(eng) Mike Mullin - Ashfall 01 by Ashfall

Author:Ashfall [Ashfall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 32

It got colder throughout the day. When we stopped for lunch, I was surprised to find that the water bottles I’d packed in the outside pockets of my backpack were partially frozen. After we ate (cold strips of smoked rabbit meat), I repacked everything so that the water was inside the pack, against my back. Hopefully that would keep it liquid.

Now that she didn’t have to hold the rabbit, Darla kept up easily. She probably could have passed me—she was in way better shape than I was—but she skied behind, matching my pace.

I started searching for a place to spend the night about midafternoon. There were farmhouses along the road every half mile or so. The first three we passed had tracks in the ash between the outbuildings and the houses. Probably the people in them would have been friendly and let Darla and me hole up in one of their barns overnight, but I was tired of people and their stupid guns. I skied on.

The fourth place we came to was obviously uninhabited, obvious because the house, barn, and garage had all collapsed. The only intact buildings were two concrete grain silos. I slid twice around both the cylindrical silos, looking to see if we could get inside, but there was no visible entrance. There must have been some way to get in-they’d be useless if the farmers couldn’t load them with grain. Maybe Darla knew how they worked, but she still wasn’t talking.

The barn had stood next to the silos, but it was hopeless. The ash had flattened it completely—panels of wood siding and rafters jutted randomly from the heaped wreckage.

The front part of the farmhouse was standing, sort of. The whole back section and roof had collapsed, pulling the front wall backward so it leaned precariously at about a sixty-degree angle. I didn’t want to get near it for fear it would fall on us.

A big metal garage had stood not far from the house. The roof and walls were down, but something was supporting the wreckage in the middle. I crawled under a bent wall panel to check it out but couldn’t see anything inside. I had to duck out, fish a candle out of my pack, and try again.

There was a huge John Deere tractor inside, a combine, I guessed. It supported the wrecked roof, creating a triangular area big enough to walk around in. It seemed safe enough; certainly the tractor wasn’t going anywhere. And finding a sheltered spot to spend the night was a huge relief. At least we wouldn’t freeze to death—not tonight, anyway.

I led Darla in and built a fire beside the combine, using scraps of wood from the fallen barn. It’s a lot harder to cook over a fire than you’d think. I made corn pone. Some of it was a bit burnt, but Darla ate it, and she hates corn pone, so maybe it wasn’t too bad. Either that or she was starving. She got some cornmeal from my pack and tried to feed her rabbit.

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