Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

search for whatever or whoever was causing the ruckus.
    Dad grouped me with two others, Jones and Altemeier, and told us to sweep the perimeter of the camp along the fence. We set off at a run.
    By the time we got to the fence, it seemed like the commotion had mostly moved deeper inside the camp. I scanned constantly back and forth as we ran, hyperalert for any movement.
    As we passed the gate, I saw four Black Lake guys, double the usual contingent, leaning against the guard shack outside the fence. “Why don’t you do something?” I yelled. They laughed, and one of them pantomimed shooting me. I turned away, and we ran on.
    A few hundred yards farther on, we heard a child screaming. Following the noise, we found a little girl, maybe four or five years old, sitting in the snow between two of the tents, screaming, “Mommyyyyy! Mommyyyyy! Mommyyyyy!” She paused just long enough between each scream to breathe.
    We quickly scouted the adjacent tents. Nobody was there. I scooped up the girl in my arms, which only made her scream louder. “I’ll run her to the middle of camp, then catch up to you,” I yelled. Jones nodded, and she and Altemeier took off along the fence line.
    I headed toward the center of the camp, slowing to a jog to conserve my strength. I had to detour once, to avoid a chaotic melee between three black-clad biker-types and five or six prefects. I would have been worse than useless in the middle of a fight with a squirming little girl in my arms.
    It took more than ten minutes to find Mom in the chaos at the center of camp. She was organizing refugees who weren’t part of the prefect system into groups she designated runners or fighters. I guessed she was organizing for an attack, but I didn’t stop to ask her. Instead I thrust the little girl into her startled arms and took off again.
    I couldn’t find Jones or Altemeier. I looked for a few minutes before I came across another fight. A group of three flensers armed with knives were fighting with a much larger cluster of refugees. I ran toward them, but by the time I arrived, the invaders had broken off, running toward the gate. Nobody chased them—two of the refugees involved in the fight had been stabbed and were bleeding badly. I stopped to help.
    A few minutes later, it was over almost as suddenly as it had started. The cries of rage died, replaced by the wails of the wounded and moans of the dying.
    It took more than twelve hours for Dad to get a clear picture of what had happened. We’d been attacked by members of the Dirty White Boys. Something between fifteen and thirty of them, working in groups of three or four, had swarmed through the camp searching tents and stabbing anything that moved.
    We had eleven fresh corpses. Eight refugees and three Dirty White Boys. Dozens more were wounded, including a few that might soon join the dead. Dad decided to deliver all the corpses to the guard gate along with a protest—not that either of us really thought it would do any good. The guards had let the DWBs in. They knew what would happen.
    The little girl I’d grabbed in the middle of the night turned out to be named Lisa. Her mother had gotten pulled away from her in the crush of fleeing people. The only good tears I saw that day were the ones when mother and daughter were reunited.
    Hoping for Black Lake to take action seemed futile, so we spent an exhausting day preparing for the night to follow. We organized more fighters, distributed captured knives, and made plans for refugees to flee to the protected zone at the center of the camp if the DWBs came again. I had no time to do anything about my escape plan amid the rush to prepare for another attack.
    Dad planned for everyone on defensive patrols to sleep in the late afternoon. We would need our sleep if the camp got attacked again. But organizing and getting cleaned up took far longer than it should have. By nightfall, neither Dad nor I had had so much as a nap. We were drunk with exhaustion. If the DWBs came again that night, we’d be useless.
    So of course they did.

Chapter 67
    One of the prefects Dad had assigned to watch the gate sprinted up to us. I was out of breath myself, having just returned from running orders to a patrol on the far side of the camp. What the scout said made further orders irrelevant.
    “DWBs, sir.” The woman was gasping, out of breath. “Just came through the main gate.”
    “How many?” Dad barked.
    “Just two so far.”
    The three of us ran back