Read Ashen Winter (Ashfall) for Free Online

a small puncture that had mostly quit bleeding, but the bullet had left a crater the size of a child’s fist as it exited the front.
    “It’s not like we have a lot of extra bandages to waste on this guy,” Darla said when she returned with our first-aid kit.
    I took a clean cloth out of the box, wadded it, and packed it into the wound as tightly as I could.
    “He isn’t going to make it,” Darla said. “He’s lost too much blood already.”
    I didn’t reply, instead starting to wrap his torso with an Ace bandage. Darla shook her head in disgust but knelt to help.
    When I pulled the Ace bandage tight, the guy woke up and started mumbling. Something about “Gun, gun, where’s my gun?” His hands clenched and unclenched as he talked.
    “Where’d Bill get the shotgun?” I asked him.
    He kept mumbling, his voice dropping and his words becoming incoherent.
    Darla slapped her palm over the wound and pushed down. “Where’d you get the shotgun!”
    The guy moaned and batted at her hand, feebly trying to knock it away from the wound. Darla bore down harder, and suddenly his body went limp. “Is he dead?” she asked.
    I checked his breathing and pulse again. “No.”
    We lit a fire in the living room hearth and melted snow. But no amount of water splashed on the guy’s face would wake him. Darla went outside, scouting for signs of Blue Scarf. When she stomped back into the living room, she said, “That last guy with this loser isn’t leaving a trail. He must have left here by the road. Maybe he kept going south, but as soon as he makes a turn, we’ll lose him.”
    “He could have left hours ago.”
    “Yeah. I think it’s a lost cause. Sorry, Alex.”
    “This guy’s still alive. Maybe he’ll recover.”
    “You want to hang around here and see if he wakes up?”
    “No, that’ll take too long. And he might die. Let’s load him on Bikezilla and take him to a doctor.” I lifted him by his shoulders and started jamming his arms into his shirt.
    Darla sighed and helped me dress him. Then she lifted the guy’s ankles while I grabbed his shoulders. We dragged him out of the house and laid him in the snow beside Bikezilla.
    “We can tie him on the load bed, over the supplies,” I said as I repacked the first-aid kit, lantern, and guns. “You know where we are?”
    “I think so.” Darla took the Illinois roadmap out of its protective, plastic folder and opened it. “I think we’ve been biking south on 78. We should be near Stockton.” She pointed at a dot on the map south of Warren.
    “You know anything about Stockton? Is there a doctor there?”
    “I dunno. It looks bigger than Warren on this map. We could probably make it back to Warren in a couple hours—it’s straight north on 78. Just take him to Doc McCarthy.”
    I looked over her shoulder at the map. “Let’s try Stockton. It’s a lot closer. And I don’t really want to bring a bandit into Warren if we can help it.”
    Darla shrugged. We repacked all our gear and then laid the guy on his stomach over Bikezilla’s load bed. Darla tied him down, leaving his arms and legs overhanging the sides.
    We mounted Bikezilla and started pedaling south along Route 78. Less than ten minutes of travel brought us to a T in the road. We passed three metal sign supports that barely protruded from the snow, but someone had sawn the signs off them. I wasn’t sure why anyone would bother to vandalize the signs—maybe they didn’t want strangers to find Stockton. “Which way?” I asked Darla.
    Darla looked over her shoulder at me. “Right, I think. This should be Highway 20. It’ll take us straight into Stockton.”
    We rounded the corner and passed a burned-out building on our left. The sign in front read G ALENA S TATE B ANK & T RUST. We raced on past a whole series of burnt buildings, but none of the rest of them had signs.
    Peering around Darla, I saw something surreal. A few hundred yards ahead of us, a line of cars stood upright, resting on