Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

Gunning down the driver as he fled seemed wrong, although letting him fetch his buddies in Anamosa wasn’t such a bright idea, either. And what if Alyssa decided to use the shotgun on me?
    She snicked off the safety and pulled the trigger. Her shot was high and wide, and she hadn’t braced herself at all. The shotgun knocked her on her ass. “Piece of shit!” she screamed and threw the shotgun aside.
    “Waste of a good shell,” I said wryly.
    She sprang back to her feet and reached for the knife on my belt.
    I caught her wrist as her fingers wrapped over the hilt. “What are you doing?” I yelled.
    “Let go!” she screamed back.
    The driver had picked up his pace and was more than one hundred feet down the road now.
    “What are you going to do with my knife?” I asked again.
    “Fine,” she said. “You win.” She released her grip on the knife hilt, and I turned and crouched to retrieve the shotgun. Something tugged at my waist, and I spun back just in time to see Alyssa running down the road toward the driver with my knife raised above her head, ready to stab.
    She’d only taken a few steps when an eerie, monotone moan emanated from the truck’s load bed. She took one more step forward, then looked back, clearly undecided. Finally she pivoted and marched back to me.
    “Now look what you’ve done. You’ve upset Ben.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    She pointed the knife at me, waving it as she spoke. “Do. Not. Mess. With. My. Brother.”
    “Who do you think I am, other than the guy who just rescued both of you? Give me my knife back. Please.”
    She thrust the knife into her belt and turned away, marching toward the truck bed.
    I looked down the road at the driver for a while. He was already out of the shotgun’s range, but I wanted to make sure he didn’t double back. I didn’t relax until he was a solid quarter mile down the road.
    I turned my attention to the corpse of the truck’s passenger. A ring of keys dangled limply from his belt. I took the keys and started searching his pockets. As I searched, the moaning coming from inside the truck ended. I put the pistol in my belt, stowed the shotgun in the passenger-side footwell, and trudged to the back of the truck.
    I pulled aside the canvas flap. Alyssa was crouched in the back of the truck beside the big guy I’d last seen in the Anamosa garage. They sat on a jumbled pile of wooden crates. She had a glove balled up in one hand, and she was rubbing the guy’s back with it, running it repeatedly over his coat. He was blocky, but his flesh appeared to be hung on an oversized skeleton. Like he hadn’t eaten well recently. He looked maybe nineteen or twenty years old.
    I let down the tailgate and climbed into the load bed. “Is he okay?”
    Alyssa looked at me over her shoulder. She didn’t stop brushing the guy’s back. “He’ll be okay.”
    “You didn’t get hurt during the crash?”
    “Ben and I were thrown into the canvas wall. With the crates,” she said. “I’ve got some ugly bruises.”
    “What about you?” I asked, addressing Ben. He was huge. Sitting with his ankles tucked under him, he was almost as tall as I was standing. He was shackled prison-style, wrists and ankles cuffed and linked with chains that severely restricted his movement.
    He didn’t respond. He was gently rocking forward and back, back and forward.
    “Doesn’t he talk?” I stretched, trying to work out the painful kinks in my side and shoulder.
    “When he wants to.”
    “Why are you rubbing his back?”
    “I’m brushing, not rubbing. It helps. Why’d you crash the truck?”
    “I thought you were Darla. She fell onto a Peckerwood truck during an ambush. I’ve been trying to find her. You’ve seen her? Did you talk to her?”
    “No, I never talked to her. The only time I saw her, she was asleep. They had her in the infirmary at Anamosa. She didn’t look like she was hurt too bad.”
    “What’ll they do to her?”
    The girl shook her head slowly. “They won’t flense her, probably. They’re running out of girls. And we’re valuable. I think they only decided to trade me away because I come with an extra mouth to feed.” She glanced at Ben.
    “I’ve got to get back to Anamosa.”
    “They’ll kill you.”
    “Maybe. What do you want to do? If you stay here, the Peckerwoods might come back and pick you up.”
    “No!” She grabbed my arm and stared at me. A fierce light burned in her eyes. “Get us out of here. Anywhere. I