Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

started crawling beside the snow berm. I followed on my hands and knees. We didn’t stand up until we’d left the metal building far behind.
    Cascade was wrecked. We moved slowly and silently, sticking to the shadowed area alongside the road. Burnt, partially collapsed buildings flanked us, leaning in like gravestones in an unkempt cemetery.
    We reached a major intersection. On the far side a mostly collapsed building still sported its bright red C ONOCO sign. The area in front of the building, where the gas pumps used to be, was now nothing but a fire-seared crater. A sign clung to a fallen light pole: H IGHWAY 136.
    “Right turn here.” Darla’s voice was so soft I could barely make out her words.
    The building on the corner to our right had burnt, too. Only its brick walls still stood. A half-melted plastic sign read T RI -C OUNTY B ANK. Below that, someone had spray-painted a crude drawing of a woodpecker similar to the much-larger one on the water tower. I shuddered, and we hurried past the bank’s abandoned shell.
    As we reached the outskirts of Cascade, total darkness fell. Darla and I held hands and stumbled along more by feel than by sight.
    After about twenty minutes, I felt a break in the berm at the road’s edge. I groped around, trying to figure out if we’d come to a crossroads. To my right, there was a steep uphill slope. It was strange—the slope was concrete, not snow or ice. I struggled partway up it, trying to figure out what it was—it was far too steep to be a road. The underside of a girder loomed in the darkness. We were under a highway overpass.
    There was a low, flat shelf at the top of the slope. The girders were at least five feet high—I could stand upright in between them. “Let’s stop here for the night,” I said.
    “We’re still too close to Cascade,” Darla whispered.
    “It’s sheltered here and hidden. We’re going to freeze if we keep going.”
    I lay down on the concrete floor of our hidey hole. It was intensely cold, chilling my side almost immediately. I wanted a fire for warmth and to cook more wheat, but the flames would have stood out like a beacon. Darla lay next to me, and I wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close. We were both shivering. Darla pushed back against me until we were sandwiched together as close as any two people who still have all their clothes on can be. Eventually our shivers subsided, and I fell into a fitful sleep.
    In the morning, I woke to the rattle of gunfire.

Chapter 27
    I elbowed Darla, but she was already awake. The pop-pop of gunfire was faint, coming from our north, the direction of Worthington, but drawing steadily closer. I could barely make out the muted roar of distant engines, but that noise wasn’t tied to a direction; it seemed to be coming from all around us.
    I peered to the north. The light was good—we’d slept at least an hour past dawn, but I couldn’t yet locate the source of the noises. “Let’s move,” I whispered.
    “Yeah.” Darla rolled over and started crawling to the north, away from Cascade and toward the gunfire.
    “The other way,” I hissed.
    Darla kept going. “We need to know what’s happening.”
    The gunfire grew louder as we reached the edge of the overpass. A few miles off, a line of trucks raced directly toward us.
    “They’re going to pass right through here,” I whispered. “Let’s get on top of the overpass and hide.”
    We turned around and crawled as quickly as we could toward the other side of the overpass. There were two bridges above us—both sides of a divided highway with a gap in between. I forced my way through the snow that had fallen between the bridges and wormed to the south side of the overpass. Peeking out, I discovered why the engine sounds seemed to be coming from all around us. Another line of four vehicles was barreling toward us from Cascade to our south. They were small and low, each one kicking up a plume of snow into the air behind it.
    “Snowmobiles,” Darla said. “Christ.”
    As we watched, the snowmobiles spread out to surround the south side of the overpass in a rough semicircle. The one closest to us stopped, and the two men riding it dismounted and pulled long guns from a saddlebag. They wore military-style fatigues and camo jackets.
    “Let’s go!” I tugged on Darla’s jacket. We crawled as quickly as we could back to the center of the overpass. When I reached the break between the bridges, I darted out from under the ledge and