Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

Darla said.
    “Well, that shotgun—”
    “You got hit? And you didn’t tell me?” She was practically yelling.
    “I thought you could tell from the holes in my coat.”
    “Shut up. Your clothing’s so ragged nobody’d notice a few extra holes. And we rode all the way to—lie down on that couch right now, you jerk!”
    I obeyed. When Darla was that angry, doing anything else was insane.
    She started stripping my clothing, muttering all the while, “Stupid, pigheaded, obstinate, obnoxious, oviparous, egg-sucking boy.” I both laid and sucked eggs? That didn’t make sense. Whatever.
    Most of the shotgun pellets hadn’t penetrated my five layers of clothing. I had eight or nine purplish bruises and three blood-encrusted holes on the side of my belly. All three holes were below the huge, horseshoe-shaped scar where Darla had stitched up the hatchet wound a prison escapee named Target had inflicted on me the year before.
    “What, are you collecting scars on that side of your body?” Darla said.
    “I guess.”
    “Well, quit. The spot I stitched up is enough.”
    “That’s a pretty rough-looking patch job,” Dr. McCarthy commented.
    Darla scowled. “Like to see you do better with an old sewing needle.”
    “I probably couldn’t.” Dr. McCarthy took the leather-wrapped stick from Max, wiped it on a cloth, and gave it to me to bite. He dropped a scalpel and scissor-like pair of tongs he called a hemostat into a pan of water boiling over the living room fire. While we waited for his tools to be sterilized, he gently wiped away the dried blood on my side.
    When he slit the side of the first wound, it didn’t hurt much. But then he started digging around in the hole. Tears leaked from my eyes. When he got the hemostat clamped on the pellet and pulled it free, I just about launched off the couch to slug him. Darla grabbed my hand, and I clung to her, trying not to move. Then we had to repeat the whole procedure. Twice.
    Dr. McCarthy didn’t stitch up the holes. He just put a bandage over them and taped it in place. “Guess you all get a bulk discount today.”
    “I guess.” Aunt Caroline sighed. “I’ll get you some supplies.”
    “Got any eggs?”
    “A few. Some goat meat, too.” Aunt Caroline stood up.
    “Where’s everybody else?” Darla asked.
    “Out by the greenhouses,” Aunt Caroline answered.
    “I’ll go see if Paul needs help,” Darla said.
    “Let me get dressed,” I said. “I’ll come, too.”
    “You need to rest,” Darla said.
    “If I can bike all the way to Warren with three shotgun pellets in my side, I can walk to the greenhouses without them.”
    “Tell him to rest, would you please?” Darla begged Dr. McCarthy.
    “He won’t listen to me, anyway. Just stay with him and don’t let him do any heavy lifting for a couple days.”
    Darla scowled, but she got a clean T-shirt out of a basket in the corner of the room and tossed it at me.
    As we approached the greenhouses, I saw Rebecca’s and Anna’s silhouettes moving around inside. Uncle Paul was bent over the toboggan, sorting through the bandits’ supplies.
    “Did you find the shotgun?” I asked.
    “Shotgun?” Uncle Paul said. “One of them had a little .22 pistol in his hand.”
    I pointed at the other corpse lying in the snow. “He had a shotgun.” I walked over to the body. A huge red stain had spread from the hole in the guy’s chest to the surrounding snow, and the blood had already started to freeze. I looked around. Sure enough, there was a long depression in a snowdrift on the far side of the toboggan. The shotgun must have flown out of his hands and buried itself in the snow when Darla shot him.
    I pulled the shotgun free and wiped the snow off it with my shirttail. Someone had painted four tiny blue flowers on the wooden stock. They seemed incongruous—too delicate to decorate a weapon of war. Amid the flowers, two words were drawn in fancy script: “Blue Betsy.”
    “Weird,” I said to Darla. “Who decorates their shotgun with flowers?”
    Darla shrugged.
    “Decorates? With flowers?” Uncle Paul said. “Blue flowers? Let me see.”
    I passed the shotgun to him.
    “How did—”
    “What is it?”
    “Remember I told you I traded a pair of goats for a shotgun and gave it to your dad? And he took it with him when he left here last year?”
    “Yeah . . .?” I said.
    “This is it, Alex. The shotgun he took when he left for Iowa last fall. When he went to search for you.”

Chapter 3
    I