Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

snow berm on the opposite side, and stalled.
    I sprinted across the road. “Don’t get it stuck again!” I yelled.
    “I wasn’t trying to!” Alyssa retorted.
    “I know. But let me drive, okay?”
    “Gladly. Stupid truck.” Alyssa unbuckled her seat belt and scooted to the middle of the bench seat, straddling the gearshift. Ben got in the passenger side, smearing the blood on the seat into his pants. I passed him my backpack to stow under the passenger seat. A bulging daypack already rested under there, but I didn’t want to spend time investigating it at that moment. When I got in, Ben was pulling out the seat belt on his side. It stretched across both his lap and Alyssa’s. I fastened my own seat belt.
    Ben put the shotgun in his lap with the barrel pointed toward the passenger door. He bent over it, minutely inspecting some aspect of its workings.
    “Will he be okay with that?” I asked Alyssa. What I really needed to know was whether he was likely to accidentally shoot me.
    “Safer than you or me. Knows so much about firearms he used to get email from adult collectors who read his blog. Before.”
    “How many shells we got?” I said to Ben.
    “This is a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. It is the most popular shotgun ever made. Law enforcement and military all over the world use this gun.” Ben tried to pump the shotgun, but the slide wouldn’t operate. “It is loaded.”
    “So how many shots are in it?” I asked as I started the truck.
    Ben clicked a lever on the side of the gun and started pumping the slide. Chunk-chunk. Chunk-chunk. Each time he pumped the gun a shell flew out, landing in the footwell. “None,” Ben said when he finished.
    “None? Those shells are duds?”
    “No. There are no shells in the shotgun now. There were five.”
    I wanted to throttle him despite the fact that he was roughly twice my size. “Well, reload it, would you?”
    “Yes, I would.” Ben started picking up shells off the floorboard.
    “You want to test fire one out the window?” I forced the shifter left and down for first gear, lifted off the clutch, and promptly stalled the truck again.
    Ben ignored my question, continuing to reload the shotgun.
    “He doesn’t shoot guns,” Alyssa said while I restarted the truck. “We took him to a rifle range for his tenth birthday. He was already into all things military then. He fired a .22, put it down, and left the range. He doesn’t like the noise.”
    “That’s . . . different.” I stalled the truck once more before I got it in first. Then I pulled out too fast and nearly ran over the corpse we’d left lying in the road.
    At last we were rolling down the road away from Anamosa—south, I thought. We’d made it away before Clevis could send a search party from the prison—though if the Peckerwoods sent anyone after us, it would be more like a search-and-destroy party. Ben put the shotgun back in the footwell. He rolled down his window and peered out, twisting his head to look behind us.
    “Is that shotgun safetied?” I asked.
    Ben didn’t say anything. I glanced at Alyssa. “How should I know?” she said.
    “Find out, would you?” I tried to shift into second gear and stalled the truck again. “God—”
    “Don’t cuss around Ben,” Alyssa interrupted. “He doesn’t like it.” She turned back toward Ben while I restarted the truck. “You remember your social interactions class, Ben?”
    He didn’t respond.
    “What are you supposed to do when someone asks you a question?”
    “I am supposed to choose an appropriate response.”
    “And what did Alex just ask you?”
    “Alex asked me whether I safetied the Remington 870 shotgun. I always check the safety before I handle any weapon. I always check the safety when I set a weapon down or pass it to someone else. I never disengage a weapon’s safety.”
    “That’s good.” I’d gotten the truck restarted, even managed to put it into second gear. Ben was hanging his head out the window. “Would you close the window, please?” I asked. “I’m cold.”
    Ben pulled in his head and started rolling up his window. “The deuce-and-a-half behind us is an A3, remanufactured under the extended service program between 1994 and 1999.”
    “Wait, you mean our deuce-and-a-half, right?”
    “No, the truck in which I am riding is an A2 with the multifuel feature and a manual transmission.”
    I cranked my window down and adjusted the mirror. A truck was racing toward us, gaining far too