I struggled to stay alert, trudging back and forth beside the fire. When I saw the first hint of dawn in the east, I shook Darla awake. “I gotta sleep,” I said. She mumbled something and pushed herself upright. I was fast asleep before my head fully settled on the log.
It seemed like no time at all had passed when Darla pushed on my shoulder, saying, “Alex, wake up.”
I startled fully awake, sat up, and looked around. “Something wrong?”
“No, everything’s okay. But we should get going.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Around noon, maybe.”
Darla was dressed in her own clothes, and my coveralls were laid out on the tripod by the fire. I slipped my toasty warm coveralls on, struggling to pull the legs over my boots.
Darla fiddled with a bundle of wood. “What’s that?” I asked.
“I worked on the fire-by-friction set while you were asleep. Made a new thunderhead out of oak, so it won’t burn through. We’ve got two extra spindles now, too. Here’s your shoelace.”
I started relacing my boot while Darla tied all the fire-by-friction stuff into a neat bundle using a drawstring she’d cannibalized from her jacket. We kicked snow over the fire, tore down the tripod, and set out.
“Which way?” I asked.
“Maybe follow this creek upstream? Easier to walk on the ice. Hopefully we’ll hit a road.”
“How far is it to Worthington?”
“I don’t know, exactly. We’re near Bellevue. It’s about thirty miles from Worthington to Dubuque, but I think Bellevue is farther. Maybe forty or forty-five miles?”
“That’s going to take forever if we have to walk through deep snow. And I’m already famished.”
“Let’s see what the roads are like. If they’re bad, maybe I can improvise some snowshoes.”
We’d walked along the creek until we reached a railroad trestle that passed about twenty feet above the ice. Beyond that, I saw the concrete pylons and steel girders of a highway bridge.
We walked under the railroad trestle and turned to fight our way up the bank between the two bridges. The bank wasn’t steep, but the snow was so deep that it was difficult to force our way upward. For every step we managed, we slid back a half step.
Finally we got to the top, only to confront an enormous berm of plowed snow alongside the road. I led the way up the berm, thrusting my hands into the snow to make tenuous grips and kicking footholds into the side of the pile. The snow here was a filthy blend of volcanic ash and ice plowed off the road.
We hid near the top of the berm, watching the road for more than an hour. Nothing moved. There was no sound but the chattering of our teeth. I was worried about patrols, but it would take too long to get to Worthington traveling cross-country.
I got down the far side of the berm to the road by sliding on my butt. We were on a two-lane plowed highway.
“You think all the roads are this good?” I said.
“I hope so.” Darla stood and dusted the snow off herself. “We’ll make good time on this. Maybe get to Worthington in two, two-and-a-half days. Before we starve, anyway.”
“I guess there is one advantage to FEMA being in Iowa now.” Last year none of the roads on this side of the river had been plowed.
“That’s the only good those ass-puppets do.”
“Yeah.” I looked up and down the highway. “Which way?”
“Right. North. Worthington is northwest of us somewhere.”
“Won’t that take us closer to the lock and Black Lake?”
“Yeah. We’ll turn west as soon as we can.”
We made great time on the packed snow of the road. We didn’t talk-I was listening for engine noises and continually glancing behind us. I hoped there wouldn’t be any Black Lake trucks, but if any trucks did come, I wanted time to try to get away, although that might be impossible-the piles of snow and ash alongside the road were so high that we were essentially trapped.
We got off the highway onto a back road at the first opportunity. Darla led us through a dizzying succession of turns, heading north and west, she said. The roads were all deserted, which was a relief but also a bit puzzling. Why bother plowing roads nobody was going to use?
We passed six or seven farmsteads. All of them were clearly abandoned. About half the houses had burned. “Why do you think so many houses are burned?” I asked.
“Probably people took shelter in them and lit fires in places they shouldn’t have,” she replied. “You build a wood fire in a hearth that’s only designed for a gas log, you’ll burn the house down quick-like.”
As twilight set in, we stopped at a farmstead. It consisted of two cylindrical concrete grain silos and a one-story farmhouse. There were three hillocks of snow that might have been collapsed barns or sheds-I couldn’t tell. The front door and door trim of the farmhouse were missing-a drift of snow more than two feet deep graced the entryway. It was too dark inside to see much, but what I could see wasn’t pretty. The house had been thoroughly looted-furniture, doors, door trim, baseboards, and cabinets were all missing, probably burned as firewood. The mantle around the living room fireplace was gone, leaving an ugly hole in the wall, but there was a tiled area around the fireplace where we could safely build a fire. A big sooty stain proved we weren’t the first people to build a fire there, although there were no other signs of past occupants.
Darla started setting up the fire-by-friction set while I looked for wood. Everything burnable inside the house was gone. There were a bunch of trees outside, but all the lower limbs and smaller trees had been cut. I picked out the smallest of the remaining trees and started the long process of felling it with my hatchet-a job that really required a chainsaw or at least a full-size ax.
It was almost an hour later and fully dark by the time I returned to the living room with an armload of wood. I could barely make out Darla’s form hunched over a tiny, glowing spark.
“This is so cool-this black dust the set makes will keep a spark alive, like forever. We’ve got to find some way to store this stuff.”
“Sorry I took so long. Had to cut a tree down to get at the branches.”
“It’s okay. Make me a bird’s nest, would you?”
It was so dark, I could barely see anything. I stripped the bark from a couple of branches, working by feel. I took off my gloves to make it easier to shred the bark, and soon my hands were freezing. Darla stayed hunched over her spark, feeding it with black powder from the fire-by-friction set and fanning it gently with her knife blade.
“I think this thing is ready,” I said, holding the bird’s nest out to Darla.
“Just hold it next to the spark.” Darla cut the spark in two with her knife and lifted half of it into the bird’s nest.
I slowly lifted the bird’s nest to my lips. I whispered to it, “Burn, baby, burn,” letting the gentle breath of my whisper fan the spark. Darla was feeding the other half of the spark more black powder, building it up in case mine died.
A strand of bark flared orange, looking like the filament in an old incandescent lightbulb. A tiny flame followed, and in seconds the whole bird’s nest was engulfed in fire. I laid it down in the middle of the tiled area. It threw off just enough light that I could find pieces of kindling to feed it.
Darla abandoned the rest of the spark and helped me feed the fire. I offered to get more wood, but it was so dark out that I wasn’t sure I could find the tree I’d felled again. I took a flaming stick out of the fire, hoping to use it as a torch. It went out before I even reached the front doorway.
I bent low, using the faint glow of the embers still clinging to my stick to follow my footprints back to the tree. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to the house, but the glow of the fire was clearly visible through the open maw left by the missing front door.
That aroused a new worry: What if someone came by? It would be obvious from the light that we were camping in the abandoned house. But we hadn’t seen anyone on the roads all day, and it would be even harder to travel by night.
I broke more small branches and carried them back to the house. “We’re going to need some bigger logs to keep the fire going all night,” Darla said as I dropped the wood.
“I can’t see well enough to use the hatchet,” I replied.
“Hmm.” Darla gathered up several long, slender branches, arranging them in a bunch. She thrust one end into the fire. When she pulled it out, the tip of the bundle was engulfed in a steady flame that survived movement, unlike the single branch I’d used. “Come on. I’ll hold the light for you.”
With Darla clutching her makeshift torch and me chopping, we got enough wood to last the night. By the time we finished, I was hungry and thirsty. I’d been hungry all day-there was nothing I could do about that. But the thirst I could deal with. “I’m going to get some snow,” I said.
I didn’t bother taking a torch. Snow was easy to find-it was everywhere. I molded two cantaloupe-sized snowballs and carried them inside. Darla took one, broke off a piece, and put it in her mouth to melt. “Just when I get warm, I’ve got to eat this damn snow,” she said.
“Beats going without water.”
“I guess. Let me see the hatchet.”
I passed the hatchet to her. She wandered around the bare living room for a minute, staring at the ceiling and floor and holding the hatchet by her side. Just as I was getting ready to ask her what in the world she was doing, she gripped the hatchet firmly in two hands and buried it with a thunk in the floor.
She swung the hatchet like a madwoman, chopping at the floor. Tufts of ash-filled, mildewed carpet flew everywhere. Darla was quickly coated in ash and dirt. She looked like a chimney sweep turned ax murderer: completely insane.