When I turned on the kitchen faucet, hoping to wash up, nothing came out. Hot, cold—neither worked. I checked the downstairs bathroom; there was no water there, either. So we’d have to drink from the bathtub now. And the toilets were only going to flush one more time. That was a problem—it was going to get stinky in a hurry.

Joe served more lettuce for breakfast. He wanted to finish all the perishables. Darren grumbled about it some—I didn’t like a salad for breakfast any better than he did, but I figured Joe was making sense. Complaining wouldn’t improve anything. Besides, I was a guest—they didn’t have to share.

After breakfast Joe took me to the master bedroom and got some clean clothes out of his closet for me. They didn’t fit very well. Darren and Joe are both a bit taller than I am and a lot heavier. Not fat, exactly, but big enough that Joe’s jeans bunched uncomfortably around my waist and his T-shirt was like a maternity blouse. Still, it beat my filthy clothing.

Late that morning we noticed something new. There was an occasional flash of lightning visible in the windows through the ashfall. It was always accompanied by an immediate clap of thunder—the lightning was close.

As the day wore on, it got steadily brighter. At first, we could only see during the lightning flashes. But by late afternoon, it wasn’t pitch-black anymore. Oh, it was still dark, but I could see my fingers if I stood by a window and waggled them near my eye. It was like a moonless, overcast night—about like the darkest night I’d ever experienced until two days ago. But it beat the cave-like blackness I’d woken up to that morning.

Joe played with the Maglite for a while, swapping D-cells to it from the boombox until it had a pretty strong beam. He tried the boombox again too, quickly scanning all the channels. Nothing. He shut it down to save the batteries.

It started to rain. Fat black raindrops splattered on the windows and washed streaks in the fine dust that clung to the panes. It was strange; I would have thought the rain would wash the ash out of the sky, but it didn’t work like that. The rain fell, and the ash kept coming down, at about the same rate and density as before. It didn’t even clump up like ash from a fire.

The rain had been falling for a couple hours, and we were thinking about dinner, when we heard a cracking sound and then a huge crash from outside. Joe grabbed the Maglite and ran for the front door. Darren and I followed him.

The ash had blown up over the front porch, covering it in a layer a couple inches deep. It was dry under the porch roof, so our feet stirred up the stuff. It rose in little clouds around us. I took a deep breath, which was a mistake, earning me a mouthful of sulfurous grit. It tasted nasty and set off a fit of hacking coughs. I tried to breathe shallowly and through my nose after that.

A concrete stairway led to the yard from the porch—four steps, I remembered. The bottom two were now buried in ash. Joe took a tentative step into the ash. His foot sank a few inches and pulled free only with a visible effort. I followed him, and we slogged around to the side of the house in the direction the noise had come from, while Darren waited on the porch.

Walking in the wet ash was like walking in thick, wet concrete. My sneakers kept trying to pull off my feet. Scrunching up my toes helped some.

The side of the house was a mess: a confused tangle of wood, asphalt shingles, and metal guttering. The ash, heavy with water, had pulled down the old-fashioned, built-in gutters, taking the soffit and the edge of the roof as well. As we gawked, a load of wet ash landed with a splat amid the wreckage.

We couldn’t see the roof very well, even in the powerful beam of the Maglite. What if more of the roof fell while we were standing there? I took a couple steps backward. Then another worry occurred to me: How long would the house itself be able to withstand the weight of the ash and water on the roof?

Joe shrugged and plodded back to the front door. As we were closing the door behind us, we heard a crack and crash from the other side of the house. I assumed the gutters on that side had just fallen.

Ash clung to us everywhere. Joe and I beat at it, knocking clumps of wet ash onto the entryway floor. It was hopeless, though; the stuff was so fine it clung to our clothes and skin despite our efforts.

The ash looked almost white in the dim light, giving us a ghostly aspect. Maybe we were ghosts of a sort, spirits from the world that had died when the volcano erupted. Now we haunted a changed land. Would there be any place for us in this new, post-volcanic world?

Chapter 7

It was brighter the next morning. Still dark—the ash continued to fall—but at least we could walk around the house without crashing into stuff.

Joe and I dragged the propane grill into the kitchen from the back deck. We wet rags before we went out and tied them around our mouth and nose, like old-time bandits. That kept most of the grit out of our mouths and lungs. The grill was buried in a foot and a half of heavy, wet ash. I cleaned off the top of the grill while Joe tried to pull it free. Even when both of us heaved, the legs wouldn’t come up. Joe fought through the ash to his detached garage and returned with a shovel. I volunteered to dig—it took about ten minutes to free the grill.

Miraculously, the grill worked. The smoke wasn’t going to do their kitchen ceiling any good, but neither Joe nor Darren seemed to care. Their house was pretty much wrecked, anyway. I’d noticed water running down one of the guest room walls that morning, presumably from holes ripped in the roof when the built-in gutters had fallen.

We ate steaks for lunch, Black Angus filet mignon. They tasted heavenly after a day and a half of salads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Joe told me to eat as many as I wanted since they were all going to spoil anyway. I ate three.

That afternoon I was napping off the huge lunch in an easy chair in the living room when somebody started banging on the front door. They were whaling on it, too—the noise was almost louder than the thunder, loud enough to wake me up.

I stood and tried to shake the postnap loginess out of my brain. Joe went to get the door. Something made me suddenly nervous. Who would be out in the ash? And why? Whoever it was kept hitting the door, slamming something into it so hard that I wondered if it would break. I suppressed a sudden desire to move away—hide in the back of the living room or go upstairs, maybe. Instead, I moved to the living room doorway where I could watch Joe in the foyer.

“Don’t answer,” Darren said. I nodded.

“Why not?” Joe replied. “It’s probably just the neighbors. We ought to be banding together, helping each other out.”

“You don’t know that. It sounds like they’re trying to break down the door.” Darren retreated past me into the living room.

“If they weren’t knocking that loudly, we wouldn’t be able to hear them over the thunder.” Joe peered into the glass peephole set into the door. “I can’t see anything. Too dark.” He unlocked the deadbolt and twisted the knob.

The door flew all the way open, pushed violently from outside. Joe stumbled backward as the door struck him. Three guys burst through. They were so coated in ash that it was impossible even to tell what color their hair or skin was. The lead guy was carrying a baseball bat. I shrank back into the living room, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. My heart lurched, starting a hammering thump in my chest. I thought about running, following Darren toward the far side of the living room, but I would have had to cross the large open doorway between the living room and foyer. They’d have seen me for sure.