Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

the lock and Black Lake?”
    “Yeah. We’ll turn west as soon as we can.”
    We made great time on the packed snow of the road. We didn’t talk—I was listening for engine noises and continually glancing behind us. I hoped there wouldn’t be any Black Lake trucks, but if any trucks did come, I wanted time to try to get away, although that might be impossible—the piles of snow and ash alongside the road were so high that we were essentially trapped.
    We got off the highway onto a back road at the first opportunity. Darla led us through a dizzying succession of turns, heading north and west, she said. The roads were all deserted, which was a relief but also a bit puzzling. Why bother plowing roads nobody was going to use?
    We passed six or seven farmsteads. All of them were clearly abandoned. About half the houses had burned. “Why do you think so many houses are burned?” I asked.
    “Probably people took shelter in them and lit fires in places they shouldn’t have,” she replied. “You build a wood fire in a hearth that’s only designed for a gas log, you’ll burn the house down quick-like.”
    As twilight set in, we stopped at a farmstead. It consisted of two cylindrical concrete grain silos and a one-story farmhouse. There were three hillocks of snow that might have been collapsed barns or sheds—I couldn’t tell. The front door and door trim of the farmhouse were missing—a drift of snow more than two feet deep graced the entryway. It was too dark inside to see much, but what I could see wasn’t pretty. The house had been thoroughly looted—furniture, doors, door trim, baseboards, and cabinets were all missing, probably burned as firewood. The mantle around the living room fireplace was gone, leaving an ugly hole in the wall, but there was a tiled area around the fireplace where we could safely build a fire. A big sooty stain proved we weren’t the first people to build a fire there, although there were no other signs of past occupants.
    Darla started setting up the fire-by-friction set while I looked for wood. Everything burnable inside the house was gone. There were a bunch of trees outside, but all the lower limbs and smaller trees had been cut. I picked out the smallest of the remaining trees and started the long process of felling it with my hatchet—a job that really required a chainsaw or at least a full-size ax.
    It was almost an hour later and fully dark by the time I returned to the living room with an armload of wood. I could barely make out Darla’s form hunched over a tiny, glowing spark.
    “This is so cool—this black dust the set makes will keep a spark alive, like forever. We’ve got to find some way to store this stuff.”
    “Sorry I took so long. Had to cut a tree down to get at the branches.”
    “It’s okay. Make me a bird’s nest, would you?”
    It was so dark, I could barely see anything. I stripped the bark from a couple of branches, working by feel. I took off my gloves to make it easier to shred the bark, and soon my hands were freezing. Darla stayed hunched over her spark, feeding it with black powder from the fire-by-friction set and fanning it gently with her knife blade.
    “I think this thing is ready,” I said, holding the bird’s nest out to Darla.
    “Just hold it next to the spark.” Darla cut the spark in two with her knife and lifted half of it into the bird’s nest.
    I slowly lifted the bird’s nest to my lips. I whispered to it, “Burn, baby, burn,” letting the gentle breath of my whisper fan the spark. Darla was feeding the other half of the spark more black powder, building it up in case mine died.
    A strand of bark flared orange, looking like the filament in an old incandescent lightbulb. A tiny flame followed, and in seconds the whole bird’s nest was engulfed in fire. I laid it down in the middle of the tiled area. It threw off just enough light that I could find pieces of kindling to feed it.
    Darla abandoned the rest of the spark and helped me feed the fire. I offered to get more wood, but it was so dark out that I wasn’t sure I could find the tree I’d felled again. I took a flaming stick out of the fire, hoping to use it as a torch. It went out before I even reached the front doorway.
    I bent low, using the faint glow of the embers still clinging to my stick to follow my footprints back to the tree. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to the house, but the glow of the fire was clearly visible through the