Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

blankets,” Rita Mae wrote. “You can all stay here if you like. I’ll be back with the medicine and food.”
    Floyd had laid a heavy blanket over Darla. As I turned to help get everyone else settled, I saw Darla staring at me from the exam table. Her eyes reflected the light, shining like distant campfires on an icy winter night. I stepped toward her. I wanted, needed, to talk to her about what had happened, to learn how she’d survived. But by the time I reached her side, she was asleep again. I pulled up a chair to sit in vigil over her—as if my will alone could keep her alive.

Chapter 84
    Rita Mae returned in less than an hour, carrying a backpack stuffed with food and drugs. Floyd woke Darla up and gave her a glass of water, two Tylenol, and a Cipro tablet. I held her hand for no more than a minute before she fell back asleep.
    Everyone else bedded down on the cots, close to the small fire. I dragged my blankets into Darla’s room and wrapped them around myself, sitting on the chair by her bed. Soon I was asleep.
    Darla haunted my dreams. She was naked and curled into a ball, alone in a vast white space. She curled up tighter and tighter, and her skin turned red and blistered, as if from sunburn. I screamed, “Darla!” but she couldn’t hear me. I ran toward her, but she receded faster than I could run. Purple and green and yellow blotches crawled across her skin, and she hunkered down even further, into an impossibly small ball. Suddenly her skin was black and charring, and then there were flames. Darla was burning before my eyes. The flames jumped and lit Mom, who was somehow beside her, and they jumped again and burned Dad. Everything charred to ash.
    Alyssa crawled toward me, blocking the cinders of my family from view. She was naked and above me, her breasts swaying pendulously, hypnotically. I was excited and ashamed. She called to me seductively, “Alex . . .,” and I lifted my head toward her.
    I woke up. “Alex! Alex!” Alyssa was above me, fully clothed. And she was shaking my shoulder and yelling my name, although it was in no way seductive. And I could hear! Not well, maybe, but well enough to understand her.
    “Yeah?” I mumbled.
    “You said you wanted to leave in four hours,” she said. “It’s time.”
    “Thanks,” I said. Alyssa left, and I stood, turning toward Darla. “You okay?” I asked as her eyes opened.
    “Shoulder hurts,” she said. “I’ll live. How about you?”
    “I’m okay. Now that I found you.” Suddenly I recalled what finding her had cost. My dad slamming the shifter into reverse. I choked back a sob.
    Darla reached out with her good hand, drawing me down into an embrace, and I bawled into the comforting semi-circle of her arm. “Shh,” she said.
    When my tears subsided, I whispered, “Things are never going to be the same again, are they?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I thought that finding my parents would change things. Would . . . well, I knew things wouldn’t go back to the way they were before the volcano, but I thought they’d get better.”
    “Get better how?”
    “I guess I thought I wouldn’t have to carry everything on my own shoulders, every decision. It’s—I don’t always know what’s right. Sometimes I think it’d be nice to be a little kid again, to leave the weightiest decisions to my parents.”
    “Alex,” Darla said, her face serious, “you haven’t been a kid for a long time now.”
    “And now I never will be again.”
    “No.”
    I was afraid I’d start bawling again, so I changed the subject. “You, how did you—I was afraid they’d flense you or . . .”
    “Danny didn’t want to flense me. He thought I was cute.” Darla’s face twisted with disgust. “He was going to let me heal and then make me . . . take me to bed.”
    “Rape you.” I held the rail of her cot in one hand, gripping it so hard I wondered if it might crumple in my fist.
    “Yeah. But Alyssa went missing, and he had to send a girl to the Dirty White Boys as a replacement. I was handy.”
    I sat down, rested my head against her shoulder, and listened.
    “The truck broke down on the way. Radiator problem. I told them how to fix it. So when I got to Iowa City, I wound up repairing stuff for them instead of filling a bed in their whorehouse, thank God.”
    “Yeah,” I replied, as gently as I could manage. “You had a lockpick and a weapon—why were you still there?”
    “Look at me. I’m weak. And sick. I wouldn’t eat the meat