In my dreams, I was trapped again in my bedroom in Cedar Falls. The desk pressed down on my chest, suffocating me. The wall by my head was hot to the touch. And everything was smoky-my eyes burned with smoke, my nostrils swelled with its stench.
I woke, twitchy with remembered fear, but the smell of smoke hadn’t faded with my dream. If anything, it was stronger now. A lurid orange light shone into the loft from the room below. Darla was still asleep, curled into a fetal position, almost touching my back. I shook her awake and stalked as quietly as I could to the edge of the loft.
There were two separate fires blazing in the room below. Target was there, trying to ignite the workbench with a torch.
I picked up the grindstone. It had seemed impossibly heavy when I’d lugged it up the ladder. Now, charged with adrenaline, I could move it as if it were Styrofoam.
I shuffled sideways along the edge of the loft. One of the boards under my feet creaked-a groan that seemed loud enough to be heard in Worthington. I held my breath, watching Target. He didn’t look up.
I got into position more or less above him. He was wearing a big backpack, one of the old-school kind with an external frame. I stared down at the tattoo inked on the back of his head for a couple seconds, and then I dropped the grindstone, aiming for the center of the target.
There was a soft thunk. Target fell, catching his chin on the edge of the workbench. He landed on the barn floor on his side. The torch fell near his face. Even from ten feet above him, I could see the deep valley the rock had smashed into the back of his skull. He didn’t move, despite the flames licking his nose.
I didn’t feel much of anything. No gladiator’s thrill of victory. Not even relief. Just a numb horror at all the senseless death Target had left in his wake.
Flames were already spreading in the dry hay and shooting up the barn walls. I glanced around for Darla and found her standing at the edge of the loft, staring down at Target. I grabbed the aluminum ladder and threw it into place. Darla just looked at it.
“Hurry up! Go, go, go!” I screamed.
Darla climbed onto the ladder and started down, so slowly she might have been on the way to her own funeral, not trying to escape a burning barn. I jumped on behind her. I wanted to kick her in the head, her pace was so frustrating. Instead, I kept screaming at her. When we finally got down, I grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the barn.
I froze and stared in shock. Target had obviously started with the house. It was completely engulfed in flames. The fire at my house in Cedar Falls was a weenie roast in comparison.
I clenched my fists and screamed. All our food, our water bottles, tarps, clothing-everything was in that house. I thought about trying to save something by running into that inferno. But as I watched, part of the roof collapsed. It was hopeless. Without any supplies, we’d die for sure. The only question was what would kill us first: silicosis, cold, thirst, or starvation.
I ran back into the barn. The heat and smoke seemed to suck all the oxygen from my lungs. I grabbed our skis, poles, and Mrs. Parker’s bo staff and ran outside, dumping them in a pile at Darla’s feet.
As I gasped cleaner air, I tried to think. There had to be a way to salvage something from this fiasco. Then it hit me: Target’s backpack. Surely he’d scavenged supplies from the house-supplies that might keep us alive.
I dove back into the barn. Target’s torch had started a fire by his face, but the backpack looked okay. I grabbed it and yanked. Nothing. The backpack wouldn’t budge. Target was on his side, his back toward me. One arm was under him, and the other one was flopped into the fire. The heat was so intense I could barely grab the backpack, let alone Target.
I tugged on the backpack, trying to drag Target away from the fire so I could get the pack off him. My feet slipped in the straw, and I screamed in frustration.
The hatchet on Target’s hip caught my eye. I yanked it out of his belt loop and hacked at the backpack straps. I missed once and buried the hatchet in his side, ironically in about the same spot where he’d gouged me three weeks before. Blood dripped from the hatchet’s blade. I chopped at the straps a couple more times before the backpack came free. I ran outside.
I dropped the backpack and hatchet and collapsed in the ash. Darla mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I rested my head in my hands and gulped fresher air. Darla mumbled again.
“What was that?”
“My rabbits…” she murmured.
Crap. I’d totally forgotten them. I struggled back to my feet and ran into the blazing barn.
It was impossible to breathe, hotter than the inside of an oven and full of smoke. I held my breath and stumbled into the rabbits’ room. Somehow I found the row of cages. I opened two, and got a rabbit under each arm. They were limp: dead or passed out from the smoke, I couldn’t guess.
I ran outside and passed the rabbits to Darla. I tried to go back, but it was impossible. My skin already felt burnt, like a bad sunburn. I couldn’t get within five feet of the barn door now, the heat had grown that intense.
I turned back to Darla. “It’s too hot. I can’t… sorry.” She was sitting in the ash, cradling the rabbits in her lap and petting them. They weren’t moving at all.
I inventoried the contents of Target’s pack. It was a jackpot. A big plastic tarp and two heavy blankets were rolled up on top. Under those I found a dozen full water bottles, six bags of cornmeal, a frying pan, what looked to be our entire supply of smoked rabbit meat, a coil of rope, all the matches and candles from Mrs. Edmunds’ kitchen drawer, and the five-inch chef’s knife I’d carried from Cedar Falls. There was some clothing, too. Probably way too big for me or Darla. Anyway, the supplies would be enough to keep us alive and fed for a week, maybe longer with a little luck.
I used a bit of the rope to repair the backpack straps where I’d hacked through them. Darla was still petting the rabbits. One of them was moving a little. The other was clearly dead. I took the limp rabbit from her and got the chef’s knife.
“Will you help me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I could butcher the rabbit by myself.
Darla didn’t look up, just kept petting the rabbit squirming in her lap.
Fine. I’d do it myself. I put the tip of the knife against the rabbit’s throat and started a downward cut. There were only a couple droplets of blood, but somehow it reminded me of the blood bubbling out of Mrs. Edmunds’ mouth… and Ferret’s body, his head lolling at an odd angle on the kitchen floor… and the soft thump as the grindstone crushed Target’s skull.
I retched, bringing up nothing but scalding stomach acid. When I was done trying to vomit, I dug a crude hole with my staff and buried the dead rabbit.
Darla watched.
“We should go,” I said as I finished kicking ash over the tiny grave.
Darla stared at the blackened husk of her home. The roof had collapsed completely. The walls and chimney still stood, but all the windows had burst from the heat. There were flames gnawing on the skeleton of the house here and there. Darla whispered something: “Mom,” maybe.
“It’s okay,” I said. What a stupid thing to say. It definitely was not okay.
Darla just stared. Maybe she was looking at the roiling brown smoke rising from the fire, searching for her mother’s face in the ever-shifting doppelganger cloud.
I took one of her hands in mine, pulling it away from the rabbit. I led her closer to the house, until we could feel the heat from the fire on our faces.
I stopped and tried to pull my hand away from hers, but she held on. “We should have buried her,” Darla whispered.
One of the walls crashed inward, and sparks flew into the sky. “Some people get cremated when they die,” I said. “And she’s at home. I don’t think she would have minded.”
We held hands in silence for a while. The rabbit squirmed in Darla’s other arm, and she gripped it tighter.
“You want… should we say a prayer or something?” I said. “Like a funeral?”
She nodded.
I wished I hadn’t said anything. I’d only been to one funeral, for my grandfather almost ten years ago. At that moment, I couldn’t remember a bit of it, only the waxy pallor of his skin in the casket during the viewing and the way his dead hand felt-cold and plastic, nothing like real skin.
But I had to try. “Dear God, um…” Not such a good start. I had no idea what to say. I stood silently, holding Darla’s hand, searching my brain for something, anything, to talk about. I thought about the first time I had seen Mrs. Edmunds pouring corn into the gristmill, right before I passed out on the barn floor. So I began there:
“When I met Mrs. Edmunds, I was almost dead. I’d been running-skiing, I guess-away from trouble for days. I was bleeding, dizzy with pain, struggling to keep pushing one foot in front of the other. I was hoping for nothing more than a quiet barn to hide in, a place where I could heal or die.
“Instead, I met Mrs. Edmunds and Darla. They took me in, fed me, and sewed up my side. I’m alive because of the kindness they showed to me, a complete stranger.
“God, I don’t know if I caused Mrs. Edmunds’ death.” I tried to drop Darla’s hand, but she held on. “Maybe I led Target to her, or maybe it was just horrible luck. I wish… I wish Target had killed me instead of Mrs. Edmunds. I would have been dead anyway if not for her help.
“But I can’t change that. And I guess You have some plan.” (A crappy plan, one that had transformed Iowa into an ashen hell, that had left Darla an orphan and me unable to discover whether I was an orphan or not. But saying all that wouldn’t help her.) “So I’m thankful that I met Mrs. Edmunds. She welcomed me, made me feel… loved, I guess. Wherever she is now, please welcome her the way she welcomed me, a bleeding stranger at her barn door. Amen.”
“Amen,” Darla said. “I miss you already, Mom,” she added, whispering.
I hugged her. We stood there a long time, warmed by the dying embers of Mrs. Edmunds’ funeral pyre, the rabbit squirming between us. Three fading sparks of life on an endless, burnt field of ash.