Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

scarf. Darla handed me one of hers, and I wrapped it around his head as tightly as I could.
    Anna was crouched with her hands covering her inner thighs. I saw a spot of wetness around one of her hands.
    “Anna,” I said softly. “It’s okay. I peed myself the first time I met bandits last year.”
    “You did?”
    “Yeah, I did.” It wasn’t true. I’d thrown up. But I needed Anna’s help. “Can you take care of your brother while Darla and I get Dr. McCarthy?”
    Anna nodded.
    “Your mom and dad will be back soon. Tell them we’ve gone to get the doctor, and we’ll be right back, okay?”
    She nodded again. I tied the second scarf around Max’s head, and we carried him into the house and laid him on the floor by the living room fireplace. I grabbed a couple of spare scarves while Darla told Anna how to care for Max. As we ran toward the barn, I passed one scarf to Darla and wrapped the other one around my neck. It was one of Aunt Caroline’s—bright orange-red and not particularly warm. Better than nothing. We threw open the barn doors and dragged out Bikezilla.
    That’s what I’d dubbed Darla’s snowmobile. She’d built it not long after she finished the gristmill. The snowmobile was a tandem bike frame with a ski attached to the front fork where the tire had been. Darla had scavenged a track off a real snowmobile and installed it in place of the bicycle’s rear wheel. Above that she built a small wooden load bed, almost like a pickup truck’s.
    A real snowmobile would have been a lot faster, but we couldn’t get gas. The meager amount still stored in the tanks at Warren’s only gas station was reserved for emergencies.
    We’d been using Bikezilla for the last six months to haul kale to Warren to trade for pork. Warren had thousands of frozen hog carcasses stored, since there were several slaughterhouses nearby. Bikezilla wasn’t as fast as a real bicycle, but it could handle deep snow okay, and the load bed could carry plenty of pork. On the icy road to Warren, it was at least twice as fast as running.
    Darla and I stood up on the bike for the whole trip, kicking the pedals down. We had no extra breath for talking. My side hurt where the shotgun pellets had hit, and I felt a warm spot of blood soaking into my T-shirt. I gritted my teeth and ignored it.
    Darla and I slid up to the clinic, beating our previous best time to Warren by five or six minutes. I could tell Dr. McCarthy was in because I saw his ’41 Studebaker Champion parked around back.
    We charged into the small, one-story clinic. Dr. McCarthy was in an exam room, chatting with a patient by the light of an oil lamp. When I told him what was wrong, he got his assistant to take over. “You want to ride along?” he asked.
    “No,” I said. “We’ll ride back. I don’t want to leave Bikezilla.” I didn’t think it would get stolen in Warren, but I didn’t want to take that chance, either.
    By the time we got back to the farm, Dr. McCarthy was almost done stitching up Max. Aunt Caroline was assisting him. The injured side of Max’s head had been shaved. He was biting down on a leather-wrapped stick, since Dr. McCarthy had run out of painkillers months ago. I wondered if it was the same stick that Uncle Paul had bitten when Dr. McCarthy had set his broken leg the year before. The leather was scarred by dozens of bite marks.
    “He okay?” I asked.
    “Seems to be,” Aunt Caroline answered. Dr. McCarthy was concentrating on his stitches. “He might be concussed. Although with Max, how would you know if his brains were scrambled?” She was smiling as she said it, but unbidden tears spilled from her eyes.
    “Maybe instead of scrambling his brains the bullet knocked them back into working order,” I said.
    “I’m still here,” Max grunted through clenched teeth.
    “I know you are, honey.” The gratitude in Aunt Caroline’s voice was palpable.
    “A leather-wrapped stick is a pretty crappy birthday present,” I said.
    Max grunted. I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or just annoyed at my lame joke.
    Aunt Caroline broke the short silence. “Max said you just walked up to those bandits, Alex.”
    “Pretty much.”
    “That was stupid.”
    “Yeah. But I knew Darla was getting help. I’m just lucky she decided to get the rifle instead of going to get you guys.”
    Dr. McCarthy tied off the last stitch in Max’s head.
    “Hey, Doc, can you take a look at my side?” I asked.
    “What’s wrong with your side?”