Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

while I was staying at Darla’s house after I’d been injured by Target the year before. Actually, what I used was her mother’s second-best bread pan. We never did tell her mother about that. The memory of Mrs. Edmunds sat heavy in my chest. I’d known her for less than three weeks before she was murdered, but still, I missed her.
    I’d be dead now if not for her. She’d shown me a kindness I could never repay—a kindness that moved her to welcome a bleeding stranger into her home.
    “Done,” I heard from the exam room.
    I went inside and took the bedpan from the bandit. It sloshed with urine so dark it was almost orange. I carefully set the stinking pan on the desk and lowered myself into a chair. “So, Ralph, you got that—”
    “Ralph? Who’s Ralph?”
    “You said your name is Ralph.”
    “I did? When?”
    “Last night.”
    “Don’t remember that. No, I’m Ed. My dog’s name was Ralph.”
    “Huh, wonder why you told me your name was Ralph?”
    He twisted his head and stared at the ceiling.
    “I need to know where you got that shotgun,” I said. “Blue Betsy, remember?”
    “Why am I here?”
    “Because I need to know where the shotgun came from.” This was getting old. “Trust me, I’d have preferred to leave you where you were. You’d have bled out or frozen to death.”
    “Might’ve been better if you had.”
    “Yeah. But—”
    “You want to know where we got that shotgun. You going to kill me after I tell you?”
    “What? No.”
    “You’re just going to let me go. Tell me another one, kid. How do they do it here? Hanging? Or a bullet in the brain?”
    “Neither. You’ve just got to move on and never come back.”
    “Huh.” Ed folded his arms and closed his eyes.
    “Where’d that shotgun come from?”
    Ed was silent.
    I leaned forward and breathed out heavily, staring at him. I had to convince him to trust me, at least a little. “You hungry?”
    “Yeah, but you ain’t gonna feed me. Nobody’s got enough food to waste it on half-dead strangers.”
    “Wait here.”
    He laughed a wheezy, halfhearted cackle. “I can’t even sit up by myself.”
    He had a point. I returned to the room Darla and I shared. She was still loudly asleep. I dug through our supplies, pulling out packages of food. I thought about what would impress Ed, but while we had plenty of food, there wasn’t much variety. I settled on a sandwich—two cornmeal pancakes for the bread with a slice of ham and a slab of goat cheese for the filling. Ice crystals shattered off the ham as I cut it, and the slice was hard as a board. We had no way to keep it warm. The cheese crumbled. As a finishing touch I peeled an icy kale leaf off the stack and added that to the sandwich.
    Ed was staring at the door when I returned to his room. I put the sandwich in his hands.
    “That’s . . . for me?” he asked.
    “Yeah,” I replied, “Don’t eat too fast. You’ll barf.”
    “I know.”
    I sat him up, propped against the wall. He took a bite, chewing slowly. He held the sandwich in front of him as he ate, staring at it like a kid with a new iPhone on Christmas morning. Well, like a kid would have stared at an iPhone before the volcano. Now that kid would just toss the useless chunk of metal and glass aside and look for the good stuff: food, clothing, matches, or weapons.
    I refilled his water cup.
    Ed set the water beside him and said, “So this is corn, lettuce—”
    “Kale,” I said.
    “Kale, okay. Cheese and a slab of?”
    “Ham.” I was quiet for a while as Ed ate. “Why’d your buddy leave you in that house, anyway?”
    “I was slowing him down. I think he was going to put me out of my misery, but I got him to leave me there the same way I got you to back off. Pure D bluff. Told him I had one bullet left for the MAC-10. He didn’t want to find out the hard way whether I was telling the truth or not.”
    “Took balls—so what did you do before the eruption?”
    “Before the eruption?”
    “Yeah, like, I went to high school. Cedar Falls High.”
    “I . . .” Ed lifted the sandwich, staring at it, not eating it. “Mandy used to love ham sandwiches.”
    “Mandy?”
    “I haven’t thought about her in months. She was my life—how could I forget?”
    “What about—”
    “I guess you just go along, don’t you—”
    “I don’t—”
    “Every day you do what it takes to survive. And every day what you’re willing to do gets a little worse. Until you’re—Jesus, we were shooting