Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

fingers—”
    My icy immobility shattered, and I lashed out, striking Dad’s wrist. The finger went flying, hitting the side of the tent with a thump. “What the hell!” I shouted. “This isn’t us! This isn’t you! Stop it!”
    Dad’s face was twisted by some kind of sick, almost gleeful rage. “Oh, we lost your finger,” he cooed to Shawn. “I know where we can get nine more.” He lifted the knife and stepped behind Shawn.
    As he seized Shawn’s broken ring finger, Shawn blubbered, “No. Stop. . . . The DWBs, we have a deal with some of the guards.”
    “A deal?” Dad asked.
    “They let us in and out.”
    “In return for what?”
    “We bring them supplies. Drugs, booze, food. Let them do the girls sometimes.”
    “What happens to the people you take?”
    “Flense most of them. We keep some of the girls to trade.”
    I thought of Darla. If she was still alive, she was in the hands of a gang like this one. I stumbled out of the tent and vomited.
    Through the wall of the tent, I heard Dad saying, “Which guards work with you?”
    Shawn gave him about a dozen names. Then he asked in a tremulous voice, “You going to flense me now?”
    “I haven’t decided,” Dad replied. The tent flap rustled, and he strode past me.
    I hurried to catch up and grabbed his arm. “What the hell was that?”
    “That’s the world we live in now.”
    I swung him to face me. “No. You’re blaming the world for choices you made.”
    Dad tried to pull away. “That’s just the way things are now.”
    There was a wet, choking sound behind me and a thump. “What was that?”
    “Jones. Taking care of the flenser .” He said “flenser” like it was the vilest curse word ever invented.
    Jones pushed through the tent flap, carrying the light in one hand and awkwardly dragging Shawn in the other. She was bent almost double, straining against his bulk. A trail of blood followed Shawn’s head. His throat had been cut. “What . . .why?”
    “They’re flensers,” Dad said flatly. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect those under my care from the likes of him. Whatever. I’ve got no apologies to make. Now let go of me, son.”
    “What’re you going to do?” I asked.
    “Take care of the rest of the flensers,” Dad replied. “Go help Jones with that offal.”
    “So you kill the other three cannibals. What good does it do?”
    “Three fewer flensers in the world.”
    “And they send four other guys. Or forty. It gets us nothing.”
    “So what? We let them go?”
    Part of me wanted to say forget it, they deserved to die. To let Dad do whatever he wanted to the other three. I didn’t really care what happened to them. But I did care about Dad, about what he was becoming. Or had already become. “What if we let one of them go? Would they trade something for the other two?”
    “I don’t know,” Dad said. “What do they have that we’d even want?”
    “An end to the raids on the camp would be a good start.”
    “We can’t trust the DWBs. And some other gang might start raiding, instead.”
    “Yeah. You know, it’s not the gangs. It’s Black Lake. We need some way to stop them from letting gangs into the camp, period. Can we report them to someone? Call their HQ?”
    “There’s no cell network anymore. Maybe a shortwave radio. I’ve heard that’s how Black Lake stays in touch with Washington.”
    “Can you keep two of them hidden while we work out a trade?”
    “Maybe,” Dad shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, we go with plan A and slit their filthy throats.”
    The three live flensers were called Trey, Darrell, and Cody, who was the boss. We released Trey with a message: Bring a shortwave radio transceiver and an extra set of batteries to camp, and we’ll free Cody and Darrell. Continue raiding, or tell Black Lake we have captives, and we’ll slit the two guys’ throats without a second thought. For good measure, Dad retrieved the bloody, dirty pinkie stub and told Trey to take it along—to let his bosses know we were serious.
    After releasing Trey, Dad went to help move our captives to new tents, and I returned to the tent I shared with Dad. I lay down but didn’t sleep. It was after dawn by then, and the tent flap let in a sliver of light. It let in a frigid breeze, too, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and tie it tighter. Instead I stared into the light while my thoughts churned my brain to mush.
    I was still trying to sleep when Dad finally came in. “You’re awake,”