Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

thought I understood what Darla was doing. The Humvee would have to turn in a wide arc to get lined up to try to run us down again. By then, maybe we could make it into the woods.
    But the driver wasn’t cooperating. He skidded to a complete stop, almost putting the nose of the Humvee into the woods. But instead of turning around, he started backing up. Straight toward us.
    “Christ!” Darla screamed. “Male drivers!” She kept accelerating directly toward the Humvee as it raced backward toward us. Playing chicken with a truck fifty times our size didn’t seem like a great idea to me, but I wasn’t in the driver’s seat. And Darla had dodged the truck twice now—one more time and we’d make it to the woods.
    “Yeeaaah,” Darla screeched a banshee wail. “Faster!”
    I was already white-knuckling the handlebars, pumping for all I was worth. A drop of blood oozed out between Darla’s right hand and her handlebars and was whipped past me by the wind.
    The back of the Humvee loomed. I wanted to close my eyes. I couldn’t close my eyes. At the last second, Darla swerved left. The driver of the Humvee swerved, too. The truck’s front quarterpanel sideswiped Bikezilla’s load bed just behind my right leg.
    We were thrown into a spin. I was sure we’d roll, but Darla steered into the skid, pedaling like mad, and somehow kept us upright. She shot between a pair of trees that were too close together to admit the Humvee.
    We were racing along a tiny frozen creek, forest lining either side. I looked back and almost got knocked off the bike when an overhanging branch smacked me in the side of the head. I didn’t see any sign of the Humvee.
    Both banks of the creek were overgrown with leafless bushes and trees. I had to watch Darla carefully; when she ducked, I had a split second to follow or get whacked by a branch. Several times Darla threw an arm up to block them instead. The branches were dead and shattered easily, bits of dry wood spinning away as we whizzed past.
    Drifts of snow had covered the ice here and there. I felt these as much as saw them—it got much harder to pedal, and Bikezilla rose and fell slightly, following the contours of the blown snow.
    Suddenly we burst out of the narrow confines of the creek onto another lake. Darla steered the bike in a broad left turn. We’d been following this new course less than a minute when I started to hear a faint new sound under the chatter of our rear track: the roar of falling water.
    I yelled, “Is that—”
    “The roller dam, yeah,” Darla yelled back. “We’re headed right toward the barge and all those soldiers. Look for a place to turn left.”
    “Up there?” I pointed.
    Darla was already steering toward the break in the trees I’d seen. We turned into the new channel, a broad, straight stretch of river. It would have been easy to pedal down it except for one thing: The Humvee was again accelerating across the ice, directly toward us.

Chapter 18
    The Humvee was about a mile south of us but racing north fast. Both banks of this stretch of river were densely forested—I didn’t see any place we could get off the river ice. Darla braked hard and spun us into a tight turn, and we stood on the pedals, accelerating north away from the Humvee.
    “Darla, look!” I yelled and pointed.
    “I see it.”
    To the north, there was a break in the trees: a path barely big enough for Bikezilla, its opening flanked by two huge cottonwoods that would prevent the Humvee from following us. Darla steered straight toward it.
    My legs burned. We’d been pedaling flat out since we left the guard shack more than a half hour ago. My body was coated in cold sweat—from exertion or terror, I wasn’t sure which. I tried to coax one more burst of speed from my body, but I could barely maintain our current pace.
    Darla was exhausted, too. I could hear her gasping for air even over the clatter of Bikezilla. If anything, we were slowing down. But then I heard the Humvee’s engine revving behind us and discovered I did have some hidden reserve left.
    I bore down on the pedals and we shot forward, a missile homing in on the safety of the trees ahead. There were no tricks left, no fancy maneuvers. If we kept playing chicken with the Humvee, eventually we’d lose.
    There was no gunfire. Maybe I’d actually done some damage by throwing the pistol. The rumble of the engine behind us crescendoed. I looked back—we weren’t going to make it.
    I braced myself uselessly,