Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

an arm across my shoulders. Rita Mae had sat down beside me on the bench and pulled me toward her. I flopped right over, my head cradled in her lap. She smelled of book dust and mildew—not entirely pleasant, but somehow comforting.
    “I can’t do this,” I moaned. “I can’t handle it. Everything’s gone to ash. I don’t know how to make it right again.”
    “None of us can handle it, sweetie. We just do the best we can.” Rita Mae gently stroked my hair.
    “Earl says Darla’s dead. She can’t be dead. Earl’s got to be wrong.” I rubbed my fists against my eyes. “What do you think?”
    “Are you asking me for reassurance or for the truth, Alex?”
    I thought for a moment. My mother used to say never to ask for the truth unless you were prepared to handle it. I swallowed hard and said, “The truth.”
    “She’s probably dead. Either the bullet killed her or the Peckerwoods did.”
    I choked back a sob.
    “If she is alive, that might be worse,” Rita Mae said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Grant told us the gangs are trading in slaves. Young girls, mostly.”
    “So Darla could be alive.”
    “Not a life such as I’d want to live—a slave to bandits and rapists.”
    “But—” I pushed myself out of Rita Mae’s lap. “I’m going after her.”
    “Your parents—”
    “Have been in that camp for months and have each other. They can wait. Darla can’t. I’m leaving now.”
    “There can’t be much more than four or five hours of light left in the day. Won’t do her any good if you get killed. Best you go at first light, rested and with a full stomach.”
    Every muscle in my body was tensed, as if screaming at me to get moving—now! But Rita Mae was right. I was sleepwalking through the day in a fugue state, dead to the world, dead even to my body’s needs. At least I could force down some food before I left. I breathed in. “Okay,” I muttered.
    Rita Mae closed up the library and took me to her home. It looked different than it had the year before. Back then, the front porch had been a collapsed wreck. Someone had cleaned up the mess, removing the jumble of joists, rafters, and shingles. They hadn’t rebuilt the porch, though; long scars marked where it had been attached to the house. The front door was about three feet off the ground. I saw a new structure behind the house: a small outhouse built of unpainted gray boards.
    “We’ll go around back,” Rita Mae said. “The first step’s not such a doozy.”
    Rita Mae fed me a huge meal. A dandelion-green salad drizzled with a bit of soybean oil. Then hasty pudding—her version turned out to be cornmeal mush flavored with dandelion flowers and tiny bits of beef. It tasted a little odd but was filling, so I ate three servings. She did all the cooking at the hearth in the living room over a small fire she fed with scraps of two-by-four. My offer to help was met with a dismissive wave. For dessert, she fried a hamburger only a little bigger than a quarter.
    “Where’d you get the meat?” I asked.
    “Some of the cows survived the ashfall. We slaughtered almost all of them not long after winter set in. We ran out of hay, and we can’t afford to feed them on corn. That’s most of my meat ration for the week.”
    “Here.” I pushed my plate toward her. “You eat it.”
    “Now what kind of hostess would that make me?”
    “An alive one?” I shrugged and cut the burger in half with the edge of my fork. “Halvsies. Or I’m not eating it, either.”
    “Okay.” Rita Mae speared her half of the hamburger with her fork and lifted it to her mouth. The beef was delicious—hot and crispy and juicy.
    When we finished cleaning up from our huge late lunch, I picked up my backpack and struggled to force my aching right arm through the straps.
    “You leaving already?” Rita Mae asked.
    I nodded.
    “Won’t make it to Cascade before dark.”
    I shrugged.
    “Going to stick out like a sore thumb with that bright blue backpack.”
    I thought about it a moment. The insulated coveralls Rita Mae had helped me procure were light brown—not too bad. But the backpack would be painfully obvious against the snow.
    “I guess you’re right. I need some kind of camouflage,” I told Rita Mae. “Something that won’t stand out against the snow.”
    “A ghillie suit,” Rita Mae said.
    “A what?”
    “It’s a suit with lots of cloth strips hanging off it made to blend in with underbrush. Snipers use them. I read about them in Rainbow