“If you keep using my clothes for bandages at this rate, I’ll be naked in a few days,” I said.

Darla laughed. “Fine by me. I’ll enjoy the naked boyfriend show. Might be a bit cold for you, though.” She pulled the makeshift pan away from the fire. All the snow had melted.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll wait until we get somewhere warmer before I let you rip all my clothing to rags.”

“Deal.”

We waited a bit for the pan to cool, then carefully sipped warm water from its sharp edges. “We’ve got six bags of wheat. Maybe we should cook one?”

“We don’t need to,” Darla said. “We should make it to Worthington the day after tomorrow.”

“Better to keep up our strength. How do you cook wheat, anyway?”

Darla shrugged. “Boil it like corn? I don’t know.”

I refilled the pan with snow. When that melted, I dumped a bag of wheat in. While I waited for that to boil, I whittled flat spots on a couple of sticks—improvised spoons.

I had no idea how long to cook it. After about fifteen minutes of boiling, I scooped out a few kernels with my stick. They were so hard that they were difficult to chew, and they had an unpleasant, hairy texture.

“How is it?” Darla asked.

“Not good.”

She frowned. “Let’s get some sleep. Figure it out in the morning.”

I pulled the pan off the fire and started getting ready for bed. We hadn’t had any Cipro yet that day, so I split a tablet and handed half of it to Darla. She choked it down with a grimace.

The floor beside the fire was hard, but we were so tired it didn’t matter. I wrapped Darla up in a hug and kissed her goodnight. We slept like that, our limbs entangled, warmed by each other and the comfort of our hard-won fire.

Chapter 25

The next morning I tried the wheat again. The pan was warm from sitting by the fire all night. Soaking overnight had transformed the kernels—they were soft and delicious. Darla and I quickly ate them all.

When we’d finished breakfast, I packed the makeshift pan, the bottle of whisky, and the remaining bags of wheat under my coat. I cinched the drawstring around my waist extra-tight so everything would stay put. Darla carried the fire-by-friction set under her jacket, the bow sticking out at her collar. We looked lumpy and awkward, strange aliens trudging across the snowscape. The pan rubbed uncomfortably as I moved, its edges digging into my chest through the coveralls and overshirt.

The countryside reinforced my feeling of strangeness. Last year, more than half of the Iowa farmsteads had been occupied. Many of the unoccupied ones had collapsed under the weight of the ash and snow, but very few had burned. Now all of them were abandoned and more than half had burned. Often all that marked a former farm was a grain silo and some charred rubble. Where had all the people gone?

A faint stench of charcoal, melted plastic, and sulfur followed us along the road. The burnt-out buildings made the countryside seem more desolate. The only break in the solitude came late that morning. We heard an engine in the distance and rushed to the side of the road, thinking we’d hide. But the noise faded, and we never saw the vehicle that made it.

Iowa had been a vibrant place just ten months ago. Even on the back roads, you could always see signs of civilization, of people. Now . . . nothing. What kind of life could Darla and I hope for in this desolation? I took her hand and held it for a while as we walked.

I was hungry despite the half-pan of boiled wheat I’d eaten that morning. The hunger made us tired. Our steps slowed as the day wore on, and we barely talked.

About an hour before nightfall, we passed a whole series of burnt houses. All that remained were a few scarred and blackened brick walls and chimneys. We trudged up a slight rise. At the top perched a dark-blue, cylindrical water tower overlooking the town. CASCADE, it read in huge white block letters. Below the town’s name, someone had spray-painted a crude drawing of a woodpecker in garish red and neon blue. The woodpecker stood on its hind feet, wings thrust into the air some twenty feet above his head. Fat red boxing gloves capped each of the woodpecker’s upraised wings.

“Excellent,” Darla said. “Cascade is only ten miles from Worthington. But what is that drawing on the water tower?”

“Woody Woodpecker,” I said.

“Woody what?”

“You know. The cartoon.” I tried to make the Woody Woodpecker sound, but it didn’t come out too well.

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

“You’ve never heard of Woody Woodpecker?” I asked.

“No.”

“Country people.” I shook my head in mock seriousness. “They lack cultural awareness.”

Darla slugged my shoulder. “Well, if that’s a woodpecker, it’s got a huge evolutionary advantage.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s so ugly, trees will die at the sight of it.”

“Yeah, it is ugly. I wonder why someone bothered painting it up there. Must have taken a lot of spray paint to make it that big.”

As we got closer, we could see beyond the water tower. There was an open snowfield boxed in by two small apartment buildings and a massive metal shed. The shed’s sliding door was open, and we could see a fire flickering within.

“I think I see people moving by that fire,” Darla whispered.

“Check it out?” I asked. “See if they look friendly?”

“Yeah. But stay hidden ’til we’re sure.”

We crept closer, keeping below the level of the wall of plowed snow that lined the road. Once we were within a few hundred feet, Darla and I slowly raised our heads.

Inside the shed, four men clustered around a small, bright-yellow machine. They were big guys, heavily muscled and tattooed. They looked like they’d been eating well. Three women sat by the fire. Two of them had their backs to us. They were working on something in their laps. The other woman was hunched over the fire, cooking.

“What’s that machine they’re working on?” I whispered. “A jet ski?”

Darla shook her head. “A jet ski? What would they do with that? It’s a snowmobile,” she hissed.

One of the women stood up. She carried a crude mortar and pestle. She dumped ground meal out of her mortar into a paper bag and scooped something from a feed sack. Behind her, I saw something roasting on a spit over the fire: a leg.

Chapter 26

“Is that . . .?” I asked.

“It’s too thin to be a cow’s leg,” Darla whispered. “Too long to be a pig’s.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“We need to find a place to spend the night.”

“Not in this town.”

Darla started crawling beside the snow berm. I followed on my hands and knees. We didn’t stand up until we’d left the metal building far behind.

Cascade was wrecked. We moved slowly and silently, sticking to the shadowed area alongside the road. Burnt, partially collapsed buildings flanked us, leaning in like gravestones in an unkempt cemetery.

We reached a major intersection. On the far side a mostly collapsed building still sported its bright red CONOCO sign. The area in front of the building, where the gas pumps used to be, was now nothing but a fire-seared crater. A sign clung to a fallen light pole: HIGHWAY 136.

“Right turn here.” Darla’s voice was so soft I could barely make out her words.

The building on the corner to our right had burnt, too. Only its brick walls still stood. A half-melted plastic sign read TRI-COUNTY BANK. Below that, someone had spray-painted a crude drawing of a woodpecker similar to the much-larger one on the water tower. I shuddered, and we hurried past the bank’s abandoned shell.

As we reached the outskirts of Cascade, total darkness fell. Darla and I held hands and stumbled along more by feel than by sight.

After about twenty minutes, I felt a break in the berm at the road’s edge. I groped around, trying to figure out if we’d come to a crossroads. To my right, there was a steep uphill slope. It was strange—the slope was concrete, not snow or ice. I struggled partway up it, trying to figure out what it was—it was far too steep to be a road. The underside of a girder loomed in the darkness. We were under a highway overpass.