When we emerged from our igloo in the morning, it was bitterly cold. No snow was falling, and there was very little wind. The morning light reflected off the snow, making it the brightest day I’d seen since the eruption.
Darla made breakfast while I scouted around. The snow was deep-I sank to the top of my thighs in it. The north wall of our shelter was completely hidden by a huge snowdrift that sloped gently upward, reaching all the way to the top of the bridge.
I found two strong branches and hacked them off their tree with the hatchet I’d taken from Target. One branch was the perfect length for a ski pole. The other was about six feet long, so I planned to use it as a makeshift bo staff.
We ate corn pone for breakfast and refilled all our water bottles. At least the snow had solved our water problems. Now we simply filled the frying pan with snow, held it over the fire for a few minutes, and poured the fresh water into our bottles. We packed up everything, clipped into our skis, and set out.
Sidestepping up the embankment to the bridge was difficult. We started at the north side, but the drifts were too deep. Even with the skis, we sank so far into the snow that we couldn’t lift our legs high enough to make any upward progress. We gave up and skied to the south side.
We made it up that embankment. I sidestepped to the crown of the road, pointed my skis across the bridge, and pushed off.
What followed was utter fail on two levels: First, my improvised ski poles just poked holes in the snow. They never hit anything solid, so I couldn’t push off. Second, when I tried shuffling forward without pushing off, my skis dug troughs five or six inches deep in the soft snow. The tips of my skis promptly dove under the snow ahead of me and caught, pitching me forward onto my face.
I lifted my head out of the snow and looked back. Darla was smiling, trying somewhat unsuccessfully to suppress outright laughter. “Fine. You try it,” I grumbled.
Darla pushed off with her poles and glided smoothly over the surface of the snow. She looked back at me and shrugged.
I tried again. My ski tips pushed under the snow, nearly causing another fall.
I glared at my skis. That was when I noticed they were different from Darla’s. For one thing, her poles had big baskets a few inches from the end that caught in the snow and let her push off, even in the deep stuff we were trying to cope with. For another, her skis were a lot wider than mine and a little shorter. They were slightly concave on each edge, too. My best guess was that the librarian had sold us a pretty good pair of off-trail skis, while my dad’s old skis were designed for groomed snow. I shared this theory with Darla.
“I don’t know anything about skis, but I think you’re right,” she said. “I’ve got an idea-I think I can make some baskets for the ends of your poles if we can find some twine somewhere. I can’t think of any way to fix your skis, though.”
“Me, either.”
“Try skiing in my tracks.”
That worked okay. So long as I stayed behind Darla and kept my weight centered on my skis, I could shuffle along in the grooves her skis cut in the new snow. I was a lot slower than she was. Being able to use her poles more than compensated for the extra effort she had to put in to break the trail. Every forty or fifty feet she’d stop and wait for me to catch up. I thought fondly back to our first trip to Worthington, when I’d been on skis and she’d been on foot. We had been a strange team, even back then.
We broke into a farmhouse that night. It looked deserted-no tracks in the snow, no smoke from the chimney-and it was, sort of.
Darla found a window ajar at the back of the house. We unclipped from our skis and stuck them upright in the snow. I shoved the window fully open and climbed through.
It was late and too dark to see much in the room. There was a vaguely unpleasant smell, a hint of something putrid lingering on the knife-edge of the frozen air. Darla stepped behind me and dug a candle and matches out of my backpack.
By the candlelight we discovered we were in a bedroom. A queen bed, sheets pulled tight with military precision, filled the center of the room. A man wearing a black suit lay in the center of the bed, his skin frozen to a blue-white pallor. He looked almost normal-peaceful, even-except for the gun clutched in his right hand and the huge black stain wreathing his head in a sanguinary halo.
Darla jumped and let out a yelp. Maybe I should have been startled, as well. Finding myself in a room with a corpse would have scared the bejeezus out of me only five weeks ago. But I’d seen a lot of corpses since I’d left home; this fellow wasn’t the worst-and probably wouldn’t be the last.
Darla turned away from the bed. She stared at a cracked mirror mounted above the dresser. The mirror was so coated in dust that it didn’t reflect anything. She dragged her splayed fingers across its surface, and our reflections appeared, fractured into five narrow lines by the paths she’d drawn.
I held the candle over the bed. Flecks of blood spotted the guy’s lips, gleaming black in the candlelight.
“What do you think happened?” Darla asked.
“He shot himself. Put the gun in his mouth.”
“He put on his best suit, too. His funeral suit… Why?”
I wasn’t sure if she was asking why he had killed himself, or why he had dressed up to do it, but either way the answer was the same. “I dunno.” I reached out and touched the guy’s hand. It felt cold and hard as marble.
“What are you doing?” Darla asked.
“Getting the gun.” I had to bust his finger to get it out of the trigger guard. It cracked, like ice breaking. “You know anything about pistols?”
“Not much.”
I handed the gun to her anyway. “Not much” beat what I knew, which was absolutely nothing. Darla found a latch on the left side of the gun that released the cylinder. There was one spent casing in there-no bullets. Darla picked the casing out with her fingernail and closed the cylinder. She put the gun in one of the exterior pockets of my backpack.
We looked through the rest of the house. It was small: two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, and a living room with a fireplace. Nobody else was there, alive or dead.
I unlocked the front door and opened it. Snow was piled so high against the storm door that I couldn’t get out, so we trooped in and out through the bedroom window and around the dead guy’s bed carrying firewood. We could have burnt a kitchen chair or the coffee table instead, but there were plenty of trees around the house. Besides, burning the furniture seemed rude somehow, since we were guests, albeit uninvited ones.
At first, walking by the dead guy creeped me out a little. But after hauling three armloads of wood and a couple of frying pans full of snow past him, I got used to it. I even said “hi” the last time I walked through that night.
I made corn porridge with bits of rabbit meat for dinner. Darla fed some of it to Jack. We’d make a cannibal out of that poor rabbit yet. He seemed to be doing better. One nice thing about all the snow was that it covered the ash, keeping it from blowing around. We were breathing the cleanest air we’d had since the eruption-maybe that was helping Jack, too.
I shook out a blanket and laid it between the fireplace and the couch. The spare bedroom held a nice bed, but it was frigid in there. We’d sleep warmly in front of the fire.
“You can have the couch if you want,” I said.
“I think there’s room for both of us.”
There was not room for both of us on that couch. But Darla moved all our blankets onto it and got me to help her drag it closer to the fireplace. She efficiently stripped off her overshirt, boots, and jeans. I tried not to watch. She was wearing a T-shirt that read Rabbits Bite! in huge letters across her boobs and Dubuque County 4H below that. Her panties were cute girlie things with yellow stripes and pink hearts-not like her at all. The effect was ruined somewhat by the gray streaks of ash staining them. I’d seen them before, of course. I had no idea why I was noticing them again at that moment.
Darla sat on the edge of the couch and rubbed her feet.
“You okay?” I asked.
“It’s just my feet-the ski boots are too tight.”
“I’ll help if you want.”
“Sure.” She stretched out her feet toward me.
I sat on the floor and massaged her feet. They were crosshatched with red welts. They didn’t smell bad at all, which surprised me-my feet probably stank.
“Oh,” Darla sighed, “that feels so good.” She pulled her feet away from my lap, climbed under the blankets, and stretched out on her side with her face toward the fire. I sat on the edge of the couch beside her and pulled my boots off.
Suddenly I felt funny about getting undressed. It made no sense-I’d been completely naked in front of Darla repeatedly over the last few weeks. I sent strict orders to my body to chill out. Concentrating on my breathing helped. Two quick breaths in through the nose, two quick breaths out through the mouth, just like I’d use during a sparring match. I peeled off my jeans and overshirt and crawled under the blankets with her.
I spooned against her, my back against her stomach. Well, honestly, what I noticed were her breasts against my back. They formed two puddles of warmth beneath my shoulder blades, although maybe my overactive imagination was at work. I didn’t think I was pressed that tightly against her.
I probably smelled rank in my sweaty underclothes. I had probably smelled rank for days, but it hadn’t bothered me until then.
“Goodnight,” Darla said.
“Goodnight.”
My knees and arms hung over the edge of the couch. The room was bright-we’d built the fire up before we turned in. I stared into the flames for a while.
“You awake?” I asked, my voice pitched low.
“Yeah.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
“What?”
“Obviously, you can ask me something. You just did. You asked if you could ask me something.”
“Do you know you’re annoying?” I punctuated this comment by elbowing her in the side.
“Yeah, sorry. What did you want to ask me?”
“Nothing.”
“No, really, what was it?”
I sighed. “It was… I was wondering. Why’d you follow me out of Worthington?”
“I dunno.”
“No, I’m serious. You would have been safer there. They’re organized. They’ve got water and food. The people there know you and like you. But I’m… with me, your chances aren’t so good. I’ve almost died three or four times already. We’ve got food for what? Four or five more days, maybe? Maybe we can make it to Warren by then, but I don’t know what’s waiting for us, if anything. I mean, I hope my parents are there with my uncle and his family, but I don’t know. I don’t know anything, really.”
She was silent.
“I mean, I’m glad you did follow me,” I said. “I’d have been dead in that river without you. But I’m not sure it was so smart.”
“I’m not exactly sure why myself.” Her voice was so soft that the whisper of the flames in the fireplace threatened to drown it. “I.. . look, it’s not logical, but I feel safe with you. I should be freaked out by the dead guy in the room behind us, but I’m not. I know I’d be safer in Worthington, but I didn’t feel that way when I woke up that morning and you weren’t there.”
I reached back, caught her left hand in mine, dragged it to my chest, and held it there.
“I guess I never bothered to ask whether you wanted me with you,” Darla continued. “Maybe you could make better time without me. And I know I was a real drag to have around-”
“Want you? Of course I do, Darla. I’d be dead twice over now except for you. And you’re an amazing girl. I’ve never met anyone who works as hard as you do. Or knows as much about machines. When I first saw you in your barn, I thought you were an angel. If I didn’t know you were already in love with Jack, I might seriously let myself-”
“Roll over.”
I did. Darla’s lips were on mine before I’d completely turned over. We kissed. I felt like I was falling, plunging headlong down a warm, moist tunnel.
My eyes were closed. My right arm was wrapped around her shoulder; my hand gently cupped the back of her head, as if it were some wondrous glass sculpture, fragile in my palm.
Darla started crying.
No, that’s wrong. She wasn’t crying; she was sobbing, in full-throated wails. I pulled away, shocked. What had I done wrong?
Darla wrapped her arms around me, pulling my body back to hers as she cried. She held on as if she were trying to crush my body in her arms. I returned her embrace a little weakly-I was having trouble breathing.
When she’d finally run out of tears, her arms relaxed, and I sucked in a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That kiss. It was… how can we feel so good when so many people are dying? I started thinking about Mom, Dad
…”
She was quiet. I held her tighter.
We lay like that for a long time, but eventually it got uncomfortable. Our knees knocked together. Darla rolled over again, and I snuggled against her back.
Her breathing calmed as she drifted to sleep. I watched the firelight play with her hair, watched it until the fire had burned so low that I couldn’t see her anymore. Then, at last, I slept too.