Darla's Story (7 page)

Mom dropped the bag of corn kernels and
rushed toward him. I stopped pedaling and scrunched my eyes closed
for a moment.

Not again! I thought as I jumped off the bike
to help Mom.

A huge thank you to my brilliant writing
group, the YA Cannibals, for suffering through two early drafts of
this story. If it’s any good now, part of the credit goes to Robert
Kent, Lisa Fipps, Shannon Lee Alexander, and Jody Sparks.

Thank you to my wife, Margaret, for suffering
through at least
four
early drafts of this story.

Thank you to Peggy Tierney for her generous
and insightful editorial feedback and to Dorothy Chambers for
fixing my atrocious grammar and spelling. Many thanks to Ana
Correal for the cover image and to Emlyn Chand for figuring out how
to turn my mess into a real ebook. Without all of you,
Darla’s
Story
would not exist.

Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum
off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things
went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a
bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place
that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down
on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company
included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist,
so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles
at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there
was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him
off ladders. So he’s really glad this writing thing seems to be
working out.

Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo.
He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three
cats. 
Ashen Winter
 is his second novel. His
debut, 
Ashfall
, was named one of the top five young
adult novels of 2011 by National Public Radio, a Best Teen Book of
2011 by
 Kirkus Reviews
, and a New Voices selection by
the American Booksellers Association.

Learn more or contact Mike at
www.MikeMullinAuthor.com
.

Many visitors to Yellowstone National Park
don’t realize that the boiling hot springs and spraying geysers are
caused by an underlying supervolcano. It has erupted three times in
the last 2.1 million years, and it will erupt again, changing the
earth forever.

Fifteen-year-old Alex is home alone when
Yellowstone erupts. His town collapses into a nightmare of
darkness, ash, and violence, forcing him to flee. He begins a
harrowing trek in search of his parents and sister, who were
visiting relatives 140 miles away.

Along the way, Alex struggles through a
landscape transformed by more than a foot of ash. The disaster
brings out the best and worst in people desperate for food, clean
water, and shelter.  When an escaped convict injures
Alex, he searches for a sheltered place where he can wait—to heal
or to die. Instead, he finds Darla. Together, they fight to achieve
a nearly impossible goal: surviving the supervolcano.

Learn more or order your copy at
MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books
.

It’s been over six months since the eruption
of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Alex and Darla have been staying
with Alex’s relatives, trying to cope with the new reality of the
primitive world so vividly portrayed in 
Ashfall
, the
first book in this series. It’s also been six months of waiting for
Alex’s parents to return from Iowa. Alex and Darla decide they can
wait no longer and must retrace their journey into Iowa to find and
bring back Alex’s parents to the tenuous safety of Illinois. But
the landscape they cross is even more perilous than before, with
life-and-death battles for food and power between the remaining
communities. When the unthinkable happens, Alex must find new
reserves of strength and determination to survive.

Learn more or order your copy at
MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books
.

The Yellowstone supervolcano nearly wiped out
the human race. Now, almost a year after the eruption, the
survivors seem determined to finish the job. Communities wage war
on each other, gangs of cannibals roam the countryside, and what
little government survived the eruption has collapsed completely.
The ham radio has gone silent. Sickness, cold, and starvation are
the survivors' constant companions.

When it becomes apparent that their home is
no longer safe and adults are not facing the stark realities, Alex
and Darla must create a community that can survive the ongoing
disaster, an almost impossible task requiring even more guts and
more smarts than ever—and unthinkable sacrifice. If they fail . . .
they, their loved ones, and the few remaining survivors will
perish.

This epic finale has the heart
of 
Ashfall
, the action of 
Ashen Winter
, and
a depth all its own, examining questions of responsibility and
bravery, civilization and society, illuminated by the story of an
unshakable love that transcends a post-apocalyptic world and even
life itself.

Coming March 17, 2014.
Learn more at
MikeMullinAuthor.com/Books
.

I was home alone on that Friday evening.
Those who survived know exactly which Friday I mean. Everyone
remembers where they were and what they were doing, in the same way
my parents remembered 9/11, but more so. Together we lost the old
world, slipping from that cocoon of mechanized comfort into the
hellish land we inhabit now. The pre-Friday world of school, cell
phones, and refrigerators dissolved into this post-Friday world of
ash, darkness, and hunger.

But that Friday was pretty normal at first. I
argued with Mom again after school. That was normal, too; we fought
constantly. The topics were legion: my poor study habits, my video
games, my underwear on the bathroom floor—whatever. I remember a
lot of those arguments. That Friday they only fueled my rage. Now
they’re little jewels of memory I hoard, hard and sharp under my
skin. Now I’d sell my right arm to a cannibal to argue with Mom
again.

Our last argument was over Warren, Illinois.
My uncle and his family lived there, on a tiny farm near Apple
River Canyon State Park. Mom had decided we’d visit their farm that
weekend. When she announced this malodorous plan, over dinner on
Wednesday, my bratty little sister, Rebecca, almost bounced out of
her chair in delight. Dad responded with his usual benign lack of
interest, mumbling something like, “Sounds nice, honey.” I said I
would not be going, sparking an argument that continued right up
until they left without me on that Friday afternoon.

The last thing Mom said to me was, “Alex, why
do you have to fight me on absolutely everything?” She looked worn
and tired standing beside the minivan door, but then she smiled a
little and held out her arms like she wanted a hug. If I’d known I
might never get to argue with her again, maybe I would have
replied. Maybe I would have hugged her instead of turning away.

Cedar Falls, Iowa, wasn’t much, but it might
as well have been New York City compared to Warren. Besides, I had
my computer, my bike, and my friends in Cedar Falls. My uncle’s
farm just had goats. Stinky goats. The males smell as bad as
anything short of a skunk, and I’ll take skunk at a distance over
goat up close any day.

So I was happy to wave goodbye to Mom, Dad,
and the brat, but a bit surprised I’d won the argument. I’d been
home alone before—I was almost sixteen, after all. But a whole
weekend, that was new. It was a little disappointing to be left
without some kind of warning, an admonition against wild parties
and booze. Mom knew my social life too well, I guess. A couple of
geeks and a board game I might manage; a great party with hot girls
and beer would have been sadly beyond me.

After I watched my family drive off, I went
upstairs. The afternoon sun blazed through my bedroom window, so I
yanked the curtains shut. Aside from the bed and dresser, my
bedroom held a huge maple bookcase and desk that my dad had built a
few years ago. I didn’t have a television, which was another
subject Mom and I fought about, but at least I had a good computer.
The bookcase was filled with computer games, history books, and
sci-fi novels in about equal proportions. Odd reading choices
maybe, but I just thought of it as past and future history.

I’d decorated my floor with dirty clothes and
my walls with posters, but only one thing in the room really
mattered to me. In a wood-and-glass case above my desk, I displayed
all my taekwondo belts: a rainbow of ten of them starting with
white, yellow, and orange and ending in brown, red, and black. I’d
been taking classes off and on since I was five. I didn’t work at
it until sixth grade, which I remember as the year of the bully.
I’m not sure if it was my growth spurt, which stopped at a
depressingly average size, or finally getting serious about martial
arts, but nobody hassles me anymore. I suppose by now those belts
are burnt or buried in ash—most likely both.

Anyway, I turned on my computer and stared at
the cover of my trigonometry textbook while I waited for the
computer to boot up. I used to think that teachers who gave
homework on weekends should be forced to grade papers for an
eternity in hell. Now that I have a sense of what hell might be
like, I don’t think grading papers forever would be that bad. As
soon as Windows started, I pushed the trig book aside and loaded
up
 
World of Warcraft
. I
figured there’d be enough time to do my homework Sunday night.

None of my friends were online, so I flew my
character to the Storm Peaks to work on daily quests and farm some
gold. WoW used to hold my interest the way little else could. The
daily quests were just challenging enough to keep my mind occupied,
despite the fact that I’d done them dozens of times. Even gold
farming, by far the most boring activity, brought the satisfaction
of earning coin, making my character more powerful, achieving
something. Every now and then I had to remind myself that it was
all only ones and zeros in a computer in Los Angeles, or I might
have gotten truly addicted. I wonder if anyone will ever
play
 
World of Warcraft
again.

Three hours later and over 1,000 gold richer,
I got the first hint that this would not be a normal Friday
evening. There was a rumble, almost too low to hear, and the house
shook a little. An earthquake, maybe, although we never have
earthquakes in Iowa.

The power went out. I stood to open the
curtains. I thought there might be enough light to read by, at
least for a while.

Then it happened.

I heard a cracking noise, like the sound the
hackberry tree in our backyard had made when Dad cut it down last
year, but louder: a forest of hackberries, breaking together. The
floor tilted, and I fell across the suddenly angled room, arms and
legs flailing. I screamed but couldn’t hear myself over the noise:
a boom and then a whistling sound—incoming artillery from a war
movie, but played in reverse. My back hit the wall on the far side
of the room, and the desk slid across the floor toward me. I
wrapped myself into a ball, hands over the back of my neck, praying
my desk wouldn’t crush me. It rolled, painfully clipped my right
shoulder, and came to rest above me, forming a small triangular
space between the floor and wall. I heard another crash, and
everything shook violently for a second.