Darla's Story

Published by Mike Mullin at Smashwords.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This book is a work of fiction. Although some of the
places mentioned are real, any similarities to actual people or
events are coincidental.

I can almost hear the drone of my world
history teacher’s voice: “If one person dies, it’s a tragedy. If a
million die, it’s a statistic.” Mr. Wembender didn’t make that up;
he was quoting someone. I’m not sure who, though—I slept through
most of world history. Sometimes he’d interrupt his lectures by
shouting “Darla! Wake up!” but mostly he let me sleep.

That was the bad year, the year my dad died.
Mom and I tried to keep the farm running by ourselves, and I almost
flunked out of school. Then we sold the dairy cows, and things got
better.

At the time, I thought Mr. Wembender was full
of manure. Look at it this way: If a good milker dies, it’s a
tragedy, sure. If the whole herd dies, it’s a really big freaking
tragedy, not just a statistic.

But now I sort of get it. When the volcano
erupted—the big one, at Yellowstone—I knew millions of people were
dying. I even knew that Mom and I might die. But I didn’t feel
those deaths the way I felt it when I ran over the old lady with my
tractor.

Everything started on an otherwise ordinary
Friday afternoon. The rabbits knew something was wrong before I
did. I mean, I’d heard the reports on the radio about the huge
earthquake in Wyoming—I’d even heard some nut on KUNI babbling
about the end of times and the volcano under Yellowstone National
Park. But I didn’t believe any of it, at least not until after my
rabbits started acting crazy.

I was out in the barn, working on my
dollhouse. I had a crapload of weekend homework, but who does
homework on Friday?

The dollhouse was more my dad’s thing than
mine. When he presented it to me for my eighth birthday, I had to
fight back sudden tears. Dad thought they were tears of joy and
started babbling about all the micro-furniture we could build
together. But I was trying, and failing, to hide my disappointment.
I’d been hoping to get a tractor—or at least an ATV.

For a while, I kind of liked the dollhouse,
despite my initial disappointment. Building furniture with Dad was
fun. We made bureaus and nightstands—the drawers joined with
dovetails so fine I had to carve them with an Exacto knife. Dad
whittled lion’s-paw legs for the tables and chairs, while I
laboriously fashioned tiny tabletops and chair backs mortised so
tightly that they didn’t need glue.

About the time I turned twelve, I got bored
with the dollhouse. I had my own tractor by then, an ancient Deere
that spent more time in the shop than it did running. When I wasn’t
working on the tractor, I built oddments like my potato cannon. I
could shoot a potato more than five hundred feet with that thing. I
just needed a target—and the dollhouse was perfect.

When Dad saw the results, he was as crushed
as the dollhouse itself. He tried to hide his disappointment, but I
saw the light glinting from his damp cheek as he turned away.
Before then, I didn’t realize what the dollhouse meant to him. He
told me it was okay—that the dollhouse was mine, and destroying it
with ballistic potatoes was no big deal—but I could tell he didn’t
really mean what he was saying.

I had hauled the broken pieces of the
dollhouse into my room. It took more than a month of exacting labor
to rebuild it. Shattered boards had to be recut, yellow
potato-juice stains painted over, furniture repaired or rebuilt.
But the look on Dad’s face when I hauled the resurrected dollhouse
out of my room made all the hours of labor worthwhile.

A year and a half after that, Dad was dead.
Crushed under a cattle grate he had been trying to clean.

When I missed him, I worked on the dollhouse.
I kept it in the workroom in our barn, on the rough wooden slab
that had served as a workbench during those happy hours Dad and I
had spent building miniature furniture.

On that Friday, the day of the eruption, I
was building a tiny pergola to shade the back patio. I cut a joist,
working with an Exacto knife to carve a curved flourish into the
joist’s tail. As I reached for a square of sandpaper, the power
went out.

Losing power on the farm was no big deal. It
happened far too often, although usually not on blue-skied,
late-August afternoons. I stood and heaved the barn’s massive
sliding door wide. With the door fully open, enough light would
enter the barn that I could continue working at least until
dusk.

As the door slammed against its backstop,
jarring my shoulder, the ground shook. An earthquake, maybe,
although I couldn’t be sure—I’d never been in an earthquake before.
They’re not exactly common in Iowa.

I looked around. A column of smoke rose
against the deep blue sky. It looked like it was coming from the
Haymaker place, a few miles northwest of us. The Haymakers were a
bit odd, so the smoke didn’t completely surprise me. Most folks
clear and burn their brush in late fall, after the harvest is in
and the sap has run out of the trees. But if the Haymakers wanted
to do it in August, well, it was their land and their brush.

On my way back to the workbench, I thrust my
head into the side room that held my rabbits. I’d just meant to
glance at them, but what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

The dumb bunnies were in a lather over
something, scrabbling against the floor of their cages, running and
pushing against the wire-mesh walls. But the weirdest thing? They
were all trying to run exactly the same direction—roughly east.

I peered into the darkness at the west end of
the room. What had spooked them? The earthquake hadn’t seemed
severe enough to still be scaring the rabbits. Maybe a coyote? Not
likely in the daytime. Same went for owls. Fox? Nothing made sense.
I strode into the dark part of the room, kicking through the straw
on the floor. I found nothing to explain my rabbits’ strange
behavior.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked them. They
didn’t answer, and I couldn’t figure out what else to do, so I
returned to my whittling.

I’d spent at least an hour and a half cutting
and placing more than two dozen joists when Mom walked into the
workroom.

“You see the fire?” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Looks like it’s coming from the Haymaker
place—we should check on them.”

“They’re probably just burning brush.”

“Wrong time of year for that. What if it’s
their house?”

“Then we’d have heard fire engines. You call
the fire department?”

“I tried,” Mom said. “Phone’s out. Thought it
isn’t supposed to go down, even when the power’s out.”

“It’s not.”

“We should check on them.”

I started stowing my tools. I didn’t want to
go—the pergola was almost finished. “Christ,” I said.

“Darla Jane Edmunds,” my mom admonished.
“Thou shall not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Sorry, Gloria,” I muttered.

“And none of that sarcasm. I’ve raised you
better than—”

A sudden roar drowned out my mom’s lecture.
The noise was so loud, it swept into the barn like a tornado,
scattering the straw on the floor.

I saw that Mom was screaming, but I couldn’t
hear her over the apocalyptic roar. Flaming knives stabbed through
my ears, deep into my brain. My hands were clamped over my ears,
but I had no memory of putting them there.

The unearthly noise was so overwhelming, I
couldn’t think. I stood, stunned. I must have looked something like
a sheep separated from its flock, mouth stupidly wide. Maybe I was
even bleating a little—it was impossible to tell over the
all-consuming noise.

Mom’s hands were plastered over her ears, and
her mouth hung open like mine. She twisted, obviously in pain,
although I couldn’t hear her moans.

Mom’s suffering shocked me into action. I
leapt off my stool and grabbed for the headphones hanging on the
pegboard above the bench. My dad had lost forty percent of his
hearing from a lifetime of working with power tools and engines, so
he had become a fanatic about headphones. He’d bought a matched set
for us—two high-end Peltor hearing protectors. I put one on, and
the noise eased from intolerable to merely deafening. I ran to Mom
and slapped the second pair around her head.

Mom pressed her hands over the headphones, as
if trying to meld them to her ears. I shouted, “What the hell!?”
but I couldn’t even hear my own voice—there was no way Mom could
understand me.

Eventually, my paralysis broke, and I crept
toward the door. My heart hammered in my chest so hard that I could
feel it even over the noise. I feared what I’d see outside the
barn—maybe a blasted and sere landscape, something like those
pictures of Hiroshima in my world history textbook, our barn
somehow the lone survivor of an architectural holocaust.

But the view outside was bizarre: everything
looked normal. The leaves on the trees were whipped by a fierce
wind, and there was a lot of dust in the air, but that’s not
unusual in Iowa. The sky was a brilliant sapphire blue, marred only
by the column of smoke still rising at a shallow angle from the
Haymaker place. So where was this appalling noise coming from?
Whatever its source, I didn’t think waiting it out in the barn was
safe.

Mom grabbed my arm, trying to pull me away
from the door. I resisted and shouted, “Let’s go to the cellar!”
but there was no way she could hear me. I tried to explain my idea
with gestures, but I’ve never been any good at charades, and Mom
kept trying to pull me deeper into the barn. I twisted free and ran
out the door.

I looked back. Mom was chasing me, shouting
something, her features twisted in an appalling mixture of terror
and rage. I ran faster. When I reached the cellar door, which was
mounted at an angle at the side of the house, I threw it open and
started down the dark stairs.

It was cool and noticeably quieter in the
root cellar. Mom stumbled down the stairs behind me. She was
frowning now instead of shouting, so I figured she agreed with my
plan to hide out down there. Dust rained off the joists above us,
rattled free by the neverending roar. I dashed back up the stairs
and closed the door behind Mom, plunging us into darkness.

I groped for the string that controlled the
single bulb in the root cellar, found it, and pulled. Nothing.
Idiot—I already knew the power was out.

I felt my way to one of the root cellar’s
ancient brick walls and sat down with my back to the wall. The dirt
floor felt cool even through my jeans, but that was a bit of a
relief after the heat of the barn.

Mom stumbled on my ankle, caught herself, and
sat down beside me. Her hand found mine, and we clung to each
other, waiting for the roar to subside.

My thoughts ground over and over. What could
make a noise that loud for that long? A nuclear bombardment, but
that didn’t seem likely. An asteroid strike would be loud, but it
wouldn’t continue for this long, would it? Maybe an earthquake, but
the walls weren’t shaking, just vibrating with the noise. I knew
volcanoes could be loud, but as the minutes stretched into hours
with no abatement in the noise, that seemed less and less likely an
explanation. Surely an eruption would end at some point?

I got fed up with waiting and wondering what
in the world was going on. I stood, wrenching my hand free from
Mom’s. I groped blindly toward the stair. When I found it, I
scrambled up on all fours and threw the door at the top open.

The noise instantly redoubled. It was fully
dark, but I could see okay by the light of the stars and moon.
Everything looked peaceful, despite the unearthly roar. I glanced
back—Mom was standing at the foot of the stairs with a scowl on her
face and one palm upraised in a “stop” signal. I mouthed “water”
and stepped out of the cellar.

I ran around to the back door of the house.
Inside, I groped around under the kitchen sink until I felt the
flashlight we keep there, thumbed it on, and used it to find a pad
of paper and a couple of pens. It was well past suppertime, so I
grabbed two bottles of water and a box of granola bars. I didn’t
want to stay above ground long enough to mess with anything more
elaborate. That got me thinking: what if we were forced to hide out
all night? I ran to the living room and grabbed two pillows and the
afghan, wrapping everything up into a bundle. Mom stormed into the
living room. She wrapped me in a hug and dragged me back toward the
door.