Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

. . heave!” We got the car about a foot off the ground before Ben’s hands slipped and the Bug fell back.
    “We can do this. Scream when you lift this time. Three . . . two . . . one . . . now!” I screamed. This time I was able to straighten my legs completely, and the car rocked past its center of balance and crashed onto its side.
    We’d created about three feet of space between the car and truck. Now we had room to spread out. Each of us grabbed whatever was handy—the exhaust system, parts of the frame, or the tires. This time we rolled the car easily onto its back.
    Now, though, there was nothing to grip. We couldn’t generate enough force by pushing to roll the Bug again. And reaching down didn’t help—we couldn’t reach anything but the smooth, rounded body panels. And the car was still blocking the UPS truck.
    “Everybody move down the street,” Dad said. “I’ve got this.”
    As he climbed into the UPS truck, Dad yelled, “Move farther!”
    We were half a block down the street when he started the truck. He revved the engine and threw the truck into reverse, crunching into the Bug. It slid easily on its roof, coasting five or six feet. Dad pulled the truck forward and backed into the Bug again. He had more space to gain speed this time, so he hit the Bug with a crash and screech of tortured metal. The car sailed across the road, spinning on its roof until it slammed into the snowbank on the opposite side and stuck.
    Dad pulled out onto Main Street. “Hurry up, there’s no fuel to waste!”
    We sprinted to the truck and piled in. I took shotgun—maybe I should have offered the passenger seat to Mom or Alyssa, but I knew where the propane distributor was. I needed to be able to see and talk to Dad. Everyone else sat on the floor in back amid the remaining wrecked boxes.
    The propane distributor was even closer than I remembered—just past the abandoned strip mall and collapsed fast food restaurants south of Anamosa on Highway 1. It was comprised of a low cinderblock building labeled T RI -C OUNTY P ROPANE , one tank about the size of a semitrailer, and a dozen smaller tanks, each fifteen or sixteen feet long and raised about four feet off the ground, so their bases were at the level of the snow around them. All the tanks were painted to mimic ears of corn—green leaves on one end peeled back partially to reveal yellow kernels on the other. Each tank sported a cap of deep snow. There was also a long row of lumps in the snow, probably marking smaller, buried tanks.
    Dad stopped and cut the engine. “How in the world are we going to load one of those tanks onto this truck?”
    “Dig out one of the smaller tanks and drag it out here?” I suggested.
    “Yeah, maybe.”
    We struggled over the high snow berm. Flailing through chest-deep snow to reach the row of mounds was a huge chore, even though we had less than one hundred feet to cross. We dug through a mound, finding that there was indeed a smaller propane tank—an oval six or seven feet long—buried under all that snow. But the gauge on top of the tank read empty.
    Mom and Dad started working on the next tank in the line, while Alyssa and I skipped down the row about twenty feet to work on a different tank. Working with our hands and arms, it seemed to take forever just to dig enough snow to read the gauges. Both tanks were empty.
    In the meantime, Ben had wandered over to the big tanks. Their gauges were bottom-mounted and easier to clear. He’d checked half a dozen tanks in the time it took the four of us to check two.
    “Any luck, Ben?” I yelled.
    He stopped and looked down for a moment, as though thinking. “Yes,” he yelled. “I am alive. I am free of the Peckerwoods and free of the Black Lake camp. That is very lucky.”
    “I guess. But I wanted to know if any of those tanks have propane in them.”
    “You did not ask that,” Ben said.
    Gah. What would it take to get a simple, straight answer? “So do they?” Ben looked again at his feet, and I realized what my mistake was. “Do any of the large tanks have propane?”
    “I have only inspected six of them,” Ben said. “The one on the end is full, and the rest are empty.”
    Dad looked up from digging in the snow. “Maybe we could clear a path and back the truck up to it. Run a hose or something to fill the tanks on the truck?”
    “If we’re going to do all that work,” I said, “let’s load the whole tank onto the truck.”
    “That thing’s got to weigh