left without me on that Friday afternoon.

The last thing Mom said to me was, “Alex, why do you have to fight me on absolutely everything?” She looked worn and tired standing beside the minivan door, but then she smiled a little and held out her arms like she wanted a hug. If I’d known I might never get to argue with her again, maybe I would have replied. Maybe I would have hugged her instead of turning away.

Cedar Falls, Iowa, wasn’t much, but it might as well have been New York City compared to Warren. Besides, I had my computer, my bike, and my friends in Cedar Falls. My uncle’s farm just had goats. Stinky goats. The males smell as bad as anything short of a skunk, and I’ll take skunk at a distance over goat up close any day.

So I was happy to wave goodbye to Mom, Dad, and the brat, but a bit surprised I’d won the argument. I’d been home alone before—I was almost sixteen, after all. But a whole weekend, that was new. It was a little disappointing to be left without some kind of warning, an admonition against wild parties and booze. Mom knew my social life too well, I guess. A couple of geeks and a board game I might manage; a great party with hot girls and beer would have been sadly beyond me.

After I watched my family drive off, I went upstairs. The afternoon sun blazed through my bedroom window, so I yanked the curtains shut. Aside from the bed and dresser, my bedroom held a huge maple bookcase and desk that my dad had built a few years ago. I didn’t have a television, which was another subject Mom and I fought about, but at least I had a good computer. The bookcase was filled with computer games, history books, and sci-fi novels in about equal proportions. Odd reading choices maybe, but I just thought of it as past and future history.

I’d decorated my floor with dirty clothes and my walls with posters, but only one thing in the room really mattered to me. In a wood-and-glass case above my desk, I displayed all my taekwondo belts: a rainbow of ten of them starting with white, yellow, and orange and ending in brown, red, and black. I’d been taking classes off and on since I was five. I didn’t work at it until sixth grade, which I remember as the year of the bully. I’m not sure if it was my growth spurt, which stopped at a depressingly average size, or finally getting serious about martial arts, but nobody hassles me anymore. I suppose by now those belts are burnt or buried in ash—most likely both.

Anyway, I turned on my computer and stared at the cover of my trigonometry textbook while I waited for the computer to boot up. I used to think that teachers who gave homework on weekends should be forced to grade papers for an eternity in hell. Now that I have a sense of what hell might be like, I don’t think grading papers forever would be that bad. As soon as Windows started, I pushed the trig book aside and loaded up World of Warcraft. I figured there’d be enough time to do my homework Sunday night.

None of my friends were online, so I flew my character to the Storm Peaks to work on daily quests and farm some gold. WoW used to hold my interest the way little else could. The daily quests were just challenging enough to keep my mind occupied, despite the fact that I’d done them dozens of times. Even gold farming, by far the most boring activity, brought the satisfaction of earning coin, making my character more powerful, achieving something. Every now and then I had to remind myself that it was all only ones and zeros in a computer in Los Angeles, or I might have gotten truly addicted. I wonder if anyone will ever play World of Warcraft again.

Three hours later and over 1,000 gold richer, I got the first hint that this would not be a normal Friday evening. There was a rumble, almost too low to hear, and the house shook a little. An earthquake, maybe, although we never have earthquakes in Iowa.

The power went out. I stood to open the curtains. I thought there might be enough light to read by, at least for a while.

Then it happened.

I heard a cracking noise, like the sound the hackberry tree in our backyard had made when Dad cut it down last year, but louder: a forest of hackberries, breaking together. The floor tilted, and I fell across the suddenly angled room, arms and legs flailing. I screamed but couldn’t hear myself over the noise: a boom and then a whistling sound—incoming artillery from a war movie, but played in reverse. My back hit the wall on the far side of the room, and the desk slid across the floor toward me. I wrapped myself into a ball, hands over the back of my neck, praying my desk wouldn’t crush me. It rolled, painfully clipped my right shoulder, and came to rest above me, forming a small triangular space between the floor and wall. I heard another crash, and everything shook violently for a second.

I’d seen those stupid movies where the hero gets tossed around like a rag doll and then springs up, unhurt and ready to fight off the bad guys. If I were the star in one of those, I suppose I would have jumped up, thrown the desk aside, and leapt to battle whatever malevolent god had struck my house. I hate to disappoint, but I just lay there, curled in a ball, shaking in pure terror. It was too dark under the desk to see anything beyond my quivering knees. Nor could I hear, as the noise of those few violent seconds had left my ears ringing loudly enough to drown out a marching band if one had been passing by. Plaster dust choked the air, and I fought back a sneeze.

I lay in that triangular cave for a minute, maybe longer. My body mostly quit shaking, and the ringing in my ears began to fade. I poked my right shoulder gingerly; it felt swollen, and touching it hurt. I could move the arm a little, so I figured it wasn’t broken. I might have lain there longer checking my injuries, but I smelled something burning.

That whiff of smoke was enough to transform my sit here-trembling terror into get-the-hell-out-of-here terror. There was enough room under the desk to unball myself, but I couldn’t stretch out. Ahead I felt a few hollow spaces amidst a pile of loose books. I’d landed wedged against my bookcase. I shoved it experimentally with my good arm—it wasn’t going anywhere.

The burning smell intensified. I slapped my left hand against the desk above me and pushed upward. I’d moved that heavy desk around by myself before, no problem. But now, when I really needed to move it, nothing . . . it wouldn’t shift even a fraction of an inch.

That left trying to escape in the direction my feet pointed. But I couldn’t straighten my legs—they bumped against something just past the edge of the desk. I planted my feet on the obstacle and pushed. It shifted a little. Encouraged, I stretched my good arm through the shelves, placing my hand against the back of the bookcase. And snatched it away in shock—the wall behind the bookcase was warm. Not hot enough to burn, but warm enough to give me an ugly mental picture of my fate if I couldn’t escape—and soon.

I hadn’t felt particularly claustrophobic at first. The violence of being thrown across the room left no time to feel anything but scared. Now, with the air heating up, terror rose from my gut. Trapped. Burned alive. Imagining my future got me hyperventilating. I inhaled a lungful of dust and choked, coughing.

Calm down, Alex, I told myself. I took two quick breaths in through my nose and puffed them out through my mouth—recovery breathing, like I’d use after a hard round of sparring in taekwondo. You can do this.

I slammed my hand back against the wall, locked my elbow, and shoved with my feet—hard. The obstacle shifted slightly. I bellowed and bore down on it, trying to snap my knees straight. There’s a reason martial artists yell when we break boards—it makes us stronger. Something gave then; I felt it shift and heard the loud thunk of wood striking wood. Debris fell on my ankles—maybe chunks of plaster and insulation from the ceiling. A little kicking freed my legs, stirring up more dry, itchy dust.

I forced my way backward into the new hole. There were twelve, maybe sixteen inches of space before I hit something solid again. The air was getting hotter. Sweat trickled sideways off my face. I couldn’t dislodge the blockage, so I bent at the waist, contorting my body around the desk into an L shape.

I kept shoving my body backward into the gap between a fallen ceiling joist and my desk, pushing myself upward along the tilted floor. A lurid orange light flickered downward into the new space. When I’d wormed my way fully alongside the joist, I jammed my head and shoulders up through the broken ceiling into what used to be the unfinished attic above my room.

A wall of heat slammed into me, like opening the oven with my face too close. Long tendrils of flame licked into the attic above my sister’s collapsed bedroom, cat tongues washing the rafters and underside of the roof decking with fire. Smoke billowed up and pooled under the peak of the roof. The front part of the attic had collapsed, joists leaning downward at crazy angles. What little I could see of the back of the attic looked okay. An almost perfectly round hole had been punched in the roof above my sister’s bedroom. I glimpsed a coin of deep blue sky through the flames eating at the edges of the hole.

I dragged myself up the steeply angled joists, trying to reach the back of the attic. My palms were slippery with sweat, and my right shoulder screamed in pain. But I got it done, crawling upward with the heat at my back urging me on.

The rear of the attic looked normal—aside from the thick smoke and dust. I crawled across the joists, pushing through the loose insulation to reach the boxes of holiday decorations my mother had stored next to the pull-down staircase.

I struggled to open the staircase—it was meant to be pulled open with a cord from the hallway below. I crawled onto it to see if my weight would force it down. The springs resisted at first, but then the hatch picked up speed and popped open with a bang. It was all I could do to hold on and avoid tumbling into the hallway below. It bruised my knees pretty good, too. I flipped the folded segments of the stair open so I could step down to the second floor.

Keeping my head low to avoid the worst of the smoke, I scuttled down the hallway to the staircase. This part of the house seemed undamaged. When I reached the first floor, I heard banging and shouting from the backyard. I ran to the back door and glanced through the window. Our neighbor from across the street, Darren, was outside. I twisted the lock and threw the door open.

“Thank God,” Darren said. “Are you okay, Alex?”

I took a few steps into the yard and stood with my hands on my knees, gulping the fresh air. It tasted sweet after the smoke-drenched dust I’d been breathing.

“You look like three-day-old dog crap. You okay?” Darren repeated.

I looked down at myself. Three-day-old dog crap was way too kind. Sweat had drenched my T-shirt and jeans, mixing with plaster dust, insulation, and smoke to form a vile gray-white sludge that coated my body. Somewhere along the way, I’d cut my palm without even feeling it. A smear of blood stained the knee of my jeans where my hand had just rested.

I glanced around; all the neighbors’ houses seemed fine. Even the back of my house looked okay. Something sounded wrong, though. The ringing in my ears had mostly faded, but it still took a moment to figure it out: It was completely silent. There were no bird or insect noises. Not even crickets.

Just then Joe, Darren’s husband, ran up behind him, carrying a three-foot wrecking bar. “Glad to see you’re out. I was going to break the door down.”

“Thanks. You guys call the fire department?”

“No—”

I gave him my best “what the hell?” look and extended both my palms.

“We tried—our house phone is dead, not even a dial tone. Cell says ‘no service,’ but that can’t be; it’s usually five bars here.”

I thought about that for two, maybe three seconds and took off running.

Chapter 2

Darren and Joe yelled something behind me. I ignored them and made tracks as best I could. My bruised knees weren’t helping, neither was my right shoulder. I probably looked kind of funny trying to sprint with my left arm pumping and my right cradled against my side.

Still, I made good time toward the fire station. Partway there, I realized I was being stupid. I’d taken off impulsively, needing to do something— anything—instead of jawing with Darren while my house burned down. I should have asked Darren and

Joe to drive me or stopped to grab my bike from the garage. But by the time I’d thought through it, I was almost at the fire station.

I noticed a couple of weird things along the way. The traffic light I passed was out. That made the run faster— cars were stopping at the intersection and inching ahead, so I could dart through easily. I didn’t see house lights on anywhere; it was early evening and fairly bright outside, but usually there were at least a few lights shining from somewhere. And in the distance to my left, four thin columns of smoke rose against the deep blue sky.

A generator growled at the side of the fire station as I ran up. The overhead door was open. I ran through and dodged around the truck. Three guys in fire pants and light blue T-shirts with “Cedar Falls Fire Department” on the back huddled around a radio. A woman dressed the same way sat in the cab of the ladder truck.

“Piece of crap equipment purchasing sticks us with,” I heard one of them say as I approached.

“Hey kid, we’re—” The guy broke off mid-sentence when he got a good look at me. Then he sniffed. “Burnt chicken on a stick, you’ve been in a fire. Y’ought to be at the hospital.”

I was gasping, out of breath from the run. “I’m okay. . . . Neighbors been trying to call . . . ”

“Yeah, piece of junk ain’t working.” The guy holding the radio mike slammed it down.

“My house is on fire.”

“Where?”

“Six blocks away.” I gave him my address.

A guy only slightly smaller than the fire truck beside him said, “We’re not supposed to go out without telling dispatch—how we gonna get backup?”

“Screw that, Tiny. Kid’s house is on fire. Load it up!” They all grabbed helmets and fire coats off hooks on the wall. In seconds, I was sandwiched between Tiny and another guy in the back of the cab. I could just see the firefighter at the wheel over the mound of equipment separating the two rows of seats. She flicked a switch overhead, starting the sirens blaring, then threw the truck into gear. It roared down the short driveway and narrowly missed a car that failed to stop.

I glanced at Tiny once during the drive back to my house. His eyes were scrunched shut, and he was muttering some kind of prayer under his breath. The firefighter at the wheel laughed maniacally as she hurled the huge truck back and forth across the lanes, into oncoming traffic and even halfway onto a sidewalk once. She swiveled in her seat to look at me, taking her eyes off the road completely. “Anyone else at home, kid?”

“No,” I answered, hoping to keep the conversation short. “Any pets?”

“No.”

The ride couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, but it felt longer. Between the crazy driving and Tiny’s muttered prayer, I wished I’d run back home instead. The truck slammed to a stop in front of my house, and before I could get my stomach settled and even think about moving, the cab was empty. Both doors hung open. I groaned and slid toward the driver’s side. Everything hurt: both knees, my right shoulder, the muscles in my calves and thighs: my eyes stung, my throat felt raw and, to top it all off, my head had started to ache.

Two huge steps led down from the cab. I stumbled on the first one and almost fell out of the truck backward. I caught myself on the grab bar mounted to the side of the truck. When I reached the ground, I kept one hand on the bar, holding myself upright.

The house was wrecked. It looked like a giant fist had descended from the heavens, punching a round hole in the roof above my sister’s room and collapsing the front of the house. Flames shot into the sky above the hole and licked up the roof. Ugly brown smoke billowed out everywhere.

Thank God my sister wasn’t home. If she’d been in her room, she’d be dead now. An hour ago I’d been looking forward to an entire weekend without her. Now I wanted nothing more than to see her again—soon, I hoped. Mom would burn rubber all the way back from my uncle’s place in Illinois as soon as she heard about the fire. It was only a two-hour drive. I gripped the bar on the fire truck more tightly and tried to swallow, but my mouth was parched.

The firefighter wrestled a hose toward the front of the house. Tiny hunched over the hydrant across the street, using a huge wrench to connect another hose to it. Darren and Joe were standing in our next-door neighbor’s yard, so I stumbled over to them. From there I could see the side of my house. One of the firefighters opened the dining room window from the inside and smoke surged out.

“You okay?” Darren asked.

“Not really.” I collapsed into the cool grass and watched my house burn.

“We should take you to the hospital.”

“No, I’m okay. Can I borrow your cell? Mine’s in there. Melted, I guess.” I wanted, needed, to call Mom. To know she was on her way back and would soon be here taking care of things. Taking care of me.

“Still no service on mine, sorry.”

“Maybe it’s only our carrier,” Joe said. “I’ll see if anyone else has service.” He walked across the street toward a knot of people who’d gathered there, rubbernecking.

I lay back in the grass and closed my eyes. Even from the neighbor’s yard, I felt the heat of the fire washing over my body in waves. I smelled smoke, too, but that might have been from my clothing.

A few minutes later, I heard Joe’s voice again. “Nobody’s got cell service. Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T—all down. Nobody’s got power or landlines, either.”

I opened my eyes. “I thought landlines weren’t supposed to go down. I mean, when our power’s out, the old house phone still works. Just not the cordless phones.”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But nobody’s telephones work.”

“Huh.”

“You know what happened to your house? Looks like something fell on the roof.”

“I dunno. Power went out, and then, wham, the whole house fell on me.”

“Meteor, you think? Or a piece of an airplane, maybe?”

“Would that make the power and phones go down?”

“No . . . shouldn’t.”

“And there are other fires. At least four, judging by the smoke.”

Joe peered at the sky. “Yeah. Looks like they’re a ways off. In Waterloo, maybe.”

I tried to sit up. The motion triggered a coughing spasm—dry, hacking coughs, every one of them setting off a sharp pain in my head. By the time my coughing fit passed, the headache was threatening to blow off the top of my head.

“You want some water?” Joe asked. “Yeah,” I wheezed.

“We should take you to the hospital,” Darren said again, as Joe trotted back across the street toward their house.

I closed my eyes again, which helped the headache some. The water Joe brought me helped more. I chugged the first bottle and sipped the second. Joe left again—said he was going to find batteries for their radio. Darren stood beside me, and we watched the firefighters work.

They’d strung two hoses through a window at the side of the house. All four of the firefighters were inside now, doing who-knew-what. The hoses twitched and jumped as water blasted through them. Pretty soon the flames shooting out the roof died down. I heard sizzling noises, and the smoke pouring out the windows turned from an angry brown to white as the fire surrendered.

Two firefighters climbed out a window. One jogged to the truck and got two long, T-shaped metal pry-bars. The other guy walked over to me.

“Are you okay? Having any trouble breathing?” he asked.

“I’m okay.”

“Good. Look, normally we’d call a paramedic and the Red Cross truck to get you some help, but we can’t even raise dispatch. You got anyone you can stay with?”

“He can stay with us,” Darren said. “Till we can get hold of his family, anyway.”

“That okay with you, kid?”

“Yeah, fine.” I’d have preferred to see Mom’s minivan roaring up the street, but Joe and Darren were okay. They’d lived across the street from us forever.

“The fire’s pretty much dead. We’re going to aerate some walls and do a little salvage work. Make sure you stay out of the house—it’s not stable.”

“Okay. What started it?”

“I don’t know. Dispatch will send an investigator out when we reach them.”

“Thanks.” I wished he knew more about what was happening, but it didn’t seem polite to say so.

“Come on,” Darren said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

I struggled to my feet and plodded across the street alongside Darren. The sun had gone down; there was a hint of orange in the west, but otherwise the sky was a gloomy gray. No lights had come on. About halfway across Darren’s yard, I stopped and stared at the white steam still spewing from my partly collapsed home. I put my hands on my knees and looked at the grass. A numb exhaustion had seeped into every pore of my body, turning my muscles liquid, attacking my bones with random aches. I felt like I’d been sparring with a guy twice my size for an hour.

Darren rested his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be all right, Alex. The phones will probably be back up tomorrow, and we’ll get your folks and the insurance company on the line. A year from now, the house will be as good as new, and you’ll be cracking jokes about this.”

I nodded wearily and straightened up, Darren’s hand still a comfortable weight on my shoulder.

Then the explosions started.

Table of 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

About the Author

Book 1: Ashfall

Book 2: Ashen Winter

Book 3: Sunrise

Chapter 1

Chapter 2