Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

Attachment stood up, you’d be in each other’s field of fire. If you missed or just grazed your target, you could easily wind up shooting one of your team members.”
    Her Attachment? Me? And what was he doing lecturing these people about infantry tactics? “Shut. Him. Up!” I hissed at Alyssa.
    “Like I could,” she whispered back.
    Ben kept talking. “With a Winchester Model 70 at a range of twelve feet, even a hit might pass through the target and impact a team member.”
    The man looked down at his rifle, clearly surprised.
    “Fixing your deployment would be easy. You, Short One,” Ben said, addressing the kid. “Move over here, on the other side of me.”
    Great, I thought, now he’s telling people how to kill us more effectively.
    To my amazement, the boy did it, moving away from the woman.
    “No. Farther away,” Ben said, “so you can’t be used as a shield or hostage easily.”
    The boy took two steps back.
    “Now, you,” Ben said to the woman. “Take three big steps to your right.”
    She started to turn.
    “No,” Ben said. “Sidestep. So your weapon stays on the target.”
    The woman sidestepped so that now the three of them formed a neat triangle around us.
    “Good,” Ben said. “Now if you discharge your weapons, each of you will have a clear field of fire. This formation is not recommended in situations where there is a risk of encountering flanking forces. In that situation, an enfilade deployment is preferable. . . .”
    Ben kept talking about the benefits and drawbacks of an enfilade deployment, whatever that was. The man’s mouth formed an O, probably because it couldn’t very well form the letters WTF. The situation was so ridiculous and tense that I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing.
    Everyone looked at me as if I were crazy. Which was fair, I guessed. Then the man holding the rifle started laughing, too, and pretty soon everyone but Ben had joined in.
    When the hilarity had died down, the man said, “You all are just crazy enough that I think I understand why you’re still alive.”
    “Yeah,” I said. I pushed myself slowly upright, keeping both hands in view. Maybe this guy was laughing, but he still had a rifle pointed my way. I took a step closer to him and stretched my left hand out as if to shake. My right arm still wasn’t working too well.
    He snicked on the safety and moved the rifle to his shoulder, pointed upward. His handshake was a little too vigorous for my liking—I could move my left arm, but it still hurt when he pumped it. “I’m Eli. My wife there’s Mary Sue, and that’s my son, Brand.” He was so dirty he left a smudge on my hand. Not that my own hands were any too clean.
    “What’s wrong with him?” Brand said, looking at Ben.
    “Nothing’s wrong with him,” Alyssa snapped as she stood up.
    “He’s autistic,” I said.
    “He doesn’t seem artistic,” Brand replied.
    Alyssa wasn’t smiling. “Autistic. And he’s smarter than everyone else in this room put together.”
    “Sorry,” Brand muttered.
    Ben was ignoring us all, sketching something with his fingertip in the dust on the floor. More infantry tactics, maybe.
    I still felt as if I were inching along the edge of a one-hundred-foot cliff. There were no guns pointed at us now, but they were still armed, and we weren’t. “Can I have my stuff back?” I asked Brand.
    He looked at his father, who shook his head.
    “You all weren’t planning on staying here, were ya?” Mary Sue said, the first words she’d uttered. Her voice brought to mind the sibilant whisper of a moving snake.
    “We’re headed to Worthington,” Alyssa said.
    “Huh, probably nothing there. Morley, Olin, and Mechanicsville’s all been ransacked. Not a living soul in any of ’em. No dead people, either, ’less you count bones already cracked and sucked dry of their marrow. We visited, hopin’ to trade.” Mary Sue stepped closer to us as she talked. Her teeth shone yellow in the firelight. Each tooth was outlined in blood.
    “Worthington was fine a week ago,” I said. “Your gums are bleeding. You have scurvy?”
    “Yeah. No fresh food. Girls got it worse.”
    “Girls?” Alyssa said.
    “Alba and Joy,” Mary Sue said. “They’re hidden. Safe.”
    I rummaged through my pack. Eli readied his rifle, eyeing me suspiciously. I was running low on dandelion leaves, and the ones I had left were pretty badly wilted. As I pulled a bag out of my backpack, Eli aimed the rifle at me again