Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

helped me dress him. Then she lifted the guy’s ankles while I grabbed his shoulders. We dragged him out of the house and laid him in the snow beside Bikezilla.
    “We can tie him on the load bed, over the supplies,” I said as I repacked the first-aid kit, lantern, and guns. “You know where we are?”
    “I think so.” Darla took the Illinois roadmap out of its protective, plastic folder and opened it. “I think we’ve been biking south on 78. We should be near Stockton.” She pointed at a dot on the map south of Warren.
    “You know anything about Stockton? Is there a doctor there?”
    “I dunno. It looks bigger than Warren on this map. We could probably make it back to Warren in a couple hours—it’s straight north on 78. Just take him to Doc McCarthy.”
    I looked over her shoulder at the map. “Let’s try Stockton. It’s a lot closer. And I don’t really want to bring a bandit into Warren if we can help it.”
    Darla shrugged. We repacked all our gear and then laid the guy on his stomach over Bikezilla’s load bed. Darla tied him down, leaving his arms and legs overhanging the sides.
    We mounted Bikezilla and started pedaling south along Route 78. Less than ten minutes of travel brought us to a T in the road. We passed three metal sign supports that barely protruded from the snow, but someone had sawn the signs off them. I wasn’t sure why anyone would bother to vandalize the signs—maybe they didn’t want strangers to find Stockton. “Which way?” I asked Darla.
    Darla looked over her shoulder at me. “Right, I think. This should be Highway 20. It’ll take us straight into Stockton.”
    We rounded the corner and passed a burned-out building on our left. The sign in front read G ALENA S TATE B ANK & T RUST. We raced on past a whole series of burnt buildings, but none of the rest of them had signs.
    Peering around Darla, I saw something surreal. A few hundred yards ahead of us, a line of cars stood upright, resting on their front bumpers with their trunks in the air. They formed a wall that stretched as far as I could see to the left and curved away from us to the right. Where U.S. 20 passed through the car-wall someone had built a heavy timber gate across the road. Almost before I’d processed what I was seeing, church bells began ringing furiously. A line of men popped into view one by one, their heads and shoulders above the low log gate.
    Every one of them was pointing a rifle at us.

Chapter 7
    Darla must have seen the rifles, too, because she slammed on the brakes. I got off the bike and stepped up beside her.
    “I doubt if any of them can hit us from this far off,” she said.
    “Yeah,” I replied. “How about if I walk up there with my hands up and try to talk to them, and you turn Bikezilla around so that if they start shooting, we can ride out of here in a hurry.”
    Darla paused. “Okay.” She pulled me close for a kiss. “I’ll get out the binoculars and keep a lookout. If I yell, run back as fast as you can. And be careful.”
    “I will.” I held up my hands with my palms open and started trudging down the road toward the guns.
    The wind was in my face, blowing bits of ice that stung my skin. I had to squint, making everything look indistinct.
    As I got closer, I could see the car-wall better. It was bizarre—made up of every conceivable make and model of automobile: from huge pickup trucks and SUVs to Priuses and mini Coopers. Their front bumpers were planted on the ground, hidden by the snow. The rear bumpers rose in the air at various heights, so that the arrangement looked like a monstrous row of multicolored teeth gnawing up from the ground. Each car touched its neighbor on both sides, forming an impassable wall. I couldn’t tell what held them upright.
    I got to within about a hundred feet of the gate and yelled, “Hello! Is this Stockton?”
    Someone yelled back, “We’re closed.”
    “You got a doctor here?”
    “Yep. She’s closed, too.”
    “I can trade.”
    “Trade what?”
    “Guns, seeds, food . . .”
    A lean man wearing a chocolate-brown coat and overalls set his rifle aside, climbed over the log gate, and started walking toward me. I noticed he was walking to one side of the road, carefully staying out of his buddies’ line of fire. I briefly toyed with the idea of sidestepping to put him between me and the guns, but there was no point—he could easily sidestep, also.
    He stopped about ten feet from me. “Who’re you?”
    “Alex