“We’ll see what we can find out there, thanks.”

Darla and I helped serve lunch to the crew digging corn in the field. Hasty pudding turned out to be a sort of cornmeal mush flavored with bits of pork. After we’d served everyone else, Mrs. Matthews scooped a couple mugs of it for Darla and me.

I didn’t recall volunteering, but somehow we wound up helping Mrs. Matthews haul all the dirty dishes back to her house. When we got to her back deck, she reached inside the sliding glass door for a broom. She handed it to Darla, telling her, “Beat the dust off that boy and then have him try to clean you off.”

Darla took the instructions to heart. I felt like an old threadbare rug by the time she finished thwacking me with that broom, avoiding none of my parts except my side and my manhood—what was left of it, so to speak. I endured it without complaint by reminding myself that my turn to use the broom on her would come next. Mrs. Matthews was using a whiskbroom on herself, not that she needed to. Despite the hike to the field, everything but her pants legs was mostly clean. I couldn’t figure out how she did it—dust just didn’t stick to her.

By the time I’d beaten most of the ash off Darla, Mrs. Matthews was already inside. When we stepped into the kitchen, she was carefully scraping out the remnants of hasty pudding from the Dutch ovens into a plastic leftover container. She finished the Dutch ovens and started on the mugs people had eaten out of. Most of them were already licked clean, but when she found even a speck of food, into the leftover container it went.

But what really shocked me was when she put a stopper in the kitchen sink and began filling it. With water. From the faucet. I must have been staring, because she gave me a funny look and said, “You look like you’ve never seen indoor plumbing before, child.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I mean, yes, of course I have, but not since the eruption.”

“Mayor’s responsible for it. Got a crew to go around after the noise stopped. Made everyone promise to use less than five gallons a day. Anyone uses more, their water gets shut off. They say the water in the tower might last a year.”

“Smart guy, your mayor.”

“Gal. Yep, she’s done all right. Helped organize the shelter at St. Paul’s school and the crews out there digging for corn. There’s folks that complain, of course, about the government rationing everything, telling them what to do and whatnot, but most see the sense of it and try to help.”

The Dutch oven in the sink was full of water now. I grabbed a scrubby out of the plastic basket hanging in the sink and went to work on it. There was a bottle of Dawn beside the sink, but when I reached for it Mrs. Matthews knocked my hand away, saying something about how I’d ruin the finish on her good iron pans. I didn’t know; it seemed to me that a little soap would help get everything cleaner. Whatever.

So I scrubbed while Darla rinsed and dried. It took us about a half hour to finish. By unspoken agreement, we hustled out of there as fast as we could just to keep Mrs. Matthews from volunteering us for any more jobs.

Chapter 26

The library occupied a third of a long metal building across from the town park. The rest of the building was shared by the city hall and fire department. A fire truck sat outside the big overhead door on one side of the building. It was halfway in the street and buried to its rims in ash, hopelessly stuck.

Darla hiked toward the library door, and I slid along beside her. There were huge drifts of ash surrounding the building except in front of the doors, which had been shoveled clear. I glanced up and figured out why. Someone had cleared the ash off the roof, throwing it down in piles below the eaves.

Darla tried the metal door labeled Worthington Public Library. “Weird, it’s locked. Supposed to be open.” She rapped on the door.

I heard a click—the lock turning in the door. A muffled voice came from inside, “Come in.” I unclipped my boots from the skis and followed Darla through the door.

The first thing that caught my eye was the huge double-barreled shotgun pointed at us. It gleamed in the light of an oil lamp. My eyes followed the barrel of the gun back to where it was planted against its owner’s shoulder. She was a tiny old woman; she looked smaller than the gun she was wielding. Her hair bloomed in a crazed white tangle above her eyes, which peered suspiciously along the barrel at us.

“Christ!” Darla said. “What is wrong with Worthington? Does everyone here have to point a gun at me?”

I didn’t say anything—just held up my hands and shuffled backward toward the door. Antagonizing a little old lady holding a shotgun seemed like a very bad idea.

“Darla?” The woman behind the gun said. “Darla Edmunds?”

“Yeah, it’s me, Rita Mae. Now would you put that goddamn gun down?”

She leaned the shotgun against the circulation desk. “Now there’s no call to be cussing and using the Lord’s name in vain, young miss.”

“Maybe not but sh—, I mean, that’s the third time in two hours someone’s pointed a gun at me. That’s not at all like people around here.”

“Maybe not, but there’s good reason.”

“What, the pheasants have flown up out of the ash to exact revenge for years of hunting? Worthington’s got to be the safest place in Iowa.”

“Now don’t get all impertinent. Why, you know the Fredericks’ place, outside town? Someone broke in there and murdered them all. Horrible.” Rita Mae glared at Darla.

I decided to interrupt before the argument got out of hand. “We came to see if you had any information about rabbit diseases.”

Rita Mae swung her glare onto me. “And you are?”

“That’s Alex,” Darla said. “He’s a . . . uh, friend.”

“Well, son, I believe in free public libraries. But considering the situation we’re in, it’s become customary to offer something for the maintenance of the library in order to use our services. We’re in dire need of candles, batteries, lamp oil, and the like.”

“I don’t have anything like that,” Darla said.

“I might have a candle stub and a few matches,” I said.

“What about food?” Darla asked. “That help?”

“Certainly,” Rita Mae said. “A librarian can’t live by books alone, and I wouldn’t eat them if I could. Feel too much like cannibalism.” She shuddered.

Darla dug through her pack and found one of the bags of cornmeal. “So, my rabbits. They’re running a temperature, and they keep climbing into their—”

“Water bowls, right?” Rita Mae said. “You feel any funny bumps or growths on their bones, especially legs? Labored breathing, panting, or signs of respiratory distress?”

“I haven’t noticed anything weird about their bones, but I haven’t checked that carefully.”

Rita Mae pulled a book off the shelf behind her desk. “This is about the dig at Ashfall Beds. You know it?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s a paleontology site in Nebraska. They’re digging up hundreds of animal skeletons there—ancient rhinos, deer, birds—”

“Okay, but what does this have to do with my rabbits?” Darla asked.

“I’m getting to that. About twelve million years ago, an enormous volcano erupted in what’s now southern Idaho. It’s the same volcano as Yellowstone, but the tectonic plate has moved above the volcanic hot spot, shifting it from southern Idaho to northwestern Wyoming.

“The eruption dumped more than a foot of ash in northeast Nebraska, about a thousand miles from the volcano. The animals living there breathed in the ash and got sick with silicosis, a lung disease. Symptoms include high fever, respiratory distress, and unusual porous deposits on bones.

“Since the animals were running a fever, they crowded into a watering hole to cool off. They died there and then were buried by drifting ash.”