I snapped my boots into my skis and shouldered Target’s pack. Darla hadn’t moved.
“We’ve got to go,” I said.
Darla stroked the rabbit.
“Put your skis on and get your poles.”
Nothing.
“Damn it, Darla, we’ve got to go. There’s no shelter here now.” It was probably midmorning by now, and I was feeling antsy. I didn’t know why. The burnt buildings, Target’s body-I wanted to get away from the farm as fast as possible.
But Darla wasn’t budging.
I wanted to scream in frustration, but instead I said as gently as I could, “Put your skis on, now, please.”
Finally, she moved. She transferred the rabbit to one arm and slowly clipped her boots into the skis.
“Pick up your poles.” I tried to take the rabbit from her, but she shied away, clutching it with both hands. I gave up and handed the ski poles to her. She took both of them in one hand, the other still clutching the rabbit tightly against her chest.
I sighed and pushed off powerfully with my pole and staff, heading for the road in front of Darla’s farm. About thirty feet off, I stopped and turned. She hadn’t inched forward at all.
“Come on, Darla. Get moving!” I yelled.
She shuffled out to meet me.
It was excruciatingly slow. Darla held the poles as deadweight in one hand. Twice, the rabbit got unruly, and Darla dropped her poles to cuddle him. The second time, I stopped and strapped her ski poles to the back of my pack.
We made better time then. At least the rabbit wasn’t holding us up-with both hands free, Darla could keep him under control. Better time didn’t mean we made good time, though. Without poles, Darla couldn’t balance as well or push herself along. I had to stop again and again to wait for her to catch up.
I couldn’t keep going this way. I felt terrible for Darla. She’d lost her home, her mother, everything she’d built, and almost all her rabbits. I thought I partly understood how she felt-at that moment I wanted to stop, curl up into a ball, and let someone take care of me again. But even more than I wanted to check out and give my emotional wounds time to scab over, I wanted to live. Neither Darla nor I were likely to survive if we kept heading for Warren at a snail’s pace. So when we reached the intersection where I’d planned to turn east, I turned south toward Worthington instead. Darla followed me.
A couple miles farther on, we skied down a steep hill into a small valley. A creek burbled merrily under the bridge at the bottom of the hill. It had washed away some of the ash from each bank, revealing a few tendrils of sickly yellow vegetation.
I stopped, shrugged off my pack, and sat on the guardrail along the edge of the bridge. As I dug through the backpack, hunting for lunch, I talked to Darla.
“We can leave the rabbit here. There’s water. There are some plants to eat. It’ll be okay.” I didn’t really believe this. That rabbit was dead either way. If it stayed with Darla, she’d probably eat it when she got hungry enough. The plants by the creek looked dead-and there weren’t enough of them to sustain a mouse, let alone a rabbit. I was just hoping she’d give it up, so we could move at a reasonable pace.
“No,” Darla replied.
Okay then, that was progress, I guessed. It was the first word she’d said since we’d left the farm over two hours before. I handed her a strip of smoked rabbit. Lunch.
She held the strip of meat in one hand and the rabbit in the other and sat beside me on the guardrail to eat. The rabbit sniffed the meat and wrinkled its nose-in disgust, perhaps.
When she finished eating, Darla rummaged through the backpack one handed. She came up with a handful of cornmeal and started feeding the stupid rabbit out of her hand.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. “We need that food!”
Darla gave no sign that she’d heard me. I yelled some more, but I might as well have screamed at the ash for all the good it was doing. I thought the rabbits wouldn’t eat corn, but it seemed to be nibbling on it now. Maybe it had gotten so hungry it couldn’t afford to be picky anymore. Anyway, I closed up the backpack and took off, skiing along the road to Worthington.
I got about a half mile ahead of Darla before I felt guilty and stopped to wait. I thought about our other trip to Worthington, just the day before. In places where the road was sheltered from the wind, I could see our tracks in the ash: one set of ski tracks going, with Darla’s deep boot prints running alongside. Two sets of ski tracks returning.
How different that trip had been: Darla riding on my skis down the hills, pressed up against my back, rolling around together in the ash, and playfully hurling handfuls of it at each other.
Eventually, Darla caught up. I never let myself get more than thirty feet ahead of her the rest of the way to Worthington.
The putrid yellow haze in the sky was slowly being replaced by gray twilight as we skied into Worthington. Incredibly, we’d made better time yesterday with Darla walking than we had today with both of us on skis.
I led Darla through town to the school I’d seen yesterday, St. Paul’s. There were ramparts of ash around it where someone had shoveled off the roof. A cleared path led to the front door, but it was locked and dark inside. I banged on the door, but no one answered. Surely this was the right place? Several people had mentioned yesterday that this school was serving as a shelter.
I slogged to the side door next to the gym, with Darla following. These doors were unlocked. I brushed as much ash off my clothes as I could, unsnapped my skis, and stepped inside.
The gym here wasn’t nearly as large as the one at Cedar Falls High, but the scene inside was similar, if a little more chaotic. An elderly woman sat at a desk inside the gym doors, working by the light of a battery-powered lantern. The gym floor was covered with every type of bed imaginable laid out in a grid. There were leather couches, sleeper sofas, futons, cots, a bunch of twin beds, and even a heart-shaped monstrosity-a honeymooner’s red nightmare bed. Some of the beds were surrounded with makeshift enclosures, drapes hanging on rough frames made of two-by-fours, curtain rods, and rope. Most of the drapes were pulled back at the moment, I assumed to allow light into the sleeping areas.
There must have been eighty beds in there, but there weren’t many people in the gym, only the woman at the desk, a couple of adults napping on couches, and a group of very small kids playing Chutes amp; Ladders on the floor.
I stepped up to the desk. Nobody noticed me. The woman was completely engrossed in a piece of paper that had Duty Schedule printed in block letters across the top.
“Uh, hi,” I said.
The woman jumped halfway out of her chair. She whipped open one of the desk’s drawers and thrust her hand inside. I heard a metallic click, but her hand didn’t emerge from the drawer. I held my hands up by my shoulders, palms open.
“Sorry I startled you,” I said.
“You certainly did, young man. I’m going to strangle Larry.”
That didn’t make sense, but I let it pass. “Darla and I don’t have a place to stay, and we heard this was a shelter…”
The woman removed her hand from the desk drawer and looked at Darla standing beside me. “Darla Edmunds? I heard you were in town yesterday. Heard you and your mother were doing well, all things considered.”
Darla looked away.
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “They were. Doing well, I mean. Yesterday. But Darla’s mom is dead now, and she has no place to stay. I wondered if she could stay here for a while.”
“Gloria’s dead? I’m so sorry. How?”
“Bandits. They’re dead now. Darla and I killed them. But they burned-”
A beefy guy emerged from the locker room and ran to the desk. “Sorry, Mrs. Nance. I think it’s all this corn. Gives me constipation-”
She cut him off with a glare and struck through a name under “Security” on her duty roster. She wrote “Larry Boyle” in a column labeled “K.P.” Larry slunk off toward the gym doors. Mrs. Nance turned back to me, “Of course you can both stay here. You’ll need to work-everyone’s expected to do something. I’ve heard Darla’s a wizard with machines. There’s a crew trying to rig some of the old farm windmills to recharge batteries. That suit you, Darla?”
Darla didn’t reply.
“Yes, that sounds fine,” I said.
Mrs. Nance frowned but made a note on her roster. “And your name, young man?”
“Alex.”
“Are you particularly good at anything?”
“Not really.”
“Field duty then, digging corn. You look strong enough.”
“If it’s okay, I’d been planning to move on tomorrow. My family, they’re in Warren, Illinois. At least I hope they are.”
Darla turned her head and stared at me then. She had an expression on her face that I found impossible to interpret.
“Lot of lawless country between here and there,” Mrs. Nance replied. “And where are you planning to cross the Mississippi? I hear there’ve been riots in Dubuque.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’d noticed-about the lawless country, that is. And I hadn’t thought ahead about crossing the river.”
“Where did you come from?”
She teased the whole story out of me. I didn’t really want to talk about it. I tried giving her one-word answers, but she kept asking me questions, and gradually I gave her the whole story. My room collapsing in Cedar Falls. The three guys trying to invade Darren and Joe’s place. My lonely trek across northeast Iowa. When I finished, Mrs. Nance shook her head. “That’s quite a story, young man. I can offer you dinner tonight and one night’s lodging. I wish I had supplies to spare to help you along, but we have our hands full here.”
“I understand. And thank you,” I said.
“I hear FEMA is in Illinois. Maybe you can find some help there. There are no relief supplies for this side of the Mississippi yet, although I understand the politicians in Washington have figured out that this is a disaster area and declared it so.” Mrs. Nance laughed, a short sharp sound halfway between a bark and a sob.
Dinner that night was thin corn porridge. Everyone filed into the school cafeteria shortly after nightfall. About seventy people were staying at the school. Most of them arrived for dinner covered with ash; they’d been digging corn all day.
Darla carried the stupid rabbit into the cafeteria with her. She got a few strange looks, but mostly people seemed too tired to care. I saw her sneak two spoonsful of porridge to the rabbit. I don’t think anyone else noticed. There might have been trouble if they had. The portions were small enough without sharing food with a rabbit that would itself have made a nice meal.
The good beds were all claimed, of course. I’d been hoping for the leather couch or maybe that enormous heart-shaped bed, tacky as it was. An old, wiry guy stretched out on the couch, and a mother shared the heart bed with her three young kids. Darla and I got twin mattresses on the floor near the gym door.
Darla flopped fully clothed onto her mattress, on top of the blanket. She held the rabbit against her chest. I hoped it would wander off in the night.
I stripped off my outer shirt, boots, and jeans and crawled under the blanket. A little girl flickered through my memory-the girl who had tried to steal crackers from me while I slept at Cedar Falls High. I pulled my backpack up onto the mattress next to me and flung one arm over it.
“Goodnight, Darla.”
Nothing.