Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

rusted tractor sat in the center of the barn. In one corner there was a huge pile of brown-and-yellow cornhusks, useless except to feed to goats or pigs.
    On the way back, I looked into the bed of our truck. The wooden crates were a jumbled mess. “What’s in the crates?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Alyssa answered. “The Peckerwoods loaded them before they loaded us.”
    “Help me get up there.”
    Alyssa let down the tailgate and boosted me up. I hacked at the nearest crate with my hatchet. Opening it one-handed proved to be difficult—I struggled fruitlessly for fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally I got the blade of the hatchet jammed under the lid and used the handle as a lever.
    Inside, it was full of steel chains. I picked one up—it was really four chains with manacles attached, identical to the set Ben had been wearing. The key was affixed to one of the manacles with a strip of duct tape.
    I hacked open another box. It was packed with neat rows of identical brown paperboard boxes. I opened the flap of one at random. Gleaming rows of brass shotgun shells, stacked upright, filled the box. There must have been one hundred shells in that one box. Thousands in the whole crate.
    “Too bad I lost the shotgun,” I said. “Anyway, I guess we’re rich.”
    “Those are worth a lot?” Alyssa asked.
    “Yeah. A fortune—if we can find someone to trade with. I was hoping the barn would have something we could use as a jack and maybe a wrench.”
    “Can’t we just drive real slow?”
    “Yeah. But it would take all day to get to Worthington that way. You’d run out of gas.”
    “Oh.”
    “Maybe we can cut a beam out of the barn. Use it as a lever to lift one side of the truck and block it up.”
    “Will that work?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t see any way to try it right now, as beat up as I am. I wish Darla were here. She’d know how to do it.”
    “She was good with trucks?”
    “Yeah. She’s a wizard with any kind of machine.” I turned from Alyssa to hide the trembling in my lip.
    “She’ll be okay. The Peckerwoods . . . well, the crazy ones, the most brutal ones, they’re already dead. The guys that are left . . . some of them are plenty nasty, but they’re smart, too. They won’t kill her. They won’t destroy something that has value.”
    Something. That word sparked my fury. It filled me like the deep breath you take before a scream. But the Peckerwoods weren’t Alyssa’s fault. She hadn’t created this ash-cursed world. I swallowed on my anger. “You’re not really helping,” I said as mildly as I could manage. “Oh. Sorry.”
    • • •
    We spent the rest of the day cooking, eating, and resting. Just the short walk out to the barn and truck had left me exhausted, and I couldn’t do anything but sleep. The weakness in my body infuriated me. Darla might be suffering far worse than I, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d abused my body so badly that I couldn’t keep going, no matter how much I wanted to—I was completely out of gas.
    After dinner, I offered to take the first watch while Alyssa and Ben slept. After waking up completely unguarded the night before, I didn’t trust either of them to do it.
    As they arranged themselves around the fire to sleep, I wondered how I was going to know when to wake Alyssa. In the past, sometimes I’d paced, counting steps and estimating time that way. Now, I was too weak to pace.
    I started counting slowly on my fingers, trying to time a second per finger. As I tapped my pinky against the floor, a nursery rhyme came to mind, unbidden: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. . . .” I started muttering the rhyme instead of counting.
    Reciting the nursery rhyme brought my mother to mind. She used to singsong it with my sister and me, grabbing our toes and wiggling them with each line of the poem. In my worry for Darla, I’d almost forgotten about Mom and Dad. They were the reason we’d left Warren, the reason Darla got shot. Just a week ago, I’d been determined to find them. Now, leaving Warren seemed like a stupid idea. The dumbest thing I’d ever done.
    Maybe ten seconds passed each time I said the rhyme. Six rhymes a minute. Three hundred and sixty mind-numbing rhymes an hour. Fourteen hundred and forty before I could wake Alyssa. I’d probably have nightmares about stupid little piggies.
    By the time I finished, I was speed-mumbling, saying the rhyme in seven or eight seconds